It remains that I should say something concerning the style of this singular work, which, as the reader is now aware, is a continuous display of rhetorical artifices, and is full, from beginning to end, of alliteration, assonance, rhyme, paronomasia, and what Europeans are apt to con­sider merely verbal conceits. These caprices, so alien from our taste, have since pervaded not only the Arabic litera­ture, but the literatures which, like the Persian, the Hin­dustani, and the Turkish, have accepted the rhetoric of the Arab scholars, and have followed their canons. We find the authors, not of one age and nation, but of all the Moslem world, for many centuries, delighting in what seem to us the poorest artifices of composition, cursed by a vitiated and pestilent taste, and degrading their genius by mingling the loftiest themes with displays of verbal cleverness, in no way above the level of the pun and the conundrum. If the Persians borrowed their conceits from the Arabs, they bettered the instruction, and the reaction of their literary influence tended to con­firm the taste of their masters. But it would be a narrow view of the subject to regard such compositions as the Assemblies as the result of literary fashion or scho­lastic pedantry. The Arabic student cannot but perceive that the language lends itself with singular readiness to responsiveness and parallelism of sound, and that assonance and paronomasia offer themselves almost unbidden. The triliterity of the root, and the ramifica­tion from it of a vast number of forms, each of which has an accordance of sound with the same form of other roots, give a natural and inevitable similitude to Arabic words, which forces itself on the attention of the orator and his audience. Then the development of almost every abstract idea from a root which signifies a strictly material action; the primitive meaning being ever dimly visible to the mind’s eye of the people behind the deriva­tive meaning, and not, as in our words of Latin and Greek provenance, wholly lost, tended to suggest com­parisons between the multitudinous ideas associated with a single root, which gave an involuntary impulse towards paronomasia. We do, indeed, find a tendency towards these rhetorical figures in the very earliest productions of the Semitic race. The alliterations, the assonances, the antitheses of sound, the evident paronomasia, and, above all, the strange etymologies of the Bible, bear wit­ness that, even in the most remote times, the most simple and noble of composers were not without a kind of verbal consciousness; repressed, indeed, in them by the pure and classic spirit of their genius, but still the germ from which in later times were developed the puerilities of the Rabbins and the artificial rhetoric of the Arabic authors.

The instinct to gratify the ear—or something deeper than the ear—by accordance of words, and to create a si­militude between the sound and the sense, is common to every race, and, if regarded philosophically, will not be found worthy of contempt or reprobation. It has been especially strong in our Teutonic branch of the human family, which not only has had an alliterative and asso­nant poetry in former ages, but still fondly clinges to phrases and proverbs which recal the ancient rhythm. No one would wish such expressions as “to have and to hold,” “bed and board,” “kith and kin,” “last not least,” to be banished by a pseudo-classic taste from the use of the nation. In Hebrew such combinations appear with frequency, and the alliterative accordance which they exemplify appears to have almost stood in the place of metre as a poetical instrument. From these to paro­nomasia, and play on words, there is but a step. Of this figure, a few examples may be given. At Psalm xl. 3, and lii. 6, according to the numbering of our version, there is a play on words between “see” and “fear,” which occurs also elsewhere. Compare also Isaiah v. 7, lvii. 6, and lxi. 3; also on the same word as this last Job xxx. 19, and xlii. 6; also Psalm xviii. 7, Ecclesiastes, vii. 6. To these may be added the chant of Samson at Judges xv. 16, and perhaps the account of the sons of Jair at x. 4.

But it is in connection with proper names that this ten­dency is most manifest. We may either see in the etymo­logies of the Pentateuch the ingenious labours of Hebrew priests and scholars, anxious to give an applicability to names the origin of which was lost, just as Ya‘rob is made by the Arabs to have been the first man who spoke Arabic, and Muzayḳîyâh is said to have been so called because he tore up his clothes every evening; or we may suppose that the etymologies were framed at a very early period, almost unconsciously, by the people themselves, who, being accustomed to name their children, their habitations, and remarkable places by apposite terms, and being hardly able to conceive an appellation without a meaning, instinctively sought the signification of the patriarchal names, and sometimes moulded the legend in accordance with the supposed etymology. It is reasonable to conclude that both these sources have contributed to the large stock of derivations which we find in the Pen­tateuch. Some of them seem too artificial to have arisen spontaneously among the people: they resemble rather the laboured comparisons of scholars than the similarities which would strike the popular ear. But the greater part are probably derived from remote and unlettered tradition. It is unreasonable to doubt the antiquity of the speech of Lamech, at Genesis v. 29, which contains a play upon the name of Noah; or of Noah’s curse and blessing, at ix. 25, in which the name of Japhet is similarly treated. Furthermore, the name in some cases has evidently in­fluenced the narrative, as where Abraham and Sarah suc­cessively laugh in connection with the birth of Isaac, (Genesis xvii. 17, and xviii. 12; compare also xxi. 6.); as also in the unholy ancestry attributed by Israel to its enemies, Moab and Ammon. We may also fairly allow a popular origin to the etymology of the word Manna, suggested at Exodus xvi. 15. But whether originating with the people or the learned, we find at a very early period in Hebrew history a tendency, which cannot be mistaken, to reflect upon names and significations, to play and refine upon them. In the later writers, this spirit is still more manifest. A proper name frequently suggests paronomasia, and the instinc­tive tendency towards this figure throws a light on the formation of the etymologies of which I have spoken. Compare Isaiah xxi. 2, with regard to the name of Elam; Jer. vi. 1, with regard to Tekoah; Ezekiel xxv. 16, to Cherithim; Jer. xlviii. 2, to Heshbon; Nehemiah ix. 24, to Canaan. A number of others may be discovered by an attentive reading of the prophetical books. But enough has been said to show that the germ of those literary tendencies, which were in after ages developed in the Arabic literature, existed from the earliest times among their Semitic brethren.

A still more striking example of artificiality in compo­sition is afforded by those alphabetical pieces, which have raised so much curiosity and discussion among scholars. The Hebrew literature did not escape the fate which con­demns nations to lose much of their poetical vigour and spontaneity by a long continued culture, especially when they restrict themselves, as did the ancient nations for the most part, to a traditional range of ideas. From Athens to Alexandria, from Alexandria to Constantinople, we may trace the decline of Greek letters—ever more learned, ever more laborious, and ever more feeble. The later ages of the Hebrew literature were, indeed, illustrated by compo­sitions of surpassing grandeur and beauty, such as the pieces appended to the Book of Isaiah (chapter xl. to the end); the Lamentations, of which the greater part are in the alphabetical form; and the Book of Daniel, which, composed probably as late as the second century before Christ, opened the magnificent series of apocalyptic writ­ings, the germ of which may be found in the prophecies of Ezekiel. But it is not the less evident that, even be­fore the Captivity, composition had become more the task of a literary class, prone to imitate rather than originate, and to look for inspiration in the works of its predecessors rather than in nature and human life. Among these arose the alphabetical poem, in which the compiler seems to have sought to add freshness to his groupings of ancient thoughts by a new and striking literary device. The success of this kind of composition bears witness to the taste of the Jews and the nations related to them. Similar compositions appeared among the Syrians and the Samari­tans, and the neo-Hebrew, or Rabbinical literature, is full of them.* The Biblical poems, which belong to this order, are Psalms xxv., xxxiv., xxxvii., cxi., cxii., cxix., cxlv.; the description of the virtuous woman, at Proverbs xxxi. 10–31, and the Book of Lamentations, with the exception of the last chapter. In Psalms cxi. and cxii. the artifice is carried so far that not each verse, but each member of the verse, is alphabetical. In Lamentations iii., the verses are divided into twenty-two triplets, the verses of the triplets beginning with the twenty-two letters of the alphabet in succession. The hundred and nineteenth Psalm shows a still further elaboration of the same idea, and in its structure and purport bears a visible analogy to such productions as the Assemblies of Ḥarîri. In this lengthy composition the hundred and seventy-six verses are divided into twenty-two groups of eight verses each, and the verses of the groups begin with the twenty-two letters in alphabetical succession; that is, the eight verses of the first group begin with Aleph, the eight of the second group with Beth, the eight of the third group with Gimel, and so on. This Psalm has, however, a more remarkable peculiarity, inasmuch as the author strives in the true spirit of an Eastern scholar to attract the fancy to his theme, by introducing into every verse, without exception, a synonym for the word or commandment of God.

Before quitting this part of the subject, I will venture to suggest a comparison between the gnomic and senten­tious character of the Arabic poetry, as exhibited in the Assemblies, and some portions of the Old Testament— as the books of Job and Ecclesiastes—in which the pure Semitic spirit breathes, uncontrolled by national patriot­ism or Mosaic traditions. This, however, is a matter which must be left to the preception of the reader. Yet I cannot but think that in the figurative description of old age, in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, I recognise a tendency to obscure poetical metaphor, which, trans­mitted through many generations, darkens the work of the learned Basrian.