CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE BY I. D'ISRAELI LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, LIMITED BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL MANCHESTER AND NEW YORK 1893 19493.35 HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY GIFT OF PROF. JOHN TUCKER MURRAY ROUTLEDGE'S POPULAR LIBRARY OF STANDARD AUTHORS. EMERSON'S WORKS. With Steel Portrait. and Plates by Sir JOHN GILBERT, R.A. HOLMES'S" BREAKFAST TABLE" SERIES. With THE ARABIAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENTS. MACKAY'S A THOUSAND AND ONE GEMS OF MEMOIR OF THE LATE ISAAC D'ISRAELI. DESCENDED from a line of Jewish merchants who had dwelt in the "Home of the Ocean" during the proud days when Venice remained, at least in name, the queen of the Adriatic, the father of the late Mr. Isaac D'Israeli brought with him to England a store of historical associations and traditions meet nurture for "a poetic child," and equally calculated to incite the imaginative to realise their conceptions in romantic fiction, and the inquisitive to ascertain their realities by sober investigation. About the time that the first D'Israeli settled in England, the country was convulsed by one of those popular alarms, the result of combined fraud and fanaticism which appear like periodical visitations in our history. A law for the naturalization of the Jews had been passed with little opposition by both houses of parliament, and had received the ready support of the most distinguished prelates on the episcopal bench. An alarm for the church and for religion was however produced among the inferior clergy, and principally, as Walpole assures us, among the "country parsons.' The alarm was as senseless and the cry as absurd as on the occasion of Dr. Sacheverell's trial, when a very stupid and very malevolent sermon was sufficient to set the whole country in a flame. It was proclaimed from countless pulpits that, if the Jews were naturalized in Britain, the country became liable to the curses pronounced by prophecy against Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The logic of this argument is of course as defective as its charity, but the multitude is liable to be deluded by confident and repeated assertion; it also happened that at the time suspicions were entertained of hostile designs from France, and though the Jews could not be associated with the French by any show of reason, they were linked to the enemy by a very tolerable rhyme. Every dead wall in the kingdom exhibited in varied orthography the delectable couplet, No Jews, No wooden shoes. Some of the bishops adopted towards their insubordinate curates the same course that indiscreet parents employ to lull the tumults of the nursery when they proffer cakes as a bribe to stop crying. They resolved that it would be wise to make some concessions to clamour, and they joined in a representation to the minister which set forth that they by no means vouched for the truth of the popular calumnies directed against the Jews, that they had not even examined the evidence on which such tales of scandal were founded, but that believing the recent law to be offensive |