prescriptive right. Such elevation was accorded by Ahasuerus to Haman and the whole empire obediently bowed down. A single individual was found to resist the Jew Mordecai, who had made his kinswoman and adopted daughter a queen, but for himself was content to watch over her from a distance, as one of those who sat in the king's gate. Officials of the court sought in vain to move Mordecai, and at last had to make his stubborn resistance known to Haman. The offended favourite "thought scorn to lay hands on Mordecai himself": nothing less would satisfy his oriental spirit of vengeance than to destroy the whole people to which Mordecai belonged throughout the empire of Ahasuerus. To make the destruction more dramatic, a day is chosen by lot for simultaneous slaughter. To the king Haman uses two arguments: the diversity of the Jews in laws and customs from all other peoples, and the treasure of silver he will himself pay into the king's treasury if his petition be granted. But Haman is at the height of favour with the king, who bids him take the people and the silver too. The complex machinery of the empire is set in motion, and despatches sent in every direction. Then, we are told, "the king and Haman sat down to drink, but the city of Shushan was perplexed."

We have been following one side of the story; but the other centre of interest, Queen Esther, is involved in the conspiracy thus set on foot; and the mourning of Mordecai and the city soon makes the Queen aware of the peril hanging over her people, for whom there seems to be no help but through herself. There is something very attractive to the imagination in the situation in which Esther is thus placed. The strongest and most mature of men will feel his nature tasked to its depths by a summons to rest his life and all upon a single crisis. But such a summons comes in this case to a girl, in beauty found fairest after an empire has been searched, in the first flush of her youth, with life just opening before her as a vista of softness and luxury. Her momentary hesitation only makes her seem more human. But when the extremity of the crisis is urged upon her, with the suggestion

that she may have come to the kingdom for such a time as this, she nerves herself to her task. First she gives herself up to fasting and prayer; then, with all signs of fear suppressed, she presents herself in full splendour of beauty and royal state before the king, well knowing that she may incur thereby the penalty of death. For a moment the fate of her nation and herself trembles in the balance: then the sceptre is held out to her and the perilous moment is past. Here it is that the character of Esther begins to come out. It might well have been expected that, in the reaction from personal danger, Esther might have at once cast herself before the king, and with sobs and cries told the affliction of her people. This is probably what Mordecai meant her to do. But a girl has been raised up to save her people, and she must do it in her own girlish way; and accordingly, when she is asked her petition and request unto the half of the kingdom, the answer reveals no court intrigue, but a simple childlike invitation that the king and Haman may come to a banquet that she will prepare. Ahasuerus is delighted: he had deposed Vashti for refusing his summons to an orgie, her successor is one to risk her life on an invitation to a banquet. The enemy is disarmed from suspicion. But, more than all this, Esther knows well that she has to fight against the whole power of Haman and the king with no weapon but that of her own beauty: instinct makes her realise that she must give that beauty full opportunity to make itself felt.

The banquet takes place, with the king and Haman as the sole guests. Though she had been crowned as the fairest in the kingdom, yet for thirty days before this the charms of Esther had been entirely forgotten by the royal voluptuary amid other distractions of pleasure. Now the dominion of beauty can make its sway prevail over Ahasuerus, and at the end of the feast he again asks his Queen what is her petition and request. But Esther is strong enough to wait, and make surety yet more sure. She begs therefore for a second banquet on the morrow with the same two guests, and by that time she will have a boon to ask. Haman leaves the palace at the height of blind security. In the gate his

spirits feel a rebuff at the sight of the unbending Mordecai: a first speck of shadow upon his horizon of fortune. He hurries home, and in family council details his accumulated honours and his one drop of bitterness. They bid him build a gallows fifty cubits high, and ask Mordecai's life at once without waiting for the slower fate of his nation.

Two days and the night that separates them make up the period of crisis for this story of Esther. The turning-point of the whole is found in the words: "On that night could not the king sleep." They read to the restless king the chronicles of his kingdom; and the particular passage details how a conspiracy against his life was revealed by one Mordecai, a Jew. Ahasuerus enquires what honour has been done to this Mordecai in recompense; and hearing that nothing has been done, the king will take up the matter at once. Haman is entering in the early morning to beg the life of the Jew, who refuses to bow down before him, when the king shouts to him from his bed the question, "What shall be done unto the man whom the king delighteth to honour?" It is impossible for Haman to understand this otherwise than as a salutation to himself; and in reply advises a royal progress with a chief prince to proclaim before the fortunate man the king's purpose to honour him. He is bidden to carry out his advice without omission of a single article upon Mordecai. So bitterly has nemesis swung round upon him that Haman is forced with his own lips to proclaim the honours of his hated foe. And when, after the ordeal is over, he rushes home to his family council for comfort, here, where he feels most secure, he is forced to see the shadow of doom deepening over him; for his wife and councillors make

answer:

If Mordecai, before whom thou hast begun to fall, be of the seed of the Jews, thou shalt not prevail against him, but shalt surely fall before him.

But before he has time to ponder these words the royal escort summons him to Esther's banquet.

The second banquet intensifies the effect of the first, and Ahasuerus is completely under the spell of Esther's beauty when, for the third time, he asks her to name her petition and request. The youthful queen has been all this time holding a crisis of history in her delicate fingers. Now she lets the thunderbolt fall. Her petition is her own life, and the life of her people, sold, to the king's damage, by "this wicked Haman." The stricken favourite grovels before the king's burst of fury, and is seeking the injured Jewess as an intercessor, when he is hurried away to the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai. The crisis is past, and Mordecai is elevated to the dignity from which his foe had fallen. But there is still the decree against the Jews throughout the empire, enrolled among the laws of the Medes and Persians that cannot be altered, and the date of their doom is steadily advancing. Mordecai's plan is to send another decree after the first, to the effect that the Jews on the day appointed shall have full power to defend themselves. So when the day of fate arrives, this is the situation throughout the hundred and twenty-seven provinces of the empire: on one side are the enemies of the Jews armed with the king's irreversible decree to massacre them; on the other side are the Jews armed with the king's irreversible decree to defend themselves; and the satraps and princes of the provinces will know which side to take in the fray now that a Jew is minister of the empire. It becomes a day of slaughter for the enemies of the Jews throughout the provinces and the royal city; and our last sight of Esther reveals her as a beautiful incarnation of vengeance, petitioning for another day of slaughter. But this is the passing excitement of the crisis, the passionate justice of one trained in the law of retaliation. When the ordinary current of events is resumed, a feast is instituted throughout the villages and towns of the Jews, in which they are to send portions one to another and gifts to the poor, as they commemorate their nation saved from destruction by the wisdom of Mordecai and the beauty of Esther.

So far the literature we have treated has been Epic Poetry in the strictest sense. There are, however, two other types to be noted. The Idyl is not a distinct literary form,

Modifications of

but a modification of other forms; and the Bible Epic contains an Epic Idyl as well as a Lyric Idyl.'

Again, the great department of Prophecy has one branch which is specially connected with Epic Poetry.

If the chief distinction of the Idyl be its subject matter of love and domestic life, then in all literature there is no more typical Idyl than the Book of Ruth. Following the Book

Book of Ruth

of Fudges, which has been filled with bloodshed Epic Idyl: The and violence and the heroism of the sterner virtues, it comes upon us like a benediction of peace. It contains no trace of war or high politics; the disasters of its story are the troubles of family life exile, bereavement, poverty; while its grand incidents are no more than the yearly festivities of country life, and the formal transfers of property that must go on although kingdoms rise and fall.

The thread running through the whole, and binding the parts together, is found in a magnetic personality such as may exist in the quietest life, leaving no achievements behind it, yet in its time swaying all who approach it. Elimelech the husband, and his two sons, are no more than names to us; it is Naomi who is remembered in Bethlehem when the family have been long in exile; and when she returns, the whole of the rural city is moved at the thought of the 'Pleasant One' the famous beauty of former years come back again. Naomi herself feels the bitter irony of a name that speaks of attractiveness: "Call me not Naomi, call me Mara, for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.” Three waves of trouble had passed over her since she had wedded the husband of her youth. First came famine: Elimelech's land would yield no living, and husband, wife, and two youthful sons had to migrate into the land of Moab, where exile meant not only change of climate and people, but isolation in religion, with wor

1 See above, note on page 208.