in persecution, half of fear for its possible tendency to conversion. And so by degrees they locked, from the inside also, those closed gates which led out on the open roads to use, and name, and fame. Intelligent men were content to limit all intellectual occupation to the study of the Law, and to find sufficient interest and entertainment in the endless discussion of its more intricate passages. ‘Talmudical mountebanks,’ one old chronicler somewhat unkindly calls these grim and unattractive students of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It seems a harsh phrase. The long-winded, hair-splitting arguments over trivial, abstruse points were rather a forced than a voluntary kind of mental gymnastics; and if such discussions were not interesting to outsiders, they were never meant for them. Learned philologists, before and since, have indulged in discussions, quite as long, over the meaning and form of a single particle in Homer! The Jewish Rabbis never forgot the moral education of their disciples; and the longest and weariest of these dismal dissertations of theirs seldom wound up without some popular moral lesson. At any rate, these crowds of Jewish ‘unemployed,’ oppressed and distressed as they were, did not meet to talk sedition or to plot revenge. And in their attitude of resolute aloofness from the interests of the hard outside world, there was at least no trace of self-seeking. Perhaps, in the cruel circumstances of their lot, they were not altogether so mistaken as, at the first look, they seem. One may hardly dare to blame them, these ringleted, gaberdined, bigoted heroes, who, for generations, turned their faces to the wall, and seemed, to superficial gaze, to hug their chains. They were quite sharp enough to know that, in shutting themselves in, they were also shutting themselves out, but it was so they made their dogged, miserable choice between the chances and the prizes of conversion, and the blanks――the weary, hopeless, certain blanks of a rigid loyalty to their race and their religion. As we read the story of the wise and liberal philosopher, who broke through the barriers and let in the light of learning, and of social countenance, on mediæval benighted Judaism, we shall see that the very children of the emancipator were dazzled by the unaccustomed rays, that his sons wavered and his daughters apostatised, and that in the third generation――only the third――the fetters which degraded were called degrading, and were altogether cast off, and the grandchildren of Moses Mendelssohn, the typical Jew, were Jews no longer. CHAPTER XXXVII. MOSES MENDELSSOHN.