8. The Pentecostarion,-more properly the Pentecostarion Charmosynon, — the Office for Easter-tide. On a moderate compution, these volumes together comprise 5,000 closely printed quarto pages, in double columns, of which at least 4,000 are poetry.

The thought that, in conclusion, strikes one is this: the marvellous ignorance in which English ecclesiastical scholars are content to remain of this huge treasure of divinitythe gradual completion of nine centuries at least. I may safely calculate that not one out of twenty who peruse these pages will ever have read a Greek 'Canon' through; yet what a glorious mass of theology do these offices present! If the following pages tend in any degree to induce the reader to study these books for himself, my labour could hardly have been spent to a better result.

EPOCHS OF

GREEK ECCLESIASTICAL POETRY.

LIKE that of the Latin, the Poetry of the Greek Church may be divided into three epochs :

I. That of formation, while it was gradually throwing off the bondage of classical metres, and inventing and perfecting its various styles; and this ends about A.D. 726.

II. That of perfection: which, as we shall see, nearly coincides with the period of the Iconoclastic Controversy, A.D. 726820.

III. That of decadence: when the effeteness of an effeminate Court, and the dissolution of a decaying Empire, reduced ecclesiastical poetry, by slow degrees, to a stilted bombast, giving great words to little meaning, heaping up epithet on epithet, tricking out commonplaces in diction more and more gorgeous, till sense aud simplicity are alike sought in vain. A.D. 820-1400.

B

EPOCHS OF

GREEK ECCLESIASTICAL POETRY.

LIKE that of the Latin, the Poetry of the Greek Church may be divided into three epochs :

-

I. That of formation, while it was gradually throwing off the bondage of classical metres, and inventing and perfecting its various styles; and this ends about A.D. 726.

II. That of perfection: which, as we shall see, nearly coincides with the period of the Iconoclastic Controversy, A.D. 726820.

III. That of decadence: when the effeteness of an effeminate Court, and the dissolution of a decaying Empire, reduced ecclesiastical poetry, by slow degrees, to a stilted bombast, giving great words to little meaning, heaping up epithet on epithet, tricking out commonplaces in diction more and more gorgeous, till sense aud simplicity are alike sought in vain. A.D. 820-1400.

B