succeeded, however, in obtaining a decree that forbade their trading in mercery and drapery in Paris. The edict obtained by Malesherbes in favour of the Protestants became another step towards the emancipation of the Jews. The question of the amelioration of the condition of the latter soon followed. Learned and wealthy Jews were called to Paris to give their testimonies. With the Revolution, Mirabeau, ClermontTonnerre, and other vindicators of the rights of humanity, took the part of the proscribed race at the Assemblée Constituante, and at last a decree was passed granting to them all civic rights; and thus vanished for ever all those odious distinctions which had their origin in a blind fanaticism, and which had endured for eighteen centuries. "This victory of reason," says M. Bédarride, "over old errors was, perhaps, one of the noblest triumphs of a free people." Freedom of worship had henceforth become one of the first principles of public right, and the Jews availed themselves of it with enthusiasm. Napoleon convoked the first assembly of Jews in Paris; but not precisely satisfied with the explanations given, he further convoked a grand sanhedrin, or assembly of doctors of the law, to determine whether there really was anything in the Jewish laws and practices-such as polygamy, intermarriage, divorce-incompatible with other nationalities, and contradictory to the laws and practices of Christians, so as to prevent their being treated as brethren. The result of these solemn assemblies was the establishment of an exceptional condition of things, which did not bear out what M. Bédarride calls the legitimate hopes founded upon their proceedings. A first decree, which still materially impugned the morality of the Jews, was modified by an act which left the original decree in force only in Alsatia. Another decree also organised the Jewish worship. Consistories, schools, and seminaries were founded. It was even projected to elevate M. Furtado, of Bordeaux, who had presided at the assemblies, to the rank of senator of the Empire. Several Jews had already obtained high rank in the army. The progress of events, however, anticipated illusions so brilliant to the Jewish imagination, and, with the Restoration, the French Jews fell once more under the yoke of oppression. Their condition in Spain and in the Roman States had undergone no amelioration corresponding to that which had taken place in France under the Empire. The Bourbons had nothing to do but to look around them to find an excuse for casting back the Jews of France into the same state of disabilities in which they vegetated, rather than lived, before the Revolution. The charter of Louis XVIII. extended, however, its protection to the liberty of worship, only the consistories were to be salaried by the state. But while usurers were pursued with all the rigours of the law, the moral condition of the Jews continued to improve, for they lived without fear of more oppressive persecutions. The law was declared to be the same for all. Legislation, in fact, made all the barriers which separated the Jews from the Christians disappear, and left nothing in France but citizens participating in the same prerogatives, and subjected to the same duties. The revolution of 1830 only consecrated these happy results. The French Israelites, if we are to give credit to M. Bédarride, are no longer Jews, but Frenchmen, and the free suffrages of their fellow-citizens reached them in the elecMay-VOL. CXIX. NO. CCCCLXXIII. F tions. Some, among whom M. Bédarride himself, found in religious prejudices a barrier to national representation which they could not consistently get over; others were not arrested by any such obstacle. The names of Fould, Crémieux, and Cerf Berr were inscribed in the list of members of the Chamber of Deputies. Louis Philippe, addressing himself to the president of the Israelite Consistory on the occasion of the felicitations customary on the New Year, said: "As water falling drop by drop finishes by wearing away the hardest rock, so will the unjust prejudices which pursue you vanish before the progress of human reason and of philosophy." "Words," says our author, "worthy of being inscribed in the registers of history." "When governments march resolutely in the path of a wise liberty, and equal justice to all, there is no prejudice that can resist it." So also in 1848, when the sovereignty of the people was pushed to its extreme limits, the great seal of France was entrusted to the hands of an Israelite, and a Jew became minister of finance. What a contrast do such times present to the yellow hats of the popes, the wheels of Saint Louis, and the humiliations, the persecutions, and the burnings of the middle ages. In the words of Disraeli, "banishments, expulsions, captivities, confiscations, refined tortures, prodigious massacres, have failed to extirpate a superior race." M. Bédarride, with more modesty, disclaims the pretension to superiority, and he concludes by saying, "The problem is now solved, and it is not under a government so enlightened, so friendly to justice and to liberty of conscience as the existing government is, that a return to the past is to be dreaded." The history of the Jews of old has been penned by eloquent and illustrious men; that of the middle ages remained to be written, and that has now been accomplished in an able and impartial manner. While it is impossible not to concede the good done under Divine Providence by the chosen race amidst all their humiliations and sufferings, their degradations and consequent immorality in periods of ignorance and darkness, so also it is impossible to peruse the detailed account of these, taken apart from general history and brought out in sole relation to that of the continental Jews, and not to feel how little credit these persecutions have entailed upon their authors, and how time has helped to place each in his right position, giving to the persecuted liberty and honours, and leaving to the persecutors nothing but the execrations of future ages-the infamous brand of wholesale torture and manslaughter and that, too, committed under the cloak of religion! NIGHTINGALE NOTES. BY SIR NATHANIEL. $ 1. THE late Madame de Tracy, an essay-writer of varied talent and considerable learning, should have lived to read Michelet on Birds-for as he is the most fanciful of bird historians, so was she one of the most pronounced of bird-fanciers. Birds divided her affections with her parents and with Erard's pianofortes-next to which in the order of favouritism came flowers. In age she retained all the loves of her youth for the birds of the air. "I mean," she said, "to write a History of Birds for my grandchildren, as my daughters have no taste that way.. Madame de N is another instance of indifference to birds, but in her case the reason is of a particular kind-they are not big enough to eat, she says." Whereas Madame de Tracy, in M. Cuvillier Fleury's language, “loved little birds and their little ones as God loves them." They fed on her knees. She would get up in the night to see to their wants or ailments. One day her nightingale was ill. "You remember that Rousseau could not listen to the song of the nightingale without tears. -- Un cœur aussi dans ses notes palpite; L'âme s'y mêle à l'ivresse des sens, says M. de Lamartine.* Madame de Tracy all but shed tears because her nightingale stopped singing.....The Duchesse de Coigny called to see me that morning. She found me bent double, as though I had the lumbago. What's the matter with you? she asked me.-[Answer, in the original:] J'ai un oiseau sur l'estomac.-You mean you've eaten one [and it has disagreed with you]?-No, Dieu merci; but I'm the sick-nurse of my nightingale, and am trying to make him warm again.' -In fact, the love of birds was, with Madame de Tracy, the beginning of wisdom. To cut their pattes, was to prove oneself capable of strangling one's own children, or of poisoning one's husband, witness Madame Lafarge, who mutilated her grandfather's sparrows. Madame de Tracy liked to quote the names of all those among her illustrious contemporaries who have shown sensibility in the matter of ornithology. M. de Lamartine is a great amateur in nightingales, but does not keep any, parce qu'il les change continuellement de place. M. Thiers is wiser. He can manage an aviary, and Madame de Tracy remarks that he always received with much deference' the advice she tendered him on this subject. As for M. Michelet, of him she makes no mention, perhaps because she knew this ultrà-apologist for l'oiseau to be, in reality, a determined bird-eater-un ornithophage déterminé. Far otherwise with the Abbé Dupanloup, with whom she was one day chatting about the Fathers of the Latin Church, when all of a sudden the abbé exclaimed, "Ah! the pretty little bird!' It was one of the nightingales of the *In Jocelyn. house, taking its promenade on the carpet. He said it,' adds Madame de Tracy, with an accent that went to my heart. I had hitherto admired M. Dupanloup: I now have a lively affection for him.'"*— We strongly suspect that the author of "L'Amour" and of "L'Insecte" would have advanced with like rapidity in her good graces, had she lived to peruse all he says of the bird-world in general and of nightingales in particular-unless, indeed, she had met him at dinner the same day, and witnessed with her own shocked eyes his devastation of roast fowl and pigeon-pie. When M. Taine reviewed the brilliant French historian's book on Birds-L'Oiseau, par Jules Michelet-he said, with something of the historian's own manner: The nightingale is God in this book, and M. Michelet is his prophet. In listening to the nightingale, M. Michelet has had his visions, dreams, and revelations, just like Mahomet. He writes dialogues about her, like those in the Koran. He watches her movements, as she flits along-timid, voiceless, in her dusky attire, among the reddening leaves of autumn. Whither goest thou? the most fanciful of bird-fanciers demands. Why stayest thou not in Provence, in sheltered glens where sunshine in winter itself has the grateful warmth of the finest spring-time? No,-departing Philomel is supposed to reply, to her rapt observer and prose-poet's Whither away?-No, depart I must. Others may stay that list: they have no concern with the East. As for me, my cradle summons me; I must needs see again those dazzling skies, those sunlit ruins wherein my ancestors sang; I must needs rest me again on my first love, the rose of Asia, and bathe in sunshine... There is the mystery of my life; there, the fertilising flame which shall revive my song; in the clear light of unclouded day has my voice its being, in it my muse exists. Away, therefore, from M. Michelet's wistful gaze, the nightingale wends her flight, as upon the wings of the wind. Anon she is reported of as halting before the great gate of Italy-before the cold white colossal Alps, peopled with all the brigands of the air, who lie in wait for her coming. She is seen to pause at the sacred wood of the Charmettes, and is heard to say, deliberating and in distrust: If I pass on by day, they all are there; they know the season; the eagle pounces on me, and all is over. If I pass on by night, the grand-duc, the owl, a whole army of horrible phantoms with eyes magnified in the darkness, seize upon me, bear me off to their young brood.... Alas! what shall I do?...I will try to escape day and night both. In the dull hours of early morning, while frosty dews chill in his aerie the great fierce bird of prey that can't build himself a nest, I will hurry by unseen... Even should he see me, I should have got out of his reach ere ever he could begin to move the heavy apparatus of his well-drenched wings. A good reckoning, Philomela. Nevertheless, a score of accidents supervene. Setting off at midnight, she may have to encounter, full in the face, through the long range of Savoy, the pitiless east wind, that tosses, and whirls, and retards her-a cruel clog on her efforts, and all but breaking her straining wings... And, lo! it is daylight already... * Cuv. Fleury, Etudes (dernières) historiques et littéraires, t. ii. The mountains, ces mornes géants, already, in October, robed in white mantles,-how gloomy they are, and ill-boding, in the shroud they wear. Motionless as are their peaks, they create beneath them and around them an agitation everlasting, violent currents of air, blowing in opposite directions, and struggling together in furious strife-so furious sometimes, that one must wait till the frenzy is overpast.-Again the nightingale muses with herself: If I take passage lower down, then the torrents that roar in the darkness with a crash as of artillery, have waterspouts that may carry me away. And if I ascend to the high and bitter cold regions above, where daylight is abroad, I give myself at once to the destroyer; the hoar-frost will slacken and freeze up my pinions.-Ny a-t-il point là, M. Taine asks, tout un drame? Who but must be touched by the anxieties of this " pauvre petit voyageur," lost in snowstorms among the gorges of the Alps?-The drama concludes with an ode, which is the hymn of the nightingale. What she sings, is her love, her grief, her joys, her infinite hopes. Buffon had taken note of the roulades, the flourishes, trills, arpeggios, of her warbling,-with all the precision of a good observer, an attentive analyst, who was thus enabled to define all the operations of that tiny throat, but confining himself to the partie extérieure of the hymn. What M. Michelet perceives in it, is, the source intérieure—the musical passion-the creative soul. In it, as in everything else, he discerns the mystery of Love and of Life. But we cannot follow him into his exegesis of all these nightingale noteslest we get quite beyond our allotted length, as well as utterly out of our depth, in a rhapsody of pantheistic passion. Rather let us look at, and listen to, Philomela, through the clear eyes, and with the glad open ears, of some of our English poets, medieval and modern. Often we have glimpses of her in Chaucer. Now as "the nightingale that clepeth forth the freshè leavès new”*-now as "the lusty nightingale," that goes to matins on May-day with the lark, "within a temple shapen hawthorn-wise"t-now in a poem to himself, with the cuckoo,-in which, as in the Assembly of Fowls, the cuckoo represents profligate celibacy, and the nightingale pure wedded love. "Full little joy have I now of thy cry," the poet tells that "sorry bird, the leud cuckow" And as I with the cuckow thus gan chide, I heard, in the next bush beside, A nightingale so lustely sing, That her clere voice she made ring and when she has sung her song to the end, and bade the poet "every day this May or thou dine Go looke upon the fresh daisie," his favourite flower of the field, and taken her leave of him, he prays to God "alway with her to be, And joy of love he send her evermore, And shilde us from the cuckow and his lore, For there is not so false a bird as he."‡ In another of Chaucer's best poems, the nightingale seems intended, in contrast with the gay-plumed goldfinch and its tinkling notes, to denote by her sober outward appearance and impassioned song, greater depth of †The Court of Love. * The Assembly of Foules. The Cuckow and the Nightingale. |