, and even persecuted. We can clearly discern his own character.
He was timid, and yet ambitious; he was tempted to use deceit and
hypocrisy, to acquiesce in the tone about him; he was inclined to be
covetous; he had sinned, and had learnt something of holiness from his
fall; he was given to solitude and prayer. He was sensitive, and his
sorrows had affected his health; he was sleepless, and had lost the
bloom of his youth.

All this and more we can read of him; but what is the saddest touch of
all is the isolation in which he lived. There is not a word to show
that he met with any sympathy; indeed the misunderstanding, whatever it
was, that overshadowed him, had driven acquaintances, friends, and
lovers away from him; and yet his tender confidence in God never fails;
he feels that in his passionate worship of virtue and truth, his
intense love of purity and justice, he has got a treasure which is more
to him than riches or honour, or even than human love. He speaks as
though this passion for holiness had been the very thing that had cost
him so dear, and that exposed him to derision and dislike. Perhaps he
had refused to fall in with some customary form of evil, and his
resistance to temptation had led him to be regarded as a precisian and
a saint? I have little doubt myself that this was so. He speaks as one
might speak who had been so smitten with the desire for purity and
rightness of life, that he could no longer even seem to condone the
opposite. And yet he was evidently not one who dared to withstand and
rebuke evil; the most he could do was to abstain from it; and the
result was that he saw the careless and evil-minded people about him
prosperous, happy and light-hearted, while he was himself plunged by
his own act in misunderstanding and solitude and tears.

And then how strange to see this beautiful and delicate confession put
into so narrow and constrained a shape! It is the most artificial by
far of all the psalms. The writer has chosen deliberately one of the
most cramping and confining forms that could be devised. Each of the
eight verses that form the separate stanzas begins with the same letter
of the alphabet, and each of the letters is used in turn. Think of
attempting to do the same in English--it could not be done at all. And
then in every single verse, except in one, where the word has probably
disappeared in translation, by a mistake, there is a mention of the law
of God. Infinite pains must have