But if this be a crime, then the worst offender was none other than the famous Israel Najara. In the middle of the sixteenth century he added some of its choicest lyrics to the Hebrew song-book. The most popular of the table hymns (Zemiroth) are his. He was a mystic, filled with a sense of the nearness of God. But he did not see why the devil should have all the pretty tunes. So he deliberately wrote religious poems in metres to suit Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Spanish, and Italian melodies, his avowed purpose being to divert the young Jews of his day from profane to sacred song. But these young Jews must have been exigent, indeed, if they failed to find in Najara's sacred verses enough of love and passion. Not only was he, like Jehudah Halevi, a prolific writer of Wedding Odes, but in his most spiritual hymns he uses the language of love as no Hebrew poet before or after him has done. Starting with the assumption that the Song of Songs was an allegory of God's espousal with the bride Israel, Najara did not hesitate to put the most passionate words of love for Israel into God's mouth. He was strongly attacked, but the saintly mystic Isaac Luria retorted that Najara's hymns were listened to with delight in Heaven--and if ever a man had the right to speak of Heaven it was Luria. And Hebrew poetry has no need to be ashamed of the passionate affection poured out by these mystic poets on another beloved, the Queen Sabbath. This is not the place to speak of the Hebrew drama and of the form which the love interest takes in it. Woman, at all events, is treated far more handsomely in the dramas than in the satires. The love scenes of the Hebrew dramatists are pure to coldness. These dramas began to flourish in the eighteenth century; Luzzatto was by no means an unworthy imitator of Guarini. Sometimes the syncretism of ideas in Hebrew plays is sufficiently grotesque. Samuel Romanelli, who wrote in Italy at the era of the French Revolution, boldly introduces Greek mythology. It may be that in the Spanish period Hebrew poets introduced the muses under the epithet "daughters of Song." But with Romanelli, the classical machinery is more clearly audible. The scene of his drama is laid in Cyprus; Venus and Cupid figure in the action. Romanelli gives a moral turn to his mythology, by interposing Peace to stay the conflict between Love and Fame. Ephraim Luzzatto, at the same period, tried his hand, not unsuccessfully, at Hebrew love sonnets. Love songs continued to be written in Hebrew in the nineteenth century, and often see the light in the twentieth. But I do not propose to deal with these. Recent new-Hebrew poetry has shown itself strongest in satire and elegy. Its note is one of anger or of pain. Shall we, however, say of the Hebrew race that it has lost the power to sing of love? Has it grown too old, too decrepid?