ave in his synagogue while he exclaims, as the crowd did when the
Divine descendant of David entered Jerusalem, 'Hosanna in the highest!'

There is something profoundly interesting in this devoted observance
of Oriental customs in the heart of our Saxon and Sclavonian cities; in
these descendants of the Bedouins, who conquered Canaan more than three
thousand years ago, still celebrating that success which secured their
forefathers, for the first time, grapes and wine.

Conceive a being born and bred in the Judenstrasse of Hamburg or
Frankfort, or rather in the purlieus of our Houndsditch or Minories,
born to hereditary insult, without any education, apparently without a
circumstance that can develop the slightest taste, or cherish the least
sentiment for the beautiful, living amid fogs and filth, never treated
with kindness, seldom with justice, occupied with the meanest, if
not the vilest, toil, bargaining for frippery, speculating in usury,
existing for ever under the concurrent influence of degrading causes
which would have worn out, long ago, any race that was not of the
unmixed blood of Caucasus, and did not adhere to the laws of Moses;
conceive such a being, an object to you of prejudice, dislike, disgust,
perhaps hatred. The season arrives, and the mind and heart of that being
are filled with images and passions that have been ranked in all ages
among the most beautiful and the most genial of human experience; filled
with a subject the most vivid, the most graceful, the most joyous, and
the most exuberant; a subject which has inspired poets, and which has
made gods; the harvest of the grape in the native regions of the Vine.

He rises in the morning, goes early to some White-chapel market,
purchases some willow boughs for which he has previously given
a commission, and which are brought, probably, from one of the
neighbouring rivers of Essex, hastens home, cleans out the yard of his
miserable tenement, builds his bower, decks it, even profusely, with the
finest flowers and fruits that he can procure, the myrtle and the citron
never forgotten, and hangs its roof with variegated lamps. After the
service of his synagogue, he sups late with his wife and his children in
the open air, as if he were in the pleasant villages of Galilee, beneath
its sweet and starry sky.

Perhaps, as he is giving the Keedush, the Hebrew blessing to the Hebrew
meal, breaking and distributing the bread, and sanctifying, with a
preliminar