6 FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY
of documentary analysis and questions of origin,
Astruc may seem a more important founder of
Modern Criticism than Lowth. But in reality
the general implications of Lowth's discussion of
Hebrew poetry, apart from certain special con-
clusions reached by him to which we shall pass
immediately, make his lectures of wider signifi-
cance than even Astruc's acute conjectures ; and
we may fairly claim that, through Lowth and
his two principal works, both of which were
translated into German, the Lectures by Michaelis,
the Isaiah by Koppe, Oxford, in the middle of
the eighteenth century, contributed to the critical
study of the Old Testament and the apprecia-
tion of Hebrew literature in a degree that was
scarcely equalled till the nineteenth century was
drawing to its close.
It is a relatively small part of Lowth's lectures
that is devoted to those forms or formal char-
acteristics of Hebrew poetry with which we are
here concerned: of the thirty-four lectures one
only, the nineteenth, is primarily devoted to that
form with which Lowth's name will always be
associated, though the subject of parallelism was
already raised in the third lecture. The maturer
and fuller discussion of this and kindred topics
was first published in 1778 as a preliminary dis-
sertation to the translation of Isaiah. Briefly
summed up, Lowth's contribution to the subject
was twofold: he for the first time clearly