N XIX. DAVID. character has suffered more than that of David, from all sorts of imperfect appreciation. While some have treated him as a monster of cruelty and lust, classing him with the Neros and Domitians, others have invested him with almost divine immunities, as if we had no more right to ask at him than at God, "What dost thou ?"-as if his motions had been irrepressible as those of the wind, and his vengeance inevitable as the thunderbolt. David, in our view of him, was neither a monster nor a deity-neither a bad man nor by any means the highest of Scripture worthies. William Hazlitt has nowhere more disgraced his talents than in a wretched paper in the Round Table, where he describes David as a crowned spiritual hypocrite, passing from debasing sins to debasing services-debauching Bathsheba, murdering Uriah, and then going to the top of his palace and singing out his penitence in strains of hollow melody. Paine himself never uttered a coarser calumny than this. Nor ever did the pure and lofty spirit of Edward Irving look nobler and speak in higher tones than when, in his preface to Horne on the Psalms, he gives a mild yet stern verdict upon the character of this royal bard-a verdict in which judgment and mercy are both found, but with "mercy rejoicing against judgment." Many years have elapsed since we read that paper, and should our views, now to be given, happen, as we hope, to be found to coincide with it, we must still claim them as our own. We remember little more than its tone and spirit. David was a composite, though not a chaotic, formation. At first we find him as simple and noble a child of God, nature and genius as ever breathed. A shepherd boy, watching now the lambs and now the stars, his sleep is peradventure haunted by dreams of high enterprise and coming glory, but his days are calm and peaceful as those of the boy in the Valley of Humiliation who carried the herb "heart's-ease" in his bosom, and sang (next to David's own twenty-third Psalm) the sweetest of all pastorals, closing with the lines, "Here little, and hereafter bliss, And yet this boy had done, even ere he went to the camp of Israel, one deed of "derring-do;" he had wet his hands in the blood of a lion and a bear. This had given him a modest sense of his own strength, and perhaps begun to circulate a secret thrill of ambition throughout his veins; and when he obeyed the command of Jesse to repair to his brethren in the host, it might be with a foreboding of triumph and a smelling of the battle afar off. We can conceive few subjects fitter for picture or poetry than that of the young David measuring the mass of steelGoliath with an eye which mingled in its ray wonder, eagerness, anger and "That stern joy which warriors feel A hundred battles looked forth in that lingering, longing, insatiate glance. Every one knows the result to the giant of Gath: he fell before the smooth sling-stone. The result on David's mind is not quite so evident; but we think that all the praises and promotion he received did not materially affect the simplicity of his habits or the integrity of his purposes. Nor did, at first, 'Pilgrim's Progress. the persecution of Saul much exasperate his spirit, balanced as that was by the love of Jonathan. But his long-continued flight and exile, the insecurity of his life, the converse he had with "wild men and wild usages" in the cave of Adullam and the wilderness of Ziph, although they failed in weaning him from his God or his Jonathan, or even Saul, did not fail somewhat to embitter his generous nature and to render him less fitted for bearing the prosperity which suddenly broke upon him. More men are prepared for sudden death than for sudden success. Even after he had reached the throne of his father-in-law, there remained long, obscure contests with the remnant of Saul's party, sudden inroads from the Philistines, and a sullen, dead resistance on the part of the old heathen inhabitants of the land, to annoy his spirit. And when afterward he had brought up the ark of the Lord to the city of David-when the Philistines were bridled, the Syrians smitten, the Ammonites chastised, and their city on the point of being taken-from this very pride of place David fell—fell foully—but fell not for ever. From that hour his life ran on in a current of disaster checkered with splendid successes; it was a tract of irregular and ragged glory, tempering at last into a troubled yet beautiful sunset. But all the elements for our judgment of it had been collected by the time that the "matter of Uriah" was fully transacted. A noble nature, stung before its sin and seared before its time— contending between the whirlpool of passion and the strong, still impulses of poetry and faith-ruling all spirits except his own, and yet for ever seeking to regulate it too—sincere in all things— in sin and repentance, but sincerest in repentance—often neglecting the special precept, but ever loving the general tenor of the law-unreconciled to his age or circumstances, and yet always striving after such a reconciliation-harassed by early grief, great temptations, terrible trials in advanced life, and views necessarily dim and imperfect,─David, nevertheless, retained to the last his heart, his intellect, his simplicity, his devotion, above all, his sin cerity, loved his God, saw from afar off his Redeemer; and let the man who is "without sin" among his detractors cast the first stone. His character is checkered, but the stripes outnumber the stains, and the streaks of light outnumber both. In his life there is no lurking-place-all is plain; the heights are mountains— "the hills of holiness," where a fine spirit walks abroad in singing robes; the valleys are depths out of which you hear the voice of a prostrate penitent pleading for mercy, but nothing is or can be concealed, since it is God's face which shows both the lights and shadows of the scene. David, if not the greatest or best of inspired men, was certainly one of the most extraordinary. You must try him not, indeed, by divine or angelic comparison; but if there be any allowance for the aberration of a tortured, childlike, devout son of genius-if the nobler beasts of the wilderness themselves obey a law and observe a chronology and follow a path of their own-then let the wanderer of Adullam be permitted to enter or to leave his cave at his own time and in his own way, seeing that his wanderings were never intended for a map to others, and that those who follow are sure to find that they are aught but ways of pleasantness or of peace to them. The position of David is virtually that of the founder of the Jewish monarchy. In this sense his name is repeated in every possible form. "The city of David," "The seed of David," "The house of David," "The key of David," "The oath sworn unto David," are expressions which pervade the whole subsequent history and poetry of the Old Testament and much of the figurative language of the New. The cruelty, the self-indulgence, the too-ready falsehood, sufficiently appear in the events of his history. But there was a grace, a charm, about him which entwined the affections of the nation round his person and his memory, and made him, in spite of the savage manners of the time and the wildness of his own life, at once the centre of something like a court, the head of a new civilization. He was a born king of Israel by his natural gifts. His immense activity |