icated to 'Our Lady of Tears,' and the name remained forever to
commemorate the miraculous event.

Besides mobbing the Jews in the streets and plundering them when they
could, the Roman populace invented means of insulting them which must
have been especially galling. They ridiculed them in the popular
open-air theatres, and made blasphemous jests upon their most sacred
things in Carnival. It is not improbable that 'Punch and Judy' may have
had their origin in something of this sort, and 'Judy' certainly
suggests 'Giudea,' a Jewess. What the Roman rabble had done against
Christians in heathen days, the Christian rabble did against the Jews in
the Middle Age and the Renascence. They were robbed, ridiculed,
outraged, and sometimes killed; after the fall of the Pierleoni, they
appear to have had no civil rights worth mentioning; they were taxed
more heavily than the Christian citizens, in proportion as they were
believed to be more wealthy, and were less able to resent the
tax-gatherer; their daughters were stolen away for their beauty, less
consenting than Jessica, and with more violence, and the Merchant of
Venice is not a mere fiction of the master playwright. All these things
were done to them and more, yet they stayed in Rome, and multiplied, and
grew rich, being then, as when Tacitus wrote of them, 'scrupulously
faithful and ever actively charitable to each other, and filled with
invincible hatred against all other men.'

[Illustration: SITE OF THE ANCIENT GHETTO]

The old Roman Ghetto has been often described, but no description can
give any true impression of it; the place where it stood is a vast open
lot, waiting for new buildings which will perhaps never rise, and the
memory of it is relegated to the many fast-fading pictures of old Rome.
Persius tells how, on Herod's birthday, the Jews adorned their doors
with bunches of violets and set out rows of little smoky lamps upon the
greasy window-sills, and feasted on the tails of tunny fish--the meanest
part--pickled, and eaten off rough red earthen-ware plates with draughts
of poor white wine. The picture was a true one ten years ago, for the
manners of the Ghetto had not changed in that absolute isolation. The
name itself, 'Ghetto,' is generally derived from a Hebrew root meaning
'cut off'--and cut off the Jews' quarter was, by walls, by religion, by
tradition, by mutual hatred between Hebrews and other men. It has been
compared to a beehive, to an anthill, to an