, he imagined a man who would
have all the elements necessary for sympathy with him, but in an
embodiment unlike his own: he must be a Jew, intellectually cultured,
morally fervid--in all this a nature ready to be plenished from
Mordecai's; but his face and frame must be beautiful and strong, he
must have been used to all the refinements of social life, his voice
must flow with a full and easy current, his circumstances be free from
sordid need: he must glorify the possibilities of the Jew, not sit and
wonder as Mordecai did, bearing the stamp of his people amid the sign
of poverty and waning breath. Sensitive to physical characteristics, he
had, both abroad and in England, looked at pictures as well as men, and
in a vacant hour he had sometimes lingered in the National Gallery in
search of paintings which might feed his hopefulness with grave and
noble types of the human form, such as might well belong to men of his
own race. But he returned in disappointment. The instances are
scattered but thinly over the galleries of Europe, in which the fortune
or selection even of the chief masters has given to art a face at once
young, grand, and beautiful, where, if there is any melancholy, it is
no feeble passivity, but enters into the foreshadowed capability of
heroism.

Some observant persons may perhaps remember his emaciated figure, and
dark eyes deep in their sockets, as he stood in front of a picture that
had touched him either to new or habitual meditation: he commonly wore
a cloth cap with black fur round it, which no painter would have asked
him to take off. But spectators would be likely to think of him as an
odd-looking Jew who probably got money out of pictures; and Mordecai,
when he looked at them, was perfectly aware of the impression he made.
Experience had rendered him morbidly alive to the effect of a man's
poverty and other physical disadvantages in cheapening his ideas,
unless they are those of a Peter the Hermit who has a tocsin for the
rabble. But he was too sane and generous to attribute his spiritual
banishment solely to the excusable prejudices of others; certain
incapacities of his own had made the sentence of exclusion; and hence
it was that his imagination had constructed another man who would be
something more ample than the second soul bestowed, according to the
notion of the Cabbalists, to help out the insufficient first--who would
be a blooming human life, ready to incorporate all that was worthie