When, in 1808, Napoleon made Frankfort the capital of his new grand duchy, the Ghetto gates were demolished, and many vexatious restrictions were repealed. Such new hopes, however, as the Frankfort Jews may have begun to indulge, fell with Napoleon’s downfall in 1815. Civil and political disabilities were revived, and it was not till 1854 that the last of these were erased from the statute-book. The one house in that sad old street, the stirring sermons in whose stones might be ‘good in everything,’ would be No. 148, the little low-browed dwelling with the sign of the Rose and Star--a veritable Rose of Dawn it has proved--which was purchased more than a hundred years ago [in 1780] by Meyer Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the great Rothschild house. Every one knows the fairy-like story of that old house; how Meyer Amschel, intended by his parents to be a rabbi, as many of his ancestors had been before him, chose for himself a different way of helping his fellow-men; how he went into commerce, and made commerce, even in the Ghetto, dignified and honourable, as he would have made chimney-sweeping if he had adopted it; how he became agent to the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, how faithfully he discharged his stewardship, and how his money took to itself snowball properties, and changed the tiny _Judengasse_ tenement into gorgeous mansions. And the old stones would tell, too, of how faithful were the old merchant prince and the wife of his youth to early associations; how sons and daughters grew up and married, and moved to more aristocratic neighbourhoods, but how Meyer Amschel and his old wife clung to the shabby old home in the Ghetto, and lived there all their lives, and till she died, nearly fifty years ago.[10] The very iron bars of those windows would speak if they could, saying never a word of their old bad uses, but telling only how kind and wrinkled hands were stretched out through them day by day, and year after year, dealing out bread to the hungry. No. 148 could certainly tell the prettiest story in all the street, and preach the most suggestive line in all the sermons carted away with those stones of the Frankfort _Judengasse_. And it would be a story with a sequel. For when all the other sad old houses were demolished, the walls and rafters of No. 148 were carefully collected and numbered, and for a while reverently laid aside. And now, re-erected, the house stands close by its old site, serving as the centre or depôt for the dispensing of the Rothschild charities in Frankfort. Fanciful folks might almost be tempted to believe that stones with such experiences would be sufficiently sentient to rejoice at the pretty sentiment which refused to let them perish, and which, regarding them as relics, built them up afresh, and consecrated them to new and noble uses. HEINRICH HEINE: A PLEA ‘That blackguard Heine.’--CARLYLE. ’“Who was Heine?” A wicked man.’ CHARLES KINGSLEY.