THE LAST DAYS OF JERUSALEM.*
PROFESSOR CHURCH'S fascinatingly-told stories from Ilerodotas, Homer, Virgil, and the Greek tragedians have been so deservedly successful, that he has been encouraged to extend his labours in a somewhat new direction. It is a "far cry " from Homer to Josephus, and yet there is to be found in the narrative of the "Fain and not always veracious Jew, material which is as truly -epical in essential character, and quite as fully charged with the strongest human interest, as anything in the pages of the Iliad or the Odyssey. It is, indeed, strange that its impressive record of the fall of what is, in some respects, the most noteworthy of the historic cities of the world, should not before now have formed the theme of some great poem by some great poet ; for though it was handled with fair success by Dean Milman, his ,dramatic work can hardly with justice be so described. The story of the great catastrophe in which the Jewish nationality perished is, in many respects, a more manageable, and, in some respects, a more inspiring subject than that chosen by Tasso in his Gerusalemme Liberata ; for though it has the disadvantage
.of being destitute of so heroic a central character as Godfrey de Bouillon—Titus being on the wrong side—it has the more than -counterbalancing advantage of having an imaginatively satis- fying climax, which is in the actual story so artistically led up to, that the facts as they stand need nothing, or next to nothing, in the way of manipulation and arrangement. How many such poems as Milman's —effective as that undoubtedly is—would we give for a Fall of Jerusalem from the pen of Milton or Shake- speare ! though we venture to think that, of all English poets, Marlowe would have made the story most his own, would have • .celebrated with the greatest force and freedom its lurid splen- dours and Dantesque horrors, and enabled us to breathe the heavy atmosphere of the doomed city, laden with the cry of human agony, and luminous with the gleam of superhuman portent. The poets have, however, neglected the theme, and we are left with the prose of Josephus, which, as a literary vehicle, is eminently pictorial, without any of the vices of modern " picturesque" writing. The main current of narrative flows easily and pleasantly along, and the introduction of the episodes—always a severe test of an historian's skill—is so admirably managed, that the story is not in the least confused or broken up, but only rendered varied and vivid.
Professor Church, in the peculiar line of work which he has chosen, has evidently been thinking of the requirements of the young people from whose ranks the scholars of the future must come. We do not mean that his books may not be perused with pleasurable interest by adult readers, but simply -that their principal value resides in their attractiveness for juvenile students, and the temptation they must present to such -to search for themselves in the treasure-houses from which erofessor Church has drawn such goodly stores. The stories from Homer and Virgil can hardly fail to send them to the Iliad or the 2Eneid, and this admirably made selection from the record of Josephus is certain to inspire them with a strong .desire to know something at first-hand of those Antiquities and Wars of the Jews which they have most probably returned to the book-shelves, after a very cursory examination, with the final verdict of youthful condemnation,—" Awfully dry !" Even -the boy or girl who is most difficult to please is not likely to ,complain of any " dryness " in the pages of this Story of the Last Days of Jerusalem. The Complete I37orks of Flavius Jasephys, the most ordinary editions of which are—so far as .external appearance goes —fearfully and wonderfully un- attractive, are not, indeed, without their youthful admirers, who soon become absorbed in the plotting and the fight- * The Story of the Last Days of Jerusalem. From Josephus. By the Rev. Alfred J. Church, ILA. London : Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday.
Mg, the gruesome horrors and the ghostly accessories of the siege, to which portion of the book they always turn ; and in Professor Church's dainty volume, the most striking points of interest—the sugar-plums of narrative—are picked out of the mass, and brought together in such compass as to be really appetising.
Josephus is one of those writers whose work can be abridged without suffering much in the process. Sometimes it is even improved, not because the literary style is diffuse—for it is, on the contrary, very solid and compact—but because the writer crowds into his story such a multiplicity of details, which, though never really trivial or insignificant, admit of easy ex- cision, and can be removed by a judicious editor without seriously disarranging the general composition of the picture. The work of Defoe is of the same character ; and though no adult reader with any genuine feeling for literature would care to read an abridgment of Robinson Crusoe, such an editorial production, if not too unsparing in its cutting-down, would probably be preferred to the original by a considerable number of youthful students ; and this condensation of Josephus is likely to meet with similar approval. Considering the number of omissions made, it is remarkable how little of importance is missed, even by a reader whose recollection of the story as told by Josephus is fairly good, and has been freshened by a recent reperusal.
Professor Church judiciously cautions his readers against putting too much confidence in the narrative of Josephus on any point where interest or vanity may have tempted him to depart from the truth, and draws attention to one curious instance of a deliberate falsification of history. Josephus, wish- ing to add every possible touch of flattery to his portrait of Titus, represents him as consistently anxious to save the Temple ; but it seems that "the ingenuity of a German critic, Jacob von Bernays, detected in the Chronicle of Sulpicius Severus a very slightly disguised quotation from one of the lost books of the History of Tacitus," which Professor Church thus translates :—
" Titus is said to have called a council of war, and then put to it the question whether he ought to destroy so grand a structure as the Temple. Some thought that a sacred building, more famous than any that stood upon the earth, ought not to be destroyed. If it were preserved, it would be a proof of Roman moderation ; if destroyed, it would brand the Empire for ever with the stigma of cruelty. On the other hand, there were some, and among them Titus himself, who considered that the destruction of the Temple was an absolute neces- sity, if there was to be a complete eradication of the Jewish and Christian religions. These superstitions, opposed as they were to each other, had sprung from the same origin ; the Christians had come forth from among the Jews; remove the root, and the stem would speedily perish."
This is an interesting point, and a few more notes drawing attention to similar inaccuracies would have added to the value of Professor Church's volume. As it stands, however, we have no words for it but those of praise and welcome. The illustra- tions in colour and the charmingly designed cover are altogether satisfactory.
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