furniture was bare benches, a raised platform with a reading desk in the centre and a wooden curtained ark at the end containing two parchment scrolls of the Law, each with a silver pointer and silver bells and pomegranates.  The scrolls were in manuscript, for the printing-press has never yet sullied the sanctity of the synagogue editions of the Pentateuch.  The room was badly ventilated and what little air there was was generally sucked up by a greedy company of wax candles, big and little, struck in brass holders.  The back window gave on the yard and the contiguous cow-sheds, and “moos” mingled with the impassioned supplications of the worshippers, who came hither two and three times a day to batter the gates of heaven and to listen to sermons more exegetical than ethical.  They dropped in, mostly in their work-a-day garments and grime, and rumbled and roared and chorused prayers with a zeal that shook the window-panes, and there was never lack of minyan—­the congregational quorum of ten.  In the West End, synagogues are built to eke out the income of poor minyan-men or professional congregants; in the East End rooms are tricked up for prayer.  This synagogue was all of luxury many of its Sons could boast.  It was their salon and their lecture-hall.  It supplied them not only with their religion but their art and letters, their politics and their public amusements.  It was their home as well as the Almighty’s, and on occasion they were familiar and even a little vulgar with Him.  It was a place in which they could sit in their slippers, metaphorically that is; for though they frequently did so literally, it was by way of reverence, not ease.  They enjoyed themselves in this Shool of theirs; they shouted and skipped and shook and sang, they wailed and moaned; they clenched their fists and thumped their breasts and they were not least happy when they were crying.  There is an apocryphal anecdote of one of them being in the act of taking a pinch of snuff when the “Confession” caught him unexpectedly.

“We have trespassed,” he wailed mechanically, as he spasmodically put the snuff in his bosom and beat his nose with his clenched fist.

They prayed metaphysics, acrostics, angelology, Cabalah, history, exegetics, Talmudical controversies, menus, recipes, priestly prescriptions, the canonical books, psalms, love-poems, an undigested hotch-potch of exalted and questionable sentiments, of communal and egoistic aspirations of the highest order.  It was a wonderful liturgy, as grotesque as it was beautiful—­like an old cathedral in all styles of architecture, stored with shabby antiquities and side-shows and overgrown with moss and lichen—­a heterogeneous blend of historical strata of all periods, in which gems of poetry and pathos and spiritual fervor glittered and pitiful records of ancient persecution lay petrified.  And the method of praying these things was equally complex and uncouth, equally the bond-slave of tradition;