condition had been considerably bettered. His precursors had looked upon the Haskala as the most precious treasure, to be preferred to all else in life. Abramowitsch loves his people more than wisdom and culture, and the more oppressed and suffering those he loves, the more earnest and the more fervent are his words in their behalf. He is the advocate of the poor against the rich, the downtrodden against the oppressor, the meek and long-suffering against the haughty usurper of the people's rights. He is, consequently, worshipped by the masses, and has been hated and persecuted by those whose meanness, rascality, and hypocrisy he has painted in such glaring colors. He had even once to flee for his life, so enraged had the representatives of the kahal become at their lifelike pictures in one of his dramas. His love for the people is an all-pervading passion, for man is his Godhead. There is a divine element in the lowest of human beings, and he thinks it worth while to discover it and to bring it to light, that it may outshine all the vices that have beclouded it. He turns beggar with the beggar he describes, becomes insane with him who ponders over the ills of this earth, and suffers the criminal's punishment. He at all times identifies himself with those of whom he speaks. In the more external form of composition there is again a vast progress from the writings of Lefin to the style and diction of Abramowitsch. Lefin was the first to show what vigor there was in the use of the everyday vernacular. Ettinger, Aksenfeld, and Gottlober have well adapted that simple, unadorned speech to the requirements of literary productions; but it was only Abramowitsch who demonstrated what wealth of word-building, what possibilities of expression, lay dormant in the undeveloped dialects of Judeo-German. He was peculiarly fitted to enrich the language by new formations, for having passed the first eighteen years of his life in Lithuania and passing the greater part of his later years in the Southwest, he was enabled to draw equally from the source of his native Lithuanian dialect and the spoken variety of his new home. He has welded the two so well that his works can be read with equal ease in the North and in the South, whereas the language of Aksenfeld offers a number of difficulties to the Lithuanians and even the Polish Jews whose dialect the Southern variety resembles. In diction he differs from his masters in that he substitutes a regular prose structure for the semi-dramatic utterances of the older narration, without affecting the natural speeches of the characters wherever these are introduced. In these cases he becomes so idiomatic as to baffle the best translator, who must be frequently satisfied with mere circumlocutions. He also abandons the anonym of the former generation for a pseudonym, Mendele the Bookpedler, which is, however, but a thin disguise for his real name, for his writings are of such an individuality that there can be no