=1. Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021‒1070).=――This poet and philosopher, who was born at Malaga in 1021, is a very good example of what tolerant Mahomedan Spain produced among her Jews. The truest lives, it has been said, are those which have been cut rose-diamond fashion, that is to say, many-sided, and each side answering to some useful aspect of the life around them. This many-sidedness is perhaps a distinctive feature of Jewish genius, and due as much to circumstances as to nature. Solomon ibn Gabirol is an instance in point. He was poet, patriot, astronomer, and philosopher in one, and equally distinguished all round. Of his own life-history we unfortunately know almost as little as we do of Shakespeare’s, for biographies and autobiographies were not so much in fashion in those days as in these. But sonnets and poems with Gabirol, as with the great Englishman, take often a personal turn, and from these we learn that the Spanish poet was early left an orphan, and that he found a friend and protector in a certain Jekuthiel ibn-Hassan, the chief minister of the reigning kaliph. There are verses in existence which tell us of the friendship, and verses, too, of a sadder sort, which tell us of that friendship’s ending. Jekuthiel died when the boy he loved, and who loved him back again as only boys and poets can, was but eighteen, and the sorrow that came thus early into Gabirol’s life shadowed it henceforth. He seems always to have been of a somewhat sombre temperament, and it is possible that the loss of his parents when he was a child, and then the loss of this good friend just as he was entering manhood, may have made him more inclined than even he was naturally, to take sad views of things. He wrote a really wonderful elegy for so young a poet, on the death of Jekuthiel, and for the rest of his life he seems to have turned to work as a cure for heart-break. The most valuable of his writings is called ‘The Fountain of Life,’ and its philosophy was so wise and so original that the book grew more celebrated than the author. It was translated about 1150, from the Arabic language in which it was written, into Latin, and under its name of _Fons Vitæ_ it was greatly prized by learned schoolmen of the period, and in time it became a puzzle to identify the writer. ‘Avicebron’ was received as the name of the author, but who Avicebron might be was only conclusively solved in these days, when the French _savant_ Munk proved, to the satisfaction of all who knew most about the facts, that the unknown and celebrated ‘Avicebron’ of general fame, and the known and loved Gabirol of Jewish fame, were identical. To Jewish literature his chief contributions were numerous _Piyutim_, to be found in the various rituals, and the כֶּתֶר מַלְכוּת, or Kingly Crown, which forms part of the New Year service in the Prayer-books of the Spanish and Portuguese and the British Jews. This is a most beautiful religious poem, beginning ‘Heavenly and earthly creatures bear