Whilst the leaders of society, the licentious crusader and the celibate monk, were stumbling so sorely in the shadow of the Cross, and whilst the rank and file throughout Europe were steeped in deepest gloom of densest ignorance and superstition, the lamp of learning, handed down from generation to generation of despised Jews, was still being carefully trimmed, and was burning at its brightest among the little knot of philosophers and poets in Spain. Alcharisi, the commentator and critic of the circle, gives, for his age, a curiously high standard of the qualifications essential to the sometimes lightly bestowed title of author. ‘A poet,’ he says, ‘(1) must be perfect in metre; (2) his language of classic purity; (3) the subject of his poem worthy of the poet’s best skill, and calculated to instruct and to elevate mankind; (4) his style must be full of “lucidity” and free from every obscure or foreign expression; (5) he must never sacrifice sense to sound; (6) he must add infinite care and patience to his gift of genius, never submitting crude work to the world; and (7) lastly, he must neither parade all he knows nor offer the winnowings of his harvest.’ These seem sufficiently severe conditions even to nineteenth-century judgment, but Jehudah Halevi, say his admirers and even his contemporaries, fulfilled them all. That a man should be judged by his peers gives a promise of sound and honest testimony, and if such judgment be accepted as final, then does Halevi hold high rank indeed among men and poets. One of the first things that strike an intruder into this old-world literary circle is the curious absence of those small rivalries and jealousies which we of other times and manners look instinctively to find. Such records as remain to us make certainly less amusing reading than some later biographies and autobiographies afford, but, on the other hand, it has a unique interest of its own, to come upon authentic traces of such susceptible beings as authors, all living in the same set and with a limited range both of subjects and of readers, who yet live together in harmony, and interchange sonnets and epigrams curiously free from every suggestion of envy, hatred, or uncharitableness. There is, in truth, a wonderful freshness of sentiment about these gentle old scholars. They say pretty things to and of each other in almost school-girl fashion. ‘I pitch my tent in thy heart,’ exclaims one as he sets out on a journey. More poetically Halevi expresses a similar sentiment to a friend of his (Ibn Giat): ‘If to the clouds thy boldness wings its flight, Within our hearts, thou ne’er art out of sight.’ Writes another (Moses Aben Ezra), and he was a philosopher and grammarian to boot, one not to be lightly suspected of sentimentality, ‘Our hearts were as one: now parted from thee, my heart is divided into two.’ Halevi was the absent friend in this instance, and he begins his response as warmly:--