oars with full force, unfurl all the sails, and, favored by wind and weather and propelled by the buoyant courage peculiar to his sanguine nature, steer straight for the destination whither impulse drew him. It was the first time that his official duties coincided with his inner vocation. Faithful, zealous performance of the service he was engaged to do promoted the work he had set himself as the goal of his life. In regular, uninterrupted succession, volume after volume of his “History” now began to appear in complete realization of his plan. In 1856 the _third_ volume was published under the title, “History of the Jews from the Death of Judas Maccabæus to the Downfall of the Jewish State.”[48] It formed the complement and justification of his view of the Talmudic epoch, the one with which he had begun as being the period “least understood in its inner relations.” At the same time the third volume distinctly bounds the spiritual territory in which the Jewish history of the diaspora is rooted. For he intended to dispose of the Jewish history of the diaspora down to the present time before beginning the account of the Biblical and the early post-Biblical periods. Therefore, when he published his fifth volume, “History of the Jews from the Completion of the Talmud (500) to the Beginnings of Jewish-Spanish Culture (1027),”[49] he had, as he said in the preface, “got back on the right track.” Now every doubt was bound to vanish; after many years a genuine historian had arisen unto Judaism.