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Instability in American Public Life, 480 Women, College, The Health of

READINGS FROM NEW BOOKS.

Breakwater, A, of Barbarism, . . 773 Mangan and His Poetry,

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PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

THE LIVING AGE COMPANY, BOSTON.

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FOR SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, THE LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

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And send its breath

Oh, my heart, why should you break at To whisper of the earth, its beauty and its any thoughts like these?

So sooth are they of the old time that they should bring you ease;

Of Hester in the lavender and out among the bees,

grace,

And combat death,

It would be light and I should see in thy dear eyes

The sorrow grow,

Clipping the long stalks one by one under Love, could I lift my own undimmed to

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From The London Quarterly Review. JEWS IN ENGLISH FICTION. 1 Of late years it has been a commonplace of conversation with Englishmen to speak with extremest reprobation of German "Judenhetze" and Russian Anti-Semite ferocity, and to denounce the irritating insults, the oppressions, the plunderings, the wholesale deportations of an industrious unhappy people, in which the fanatic dislike to an alien and obstinate race has expressed itself; while the speakers have rarely failed to dwell complacently on British exemption from these offences against justice and mercy. Yet there was a time when anti-Jewish prejudices, bitter as those of Russ or German, harbored in English breasts, and expressed themselves in insults as unfeeling, and deeds as cruel. Very slowly were those prejudices modified, while the English nation, coming Itself into fuller light of liberty, was won first to endure the presence of the Hebrew alien, and then to admit him, though with much hesitation, to share in the rights of citizenship.

After this it could hardly be denied, by men of liberal culture, that he was responsive to kindlier usage, and showed himself a human creature, and no enemy of mankind, one of a race distinguished by its own excellences as well as by marked defects. Yet, even thus, the extraordinary mingling in him of the base and the noble has earned for him more than his full share of disfavor in the land of his adoption, and his persistent separation has worked to render it hard for either friend or enemy to appraise him quite justly; one outsider has despised him, another has praised him highly; the estimate of both, it may be, has been erroneous. Perhaps it is only to-day, when some children of Israel have themselves taken the pen and written true words of their people, that the English Jew is begin

1 1. The Prioresse's Tale. By Chaucer. 2. The Merchant of Venice. By Shakespeare. 3. Ivanhoe. By Sir Walter Scott.

4. Daniel Deronda. By George Eliot.

5. Sebastian Strome. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. 6. Reuben Sachs. By Amy Levy.

7. Children of the Ghetto. By I. Zangwill.

ning to be rightly understood by his neighbor, the English Gentile. Is it not worth our while to note under what varying aspects, and with what near or remote approach to truth, English imaginative writers have portrayed him, in this age, and in others more remote? A few typical examples may suffice us to judge what has been our advance in intelligent toleration, and what may be hoped for Israel from the freer contact with the outer world.

Our earliest great poet and earliest great master of fiction, Geoffrey Chaucer, shall lead us first into his pleasant world of Fantasy-a broad, gay, rich landscape in the promise of springtime, bathed in the warm light of unclouded sunrise; not even the earthly, gross, grotesque figures that mingle in it with more gracious shapes can do away with its special charm of "Maytime and the cheerful dawn." Yet if we look more closely into the rejoicing scene, we shall find on its sunny verdure one blot of sooty blackness; it is where, in "The Prioresse's Tale," the figure of the "cursed Jew" is brought forward as a mark, not of sportive mockery, but of hatred too deadly to be blent with derision. The story of the little child who roused murderous hate in the inmates of "a Jewerie" by carolling loud and clear his new-learnt hymn, “O alma Redemptoris mater!" as day by day he passed their doors on his way to school, stands grim and dark among the "Canterbury Tales," a witness to the banned existence of the Jew in mediæval England, as elsewhere in Europe, and to the fierce suspicion with which he was regarded.

To the Prioresse and her poet-creator, the Jew, enclosed in his Ghetto, is no better than some specially loathly spider encamped in its web; he is for them only the envenomed enemy of Christianity, a creature made up of cursing and bitterness.

What more

natural for him than to resent as an intolerable insult the child's loud chanting of the praise of the Virgin Mother? -what so likely as his avenging that insult in the blood of the innocent offender? The legend of the crime and of

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