its miraculous detection is told with entire faith, and with a significant reference to the fate of "young Hew of Lincoln, slain by cursed Jew"-one of the too famuar tales of child sacrifice that have haunted the painful path of Israel all down the Christian centuries; a story which, sung in ballad form by wandering minstrels, did its part in embittering English feeling against the outcast nation, actually banished from England when Chaucer told his tale.

From that dawn-time of English literature we pass to the great days of the drama. Two famous playwrights turn to profit the general abhorrence of the Jewish usurer, and make his imagined plottings against the lives of Christian men their theme; Marlowe's savage caricature in "The Jew of Malta" is followed by Shakespeare's immortal picture in "The Merchant of Venice." In drawing Barabbas, his hideous Jew, "the mere monster who kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries, and invents infernal machines," Marlowe was simply embodying common English opinion concerning the Jews, driven forth of England so early as the reign of Edward I. Ignorant hate inspired that tradition, and the playwright gave vivid and violent, but scarcely exaggerated, expression to it. But it is far otherwise with Shakespeare's masterpiece the only really adequate appreciation of Jewish character, in its unlovelier aspect, produced before the present century, by any imaginative writer. The author of "The Merchant of Venice" might have been able to study from the life the Judaic traits he reproduces—the hard, but real, patriotism, the secret scorn for the injurious inconsistent Christian, the stiff tribal prejudice, the singular mixture of craft and boldness employed in the pursuit of revenge for wrongs long unwillingly borne with inward fierce resentment-these, one might suppose, must have been seen in action to be so well understood; and, indeed, some students of the play are inclined to credit its author with personal knowledge of Venice and of its Jews, whom he has drawn with unflattering and unloving skill. A far more intelligent,

but a not less real, dislike than that inspired by Marlowe's coarse misrepresentation would be produced in those who first watched with delight the unfolding of Shylock's character, and the unravelling of his murderous schemes, and exulted in the completeness of his overthrow; the kindliest feeling that an Elizabethan audience would carry away from that spectacle could only be a sort of humorous scorn for the defeated, humiliated, ruined usurer, caught in his own snare; for the cheated, plundered father, whom his only child deserts for a Christian lover. Yet is it very much that Shakespeare should have seen in the Jew a man of like passions with other men, heir to the long injuries of his people, justly claiming to have suffered in his own person from maddening contempt and insult, while he has little reason to render thanks for that boasted Christian gentleness and mercy, which compels him to apostasy, and, while leaving him life, take from him the means by which he lives? Pitilessly hard, incapable of discerning that he sins in standing on mere legal right when he does so with intent to murder, this Jew still owes much of his deformity of soul to Christian ill-usage: Shakespeare has discerned this, and made it evident-an astonishing achievement for this son of the sixteenth century, and a sufficient proof of his intellectual sovereignty, were there no other.

It was long before any Jewish portrait, even remotely comparable to the unsympathetic but living delineation of Shylock, was drawn by an English hand. The Hebrew, permitted at last to return to England after the Restoration, dwelt among us many years an unloved alien, and his self-seeking greed, his usurious practices, too often furnished a theme for the mockery of witty dramatists like Sheridan, and of other writers less famous; till another great artist in fiction awoke to the more serious, picturesque possibilities of the despised Oriental money-lender, and Scott gave us in "Ivanhoe" that sordid, yet pathetic, figure of Isaac of York; that noble and heroic form of his

daughter Rebecca-shapes much less realistically faithful than Shylock and Jessica, but drawn with an amount of tenderness which tells us that a new era in toleration has opened. Isaac is depicted, indeed, as a servile, crouching money-lover, not incapable of insolent self-assertion if it should be absolutely safe, and too ready in using that pitiful weapon of the weak-prevarication that merges into falsehood. But we are not allowed to forget that his timid guilefulness is that of a feeble, hunted creature; and that, if he holds to his hoarded wealth with frenzied tenacity, to that wealth alone he owes the bare right to live in the midst of a community that loathes him and his, and only tolerates him because of his financial usefulness. To him Scott has attributed in full measure the strong domestic affection of his people, without indicating how that affection could on occasion transform itself into the savage feeling displayed by "the Jew whom Shakespeare drew," who, in his wrath against his apostate child, would gladly bury with her death the gold and gems of which she has robbed him; "I would my daughter were dead at my feet, and the jewels in her ear! would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin!" Isaac of York is imagined as a creature of softer mould, holding his fair, wise, high-hearted Rebecca dearer even than his hoarded wealth, since for her sake he will make some sacrifice of that "god of his idolatry;" feeble-hearted as he is, there is little Jewish bitterness in him; witness his kindly will towards the Gentile Ivanhoe, who has shown him some kindness; he will take some pains to serve this benefactor, and incurs some risk of loss for his sake. The contrast is more dramatic than probable between Isaac and his noble daughter, so justly proud of the past glories of her race, so humbly acquiescent in its present humiliation; merciful and generous to all, be they children of Israel or not; constant under fierce temptation, possessing her soul in lofty calmness amid the most appalling perils.

esteem father and daughter both as real, and accept the large-hearted wisdom and vestal devotion of the one as implicitly as the tremulous weakness of the other; yet, for all the Scriptural fashion of their speech, there is so little of the true Jewish color about them that they will not endure comparison with the harsh powerful portraiture of Shylock. A daughter of Israel might indeed give proof of virtue no less lofty than Rebecca's; but it would express itself in another guise. The gentle generous Scott chose probably to draw on his large historic imagination rather than on reality when he wished to depict this Israelitish parent and child. But the pity, sympathy and interest, aroused by his idealized representation were not the less a gain for the cause of humanity.

It is "a far cry" from "Ivanhoe" to "Oliver Twist," yet Charles Dickens is the next great master who can furnish us with such an illustration of our theme as we need consider. He, who fell heir to much of the popularity of Scott, in his turn, made capital of the peculiar position held by the Jew in popular esteem, and gave us two widely contrasted portraits of scions of the Chosen People, whereof the second was, as is well known, intended as a sort of atonement for the first. Some atonement was indeed called for; nothing could well be more odious than that assemblage of vile human qualities known to lovers of Dickens as the Jew Fagin.

is nothing but grimmest reality in a scene made up of such elements. And yet the Fagin of Dickens lacks actuality, considered as a typical Jew, and has less that is genuinely characteristic about him than Isaac of York. Thiefmaster and teacher, discovered to us at first in the un-Hebraic act of cooking sausages, he has broken so completely with his people and their ways, that none of their stiff prejudices as to the habits and food of the Gentiles cleave to him, and scarcely a trace of their peculiar diction can be discerned in his speech. He is a mere embodiment of cruel, remorseless, pitiless greed of gain, labelled with the name of "Jew" to make it more hateful. Love of lucre makes him more than willing to undertake the poisoning of a soul, and his vindictive rage at being foiled in that gainful enterprise, leads him on to the instigation of a peculiarly cruel murder -a sin one degree darker than his exultation in the fate that has fallen on many of his thievish clients, who, safely hanged out of the way, cannot betray their original betrayer and tempter, enriched by their thefts; and his ruthlessness towards others is balanced by grovelling cowardice in the face of personal peril. He is the apt caterer for every vice, he thrives on every sin, and in all his business there is not one redeeming feature.

Is it impossible that a renegade Israelite should be such an embodiment of all that is evil? Perhaps not; but assuredly it is most improbable that amongst a crowd of utterly depraved associates, a Jew should stand alone in the attainment of such heights of wickedness; and it was with justice that one of the nation libelled by the special association of such qualities with its name, made protest against the unfairness of the picture. An attempt to remedy the wrong was made in "Our Mutual Friend;" but the character therein introduced of a benevolent transparently guileless Israelite, who, in his confiding affection for a supposed benefactor, is willing to play the part of a heartless usurer, in unquestioning deference to the will of the sordid En

glish money-lender, who employs him out of feigned charity, is something too impossible; and it remains colorless and flat in its magnanimity, its patience under injury, its tranquil superiority to insult and persistence in well-doing. There is an obvious intention to invest this figure with the distinctive Jewish air that was lacking in Fagin; but the stately serious fashion of Riah's speech, like his white-haired venerable aspect, appears rather artificial; both make a curious impression of being theatrical properties.

One may dismiss this attempt to remedy an injustice as being a wellmeant failure; yet it witnesses, taken with the character of Fagin, to the double current of feeling in regard to Israel-the sense of something superior and possessing high affinities, the opposed sense of something ignoblewhich expresses itself in Scott's picture of Rebecca and her father.

We need not dwell very long on those grandiloquent passages in the writings of the late Lord Beaconsfield, which, as a novelist, he devoted to the glorification of his race. Lords of the moneymarket such as his "Sidonia," with their preternatural intelligence and fabulous Oriental magnificence of liberality, are fictions too remote from the possibilities of every-day life, belonging rather to the world of the Arabian Nights; and the Hebrew heroine of his "Tancred," who far outdoes Scott's Rebecca in the exaltation of her patriot passion, is but a visionary shape, endowed with impossible perfections by her creator, to make her a fit medium for impressing on a scornful generation his proud estimate of the vast unsuspected influence wielded through all the ages by the gifted sons of Israelmasters of mankind, according to him, in every field of thought and achievement. True or false that estimate, the characters called out of the realms of fancy in order to express it are but shadows.

A popular English novelist of a very different school, with no personal reason to actuate him but his unvarying ambition to present the very truth of

things, has given us his idea of what a son of Jacob might be in good and evil; and humble as is the sphere in which moves the Isaac Levi, of Charles Reade's "Never Too Late to Mend," he is drawn with a vigor and consistency that make him better worth considering than the superb hero of Disraeli. Faithful always to his selfinterest, he will do much for those to whom he owes gratitude; keenly resentful of injury, he is keenly sensitive to kindness; astute, able, patient, he is seen following up а long-cherished revenge with terrible ingenuity and persistency, yet he can be softened towards a fallen foe who asks of him justice tempered with mercy; and there is even a certain grandeur, a sort of Scriptural majesty about him, despite the crooked methods by which he exacts retribution from one who has insulted and oppressed him. His hard righteousness in business transactions, his active benevolence towards those whom he can serve without endamaging himself, the grave and lofty tone of his rebukes to foolish wrong-doing-all are aptly combined so as to produce a strong impression of reality. cellently imagined and portrayed as it is, this character also is much more a creation of its author's fancy than a picture wrought in presence of the living model. The details would be far other in that case; but at least there is none of the unpleasantness of caricature about the idealized figure, and its effect on the spectator is all in the direction of inclining to fair and just judgment of the nationality personified in Isaac Levi.

Yet, ex

It was a new idea that possessed George Eliot, when, with the most serious intention to do justice to an illunderstood people, and to represent things exactly as they are, she made Jewish life, Jewish hopes and dreams, Jewish character, both of the more sordid and the more exalted sort, the leading interest in her “Daniel Deronda." The great realistic writer knew better than to depict such extremes of vice and virtue as are exemplified in the bad and good Jews of Dickens. Her scheme of

color included nothing darker than the despicable meanness of the gambling opium-eating Lapidoth, bent on exploiting for his own sordid advantage the gifts and graces of his innocent daughter; whom, with that end in view, he has stolen from her mother, careless if the end be secured in fair ways or foul. Lapidoth is sufficiently contrasted with that poetically guileless daughter, Mirah, the "pearl whom the mud had only washed" with his austerely pious son, the patriot dreamer whose suffering existence is consecrated to the visionary hope of achieving the regeneration and restitution of Israel. Taking these figures as representing the opposed poles of Hebrew character, George Eliot made more strenuous, and, on the whole, more successful efforts than any of her forerunners, to secure proper local color, and to make her characters think and act according to hereditary use and wont; but it must be admitted that none of the others are so life-like as that pawnbroking family of the Cohens, heartily and complacently vulgar, who are revealed to us, a pleasant Rembrandtish group, dark-eyed, genial, prosaic, clad with barbaric richness of color and ornament, in their fire-lighted home on the eve of the Their guest, the sad enthusiast, Mordecal, whom they entertain from mixed motives-kindly pity, respect for his learning, and value for him as a cheap workman, a gratuitous teacher, and a means of earning merit for good works

Sabbath.

is much less human and probable than his hosts; his mystical exultation is too unvarying, his aspirations, however eloquently expressed, seem formless and unsubstantial, and it remains extremely doubtful what is his exact position towards the faith of his fathers, though, as there are not a few Jews of superior attainments and character, whose position as believers is similarly uncertain, this point can hardly be regarded as impairing the verisimilitude of the creation. The gracefully-drawn figure of his sister Mirah, the Jewess ignorant of her religion and divided from her people, but passionately bent