Of the visiting of the sick, the Talmud speaks with a sort of awe. God’s spirit, it says, dwells in the chamber of suffering and death, and tendance therein is worship. Nursing was to be voluntary, and no charge to be made for drugs; and so deeply did the habit of helping the helpless in this true missionary spirit obtain among the Jews, that to this day, and more especially in provincial places, the last offices for the dead are rarely performed by hired hands. The ‘accompanying of the bride’ is _Gemiluth-chesed_ in another form. To rejoice with one’s neighbour’s joys is no less a duty in this un-Rochefoucauld-like code than to grieve with his grief. A bride is to be greeted with songs and flowers, and pleasant speeches, and, if poor, to be provided with pretty ornaments and substantial gifts, but the pleasant speeches are in all cases, and before all things, obligatory. In the discursive detail, which is so strong a feature of these Talmudic rulings, it is asked: ‘But if the bride be old, or awkward, or positively plain, is she to be greeted in the usual formula as “fair bride--graceful bride”?’ ‘Yes,’ is the answer, for one is not bound to insist on uncomfortable facts, nor to be obtrusively truthful; to be agreeable is one of the minor virtues. Were there anything in the doctrine of metempsychosis, one would be almost tempted to believe that this ancient unnamed Rabbi was speaking over again in the person of one of our modern minor poets: ‘A truth that’s told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent.’[30] The charity of courtesy is everywhere insisted upon, and so strongly, that, on behalf of those sometimes ragged and unkempt Rabbis it might perhaps be urged that politeness, the _politesse du cœur_, was their Judaism _en papillote_. ‘Receive every one with pleasant looks,’ says one sage,[31] whose practice was, perhaps, not always quite up to his precepts; ‘where there is no reverence there is no wisdom,’ says another; and as the distinguishing mark of a ‘clown,’ a third instances that man--have we not all met him?--who rudely breaks in on another’s speech, and is more glib than accurate or respectful in his own.