following letter bearing date from ‘the office of the Chief Rabbi:’
REVEREND SIR. I cannot refrain from expressing to you my heartfelt
thanks on behalf of those of my flock whose relatives have
unfortunately been among those who perished at the late wreck of
the Royal Charter. You have, indeed, like Boaz, ‘not left off your
kindness to the living and the dead.’
You have not alone acted kindly towards the living by receiving
them hospitably at your house, and energetically assisting them in
their mournful duty, but also towards the dead, by exerting
yourself to have our co-religionists buried in our ground, and
according to our rites. May our heavenly Father reward you for
your acts of humanity and true philanthropy!
The ‘Old Hebrew congregation of Liverpool’ thus express themselves
through their secretary:
REVEREND SIR. The wardens of this congregation have learned with
great pleasure that, in addition to those indefatigable exertions,
at the scene of the late disaster to the Royal Charter, which have
received universal recognition, you have very benevolently employed
your valuable efforts to assist such members of our faith as have
sought the bodies of lost friends to give them burial in our
consecrated grounds, with the observances and rites prescribed by
the ordinances of our religion.
The wardens desire me to take the earliest available opportunity to
offer to you, on behalf of our community, the expression of their
warm acknowledgments and grateful thanks, and their sincere wishes
for your continued welfare and prosperity.
A Jewish gentleman writes:
REVEREND AND DEAR SIR. I take the opportunity of thanking you
right earnestly for the promptness you displayed in answering my
note with full particulars concerning my much lamented brother, and
I also herein beg to express my sincere regard for the willingness
you displayed and for the facility you afforded for getting the
remains of my poor brother exhumed. It has been to us a most
sorrowful and painful event, but when we meet with such friends as
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
yourself, it in a measure, somehow or other, abates that mental
anguish, and makes the suffering so much easier to be borne.
Considering the circumstances connected with my poor brother’s
fate, it does, indeed, appear a hard one. He had been away in all
seven years; he returned four years ago to see his family. He was
then engaged to a very amiable young lady. He had been very
successful abroad, and was now returning to fulfil his sacred vow;
he brought all his property with him in gold uninsured. We heard
from him when the ship stopped at Queenstown, when he was in the
highest of hope, and in a few short hours afterwards all was washed
away.
Mournful in the deepest degree, but too sacred for quotation here,
were the numerous references to those miniatures of women worn
round the necks of rough men (and found there after death), those
locks of hair, those scraps of letters, those many many slight
memorials of hidden tenderness. One man cast up by the sea bore
about him, printed on a perforated lace card, the following
singular (and unavailing) charm:
A BLESSING.
May the blessing of God await thee. May the sun of glory shine
around thy bed; and may the gates of plenty, honour, and happiness
be ever open to thee. May no sorrow distress thy days; may no
grief disturb thy nights. May the pillow of peace kiss thy cheek,
and the pleasures of imagination attend thy dreams; and when length
of years makes thee tired of earthly joys, and the curtain of death
gently closes around thy last sleep of human existence, may the
Angel of God attend thy bed, and take care that the expiring lamp
of life shall not receive one rude blast to hasten on its
extinction.
A sailor had these devices on his right arm. ‘Our Saviour on the
Cross, the forehead of the Crucifix and the vesture stained red; on
the lower part of the arm, a man and woman; on one side of the
Cross, the appearance of a half moon, with a face; on the other
side, the sun; on the top of the Cross, the letters I.H.S.; on the