language of Italy; Immanuel, witty and caustic, venting his frolicsome sarcasms in the solemn tongue of the Hebrew prophets. The contrast is brought home to us with almost deliberate vividness by the works of the two friends. They both wrote visits to the land of the dead. Dante’s is a tragedy; Immanuel’s a satirical comedy--almost a parody. But in one respect the Jew shows himself superior to the Christian. His paradise includes the great shades of the pagan world. And yet it would be an error to imagine that the Jew, even in those halcyon days of Italian freedom, was wholly exempt from the penalty which pursues dissent. Whatever the feelings of the cultured and the thoughtful might be, to the populace of Italy the Jew was a pestilent heretic. As early as 1016 we hear of a massacre of the Jews in Rome owing to an earthquake which wrought great havoc in the city. The calamity occurred on Good Friday, and it was ascertained that at the time of its occurrence the Jews were worshipping in their synagogue. A coincidence to the mediaeval mind was tantamount to conclusive proof of cause and effect. The Roman rabble, under the influence of panic and superstition, wreaked a terrible vengeance on the supposed authors of the misfortune, and Pope Benedict VIII. sanctioned a crime which he was probably unable to prevent. Innocent III. proved his consistency by oppressing the “enemies of Christ” in Italy as scrupulously as elsewhere, and the Jews were also expelled from Bologna in 1171. In 1278--when Dante was a precocious youth of twelve years of age, already devoted to his mystic adoration of Beatrice; when Thomas Aquinas, the tolerant of Judaism, had been dead only four years; and two years after the birth of the great painter Giotto, to whom we owe the one portrait of Dante that has escaped the deluge of the centuries--at that period at which the rosy morn of the Renaissance was faintly gilding the eastern firmament, we find the Jews compelled to attend Christian services and to submit to sermons preached against their own religion. But, with few exceptions, no bloody persecution soiled the canvas of Italian history. In the ensuing century synagogues, plain, gaunt, and ungainly, might still be seen in close proximity to gorgeous Christian churches in Rome, and the congregations which thronged the latter on Sundays had not yet discovered that it was their duty to punish their neighbours for worshipping their god on Saturday. But the discovery was not far distant.