When, therefore, we find the retired Leader of the House of Commons and of the Liberal party throughout the country devoting a portion of his leisure to editing an edition of the English Psalter and furnishing it with auxiliary matter, we do not think of him as breaking ground in a fresh field, rather do we regard him as falling back upon earlier studies which have never for him parted with their charm. And this view of Mr Gladstone, as he sends forth from Hawarden Castle " a book of private devotion," finds confirmation in the closing paragraph of his briefly worded preface, in which paragraph he states that the Concordance, which is the adminiculum of greatest bulk, was executed "nearly half a century ago," executed, that is to say, when Macaulay's young man was rising to eminence in the House of Commons," and shortly after his appearance as an author, if not an authority, upon Church and State Relations.

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The auxiliary matter supplied by Mr Gladstone for this separate issue of the Prayer-book prose version of the Psalms consists of (1) Headings for the several Psalms; (2) Subjects specially touched in particular passages of the Psalms; (3) Psalms and Psalm Extracts; (4) Psalms specially appropriated to ordinary and occasional services; (5) Alternative Renderings; (6) A Concordance of 1st,

Proper Names; 2nd, Ordinary Words. Of these six groups of

editorial matter nothing but what is favourable falls to be said. Each section is interesting and suggestive, although no one department is exhaustively treated or displays any striking originality of conception or of treatment.

The one desideratum a survey of the contents suggests is some information regarding the Psalter itself, the position it holds among English Versions of Scripture, its literary peculiarities, and its claims to a place of permanence in the literature of our country.

The editor's explanation of the absence of information bearing on these points would probably be that any treatment of them, however brief, would be out of place in a small volume intended for private devotional use. It may, however, be permitted us to supply in a few sentences what is wanting, and what in our judgment would, if furnished, have enhanced the value and interest of a publication which, on editorial grounds alone, will always have attraction for book fanciers and book collectors.

The rendering of the Psalter used in the Church of England Book of Common Prayer, and here reprinted separately, is not that of 1611. While by far the greater number of Scripture quotations in the Prayer-book are taken from "the King's Bible," or Authorised Version, the Psalter and the Scripture passages employed in the office of Holy Communion are derived from an older English translation.

That translation was, on its first appearance in 1539, called

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"The Great Bible," on account of its bulky dimensions and appearance; and when, in 1540, it appeared with a lengthy prologue by Cranmer, it came to be known as Cranmer's Bible." But this Bible was only a revised version of Coverdale's translation made and published in 1535. Now one peculiarity of Coverdale's translation is that it is not and does not profess to be made from the original Hebrew and Greek. It is only a secondary version, a translation of other translations. On the title-page of the one perfect copy in the Earl of Leicester's library at Holkham it is honestly declared to be" Biblia-The Bible, that is, the holy Scripture of the Olde and New Testament, faithfully translated out of Douche and Latyn in to Englishe. M.D.XXXV." From this it will be seen that, whatever excellences the Prayer-book Psalter may possess, it is wholly destitute of exegetical or critical value. No scholar thinks of referring to Coverdale's Bible in connection with a disputed reading or a doubtful rendering; no exegete seeks to strengthen his interpretation of a knotty passage with a quotation from the Prayerbook prose version.

When it is enquired how it came about that, while other portions of Scripture in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer-with the exception of those in the Communion service-were taken from the Authorised Version of 1611 at the latest Prayer-book revision in 1661, the old Psalter was not altered, but remained as in 1535, the only explanation seems to be that cathedral and parish church choirs had grown accustomed to the older version, the language of which was smoother, and so better adapted for chanting than that of later date.

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The retention of this sixteenth century version is, however, attended with drawbacks. For some of the words occurring in it have become obsolete, while others have acquired a significance different from the earlier one. Instances of obsolete words are to be found in "Tush," "knappeth," "good-luck," "vamping," "shawms"; for illustration of a word of changed signification there may be given the use of the vocable "namely in such a verse as, Namely, while they say daily unto me, Where is now thy God?" in which verse "namely " has the force of particularly, specially. Then, as might be expected in the case of a version devoid of scholastic value, the Prayer-book Psalter betrays great weakness and considerable caprice in its rendering of tenses. Thus, the plaintive prayer in the seventh and eighth verses of the fifty-first Psalm is set aside in favour of this weak series of affirmations :— "Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Thou shalt make me hear of joy and gladness that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice." Again, some of the renderings in the Psalter translation, although

:

not positively erroneous, are quaint, grotesque, and not without a suggestion of the ludicrous out of place in a book intended for modern private devotions. It is so in the case of this rendering of the sixth verse of the sixty-eighth Psalm, which we give in the original spelling-"He is the God that maketh men to be of one mynde in a house, and bryngeth the presoners out of captiuitie in due season, but letteth the rennagates continue in scarcenesse ; and also in this of the sixth verse of the seventy-second : "He shall come down like the rain into a flese of woll, even as the droppes that water the earth."

What is there, then, in this old version of the Psalter to counterbalance such peculiarities and blemishes, and to evoke the loving regard and admiration of its most recent editor? Mr Gladstone himself suggests the answer when, in the course of his preface, he affirms of the Psalter text as it stands in his Prayer-book-" it is of incomparable beauty." This beauty shines forth alike in sentences and in phrases, the felicity and the cadence of which fill the ear and haunt the memory of even illiterate and unmusical souls. Of entire verses, apt and melodious in rendering, two are probably known to most of our readers. One is the rendering of the last verse of Psalm twenty-seven, "O tarry thou the Lord's leisure be strong, and He shall comfort thine heart; and put thou thy trust in the Lord." Was it the first sentence in this translation that suggested to Toplady two lines in his hymn beginning, "Your harps, ye trembling saints"-lines that form the opening of verse sixth, a verse which, by a singular conspiracy of editorial ineptitude, has been omitted from every Presbyterian hymnal of modern compiling, but which runs thus:

"Tarry His leisure then,

Although He seem to stay;

A moment's intercourse with Him,
Thy grief will overpay?"

The other verse is to be found in the ninety-sixth Psalm, where the tenth verse has for rendering, "Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King: and that it is He who hath made the round world so fast that it cannot be moved; and how that he shall judge the people righteously." Here the opening summons has been skilfully appropriated by Miss Havergal in her spirited missionary hymn or anthem, "Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King! Tell it out! Tell it out!"

It would be easy to place alongside of these two other verserenderings in no way inferior to them in beauty. Exhausted space, however, does not admit of our doing more than simply directing attention to Psalms xviii. 30; xix. 7; xxxiii. 19; lxix. 5; lxxi. 18; lxxxi. 1; and cvi. 24.

Then Coverdale's Psalter is as rich in phrases of felicity and melody as it is in sentences of rhythmic flow and fulness. The version of 1611 enriched its pages with a large number of these, but over and above what has found a place there the reader of the old Psalter will come upon such felicities of wording as, "The patient abiding of the meek," "the needful time of trouble," "the nethermost hell,' ," "the waters of comfort," "the fair beauty of the Lord," "the sorrowful sighing of the prisoners," "the great waterfloods," a man full of words."

Taking all that has been advanced into account, it may safely be predicted that Coverdale's Psalter will never become wholly obsolete, although it is of no value to the scholar, and contains a considerable amount of antiquated phraseology. Associated with its intrinsic merits as a manual of devotion there will ever after this be the charm of a name which his countrymen will not suffer to die out of grateful remembrance--that of its loving and painstaking elucidator, William Ewart Gladstone. C. G. M'CRIE.

Grammatik des jüdisch-palästinischen Aramäisch nach den Idiomen des palästinischen Talmud und Midrasch, des Onkelostargum (Cod. Socini 84) und der jerusalemischen Targume zum Pentateuch. Von Gustaf Dalman. Leipzig: Hinrichs. 8vo, pp. xii. 348. Price, M.12.

ALL who have roamed in the wilderness of Jewish-Aramaic forms, as exhibited in Talmud, Midrash and Targum, will welcome the appearance of Herr Dalman's careful and scientific grammar. As its title indicates, the book is limited to Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, leaving out of account meanwhile the Babylonian dialect (which belongs not to Western, but to Eastern Aramaic) employed in the Aramaic of the Babylonian Talmud, and in other productions of the Babylonian school, such as the decisions of the Doctors (Geonim). Within the field of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic there are in the main two dialects to be distinguished—(1) Judean, fairly well represented to us (though much affected by Hebrew) (a) in an older stage (third and second centuries B.C.) by the Aramaic of Daniel and Ezra, and (b) in a later stage by two Targums, the so-called Onkelos on the Pentateuch and so-called Jonathan on the Prophets, which, though almost certainly first written down at Babylon not earlier than the fifth century A.D., have nevertheless largely conserved the linguistic features they had acquired during centuries of oral use in Palestine.

(2) Galilean, the dialect employed by the learned of Tiberias, Caesarea and other Galilean schools from the fourth to the sixth centuries A.D., of which the greatest monument is the Aramaic of the Palestinian Talmud. It is interesting to note that Dalman has shown, by a careful comparison of words and forms (see the list on pp. 34-40), that this Galilean dialect is most nearly akin to the Christian Palestinian Aramaic, of which the grammar was written by Nöldeke in Z. D. M. G., xxii. pp. 443-527, and the extant literature has been published by Count Miniscalchi Erizzo, Lagarde, and others (Wright's Syriac Literature, p. 17 f). The Samaritan dialect, which does not fall within the scope of Dalman's work, occupies a middle place between Judean and Galilean. Lastly, must be mentioned the mixture of the Judean and Galilean dialects that characterises the so-called Jerusalem (really Palestinian) Targums, which, in Dalman's view, are much later than the works above mentioned. It should be observed that, in dealing with the Targums, Babylonian and Palestinian alike, he confines himself in the main to those on the Pentateuch (Onkelos and Yerushalmi), putting aside for convenience sake those on the Prophets and Hagiographa.

The distinguishing merit of Dalman's method is the separation, for grammatical purposes, of Jewish works which betray diversity of origin by difference of linguistic features. That this may be done effectively, references are given throughout for all but the most common words to the works in which they occur, and the forms characteristic of the Judean, Galilean and mixed dialects are set side by side. This constitutes a great advance on the treatment of Jewish-Aramaic in the older grammars of Winer, Fürst, and Petermann, and almost rivals in thoroughness the work of Kautzsch within the narrower sphere of Biblical Aramaic. The method, of course, makes the grammar more cumbrous and difficult to read, but the practical gain for research is enormous. One can imagine how useful the book would have been in a recent controversy on the Aramaic original of the Gospels.

Another most important feature is the thoroughly scientific treatment of the vowels. Following the footsteps of Merx in his Chrestomathia Targumica, Dalman has recognised the great importance to be attached to the testimony of the supralinear pointing of the Targums as exhibited in South Arabian MSS., and has used this pointing throughout the grammar (except in the paradigms, for a reason stated in the preface). But he has at the same time done justice to the Massoretic sublinear pointing of Biblical Aramaic (which he calls Tiberian, from the place of its origin), while he recognises the extent to which this has been affected by Hebraisation (as has also the supralinear, though to a less extent). Most interesting is