THE Old Jewry was the Ghetto of mediæval London. The Rev. Moses Margoliouth, in his interesting "History of the Jews in Great Britain," has clearly shown that Jews resided in England during the Saxon times, by an edict published by Elgbright, Archbishop of York, A.D. 470, forbidding Christians to attend the Jewish feasts. It appears the Jews sometimes left lands to the abbeys; and in the laws of Edward the Confessor we find them especially mentioned as under the king's guard and protection.

The Conqueror invited over many Jews from Rouen, who settled themselves chiefly in London, Stamford, and Oxford. In London the Jews had two colonies-one in Old Jewry, near King Offa's old palace; and one in the liberties of the Tower. Rufus, in his cynical way, marked his hatred of the monks by summoning a convocation, where English bishops met Jewish rabbis, and held a religious controversy, Rufus swearing by St. Luke's face that if the rabbis had the best of it, he would turn Jew at once. In this reign the Jews were so powerful at Oxford that they let three halls-Lombard Hall, Moses Hall, and Jacob Hall-to students; and their rabbis instructed even Christian students in their synagogue. Jews took care of vacant benefices for the king. In the reign of Henry I. the Jews began to make proselytes, and monks were sent to several towns to preach against them. Halcyon times! With the reign of Stephen, however, began the storms, and, with the clergy, the usurper persecuted the Jews, exacting a fine of £2,000 from those of London alone for a pretended manslaughter. The absurd story of the Jews murdering young children, to anoint Israelites or to raise devils with their blood, originated in this reign.

Henry II. was equally ruthless, though he did grant Jews cemeteries outside the towns. Up till this time the London Jews had only been allowed to bury in "the Jews' garden," in the parish of St. Giles's, Cripplegate. In spite of frequent fines and banishments, their historian owns that altogether they throve in this reign, and their physicians were held in high repute. With Richard I.,

chivalrous to all else, began the real miseries of the English Jews. Even on the day of his coronation there was a massacre of the Jews, and many of their houses were burnt. Two thousand Jews were murdered at York, and at Lynn and Stamford they were also plundered. On his return from Palestine Richard established a tribunal for Jews. In the early part of John's reign he treated the moneylenders, whom he wanted to use, with consideration. He granted them a charter, and allowed them to choose their own chief rabbi. He also allowed them to try all their own causes which did not concern pleas of the Crown; and all this justice cost the English Jews only 4,000 marks, for John was poor. His greed soon broke loose. In 1210 he levied on the Jews 66,000 marks, and imprisoned, blinded, and tortured all who did not readily pay. The king's last act of inhumanity was to compel some Jews to torture and put to death a great number of Scotch prisoners who had assisted the barons. Can we wonder that it is still a proverb among the English Jews, "Thank God that there was only one King John?"

The regent of the early part of the reign of Henry III. protected the Jews, and exempted them from the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts; but they were compelled to wear on their breasts two white tablets of linen or parchment, two inches broad and four inches long; and twentyfour burgesses were chosen in every town where they resided, to protect them from the insults of pilgrims; for the clergy still treated them as excommunicated infidels. But even this lull was short-persecution soon again broke out. In the 14th of Henry III. the Crown seized a third part of all their movables, and their new synagogue in the Old Jewry was granted to the brothers of St. Anthony of Vienna, and turned into a church. In the 17th of Henry III. the Jews were again taxed to the amount of 18,000 silver marks. At the same time the king erected an institution in New Street (Chancery Lane) for Jewish converts, as an atonement for his father's cruelty to the persecuted exiles. Four Jews of Norwich having been dragged at horses' tails and hung, on a pretended charge of

burnt, the leader of the mob, John Fitz-John, a baron, running Rabbi Abraham, the richest Jew in London, through with his sword. On the defeat of the king's party at the battle of Lewes, the London mob accused the Jews of aiding the king, and plundered their houses: all the Israelites would have perished, had they not taken refuge in the Tower. By royal edict the Christians were forbidden to buy flesh of a Jew, and no Jew was allowed to employ Christian nurses, bakers, brewers, or cooks. Towards the close of Henry's life the synagogue in Old Jewry was again taken from the Jews, and given to the Friars Penitent, whose chapel stood hard by, and who complained of the noise of the Jewish congregation; but the king permitted another synagogue to be built in a more suitable place. Henry then ordered the Jews to pay up all arrears of tallages within four months, and half of the sum in seventeen days. The Tower of London was naturally soon full of grey-bearded Jewish debtors.

No wonder, with all these persecutions, that the Chancery Lane house of converts began soon to fill."On one of the rolls of this reign," says Mr. Margoliouth, probably quoting Prynne's famous diatribe against the Jews, "about 500 names of Jewish converts are registered." From the 50th year of Henry III. to the 2nd of Edward I., the Crown, says Coke, extorted from the English Jews no less than £420,000 15s. 4d.!

Edward I. was more merciful. In a statute, however, which was passed in his third year, he forbade Jews to practise usury, required them to wear badges of yellow taffety, as a distinguishing mark of their nationality, and demanded from each of them threepence every Easter. Then began the plunder. The king wanted money to build Carnarvon and Conway castles, to be held as fortresses against the Welsh, whom he had just recently conquered and treated with great cruelty, and the Jews were robbed accordingly. It was not difficult in those days to find an excuse for extortion if the royal exchequer was empty. In the 7th year of Edward no less than 294 Jews were put to death for clipping money, and all they possessed seized by the king. In his 17th year all the Jews in England were imprisoned in one night, as Selden proves by an old Hebrew inscription found at Winchester, and not released till they had paid £20,000 of silver for a ransom. At last, in the year 1290, came the Jews' final expulsion from England, when 15,000 or 16,000 of these tormented exiles left our shores, not to return till Cromwell set the first great example of toleration. Edward allowed the Jews to take with them part of their money and

movables, but seized their houses and other posses sions. All their outstanding mortgages were forfeited to the Crown, and ships were to be provided for their conveyance to such places within reasonable distance as they might choose. In spite of this, however, many, through the treachery of the sailors, were left behind in England, and were all put to death with great cruelty.

"Whole rolls full of patents relative to Jewish estates," says Mr. Margoliouth, "are still to be seen at the Tower, which estates, together with their rent in fee, permissions, and mortgages, were all seized by the king." Old Jewry, and Jewin Street, Aldersgate, where their burial-ground was, still preserve a dim memory of their residence among us. There used to be a tradition in England that the Jews buried much of their treasure here, in hopes of a speedy return to the land where they had suffered so much, yet where they had thriven. In spite of the edict of banishment a few converted Jews continued to reside in England, and after the Reformation some unconverted Jews ventured to return. Rodrigo Lopez, a physician of Queen Elizabeth's, for instance, was a Jew. He was tortured to death for being accused of designing to poison the Queen.

No. 8, Old Jewry was the house of Sir Robert Clayton, Lord Mayor in the time of Charles II. It was a fine brick mansion, and one of the grandest houses in the street. It is mentioned by Evelyn in the following terms :-" 26th September, 1672.-I carried with me to dinner my Lord H. Howard (now to be made Earl of Norwich and Earl Marshal of England, to Sir Robert Clayton's, now Sheriff of London, at his own house, where we had a great feast; it is built, indeed, for a great magistrate, at excessive cost. The cedar diningroom is painted with the history of the Giants' war, incomparably done by Mr. Streeter, but the figures are too near the eye." We give on the previous page a view of the garden front of this house, taken from an old print. Sir Robert built the house to keep his shrievalty, which he did with great magnificence. It was for some years the residence of Mr. Samuel Sharp, an eminent surveyor. In the year 1805 was established, by a proprietary in the City, the London Institution, "for the advancement of literature and the diffusion of useful knowledge." This institution was temporarily located in Sir Robert Clayton's famous old house. Upon the first committee of the institution were Mr. R. Angerstein and Mr. Richard Sharp. Porson, the famous Greek scholar and editor of Euripides, was thought an eligible man to be its principal librarian. He was accordingly appointed to the

office by a unanimous resolution of the governors; and Mr. Sharp had the gratification of announcing to the Professor his appointment. His friends rejoiced. Professor Young, of Glasgow, writing to Burney about this time, says :-" Of Devil Dick you say nothing. I see by the newspapers they have given him a post. A handsome salary, I hope, a suite of chambers, coal and candle, &c. Porter and cyder, I trust, are among the et cæteras." His salary was £200 a year, with a suite of rooms. Still, Porson was not just the man for a librarian; for no one could use books more roughly. He had no affectation about books, nor, indeed, affectation of any sort. The late Mr. William Upcott, who urged the publication of Evelyn's diary at Wotton, was fellow-secretary with Porson. The institution removed to King's Arms Yard, Coleman Street, in 1812, and thence, in 1819, to the present handsome mansion, erected from the classic design of Mr. W. Brooks, on the north side of Moorfields, now Finsbury Circus.

The library is "one of the most useful and accessible in Great Britain ;" and there is to be found in a few of the books Porson's handwriting, consisting of critical remarks and notes. In a copy of the Aldine "Herodotus," he has marked the chapters in the margin in Arabic numerals "with such nicety and regularity," says his biographer, "that the eye of the reader, unless upon the closest examination, takes them for print."

Lord Byron remembered Porson at Cambridge; in the hall where he himself dined, at the ViceChancellor's table, and Porson at the Dean's, he always appeared sober in his demeanour, nor was he guilty, as far as his lordship knew, of any excess or outrage in public; but in an evening, with a party of undergraduates, he would, in fits of intoxication, get into violent disputes with the young men, and arrogantly revile them for not knowing what he thought they might be expected to know. He once went away in disgust, because none of them knew the name of "the Cobbler of Messina." In this condition Byron had seen him at the rooms of William Bankes, the Nubian discoverer, where he would pour forth whole pages of various languages, and distinguish himself especially by his copious floods of Greek.

Lord Byron further tells us that he had seen Sheridan "drunk, with all the world; his intoxication was that of Bacchus, but Porson's that

Of all the disgusting brutes, sulky, abusive, and intolerable, Porson was the most bestial, so far as the few times that I saw him went, which were only at William Bankes's rooms. He was tolerated in this state among the young

men for his talents, as the Turks think a madman inspired, and bear with him. He used to write, or rather vomit, pages of all languages, and could hiccup Greek like a Helot; and certainly Sparta never shocked her children with a grosser exhibition than this man's intoxication."

The library of the institution appears, however, to have derived little advantage from Porson's supervision of it, beyond the few criticisms which were found in his handwriting in some of the volumes. Owing to his very irregular habits, the great scholar proved but an inefficient librarian ; he was irregular in attendance, and was frequently brought home at midnight drunk. The directors had determined to dismiss him, and said they only knew him as their librarian from seeing his name attached to receipts of salary. Indeed, he was already breaking up, and his stupendous memory had begun to fail. On the 19th of September, 1806, he left the Old Jewry to call on his brother-in-law, Perry, in the Strand, and at the corner of Northumberland Street was struck down by a fit of apoplexy. He was carried over to the St. Martin's Lane workhouse, and there slowly recovered consciousness. Mr. Savage, the under-librarian, seeing an advertisement in the British Press, describing a person picked up, having Greek memoranda in his pocket, went to the workhouse and brought Porson home in a hackney coach; he talked about the fire which the night before had destroyed Covent Garden Theatre, and as they rounded St. Paul's, remarked upon the ill treatment Wren had received. On reaching the Old Jewry, and after he had breakfasted, Dr. Adam Clarke called and had a conversation with Porson about a stone with a Greek inscription, brought from Ephesus; he also discussed a Mosaic pavement recently found in Palestrina, and quoted two lines from the Greek Anthologia. Dr. Adam Clarke particularly noticed that he gave the Greek rapidly, but the English with painful slowness, as if the Greek came more naturally. Then, apparently fancying himself under restraint, he walked out, and went into the African or Cole's coffee-house in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill; there he would have fallen had he not caught hold of one of the brass rods of the boxes. Some wine and some jelly dissolved in brandy and water considerably roused him, but he could hardly speak, and the waiter took him back to the Institution in a coach. He expired exactly as the clock struck twelve, on the night of Sunday, September 25, 1808. He was buried in the Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, and eulogies of his talent, written in Greek and Latin verse, were affixed to his pall-an old