price, it produced already 20 per cent. Asrasrafel was obliged to take some shares. Another day the same enthusiast renewed his visit: "I' have now to submit the prospectus of a most wonderful discovery, a projectile steam-engine, one discharge of which, in time of war, will take down whole regiments, and that will be doing good, and will be humane, for it will abridge wars. With this same machine, I can, if necessary, treat our neighbours, at the other side of the channel, to a cataract of boiling water, or a charge of some two thousand pounders, whichever they like. In short, Sir, the subscription is opened for a project by which our countrymen among the Velches shall be supplied with boiling water for their tea: our true patriots, there is no doubt, will be anxious to use the national water: we can throw it at any distance; and nothing can equal the delicate precision with which we shall direct the stream into the tea-pot, no matter in what part of France it may be placed. But what I chiefly pride myself in is, the despatch-bullets: great inconvenience is felt at present by the delays of communication with our colonies: I shall remedy it: I have had hollow bullets formed capable of containing two persons with convenience. The engine sends them wherever you like: we have made experiments already: the persons sent with the first despatches have not as yet returned; but there is no doubt of our success: I am to have the patent; and you shall have as many shares as you like."-At this period, a rival projector enters. "What, Count! I am quite distracted to find in the hands of a vain speculator: I am your only man. Here is a project worth your attention: the public is. mad for shares: the books will be closed to-morrow,' but you shall have a preference." Asrasrafel inquired to what enterprize he belonged. "What, you in England, and not know of our Eolian baths, our aerial draughts !"-" No, I confess."-" Well, then, please to be informed of this, our government has long beheld with regret the number of our countrymen who go abroad to spend their money among strangers, to the great injury of their native land. Now, Sir, it is not for me to speak of it, but I must say, I think I have found out a way of combining two things before deemed incompatible; namely, individual accommodation, and the national interest. You hear these people say, I must have change of air-change of air is all I want.' Now, Sir, I am the man that will put an end to all such pretexts: I undertake to get together, at home, every individual air from the pole to the torrid zone inclusively: my balloons, Sir, shall pick up the choicest airs of the most celebrated countries, you and and the public will have the opportunity of taking (at home) any air they please for the benefit of their health: do me the favor of a visit." Some days afterwards, Asrasrafel, passing by the aerial repository, is invited by a huge man with an appropriate placard and board, and the address, "Ladies and gentlemen, please to walk in: now is your time for a blast." He enters, and in the first place encounters the physician to the establishment, who was celebrated for the ready certainty with which he declared each person's particular disease by a figure, and his skill in prescribing the suitable air: he approached our ambassador who declared himself free from illness. "What, not ill, with that hot air about you! I say, Zephyr, (the name of the waiter,) go fetch three good blasts of Upper Alps' wind for this gentleman, number seven." At this time the institution was crowded with patients, some to be refrigerated with Siberian airs, some to inhale the balm of an Italian breeze, some to respire in the climate of the sun: our minister got off from the ordeal with merely a little frost on his nose. This is by far the best satire that has been yet written on the chimerical associations, which have been, for the last year or two, cheating the good people of the city. The writer next proceeds, in a similar style of gaiety and grace, to remark on our political institutions and characters: but we have already exceeded our limits, and can only add, that the volume is exceedingly amusing, and evidently the work of a witty and an accomplished mind. ART. VI. FEW Beginning of the Nineteenth Dutch of M. PAUL VAN HEpp. 40. London. John and Ew of the decrees of Providence are more manifest in their operation than the dispersion of the Hebrew people through almost every portion of the world, and the isolated condition in which they subsist, wherever they are established. Intermarrying only with each other, their features mark them out the moment they are seen: climate, habits of civilization, seem to produce little effect upon them: they carry with them every where the indelible sign of their origin; and, though they must frequently find it an inconvenience, they appear to entertain no desire of modifying it in the slightest degree. The barbarity with which the Jews were treated in this country some centuries ago, forms one of the most disgraceful Kk 3 pages pages of our history. We have, however, since the Revolution, given them more ample compensation for their unmerited sufferings than any other nation. We meet with Jews, many of them amiable, learned, active, and accomplished men, in every walk of life. They are admissible to parliament, and have actually sat in the House of Commons. There are Jews eminent at the bar, to all the dignities of which they may attain; and the subordinate branches of the law are crowded with them. The Rotschilds have not only raised their nation to a rank such as it never attained before, but they have elevated commerce itself by the enormous extent of their transactions, and by the acquisition of such unbounded opulence, that they have made emperors, kings, and republics, their tributaries. There are many other mercantile houses conducted by Jews in London, which, though they cannot rival that of the Rotschilds, are classed among the most respectable establishments of our time. Considering their great and increasing wealth, and the influence which it must inevitably give them, in whatever country they choose to exercise it, we are not surprized that the leaders of the Hebrew tribes have at length begun to turn their thoughts towards the general amelioration of their brethren in the scale of society. Upon their own exertions depends their success. They have not acted unwisely in waiting for an epoch, when prejudices of every description are wearing fast away, and the intercourse of life is carried on upon the broadest basis of liberality. The pamphlet before us is one of the first results of their proceedings; and though the information which it affords us, as to the present state of the Jews, is scanty and crude, yet we must commend the publication of it as one of the signs of a propitious age. With the exception of a few states, Jews are to be found in every part of Europe. In the European part of Turkey their number is said to be very great. Holland seems to be their favorite residence. There they are calculated at about sixty thousand souls, being nearly a thirty-second part of the population. They are admitted to the bar of Dutch jurisprudence; and the names of the advocates Meyer, De Markas, Presburg, and Asser, are honorably distinguished in the courts of Amsterdam. Prejudice no longer operates against them, to any marked extent, in the paths of social intercourse. Lessing's dramatic piece, called Die Juden, "The Jews," had the effect of considerably diminishing the violent antipathy with which that people were long treated by the Germans. Lessing conferred a still higher benefit on the Jews by by discovering and encouraging the talents of Mendelsohn. This celebrated Jew wrote a treatise, in which he maintained that Judaism is only a civil institution. His commentaries on part of the Old Testament are of some value: but his best work is a Dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul, which obtained for him the name of the "Jewish Socrates." Since his time Dr. Herz, a Jew at Berlin, was appointed by the King of Prussia Professor of Philosophy, and the Jewtax has been partly abolished. Nevertheless, several of the German turnpikes still exhibit the illiberal notice that "Jews and pigs pay toll here." There are about seven thousand Jews in Frankfort, where they inhabit a particular quarter of the town: but, according to Mr. Russel, it is no longer walled in, as it once was, to separate them from the rest of the community. The constitution of the city now gives them the fullest toleration in religion, and security of property. In France the Revolution-that mighty engine of change -raised the Jews to the rank of citizens. They became members of the municipal governments, rose to high ranks in the army, and obtained the riband of the Legion of Honor. The policy of Bonaparte was liberal in this respect. In Italy, as well as in Germany, France, and England, the condition of the Jews has, upon the whole, been greatly ameliorated within the last fifty years. In Poland, Silesia, Moravia, Suabia, and the Papal dominions, they still continue in the most abject state of debasement, and are distinguished only for their avarice, cunning, cowardice, and misery. The Portuguese and Spanish Jews, but especially the former, have long held a high rank among their nation. Persecution drove numbers of them, from time to time, to Germany, whither they carried with them considerable treasures. These they invested in the public funds of England, France, and Holland; and hence they soon became distinguished for that ambiguous sort of speculation in the stocks, which is more allied to the practices of gambling than of honest trade. They have kept themselves in a great measure distinct from the German Jews, whom they look upon as an inferior race; and they form a separate congregation, with religious rites and ceremonies peculiar to themselves. M. VAN HEMERT speaks with some partiality of another new congregation, which was established by the German Jews in Amsterdam in 1796. This new congregation,' he observes, governed by some able and worthy individuals, will sooner or later become of great benefit to the Jews here, in general, in their becoming more enlightened and ennobled. They have already done a great deal of good, and would have done more, if less egotism and more worldly citizenship would exist among mankind. I am acquainted with some members of this community who would have been an ornament to Christianity, if fate had permitted Christian parents to have given them birth; but who now, because they are born of Jews, are kept by the Christians in general at a distance, to the injury of both, and more injurious still to civil society. Some from among them, whose parents were honest citizens, have devoted themselves to the study of letters, and, after struggling with incredible difficulties, have reached a moral height, of which, among Christians, no just conception can be formed, because the latter, finding all paths even and smooth for them, cannot conceive the pains and difficulties with which a Jew has to contend, as well in regard to the straitness of pecuniary means necessary for his studies, as also in regard to the prejudices in which he is educated, and of his exclusion from all public schools and establishments.' It is pleasant to observe that this exclusion of the children of Jews from public schools does not exist in England. In point of fact, several of that race have been educated at Eton and Westminster. The Universities, however, are closed against them. Though deficient in details, there is a great deal of good ense and sound principle in this pamphlet. The author admits that much baseness of conduct is to be found among the Jews in every country, but he justly imputes it to the state of contempt and degradation, in which they have been too long held by the Christians. The only mode by which any class of men may be rendered respectable and useful members of society, is to admit them to the rank of civilized beings, to treat them with kindness, and to give them an interest in the welfare of the community. It is by this process alone that the Jews can be taught to abandon that vain expectation of a MESSIAH, which has deluded their nation for eighteen hundred years. How can they ever be convinced, that such a Being ever trod the earth, until we, who acknowlege Him, prove the fulness of our belief, by practising towards all mankind the great doctrines of charity, which it was the object of that Divine Missionary to teach not by precept only but also by example? ART. VII. Brother Jonathan; or, the New Englanders. 3 Vols. Svo. Blackwood, Edinburgh. 1825. THIS novel, though published in Edinburgh, is, we have reason to believe, written by an American. The success of the "Great Unknown" has provoked imitation no where in such multitu |