"Me?" said Mendelssohn, with the unfeigned modesty of the man who, his every public utterance having been dragged out of him by external compulsion, retains his native shyness and is alone in ignorance of his own influence. "No, no, it is Montesquieu, it is Dohm, it is my dear Lessing. Poor fellow, the Christian bigots are at him now like a plague of stinging insects. I almost wish he hadn't written _Nathan der Weise_. I am glad to reflect I didn't instigate him, nay, that he had written a play in favor of the Jews ere we met." "How did you come to know him?" "I hardly remember. He was always fond of outcasts--a true artistic temperament, that preferred to consort with actors and soldiers rather than with the beer-swilling middle-class of Berlin. Oh yes, I think we met over a game of chess. Then we wrote an essay on Pope together. Dear Gotthold! What do I not owe him? My position in Berlin, my feeling for literature--for we Jews have all stifled our love for the beautiful and grown dead to poetry." "Well, but what is a poet but a liar?" "Ah, my dear Herr Maimon, you will grow out of that. I must lend you Homer. Intellectual speculation is not everything. For my part, I have never regretted withdrawing a portion of my love from the worthy matron, philosophy, in order to bestow it on her handmaid, _belles-lettres_. I am sorry to use a French word, but for once there's no better. You smile to see a Jew more German than the Germans." "No, I smile to hear what sounds like French all round! I remember reading in your _Philosophical Conversations_ your appeal to the Germans not to exchange their own gold for the tinsel of their neighbors." "Yes, but what can one do? It is a Berlin mania; and, you know, the King himself.... Our Jewish girls first caught it to converse with the young gallants who came a-borrowing of their fathers, but the influence of my dear daughters--there, the beautiful one is Dorothea, the eldest, and that other, who takes more after me, is Henrietta--their influence is doing much to counteract the wave of flippancy and materialism. But fancy any one still reading my _Philosophical Conversations_--my 'prentice work. I had no idea of printing it. I lent the manuscript to Lessing, observing jestingly that I, too, could write like Shaftesbury, the Englishman. And lo! the next time I met him he handed me the proofs. Dear Gotthold." "Is it true that the King--?"