How often have we heard that the preservation of the Jews is a phenomenon without equal?
And yet they both live--the sad and sober Jew, the gay and tipsy Gipsy, Shemite and Aryan--the one so ridiculously like and unlike the other, that we may almost wonder whether Humour does not enter into the Divine purpose and have its place in the Destiny of Man.

For my own part, I shall always believe that the Heathen Mythology shows a superiority to any other, in _one_ conception--that of Loki, who into the tremendous upturnings of the Universe always inspires a grim grotesqueness; a laughter either diabolic or divine.
Judaism, which is pre-eminently the principle of religious belief:--the metaphysical emancipation and enlightenment of Germany, and the materialistic positivism of France, are then, as I have indicated, nowhere so practically and yet laughably illustrated as by the Gipsy.
Free from all the trammels of faith, and, to the last degree, indifferent and rationalistic, he satisfies the demands of Feuerbach; devoted to the positive and to the memory of the dead, he is the ideal of the greatest French philosophy, while as a wanderer on the face of the earth--not neglectful of picking up things _en route_--he is the rather blurred _facsimile_ of the Hebrew, the main difference in the latter parallel being that while the Jews are God's chosen people, the poor Gipsies seem to have been selected as favourites by that darker spirit, whose name they have naively substituted for divinity:--_Nomen et omen_.
I may add, however, in due fairness, that there are in England some true Gipsies of unmixed blood, who--it may be without much reflection--have certainly adopted ideas consonant with a genial faith in immortality, and certain phases of religion.

The reader will find in another chapter a curious and beautiful Gipsy custom recorded, that of burning an ash fire on Christmas-day, in honour of our Saviour, because He was born and lived like a Gipsy; and one day I was startled by bearing a Rom say "Miduvel hatch for mandy an' kair me kushto."-- My God stand up for me and make me well.

"That" he added, in an explanatory tone, "is what you say when you're sick." These instances, however, indicate no deep-seated conviction, though they are certainly curious, and, in their extreme simplicity, affecting.

That truly good man, the Rev.James Crabb, in his touching little book, "The Gipsies' Advocate," gave numbers of instances of Gipsy conversions to religion and of real piety among them, which occurred after their minds and feelings had been changed by his labours; indeed, it would seem as if their lively imaginations and warm hearts render them extremely susceptible to the sufferings of Jesus.