Shakspeare have performed that service on this history, which Milton,
More, and others have undertaken on other portions of the sacred
volume,--could he have digested it into a regular dramatic form,--he
would have accomplished a work of rare interest. It would include the
characters of Samuel and Saul; it would describe the magnanimous
Jonathan and the rebellious Absalom; Nathan, Nabal, Goliah, Shimei,
would impart their respective features; it would be enriched with all
that is beautiful in woman's love or enduring in parental affection. It
is full of incident, and full of pathos. It verges towards the terrible,
it is shaken with the passionate, it rises into the heroic. Pursued in
the true spirit of Jewish theology, the awful presence of God would
overhang and pervade it, while the agency of his providence should
attend on the evolutions of events.

There is one effect which, in the present arrangement of the canon, is
entirely lost to view, and which could be revived only by the
synchronizing of the Psalms with their proper epochs. For instance, the
eighth Psalm is referable to the youth of David, when he was yet leading
a shepherd life. The dramatic form of his history would detach this from
its present place, and insert it amid the occasions and in the years to
which it belongs. What a scene we should then have! The youthful David,
ruddy he was, and, withal, of a beautiful countenance, (marginal
reading, fair of eyes,) and goodly to look to; and he was a cunning
player on the harp. There is the glow of poetic enthusiasm in his eyes,
and the fervor of religious feeling in all his moods; as he tends his
flock amid the quietness and beauty of his native hills, he joins to the
aspirations of his soul the melodies of music. So the night overtakes
him, the labors of the day are past, his meditations withdraw him from
the society of men, he is alone with Nature and with God;--at such a
moment the spirit of composition and utterance is upon him, and he hymns