There are a few poems in his collection in which he bewails the lot of a Jewish poet who has only tears for his subject, but the most deal with incidents in the life of his oppressed coreligionists, now painting pictures of their misery, their poverty, their lack of orderliness, now giving them words of consolation. He never passes the narrow frame of his people's surroundings, no matter what he sings. Even when he chooses nature of which to sing, it appears to him transformed under a heavy cloud of his own sufferings superinduced by the persecution of his brethren. The best of his poems are those entitled 'Night Songs,' in which he depicts a few night scenes. Here is the way he describes the Melamed, the teacher of children in those miserable quarters called a school: "Behold the palace, oh, how beautiful, how magnificent: ivory and velvet, silk, leather, bronze, cedar wood ... here lives a Jewish teacher.... Of velvet is his skullcap--it glistens and shines from afar; the fescue is made of ivory; his girdle is of silk; the candelabrum is of bronze; the knout is of leather; the stool, the stool is cut out of cedar wood!" One can easily see that the rest of the picture is in keeping with the glory just described. There is gloom everywhere in his songs. And how could it be otherwise? It was proper for Ettinger to smile and to jest, for he was active at the dawn of better days; it was natural for the poets of the thirties and fifties to battle against superstitions and to sound the cry of progress; for the poets of the eighties there was nothing left but tears. It has been Frug's ambition to be a continuator of the bards who sang for the masses, to be a folk-poet, and the people look upon him as such, although he hardly appeals to them in the manner of the older bards. He is entirely too literary to be understood without previous training, and his allegory is not so easily unravelled. His greatest faults are, perhaps, an absence of dramatic qualities and a certain coldness of colors. Nevertheless, he is one of the best poets in Judeo-German literature, who may also claim recognition by a wider class of readers.