who led off the cotillon with her at the annual Rejoicing of the Law?
Worms have long since picked the great financier's brain, the
embroidered waistcoats of the bucks have passed even beyond the stage of
adorning sweeps on May Day, and Dutch Sam's fist is bonier than ever.
The same mould covers them all--those who donated guineas and those who
donated "gifts," the rogues and the hypocrites, and the wedding-drolls,
the observant and the lax, the purse-proud and the lowly, the coarse and
the genteel, the wonderful chapmen and the luckless _Schlemihls_, Rabbi
and _Dayan_ and _Shochet_, the scribes who wrote the sacred scroll and
the cantors who trolled it off mellifluous tongues, and the betting-men
who never listened to it; the grimy Russians of the capotes and the
earlocks, and the blue-blooded Dons, "the gentlemen of the Mahamad," who
ruffled it with swords and knee-breeches in the best Christian society.
Those who kneaded the toothsome "bolas" lie with those who ate them; and
the marriage-brokers repose with those they mated. The olives and the
cucumbers grow green and fat as of yore, but their lovers are mixed with
a soil that is barren of them. The restless, bustling crowds that
jostled laughingly in Rag Fair are at rest in the "House of Life;" the
pageant of their strenuous generation is vanished as a dream. They died
with the declaration of God's unity on their stiffening lips, and the
certainty of resurrection in their pulseless hearts, and a faded Hebrew
inscription on a tomb, or an unread entry on a synagogue brass is their
only record. And yet, perhaps, their generation is not all dust.
Perchance, here and there, some decrepit centenarian rubs his purblind
eyes with the ointment of memory, and sees these pictures of the past,
hallowed by the consecration of time, and finds his shrivelled cheek wet
with the pathos sanctifying the joys that have been.