DA COSTA had come, from Amsterdam, into England, in the year 1704. His struggling Hebrew compatriots were among the earliest sharers in his bounty. But his heart was too large to suffer that bounty to be limited by considerations either of race or of local neighbourhood. To him, as to the Samaritan of old, distress made kinship. He was wont to journey, from time to time, through thirty or forty parishes of Surrey and of Kent, with the punctual diligence of a commercial traveller, simply to succour the distressed by that best of all succour, the provision of means through which, in time, self-help would be developed and ensured. Provident loans, clothing-funds, the education and apprenticeship of necessitous children, were the forms in which DA COSTA’S benevolence delighted to invest not only his money, but his personal exertion and his cordial sympathy. He devoted more than a thousand pounds a year to the benefit of Christian Englishmen, besides all that he gave to the poor of his own faith and race. And to both he gave, without noise or ostentation. He had, too, the breadth of view which enabled him to put, on their true foot of equality, the claims of the necessitous mind, as well as those of the necessitous body. Unlike many other men of genuine beneficence, popular estimates of giving did not mislead him into one-sidedness of aim. Within a few years of DA COSTA’S arrival in England, probably about the year 1720, and when, with youthful ardour, he was seeking to acquire knowledge as well as to make money, he met, at a bookseller’s, with a remarkable collection of Hebrew books, of choice editions and in rich and uniform bindings. The collection had that sumptuousness of aspect which invited inquiry into its origin. All that he could learn on that score was the probability that some statesman or other of the Commonwealth period, had collected them for a public but unfulfilled purpose, and that they had fallen—with so much other spoil—into the hands of CHARLES THE SECOND. By that King’s order they had received, if not their rich binding, at least his crown and cypher as marks of the royal appropriation, and then (in a truly Carolinian fashion) were left in the hands of the King’s stationer for lack of payment of the charge of what—whether binding or mere decoration—had been done to the books by the royal command. DA COSTA prized them as among his chief treasures, but directly he heard of the foundation of a great repository of learning, the emotions of the Jewish broker were such as might have been felt by ‘broad-browed VERULAM,’ could he have lived to see that day; save only that BACON would first have scanned the evidence about the origin of the institution, and would have discriminated the praise.