s when his manuscript arrived little bands of earnest
students would meet, and the manuscript would be read and discussed. The
interdict placed on free thought made it attractive. Spinoza became
recognized by the esoteric few as one of the world's great thinkers,
although the good people with whom he lived knew him only as a model
lodger, who kept regular hours and made little trouble. Occasionally
visitors would come from a distance and remain for hours discussing such
abstract themes as the freedom of the will or the nature of the
over-soul. And these visitors caused the rustic neighbors to grow
curious, and we find Spinoza moving into the city and renting a modest
back room. By a curious chance, his landlady, fifty years before, had
been a servant in the household of Grotius, and once had locked that
great man in a trunk and escorted him, right side up, across the border
into Switzerland to escape the heresy-hunters who were looking for human
kindling. This kind landlady, now grown old, and living largely in the
past, saw points of resemblance between her philosophic boarder and the
great Grotius, and soon waxed boastful to the neighbors. Spinoza noticed
that he was being pointed out on the streets. His record had followed
him. The Jews hated him because he was a renegade; the Christians hated
him because he was a Jew, and both Catholics and Protestants shunned him
when they ought not, and greeted him with howls when they should have
let him alone.

He again moved his lodgings to the suburbs of the city, where he lived
with the family of Van der Spijck, a worthy Dutch painter who smoked his
pipe in calm indifference to the Higher Criticism. For their quiet and
studious lodger Van der Spijck and his wife had a profound regard. They
did not understand him, but they believed in him. Often he would go to
church with them and coming home would discuss the sermon with them at
length. The Lutheran pastor who came to call on the family invited
Spinoza to join his flock, and they calmly discussed the questions of
baptism and regeneration by faith together; but genius only expresses
itself to genius, and the pastor went away mystified. Van der Spijck
did not produce great art, yet his pictures are now in demand because he
was the kind and loyal friend of Spinoza, and his heart, not his art,
fixes his place in history.

In his sketch, Zangwill has certain of his old friends, members of the
Van den Ende family, hunt out the phi