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Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions by Isaac Disraeli
page 95 of 636 (14%)
[Footnote A: I composed the life of MENDELSSOHN so far back as in 1798, in
a periodical publication, whence our late biographers have drawn their
notices; a juvenile production, which happened to excite the attention of
the late BARRY, then not personally known to me; and he gave all the
immortality his poetical pencil could bestow on this man of genius, by
immediately placing in his Elysium of Genius MENDELSSOHN shaking hands
with ADDISON, who wrote on the truth of the Christian religion, and near
LOCKE, the English master of MENDELSSOHN'S mind.]

Mendelssohn, the son of a poor rabbin, in a village in Germany, received
an education completely rabbinical, and its nature must be comprehended,
or the term of _education_ would be misunderstood. The Israelites in
Poland and Germany live with all the restrictions of their ceremonial law
in an insulated state, and are not always instructed in the language of
the country of their birth. They employ for their common intercourse a
barbarous or _patois_ Hebrew; while the sole studies of the young rabbins
are strictly confined to the Talmud, of which the fundamental principle,
like the Sonna of the Turks, is a pious rejection of every species of
profane learning. This ancient jealous spirit, which walls in the
understanding and the faith of man, was to shut out what the imitative
Catholics afterwards called heresy. It is, then, these numerous folios of
the Talmud which the true Hebraic student contemplates through all the
seasons of life, as the Patuecos in their low valley imagine their
surrounding mountains to be the confines of the universe.

Of such a nature was the plan of Mendelssohn's first studies; but even in
his boyhood this conflict of study occasioned an agitation of his spirits,
which affected his life ever after. Rejecting the Talmudical dreamers, he
caught a nobler spirit from the celebrated Maimonides; and his native
sagacity was already clearing up the surrounding darkness. An enemy not
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