‘Vulgar minds Refuse or crouch beneath their load; the brave Bear theirs without repining,’ says an English poet.[54] Spinoza was a very different sort of man from Uriel da Costa. He neither raged, nor protested, nor recanted. He accepted the sentence passed upon him, recognising the cruel injustice of it, but recognising also the force of circumstances, and what had been his own share in bringing it about. He removed to a little distance from Amsterdam, and altering his name to its Latin equivalent, Benedict Spinoza, he faced his life under its new conditions. His first necessity was to secure the means of living; and here the Jewish instinct we have so often noted asserted itself at once, and the hands made ready to help the head. He worked as an optician, and it is characteristic of this great man that the lenses and glasses which he cut were as much appreciated by opticians as are his books by scholars. And he wrote and he taught, and in the latter occupation found some compensations from the utter loneliness to which he had been condemned. His pupils conceived an immense affection for him, and one named De Vries, who knew himself doomed to an early death, earnestly desired to make Spinoza his heir. But the young man had a brother living, and Spinoza would not permit his pupil to put aside the righteous claim of his own kindred. When De Vries died, the brother who came into his fortune would have settled an annual income on Spinoza, but even this he refused, taking only at last, after much persuasion, the half of what was pressed upon him. A man’s conduct in money matters is a very tolerable test of the stuff he is made of, and in another instance, where a legacy was in question, Spinoza acted in precisely the same serenely just and unimpulsive fashion. When his father died, there was a small inheritance left for the family, which, besides this banished son, consisted of two daughters. On the ground of his having been expelled from the community of Israel, the sisters disputed Spinoza’s right to his share of the property. Spinoza did not yield to this injustice; he considered it a duty of every citizen to resist any form of wrong-doing, whether his own advantage was concerned in the event or no. He knew he had not forfeited his right to his fair share in the division of their father’s property, and he would not waive his right. But when his claim was established and allowed, he declined to profit by it. Justice was satisfied, generosity might be indulged. He gave up to his sisters every bit of his portion, save only one bed! He cared very little about money, and even, which is rarer, very little for most of the pleasures which money ensures. His mode of living was most frugal. In his effort to make both ends meet, he once jestingly compared himself to a snake, which has to wriggle to get its tail in its mouth. Still he was not, in the very least, miserly or misanthropical.