Verses 1 to 10. It is scarcely probable that Hannah the wife of a country farmer composed this song--it is more likely to have been composed by a Levite, or perhaps by the writer of the story. Verses 13 to 16. 'This narrative presents various subjects of instruction: at first it pictures the simplicity, or rather the grossness of the manners of the times very analogous to the age of Homer. This Hebrew people were mostly composed of rustics, living on their little properties, which they had cultivated with their own hands, as the Druzes do now. The only class, a little elevated, a little less ignorant, was the tribe of Levi--that is, the priests, who lived idle, supported by the voluntary, or forced offerings of the nation; this {120} class had more time than means to employ the mind. This shows itself here in the tone and style of the narrator, who, by his knowledge of the duties of the priests, evinced himself a man of the craft. We might compare this Levite to the monks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writing: their holy histories under the auspices of superstition and credulity. In this relation we see the essential character of the priest, whose first and constant object of attention is the pot or kettle, on which his existence depends; and this reveals the motives of all that display of victims and sacrifices which play so great a part among the ancients. 'Until now I could not conceive the advantage of converting the courts and the porches of temples into slaughter-houses. [ _Vide_ remarks on page 67.] I could not reconcile the idea of the hideous spectacle of the choking of sensitive animals, of the shedding of oceans of blood, of the filthiness of entrails, with the ideas which we were taught of the divine majesty, of the divine goodness that repels to a distance the gross necessities which these practices suppose. In reflecting on that which has just been noticed, I perceive the solution of the enigma. I see that in their primitive state the ancients were as one; as are yet the Tartars of Asia, and their brothers, the savages of America, ferocious men, contending constantly against dangers, and struggling with those necessities--the violence of which raises all the sensibilities; men accustomed to shed blood in the chase, on which their subsistence depended. In this state, the first ideas which they had--the only ones they entertained of the divinity--represented him as a being more powerful than themselves; but reasoning and perceiving like them, having their passions and their character. The whole history shows the truth of this.