"We were reading "Heartsease," and he often seemed the youngest of the party in the keenness of his interest in the characters, and his never-failing recollection of every circumstance of the story.'-Vol. ii. p. 309.

Within a few months of his death he was visited by the Bishop of New Zealand, then in England, and in whose labours he had always taken deep interest.

A few months later Bishop Selwyn wrote thus of the intercourse which had been permitted him with his aged friend, intercourse of which he said publicly, that if he had gained nothing else by his visit to England, it would have been an ample recompense for the journey:

"It is no small happiness to me to have been just in time to see him, and to have enjoyed two long and precious interviews, when the setting sun, though just touching the horizon, was still unclouded, and differing only from its former self in the mellowness of its evening light."'-Vol. ii. pp. 307, 308.

And the biographer records another testimony to the beauty of this season of her uncle's life, which we quote as coming from one who had not known him in the busy part of it.

'I shall ever look upon it as one of the privileges for which I am deeply thankful, the opportunity of seeing and conversing with Mr. Joshua Watson within the last year at Daventry. I remember so well, as a lad, case-hardening myself against the name of Joshua Watson, which I was continually hearing quoted as a final authority in all Church-matters, and I pictured to myself a hard, dry, impenetrable man, who had no sympathies beyond a committee-room in Pall Mall or at Fulham. I certainly long ago learnt to change this opinion of youthful conceit, but it was a real delight to me to do my inward penance at his own table, and have my former self condemned, and yet, as I felt at the same time absolved, by his unaffected wisdom and piety, his pleasant and even playful conversation, and the zeal with which he entered into the newest and most advanced Church schemes, without a shade of the dogmatizing of old age, or the assumption of an authority which would have been so readily admitted. He seemed still the helper and sympathiser, indeed rather the listener and learner, encouraging instead of damping new projects. A less set and prejudiced man for one of strong fixed principles I never saw, and it was delightful to see the vigorous life of faith and love as fresh as ever within its wasted tabernacle. Excuse me for running on with what must be commonplace home-truths to you, but it revives in me for a while a blessed memory in which I cannot deny myself the pleasure of indulging.'—Vol. ii. pp. 308, 309.

His death took place in January, 1855, in his eighty-fifth year; his last hours cheered by every outward circumstance of tender respect and private affection, and far more by the consolations of an ardent faith and assured hope.

Many traits are given of characteristic liberality and benevolence. His devotion to public institutions had never interfered with his private charities, which seem to have been on a most generous, almost lavish scale. He helped the poor, he assisted indigent friends and relations-allowing many of them regular pensions. Everything constituted a claim. He gave a painted window where his father had gone to school; and remitted a considerable sum to a man because he had once been

his rival in business. He never gave people up or was discouraged by failure-not from want of discernment in himself, but that he held the long-suffering of Providence an example he was bound to follow. His niece, too, has preserved some of his sayings, gathered from confidential conversations, and given as the conclusions of his observations. Not that he aimed at the sententious or oracular, he indeed lived under the fear of egotism and display; but so consistent a career must have been the result of system as well as temperament; and system naturally expresses itself in conclusions. These gleanings from his matured experience prove, as his whole course proves, the mutual relation of thought and action which had always existed in him and prompted his efforts and undertakings. His thought had always tended to immediate practice. His practice never anticipated or ran counter to his deliberate opinion; and with him a well-weighed opinion had the force of a principle, and was acted upon in duty and in faith. It is certain that he impressed all who had to work with him in public affairs, and all who had to do with him in domestic relations, with the sentiment that consistent goodness and virtue must inspire. He was in their eyes, without the large list of reservations and apologies which usually accompany such a testimony, emphatically a good man: Nature and constitution no doubt befriending the fair pictureas exempting him from the temptations that beset brilliant talents and a more sensitive organization. But every temperament has its own temptations, and it was in overcoming these, in a strict obedience to the dictates of conscience, in habitual self-control, and in a diligent cultivation of his powers, in order to devote them to the highest ends, that his character attained its excellence.

ART. III.-The History of the Jews from the Christian Era to the Dawn of the Reformation. By PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. London: Printed for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. 1855.

Ar a time when inspiration is called in question, and prophecy denied, it is of no small importance to be able to appeal to living facts to prove the truth of both; and nowhere can we so confidently appeal as to the history of Israel in all its stages, since the uttering of the great prophecy of our Lord (Matt. xxiv.)— which is, in truth, only the last of a long series that had been uttered previously—to the present time. Nay, we may go back to the moment when the great Lawgiver himself, before his people entered on their career of conquest of the Promised Land, foretold to a victorious people, with marvellous exactness, the desolations unparalleled, and almost inconceivable, that have since come upon them (Deut. xxviii.)—a people separate from others in their prosperity, and separate also in their adversity—a perpetual wonder for their preservation in their own land, and equally a wonder for their preservation in those of the stranger. No other people ever has, or ever could have, preserved their existence through the persecutions of seventeen centuries, but one which the Ruler of the world intended to preserve in order to fulfil His own purposes. Whether we look to the East or to the West, to Babylon, Palestine, or Spain, the event proves the truth of prophecy. Tenacity of life is only equalled by tenacity of their religious rites. While other religions have passed away before the conquering Cross, Judaism flourishes still. While other nations, once great, and, in their field of operations, for a time invincible, have vanished, or been absorbed into other peoples, so as to form, out of the amalgamation, one new race, with almost a new language, these have continued unchanged and unchangeable; little trace remains of the Roman of two thousand years ago in the Gothicised Italian of to-day; the irruptions of the northern tribes into the Lower Empire have dissipated the blood of the ancient Greek; Arab conquest has effaced the African Vandal from the country of his adoption; the Mongol hordes in Asia have supplanted the mighty empires of Persia, Assyria, and Babylon. Amid all these changes, the Jew of conquered Palestine remains the same. While the learning and civilization, long inherited and never lost, far surpassing the rude barbarism of the northern conquerors, eminently fitted him for posts of trust and honour in the

governments of the latter, yet the curses written in the law were ever coming upon him to the uttermost, and the blood that he imprecated upon himself at the crucifixion was continually required at his hands by the believers in the Crucified. One day we see the Jew administering, with sagacity and prudence, the finances of a Christian kingdom; on the next we see the decree of an ecclesiastical council demanding his blood or banishment, as an enemy of Christ. One day we see him exercising the noble art of medicine with a knowledge and skill which he had inherited from Eastern sages; on the next we hear a popular cry for his life, on the senseless plea that he had poisoned the wells of the country. The moment that crowned his long-suffering and efforts with success was that which endangered his very life and liberties. We purpose, in the present article, to follow out the history of this remarkable people in one of the most remarkable of its periods, viz. that in which, after the fourth great catastrophe of their race, under the Emperor Hadrian in 135, they again appear in power and importance under their spiritual head, the Patriarchs of the West, and their temporal kings, the Princes of the Captivity, in the East.1

We cannot help noticing the extraordinary fact, that the most interesting history of this singular people, from the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by Hadrian to that of their final banishment from Spain in the fifteenth century-which may be reckoned as the extinction of their glory,-is so little known, and so slightly attended to, in most compendiums of history. How few among us have read the pages of the diffuse, and not altogether trustworthy, Basnage, or the more accurate Jöst, to say nothing of the laborious Buxtorf. Even Dean Milman, Dr. M'Caul, and Mr. D'Israeli, have failed to excite an interest in what may be called medieval Judaism, among a people, and at a time, that the greatest interest is manifested in the modern children of Abraham; and yet few histories contain such interesting episodes, and such strange vicissitudes of fortune. As a people, literature and learning had a home among them, and kept their place, when the swarms of northern barbarians, both of Europe and Asia, had overwhelmed both on either continent, or enclosed them within the cells of the convent and the walls of the declining capital of Eastern Rome. No less curious is it to note, that when the Mohammedan conquest of the latter

1 Let us say here, once for all, that when we speak in this article of the East and West, we are following the Jewish division, and not that which is generally understood in history,-the division of the Roman empire. The East, in Jewish history, is the country east of the Euphrates; the West, all west of that river, including, of course, Palestine and Egypt, as well as Europe and Africa.

caused the revival of letters in the West, by the dispersion of the learned of Constantinople among the courts and universities of Europe-stimulated by the invention of printing-Jewish science declined, excepting in rare and individual instances. It had done its work; it was no more needed: its brightness paled before the rising of the brighter luminaries of the Christian Church.

We propose, then, to take our readers back to the time of the fourth destruction of Jewish Jerusalem, and trace the history of Judaism in Palestine and Babylon to the extinction of independence in both. Hadrian assumed the purple in 117, and soon turned his eyes toward the turbulent and restless inhabitants of Judea: determining to put a stop for ever to the rebellious plans of the ever-plotting Jews, he sent forth an edict that Jerusalem should be razed, and a Roman colony established in its stead, with a temple dedicated to Jupiter on the very spot where that of Jehovah had once stood. Already had the Jews been forbidden to be circumcised, so that the extinction of their race, as a separate people, seemed imminent, or, at least, its absorption into that of the heathen Gentiles that surrounded them. All seemed lost but hope; their history, full of the miraculous deliverances of the Lord, led them to expect that, in their darkest hour, He would interfere to save them: besides, the persuasion hopelessly clung to that the time was at hand when the highest glory of all the kingdoms of the earth was to be theirs,1 would be only more fondly cherished in their hour of peril.

And it was at that moment that one appeared who proclaimed himself as the Deliverer: he announced himself as the 'Star of Jacob,' and declared that his name was Bar-Cochab, the Son of a Star;' he called in aid miraculous powers to attest the truth of his pretensions, fire visibly proceeded from his mouth; his miracles, or his assertions, deluded the Rabbi Akibah, the greatest living authority in the Jewish Law; and he allowed himself, at the age of one hundred and twenty, to be called the Standard-bearer of the Son of the Star. We are not going to give a description of the horrors of that war; Jerusalem fell, and only the stronghold of Bither remained: at length it also was taken, and was given over to the carnage of

3

1 'Percrebuerat oriente toto vetus et constans opinio, esse in fatis, ut eo tempore Judæa profecti rerum potirentur.'-Sueton. Vespas. cap. 4-8.

'Pluribus persuasio inerat, antiquis sacerdotum literis contineri, eo ipso tempore fore, ut valesceret oriens, profectique Judæa rerum potirentur.'-Tacit. Hist. lib. V. cap. 9-13.

On the same day, 9th Ab, that Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem, and that Titus destroyed it.

3 Until the last few years, the site of Bither was unknown; its discovery is due to the Rev. G. Williams, who found a village called Beiter, and near it a rocky eminence well suited for defence. See Holy City, Pt. I. ch. iii. pp. 136, 137.