from the Vulgate, but from the Greek text of the great scholar Erasmus.  This was the most important literary event of the time, for “it coloured the entire complexion of subsequent English prose,”—­to use the words of Professor Gosse.  This means that all prose in English written since Henry VIII has been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the prose of Tyndale’s Bible, which was completed about 1535.  Almost at the same time a number of English divines, under the superintendence of Archbishop Cramner, gave to the English language a literary treasure scarcely inferior to the Bible itself, and containing wonderful translations from the Scriptures,—­the “Book of Common Prayer.”  No English surpasses the English of this book, still used by the Church; and many translators have since found new inspiration from it.

A revision of this famous Bible was made in 1565, entitled “The Bishops’ Bible.”  The cause of the revision was largely doctrinal, and we need not trouble ourselves about this translation farther than to remark that Protestantism was reshaping the Scriptures to suit the new state religion.  Perhaps this edition may have had something to do with the determination of the Roman Catholics to make an English Bible of their own.  The Jesuits began the work in 1582 at Rheims, and by 1610 the Roman Catholic version known as the Douay (or Douai) version—­because of its having been made chiefly at the Catholic College of Douai in France—­was completed.  This version has many merits; next to the wonderful King James version, it is certainly the most poetical; and it has the further advantage of including a number of books which Protestantism has thrown out of the authorized version, but which have been used in the Roman church since its foundation.  But I am speaking of the book only as a literary English production.  It was not made with the help of original sources; its merits are simply those of a melodious translation from the Latin Vulgate.

At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.  It was the work of many learned men; but the chief worker and supervisor was the Bishop of Winchester, Lancelot Andrews, perhaps the most eloquent English preacher that ever lived.  He was a natural-born orator, with an exquisite ear for the cadences of language.  To this natural faculty of the Bishop’s can be attributed much of the musical charm of the English in which the Bible was written.  Still, it must not be supposed that he himself did all the work, or even more than a small proportion of it.  What he did was to tone it; he overlooked and corrected all the text submitted to him, and suffered only the best forms to survive.  Yet what magnificent material he had to choose from!  All the translations of the Bible that had been made before his time were carefully studied with a view to the conservation of the best phrases, both for sound and for form.  We must consider the result not merely as a study of literature in itself, but also as a study of eloquence; for every attention was given to those effects to be expected from an oratorical recitation of the text in public.