It was with a pupil of the Rabbinical College, in company with his friends, that I took my first walk through ancient Rome. I felt attracted to him by his striking face of that peculiar fine Jewish type, which is more common among the Jews in the East than among us. And when he was reading the lesson from the Prophets in the synagogue, where I made his acquaintance, he reminded me of that Jewish boy with bright eyes, black curls, and features strikingly beautiful walking as a captive from Jerusalem through the streets of Rome some seventeen centuries ago, whose proficiency in the words of Isaiah caused his redemption. It would be an exaggeration to say that my companion’s remarks were very instructive from an artistic point of view. Being born and bred in Rome, he passed with utter indifference many objects which we are bidden to admire, whilst at others he actually shouted out “Image,” or made some other prosaic remark. But in a country where one is determined to play the heathen for so many weeks, to worship superannuated deities, to get into raptures at every reminiscence of superseded and vanishing religions, and to be delighted at the sights of “greasy saints and martyrs hairy,” there can be no great harm in being called back to one’s true nature. The feelings crowding upon one, when entering that part of the ancient city which probably was in the mind of the Rabbis when they spoke of “Guilty Rome,” are of a conflicting nature. Every stone and every brick there saw the humiliation of Israel, in every theatre and every circus the Jew served as a comic figure, and was held up to ridicule, whilst there was, perhaps, hardly a single lane or gate through which those who resented the yoke of the “anti‐Semites of Antiquity” did not pass, in order to “be butchered to make a Roman holiday.” What concerns a Jew most in this perished world of ruins, and at the same time causes him the deepest grief, is the triumphal arch of Titus, “commemorating the defeat of the Jews, and dedicated to him by his successor, Domitian.” Enough has been said and written about it both by antiquarians and theologians, the former admiring the workmanship of the reliefs, the latter perceiving in it a proof of the fulfilment of the well‐known passages in the New Testament about the destruction of the Temple, which came to pass in spite of the efforts made by Titus to save it. Those who have read Bernay’s essay on the “Chronik des Sulpicius Severus” know that the behaviour of “the delight of the human species” on that occasion is rather open to doubt, and it is more probable that, instead of trying to rescue it, he commanded that it should be set on fire. Josephus, who witnessed the shame of his compatriots and co‐religionists, has left us a full account of the triumphal procession. Only a flunkey like Josephus could maintain that calm indifference with which he describes the events of the “bitter day,” the perusal of which makes one’s blood boil.