hugs it to his heart, and carefully and reverentially hives it among his precious things. But do not, I pray you, as you would avoid error, gauge his skill in glovery, by his liking for this individual specimen. So with the poorer specimens of poetry of this kind, that yet obtain high favour their value consists, not in what they are, but in what they suggest.

We easily see, therefore, how the relation of the poet to his audience must in all ages have influenced the cast of poetry. In ancient times, when books were not, the poet was obliged to address audiences, assembled persons; collective applause therefore was the necessary object of his effort—individual appreciation could be of no account. There could be but little closet-reading when books were too rare and costly, and the faculty of perusal too rare also, to be generally available.

The ancient poet, therefore, found himself compelled to write what would be pleasing to all. He might not, like Milton, be content so he could "fit audience find though few." The poetry would therefore have broader features, be bolder in its outline, and not go into those minuter touches, which close and individual observation reveals to a few, but keep to that which would be cognizable of all. The poetry, therefore, would be objective, as it is termed, rather than subjective; that is, things would be portrayed as they had a tendency to strike the generality, rather than invested with attributes existing only in the poet's own mind, or resulting from his peculiar manner of thinking. Both classes of poetry exist in modern times, but the former alone, for the reasons stated, was possible in the early ages.

And this same necessity of keeping within the appreciation of the audience, would give a character which marks all ancient poetry, viz.—that its illustrations are all drawn from objects familiar to his auditors, and never borrowed

from sources beyond their experience. And it was consequently characteristic of the age and country to which the poem belonged; for the early poetry of all nations, and especially of the nations of antiquity, would be prior to much knowledge on their part beyond what their own country and manners afforded them. Their minds, accustomed therefore to pictures that reflected their own deeds and sentiments and experience, would reject any foreign and non-vernacular element with a repugnance, of which we, in modern Europe, who, from a mixed literature of various ages and countries, have come to tolerate, and even admire and revere, much that we neither feel nor understand, can scarcely form an adequate conception. Our extended knowledge, literary and geographical, favours the importation of exotic notions and allusions, which the few understand, and which the many, without understanding, yet treat with a respect which might be withheld were there but one uniform tone of culture prevailing, as in those days.

That most ancient of books, the Bible, is highly illustrative of what we have said. The prophets drew their similes and types from the familiar objects around them; and all the poetry of Scripture, however exalted the strain, is of the same character. Through the whole compass of it, I should suppose it would be hard to fix on a single allusion or simile which the meanest peasant of Palestine might not have understood. Indeed, an adequate examination of the sacred poetry alone would go far to reproduce to us the social condition of the Hebrews of the time, so much does it picture the country and people. Instances are innumerable. Shall I trouble you with two, one illustrating the geographical features of a district, the other the social condition of the people?

The first occurred to my mind while listening to the instructive lecture lately delivered in this room on the

"Mountains and Valleys of Scripture;" in the course of which, the Lecturer having to describe a region, spoke of its irregular supply of water from torrents, that were dry in summer and swelled to inundation in the wet season, fluctuating in their courses; and took occasion to quote the passage from Deborah's Song, Judges v. 21: "The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the river Kishon." The text is familiar enough, but it was on that occasion that the significance of the epithet applied to the river first struck me: "That ancient river, the river Kishon"-a very strange and unmeaning epithet if applied to any of our waters, even to Father Thames himself; of whom it would sound singular to say, "That ancient river, the Thames," as antiquity can be no distinctive character where all the rivers, for aught we know, are equally ancient. But in a country like that in which the Kishon flows, watered by torrent streams, which, dry in summer, burst forth at other seasons not always in the same channels, a torrent river, that always kept its course, would be significantly marked by the epithet "ancient." And the occurrence of the epithet becomes geographically significant of the land to which the poetry belongs-a land of shifting torrents, where permanent streams are an exceptional feature.

The other instance marks the social condition of the people; and, although more immediately illustrative of its effect on their language, is sufficiently connected with their poetry to be mentioned here. It is the very first word of the Psalms: "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly." Now, the word "blessed" in the original Hebrew is from a word which means literally and primarily "to walk," "to cause to walk," "to direct or guide;" and, in a secondary and derivative sense, 66 to make happy." directed" to mean "He made happy?"

How came

"He

The two mean

ings are different. The somewhat wide interval between them, however, I am inclined to think, may be supplied from the pastoral habits of the Hebrews, which render the image of the shepherd and his flock so familiar in their writings. National miseries are there repeatedly pictured as sheep scattered, without a shepherd; and a happy state, as the shepherd leading his charge into fair and well-watered pastures. Guidance and direction therefore became easily identified with happiness, and the want of them with the opposite condition: a notion which was moreover strengthened by the religious conviction of the necessity of Divine direction, and the inability of man to govern himself. Nor is this etymology without a real foundation in the philosophy of life. Guidance relied on frees us, so far as it extends, from perplexity-that archtroubler of ease; and Divine guidance extending over every phase of human existence, the pictures of temporal felicity, ascribed in Scripture to the godly, may be looked on as so many statements in detail of reliance on Providence. But wherefore instance these when the whole Book of Psalms, and indeed the Bible generally, overflows with proofs of the life-reflecting character of ancient poetry, everywhere vernacular, homely, and familiar?

Among many a notion prevails that poetry is a thing apart, dealing with the remote and stately, and, rather than not, eschewing the stream of every-day life. This miserable error, which the best poetry of modern times emphatically refutes, though finding plausible support in the writings of inferior poets, found no footing at all in the early poetry of any people. In the early ages, when as yet readers of poetry were not, but hearers chiefly, assembled audiences, the poets fixed their interest by themes which engaged the auditors, not for being stately and august, but for dealing in what concerned them-for being about what they were, and what was done, and thought, and felt, and

hoped, by themselves or their ancestors, and for vividly depicting their life and manners. The high or low was not balanced by them; but the actual and true, or what they believed to be such, was what they looked for at the poet's hands. And, like the ballad of our own land, the familiarity of the theme and its treatment, so far from being a drawback to his song, was its highest recommendation. And as for the desire for contemporary subjects; at least that the subject being old was no recommendation to the ancient auditors of poetry is shown by a passage in the Odyssey, where Penelope, hearing the minstrel singing the woes of the Achæans, and their sufferings at Troy and on their return, requests him to change the theme so painful to her feelings, and sing some other song about other heroes and their deeds. Telemachus reproves her sensitiveness, declaring that the bard is not to blame for his theme, as men always love best to hear that song of which the subject is most recent.

But I feel that the subject is growing under my hands, and enticing me into a larger treatment of it than comports with our limits. Leaving therefore the rich treasures of Sacred Poetry for the present, and turning to the secular, we may observe that our knowledge of Ancient Poetry is confined to that of Greece and Rome.

Ancient poetry as picturing life may be summed in Homer. And it is a remarkable fact, that the circle of Homer and the Greek Dramatists was rarely travelled out of during the whole subsequent period of Greek literature down to the destruction of Constantinople. It was but a cooking up of the old materials. So also with Roman poetry, which for the most was but an imitation and translation of the Greek: Plautus may be excepted, who took Greek subjects indeed, but gave them a Roman handling; and Horace in his Satires and Epistles, which, bating the freedom which his times admitted, furnish some of the