A 1895 pioneering literary study by Richard Green Moulton, an English-American professor, author and lawyer of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author focused his biblical analysis on textual structures, forms and genres (epics, lyrics, poems, dramas, histories, etc). It laid the foundation of the modern approach to the literary study of the Bible and an appreciation of its literary qualities. The preface says: An author falls naturally into an apologetic tone if he is proposing to add yet one more to the number of books on the Bible. Yet I believe the number is few of those to whom the Bible appeals as literature. In part, no doubt, this is due to the forbidding form in which we allow the Bible to be presented to us. Let the reader imagine the poems of Wordsworth, the plays of Shakespeare, the essays of Bacon, and the histories of Motley to be bound together in a single volume…”