part, be ascertained from internal testimony; but the dates of one or two of them are involved in considerable obscurity.* Without entering into special arguments on this subject, I shall venture to class them in the following successive groups :-Jonah, Amos, Hosea, Micah, and Isaiah, fill up an historical space from the reigns of Uzziah in Judah, and of Jeroboam the Second in Israel, down to the earlier part of Hezekiah's reign in the former kingdom. Next came Nahum, Joel, and Habakkuk, the first of whom appears to have prophesied soon after the captivity of the ten tribes, probably in the latter years of Hezekiah. Joel may be assigned to the reign of Manasseh, when the clouds of danger were thickening over Jerusalem; and as Habakkuk speaks of the Chaldeans, he may be supposed to have prophesied after the capture of Nineveh, when the storm of Judah's destruction was impending still nearer.

Obadiah, Zephaniah, and Jeremiah, were almost contemporary witnesses of the destruction of Jerusalem---the last of them composed his elegies amidst its ruins.

Ezekiel spoke his oracles in exile upon the shores of the Chaboras, and Daniel was educated at the Chaldean court.

Haggai, Zachariah, and Malachi, belong to the last period of Hebrew literature, after the return of the Jews from their Babylonish captivity.

The book of Jonah is entirely prosaic recital, except a few verses of prayer in the second chapter.

The simple Amos interests the heart by his fellow-feeling for the poor and oppressed, and his hatred of tyrannical opulence ; whilst he pleases the fancy by the rural wildness of his imagery, and impresses the memory by a circumstantial distinctness in his graphic touches. When he describes the danger of Israel, for instance, by saying that it shall be "as if a man did flee from a lion and met a bear, or went into a house and leant his hand upon the wall and a serpent did sting him," the mind needs but one perusal of such a passage to feel and retain it. He was a shepherd in Judah, who, uneducated in any school of prophecy, boldly ventured into Israel, and rebuked the corruptions of her state under the haughty Jeroboam the Second. His truths 'naturally offended the high-priest of Bethel, Amaziah, who told the King that the land could not bear Amos's words, and the prophet was accordingly dismissed back to his native country.

The patriotic Hosea is remarkable for confining his predic

* Joel for instance, whom Drusius places in the reign of Manasseh, is put by De Wette at the head of the list, even before Jonah; because the prophet mentions neither Syrians nor Assyrians, but only Philistines, Egyptians, and Edomites, as the enemies of Judah. Dr. Lowth suspects Hosea to precede them all in point of anti quity. + Nahum, chap. ii. v. 2.

tions to the destiny of the Hebrews, without interfering with the politics of other nations. His style is concise, but abrupt; and he is obscure in the perspective arrangement of the blessings and calamities which he pourtrays. It is usual for Hebrew prophecy to open with threats, to proceed to promises, and to conclude with anticipations of triumph to the people of God. In this climax Micah is peculiarly grand and graceful. The commencement and close of his book are almost dramatically impressive. He calls upon the inhabitants of the earth---he appeals to God himself to bear witness against them. He wraps himself up in denunciations upon Israel--he lightens the gloom by a picture of the overthrow of her enemies, and he dispels it by an affecting prayer to Omnipotence---" Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgressions of the remnant of his heritage? He retaineth not his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy. **** He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us---he will subdue our iniquities, and cast our sins into the depths of the sea."

The highest rank in Hebrew poetry is, by universal consent, assigned to Isaiah. He received the gift of divination in the last year of Uzziah, King of Judaht; and surviving the reigns of Jotham and Ahaz, lived to be the friend and counsellor of Hezekiah. On that reviving age of Hebrew patriotism he seems to have impressed the stamp of his own character; and, uncertain as his personal history is, it may be confidently assumed that the Jews were indebted for no small share of the zeal which they displayed in their struggle against Sennacherib to the inspiring influence of his genius. I speak of his poetry on the assumption that the book is entirely his which bears his name‡; and, collectively viewed, it forms the greatest tablet both of awfully solemn, and of joyfully beautiful, conceptions, ever exhibited in poetic prediction. In parts of the scene we behold the calamities impending over Judah; but a far larger portion is occupied by the desolation of her proud enemies, and the downfall of their thrones and cities. The Assyrian King is laid low. "Hell itself is moved from beneath to meet him--it stirreth up the dead at his coming," and the spectred monarchs of all the nations rise from their shadowy thrones to salute and reproach him. "Art thou also become weak as we? Thy pomp is brought down to the grave. How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the Morning!" In brilliant distance beyond the gloom, Immanuel's kingdom is presented to our conceptions, where the sun shall no more go down, neither shall the moon withdraw itself, and where we ima

Isaiah, ch. vi. v. 1.

Eichorn, Gesenius, and others, strongly contend that the predictions of the fall of Babylon, and of the return from captivity, were composed by some other prophet.— Eichorn, however, allows that those passages are apparently strict imitations and echoes of his style.

gine the halleluiah of rapture to arise. "Sing, O ye Heavens, for the Lord hath done it! Shout, ye lower parts of the Earth! Break forth into singing, ye mountains! O forests, every tree therein, for the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and glorified himself in Israel."

Isaiah is far from surpassing all the Hebrew poets in individual passages; but in his fulness, force, majesty, and propriety, he comprehends more excellencies of the poetical character than any one of them. Joel may be deemed to surpass him in concinnity; and both Joel and Habakkuk are, at moments, more sublime. But their compositions are much shorter than his, and give us not the same conception of copious and unwearied inspiration. Isaiah's genius goes further on an even wing, and burns longer with an unwavering fire. When he has merely to narrate, his language has the utmost plainness, and his expositions are remarkably clear, considering the nature of oracular poetry. He unites the same simplicity with his rich and high visionary scenes, which are neither meagre like Jeremiah's, nor ambitiously overwrought and complex like Ezekiel's. A deliberate air, a divine self-possession, turns the very scorn and wrath of his spirit into movements of grace and beauty. And scornful he is even to bitterness, whether he reprobates idolatry, or mocks the wretched policy of his countrymen, in trusting to Egyptian alliance rather than to their God and their patriotism. Nor does any prophet scatter the predictions of vengeance that shall overtake the heathen over so large a compass. But his intense zeal never ruffles his majestic manner. Even when rapt into the beatitude of the golden age, he retains a tranquil command of his own inspiration; and with a painter's eye in prophecy, minutely tracing circumstance after circumstance, sets futurity before us like a present scene--"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed, their young ones shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the

adder's den."

The book of Nahum contains a spirited prediction of the siege of Nineveh, and he is ranked among the most classically poetical of the Minor Prophets. Joel's few but precious relics are also highly finished and flowing, and abound in sweet and elevated touches. It is he who has so briefly and beauti

Josephus speaks of Nahum belonging to the reign of Jotham. It may be concluded, however, from chap. ii. verse 2d, of his book, that he had witnessed the subversion of Israel by Shalmaneser, so that he probably lived till the close of Hezekiah's reign, rather less than 700 years before Christ.

fully described the plague of locusts," Before them the land is as the garden of Eden, and behind them is a desolate wilderness." The composer of the Revelations has borrowed many images from Joel, as well as from Ezekiel; and when he speaks of the locusts, the wine-press of destruction, the sickle applied to the full ear of the harvest, and of the darkening of the sun and stars, evidently reminds us of Joel *.-Habakkuk's tone of prophecy accords with the probability of his having lived very near the crisis of Jewish calamities +. His warning is like the sound of an alarm-bell at dead of night: yet he is not without a magnanimous and pious confidence; and his third chapter has been justly distinguished by Dr. Lowth, as a model of lyrical sublimity.

Far different was the effect of his country's sufferings on the tender mind of Jeremiah. His genius seems to bend, and his voice to falter, under the burden of prophecy; and though sometimes pleasingly affecting, he generally prolongs the accents of grief to monotony, and seldom avoids tautology, or reaches compression, except when he abridges the predictions of other prophets +. Jeremiah appeared early in life as a prophet, and continued to prophesy for fifty years. A strenuous opposer in Jewish politics of his countrymen's alliance with the Egyptians, he constantly foreboded their destruction from the Chaldæan arms, for which he was rewarded with persecution, imprisonment, and chains. When Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem, he respected the prophets' sacred character, and, whilst he dictated their place of exile to others, allowed Jeremiah to choose where he should reside. Honours and emoluments would have even awaited him at Babylon; but even the ashes of Jerusalem were dearer to him than the splendours of a victor's court, and he preferred remaining among the ruins of his country. Fresh oppressions, however, robbed him at length even of that melancholy consolation; and he was forced to fly into Egypt, where, it is probable, he ended his days.

From this period commenced the decline of the Hebrew language, and its mixture with Chaldaic. It has no other subsequent great poet but Ezekiel, and even his grandeur is not of the simplest and purest character. We are told indeed by Dr. Lowth, that "Ezekiel is not excelled by Isaiah himself in sublimity that he employs frequent repetitions only from the vehemence of his passion and indignation." But with the utmost respect for Dr. Lowth's general authority, I subscribe to

* Joel is also frequently imitated both by Ezekiel and Zacharias.

+ Probably in the reign of Jehoiakim, between the taking of Nineveh and the fall of Jerusalem as he prophesies of the Chaldeans and not the Assyrians.

His oracle against the Moabites is evidently taken from Isaiah 15th and 16th; the latter part of the chapter is borrowed from Numbers, chap. xxi. v. 27.

the very opposite opinion of Michaelis, that "Ezekiel displays more luxuriance in amplifying and decorating his subject, than is consistent with true poetical fervour." It must be owned, however, that his fancy is daring and ingenious. Compare the vision of Isaiah's inauguration with that of Ezekiel in his 10th chapter; and how luminously and distinctly shall we be struck with the former picture, which the mind embraces at a single glance. In Ezekiel, on the contrary, we are lost in objects that stun and dazzle the imagination. He is still, however, a powerful though elaborate poet, and his fancy and ingenuity are inexhaustible.

Daniel, educated under a foreign clime, and even writing partly in Chaldaic, departs still farther from the old simplicity of Hebrew taste, in his perpetual visionary and angelic machinery.

Haggai was the first of the prophets who comforted the Jews after their return from captivity, and Malachi was the last. In both of them the spirit of poetry manifestly declines, as the reign of divination draws towards its conclusion-when the words were destined to be fulfilled to Judah, That the sun should go down upon her prophets, and that there shall be night unto her so that she should have no visions.

MEMOIRS FROM 1754 TO 1758.

BY JAMES EARL WALDEGRAVE, K. G.

LORD WALDEGRAVE is better known to the reading part of the public by the amiable picture which Horace Walpole has given of him in his letters, than as one of his Majesty's Privy Council in the reign of George II. and Governor to the Prince of Wales, afterwards George III. His public career, though short, was honourable to himself in every respect; and was indeed long enough to afford him a lesson, which he had the wisdom to take with him into private life, and to act upon ever afterwards, which was, not " to envy any man either the power of a minister, or the favour of princes."

"The constant anxiety and frequent mortifications," says he, at the close of his Memoirs, "which accompany ministerial employments, are tolerably well understood; but the world is totally unacquainted with the situation of those whom fortune has selected to be the constant attendants and companions of royalty, who partake of its domestic amusements and social happiness.

"But I must not lift up the veil; and shall only add, that no man can have a clear conception how great personages pass their leisure hours, who has not been a prince's governor, or a king's favourite."

Such is the view of the pleasures of a palace, which is given by a man of singular sweetness of temper, and rectitude of principle, not wanting either in a spirit of gratitude, which made him