uine Israelites, I
must say something of their personal appearance. Both in Tangier and
Mogador, I was fortunate enough to be acquainted with families, who
could boast of the most perfect and classic types of Jewish female
loveliness. Alas, that these beauties should be only charming _animals_,
their minds and affections being left uncultivated, or converted into
caves of unclean and tormenting passions. The Jewesses, in general,
until they become enormously stout and weighed down with obesity, are of
extreme beauty. Most of them have fair complexions; their rose and
jasmine faces, their pure wax-like delicate features, and their
exceedingly expressive and bewitching eyes, would fascinate the most
fastidious of European connoisseurs of female beauty.

But these Israelitish ladies, recalling the fair image of Rachel in the
Patriarchal times of Holy Writ, and worthy to serve as models for a
Grecian sculptor, are treated with savage disdain by the churlish Moors,
and sometimes are obliged to walk barefoot and prostrate themselves
before their ugly negress concubines. The male infants of Jews are
engaging and goodlooking when young; but, as they grow up, they become
ordinary; and Jews of a certain age, are decidedly and most disgustingly
ugly. It is possible that the degrading slavery in which they usually
live, their continued habits of cringing servility, by which the
countenance acquires a sinister air and fiendishly cunning smirk, may
cause this change in their appearance. But what contrasts we had of the
beauty of countenance and form in the Jewish society of Mogador! You
frequently see a youthful woman, nay a girl of exquisite beauty and
delicacy of features, married to an old wretched ill-looking fellow of
some sixty or seventy years of age, tottering over the grave, or an
incurable invalid. To render them worse-looking, whilst the women may
dress in any and the gayest colours, the men wear a dark blue and black
turban and dress, and though this is prescribed as a badge of
oppression, they will often assume it when they may attire themselves in
white and other livelier colours. However, men get used to their misery,
and hug their chains.

The Jews, at times, though but very rarely, avail themselves of their
privilege of four wives granted them in Mahometan countries, and a nice
mess they make of it. I knew a Jew of this description in Tunis. He was
a lively, jocose fellow, with a libidinous countenance, singing alwa