o Italian verse, and Immanuel's Hebrew specimens thus belong to
the earliest sonnets written in any literature. It is, indeed,
impossible to convey a just sense of the variety of subject and form in
the _Machberoth_. "Serious and frivolous topics trip each other by the
heels; all metrical forms, prayers, elegies, passages in unmetrical
rhymes, all are mingled together." The last chapter is, however, of a
different character, and it has often been printed as a separate work.
It is the "Hell and Eden" to which allusion has already been made.

The link between Immanuel and his Provencal contemporary Kalonymos was
supplied by Judah Romano, the Jewish school-man. All three were in the
service of the king of Naples. Kalonymos was the equal of Romano as a
philosopher and not much below Immanuel as a satirist. He was a more
fertile poet than Immanuel, for, while Immanuel remained the sole
representative of his manner, Kalonymos gave birth to a whole school of
imitators. Kalonymos wrote many translations, of Galen, Averroes,
Aristotle, al-Farabi, Ptolemy, and Archimedes. But it was his keen wit
more than his learning that made him popular in Rome, and impelled the
Jews of that city, headed by Immanuel, to persuade Kalonymos to settle
permanently in Italy. Kalonymos' two satirical poems were called "The
Touchstone" (_Eben Bochan_) and "The Purim Tractate." These satirize
the customs and social habits of the Jews of his day in a bright and
powerful style. In his Purim Tractate, Kalonymos parodies the style,
logic, and phraseology of the Talmud, and his work was the forerunner of
a host of similar parodies.

There were many Italian writers of _Piyutim_, i.e. Synagogue hymns, but
these were mediocre in merit. The elegies written in lament for the
burning of the Law and the martyrdoms endured in various parts of Italy
were the only meritorious devotional poems composed in Hebrew in that
country. Italy remained famous in Hebrew poetry for secular, not for
religious compositions. In the fifteenth century Moses Rieti (born 1389,
died later than 1452) imitated Dante once more in his "Lesser Sanctuary"
(_Mikdash Meaet_). Here again may be noticed a feature peculiar to
Italian Hebrew poetry. Rieti uses regular stanzas, Italian forms of
verse, in this matter following the example of Immanuel. Messer Leon, a
physician of Mantua, wrote a treatise on Biblical rhetoric (1480).
Again, the only important writer of dramas in Hebrew was, as we shal