choly-then in his early prime; nor of Sir Walter Raleigh, nor of Sir Thomas Overbury - both now at the date of their best powers; nor yet would one find mention of John Donne,* though he came to be Dean of St. Paul's and wrote poems the reader may- and ought to know; nor, yet again, is there any hearing of Sir John Davies, who had commended himself specially to King James, and who had written poetically and reverently on the Immortality of the Soult in strains that warrant our citing a few quatrains :

"At first, her mother Earth she holdeth dear,

And doth embrace the world and worldly things:
She flies close by the ground, and hovers here,
And mounts not up with her celestial wings.

"Yet under heaven she cannot light on aught
That with her heavenly nature doth agree;
She cannot rest, she cannot fix her thought,
She cannot in this world contented be:

*John Donne, son of a London merchant, b. 1573, and d. 1631. There is a charming life of him by Izaak Walton. The Grosart edition of his writings is fullest and best.

From his poem of Nosce Teipsum, published in 1599. John Davies b. in Wiltshire about 1570, and d. 1626.

"For who, did ever yet, in honor, wealth,

Or pleasure of the sense, contentment find?
Who ever ceased to wish, when he had health?

Or, having wisdom, was not vexed in mind?

"Then, as a bee which among weeds doth fall,

Which seem sweet flowers, with lustre fresh and gay; She lights on that and this, and tasteth all,

But, pleased with none, doth rise and soar away!"

This is a long aside; but it gives us good breath to go back to our translators, who if not known to the general reader, were educators or churchmen of rank; men of trained minds who put system and conscience and scholarship into their work. And their success in it, from a literary aspect only, shows how interfused in all cultivated minds of that day was a keen apprehension and warm appreciation of the prodigious range, and the structural niceties, and rhythmic forces of that now well-compacted English language which Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, each in his turn, had published to the world, with brilliant illustration.

And will this old Bible of King James' version continue to be held in highest reverence? Speaking from a literary point of view - which is our

stand-point to-day-there can be no doubt that it will; nor is there good reason to believe that on literary lines-any other will ever supplant it. There may be versions that will be truer to the Greek; there may be versions that will be far truer to the Hebrew; there may be versions that will mend its science- that will mend its archæology—that will mend its history; but never one, I think, which, as a whole, will greatly mend that orderly and musical and forceful flow of language springing from early English sources, chastened by Elizabethan culture and flowing out-freighted with Christian doctrine

over all lands where

Saxon speech is uttered. Nor in saying this, do I yield a jot to any one-in respect for that modern scholarship which has shown bad renderings from the Greek, and possibly far worse ones from the Hebrew. No one it is reasonably to be presumed-can safely interpret doctrines of the Bible without the aid of this scholarship and of the "higher criticism;" and no one will be henceforth fully trusted in such interpretation who is ignorant of, or who scorns the recent revisions.

And yet the old book, by reason of its strong,

sweet, literary quality, will keep its hold in most hearts and most minds. Prove to the utmost that the Doxology,* at the end of the Lord's Prayer, is an interpolation-that it is nowhere in the earlier Greek texts (and I believe it is abundantly proven), and yet hundreds, and thousands, and tens of thousands who use that invocation, will keep on saying, in the rhythmic gush of praise, which is due maybe to some old worthy of the times of the Henrys (perhaps Tyndale himself) - "For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever, Amen!"

And so with respect to that splendid Hebraic poem of Job, or that mooted book of Ecclesiastes ; no matter what critical scholarship may do in amplification or curtailment, it can never safely or surely refine away the marvellous graces of their

* Dr. Shedd (Addenda to Lange's Matthew) says — "Probably it was the prevailing custom of the Christians in the East, from the beginning to pray the Lord's Prayer, with the Doxology." It certainly appears in earliest Syriac version (Peschito, so called, of second century). It does not appear in the Wyclif of 1380. It will be found, however, in the Tyndale of 1534- which I am led to believe is its first appearance in an accredited English translation.

strong, old English current-burdened with tenmurmurous with hopes drifting

der memories

toward days to come "or ever the silver cord be

loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern."

-

The scientists may demonstrate that this ancient oak whose cooling shadows have for so many ages given comfort and delight-is overgrown, unshapely, with needless nodules, and corky rind, and splotches of moss, and seams that show stress of gone-by belaboring tempests; they may make it clear that these things are needless for its support-that they cover and cloak its normal organic structure; but who shall hew them clean away, and yet leave in fulness of stature and of sheltering power the majestic growth we venerate? I know the reader may say that this is a sentimental view ; so it is; but science cannot measure the highest beauty of a poem; and with whose, or what fine scales shall we weigh the sanctities of religious awe?

It must be understood, however, that the charms of the "King James' Version" do not lie altogether