whom war and property have raised above the group, few of the materials requisite for literature can be said to exist. When these points of social progress have been attained, the development of literature parts into two remarkably different directions, which the literature of the Hebrews on the one hand, and the early poetry of Greece on the other, aptly illustrate. The literature of the Hebrews passed into the hands of a central priesthood; the early poetry of the Greeks is the song of bards possessing local independence. The social and hereditary spirit of the clan predominates in the former; the individual spirit of the chief lives and moves in the latter. There is, no doubt, a strong bond of connection between these early forms of literature in the individual character which decomposing clan life tends to create—a character in which sentiments of devotion to the chief supplant the old ties of communal kinship; and elsewhere we may return to this connection between communal and feudal life and literature. At present, however, we shall devote our main attention to the corporate character of clan literature.
