Venice in the person of Princess Volupine (is this another French comic-opera character; or a coined word compounded of the Latin for ‘pleasure,’ _Voluptas_, and the name of a play of Ben Jonson’s _Volpone, the Fox_; or a character from one of the obscurer dramatists of the _Mermaid Series_? We confess we do not care) has now descended so low that, no longer content with Byronic intrigues with civilization, she actually admits the Jew (in the person of Sir Ferdinand Klein, an English financier) to her embraces. Sir Ferdinand’s name is an epitome of contempt and pathetic comedy: the Jew, having made money, has likewise conquered and corrupted English society; his noble Christian name is stolen from the very country which most persecuted him (now also in decay); his family name means ‘little’ and is, appropriately enough, from the German (there is no sentimental condolence with the Germans because, presumably, they do not suffer from this peculiarly Mediterranean type of decay). So, in the person of Sir Ferdinand Klein, Bleistein succeeds where Burbank fails; the implication being that the Jew is not an individual but an eternal symbol, each Jew always being the entire race. “Lights, lights!” is a Shakespearianism further evoking the _Merchant of Venice_ atmosphere. The lion is the winged lion of St. Mark, the patron saint of Venice; but also, in a secondary sense, the British lion, whose wings have been clipped by the Jew. What the seven laws are in the Venetian context will probably be found in Baedeker or the Classical Dictionary or the _Merchant of Venice_ (where rats, the Rialto and pet monkeys also occur). This is not, of course, popular writing. It is aristocratic writing, and its jokes are exclusive; but only exclusive if the reader has no capacity or interest for sharing in them: the Baedeker is common to all men, so are the Classical Dictionary and La Rousse. The jokes are against modern civilization, against money, against classicism, against romanticism, against Mr. Eliot himself as a tourist in Venice with a Baedeker. One of the privileges of the comedian is to have prejudices without being held morally accountable for them; and the modernist poet is inclined to take full advantage of this privilege, to have caprices without being obliged to render a dull, rationalistic account of them. The anti-Jewish prejudice, for instance, occurs frequently in modernist poetry, and the anti-American prejudice also. It is part of the comedy that a Jew or an American may equally have these prejudices.