'seer' born out of due time, understood this wonderful book as no modern before him had done. The student will get more help of a certain kind from the illustrations thus reproduced in the second volume of Gilchrist's Life of William Blake, compared with the sympathetic descriptions by Blake's biographer (vol. i. pp. 330-333), than from any of the commentaries old or new.
In every respect the poem of Job stands in a class by itself. More than any other book in the Hebrew canon it needs bringing near to the modern reader, untrained as he is in Oriental and especially in Semitic modes of thought and imagination. Such a reader's first question will probably relate to the poetic form of the book. Is it, for instance, a drama? Theodore of Mopsuestia (died 428) answered in the affirmative, though he was censured for this by the Council of Constantinople. The author of Job, he says, wronged the grand and illustrious story by imitating the manner of the pagan tragedians. 'Inde et illas plasmationes fecit, in quibus certamen ad Deum fecit diabolus, et voces sicut voluit circumposuit, alias quidem justo, alias vero amicis.'[1]
Bishop Lowth devotes two lectures of his Sacred Poetry to the same question. He replies in the negative, after comparing Job with the two Œdipi of Sophocles (dramas with kindred subjects), on the ground that action is of the essence of a drama and the Book of Job contains not even the simplest action. Afterwards indeed he admits that Job has at least one point in common with a regular drama, viz. the vivid presentation of several distinct characters in a tragic situation. The view that it is an epic, held in recent times by Dr. Mason Good and M. Godet, found favour with one no less than John Milton, who speaks, as he who knows, of 'that epic form, whereof the two poems of Homer and those other two of Virgil and Tasso are a diffuse, and the Book of Job a brief model.'[2] Something is to be said for this opinion if Paradise Regained be a true epic. Dialogue with the addition of a certain amount of narrative is, roughly speak-*
