This last allusion to an ancient Egyptian similarity to a characteristic usage of Canticles leads to the remark, that Maspero and Spiegelberg have both published hieroglyphic poems of the xixth-xxth Dynasties, in which may be found other parallels to the metaphors and symbolism of the Hebrew Song. As earlier writers exaggerated the likeness of Canticles to Theocritus, so Maspero was at first inclined to exaggerate the affinity of Canticles to the old Egyptian amatory verse. It is not surprising, but it is saddening, to find that Maspero, summarizing his interesting discovery in 1883, used almost the same language as Lessing had used in 1777 with reference to Theocritus. Maspero, it is true, was too sane a critic to assert borrowing on the part of Canticles. But he speaks of the "same manner of speech, the same images, the same comparisons," as Lessing does. Now if A = B, and B = C, then it follows that A = C. But in this case A does _not_ equal C. There is no similarity at all between the Egyptian Songs and Theocritus. It follows that there is no essential likeness between Canticles and either of the other two. In his later books, Maspero has tacitly withdrawn his assertion of close Egyptian similarity, and it would be well if an equally frank withdrawal were made by the advocates of a close Theocritan parallel. Some of the suggested resemblances between the Hebrew and Greek Songs are perhaps interesting enough to be worth examining in detail. In Idyll i. 24, the goatherd offers this reward to Thyrsis, if he will but sing the song of Daphnis: I'll give thee first To milk, ay, thrice, a goat; she suckles twins, Yet ne'ertheless can fill two milkpails full. It can hardly be put forward as a remarkable fact that the poet should refer to so common an incident in sheep-breeding as the birth of twins. Yet the twins have been forced into the dispute, though it is hard to conceive anything more unlike than the previous quotation and the one that follows from Canticles (iv. 2): Thy teeth are like a flock of ewes, That are newly shorn, Which are come up from the washing, Whereof every one hath twins, And none is bereaved among them. It is doubtful whether the Hebrew knows anything at all of the twin-bearing ewes; the penultimate line ought rather to be rendered (as in the margin of the Revised Version) "thy teeth ... which are all of them in pairs." But, however rendered, the Hebrew means this. Theocritus speaks of the richness of the goat's milk, for, after having fed her twins, she has still enough milk to fill two pails. In Canticles, the maiden's teeth, spotlessly white, are smooth and even, "they run accurately in pairs, the upper corresponding to the lower, and none of them is wanting" (Harper).