practice to warn and exhort others.  The integrity and delicacy of the moral sense, whether in individuals or communities, form a most important subject of the care of all public writers and speakers, in all transactions by which, or the history or treatment of which, the public, judgment and feelings may be affected.  Hence, when mail robbers or murderers are to be tried or executed, we should be disposed to avoid all extraordinary bustle, or concern, or voluminous details about their fate; we should deem it the true policy of practical ethics to abstain from everything calculated to produce adventitious interest or consequence for the culprits.  It is not with pleasure that we hear of the crowds that besiege the door of the court-room, or see in the newspapers the many columns of evidence, with an endless repetition of trifling circumstances, any more than we can rejoice for the cause of moral and social order when convicted highwaymen or murderers are carried to the gallows as saints, and hung amidst vast assemblages, either merely indulging a callous curiosity, or losing all the horror of their offences in emotions of compassion or admiration, awakened by the dramatic nature of the whole scene.

* * * * *

=_Thomas S. Grimke,[47] 1786-1834._=

From “Addresses, Scientific and Literary.”

=_154._= LITERARY EXCELLENCE OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE.

The translation of the Bible, in the reign of James I., is the most remarkable and interesting event in the history of translations....  The great excellence of the translation is due to six considerations. First, it was made under a very solemn sense of the important duty devolved on those who were thus selected.  Hence arose that prevailing air of dignity, gravity, simplicity, which is so conspicuous. Secondly, the translators came to the task looking to the thoughts, not to the style.  Their object was not that of all other translators, to imitate and rival the beauty of style.  Their sole object was to render faithfully, and in a plain, appropriate style, the thoughts of the sacred writers.  Hence they became thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the original, and gave an incomparably better version of the Hebrew and Greek Testaments than any or all of them together could have done of any classic.  Had each of them left us translations of some classic, I hesitate not to say they would not now have been found in any library but as mere curiosities. Thirdly, the number of persons employed contributed very much to prevent any personal style from prevailing, and gave to the whole an air of plain, simple uniformity. Fourthly, the era was providential in one important view.  As the translation was made before all the bitterness of sectarian spirit distracted the English Protestant church, it was executed far less with a view to party differences than could have been