first shrunk from the dangerous honour of "being a king's son-in-law."*

That Saul had raised the social state of woman is proved by "the daughters of Israel" being specially called on to " weep the death of him who had clothed them with scarlet and other delights, and enriched their apparel with ornaments of gold.' This was the costume of the ladies of a sumptuous court, and not of the women of coarse servitude, the drawers of water, and the tenders of cattle, the thrifty mothers who built up the house of Israel in the pastoral ages.

The monarchy of the Hebrews was as yet young; but their impressionable women underwent an early modification, coincident with the times. The servant, indeed, was still seeking to adapt her versatile powers to the intentions of her master; but the decorated slave of the harem, in striving to win her way to influence, exerted other properties of mind, than those which made the efficacy of her immediate predecessors. Hopeless of rights, she applied herself to secure privileges; and the poetical idiosyncrasy which had produced the Miriams and the Deborahs, so serviceable under the hierarchy, yielded at once to the more material pressure of a new necessity. Women were no longer priestesses, prophetesses, poetesses; but, as the wives and concubines of royal lovers, they became queens and stateswomen, the mothers of rival sons, abettors of the policy, or neutralizers of the views of their enamoured despots, as their own personal or maternal ambitions directed.

The introduction of Abigail, the wife of Nabal, on the scene of the stirring drama of David's life, presents a new character of woman, as different from the nomadic females of the pastoral ages of the Hebrews, as these were from the inspired prophetesses of the hierarchy.

David was yet wandering in the wilderness of Paran, with his predatory band of young men, when the necessities of his precarious life induced him to apply for relief to one "who lived in prosperity," to Nabal, a wealthy proprietor of Carmel. Nabal returned an answer full of

* 1 Samuel, chap. xviii.

insolence to a solicitation of more than Oriental courtesy. "Who is David ?" he asks: "Who is the son of Jesse! There be many servants now-a-days that break away every man from his master. And shall I take my bread, and meat, and water, prepared for my own shearers, and give it to men whom I know not, should they come!" To this answer David replied, by arming four hundred of his men; "girding on his sword, and marching upon Nabal;" and "evil was denounced against Nabal, and on all his household!" But there was a power greater than any which Nabal could summon to his aid-a power which returned the sword of David to its scabbard, and vanquished the all but indomitable spirit of the conqueror of Goliah. Near the covert of the hill, against which the fierce invader of private property was marauding, at the head of his wellarmed and picked men, and at the moment when he was giving orders for a merciless pillage, which before “the morning light" was to desolate the dwellings and reduce the household of the "man of property" to ruin, he was suddenly stopped on his march by a woman, mounted on an ass, followed by a sumpter troop, laden with all that was necessary and all that was luxurious, to victual the little camp of the Desert of Paran. It was Abigail, the wife of the churlish and "evil-tongued Nabal;" a

woman of good understanding and beautiful countenance"-who, unknown to her hot-headed husband, had come forth, in her womanly consideration and intuitive discretion, to disarm the wrath of him whose vengeance was never slow, and whose vow of extermination had been witnessed by the heaven he invoked at the moment of her approach.

As soon as Abigail perceived the exterminator of the Amalekites, the conqueror of the Philistines, the feared of Israel, she alighted and "fell before him, and bowed her. self to the ground."

"And fell at his feet, and said, Upon me, my lord, upon me let this iniquity fall; and let thine handmaid, I pray thee, speak in thine audience, and hear the words of thine handmaid.

"Let not my lord regard this man of Belial, even Nabal; for, as his name is, so is he. Nabal is his name, and folly is with him. But I, thine handmaid, saw not the young men of my lord, whom thou didst send.

"Now, therefore, my lord, as the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, seeing the Lord hath withholden thee from coming to shed blood, and from avenging thyself with thine own hand, now let thine enemies and they that seek evil unto my lord be as Nabal.

"And now this blessing which thine handmaid has brought unto my lord, let it even be given unto the young men that follow my lord.

"I pray

thee forgive the trespass of thine handmaid, for the Lord will certainly make my lord a sure house, because my lord fighteth the battles of the Lord, and evil hath not been found in thee all thy days.

"Yet a man is risen to pursue thee, and to seek thy soul; but the soul of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of life with the Lord thy God; and the souls of thine enemies, them shall he sling out, as out of the middle of a sling.

"And it shall come to pass, when the Lord shall have done to my lord according to all the good that he hath spoke concerning thee, and shall have appointed thee ruler over Israel, that this shall be no grief unto thee, nor offence of heart unto my lord, either that thou hast shed blood causeless, or that my lord hath avenged himself; but when the Lord shall have dealt well with my lord, then remember thine handmaid."*

If the power of eloquence is to be estimated by its application, and by its effect on the auditory to which it is addressed, the speech of Abigail was not surpassed by any on record. It is not the eloquence of words, it is the oratory of thought applied to the passions, to the prejudices, and the previous associations of its object. The manner of her supplication to be heard, the playful humour of her irony launched against the character of her brutal husband, her artful predictions of David's future elevation to the throne of Israel, her allusion to the envy of Saul, to the unavailing malice of David's enemies, and her plausible claim to his future respect and gratitude for having thus saved him from the crime of shedding blood causelessly, are all of the highest order of rhetoric, traits of the finesse and subtlety of female intellectuality.

* 1 Samuel, chap. xxv., verse from 24 to 31.

David, struck, enamoured, diverted from all his purposes of vengeance, heard her out; and then burst forth into that spirited benediction, which love and poetry have since faintly imitated in effusions that have become immortal.* "And David said to Abigail, Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, which sent thee this day to me. And blessed be thy advice, and blessed be thou which hast kept me this day from coming to shed blood, and from avenging myself with mine own hand," &c.t

When Abigail returned to her home, she found her husband presiding over a feast, which, for its grandeur and luxury, was "like the feast of a king,”—the last he ever enjoyed. "But he was too merry of heart (for he was very drunk') for Abigail to commune with him; therefore she told him nothing less or more, till the morning light."

It was about ten days after this most dramatic and important interview, that "Nabal was smote by the hand of the Lord, and died;" and that "David immediately sent and communed with and took her to him to wife"the insidious and influential successor of the high-minded Michal. David, however, shortly after associated Abigail with a sort of left-handed wife, of little renown, but of devoted fidelity (Ahinoam of Jezreel) who seems to have followed her husband or master through all the vicissitudes of the most precarious stages of his life.

But Michal, the wife of his youth, the saviour of his life, the contemner of his conduct, though now the wife of another (of Phaltiel), returned to his thoughts, when his hope of mounting the throne of her father brightened on his view; and when news of the treason of Abner, and his revolt, from Ishbosheth, was brought him, he sought to authorize his ambitious intentions by claiming back the daughter of the royal Saul. Ere he consented to conclude his league with Abner (of which the kingdom of Israel was to be the price), he demanded of the archtraitor the restoration of Michal; for David said, "Well, I will make a league with thee; but one thing I require!

Benedetto sia 'l giorno, e'l mese, e 'l anno," &c.-Petrarcha, Son. xlvii. † 1 Samuel, chap. xxv., verse 32, 33.

—that you shall not see my face till you first bring me Michal, Saul's daughter."

Messengers were forthwith sent to the feeble and foredoomed Ishbosheth, to deliver up his sister; and the reiterated demand of one, now too powerful to be refused, was soon obeyed. "Ishbosheth sent and took Michal from her husband, Phaltiel,” “And her husband went with her along weeping behind her to Bahurim." But he wept in vain and the indignant and royal Michal, “who despised David in her heart," was forced from her obscure happiness, to give new lustre to the throne, through the prestige which still irradiated the house of Saul, by being again added to the number of the new king's wives: for David, when he returned from Hebron, the capital of Judah, to Jerusalem, was accompanied by "many wives" and a numerous progeny.

"When David perceived that the Lord had established him king over Israel, and that he had exalted his kingdom for his people Israel's sake," then "David took him more concubines and wives out of Jerusalem, after he was come from Hebron, and there were yet sons and daughters born to David."

To these victims of an institution founded by the selfish tyranny and the licentious passions of man, (and revived by him who had been "taken from a sheepcot, and from following the sheep," to rule over Israel), others were added; and one above all others, who became a distinguished incident in the historical records of her country, as queen, stateswoman, and foundress of the glory of the most glorified of all Hebrew princes: this was the beau tiful Bathsheba, the wife of the unfortunate Uriah.

The private crimes, the public disasters, the domestic miseries, which filled up the reign and shadowed the life of David,-which his conquests could not efface, nor his boundless power evade, were the reaction of polygamy ; a penalty on the injustice exercised on one half of the species by the other, through the superiority of physical force. It was thus that the caprice of an individual became the curse of a nation. The heart of David was hardened by sensual indulgence, until all human sympathy was extinguished; and his sense of moral right