of war: Sarmatia supplied her with steeds, Carthage traded in her fairs with silver, iron, tin, and lead. Judah and the land of Israel were her merchants, and traded in her markets wheat of Minnith and Pannag, and honey, and oil, and balm. For Tyrus the Damascus vine ripened; from the same city Tyrus drew her beautiful white wool: Greece sent her vessels of brass, and supplied her with slaves. Arabia and all the princes of Kedar supplied her plenteously with ivory and ebony; Sheba with perfumes; Syria with emeralds, purple, broidered work, coral, and agate.

That eagerness of every nation to send forth as tributes to the queen of the sea all the products of nature and arts, gives much interest and rapidity to the description, and beautifies still the splendid picture of her glory. The poet has extolled her to the skies, but with the purpose of lowering her the better, and describing her rolling to and fro in the bottom of the ocean.

- Thy rowers have brought thee into great waters: the East wind has broken thee in the midst of the seas," v. 26. e. 27.

Thy riches and thy fairs, thy merchandise, thy mariners and thy pilots, thy calkers, and the occupiers of thy merchandise, and all thy men of war, that are in thee, and in all thy company which is in the midst of thee, shall fall into the midst of the seas in the day of thy ruin," v. 27.

The crash of this sudden and unforeseen fall roars like a thunderbolt on the vast ocean. The mariners and pilots of the seas, affrighted by the Boise, come down from their ships, and stand upon the land where Tyrus stood: they cry bitterly, cast up dust upon their heads, and wallow themselves in the ashes; make themselves bald for their city, and gird themselves with sackcloths. What a sad and moving sight it is to gaze on those numerous fleets, on which the lugubrious colours of death and mourning are hoisted, precipitately sailing from the extremity of the world to give their last farewell to their queen, and bewailing at her funerals: What city is like Tyrus, like the destroyed in the midst of the seas," v. 32.

• Præfat. in Ezek.

After this bold prosopopœia, the poet resumes

"O Tyrus, thou didst enrich the kings of the earth with the multitude of thy riches and thy merchandize thou shalt be broken by the seas in the depths of the waters, thy merchandize and all thy people will fall. All the inhabitants of the isles shall be astonished at thee, and their kings shall be sore afraid they shall be troubled in their countenance," v. 34, 35. “Thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt be any more," v. 36.

This last stroke is an irrevocable decree for Tyrus. We may be surprised at first sight, and regret perhaps that pity does not soften the last strain of this sublime elegiac poet, whose composition is most unexceptionably perfect and regular. But Ezekiel being a captive in Babylon, knew that as well as that magnificent city, Tyrus exulted at the fall of Jerusalem. He inveighs against the queen of the seas: his style must therefore be stamped with the flashing fire of a patriotic and holy wrath. God through Ezekiel wished to give the nations a memorable lesson. He wanted to teach kings and nations at large, that great calamities, and the extinction of a gigantic glory, instead of exciting mockery and outrageous insults, should fill us with a religious fear and respect, lest it might foretell us the same fate. However, it does not belong to us to anatomize those ancient and inspired works with the timid rules of our criticism, and to judge them according to the niceties of modern taste. Ezekiel's style bears a serious, energetic, and deep character. According to St. Jerome, it is graced with elegancy, but it is not kept up ;* but to the judgment of Grotius and Lowth it is energetic, sorrowful, and frightful,+ and his elegies are by no means like those of Jeremiah, who is so particularly sentimental and lamentable, although he now and then soars to sublimity. It was said of Ezekiel that he is the Milton of the prophets; we might add that he is their Álcæus when he breaks out in declamations against the crimes of kings and nations: then he deserves the golden bow with which the ancients had honoured the poet of Lesbos.*

↑ Lowth, p. 209.

ISAIAH.

Isaiah treats but of the captivity of the Hebrews in Babylon, their return to Jerusalem, and the coming of the Messiah. He is as high among the prophets as St. John and St. Paul among the evangelists and apostles. Just as Bossuet, taught by those three great writers, has excelled in the department of funeral oration; so would the inspired Son of Amoz have reached the highest pitch of precedency in elegiac compositions, if he had devoted his voice to the lamenting of king's deaths, of cities' and empires' falls. We dare not ascribe the qualification of elegy to his prophecy against Babylon, because it is rather a monument of alacrity, triumph and happiness for Israel's sons, and the poet mocks the overthrow of that haughty ruler of nations, without any pity atoning for his insulting exultation, or at least without bringing in any one to take up a lamentation, as Ezekiel did when he

prophesied the destruction of Tyrus. Isaiah stands unrivalled in the lofty and sublime style: and when he descends from heaven to comfort Zion, to thank the Almighty for his benefits, and become the interpreter of the grief and gratitude of a dying king, all at once miraculously recalled to life, the prophet's sublime flights drop and alter into the more regular and pathetic tones of lamentation, and then he almost defies Ezekiel. Would not any one that has read Ezekiah's hymn think he has recognised the latter's style,-an hymn exceedingly simple and pathetic, the immortality of which has been renewed by Rousseau's translation? Isaiah would thus have graced his funeral songs with the loftiness of thought, the deepness and vivacity of

sentiments, a two-fold character of

ancient elegy, when applied to heroical subjects.

JOB'S ELEGIES.

The book of Job, the most ancient, the most regular of all inspired writings, and in which the author conveys us in turn from heaven down upon the earth, and from the earth up to heaven; that book wherein the most

Quint. Inst. Orat. lib. x. cap. 1. Ezek. xxvii.

| Job 1.

magnificent and most faithful pictures of the Almighty's power, and his con

tinued influence over the dark desti

What a

nies of man are to be met with, contains also several elegies. pathetic picture it is to fancy Job suddenly hurried down from the summit of fortune and happiness into the most wretched state of poverty and humiliation; deprived of his children, who during their repast were buried alive under the rubbish of their tumbling house. Job kisses almost the hand that strikes him: his first words convey

the import of the most submissive re

signation.||

But when the hand of

God, who wants to try him, falls heavier and heavier on him-when excruciating pain, with her iron teeth, unmercifully tears off his flesh, when his whole body is but one broad wound, and fire is kindled in his veins and gnaws his limbs to the very bones— for seven days beside him, speechless when he beholds his friends standing then Job, unable to master himself any and erect with surprise, fear and horror, longer, breaks out in imprecations and his grief, formerly so placid and resigned imitates now the roar of despair.

ob becomes conscious of having erred But after this first transport is over, and resumes his first character: his complaints are then true elegies, whether their subject be the disproportion of his sufferings with his faults, whether it be the treacherous conduct of his relations or the hard-heartedness of his friends-whether he laments for the shortness of this life, the wretchedness of human kind and consequently his own, as in the chapters vi. vii. xi. xiv. and xix. His brethren have passed away as the stream of brooks.** friends instead of speaking to him words of peace and comfort, charge him, confederate to crush him, the poor orphan, deserted by every one; what signifies that? He finds a consolation in the thought that he silently shall obey the will of God. What a forin the lessons he gives his strange comgiveness-what a mildness is there not forters?

His

be showed from his friend, but he forsaketh the fear of the Almighty."*

The pangs of physical or moral pain that day and night excruciate, without relenting a moment, its victim, were never better expressed.

"When I lie down, I say, when shall I arise, and the night be gone? and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day."+

Sometimes he wonders at the eagerness and perseverance with which God seems to persecute him: for his days are vanity. What shall we do to soften down God's wrath? He frankly confesses his sins, although often he scarcely can recognise them, in the admirable confusion of his thou, its. If he has erred, it is unwillingly.

The poem is four thousand years old, and when we want to describe the shortness of this wretched life, we are obliged to borrow again ideas and images from the same author.

66

My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle and are spent without hope." And elsewhere: Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not." ||

The twenty-ninth and thirtieth ch ters joined together form the sixth and undoubtedly the most beautiful of Job's elegies. This holy man, broken down by the most acute pains, deserted by every one, irritated by Eliphaz and Baldaad, navigates back in fancy up the banks of time: he finds in the treasure of his life, quite full of glory and virtuous deeds, comforting souveners which he opposes to his sufferings, his forlorn state, unjust suspicions, to the hardheartedness of his false friends; and the reader is moved in beholding one who has been so virtuous, exposed to so many hardships. No one ever experienced the like, never consequently did elegy breathe out so energetic complaints. Therefore all the mysteries of pain are revealed and deeply scrutinized, and Job's heart is unravelled in a state of nakedness, with

• Job vi. 14. § Job. vii. 6.

nothing but his innocence, his weakness, his sensibleness, his strength and inexhaustible patience.

Sometimes words of anger and indignation increase the bitterness of complaints extracted by pain, but a constant sadness forms ever the principal turn of those six compositions, and this is quite enough for them to be claimed by elegy as belonging to her department. Those hymns are sung in worship places on the day of affliction. It would appear then as if celestial phalanxes, called down by Job's strains, hurriedly range themselves around the dying man, to comfort and convey him from this place of banishment to his real abode.

Heder, who judged by an able and most celebrated writer,**" has better expressed than any one else the genius of that people of Prophets, to whom inspiration was but an intimate relation with a Deity." Heder says that this book, written and not translated in Hebrew, cannot, as some critics did insinuate, belong to Moses, because the character of its poetical part affords a striking analogy with that of the poetry of the Arabians, and because the author describes patriarchal manners and habits, which it was impossible for the legislator of the Hebrews to have known in Ægypt.

It is certainly a very difficult task, if not impossible, to prove that the book of Job is a work belonging to Moses, but the reason alleged by Herder is not decisive enough, because Moses, during his stay at Jethros', was liable to get an acquaintance of Arabian or at least Nomades manners.

However be the writer whom we are indebted to for this admirable epic poem who he may, we must in truth say, that he described himself, and most pathetically breathed out the expression of his grief in his hymns:

VOL. II.

2 E

pathetic picture of the evils and sufferings which Job was groaning under, drew his tears out.* "Where shall I seek thee?" exclaims that illustrious orientalist, in some stanzas full of sublimity and rapture; "Where shall I find thy tomb, O sublime poet; thou faithful trustee of the advices of God, the thoughts of men and the ministry of angels? Thy sight extends all over heaven and earth. Alternatively pathetic and sublime, thy genius sighs with the afflicted in the kingdom of tears. And swifter than light it soars high above the wonders of creation Is thy tomb still shadowed by an evergreen cypress? or is it unknown as thy cradle? Thou hast at least left an immortal monument of thy transit on earth, and certainly thou art singing around the throne of the universe together with the morning stars."+

Heder is animated with the same enthusiasm when his mind wanders among the prophets : he does not speak, he sings. A vulgar language would be unfit for his thoughts; therefore he borrows the strains of those poets-of those preceptors and revealers of an

cient times, and to use his own saying of those harps, the trustees and interpreters of the Deity. He sees with the eyes of fancy those singers living in palm trees, woods, and enjoying that unalterable peace which was not given them by Zion, Horeb, and Carmel. He perceives them mixed up, without confusion, with the Druids, with Pythagoras, Orpheus, Socrates, Plato, and all those who, incited by their example, were the legislators and fathers of nations, and after they had attentively listened to the voice of God, spread all over the world the wisdom God had poured into their soul. It is particularly, when one has read the several inspired passages that are to be met with in Heder's essay on the genius of Hebrew poetry, such as Job's stanzas, the odes of the prophets, and the elegy of Habakuk, that one feels as Madame de Staël,

"Que l'imagination de Heder était à l'étroit dans les contrees del' occident: qu'il se plaisait á respirer les parfums del' Asie, et transmettait dans ses ouvrages le pur encens que son ame y avait recueilli."

Xenophon, in the Anabasis, gives an account of Cyrus's journey through Asia Minor. He went, with some Greeks, from Sardis to Colossæ in four stages (rad), crossing the river Mæander on his route, and pretending to advance against the Pisidians. At Colossæ, he was joined by Meno the Thessalian, after which he proceeded to Celœnce, a large, populous and thriving city near the sources of the Meander and Marsyas, which latter river flowed through the town. At this place both Cyrus and the King of Persia had palaces, and Cyrus remained there a month, probably waiting for the remainder of his Greek troops, who are said to have joined him here. Having reviewed the Greeks in his park, he went to Peltæ two stages, thence to the market-place of the Kerami (Ksgau 'ayoga) two stages, and thence three stages to the plain of Cayster (sis Kavorgou idio) an inhabited town. Here he remained for five days, during which he was visited by the Queen of Cilicia, who appears to have brought him money, with which he paid his troops. He then advanced two stages to Thymbrium, thence two more to Tyricum, where he reviewed his barbarian as well as his Greek forces. He then advanced to Icomum, the furthest town of Phrygia, and having passed through Lycaonia, which he gave up to plunder, came to Dana on the confines of Cilicia.

This progress of Cyrus is represented in the maps published by some editors of the work as a direct course, but which editors must have given the subject very little attention. D'Anville and other geopraphers have ascertained that Pelta was situated north of Celence, with mountains intervening, and that the market-place of the Kerami, which Xenophon expressly says was in Mysia, was on the river Langarius or branch of it, northwards of Pelta. According to D'Anville, the plain of the Cayster was in north Phrygia, eastwards of the Kerami, whilst Thymbrium lay to the south of it; so that

a

Cyrus first marched considerably to the north from Celence and then turned southwards without any apparent cause when his avowed object was to attack the Pisidians and Lycaonians, who were to the south of Asia Minor, and his real one to get through the passes of Cilicia before his brother could stop him. The author of a map to illustrate Cyrus's march, in Thomson's Ancient Atlas, supposes the plain of Cayster nearly east of Celano, but this removes no difficulty, for why should Cyrus go north to the Kerami, where he appears to have had no business and certainly made no stay, to return at once to the line of march from which he had departed? Another difficulty is, that the plain of the Cayster would be naturally supposed to be near the river of that name which passed by Ephesus; and accordingly we find in Stephen of Byzantium Καΐστριονῆ πεδιόν τῆς Ἐφεσίας, but Diodorus Siculus (xiv. 80.) places it near Sipylus in Ionia between Sardis and the sea, and Xenophon himself in the Cyropædia makes it the place for assembling the forces of the King of Phrygia Minor, when preparing to join the enemies of Cyaxares.

To remove the difficulty Palmerius suggested that plain of Castolus should be read instead of plain of Cayster, and Mannert conjectured Kirgou idio near Sagalassus; but the plain of Castolus is generally considered to have been near Sardis, and Sagalassus is south of Celœence. So that the difficulty would still remain, why should Cyrus march so far northwards to Kerami? Let us now attend to a circumstance which may throw some light on the subject. Xenophon mentions twice in the Anabasis that Cyrus had been made Satrap of Lydia, Phrygia, and Cappadocia, and also General of all the troops that assembled at the plain of Castolus. Hence it appears that it was a place of rendezvous for all the troops of the adjacent provinces; and if we suppose it to be situated in Galatia and the place here intended, then Cyrus had appointed his barbarian forces to assemble