rite and ceremony, might at any time advance in hurtful action. Vampires and were-wolves and ghosts, and other such fabulous and fearful creatures as were common to the Middle Ages, were popularly believed in; and in some cases, at least, the very forms of their gods, which were sculptured for palace or temple, were there, not to heighten adoration, but to prevent the entrance of the obnoxious demons.1 And hence Fire and Sun were important objects, and were naturally regarded as divine, because they scared away ghosts and conquered night, the realm of evil spirits, and revealed what was bright and beneficent to man. And with these superstitious fears, which would leave them more or less in perpetual bondage-not in the awe of natural adoration, but in the fear which hath torment, the ideas also of their kings and rulers, with their natural associations of the horrors of war and slavery, would be calculated in representation rather to repress than to evoke the emotion of the sublime in the precincts of palace and temple.

We can conceive how as strangers the Assyrians might feel in the palace of their king by the experience of the uncultured in similar circumstances to-day. In telling how she felt on entering Hamilton Palace with its old historic paintings and faces gazing from the walls, a Highland woman remarked to me, “Guid sake! I was perfectly frichtet! I wadna stay yonner for the worl." With eyes that could see the beauty of each individual picture and gaze into the loveliness of field and flowers with pleasure, she yet felt, when in the palace where others would have looked on the pictures in stillness and with glory in their souls, only as in a ghostly realm where awful shapes and visions

1 Lenormant's La Magie chez les Chaldeens, p. 50.

SUBLIMITY INFERRED.

25

were appearing; and instead of being raised in quiet rapture, she was simply frightened and repelled. What she saw was not grand nor sublime, but terrible. It was ghosts she was thinking of, not humanity with its toil of centuries, its hopes, and fears, and faith within the infinite; and she was in fear-"perfectly frichtet. And it would be the same, we suspect, with the mass of the Babylonians and Assyrians when entering as strangers their palaces and temples, not that of sublimity, but terror rather would be their reigning emotion, we should say.

But, while insisting that the remnants of palace and temple do not necessarily give the proof of it, and that it is not to be assumed as a matter of course that they actually had it, we yet think that as their ideas of God and of a life to come were in some respects similar to our own, and as they too, as we have said, had a history and lived in what to them was really what in relation to ourselves we illusively call it to-day, the world's old age, it is an altogether likely thing that at least the thoughtful and more emotional and devout of the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Assyrians, and in proportion as they were free from the vulgar superstitions of ghosts, etc., had their share in the experience of the emotion of sublimity. That they had it to the same extent and in the same degree of intensity as the emotionally devout and poetically inclined and well-informed among ourselves we do not for a moment believe; but that they were incapable of the emotion, all of them, and had never known it, we can about as little believe. It may be thought perhaps that their prayers and their hymns, which in isolated passages resemble very much some of our Old Testament Psalms, might lead us to be a

little more positive in our averments on the subject. But when we take such passages in their connection, and with the general superstition and degrading beliefs and practices of the times, we do not get so much help in the settlement of our question from those prayers and hymns as we might at first sight imagine. And, so far as we know, the fact remains that we have no clear and indisputable proof of the emotion of the sublime among the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians; and to get any direct and undoubted expression of it we must pass to Jewish literature.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF TASTE IN RELATION ESPECIALLY TO THE BEAUTIFUL IN NATURE: THE HEBREWS.

WHEN we pass from the Egyptians and the Assyrians to the Jews in Old Testament times, we find that, like all their predecessors, they had a pleasure in the flowers and fragrance of the fields and gardens, in the changing of the year from winter to summer with the seasons' changing voices, in the light of day and in the starry night, in the clouds of the sky, in flocks and herds, and in other natural and home-like scenes. The Song of Solomon in particular is instinct with joy in the beauty and fragrance of vineyard and flower (ch. ii. 1-2; iv. 11-13). And in the same rich pastoral, doves and flocks of goats at rest on the hills, and sheep from the washing are favourite objects of comparison; and evidence is not awanting in it of delight in the sight of the hills with the prospect which might be obtained from them.

"Thy hair is as a flock of goats,

That lie along the side of Mount Gilead." (iv. 1.)

"Come with me from Lebanon, my bride,

With me from Lebanon:

Look from the top of Amana,

From the top of Senir and Hermon,

From the lions' dens,

From the mountains of the leopard." (iv. 8.)

And in the Psalms, and the Prophets, and the Apocrypha we have evidence of the same joy in the quieter and more domestic aspects of nature. "He was as the morning star in the midst of a cloud," says the author of Ecclesiasticus of Simon the high priest, "and as the moon at the full as the sun shining upon the temple of the Most High, and as the rainbow giving light in the bright clouds: and as theflower of roses in the spring of the year, as lilies by the rivers of waters, and as the branches of the frankincense tree in the time of summer: as fire and incense in the censer, and as a vessel of beaten gold set with all manner of precious stones: and as a fair olive tree budding forth fruit, and as a cypress tree which groweth up to the clouds." (1. 6-10.)

But when we turn to the Book of Job we find ourselves in new surroundings-among the wilder scenery of eastern lands; and we are called upon to observe not only the clouds and the sky and the lightning, but also the eagle in its rocky eyrie and the raven and the hawk, jackals and ostriches, and the hind and the wild goat and wild ass and wild ox, and, in the lower flats and among the reeds by the river, the hippopotamus and the crocodile, and the lion also waiting for his prey. We are introduced to all the wildness and grandeur of eastern mountain scenery; and with the play of lightning and the rumbling of thunder around us, we are asked to contemplate the ways of nature and of natural life as evidences of the ways and mysteries of God. Of the ways and mysteries of God; for while in the Book of Job there is an evident familiarity with natural life in its wilder aspects, and with the appearances of the sky and clouds in storm and thunder, it has to be observed