112 
incited by his friend and relation, the 
late archbishop Newcome; and the lei- 
sure that was necessary, he found dur- 
ing the late troubles in Ireland, which 
drove him from the active duties of his 
station, and compelled him to seek a 
retirement favourable to the pursuit of 
sacred literature. 4 
«Tn the space of one year,” he observes, 
“J had read aver the greatest part of the 
Old Testament in Hebrew; and, during my 
progress, my ear became so accustomed to a 
certain rhythm, or metre, seeming to per- 
vade the whole of that sacred volume, that 
] rested at last in a conviction that not the 
salms and the prophecies only, but the 
babtioal parts. also, commonly supposed to 
be written in prose, are in fact composed in 
verse, with no other difference froin the rest 
but that they waat the ornaments and bolder 
features of poetry.” 
Like the right reverend translator, we 
are “ not fond of controversy, especi- 
ally in questions of no great importance, 
and. confessedly difficult of solution ;’’ 
but it is our duty to offer some observa- 
tions which have occurred to us upon 
that which constitutes the leading fea- 
ture of his work. 
His Lordship thus states what appears 
to him to be fact, with respect to He- 
brew metre. Preface p. viii. 
«The manner of chaunting the psalms in 
our cathedrals, which has flowed, without 
interruption, into the Christian church from 
the Jewish, affords, in my apprehension, 
the easiest and clearest answer to the ques- 
tion, What is Hebrew metre? The psalms, 
we know, are divided into verses; verses 
ite two -parts, responsively sung by the 
choir; and of these parts each is distri- 
buted into musical bars of the length of four 
erotchets, which is called common time; all 
words included within the same bar, be 
they many or few, are pronounced by the 
choir in the same éime; the many rapidly, 
the few by a lengthened utterance, without 
regard to quantity, or the importance of the 
respective words in the sentence. Bars of 
this description measure the length of the 
Hebrew verses, at least of far the greatest 
part of them ; so that to the feur crotchets 
in the bar the ear discerns four rests, or 
feet, corresponding in the verse, and the 
sneasure becomes exactly similar to that of 
our English verses of eight syllables, as in 
the hundreth psalm, : 
With one consent, let all the earth 
To God their cheerful voices raise, &c. 
The exceptions to this general rule are, 
that sometimes in a stanza a line of the 
common length is succeeded by one of 
three feet. or six syllables, as in Lam. 
THEOLOGY, AND ECCLESIASTICAL AFFAIRS. 
ch. iji. throughout: and frequently a stanza 
is made to begin or end with a hemi- 
stich, instead of a whole line, of which the 
very first line of David's psalms presents aa 
example.” 
That the nature of Hebrew metre is 
such as is here represented, we shall not 
pretend either to deny or assert. ‘The 
subject appears to us, after much deli- 
beration, involved in impenetrable ob- 
scurity. Of a language, concerning 
the mode of reading which there has 
been so much dispute, and ever will be 
somuch real difficulty, we think it vain 
to expect to discover the proper rhythm. 
No doubt it was capable of poetic num- 
bers, and a great part of the books of the 
Old Testament was composed in a man- 
ner which adapted them to the purpose. 
of recitation to musical instruments ; 
but no attempt to reduce them to thetr 
original measures, we are fully” per- 
suaded, can now be successful. Of the 
scheme of bishop Hare, we may ven- 
ture decidedly to speak as fanciful and 
erroneous; and the more sfmple systems 
of Newcome, Lowth, and Stock, are 
open to objections, which their own la- 
bours furnish. The bishop of Killala, 
indeed, goes. far beyond all his prede- 
cessors, when he converts prose into 
verse, and imparts to a genealogical 
table the dignified march of a religious 
ode. That one of the earliest methods 
by which the descendants of the patri- 
arch Abraham conveyed the knowledge 
of past events to their posterity, was by 
giving them a poetical form, may be 
inferred from the uniform practice of 
remote antiquity; but that in the more 
advanced state of the Jewish people; in 
the days of Ezra, or even of David, 
their history was metrical, is a position 
which will not be easily proved, or 
readily admitted. Hebrew seholars will, 
in general, perceive some greater dif; 
ference than the mere want of orna- 
ment, between the song of Moses after 
the passage through the Red Sea, and 
his directions concerning the formation 
of the tabernacle; and conceive that - 
something more than the absence of the 
bolder features of poetry, distinguishes 
the book of Nehemiah from the love 
song of Solomen. 
Whatever may be thought of the. 
bishop of Killala’s system, and of the 
extent to which he applies it, his zeal 
and diligence will meet the highest 
praise. 
‘© Persuaded,” he observes, preface p. ix. 
