THE EMPEROR AND THE RABBI, THERE are some curious and some interesting reliques of tradition still to be found among the Jewish people. Their dispersion, and the infinite miseries inflicted on them, in every country where they fled from their own, inevitably extinguished their general cultivation of literature; but they still possessed scholars, philosophers, and teachers of the Law, who might have been distinguished in better times, and among a more prosperous people. The Talmud is well known to European scholarship as containing, amid much extraordinary and fantastic matter, some valuable records of the national history and feelings. Its sententious and moral narratives, its Agadetha, are sometimes striking and noble; and the allegories, mysticisms, visions, and parables of the Medrasbiim are sometimes not less sagacious than sublime. The subject of the following verses is from a tradition of the wisdom of Rabbi Joshuah. The Jews to this day speak with malediction of Titus, the destroyer of the temple, and of Hadrian, the destroyer of the nation. But Trajan is sometimes spoken of with more respect, probably from the contrast of his character, stern as it was, with that of his fierce and sanguinary successor, Hadrian; and from the comparative security of the Jews under an emperor who was too much engrossed with his incessant wars to have any leisure for persecution. I then shall believe; 'Tis the senses alone That can never deceive. Nay, show me your idol, Shall, old dreamer, be mine." 'Twas Trajan that spoke, Still play'd on his features And himself was that one. "The God of our forefathers!" "He is seen when the lightnings He is heard when the tempest Is flung on the shore." "Those are dreams," said the mo narch, "Wild fancies of old; Can I kneel to the lightning, That but lives in the mind?" "I'll show thee his footstool, Round the marble-crown'd mount And flaming o'er all, But the East now was purple, On the wave, lay the sun: Their rich canopy roll'd, The Rabbi's proud gesture "What! gaze on the sun, Can look on that blaze!" "Ho, Emperor of earth, And the Sovereign of thee?" Έως. Mary-le-bone Vestry-Room. May 10. TO THE EDITOR OF BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE. SIR,-Though folks say you are not one of we Liberals, 'tis allow'd on all hands you are all straight and fair like, and don't begrudge lending a lift to any thing in the poetry line, British or foreign, or what not, when good of the sample. Now, sir, I take liberty to hand you over the case of my nephew Alfred Mulgrave Timms, which I think have been a Scandalous victim of Tory oppression. I don't, for my part, understand Latin or Oxford doings, nor don't want to, neither: hows'ever, the case is as thus. My nephew having been brought up at my expense for seven years as a parlour boarder in the Academy of the Reverend Jubb of Little Pedlington, which I can well afford, which is neither here nor there; well, sir, this youth is an honour to his family, and bids fair to be a Parliament man, and go to court, as the great Mr Owen does, whose ideas, however, I don't go thorough-stitch with, as some of our gents of the board, as keeps ladies, and has whitewashed with their creditors, do,-well sir, I booked his name regular, I mean Mulgrave's, at one of the places in Oxford College, and made it all right to qualify him to walk off with all the prizes, as in course with fair play he ought to; but having some inkling of a Commissionership from a high quarter not one hundred miles from Kilkenny, whom I served in times past, he has not settled his mind as to lodging and vittling with the Collegers, some of which is no better than they should be, and dangerous at times to a timid youth; not as the money is any object, nor not as Mulgrave is anyways timid in the talking way. - Well, sir, the prize gave out this year being about the Great Plague of London, which was plaguy odd when there was so many genteeler topics, and more suiting the late auspi cious nuptials; so what does Mulgrave do, but he gives his concern a neatish twist like of his own, to teach the Big- Wigs what was what, and as he says, says he, "to correct their bad taste as to subject." Well, sir, lo and behold! here comes his copy-book returned, costing me eightpence out of my own pocket by post, with a pencil scribble on the back to say, "cannot be admitted to competition, having nothing to do with the subject, and savouring of political bias." This is a burning shame, sir: envy and jealousy is at the bottom of the "tottle of the whole," as my friend above quoted says; and so thinks Mulgrave himself; what's more, he has touched it up again, and stuck a regular stinger in the tail, which will make the doctors and proctors, and suchlike, look about them. The great Mr G., our city member, who was a Cambridge scholar, and counted by the Liberal interest to be an uncommon good judge of foreign tongues, says it reminds him of one Junival, (a Frenchman, I suppose, by the turn of his name.) Mr G. Englished it to me and my friend not one hundred miles from Kilkenny, as before quoted, and we both think the sentiments is quite prime, and nothing else. Whereby, if you would print it in your next, I would stand any loss under a five-pound note; for, as I said before, money's no object, particularly when a man feels his back up under the sense of tyranny.-Yours, Sir, to command, SOLOMON TIMMS. PESTIS LONDINUM DEVASTANS. CARMINIS SÆCULARIS RITU (UT MELIUS) TRACTATA. * * * * Quis me virginibus felicem insignibus octo * " Eheu! quam suave est," &c.- Ita Lathamus in Corintho. 1809. † Sir De L. Evans. Quis tubicen me imponet equo? (licet artis equestris ALFREDUS CONSTANTINUS MULGRAVE TIMMS TIMMS, * Doctor illustris ille, et comitiis suburbanis pergratus. NO. CCXCVI, VOL. XLVII. 3 E -En. lib. 6, ON PERSONIFICATION. THE disposition of our minds to invest inanimate objects with imaginary life and feeling, is more deeply implanted and more variously displayed than superficial observers are ready to believe. "Homo sum: nihil humani a me alienum puto," was the principle of Terence's philanthropist. But the affections of man are not circumscribed even by the limits of his own species. The meanest of nature's works may sometimes excite or occupy his most passionate emotions. "The centre moved, a circle straight succeeds, Another still, and still another spreads: Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace, His country next, and next all human Take every creature in, of every kind." When our feelings are thus strongly affected towards insensate objects, we have a tendency to see in them, as in a mirror, the features of our own moral frame, and to bestow on them a community or correspondence of sentiment with ourselves. In our ordinary mood we look at existence as it is: we recognise in the material world merely the mechanical qualities which move our senses: and with some persons this condition is seldom or never ex changed for livelier or loftier impressions. But those who are condemned to see things always in their literal and everyday aspect, are little to be envied and not greatly to be loved. There is generally some torpor of the heart where this peculiarity is perceptible; and, even supposing it to proceed from a defect of imagination, it is not likely that one important faculty should be thus deficient without implying or producing a corresponding inefficiency in the other powers, and among the rest, in the moral qualities. The unregenerate state of Wordsworth's potter was indicated by symptoms of this description. "He roved among the vales and streams, In the green wood, and hollow dell: They were his dwellings night and day; But Nature ne'er could find the way Into the heart of Peter Bell. "In vain through every changeful year A primrose by a river's brim. And it was nothing more." Nor was it till the face of Nature had looked on him with a fearful intelligence, and her voice had sounded in his mind's ear with an awakening solemnity, that the outcast's heart began to exchange its stony hardness for a softer structure, and his eyes to collect those drops which, descending in a plenteous shower, were to wash out the stains of his guilt and revive his deadened spirit. Not less salutary, as a preservative of virtue, is the kindly communion which good men habitually hold with inanimate nature; and the alacrity with which they interpret her looks and language when fit occasion arises, bears a proportion to the healthiness of their feelings and the innocence of their lives. We see how readily the pure and pliant minds of children give admission to an affection for inanimate things, and yield to the pleasing illusions which clothe the objects of their love with life and sensibility; and in this respect, as in others, it is well for us, if, as far as permissible, we become "as these little ones." There seems to be scarcely any strong emotion which may not place inanimate objects in such a relation towards us as to give them the aspect of living beings. Terror, wonder, love, joy, grief, are each able to pro duce this marvellous change. "A potent wand doth sorrow wield: The lifeless objects of any violent de sire or aversion assume in the whirl wind of our passion the characters of human expression. When we are buoyant with happiness, the face of nature seems to reflect our smiles: when we are sorrowful, the gloom is extended to surrounding scenes, as if they shared our sadness: when dejected beyond the point to which external things can be brought to harmonize with our sufferings, we re proach them for withholding their symanering pathy, and regard the light of heaven and the beauty of earth as if they were |