These throes tear it every way.  On the one hand we have Ascham, pendantically enough, apologising that he writes in the English tongue (yet with a sure instinct he does it):—­

If any man would blame me, either for taking such a matter in hand, or else for writing it in the English tongue, this answer I may make him, that what the best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I, one of the meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write...  And as for the Latin or Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in them that none can do better.  In the English tongue, contrary, everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and the handling, that no man can do worse.

On the other hand you have Euphuism with its antithetical tricks and poises, taking all prose by storm for a time:  Euphuism, to be revived two hundred years later, and find a new avatar in the Johnsonian balance; Euphuism, dead now, yet alive enough in its day.

For all these writers were alive:  and I tell you it is an inspiriting thing to be alive and trying to write English.  All these authors were alive and trying to do something.  Unconsciously for the most part they were striving to philosophise the vocabulary of English prose and find a rhythm for its periods.

And then, as already had happened to our Verse, to our Prose too there befel a miracle.

You will not ask me ‘What miracle?’ I mean, of course, the Authorised Version of the Bible.

I grant you, to be sure, that the path to the Authorised Version was made straight by previous translators, notably by William Tyndale.  I grant you that Tyndale was a man of genius, and Wyclif before him a man of genius.  I grant you that the forty-seven men who produced the Authorised Version worked in the main upon Tyndale’s version, taking that for their basis.  Nay, if you choose to say that Tyndale was a miracle in himself, I cheerfully grant you that as well.  But, in a lecture one must not multiply miracles praeter necessitatem; and when Tyndale has been granted you have yet to face the miracle that forty-seven men—­not one of them known, outside of this performance, for any superlative talent—­sat in committee and almost consistently, over a vast extent of work—­improved upon what Genius had done.  I give you the word of an old committee-man that this is not the way of committees—­that only by miracle is it the way of any committee.  Doubtless the forty-seven were all good men and godly:  but doubtless also good and godly were the Dean and Chapter who dealt with Alfred Steven’s tomb of the Duke of Wellington in St Paul’s Cathedral; and you know what they did.  Individual genius such as Tyndale’s or even Shakespeare’s, though we cannot explain it, we may admit as occurring somehow, and not incredibly, in the course of nature.  But that a large committee of forty-seven should have gone steadily through the great mass of Holy Writ, seldom interfering with genius, yet, when interfering, seldom missing to improve:  that a committee of forty-seven should have captured (or even, let us say, should have retained and improved) a rhythm so personal, so constant, that our Bible has the voice of one author speaking through its many mouths:  that, Gentlemen, is a wonder before which I can only stand humble and aghast.