‘Job’ was written for the Gloucester Festival of 1892 and is much shorter than the preceding oratorio. Parry’s treatment of the familiar story of the patriarch’s misfortunes is at once individual and poetic. He groups the events into four scenes, opening the first one with a noble, serene theme in the orchestra, associated with the ‘perfect and upright man that feared God,’ and appropriately using it again to bring the whole work to a close. The narrator is given an important rôle, but the climax of the work is Job’s lengthy lament for his losses in the third scene. The music is noble and of sustained dignity and impressiveness. ‘King Saul,’ Parry’s third oratorio, was performed at the Birmingham Festival of 1894. It relates, in a series of ten scenes grouped into four acts, the main events in the picturesque life of this king of Israel. The prophet Samuel and the youthful shepherd David are prominent persons in the narrative, while the introduction of the Witch of Endor scene gives opportunity for music of vividly descriptive character. Among many fine lyric passages are the love-duet of David and Michal and David’s devotional psalm after the battle with the Philistines (‘Let us lift up our eyes unto the mountains, whence cometh our help’). The choral-writing throughout is marked by unerring skill and noteworthy effectiveness. VI ‘The Three Holy Children,’ by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (born 1852), was written for the Birmingham Festival of 1885. The words are taken in the main from those parts of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha that deal with the captivity of the Jews under Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. This king had erected a great image of Bel in the valley of Dura and commanded that all his subjects worship it under penalty of death by fire. A company of Jewish women, by the waters of Babylon, are mourning over their captivity, when they are taunted by some Assyrian soldiers on their way to worship Bel and they reply with songs of their beloved country and with imprecations on their enemies. Ananias, Azarias and Misael, three prominent Jews, denounce the worship of idols and refuse to bow down to Bel. They are dragged before the king and cast into the fiery furnace; but the flames do them no harm and the amazed king releases them and joins with the multitude in praising God ‘that hath sent His angel and delivered His servants that trusted in Him.’