=5. Harvest.=――He had given lessons for some time in the family of a Mr. Bernhardt, a prominent member of the Berlin synagogue, and in 1750 this gentleman proposed to the learned young man to become resident tutor to his children. This Mr. Bernhardt was a kind man as well as a rich and a cultured one, and as tutor in his house Mendelssohn found both congenial occupation and welcome leisure. He was teacher by day, student by night, and author at odd half-hours. At the end of three or four years of this work, Mr. Bernhardt offered Mendelssohn the position of bookkeeper in his silk manufactory, with some especial emoluments and responsibilities attached to the office. It was a splendid opening, and Mendelssohn gladly and gratefully accepted it. It gave him leisure and independence, and in due time wealth, for as the years went on he came to be a manager, and finally a partner in the house. He did not sink into a mere business man, but the money gave him the means wherewith to indulge his taste for books, to enjoy the society of clever and cultivated people, and to send, too, many a welcome gift to the old home in Dessau. =6. Nathan der Weise.=――Mendelssohn’s tastes had very early drawn him into the outer literary circle of Berlin, which at this time had its head-quarters in a sort of club which met to play chess, and to discuss politics and philosophy. His good manners soon overcame any lingering social prejudices, and he was already quite a popular member, when the poet Lessing, coming to Berlin in 1754, was welcomed to these gatherings as an honoured guest. Very soon an intimacy grew up between the author, whose reputation was already high, and the struggling young Jewish student. The intimacy ripened into a lifelong friendship. Lessing was on the road to become a great author, and Mendelssohn was the first Jew he had ever known. The German author and the German Jew grew very soon to be real friends, and by-and-by Lessing wrote a play, which is now the most celebrated of his works. It is called ‘Nathan the Wise.’ The hero, Nathan, is a Jew, and Mendelssohn was Lessing’s model for Nathan. ‘Let me make a nation’s ballads, and I care not who makes their laws,’ once said a keen statesman; and the ballads, and the plays, and the literature of a country undoubtedly have an immense influence on its people’s thought and action. A Jew of the Nathan der Weise type was an altogether new experience for the Germans, and the ‘divine lessons’[61] which the drama teaches had been hitherto undreamt of in their philosophy. They put on their spectacles, as a matter of course, to commentate and to criticise the text, but by-and-by they took them off again, to study it in the original. Lessing had sketched his Jew from the life, and there were quantities of such hitherto neglected and misunderstood models on all sides about them. Other Lessings among Christians began to look for, and to find, other Mendelssohns among Jews.