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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 neighbours*, 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 of this class 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

*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.

gingerbread 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 backs, cuckoo clocks, sealing wax, quills, weather glasses, green spectacles, clumsy figures in plaister of Paris, which you see over the chimney of an alehouse parlour 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 of the law of the country:-the porkbutchers 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 watchmaker; 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 tidings arrived that the sailors had seized admi. ral 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 accommodation were 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 stpkes! 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.

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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. InfideTity 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 valour and high feelings of honour, worthy to have lived in a happier age and country. His brother was a religious poet, famous.

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