In spite of all my willingness, I did not get at the matter without difficulty; for my teacher could not suppress certain sarcastic remarks as to the real truth about Hebrew.  I concealed from him my designs upon Jew-German, and spoke of a better understanding of the original text.  He smiled at this, and said I should be satisfied if I only learned to read.  This vexed me in secret, and I concentrated all my attention when we came to the letters.  I found an alphabet something like the Greek, of which the forms were easy, and the names, for the most part, not strange to me.  All this I had soon comprehended and retained, and supposed we should now take up reading.  That this was done from right to left I was well aware.  But now all at once appeared a new army of little characters and signs, of points and strokes of all sorts, which were in fact to represent vowels.  At this I wondered the more, as there were manifestly vowels in the larger alphabet; and the others only appeared to be hidden under strange appellations.  I was also taught that the Jewish nation, as long as it flourished, actually were satisfied with the former signs, and knew no other way of writing and reading.  Most willingly, then, would I have gone on along this ancient and, as it seemed to me, easier path; but my worthy declared rather sternly that we must go by the grammar as it had been approved and composed.  Reading without these points and strokes, he said, was a very hard undertaking, and could be accomplished only by the learned and those who were well practised.  I must, therefore, make up my mind to learn these little characters; but the matter became to me more and more confused.  Now, it seemed, some of the first and larger primitive letters had no value in their places, in order that their little after-born kindred might not stand there in vain.  Now they indicated a gentle breathing, now a guttural more or less rough, and now served as mere equivalents.  But finally, when one fancied that he had well noted every thing, some of these personages, both great and small, were rendered inoperative; so that the eyes always had very much, and the lips very little, to do.

As that of which I already knew the contents had now to be stuttered in a strange gibberish, in which a certain snuffle and gargle were not a little commended as something unattainable, I in a certain degree deviated from the matter, and diverted myself, in a childish way, with the singular names of these accumulated signs.  There were “emperors,” “kings,” and “dukes,” [Footnote:  These are the technical names for classes of accents in the Hebrew grammar.—­TRANS.] which, as accents governing here and there, gave me not a little entertainment.  But even these shallow jests soon lost their charm.  Nevertheless I was indemnified, inasmuch as by reading, translating, repeating, and committing to memory, the substance of the book came out more vividly; and it was this, properly, about which I desired to be