little--he keeps his contempt to himself, for the Jew is gathering into
his own hands great part of the trade of the city, and has the power that
belongs to wealth. He is educated, liberal, and enlightened, and the last
great name in Venetian literature is that of the Jewish historian of the
Republic, Romanin. The Jew's political sympathies are invariably
patriotic, and he calls himself, not Ebreo, but Veneziano. He lives, when
rich, in a palace or a fine house on the Grand Canal, and he furnishes and
lets many others (I must say at rates which savor of the loan secured by
the pound of flesh) in which he does not live. The famous and beautiful
Ca' Doro now belongs to a Jewish family; and an Israelite, the most
distinguished physician in Venice, occupies the _appartamento
signorile_ in the palace of the famous Cardinal Bembo. The Jew is a
physician, a banker, a manufacturer, a merchant; and he makes himself
respected for his intelligence and his probity,--which perhaps does not
infringe more than that of Italian Catholics. He dresses well,--with that
indefinable difference, however, which distinguishes him in every thing
from a Christian,--and his wife and daughter are fashionable and stylish,
They are sometimes, also, very pretty; and I have seen one Jewish lady who
might have stepped out of the sacred page, down from the patriarchal age,
and been known for Rebecca, with her oriental grace, and delicate,
sensitive, high-bred look and bearing--no more western and modern than a
lily of Palestine.

But it is to the Ghetto I want to take you now (by the way we went one
sunny day late last fall), that I may show you something of the Jewish
past, which has survived to the nineteenth century in much of the
discomfort and rank savor of the dark ages.

In the fifteenth century all the riches of the Orient had been poured into
the lap of Venice, and a spirit of reckless profusion took possession of