But, just as he is to the father, Scott is more than just to the daughter.[141] While Isaac is at the best a reformed Barabas or Shylock, Rebecca is the jewel of the story. The author exhausts his conventional colours in painting her beauty, and his vocabulary in singing the praises of her character. “Her form was exquisitely symmetrical,” “the brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her eyebrows, her well-formed, aquiline nose, her teeth as white as pearls, and the profusion of her sable tresses,” made up a figure which “might have compared with the proudest beauties of England.” She is indeed “the very Bride of the Canticles,” as Prince John remarks; “the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley,” as the Prior’s warmer imagination suggests. Immeasurably superior to Abigail in beauty and to Jessica in virtue, she equals Portia in wisdom—a perfect heroine of romance. Withal there is in Rebecca a power of quiet self-sacrifice that raises her almost to the level of a saint. Altogether as noble an example of womanhood as there is to be found in a literature rich in noble women. To sum up, in contrast to Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s creations, there is a great deal of the tragic, and little, if anything, of the comic in Scott’s Jew.
It would, however, be an error to suppose that Scott was the spokesman of a unanimous public. His Ivanhoe appeared in 1819. Four years later we find the writer who with Scott shared the applause of the age, giving an entirely different character to the Jew. The Age of Bronze, written in 1823, carries on the Merchant of Venice tradition. To Byron the Jew is simply a symbol of relentless and unprincipled rapacity. Referring to the Royal Exchange, “the New Symplegades—the crushing stocks,”
“Where Midas might again his wish behold
In real paper or imagined gold,
Where Fortune plays, while Rumour holds the stake,
And the world trembles to bid brokers break,”
the poet moralises at the expense of the Jew, to whom he traces our own greed and recklessness in speculation:
“But let us not to own the truth refuse,
Was ever Christian land so rich in Jews?
Those parted with their teeth to good King John,