Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry

There are some curious and some interesting reliques of tradition still to
be found among the Jewish people. Their dispersion, and the infinite miseries
inflicted on them, in every country where they fled from their own, inevitably
extinguished their general cultivation of literature ; but they still possessed
scholars, philosophers, and teachers of the Law, who might have been distin-
guished in better times, and among a more prosperous people. The Talmud
is well known to European scholarship as containing, amid much extraordinary
and fantastic matter, some valuable records of the national history and feelings.
Its sententious and moral narratives, its Agadetha, are sometimes striking and
noble ; and the allegories, mysticisms, visions, and parables of the Medras-
biim are sometimes not less sagacious than sublime.

The subject of the following verses is from a tradition of the wisdom of Rabbi
Joshuah. The Jews to this day speak with malediction of Titus, the destroyer
of the temple, and of Hadrian, the destroyer of the nation. But Trajan is
sometimes spoken of with more respect, probably from the contrast of his cha-
racter, stern as it was, with that of his fierce and sanguinary successor, Hadrian ;
and from the comparative security of the Jews under an emperor who was too
much engrossed with his incessant wars to have any leisure for persecution.