d Theism of "The
People," affording proof that if the latter can be preserved, even in the
wildest wanderings, to illustrate Holy Writ--so can gipsydom--for no
apparent purpose whatever. 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 certain