up a suspense which would induce Mordecai to accept those
offices of friendship that Deronda longed to urge on him.

These were the meditations that busied Deronda in the interval of four
days before he could fulfill his promise to call for Mordecai at Ezra
Cohen's, Sir Hugo's demands on him often lasting to an hour so late as
to put the evening expedition to Holborn out of the question.

CHAPTER XLII.

"Wenn es eine Stutenleiter von Leiden giebt, so hat Israel die hoechste
Staffel erstiegen; wen die Dauer der Schmerzen und die Geduld, mit
welcher sie ertragen werden, adeln, so nehmen es die Juden mit den
Hochgeborenen aller Laender auf; wenn eine Literatur reich genannt
wird, die wenige klassische Trauerspiele besitzt, welcher Platz
gebuehrt dann einer Tragodie die anderthalb Jahrtausende wahrt,
gedichtet und dargestellt von den Helden selber?"--ZUNZ: _Die
Synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters._

"If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the
nations--if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they
are borne ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land--if
a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic
tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen
hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?"

Deronda had lately been reading that passage of Zunz, and it occurred
to him by way of contrast when he was going to the Cohens, who
certainly bore no obvious stamp of distinction in sorrow or in any
other form of aristocracy. Ezra Cohen was not clad in the sublime
pathos of the martyr, and his taste for money-getting seemed to be
favored with that success which has been the most exasperating
difference in the greed of Jews during all the ages of their
dispersion. This Jeshurun of a pawnbroker was not a symbol of the great
Jewish tragedy; and yet was there not something typical in the fact
that a life like Mordecai's--a frail incorporation of the national
consciousness, breathing with difficult breath--was nested in the
self-gratulating ignorant prosperity of the Cohens?

Glistening was the gladness in their faces when Deronda reappeared
among them. Cohen himself took occasion to intimate that although the
diamond ring, let alone a little longer, would have bred more money, he
did not mind _that_--not a sixpence--when compared with the pleasure of
the women and children in se