less easily illustrated. Sometimes they
enshrine a pun or a conceit, or depend for their aptness upon an
assonance. In some of the Talmudic proverbs there is a spice of
cynicism. But most of them show a genial attitude towards life.

The poetical proverb easily passes into the parable. Loved in Bible
times, the parable became in after centuries the most popular form of
didactic poetry among the Jews. The Bible has its parables, but the
Midrash overflows with them. They are occasionally re-workings of older
thoughts, but mostly they are original creations, invented for a special
purpose, stories devised to drive home a moral, allegories administering
in pleasant wrappings unpalatable satires or admonitions. In all ages
up to the present, Jewish moralists have relied on the parable as their
most effective instrument. The poetry of the Jewish parables is
characteristic also of the parables imitated from the Jewish, but the
latter have a distinguishing feature peculiar to them. This is their
humor, the witty or humorous parable being exclusively Jewish. The
parable is less spontaneous than the proverb. It is a product of moral
poetry rather than of folk wisdom. Yet the parable was so like the
proverb that the moral of a parable often became a new proverb. The
diction of the parable is naturally more ornate. By the beauty of its
expression, its frequent application of rural incidents to the life
familiar in the cities, the rhythm and flow of its periods, its fertile
imagination, the parable should certainly be placed high in the world's
poetry. But it was poetry with a _tendency_, the _mashal_, or
proverb-parable, being what the Rabbis themselves termed it, "the clear
small light by which lost jewels can be found."

The following is a parable of Hillel, which is here cited more to
mention that noble, gentle Sage than as a specimen of this class of
literature. Hillel belongs to a period earlier than that dealt with in
this book, but his loving and pure spirit breathes through the pages of
the Talmud and Midrash:

Hillel, the gentle, the beloved sage,
Expounded day by day the sacred page
To his disciples in the house of learning;
And day by day, when home at eve returning,
They lingered, clustering round him, loth to part
From him whose gentle rule won every heart.
But evermore, when they were wont to plead
For longer converse, forth he went with speed,
Saying each day: "I go--the hour