The "Song of Songs" is further attributed to Solomon, because the name of that king is found in two or three places; because it is said to the beloved, that she is beautiful as the curtains of Solomon; because she says that she is black, by which epithet it is believed that Solomon designated his Egyptian wife. These three reasons have not proved convincing: 1. When the beloved, in speaking to her lover, says "The king hath brought me into his chamber," she evidently speaks of another than her lover; therefore the king is not this lover; it is the king of the festival; it is the paranymph, the master of the house, whom she means; and this Jewess is so far from being the mistress of a king, that throughout the work she is a shepherdess, a country girl, who goes seeking her lover through the fields, and in the streets of the town, and who is stopped at the gates by a porter who steals her garment. 2. "I am beautiful as the curtains of Solomon," is the expression of a villager, who would say: I am as beautiful as the king's tapestries; and it is precisely because the name of Solomon is found in this work, that it cannot be his. What monarch could make so ridiculous a comparison? "Behold," says the beloved, "behold King Solomon with the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals!" Who recognizes not in these expressions the common comparisons which girls make in speaking of their lovers? They say: "He is as beautiful as a prince; he has the air of a king," etc. It is true that the shepherdess, who is made to speak in this amorous song, says that she is tanned by the sun, that she is brown. Now if this was the daughter of the king of Egypt, she was not so tanned. Females of quality in Egypt were fair. Cleopatra was so; and, in a word, this person could not be at once a peasant and a queen. A monarch who had a thousand wives might have said to one of them: "Let her kiss me with the lips of her mouth; for thy breasts are better than wine." A king and a shepherd, when the subject is of kissing, might express themselves in the same manner. It is true, that it is strange enough it should be pretended, that the girl speaks in this place, and eulogizes the breasts of her lover. We further avow that a gallant king might have said to his mistress: "A bundle of myrrh is my well beloved unto me; he shall lie all night between my breasts." That he might have said to her: "Thy navel is like a round goblet which wanteth not liquor; thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies; thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins; thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fish pools in Heshbon; and thy nose as the tower of Lebanon." I confess that the "Eclogues" of Virgil are in a different style; but each has his own, and a Jew is not obliged to write like Virgil.