naissance the spirit of a scene was regularly conveyed in emblematic action to the eye before the dialogue commenced; and this has been made familiar to the most general reader by the example of it preserved in Hamlet, where the gesture of pouring poison into the sleeping king's ear startles the conscience of the guilty murderer in the audience before a word of the play has been spoken. In written literature dumb show becomes hieroglyph; and, in connection with such names as Alciati in Italy, Jacob Catz in Holland, Quarles in England, Emblem Poetryhieroglyphic texts with discourses in verse-formed for more than a century the chief religious literature of Europe, and, though now forgotten, furnishes thousands of volumes to the libraries of curious collectors.

In studying Emblem Prophecy it is very important to recognise that the emblem is no more than the text, from which a regular discourse takes its departure. This principle will guard the student against opposite errors of interpretation. On the one hand, some writers have not only read the symbolic action of Biblical prophecy with extreme literalness, but have treated it as if it constituted the prophecy itself. It is true that there was in Israel a rude prophecy which consisted wholly in action, and which is still to be seen in the fakirs and dervishes of Semitic peoples, with whom a reiterated howl or a contorted body is the whole of their religious act. But the prophets of Biblical literature use such gesture language only as a pro

logue to verbal utterance. On the other hand, some commentators show a tendency to explain away the dumb show of prophecy, until it is left as little more than a literary image. They are actuated by a feeling that much of what is so described seems puerile and beneath the dignity of prophecy. But such a feeling is one to be resisted, more especially if the reader be of the English-speaking peoples: it is due largely to the notorious deficiency in gesture which makes our speech so dull and clumsy to our European neighbours. Any one who has heard a Gavazzi preach, or seen a Salvini act, will know how much of dignity, as well as force, accompanies the vivid action that half tells the tale before words come to complete it. Thus to herald speech with dumb show is only an extension of the well-known principle of oratory, that the significant gesture should, by however slight an interval, precede the words, the mind being thus unconsciously inflamed by force of curiosity into a receptive attitude that is of itself a mode of emphasis.

It will be well to take particular examples. The emblematic action in the Book of Ezekiel reaches its greatest minuteness in the Mimic Siege of Jerusalem (I. iv).

before

Thou also, son of man, take thee a tile, and lay thee, and pourtray upon it a city, even Jerusalem and lay siege against it, and build forts against it, and cast up a mount against it; set camps also against it, and plant battering rams against it round about. And take thou unto thee an iron pan,

and set it for a wall of iron between thee and the city: and set thy face toward it, and it shall be besieged, and thou shalt lay siege against it. This shall be a sign to the house of Israel.

Moreover, lie thou upon thy left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it: according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon it, thou shalt bear their iniquity. For I have appointed the years of their iniquity to be unto thee a number of days, even three hundred and ninety days: so shalt thou bear the iniquity of the house of Israel. And again, when thou hast accomplished these, thou shalt lie on thy right side, and shalt bear the iniquity of the house of Judah; forty days, each day for a year, have I appointed it unto thee. And thou shalt set thy face toward the siege of Jerusalem, with thine arm uncovered; and thou shalt prophesy against it. Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and spelt, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof; and thy meat which thou shalt eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day: from time to time shalt thou eat it. . . . And thou, son of man, take thee a sharp sword, as a barber's razor shalt thou take it unto thee, and shalt cause it to pass upon thine head, and upon thy beard: then take thee balances to weigh, and divide the hair. A third part shalt thou burn in the fire in the midst of the city, when the days of the siege are fulfilled; and thou shalt take a third part, and smite with the sword round about it; and a third part thou shalt scatter to the wind, and I will draw out a sword after them. And thou shalt take thereof a few in number, and bind them in thy skirts.

This passage has been a stumbling-block to interpreters. So sympathetic a writer as Stanley has been misled into say

ing that Ezekiel "would lie stretched out motionless, for more than a year, like one crushed to the ground under the burden of his people's sins." On the other hand, Dr. Davidson in his valuable commentary would persuade us that such action as this was intended merely to be described in narrative. But this attenuation of the natural meaning is surely impossible in view of the simple explicitness of the language quoted above. What, on such a theory, is to be made of a passage like this?

And, behold, I lay bands upon thee, and thou shalt not turn thee from one side to another, till thou hast accomplished the days of thy siege.

Take again the following:

And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it in their sight with dung that cometh out of man. . . . (Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! behold, my soul hath not been polluted: for from my youth up even till now have I not eaten of that which dieth of itself, or is torn of beasts; neither came there abominable flesh into my mouth. Then he said unto me, See, I have given thee cow's dung for man's dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread thereon.)

Such scruple on the part of the prophet would indeed be puerile if it related to what was no more than a narrated symbol. These opposite difficulties are avoided when the emblematic action is understood literally, but as no more than the text for a spoken discourse. It is clear from the

book as a whole that deputations of the people were in the habit of appearing before the prophet to hear a word from the Lord; such deputations were frequent, and, indeed, one passage* strongly suggests, if it does not demonstrate, that they were of daily occurrence. The natural interpretation of the prophecy cited is that, during the period it indicates of more than a year, the daily discourse had for its text some portion of the action so elaborately prescribed. Now the prophet would strike the attitude of the besieger of Jerusalem; now his dumb show would suggest the details of famine, or the choice of fatal evils that awaited those who miserably survived to the end of the siege. Such symbolic gesture-prolonged perhaps for no more than a few moments would introduce a verbal discourse of the same tenor: and the closing paragraphs of the written prophecy are a summary of the matter reiterated in these many discourses. On this view the very minuteness of the prescribed directions assists towards the variety of symbol texts the prophet had to choose from. And the prolongation of this one theme through these multiplied presentations is amply justified, both by the position of the fall of Jerusalem as the very foundation of Ezekiel's prophetic mission, and by the obstinate incredulity of the infatuated exiles to which his words so often bear witness.

In this discourse of the Siege of Jerusalem the emblematic starting-point has been sustained dumb show. Simi* See note (to page 95) on page 188.