Saville stopped, disgusted, and the hostess answered Sidney half coaxingly. 'Oh, I am sure you can't think that. The book is so one-sided. Not a word about our generosity, our hospitality, our domesticity--the thousand and one good traits all the world allows us.' 'Of course not; since all the world allows them, it was unnecessary,' said Sidney. 'I wonder the Chief Rabbi doesn't stop it,' said Mrs. Montagu Samuels. 'My dear, how can he?' inquired her husband. 'He has no control over the publishing trade.' 'He ought to talk to the man,' persisted Mrs. Samuels. 'But we don't even know who he is,' said Percy Saville; 'probably "Edward Armitage" is only a _nom de plume_. You'd be surprised to learn the real names of some of the literary celebrities I meet about.' 'Oh, if he's a Jew you may be sure it isn't his real name,' laughed Sidney. It was characteristic of him that he never spared a shot, even when himself hurt by the kick of the gun. Percy coloured slightly, unmollified by being in the same boat with the satirist. 'I have never seen the name in the subscription lists,' said the hostess with ready tact. 'There is an Armitage who subscribes two guineas a year to the Board of Guardians,' said Mrs. Montagu Samuels. 'But his Christian name is George.' '"Christian" name is distinctly good for "George,"' murmured Sidney. 'There was an Armitage who sent a cheque to the Russian Fund,' said Mr. Henry Goldsmith; 'but that can't be an author: it was quite a large cheque!' 'I am sure I have seen Armitage among the Births, Marriages, and Deaths,' said Miss Cissy Levine. 'How well read they all are in the national literature!' Sidney murmured to Addie. Indeed, the sectarian advertisements served to knit the race together, counteracting the unravelling induced by the fashionable dispersion of Israel, and waxing the more important as the other links, the old traditional jokes, bywords, ceremonies, card-games, prejudices, and tunes, which are more important than laws and more cementatory than ideals, were disappearing before the over-zealousness of a parvenu refinement that had not yet attained to self-confidence. The Anglo-Saxon stolidity of the West-End synagogue service, on week days entirely given over to paid praying-men, was a typical expression of the universal tendency to exchange the picturesque primitiveness of the Orient for the sobrieties of fashionable civilisation. When Jeshurun waxed fat, he did not always kick, but he yearned to approximate as much as possible to John Bull without merging in him; to sink himself and yet not be absorbed--not to be, and yet to be. The attempt to realise the asymptote in human mathematics was not quite successful, too near an approach to John Bull generally assimilating Jeshurun away. For such is the nature of Jeshurun. Enfranchise him, give him his own way, and you make a new man of him; persecute him, and he is himself again.