Yet he failed to win this approval. It is pretty certain that the etchings were never used. Mr. Fairfax Murray possessed the _Piedra Gloriosa_ with the etchings, and has now presented the volume to the University Library, Cambridge; another copy is to be seen in the Musée Carnavalet, Paris, a copy formerly owned by M. Dutuit of Rouen. But Mr. Solomons seems right in asserting that “the original etchings in the copies of Mr. Murray and M. Dutuit were no doubt inserted after by admirers of Rembrandt’s work, but certainly not with the knowledge and sanction of Menasseh.” Why not? The etchings are good work; they really illustrate their subject, and must have added to the commercial, as well as to the artistic value of Menasseh’s work. The most curious fact is that, though Rembrandt’s etchings were never used, a set of copper-plate engravings, based, as Mr. Solomons guesses, by the Jewish engraver Salom Italia on Rembrandt but not identical with his work, is found in some copies of Menasseh’s book--copies possessed by Mr. Solomons, M. Didot, and the Levy Collection in Hamburg. These engravings are laterally inverted, the right of Rembrandt’s etchings becomes the left of Salom Italia’s engravings. There are other differences in detail, all calculated to render the pictures more fitted for book illustration, but of all the changes only one is of consequence, and it was Mr. Solomons who detected the real significance of the change. The change referred to gives the clue to the whole mystery. On comparing the two versions of the Vision of Ezekiel a striking variation is discernible. The figure of the Almighty has been suppressed! Here was the fatal defect in Rembrandt’s work. Menasseh could not possibly use a drawing in which the Deity is represented; he was not the one to repeat the inadvertence of the artist of the Sarajevo Haggadah. Possibly he only detected the fault at the last hour. But a fatality clung to the second set of illustrations also. Several copies of the _Piedra Gloriosa_ are extant without any pictures at all. LANCELOT ADDISON ON THE BARBARY JEWS “Justice is done to the private virtues of the Jews of Barbary.” So Mr. Francis Espinasse remarks in his biography of Lancelot Addison. It is an accurate comment. Lancelot, the father of the more famous Joseph Addison--who himself wrote so amiably of the Jews a generation later--spent several years in Africa as English chaplain. Born in 1632, he showed an independent mind at Oxford. He roughly handled some of the University Puritans in 1658, and was promptly compelled to recant his speech on his knees in open Convocation. Tangier came into the possession of Charles II in 1662. Lancelot Addison had officiated in Dunkirk for the previous three years; but when that port was given up to the French, Addison was transferred to Morocco.