The papers which form this volume have already appeared in the pages of Good Words , Macmillan’s Magazine , The National Review , and The Spectator , and are reprinted with the very kindly given permission of the editors. The Frontispiece is reproduced through the kindness of the proprietors of Good Words . I fancy that there is enough of family likeness, and I hope there is enough of friendly interest, in these Jewish portraits to justify their re-appearance in a little gallery to themselves. K

In the far-off days, when religion was not a habit, but an emotion, there lived a little-known poet who solved the pathetic puzzle of how to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. Minor poets of the period in plenty had essayed a like task, leaving a literature the very headings of which are strange to uninstructed ears. ‘ Piyutim ,’ ‘ Selichoth ’: what meaning do these words convey to most of us? And yet they stand for songs of exile, sung by patient generations of men who tell a monotonous ta

To the ear and eye that can find sermons in stones, streets, one would fancy, must be brimful of suggestive stories. There might be differences of course. From a stone of the polished pebble variety, for instance, one could only predict smooth platitudes, and the romance in a block of regulation stucco would possibly turn out a trifle prosaic. But the right stone and the right street will always have an eloquence of their own for the right listener or lounger, and certain crumbling old tenements

There are some persons, some places, some things, which fall all too easily into ready-made definitions. Labels lie temptingly to hand, and specimens get duly docketed—‘rich as a Jew,’ perhaps, or ‘happy as a king’—with a promptitude and a precision which is not a trifle provoking to people of a nicely discriminative turn of mind. The amiable optimism which insists on an inseparable union between a Jew and his money, and discerns an alliterative link between kings and contentment, or makes now a

George Eliot and Judaism. An attempt to appreciate Daniel Deronda . By Professor David Kaufmann , of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Buda-Pesth. Translated from the German by J. W. Ferrier , 1877. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. The latest echo from the critical chorus which has greeted Daniel Deronda comes to us from Germany, in the form of a small book by Dr. Kaufmann, professor in the recently instituted Jewish Theological Seminary at Buda-Pesth. A certain prominence, which

When the prophet of the Hebrews, some six-and-twenty hundred years ago, thundered forth his stirring ‘Go through! go through the gates! prepare a way, lift up a standard for the people!’ it may, without irreverence, be doubted if he foresaw how literally his charge would be fulfilled by one of his own race in the seventeenth century of the Christian era. The story of how it was done may perhaps be worth retelling, since many subjects of lesser moment have found more chroniclers. It was in 1290 t

‘W hat have we reaped from all the wisdom sown of ages?’ asks Lord Lytton in one of his earlier poems. A large query, even for so questioning an age as this, an age which, discarding catechisms, and rejecting the omniscient Mangnall’s Questions as a classic for its children, yet seems to be more interrogative than of old, even if a thought less ready in its responses. Possibly, we are all in too great a hurry nowadays, too eager in search to be patient to find, for certain it is that the world’s

‘I wish , it is true, to shame the opprobrious sentiments commonly entertained of a Jew, but it is by character and not by controversy that I would do it.’ [32] So wrote the subject of this memoir more than a hundred years ago, and the sentence may well stand for the motto of his life; for much as Moses Mendelssohn achieved by his ability, much more did he by his conduct, and great as he was as a philosopher, far greater was he as a man. Starting with every possible disadvantage—prejudice, pover

Once find a man’s ideals, it has been well said, and the rest is easy; and undoubtedly to get at any true notion of character, one must discover these. They may be covered close with conventionalities, or jealously hidden, like buried treasures, from unsympathetic eyes; but the patient search is well worth while, since it is his ideals—and not his words nor his deeds, which a thousand circumstances influence and decide—which show us the real man as known to his Maker. And true as this is of the

Each age has its illusions—illusions which succeeding ages with a recovered sense of sanity are often apt to record as the most incomprehensible of crazes. ‘That poor will-o’-the-wisp mistaken for a shining light! Oh, purblind race of miserable men!’ is the quick, contemptuous comment of a later, clearer-sighted generation. But one may question if such comment be always just. May not the narrow vision, too unseeing to be deceived, betoken a yet more hopeless sort of blindness than the wide-eyed

‘ The old order changeth, giving place to new,’ and many and bewildering have been such changes since the daughters of Zelophehad trooped down before the elders of Israel to plead for women’s rights. The claim of those five fatherless, husbandless sisters to ‘have a possession among the brethren of our father’ has been brought, and has been answered since in a thousand different ways, but the chivalrous spirit in which it was met then seems, in a subtle sort of way, to symbolise the attitude of