terpart of Prometheus; but all that wins our sympathy for Prometheus,—his goodness, and gentleness, and love of men—is of course wanting in the character of Satan. Shelley has made his adaptation more complete, and it scarcely escapes the charge of blasphemy. The race of men are represented, in the person of his Prometheus, as always baffled in all desires and aims at good by the tyranny of some cruel power. In Byron's "Cain," this attitude is still more openly assumed, but the person of Cain is not represented as entirely deserving of our sympathy. However, these instances show how favourite a theme this, of mankind suffering in the person of one, has been with later poets.
But we will turn to a pleasanter comparison, and see mankind suffering, not in antagonism but in conscious submission to the will of God. In the oldest of all poems, it may be, in the Book of Job, the same great spectacle of heroic endurance is set before us, and there too the hero represents humanity. Prometheus, after his long suffering, is restored to happiness; humanity suffers and is restored in his person. So it is, in a much higher sense, with Job. Not only in his physical sufferings and restoration, but in the deeper agony of the moral problem which overpowers him, and the higher elevation of the future to which he looks. Job represents all mankind. In him are answered the angry questions which Shelley and Byron ask. "What means," say they, "this constant baffling of man's best efforts, this universal presence of pain and sin, this obscurity in the ways of God?" These are the questions of humanity in its sufferings,
