llon anthropon iden astea kai noon egno,
polla d' hog' en ponto pathen algea hon kata thumon,
arnumenos psuchen.... ]

but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all contrived as if to
baffle curiosity--as if, in the very form of the poem, to teach us that
it is no story of a single thing which happened once, but that it
belongs to humanity itself, and is the drama of the trial of man, with
Almighty God and the angels as the spectators of it.

No reader can have failed to have been struck with the simplicity of
the opening. Still, calm, and most majestic, it tells us everything
which is necessary to be known in the fewest possible words. The history
of Job was probably a tradition in the East; his name, like that of
Priam in Greece, the symbol of fallen greatness, and his misfortunes the
problem of philosophers. In keeping with the current belief, he is
described as a model of excellence, the most perfect and upright man
upon the earth, 'and the same was the greatest man in all the east.' So
far, greatness and goodness had gone hand in hand together, as the
popular theory required. The details of his character are brought out in
the progress of the poem. He was 'the father of the oppressed, and of
those who had none to help them.' When he sat as a judge in the
market-places, 'righteousness clothed him' there, and 'his justice was a
robe and a diadem.' He 'broke the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the
spoil out of his teeth;' and, humble in the midst of his power, he 'did
not despise the cause of his manservant, or his maidservant, when they
contended with him,' knowing (and amidst those old people where the
multitude of mankind were regarded as the born slaves of the powerful,
to be carved into eunuchs or polluted into concubines at their master's
pleasure, it was no easy matter to know it)--knowing that 'He who had
made him had made them,' and _one_ 'had fashioned them both in the
womb.' Above all, he was the friend of the poor; 'the blessing of him
that was ready to perish came upon him,' and he 'made the widow's heart
to sing for joy.'

Setting these characteristics of his daily life by the side of his
unaffected piety, as it is described in the first chapter, we have a
picture of the best man who could then be conceived; not a hard ascetic,
living in haughty or cowardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and
blood, a man full of all human loveliness, and to whom, that no room
might be left for a