accusations were levelled against the Protector. That he was, unsuspected, himself of Jewish descent, and had designs on the long vacant Messiahship of his interesting kinsfolk, was not the most malignant, though it was perhaps among the most absurd, of these tales. ‘The man is without a soul,’ writes Carlyle, ‘that can look into the great soul of a man, radiant with the splendours of very heaven, and see nothing there but the shadow of his own mean darkness.’[20] There must have been, if this view be correct, a good many particularly materialistic bodies going about at that epoch in English history when the Protector of England took upon himself the unpopular burden of being also the Protector of the Jews. There had been some opposition on the part of the family to overcome, some tender timid forebodings, which events subsequently justified, to dispel, before Manasseh was free to set out for England; but in the late autumn of 1655[21] we find him with two or three companions safely settled in lodgings in the Strand. An address to the Protector was personally presented by Manasseh, whilst a more detailed declaration to the Commonwealth was simultaneously published. Very remarkable are both these documents. Neither in the personal petition to Cromwell, nor in the more elaborate argument addressed to the Parliament, is there the slightest approach to the _ad misericordiam_ style. The whole case for the Jews is stated with dignity, and pleaded without passion, and throughout justice rather than favour forms the staple of the demand. The ‘clemency’ and ‘high-mindedness’ of Cromwell are certainly taken for granted, but equally is assumed the worthiness of the clients who appeal to these qualities. Manasseh makes also a strong point of the ‘Profit,’ which the Jews are likely to prove to their hosts, naïvely recognising the fact that ‘Profit is a most powerful motive which all the world prefers above all other things’; and ‘therefore dealing with that point first.’ He dwells on the ‘ability,’ and ‘industry,’ and ‘natural instinct’ of the Jews for ‘merchandising,’ and for ‘contributing new inventions,’ which extra aptitude, in a somewhat optimistic spirit, he moralises, may have been given to them for their ‘protection in their wanderings,’ since ‘wheresoever they go to dwell, there presently the traficq begins to flourish.’ Read in the light of some recent literature, one or two of Manasseh’s arguments might almost be termed prophetic. Far-sighted, however, and wide-seeing as was our Amsterdam Rabbi, he could certainly not have foretold that more than two hundred years later his race would be taunted in the same breath for being a ‘wandering’ and ‘homeless tribe,’ and for remaining a ‘settled’ and ‘parasitic’ people in their adopted countries; yet are not such ingenious, and ungenerous, and inconsistent taunts answered by anticipation in the following paragraph?--