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MEDIEVAL MYTHS

The Wandering Jew

HO that has looked on Gustave Doré's

WHO marvellous illustrations to this wild legend,

can forget the impression they made upon his imagination?

I do not refer to the first illustration as striking, where the Jewish shoemaker is refusing to suffer the cross-laden Saviour to rest a moment on his doorstep, and is receiving with scornful lip the judgment to wander restless till the Second Coming of that same Redeemer. But I refer rather to the second, which represents the Jew, after the lapse of ages, bowed beneath the burden of the curse, worn with unrelieved toil, wearied with ceaseless travelling, trudging onward at the last lights of evening, when a rayless night of unabating rain is creeping

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on, along a sloppy path between dripping bushes; and suddenly he comes over against a way-side crucifix, on which the white glare of departing day. light falls, to throw it into ghastly relief against the pitch-black rain clouds. For a moment we see the working of the miserable shoemaker's mind. We feel that he is recalling the tragedy of the first Good Friday, and his head hangs heavier on his breast, as he recalls the part he had taken in that awful catastrophe.

Or, is that other illustration more remarkable, where the wanderer is amongst the Alps, at the brink of a hideous chasm; and seeing in the contorted pine-branches the ever-haunting scene of the Via dolorosa, he is lured to cast himself into that black gulf in quest of rest,-when an angel flashes out of the gloom with the sword of flame turning every way, keeping him back from what would be to him a Paradise indeed, the repose of Death?

Or that last scene, when the trumpet sounds and earth is shivering to its foundations, the fire is bubbling forth through the rents in its surface, and the dead are coming together flesh to flesh, and bone to bone, and muscle to muscle-then the weary man sits down and casts off his shoes!

Strange sights are around him, he sees them not; strange sounds assail his ears, he hears but one— the trumpet-note which gives the signal for him to stay his wanderings and rest his weary feet.

It is possible to linger over those noble woodcuts, and learn from them something new each time that we study them; they are picture-poems full of latent depths of thought. And now let us to the history of this most thrilling of all Mediæval myths.

The words of the Gospel contain the germs out of which the story has developed. "Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom'," are our Lord's words, which I can hardly think apply to the destruction of Jerusalem, as commentators explain it to escape the difficulty. That some should live to see Jerusalem destroyed was not very surprising, and hardly needed the emphatic Verily which Christ only used when speaking something of peculiarly solemn or mysterious import.

Besides, S. Luke's account manifestly refers the coming in the kingdom to the Judgment, for the

1 Matt. xvi. 28. Mark iz. 1.

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