brings forth by impulse without labour. The West is the reasoning sphere, and therefore, in the pure analogical language of poetry, which ever transcends the material, it is a feminine region. By the same rule of analogy, it represents liberty in contradistinction to law, or despotism, and therefore, in the gradual progress of civilisation, from East to West, the principle of liberty grows, and woman, its representative, also escapes from the bondage of man, thus travelling on to that fulness of time, when her curse will be removed, and the perfect, or at least correlative, equality of both sexes be proclaimed.

Beautiful is the whole plan, and admirably laid out by a skilful artist, and so perfect in its details, that, were a statesman presented with a map of the world, and requested to apportion it amongst a series of nations, representing a scale of progressive principles advancing from the limited to the unlimited, from the juvenile to the mature, he could not imagine an arrangement so analogically complete.

The entire history of man and society may be called the immemorial; but this is the memorial drama which we are about to contemplate. It is the drama of civilisation, springing up amongst the chaos or immemorial usage of primitive times, and beginning with one family, as the representative of a higher order of unity, even as the human race at large may be said to have commenced with one man, who represented a physical or lower order

All

of unity. In other words, it is the historical drama, extending as far back into the vista of antiquity as the records of that long line of successive development, of which we are the terminus, will permit. The nation which represents that starting point of progression is the Jewish nation. before that nation is lost. A few straggling traditions may survive, or monuments exist; but these few traditions are either preserved in the literature of the Jews and Greeks, or in lately excavated relics of art which have been buried for ages, broken off like dead boughs, or sunk like roots, and occupying, therefore, no prominent place on the great historical arena. Their representatives also are utterly extinct, whilst the nations of the Jews and the Greeks not only exist in literature, and imbue the whole of Christian civilisation with their spirit, but they also exist in person, and live in hope of recovering the territorial possessions of their ancestors, and reappearing on the stage with greater brilliance than ever they displayed at any former period. There is no doubt, therefore,

about the commencement of this memorial drama. The lettered and the unlettered are alike familiar with the great fact that the most ancient of all the literature of the Western world is that sacred Book, which is more universally diffused than any other, and which enjoys the distinction of being called by the name of The Book, as if there were no other book but itself.

THE PENTALOGUE;

OR,

THE DIVINE DRAMA

OF

WESTERN CIVILISATION.

ACT FIRST.-The Hebrew Mission.

SCENE FIRST.

THE ROCK AND THE SAND; OR, THE LAWGIVER AND THE RABBIS.

BEING now prepared for the first act or era of the Pentalogue, we shall follow the law of dramatic etiquette by introducing the scenery along with the performers.

As the Divine Drama is the development of a progress or elevation of the human race, from a lower to a higher position, it is in perfect analogy with this distinctive character, that it should commence its performance at the very foundations of the earth. No sooner, therefore, was the nation formed that was destined to begin the career of memorial civilisation, than it was ordered to retire into the desolate region of Arabia Petræa, amid the rugged cliffs, the dark-red sides, and hoary

headed tops of Horeb and Sinai, mountains of red and white granite, and other primary rocks, representing the deepest substrata of the earth's crust. Here the foundations of the rising system were laid, amid fire and smoke, resembling the frightful mystery of the interior of the globe, of whose dread abysses geologists inform us, that they are caldrons, replenished with molten masses, cooling with time, and hardening on the surface with age, but vomiting occasionally their fused and disturbed ingredients, and thundering like Sinai when the law was proclaimed on the sides of the neighbouring mountain of Horeb. A more suitable scene could not have been selected. A cultivated plain would have been inconsistent with the harmony of Divine order it would have represented an end instead of a beginning. The sand of the desert was not in discordance with the poetry of the landscape, for it is barren and desolate-a layer for vegetative soil to rest upon, but not the alimental earth itself. Rock and sand, the lowest or the most remote from the nutritive condition of matter, and constituting therefore its primary or lifeless form, from which the principles of created life are evolved by the mysterious chemistry of creative wisdom, characterised the scenery of the hungry and thirsty desert, in which the drama of memorial civilisation commenced. So great was the barrenness of that "howling wilderness," "wherein there was no water," that

miracle alone could support the people; and it is still a wonder, amongst divines and commentators, by what special means the cattle were fed. No mundane territory could better represent the beginning of a great providential movement, than these two forms of earth. The one is compact, and the other is loose; in other words, they are absolute and free; and these two principles of absolutism and freedom, law and liberty, law solid and law not solid, are the two elementary and opposite but alike indispensable elements of civilisation or human progress. Which is the eldest, rock or sand, no man can say. Geologists usually classify rocks as lower than sand; for they form a surface on which it is deposited. But whether the rock was first produced from the sand or the sand from the rock no science can determine. They are convertible substances. Sand can be produced from any species of rock by the action of water, and rock, in return, can be reproduced from sand by the action of heat; and this beginningless as well as endless process of production and distribution, of concretion and attrition, or dissolution, is continually going on, beneath and above the plane of the earth. But though these two substances are extreme opposites, they are alike fundamental and barren to man and every created thing, and well represent that awful and mysterious Being, in whose dread infinitude created beings can only find a few spots for existence, like