Snuffy, prosy men always keep pawing over the poets. It is bad enough when they are only literary critics, but when they are theologians there is no length to which they will not go. Think what has happened to that radiant anthology which the late Morris Jastrow translated and edited as his final work, _The Song of Songs_. Originally, it seems clear, a collection of popular lyrics which the Hebrew folk prized so highly as to insist on giving them a place in the sacred canon, these poems have been argued and allegorized to what would have been the death of anything less indestructible. While the Stoics were “explaining” Homer, partly Hellenized Jews began to interpret the _Song of Songs_ as an expression of Yahweh’s love for Israel and then Christians as an expression of Christ’s love for his Church. Learned scholiasts wallowed in commentary, declaring, for instance, that the phrase “eyes like doves” referred to the wise men of the Sanhedrin or to the thoughts of God directed toward Jerusalem. Augustine saw in “where thou reclinest at noon” a hint that the true Church lay under the meridian—that is, in Augustine’s Africa! Bernard of Burgundy composed eighty-six homilies on the first two chapters. The Jewish Saadia, writing in the tenth century, detected in the _Song of Songs_ a complete history of the Jews from the Exodus to the coming of a twelfth-century Messiah; and Thomas Brightman in 1600 drew the prophecy down to Luther and Melancthon. Not until the Enlightenment, in the hands of Lowth and Herder, did criticism become more direct and reasonable. Even after that the passion for finding some kind of unity in the book led even such scholars as Ewald, Delitzsch, Renan to explain it as a rudimentary drama, with Solomon as one of the characters. There were, of course, always heretics, like Thomas Hardy’s Respectable Burgher, who slyly rejoiced to learn “That Solomon sang the fleshly Fair And gave the Church no thought whate’er,” but they were generally outside the beaten track of doctrine.