=9. Last Years.=――In 1780 Lessing died, and a friendship of nearly thirty years was thus dissolved. For Mendelssohn, the loss of his friend was a terrible blow, but for the world the work of that memorable friendship was accomplished. It had improved the position of the Jews throughout Europe, for it had made Jew known to Christian, and Christian known to Jew. The hero of Lessing’s play ‘Nathan the Wise’ had come in those thirty years to be a well-known and famous personage, and he, Moses Mendelssohn, and not the shambling pedlar whom they passed contemptuously in the street, was talked of now among cultivated people as ‘a Jew.’ The individual Jew whom they happen to come across is generally accepted by outsiders as a representative of his race, and thus the work that Mendelssohn did by being scholarly and good-mannered and straightforward was, perhaps, even more valuable to his people than his literary services. Mendelssohn himself was an interpretation of Judaism for Christians in as true a sense as his translation of Pentateuch and Psalms was a revelation of their adopted country to the Jews. His brave and sensible efforts for the study of secular subjects, and for the speaking and the writing of pure German, did much to banish the confusing, narrowing influence of a separate jargon among his people, but certainly no less did his loyal, beautiful character go far to silence that noisy, national expression of prejudice which, even to these days, debases the German tongue, making it a dialect among the languages of civilisation. Lessing’s love for his Jewish friend, and the expression of that love in his drama, had smoothed the way and hastened the work which Mendelssohn in his boyhood had longed to accomplish. The work was done when Lessing died; and the remainder of the way which he who was left had to tread alone was fortunately not long. ‘Spend in all things else,’ says an American poet,[63] ‘But of old friends be most miserly. Each year to ancient friendships adds a ring, As to an oak; and precious more and more, Without deservingness or help of ours, They grow.... ’Tis good to set them early, for our faith Pines as we age; and after wrinkles come, Few plant, but water dead ones with vain tears.’