It is tolerably certain that such fragments as those of Agur imply a literary atmosphere, a cultured philosophic constituency, and a long precedent evolution of rationalism. Such peaks are not solitary, but rise from mountain ranges. Professor Dillon, whose admirable volume merits study, finds Buddhistic influence in Agur's fragments. [9] But I cannot find in them any trace of the recluse or of the mystic; he does not appear to be even an "agnostic," for when he says "I have worried myself about God and succeeded not," the vein is too satirical for a mind interested in theistic speculations. He is a man of the world,--more of a Goethe than a Voltaire; he regards Jahveh as a phantasm, is well domesticated in his planet, and does not moralise on the facts of nature in the Oriental any more than in the Pharisaic way. He appears to be a true Solomonic philosopher and naturalist. I cannot agree to Professor Dillon's omission of the "Four Cunning Ones" (Proverbs xxx. 24-28), because they are not of the same metrical form as the others, and lead "nowhither." The lines "The ants are a people not strong, Yet they provide their meat in the summer," no doubt led to the famous parable of Proverbs vi. 6-11, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard." Being there imbedded in an otherwise commonplace editorial chapter, they may have been derived from some commentator on Agur. Agur apparently represents the Solomonic thinkers brought with the rest of the people under the trials that made Israel the Job of nations. They are such as those who led astonished Jeremiah to ask "what kind of wisdom is in them?" (Jeremiah viii.) They "do not recognise Jahveh's judgments"; in "shame, dismay, captivity, they have rejected Jahveh's word." The exquisite humor of Agur shows that these philosophers did not lose their serenity. Agur sees man passing his life between two insatiable daughters of the ghoul, "the Grave and the Womb,"--Birth and Death,--and amid the inevitable evils of life he will be wise to refrain from rage and lay his hand upon his lips. But silence was just what the Jahvist omniscients could not attain to. Notwithstanding Jahveh's confession that Job was right in his position, and the orthodox wrong in their theory that all evil is providential, the "comforters" rise again in the commentator who begins (Proverbs xxx. 5): "Every word of God is perfected. He is a shield to them that trust in Him,"