Jews. There was a great stir among them, and it is probable that if he had invited them by proclamation, and promised to give them Palestine, armies would have been raised to take and keep possession of that Holy Land to which they look individually and collectively as their destined gathering place. Individually, I say, because it is taught by many Rabbis, that the children of Israel, wherever buried, can rise again at the coming of the Messiah no where except in the Promised Land; and they, therefore, who are interred in any other part of the world, will have to make their way there through the caverns of the earth; a long and painful journey, the difficulty and fatigue of which are equivalent to purgatory. I know not whether this is believed by the English Rabbis; but that the English Jews attach as devout a reverence to the very soil of Jerusalem as we do to the holy sepulchre itself is certain. One of the wealthiest among them, in late times, made a pilgrimage there and brought back with him boxes full of the earth to line his grave. Unhappy people! whose error is the more inveterate because it is mingled with the noblest feelings, and whose obstinate hope and heroic perseverance we must condemn while we admire. No particular dress is enjoined them by law, nor indeed is any such mark of distinction necessary: they are sufficiently distinguished by a cast of complexion and features, which, with leave of our neighbors,* I will call a Portugueze look. Some of the lowest order let their beards grow, and wear a sort of black tunic with a girdle; the chief ostensible trade is in old clothes, but they deal also in stolen goods, and not unfrequently in coining. A race of Hebrew lads who infest you in the streets with oranges and red slippers, or tempt school boys to dip in a bag for gingerbread *This is not the only instance in which the author discovers a disposition to sneer at the Portugueze, with the same kind of illiberality in which the English too frequently indulge themselves against the Scotch. -TR. nuts, are the great agents in uttering base silver; when it is worn too bare to circulate any longer they buy it up at a low price, whiten the brass again, and again send it abroad. *. You meet Jew pedlars every where, travelling with boxes of haberdashery at their back, cuckoo clocks, sealing wax, quills, weather glasses, green spectacles, clumsy figures in plaister of Paris, which you see over the chimney of an ale-house parlor in the country, or miserable prints of the king and queen, the four seasons, the cardinal virtues, the last naval victory, the prodigal son, and such like subjects; even the Nativity and the Crucifixion: but when they meet with a likely chapman, they produce others of the most obscene and mischievous kind. Any thing for money, in contempt of their own law as well as the law of the country-the pork butchers are commonly Jews. All these low classes have a shibboleth of their own, as remarkable as their physiognomy; and in some parts of the city they are so numerous, that when I strayed into their precincts one day, and saw so many Hebrew inscriptions in the shop windows, and so many long beards in the streets, I began to fancy that I had discovered the ten tribes. Some few of the wealthiest merchants are of this persuasion; you meet with none among the middle order of tradesmen, except sometimes a silversmith, or watch maker; ordinary profits do not content them. Hence they are great stock-jobbers, and the business of stock-broking is very much in their hands. One of these Jew brokers was in a coffee-house during the time of the mutiny in the fleet, when the tidings arrived that the sailors had seized admiral Colpoys, and had actually hanged him. The news, which afterwards proved to be false, thunderstruck all present. If it were true, and so it was believed to be, all hopes of ac * Don Manuel appears to be as much prejudiced against the Jews as he is against the Portugueze. We cannot controvert the truth of his account of them: it may be true; but it is very difficult for one who has only seen them in America to believe him-it bears no resemblance to them of this country.-Aм. ED. commodation was at an end; the mutineers could only be supprest by force, and what force would be able to suppress them? While they were silent in such reflections, the Jew was calculating his own loss from the effect it would produce upon the funds, and he broke the silence by exclaiming in Hebrew-English, My Gott! de stukes! articulated with a deep sigh, and accompanied with a shrug of shoulders, and an elevation of eyebrows, as emphatic as the exclamation. England has been called the hell of horses, the purgatory of servants, and the paradise of women: it may be added that it is the heaven of the Jews,-alas, they have no other heaven to expect! LETTER LXIV. Infidelity.-Its Growth in England, and little Extent.Pythagoreans-Thomas Tryon.-Ritson.-Pagans.—-A Cock sacrificed.-Thomas Taylor. FROM Jew to Infidel-an easy transition, after the example of Acosta and Spinosa. When the barriers of religion had been broken down by the schism, a way was opened for every kind of impiety. Infidelity was suspected to exist at the court of the accursed Elizabeth; it was avowed at her successor's by lord Herbert of Cherbury; a man unfortunate in this deadly error; but otherwise for his genius and valor and high feelings of honor, worthy to have lived in a happier age and country. His brother was a religious poet, famous in his day: had they been Spaniards, the one would have been a hero the other a saint; but the good seed fell among thorns, and the thorns sprung up with it and choked it. During the great rebellion, a small party of the leaders were Deists; fanaticism was then the epidemic; they made no attempt to spread their principles and were swept away at the Restoration, which, after it had destroyed rebellion and fanaticism, struck at the root of liberty and morals. An open profligacy of manners had shown itself under the reign of the first James; it disappeared during the subsequent struggles, when all the stronger passions and feelings were called into action: but when once the country felt itself settled in peace, this spirit revived; and the court of Charles exhibited a shameless indecency, of which Europe had seen no example since the days of the Roman emperors. Yet, perhaps, the most shocking blasphemy of this blasphemous age is the canonization of King Charles the martyr; for such they style him in mockery, as it might seem, of martyrdom if we did not know the impudence of adulation. His office, for his festival is regularly celebrated, applies to this heretical king those texts of scripture which most pointedly allude to the sufferings and death of Christ. A poet of that reign even dared to call him Christ the Second! It is not true that the prayers to the most Holy Virgin were ever addressed in the churches to Elizabeth, as Ribadaneyra has said; but this impiety, not less shocking and not less absurd, is continued to this day; and the breviary which contains it, in the vulgar tongue, is in every person's hands. From the time of the revolution, in 1688, the Deists became bolder and ventured to attack Christianity from the press. They did it, indeed, covertly and with decency. The infidelity of these writers bears no resemblance to the irreligious profligacy of Charles's courtiers, in whom disbelief was the effect of a vicious heart. It proceeded in these from an erring reason; their books were suppressed as soon as the tendency was discovered, and the authors sometimes punished, so that they did little mischief. Condorcet has mentioned some of them as the great philosophers of England; but the French are ridiculously ignorant of English literature, and the truth is, that they have no reputation, nobody ever thinking either of them or their works. Bolingbroke alone is remembered for his political life, so mischievous to his own country and to Europe; his literary fame has died a natural death,he was equally worthless as a writer and a man. Voltaire infected this island as he did the continent -of all authors the most mischievous and the most detestable. His predecessors had disbelieved Christianity, but he hated Christ; their writings were addressed to studious men; he wrote for the crowd, for women and boys, addressing himself to their vilest and basest passions, corrupting their morals that he might destroy their faith. Yet notwithstanding the circulation of his worst works on dirty paper and worn types by travelling auctioneers and at country fairs; notwithstanding the atheism with which the Scotch universities have spawned since the days of Hume; and notwithstanding the union between infidelity and sedition during the late war, which ruined the democratic party, it is remarkable how trifling an effect has been produced. An attempt was made some twenty years ago to establish a Deistical place of worship; it fell to the ground for want of support. The Theophilanthropists never extended to England. A few clerks and prentices will still repeat the jests of Paine, and the blasphemies of Voltaire; and a few surgeons and physicians will continue in their miserable physics, or metaphysics, to substitute Nature in the place of God; but this is all. Even these, as they grow older, conform to some of the many modes of worship in the country; either from conviction, or for interest, or because whatever they may think of the importance of religion to themselves, they feel that it is indispensable for their families. Judaism can be dangerous no where unless where a large proportion of the people are concealed Jews: but that infidelity, unrestrained as it is in this land of error, should be able to produce so little evil, is indeed honorable to the instinct of our nature, and to the truth of a religion, which, mutilated and corrupted as it is, can still maintain its superiority. Where every man is allowed to have a faith of his own, you will not wonder if the most ludicrous opinions should sometimes be started; if any opinions in so important a matter may be called ludicrous without impiety. The strangest which I have yet heard is that of an extraordinary man who had passed great part of his life in Spain. It was his opinion that there is no God now, but that there would be one by and by; for |