Parenthood, perhaps, is never quite easy, but it was a very difficult duty, and a terribly divided one, for a cultivated man who a century ago desired to bring up his children as good Jews and good citizens. Many a time, it stands on record, when this patient, self-respecting, unoffending scholar took his children for a walk coarse epithets and insulting cries followed them through the streets. No resentment was politic, no redress was possible. ‘Father, is it _wicked_ to be a Jew?’ his children would ask, as time after time the crowd hooted at them. ‘Father, is it _good_ to be a Jew?’ they grew to ask later on, when in more serious walks of life they found all gates but the Jews’ gate closed against them. Mendelssohn must have found such questions increasingly difficult to answer or to parry. Their very talents, which enlarged the boundaries, must have made his clever children rebel against the limitations which were so cruelly imposed. His eldest son Joseph early developed a strong scientific bias; how could this be utilised? The only profession which he, as a Jew, might enter, was that of medicine, and for that he had a decided distaste: perforce he was sent to commercial pursuits, and his especial talent had to run to waste, or, at best, to dilettantism. When this Joseph had sons of his own, can we wonder very much that he cut the knot and saved his children from a like experience, by bringing them up as Christians? Mendelssohn himself, all his life through, was unswervingly loyal to his faith. He took every disability accruing from it, as he took his own especial one, as being, so far as he was concerned, inevitable, and thus to be borne as patiently as might be. To him, most certainly, it would never have occurred to slip from under a burden which had been laid upon him to bear. Concerning Fromet’s influence on her children records are silent, and we are driven to conjecture that the pretty significance of her name was somewhat meaningless.[35] The story of her wooing suggests susceptibility, perhaps, rather than strength of heart; and it may be that as years went on the ‘blue eyes’ got into a habit of weeping only over sorrows and wrongs which needed a less eloquent and a more helpful mode of treatment. If Mendelssohn’s wife had been able to show her children the home side of Jewish life, its suggestive ceremonialism, its domestic compensations--possibly her sons, almost certainly her daughters, would have learnt the brave, sweet patience that was common to Jewish mothers. But this takes us to the region of ‘might have been.’ Gentle, tender-hearted Fromet, it is to be feared, failed in true piety, and, the mother anchor missing, the children drifted from their moorings.