Legends moreover are characteristic of a people's culture. As a child delights in iridescent soap-bubbles, so a nation revels in reminiscences. Though poetry lend words, painting her tints, architecture a rule, sculpture a chisel, music her tones, the legend itself is dead, and only a thorough understanding of national traits enables one to recognize its ethical bearings. From this point of view, the legend of the Polish king of a night is an important historical argument, testifying to the satisfactory condition of the Jews of Poland in the fifteenth and the sixteenth century. The simile that compares nations, on the eve of a great revolution, to a seething crater, is true despite its triteness, and if to any nation, is applicable to the Poland of before and after that momentous session of the Diet. Egotism, greed, ambition, vindictiveness, and envy added fuel to fire, and hastened destruction. Jealousy had planted discord between two families, dividing the state into hostile, embittered factions. Morality was undermined, law trodden under foot, duty neglected, justice violated, the promptings of good sense disregarded. So it came about that the land was flooded by ruin as by a mighty stream, which, a tiny spring at first, gathers strength and volume from its tributaries, and overflowing its bounds, rushes over blooming meadows, fields, and pastures, drawing into its destructive depths the peasant's every joy and hope. That is the soil from which a legend like ours sprouts and grows. This legend distinctly conveys an ethical lesson. The persecutions of the Jews, their ceaseless wanderings from town to town, from country to country, from continent to continent, have lasted two thousand years, and how many dropped by the wayside! Yet they never parted with the triple crown placed upon their heads by an ancient sage: the crown of royalty, the crown of the Law, and the crown of a good name. Learning and fair fame were indisputably theirs: therefore, the first, the royal crown, never seemed more resplendent than when worn in exile. The glory of a Jewish king of the exile seemed to herald the realization of the Messianic ideal. So it happens that many a family in Poland, England, and Germany, still cherishes the memory of Rabbi Saul the king, and that "Malkohs" everywhere still boast of royal ancestry. Rabbis, learned in the Law, were his descendants, and men of secular fame, Gabriel Riesser among them, proudly mention their connection, however distant, with Saul Wahl. The memory of his deeds perpetuates itself in respectable Jewish homes, where grandams, on quiet Sabbath afternoons, tell of them, as they show in confirmation the seal on coins to an awe-struck progeny.