Dr. Jacobs well summed up our indebtedness to Browning when he said that “it is not in the minutiae of Hebrew scholarship that we are to look for Browning’s sympathy with the Jewish spirit,” so markedly shown in his writings. Mr. Stopford Brooke (_The Poetry of Robert Browning_, 1902, pp. 33-4) puts the case strongly but truly when he declares that “no English poet, save perhaps Shakespeare, whose exquisite sympathy could not leave even Shylock unpitied, had spoken of the Jew with compassion, knowledge and admiration, till Browning wrote of him. The Jew lay deep in Browning.” The writer of those sentences no doubt would not call Richard Cumberland a poet; his plays were friendly enough to the Jew. But Browning’s understanding was more profound than Cumberland’s. It is a mistake to say, as a recent critic has said, that “Browning would have us see that the purest religion is of any creed or none.” That was perhaps Lessing’s view. Browning seems to go further. He saw in Judaism certain elements of absolute truth; therefore he presented those elements through Jewish characters. K. E. FRANZOS’ “JEWS OF BARNOW” George MacDonald was a novelist of distinction. When an English translation of _Ein Kampf ums Recht_ appeared (under the title _For the Right_), MacDonald wrote an introduction. “Not having been asked to do so, I write this preface from admiration of the book.” It was a significant fact, he continued, that the generation had produced a man capable of such an ideal as the book represented. It was a work which substituted for the “half wisdom” of the cry “art for art’s sake” the whole wisdom of the cry “art for truth’s sake.” And MacDonald concluded as he began: “I have seldom, if ever, read a work of fiction that moved me with so much admiration.” Mr. Gladstone, too, was among the enthusiastic eulogists of the novel.