The psalms in themselves--as one of the purposes of their composition--were a partial witness to the place and prominence of song and chant in teaching religious truth and thus in keeping faith alive on the earth. Plato states that the first laws of all nations were composed in verse and sung. There is a remembrancer in Plato's statement concerning the first laws of nations of our own primitive pedagogical methods within certain departments of learning. And so, by tradition, recitative, minstrelsy, and psalmody--of wide application in the early ages--both a wider currency and a more tenacious hold was taken by these laws, proclamations, and truths upon the popular mind. Especially so as the popular mind was deficient in the art of reading, even when literature had been embodied in writing. And this was true in both sacred and profane history. Thus, minstrelsy, chant, and tradition have performed an important function in the beginnings of many ancient peoples. And, strange as it may seem to us, Plato, notwithstanding his voluminous writings and his place in the literary world for nearly three thousand years, put a low estimate on the importance of written as compared with oral teaching. The Greek classics--the matchless monuments of ancient literature--as represented in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns were preserved, perpetuated, and disseminated for generations if not for centuries, not by written records--as later literature has been handed down by the written or printed page--but through ballads, minstrelsy, and recitation. "The Æolic emigrants who settled in the north-west of Asia-Minor brought with them the warlike legends of their chiefs--the Archæan princes of old. These legends lived in the ballads of the Æolic minstrels, and from them passed southward into Ionia, where the Ionian poets gradually shaped them into higher artistic form."[5] "Mahaffy and Jevons are in accord," says Mr. Putnam, "in pointing out that the effort of memory required for the composition and transmission of long poems without the aid of writing, while implying a power never manifested among people possessing printed books, is not in itself at all incredible. Memory was equal to the task, and the earlier Greeks poems, memorized by the authors as composed, were preserved by successive generations of bards." And again he says, "It is to be borne in mind that the (to us) extraordinary extent to which the Greeks were able to develop their power of memorizing enabled them often to trust their memory where modern students would be helpless without the written (or printed) word.... The boys in school were given as their daily task the memorizing of the works of the poets, and what was begun under compulsion appears to have been continued in later life as a pleasure."[6] And in the preface of the book from which the foregoing statements are quoted, the author says, "It is evident that there were