But the words make one shudder. They are so turgid, so inappropriate. Judas Maccabæus, of all men, to strut forth to such a welcome--he, who belonged to the first of those who declared: Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us But unto Thy name give glory! Tennyson speaks of “perfect music set unto noble words.” Handel’s music may be as perfect as art is capable of, but his librettist betrayed him by supplying words far from noble. They would better have suited Antiochus than Judas. In fact, Handel originally wrote the melody for Joshua who would have approved them as little as the Maccabee. We still have to wait for a really great drama written round Judas Maccabæus as hero. The most has therefore been made of Longfellow’s attempt, which was turned into Yiddish by Belinson (1882) and into Hebrew by Massel (1900). Judas is not an easy character to draw. He was truculent enough, yet there must have been a fascinating sweetness in him. The key-note is struck in a phrase supplied by the First Book of the Maccabees. He and his brethren “fought with gladness the battle of Israel.” The _joyousness_ of duty is a touch which marks off the Maccabees from the Puritans, and which, developed in Israel’s after-history, helped to form the Jewish character. Longfellow, who wrote his _Judas Maccabæus_ in 1872, when he had passed the zenith of his powers, misses the point altogether. Yet he realizes other aspects of his hero’s disposition. He partly, though not completely, shares Handel’s mistake of turning Judas into a braggart. But he atones by presenting very fully the _sentimentality_ of the Maccabee. To dub a warrior sentimental may seem contradictory, but the finest soldiers have been just the most sentimental. In Judas, sentimentality shows itself chiefly in his seizing upon associations aroused by local scenery. Wherever he happens to be--so the historians of his age inform us--he recalls past incidents which occurred there. Here, again, we have in Judas a quality which afterwards became a deep-seated characteristic of the Jew, his romanticism. Longfellow was himself a romantic as well as a Puritan, and perfectly presents this side of Judas’s disposition. Thus at Beth-horon Judas recalls how, on the same battlefield, Joshua,