on in answer to the complaints of
his people about his Egyptian marriage; and this was one of the heresies
charged upon him after his death, which led to his condemnation at the
second council of Constantinople (553 A.D.). A literal interpretation
was not again attempted till in 1544 Chateillon (Castellio or Castalion)
lost his regency at Geneva for proposing to expel the book from the
canon as impure. Grotius (_Annot. in V.T._, 1644) took up a more
moderate position. Without denying the possibility of a secondary
reference designed by Solomon to give his poem a more permanent value,
he regards the Canticles as primarily an [Greek: oaristys] (conjugal
prattle) between Solomon and Pharaoh's daughter. The distinction of a
primary and secondary sense gradually became current not only among the
Remonstrants, but in England (Lightfoot, Lowth) and even in Catholic
circles (Bossuet, 1693). In the actual understanding of the book in its
literal sense no great progress was made. Solomon was still viewed as
the author, and for the most part the idea that the poem is a dramatic
epithalamium was borrowed from Origen and the allegorists, and applied
to the marriage of Pharaoh's daughter.

From Grotius to Lowth the idea of a typical reference designed by
Solomon himself appears as a mere excrescence on the natural
interpretation, but as an excrescence which could not be removed without
perilling the place of Canticles in the canon, which, indeed, was again
assailed by Whiston in 1723. But in his notes on Lowth's lectures, J.D.
Michaelis, who regarded the poem as a description of the enduring
happiness of true wedded love long after marriage, proposed to drop the
allegory altogether, and to rest the canonicity of the book, as of those
parts of Proverbs which treat of conjugal affection, on the moral
picture it presents (1758).

Then came Herder's exquisite little treatise on _Solomon's Songs of
Love, the Oldest and Sweetest of the East_ (1778). Herder, possessing
delicacy of taste and sympathetic poetical genius, delighted in the
Canticles as the transparently natural expression of innocent and tender
love. He expressed the idea that the poem is simply a sequence of
independent songs without inner unity, grouped so as to display various
phases and stages of love in a natural order, culminating in the placid
joys of wedded life. The theory of Herder, which refuses to acknowledge
any continuity in the book, was accepted by Eichhorn on