f

short of blood-letting. A night's rest, |
therefore, brought about no change in his
feelings towards that ungrateful pair, and
he was still further incensed, in the course
of the morning, by the doctor, who was
pleased to couch his report in a tone of
gentle remonstrance.

"Mrs. Stanniforth really requires care-
ful looking after; she has had a narrow
escape of a serious illness. I told her
mother, years ago, that she was a person
who might easily become consumptive;
and consumption, as I need hardly tell
you, is just one of those diseases which
attack you when you are down. She tells
me she has let her place, and I am very
glad to hear it. Get Mrs. Winnington to
go abroad with her, as she did before, and
keep her abroad for the winter. She must
be amused; and she really must not be
allowed to play these tricks with herself."
"I'll speak to Mrs. Winnington," said
Hugh rather grimly.

"I think you had better do so; and impress upon her that, unless she wishes to lose her daughter, she must take more care of her. Mrs. Stanniforth is not a person who can take care of herself."

"To lose her!" repeated Hugh aghast. "Do you think there is serious mischief, then?"

"There is a certain amount of mischief, which may be checked, I hope. She has had a bad cold and neglected it; but that is not exactly the cause of her present illness. She is suffering from nervous derangement; the result, no doubt, of worry or anxiety of some kind, seconded by a shock to which she ought never to have been exposed. There is no occasion to alarm Mrs. Winnington; but at the same time she should be made to understand that the case is one which requires care and attention."

Such a verdict as this was not calculated to soothe Colonel Kenyon's ire, and Margaret had much ado to keep him from rushing off to Park Street, with peremptory marching-orders, before luncheon.

"It is all nonsense about my going abroad at once," she said; "and I am not at all sure that it would suit my mother to start directly. At all events, if I have to go, I am quite old enough to go by myself now. I don't think there is any necessity for your seeing her, Hugh."

Margaret, in truth, was beginning to be afraid of what Colonel Kenyon might say or do when he found himself in Park Street, and would gladly have gone thither

instead of him, had she not been quite as much afraid of what her mother might say, on receiving the confession which would have to be made. She knew that, when once Mrs. Winnington set to work to ask questions, it would be impossible to conceal the fact that 5,000l. had recently been paid to Philip, and she shrank from the inevitable scene which must follow.

"I certainly shall go and see her," Hugh said resolutely; "and I should imagine that she will make her convenience suit yours. At least, if she doesn'tHowever, I have no doubt she will." "If you do go,' ," said Margaret, after a pause, "will you promise me something as a great favor?"

"What is it?"

66

'Only to say nothing about Philip. It would distress me very much if you did, and it would be rather unfair to him, I think. Perhaps I shouldn't have told you as much as I did last night, if I had had all my wits about me."

Hugh considered for a moment, and then said, "Very well; I won't mention his name if I can help it. By the way, where did you say that Marescalchi was living?

Margaret knew that she had given no information upon this point, and she was not anxious to do so now. "You are not going to see him, are you?" she asked apprehensively.

"Oh," answered Hugh, in a careless tone, "I thought I might look him up, perhaps, if I had time. But I suppose I can find out his address at his club."

This was, unfortunately, only too certain, and Margaret saw that it would be unwise, as well as useless, to make a secret of what could be so easily discovered; so she said, "He was staying at Johnson's Hotel in Berkeley Square when I last heard from him; but that is some time ago now."

Hugh took a mental note both of the address and of the circumstance that Philip did not trouble himself to write often to his benefactress; soon after which he picked up his hat and stick, remarking that, if he didn't make haste, he should hardly catch Mrs. Winnington at home.

The last thing that Margaret said to him, after repeatedly cautioning him against making a great fuss about a small matter, was, "You will be back again soon, won't you?" and the significance of this query gave Hugh matter for reflection which lasted him throughout his walk.

From The Edinburgh Review. The recent persecution of the Jews in PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS.* eastern Europe, which is the worst legacy of 1882, is a case in point. We have waited till the first passion of controversy was spent, and till a body of facts was before the public, but we propose now to take a dispassionate view both of the past. events and of the present arguments which form the so-called Jewish Ques tion. It is a question which, in England, we are fortunately not obliged to consider with any bias of self-interest. Nearly one hundred thousand Jews live amongst ourselves. In some respects they remain "the unchangeable people," but in others we see that, when planted in a foreign soil, they either drop the peculiarities of their race or are dropped by them. Chameleon-like they have acquired the hues of British culture, and they move among us, the most hard-working and gen-, erous of our citizens. But in eastern Europe the question is a very different one, complicated as it is there by mutual misunderstandings, by insane mutual prejudices, and by numerical difficulties of which we have no conception.

PERSECUTION is one of the fevers of society; partly modified, it is true, by race or country, but with a well-known diag. nosis of its own. In former times the chief incentive to persecution was religious bigotry and fanaticism; in our own it is popular ignorance and intolerance, moved by the baser passions of envy and fear. The entire history of French democratic revolution has been stained for nearly a hundred years by this spirit of persecution. It began with the persecution of the nobles, of the clergy, and of the sovereign, until the rival factions ended in equally fierce persecutions of each other. And in our own day, under the false name of republican freedom, we see the same hateful spirit revived, which, having persecuted the religious orders and persecuted the magistracy, sought to drive from the territory of France the most illustrious, the most brave, the most high-minded of her citizens. No wonder that, in a democratic age, they should share the fate of Aristides, of Cimon, and of Themistocles, who were ostracised because they were too great and too good for Athens. If ostracism has been for two thousand years the opprobrium of ancient Greece, its recurrence in France cannot fail to excite the amazement, and we must add the contempt, of modern Europe.

The Hebrews are computed to number about six million two hundred thousand souls; at least, this is the calculation adopted by Mr. Israel Davis in his excellent article in the Encyclopædia Britan nica on the modern Jews; and it does not differ widely from that of Bédarride, who reckons them at nearly seven millions. Russian agitators swell the calculation to eight millions, but this appears to us an exaggeration. Mr. Alderman Salomons (in 1866) told the late dean of St. Paul's that, of Jews, he conceived six hundred thou sand resided in Poland; and by the last accounts one hundred thousand is cer

The victims of persecution to whom the following pages are to be devoted, are, however, of a lowlier caste, though of most ancient lineage. But they have suffered all the more from cruelty and injustice; and surely the spirit of persecution is never more detestable than when it inflicts incalculable sufferings on the hum-tainly too small a figure at which to place blest members of society. Yet men persecute, as if by a horrid instinct; as if persecution were not only a parasite upon religious bodies and democratic revolutions, but an inherited taint in hu

man nature.

their numbers in France. Austria has a large Jewish population, with a distribution of five hundred thousand in Hungary, eight hundred thousand in Austria, and five hundred thousand in the small province of Galicia. There they are so densely he visited a town on the Galician frontier, massed together that Francis II., when exclaimed, "Now I know why I am called King of Jerusalem." The real Jewish Question lies in these astonishing figures. It may present some other aspects, but those, as we shall show, refer rather to the greedy passions, the prejudices, and the insufficient legislation of the countries where Jew-baiting has been either permitted or fomented.

This extraordinary people of aliens, who have seen all the greatest changes of

the Gentile world, endure with unexam-long residence in Sepharad, or Spain), pled courage, flourish under all circum claim to descend from the tribe of Judah, stances and in all climates, and increase and even in a measure from the royal with amazing fertility. In those districts of eastern Europe where they form four, five, six, seven, ten, or even thirteen per cent. of the whole population, they inevitably possess an importance which is independent of either their industry, their cohesion, or their wealth. As they are, furthermore, rich in all these three things, they excite envy and ill-will. The Pharaohs were jealous of them when the children of Israel first grew rich in Goshen, and the hidalgos and priors of Catholic Spain were jealous when a Jew was finance minister to King Alfonso XI. Jonas Hanway, in his treatise on the nationalizing of the Jews, even when he admitted that it might be right to increase "useful people," complained that these were neither husbandmen, soldiers, nor sailors; and he was only half convinced that every acquisition of wealth strengthens the State, since every trader spends. He proposed accordingly that they should not be allowed to hold real property in England. The Russians, now so jealous of their active spirit, have also a religious antipathy to them, and complain, as the Spaniards did, that they give and spread clandestine intelligence. Thus the Jewish Question, if in one sense a new one, is in reality older than the Exodus.

house of David. As such the Sephardim looked on themselves as heirs of the great and precious promises that belong to the tribe. "In Fudah is God known," was long a favorite text with them, and they avoided intermarriage with Jewish fam. ilies of mixed or unascertained descent. The second great division is that of the Ashkenazim, or German Jews. The genealogy of the Polish Jews, sometimes called the Khazim, is disputed, because, like the Sephardim, they claim a longer and a more unbroken pedigree than can be proved by the Hebrews who drifted later to Ashkenaz, or Germany. Of the Sephardic body it ought to be said that they for long enjoyed very exceptional advantages. To say nothing of the halcyon days of the Jewish patriarchates, it is certain that under the mild sway of the Arabian caliphs the Jews rose in every walk of life. Hebrew, Arabic, and that dialect of western Aramaic which was the language of Jewry at the Christian era, were all sister branches of the great Semitic speech. Then with the image-hating Moslem the Jews had many points in common, and so harmoniously did the two peoples agree, that this epoch may be called the golden age of Judaism. Hebrew traders acted as a connecting link between the East and West. Once again on those Mesopotamian plains from which their father Abraham first took his fairfaced wife, did the Hebrews grow rich. They became holders of real property in Mesopotamia, in Spain, and in Provence, and in the last two countries many of the great families trace back their descent to an Israelitish stock.

Before entering on its recent phases in Germany and in eastern Europe, it will be necessary to notice some earlier chapters of Jewish history, and to speak of the main tribal divisions among the Jews. When the great dispersion took place, it found the world already colonized by the Hebrews. For the rich cosmopolitan traders of Persia, Italy, Sarmatia, and Spain, the Jews claim perfect innocence The Arabico-Jewish schools grew faand ignorance of the dark crime of Calva- mous; Jewish physicians prescribed for ry. The same plea might be urged for kings; the Babylonish Talmud gradually the Caraïte dissenters, and for the earliest replaced the older traditions of Jerusalem; emigrants to Worms, who fled from Pal- and at the end of the twelfth century Maiestine after the Benjamite massacres in monides appeared. He came to be not Gibeah (Judges xix.). In fact Boleslas only the spiritual ancestor of Baruch Spiand Casimir of Poland affirmed that the noza and of Moses Mendelssohn, but to population of Jerusalem having been ex-form an era in the history of ideas. Less terminated by the Roman conquest, the cold, and perhaps less subtle, than the modern Jews could hardly be held guilty Christian schoolmen, he left a deep mark of the blood of Christ. Tradition says on their philosophy. But already in the that the exiles of A.D. 130-136 did but youth of this "second Moses" dark adopt a former tribal distribution when clouds of persecution had begun to gather, they hived off in search of those earlier and to the golden age there succeeded swarms which served as pioneers for their the very iron age of Judaism. Milman wandering fight. Two great divisions says of the persecutions of the Jews in are still recognized among them. Of the Middle Ages that they were the most these the first, called the Sephardim (from "hideous and continuous to be found

among nations above the state of sav- received a fresh contingent of learned ages." These times have, however, been called "the ages of faith." They certainly were the ages of the Crusades and of the "Divina Commedia." Small wonder, considering the sufferings of the Albigenses and of the Jews, that the latter should have turned away from the altars of Christendom, and have thrown themselves rather into the arms of the Moors. This attitude gave rise, however, to a genuine Jewish Question. Between Jews and Moors, between Arabic and Hebrew schools, between alchemists, physicians, and money-lenders, the civilization of southern Europe ran a risk of becoming wholly Semitic. There were over three hundred thousand Jews in Spain. One was finance minister to King Alfonso XI., one was physician at his court, while the populace loudly complained of the wealth and cruelty of the usurers. Hence the popular detestation of them. Hence the jealousy of this thriving caste. Hence the restrictive edicts of the Cortes. Hence the riots, the autos-da-fè, and the destruction of the Jewish quarters. Hence, too, the revival of the old, frivolous, and wickedly false accusations, that the Israelites insulted the host and murdered Christian children. The records of bloodshed in Aragon and Castile, when the fourteenth century closed, might give valuable hints to the Jew-baiters of to-day, and the different attitudes of the popes towards the anti-Semitic movement in Spain might at the present moment be edifying reading for the Russian minister of the interior. But we must hasten on to the catastrophe. It came eighty-nine days after the conquest of Granada, and was an event not less terrible to the Jews than full of vital import for Europe. The Semitic alliance of Moor and Jew was indeed broken up in 1492, but Spain was ruined by her own greedy cruelty, and Spanish greatness positively began to decline from the day when three hundred thousand Jews, shaking from their feet the dust of the land of Torquemada, carried over the face of Europe the wealth, the wisdom, the piety, and the industry of the Sephardim.

The edict which obliged them to leave Spain was issued in 1492, and the Jews went northwards in search of liberty and of intellectual light. Some settled in Italy, others wandered to Constantinople and to the court of King Casimir of Poland great numbers were made welcome in Holland, while the school of Narbonne

Talmudists. From thence a strongly Jewish element passed into the world of occult researches, and into the domain of religious thought. From the Jews of Spain Cornelius Agrippa imbibed his ideal alchemy, his chimerical speculations, his Kabbalistic method. From the same source Reuchlin drew his inspiration, his mysterious doctrines, and all that literature, so to speak, of Christian Kabbalism, which the Dominicans of Cologne so strongly condemned, and which Albert Dürer so deeply admired. But Judaism had also stronger meat to set before the Reformers of the sixteenth century. Reuchlin's labors having furnished them with a Hebrew grammar, they betook themselves to the study of the Old Testament in the original, endeavoring to see where it differed from the Vulgate of St. Jerome, and to master its sense, as understood by the best Jewish scholars. The English translation known as the authorized version was mainly guided by the text-books of the rabbi David Kimchi, of Narbonne; Luther often preferring, however, for his Bible, the commentaries of Solomon Rashi, of Troyes, a rabbi who lived nearly a century earlier than the learned Kimchi. It is when we note the effects of Jewish influence on the whole generation that demanded and achieved the Reformation that we realize how the study of Hebrew told on the Christian world. The Old Testament had been too long cast aside; Old Testament worthies, stripped of their nimbus, had given place to a Christian hagiology, which in its turn paled before that revival of classical learning which we call the Renaissance. But the classical spirit was not all that was needed for a world struggling to be new-born from the mists of the Middle Ages. Serene but distant, "clear, but oh how cold!" it was insufficient. The dispersion of Jewish scholars, as it added a new element to modern culture, lent a further impetus to men determined to be free. It caused a reversion to the fountain-head of Scripture-to the progres sive revelation, by Scripture, of moral and religious truth. The moral law in its simplicity swept away both the arbitrary code of the Church, and that system of indulgences which had popularized false ideas of right and wrong, false notions of the justice and clemency of God. We

d'Espinoza), and also his teacher, Saul Levi Morteira, were later refugees from Léon, settled at Amsterdam because "there every citizen might remain free in his

Both the father of the philosopher Spinoza (Michael religion."

C

have gained so much by this return to other families, too numerous to be men-
Scriptural simplicity, that we must be tioned here. Grave and haughty men
patient when we hear Luther using against were those dark-browed refugees, and,
the Jews all the invectives with which though united by religious faith, no inter-
Churchmen loaded him, or find Calvin marriages took place for more than a cen-
and Knox impregnated with the sternness tury between the Sephardim and the Ash-
of an Old Testament judge; we must kenazim, who, after their appearance in
even be charitable when we are obliged London, had also a synagogue of their
to recognize some of the harshest traits own. But time has altered the relative
of Jewish theology in the temper and ten- positions of the two tribal divisions.
ets of our own Puritan divines. True it Lord Beaconsfield was a Sephardic Jew,*
is, as has been finely remarked by a He- of Venetian extraction, and daughters of
brew divine of our own times, that "even the houses of Bernal and Ricardo have
in their punishment the children of Is- made the most splendid alliances in En-
rael have continued their mission in the gland, yet it is no longer the Spanish
world."
congregation which is most heard of. It
is the German Jews who, having made
themselves famous, constitute the true
plutocracy of London and Paris, of Vi-
enna, and even of New York; they, as
bankers, brokers, barristers, merchants,
musicians, philosophers, and poets, have
laid society under obligations to their en-
ergy, their wealth, their tunefulness, and
their talent. How extraordinary has been
their rise one may judge from the lives of
Lessing and of Heine, from Auerbach's
painful novel of "Dichter und Handler,"
from Comtesse d'Agoult's account of the
position of old Amschel Rothschild, of
Frankfort, and, above all, from the trials
of Moses Mendelssohn.

By travelling northwards the Sephardic
families could not fail to come into con-
tact with the Ashkenazim Jews, who, after
the great dispersion, had made their set-
tlements in Germany. The origin of this
body is much less well ascertained than
that of the Spanish Jews. They were
recruited out of many tribes, but their
traditions affirm that, when they went
into Germany, they only went to join ear-
lier settlers, and that the city of Worms
was the cradle of the Ashkenazim con-
gregations in Europe. The history of
Jewish families must necessarily be un-
certain. They had to keep their move-
ments secret; in some places they were
forbidden to print or to publish books,
and their libraries were repeatedly de-
stroyed. St. Louis of France had twen-
ty-four cartloads of Talmudic lore burnt
in the streets of Paris; in Cremona twelve
thousand volumes were destroyed; and a
family of Portuguese Jews still cherishes,
in England, as an heirloom, an ancestral
copy of the Scriptures, printed in the
Roman instead of in the Hebrew letter,
because in the dark days of persecution
it was necessary to deceive the Catholic
servants as to the nature and contents of
the book. The Jews have necessarily
had to depend on oral accounts of their
wanderings. Since their dispersion they
have assimilated the intelligence of every
land in which they have dwelt. They can
acquire all languages, but music seems to
be their birthright. If the sceptre has
departed from the house of David, the
harp at least has not lost its strings; and
music is the voice, the solace, and the
crown of a people who give proof, in their
music, of emotional qualities of the high-referred with great tenderness to the influence upon his
est and purest order.

The first synagogue was built in London by the Spanish Jews in 1656, and in that building were collected the progenitors of the Bernals, Ricardos, and many

Born in Dessau, in 1727, in a poor home, with every prospect of being nothing but a humpbacked pedlar, he knew the most bitter poverty. Once, when obliged to make a loaf of bread last for a week, he marked on it with ink the por tion which must suffice for each day's ration. To gain information and to rise became the passions of his life. There was something of Socrates in the deformed figure, the eager eyes, the questioning spirit, and the enthusiastic temper of this Hebrew scholar, who, leaving the rabbinical lore of his own people, dwelt rather on the harmony of moral truths. Moses Mendelssohn, the Jew of Berlin, had not only to conquer the deficiencies of his early education at a time when Jews never acquired the dead languages, but also to defy the superstitions of his neighbors. He had to fight his way against the prejudice which, proscribing

In the last months of his life Lord Beaconsfield own youth of a sister who passionately loved her people, and who first fired him with the ambition to rise. The strange pages of "Tancred" show how strong was the impression her Jewish patriotism made on his mind, and the last words of the last page of his last novel, "Endymion," are an affecting appreciation of that sister's love.