Should I forsake my sweetness and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the Trees? Then said the Trees unto the Vine, Come thou and reign over us. And the Vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine which cheereth God and Man, and go to be promoted over the Trees?” Thus far the Trees have been unsuccessful. They have found among their fellows of the forest no available candidate whose character and record are good. They anticipated a difficulty of more modern times. But they are becoming desperate. They are determined to have a king. In this extremity what step do they take? “Then said all the Trees unto the Bramble, Come thou and reign over us.” The Bramble cannot plead business. It cannot say, as do the Olive and Fig and Vine, “I am of some better use.” There is no reason, so far as any beneficent occupation is concerned, why it should not be king. The offer is eagerly accepted, and the pompous bush delivers itself of this high and mighty coronation address: “If in truth ye anoint me king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow; and if not, let fire come out of the Bramble and destroy the cedars of Lebanon!”

This Bramble, Jotham explains, represents Abimelech, while the misguided trees are the men of Shechem. Having made this application, Jotham became convinced that his mission was ended, and abandoned Mount Gerezim for a place of greater security. “And Jotham ran away and fled, and went to Beer and dwelt there for fear of Abimelech his brother.” He did not wait to see what impression he had made. He was willing to let his story, moral and all, take care of itself; for in that day, as in every subsequent age, there was no room for a satirist in the kingdom of an incompetent ruler.

II.—Samson.

Farther on in the book of Judges, we have the portrait of Samson. How quaintly is the character drawn! A great lubberly, good-natured giant, but now and then bursting out into fits of unreasoning and uncontrolled anger,—not unlike Ajax in the play. He is constantly making himself ridiculous in his love affairs.

In Love’s Labor Lost, the following dialogue occurs:—

He tries to joke in clumsy riddles: “Out of the eater came forth meat, out of the strong came forth sweetness.” But his jokes were usually of a more practical and even more disastrous kind. L’Estrange, in his History of Humor, says: “The first character in the records of antiquity that seems to have had anything quaint or droll about it is that of Samson. Standing out amid the confusion of legendary times, he gives us good specimens of the fierce, wild kind of merriment relished in ancient days; and was very fond of making very sanguinary sport for the Philistines. He was an exaggeration of a not very uncommon type of man in which brute strength is joined to loose morals and whimsical fancy. People were more inclined to laugh at sufferings formerly than now, because they were not keenly sensitive to pain, and also had less feeling and consideration for others. That Samson found some malicious kind of pleasure and diversion in his reprisals on his enemies and made his misfortunes minister to his amusement, is evident from the strange character of his exploits. ‘He caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails, and when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burned up both the shocks and also the standing corn of the Philistines, with the vineyards and olives.’ On another occasion, he allowed himself to be bound with cords and thus apparently delivered powerless into the hands of his enemies; he then broke his bonds ‘like flax that was burnt with fire,’ and taking the jawbone of an ass which he found, slew a thousand men with it. His account of this massacre shows that he regarded it in a humorous light: ‘With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of an ass, I have slain a thousand men.’ We might also refer to his carrying away the gates of Gaza to the top of a hill that is before Hebron, and to his duping Delilah about the seven green withes. * * * Samson was evidently regarded as a droll fellow in his day.”

What a touch of human nature there is in the scene between Samson and his wife, when she asks for the solution of that wretched riddle! “Thou dost but hate me,” is her reproach, “and lovest me not; thou hast put forth a riddle unto the children of my people, and hast not told it to me.” What! is there a domestic storm already brewing? There is something of a thunderclap in the angry retort of the husband: “Behold, I have not told it to my father and my mother,” (as if that would make any difference to her!) “and shall I tell it to thee?” Comparisons of this sort are but little noted for their conciliatory tendencies, and so we are fully prepared for what follows: “And she wept before him the seven days while the feast lasted.” Poor Samson is not proof against woman’s tears. He could rend the lion as a kid, and carry off the gates of Gaza as easily as a shepherd could bear a lamb upon his shoulders, but his superhuman strength is of no avail against “women’s weapons, water-drops.” We are not surprised to find that “it came to pass on the seventh day he told her.” Thus did conjugal quarrels end in the time of the Judges.

But if Samson was worsted in the encounter with his wife, he scored a victory against the Philistines who had frightened her into telling them the answer to the riddle. When they came with an air of insolent triumph and said: “What is sweeter than honey? and what is stronger than a lion?” he rather impolitely retorted,—traces of gall and wormwood at his recent humiliation by his wife still rankling in his mind,—“If ye had not ploughed with my heifer, ye had not found out my riddle.” But he paid the debt of honor he owed them, the wager he had lost. “He went down to Ashkelon, and slew thirty men of them, and took their spoil and gave changes of raiment unto them which expounded the riddle.” Thersites would have said of him as he did of Achilles, “His wit was his sinew.” Samson had wonderful muscular power of repartee.

On another occasion Samson amused himself by telling monstrous lies about the secret of his strength: “If they bind me with seven green withes that were never dried, then shall I be weak and be as another man;” “if they bind me fast with new ropes;” “if thou weavest the seven locks of my head with the web;” and so on. As Prince Hal said of the stories of his boon companion, “These lies are like the father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable.” Delilah, wearied with these practical jokes, exclaims at last, “How canst thou say ‘I love thee,’ when thine heart is not with me? Thou hast mocked me these three times, and hast not told me wherein thy great strength lieth.” Then she began a course of teasing and entreaty that finally proved successful. “It came to pass when she