Jewish Portraits

It was in the summer of the year 1666 that some such incomprehensible craze seemed to possess the ancient city of Smyrna. The sleepy stillness of the narrow streets was jarred b...

In the very early boyhood of Heine some light had broken in on the thick darkness, social and political, which enveloped Jewish fortunes. It was only a fitful gleam from the met...

Meanwhile Mendelssohn married, and the story of his wooing, as first told by Berthold Auerbach, makes a pretty variation on the old theme. It was, in this case, no short idyll o...

‘Don’t tell my wife,’ he exclaims one day, when a paroxysm that should have been fatal was not, and the doctor expressed what he meant for a reassuring belief, that it would not...

The papers which form this volume have already appeared in the pages of _Good Words_, _Macmillan’s Magazine_, _The National Review_, and _The Spectator_, and are reprinted with...

The word which in these venerable folios is made to express the thing is, in itself, significant. In the Hebrew Scriptures, though the injunctions to charitable acts are many, a...

On a first reading, these last two lines strike one as oddly out of place in a love poem. But as we look again, they seem to suggest, that in a nature so full and wholesome as H...

Set free, by the liberality of Abraham and Isaac Pereira, from the pressure of everyday cares, Manasseh again devoted himself to his books, and turned out a succession of treati...

In September 1729, under a very humble roof, in a very poor little street in Dessau, was born the weakly boy who was destined to work such wonderful changes in that weary state...

But this was his last literary work. It shows no sign of decaying powers; it is full of pathos, of wit, of clear close reasoning, and of brilliant satire; yet nevertheless it wa...

In Lord Burleigh’s _Precepts to his Son for the Well-Ordering of a Mans Life_, occurs the direction, ‘Thou wilt find to thy great grief there is nothing more fulsome than a she-...