conquer the world’--so impossible he found it to keep his eyes on the page, whilst the very motes were dancing in the sunshine as it poured in through the old convent window, which was set just too high in the wall for a safe jump into freedom. One day the need of sympathy, and possibly some unconscious association from the dim old cloister, proved momentarily too strong for the impressionable little lad’s Jewish instincts; he came across a crucifix in some forgotten niche of the transformed convent; he looked up, he tells us, at the roughly carved figure, and dropping on his knees, prayed an earnest heterodox prayer, ‘Oh, Thou poor once persecuted God, do help me, if possible, to keep the irregular verbs in my head!’ ‘Jewish instincts,’ we said, and they could have been scarcely more, for neither at home, at school, nor in the streets was the atmosphere the boy breathed favourable to the development of religious principles. The Judaism of that age was, superficially, very much what the age had made of it; and its followers and its persecutors alike combined to render it mightily unattractive to susceptible natures. Samson Heine, stolid and respectable, we may imagine doing his religious, as he did all his other duties and avocations, in solemn routine fashion, laying heavy honest hands on each prose detail, and letting every bit of poetry slip through his fat fingers, whilst his bright eager wife, with her large ideas and her small vanities, ruled her household, and read her Rousseau, and, feeling the outer world shut from her by religion, and the higher world barred from her by ritual, found the whole thing cramping and unsatisfying to the last degree. ‘Happy is he whom his mother teacheth’ runs an old Talmudic proverb; but among the mother-taught lessons of his childhood, the best was missing to Heinrich Heine--the real difference between ‘holy and profane’ he never rightly learnt, and thus it came to pass that Jewish instincts--an ineradicable and an inalienable, but alas! an incomplete inheritance of the sons of Israel--were all that Judaism gave to this poet of Jewish race.