ng Israelites not altogether without guile, and just
distinguishable from queer-looking Christians of the same mixed
_morale_. In his anxiety about Mirah's relatives, he had lately been
thinking of vulgar Jews with a sort of personal alarm. But a little
comparison will often diminish our surprise and disgust at the
aberrations of Jews and other dissidents whose lives do not offer a
consistent or lovely pattern of their creed; and this evening Deronda,
becoming more conscious that he was falling into unfairness and
ridiculous exaggeration, began to use that corrective comparison: he
paid his thaler too much, without prejudice to his interests in the
Hebrew destiny, or his wish to find the _Rabbinische Schule_, which he
arrived at by sunset, and entered with a good congregation of men.

He happened to take his seat in a line with an elderly man from whom he
was distant enough to glance at him more than once as rather a
noticeable figure--his ample white beard and felt hat framing a profile
of that fine contour which may as easily be Italian as Hebrew. He
returned Deronda's notice till at last their eyes met; an undesirable
chance with unknown persons, and a reason to Deronda for not looking
again; but he immediately found an open prayer-book pushed toward him
and had to bow his thanks. However, the congregation had mustered, the
reader had mounted to the _almemor_ or platform, and the service began.
Deronda, having looked enough at the German translation of the Hebrew
in the book before him to know that he was chiefly hearing Psalms and
Old Testament passages or phrases, gave himself up to that strongest
effect of chanted liturgies which is independent of detailed verbal
meaning--like the effect of an Allegri's _Miserere_ or a Palestrina's
_Magnificat_. The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is
the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape
from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good
to enter and abide with us; or else a self-oblivious lifting up of
Gladness, a _Gloria in excelsis_ that such Good exists; both the
yearning and the exaltation gathering their utmost force from the sense
of communion in a form which has expressed them both, for long
generations of struggling fellow-men. The Hebrew liturgy, like others,
has its transitions of litany, lyric, proclamation, dry statement and
blessing; but this evening, all were one for Deronda: the chant of the
_Ch