The death of his friend was a terrible blow to Mendelssohn. ‘After wrinkles come,’ says Mr. Lowell, in likening ancient friendships to slow-growing trees, ‘few plant, but water dead ones with vain tears.’ In this case, the actual pain of loss was greatly aggravated by some publications which appeared shortly after Lessing’s death, impugning his sincerity and religious feeling. Germany, as Goethe once bitterly remarked, ‘needs time to be thankful.’ In the first year or two following Lessing’s death it was, perhaps, too early to expect gratitude from his country for the lustre his talents had shed on it. Some of the pamphlets would make it seem that it was too early even for decency. Mendelssohn vigorously took up the cudgels for his dead friend; too vigorously, perhaps, since Kant remarked that ‘it is Mendelssohn’s fault, if Jacobi (the most notorious of the assailants) should now consider himself a philosopher.’ To Mendelssohn’s warmhearted, generous nature it would, however, have been impossible to remain silent when one whom he knew to be tolerant, earnest, and sincere in the fullest sense of those words of highest praise, was accused of ‘covert Spinozism’; a charge which again was broadly rendered, by these wretched, ignorant interpreters of a language they failed to understand, as atheism and hypocrisy. But this was his last literary work. It shows no sign of decaying powers; it is full of pathos, of wit, of clear close reasoning, and of brilliant satire; yet nevertheless it was his monument as well as his friend’s. He took the manuscript to his publisher in the last day of the year 1785; and in the first week of the New Year 1786, still only fifty-six years old, he quietly and painlessly died. That last work seems to make a beautiful and fitting end to his life; a life which truly adds a worthy stanza to what Herder calls ‘the greatest poem of all time--the history of the Jews.’ THE NATIONAL IDEA IN JUDAISM