but it is never cowardly even in its hate. The writers recount openly, and often passionately enough, the wrongs suffered by their race, but for all redress they ‘lift up their eyes to the hills, whence cometh their help.’ To the credit of these patient poets of the _Selichah_ be it said that they never used their power of national song to rouse their people to any secret plotting, nor to any working of harm against their oppressors. But to keep up a feeling of pride and hope in the poor Ghetto folks old tales of ancient glories are recited over and over again. It is somewhat curious to see how, through all the sad and often despondent strains of the _Piyutim_, there sounds every now and then a note of self-satisfied trustfulness, that seems, at first, almost like a sign of national arrogance or conceit. ‘A race that has been tested, And tried through fire and water, Is surely prized by Thee, And purified from sin,’ is an instance of the kind. But it was probably just this sure sense that God never would desert His people that saved them from utter degradation. And so, if the _Piyutim_ occasionally insist a little strongly on God’s especial and peculiar love for Israel, under Israel’s especial and peculiar need for it in those days, the slight exclusiveness of their religious aspirations may well be forgiven to them. =4. A Specimen Planet.=――Astronomers, before they begin to study the orbit of any particular star, like to be familiar with the general aspect of the heavens; and students of history, who wish to learn about any special period or personage, have to follow much the same course, in order that they may be able to fill in for themselves the background to any prominent figure. The general condition of the Jewish people in the chief countries of Europe during the Middle Ages is now, perhaps, sufficiently familiar to us for this plan to be possible, and, as each star peeps out from its own particular corner of the dark sky, we can picture somewhat accurately the nature of the surrounding darkness which it illumined. Thus, the end of the ninth century, and the country Egypt, recalls to memory the tempestuous close of a long period of literary activity. The labours of the Gaonim were becoming, by that date, intermittent and interrupted, and Jehuda the Blind, one of the most active of them all, was already nearly a hundred years dead, when in 849 the Sultan Mutavakel[33] imposed those intolerant and degrading disabilities on the Jews of the East which were the beginning of the end. Oppressed from without, and divided by jealousies from within, the schools of Babylon gradually closed, one after the other, and the scholars migrated to Egypt and to Spain. In 892, to one of these settlers in Upper Egypt there was born a child who grew up and grew famous under the name and title of Gaon Saadia.[34] He became head