Mr Liebich further declares, that while there is really nothing in it to sustain the belief, this extraordinary reverence and regard for the dead is the only fact at all indicating an idea of the immortality of the soul which he has ever found among the Gipsies; but, as he admits, it proves nothing.  To me, however, it is grimly grotesque, when I return to the disciples of Comte—­the Positivists—­the most highly cultivated scholars of the most refined form of philosophy in its latest stage, and find that their ultimate and practical manifestation of la religion, is quite the same as that of those unaffected and natural Positivists, the Gipsies.  With these, as with the others, our fathers find their immortality in our short-lived memories, and if among either, some one moved by deep love—­as Auguste was by the eyes of Clotilda—­has yearned for immortality with the dear one, and cursed in agony Annihilation, he falls upon the faith founded in ancient India, that only that soul lives for ever which has done so much good on earth, as to leave behind it in humanity, ineffaceable traces of its elevation.

Verily, the poor Gipsies would seem, to a humourist, to have been created by the devil, whose name they almost use for God, a living parody and satanic burlesque of all that human faith, doubt, or wisdom, have ever accomplished in their highest forms.  Even to the weakest minded and most uninformed manufacturers of “Grellmann-diluted” pamphlets, on the Gipsies, their parallel to the Jews is most apparent.  All over the world this black and God-wanting shadow dances behind the solid 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.