The theory that the book is a collection of bridal songs, and that the mention of Solomon is due to an eastern custom of designating the bridegroom and bride as Solomon and Queen Shulamith, during their honeymoon, does not seem consistent with the fact that in several allusions to Solomon his royal state is slighted, whereas only compliments would be paid to a bridegroom. Moreover the two--Shulamith and Solomon--are not as persons named together. It will, I think, appear as we proceed that the Shelomoh (Solomon) of Canticles represents a conventionalisation of the monarch, with some traits not found in any other book in the Bible. A verse near the close, presently considered, suggests that the bride and bridegroom are at that one point metaphorically pictured as a Solomon and Solomona, indicating one feature of the Wise Man's conventionalization. Renan assigned Canticles the date B. C. 992-952, mainly because in it Tirza is coupled with Jerusalem. Tirza was a capital only during those years, and at any later period was too insignificant a town to be spoken of as in the Song vi. 4: "Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, Comely as Jerusalem, Dazzling as bannered ranks." But the late Russell Martineau, a thorough and unbiassed scholar, points out in the work phrases from Greek authors of the third century B. C., and assigns a date not earlier than 247-222. [19] But may it not be that the Alexandrian of the third century built on some earlier foundation, as Shakespeare adapted the "Pound of Flesh" and the "Three Caskets" (Merchant of Venice) from tales traceable as far back as early Buddhist literature? or as Marlowe and Goethe used the mediæval legend of Faustus? The several songs can hardly be assigned to one and the same century. The coupling of Tirza and Jerusalem points to a remote past for that particular lyric, and is it credible that any Jew after Josiah's time could have written the figleafless songs so minutely descriptive of Shulamith's physical charms? Could any Jewish writer of the third century before our era have written iv. 1-7 or vii. 1-9, regarding no name or place as too sacred to be pressed into his hyperboles of rapture at every detail of the maiden's form, and have done this in perfect innocency, without a blush? Or if such a poet could have existed in the later Jahvist times, would his songs have found their place in the Jewish canon? As it was the book was admitted only with a provision that no Jew under thirty years of age should read it. That it was included at all was due to the occult pious meanings read into it by rabbins, while it is tolerably certain that the realistic flesh-painting would have been expunged but for sanctions of antiquity similar to those which now protect so many old classics from expurgation by the Vice Societies. These songs, sensuous without sensuality, with their Oriental accent, seem ancient enough to have been brought by Solomon from Ophir.