But Tyre was wise and powerful as well as beautiful; and so the prophet, still keeping up the metaphor, proceeds to describe how the great ship is manned. Her steersmen are the experienced statesmen whom she herself has bred and raised to power; her rowers are the men of Sidon and Aradus, who spend their strength in her service. The elders and wise men of Gebal are her shipwrights (literally “stoppers of leaks”); and so great is her influence that all the naval resources of the world are subject to her control. Besides this Tyre employs an army of mercenaries drawn from the remotest quarters of the earth—from Persia and North Africa, as well as the subordinate towns of Phœnicia; and these, represented as hanging their shields and helmets on her sides, make her beauty complete.(96) In these verses the prophet pays a tribute of admiration to the astuteness with which the rulers of Tyre used their resources to strengthen her position as the head of the Phœnician confederacy. Three of the cities mentioned—Sidon, Aradus, and Gebal or Byblus—were the most important in Phœnicia; two of them at least had a longer history than herself, yet they are here truly represented as performing the rough menial labour which brought wealth and renown to Tyre. It required no ordinary statecraft to preserve the balance of so many complex and conflicting interests, and make them all co‐operate for the advancement of the glory of Tyre; but hitherto her “wise men” had proved equal to the task. The second strophe (vv. 12‐25) contains the survey of Tyrian commerce, which has already been analysed in another connection.(97) At first sight it appears as if the allegory were here abandoned, and the impression is partly correct. In reality the city, although personified, is regarded as the emporium of the world’s commerce, to which all the nations stream with their produce. But at the end it appears that the various commodities enumerated represent the cargo with which the ship is laden. Ships of Tarshish—_i.e._, the largest class of merchant vessels then afloat, used for the long Atlantic voyage—wait upon her, and fill her with all sorts of precious things (ver. 25). Then in the last strophe (vv. 26‐36), which speaks of the destruction of Tyre, the figure of the ship is boldly resumed. The heavily freighted vessel is rowed into the open sea; there she is struck by an east wind and founders in deep water. The image suggests two ideas, which must not be pressed, although they may have an element of historic truth in them: one is that Tyre perished under the weight of her own commercial greatness, and the other that her ruin was hastened through the folly of her rulers. But the main idea is that the destruction of the city was wrought by the power of God, which suddenly overwhelmed her at the height of her prosperity and activity. As the waves close over the doomed vessel the cry of anguish that goes up from the