f these fuller texts is a matter of no
importance, but their substance, whether it was the work of a Persian
civil servant or of a Greek-Jew rhetorician, is most curious. Whosoever
it was, he knew King's Speeches and communications from "My lords" and
such like things, very well indeed; and the contrast of the mention in
the first letter of "Aman who excelled in wisdom among us and was
approved for his constant good will and steadfast fidelity" with "the
wicked wretch Aman--a stranger received of us ... his falsehood and
cunning"--the whole of both letters being carefully attuned to the
respective key-notes--is worthy of any one of the best ironists from
Aristophanes to the late Mr. Traill.

Between these two extremes of the Pentateuch and the Apocrypha there is,
as has been remarked by divers commentators, not much about letters in
the Bible. It is not auspicious that among the exceptions come David's
letter commanding the betrayal of Uriah, and a little later Jezebel's
similar prescription for the judicial murder of Naboth. There is,
however, some hint of that curious attractiveness which some have seen
in "the King's daughter all glorious within--" and without (as the
Higher Criticism interprets the Forty-Fifth Psalm) in the bland way with
which she herself stipulates that the false witnesses shall be "sons of
Belial."

There is a book (once much utilised as a school prize) entitled _The
History of Inventions_. I do not know whether there is a "Dictionary of
Attributed Inventors." If there were it would contain some queer
examples. One of the queerest is fathered (for we only have it at second
hand) on Hellanicus, a Greek writer of respectable antiquity--the
Peloponnesian war-time--and respectable repute for book-making in
history, chronology, etc. It attributes the invention of letters--_i.e._
"epistolary correspondence"--to Atossa--not Mr. Matthew Arnold's Persian
cat but--the Persian Queen, daughter of Cyrus, wife of Cambyses and
Darius, mother of Xerxes, and in more than her queenly status a sister
to Jezebel. Atossa had not a wholly amiable reputation, but she was
assuredly no fool: and if, to borrow a famous phrase, it had been
necessary to invent letters, there is no known reason why she might not
have done it. But it is perfectly certain that she did not, and no one
who combines, as all true scholars should endeavour to combine, an
unquenchable curiosity to know what can be known and is worth knowing
with a