620 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1887 



and tender melancholy contained in the most beautiful 

 of liturgical books.&quot; This may be literature, but it is not 

 history. The historian has to judge David as a king, and 

 to judge him from his whole career. We know that his 

 reign dwelt in the affectionate memory of Israel long 

 before the nation had become a Church and before the 

 renown of the warrior and judge was overshadowed by 

 the fame of the Psalmist. The nation was grateful for 

 deliverance from the Philistines, but it also remembered 

 that David &quot; did justice and judgment to all his people.&quot; 

 These are substantial titles to an honourable place in 

 history, against which neither the weakness of an old age 

 exhausted by martial toil nor the ambiguous conduct of 

 some parts of an adventurous youth can fairly be set. 

 The inner life of David as a king is revealed to us in a way 

 unique in ancient history, through a document evidently 

 dependent on the accounts of a contemporary observer, 

 one who read faces and noted minute details with a subtlety 

 which to the western reader recalls the memoirs of Saint- 

 Simon, but which is not uncommon among the Arabs. 

 This observer may have had his prejudices, but it is clear 

 that his passion was the study of men, and that no 

 prejudice would have induced him to suppress a character 

 istic trait. He spares none of David s weaknesses, and 

 yet the king appears not only a far greater man, but a 

 larger, better, and more generous nature than any of those 

 about him. David s faults were those of his age, and the 

 things in him that most offend us were not those that gave 

 umbrage to his contemporaries. Even his great sin in the 

 matter of Uriah would have been buried in oblivion but 

 for his repentance. Now oriental sovereignty is not the 

 thing to make a bad man better ; nay, even in a man 

 whose general aims are high and beneficent, it is eminently 

 calculated to produce the frame of mind which Abd-al- 

 Malik described as wrought in himself &quot; that he had 

 come to do good without feeling pleasure, and to do evil 



1 2 Sam. viii. 18. 



