The king of the birds replies that the Hebrew's arguments prove the reverse of what they were intended to prove. For the very fact that the confessors of the Jewish creed need laws and preachers, penitential and fast-days, shows clearly enough that they are not free from sin; and this being so, they have certainly no right to claim superiority over the winged creatures whose life is distinguished by simplicity and innocence. To them the whole universe is one gigantic temple wherein they sing daily praises to their Creator with a pure heart and clear conscience. They need no preachers to admonish them, nor do they require fasts to obtain absolution for their transgressions. Finding, as they do, food and shelter in the fields and gardens, on mountains and in the valleys, they are always cheerful and happy without the aid of prescribed festivals, but their happiness is often disturbed by the wickedness of man, who has no right whatever to treat them as inferior to his own species. In the introduction to the ‪אגרת בעלי חיים‬ and elsewhere Kalonymos censures the extravagant mode of living which prevailed among his wealthy Jewish contemporaries. He stigmatizes their intense fondness for display, which asserted itself so strongly as to arouse the envy and hatred of the general population, and frequently with lamentable results. Kalonymos was therefore not merely a laughing philosopher like Democritus, but a stern moralist who ridiculed certain objectionable characteristics of the Jews, indicating thereby the way to self-restraint and good taste. There is also an interesting remark to be found in the ‪אגרת בעלי חיים‬, which is to the effect that in Kalonymos's time the Greek philosophers were reputed to have made frequent use of the books on philosophy composed by Jewish writers^[114-1]. A few remarks have still to be made on Kalonymos's style. He writes partly in plain and partly in rhymed prose, without, however, much elegance in either. His excessive fondness for idiomatic phrases taken from the Talmud, which he misapplies with extraordinary ingenuity, results in puns, plays on words, especially on proper names. The following example will give an idea of the nature of the whole. It does not, however, bear translation, as the idiomatic point of the Hebrew cannot be reproduced in English. In the _Eben Bochan_ there is a chapter wherein Kalonymos ridicules the way in which the Hebrew grammarians of his time quarrelled in regard to the importance which should be assigned to the accents (‪טעמים‬) attached to the Hebrew text of the Bible. Some of them were regarded in the light of the cabbala, and were believed to contain the most profound secrets regarding the present and future world. Kalonymos writes about these disputants as follows:— אני ראיתי מחלוקה גדולה בענין _קדמא ואזלא_ וריב גדול עד שהדם נשפך בענין _שופר מהפך_ ומהם אומרים מעת משה ספרא רבא בישראל קביר לא נהיה סוד עמוק כמו לפני _דרגא תביר_.