is, when we, for the most part (and never before) prepare for
our Eternal Habitation, which we pass on unto with many sighs,
groans and sad thoughts: and in the end (by the workmanship of
Death) finish the sorrowful business of a wretched life. Towards
which we always travel, both sleeping and waking. Neither have
those beloved companions of honour and riches any power at all to
hold us any one day by the glorious promise of entertainments:
but by what crooked path soever we walk, the same leadeth on
directly to the House of Death, whose doors lie open at all
hours, and to all persons."

But great as are Bacon and Raleigh, they cannot approach, as writers of
prose, the company of scholarly divines who produced--what is probably the
greatest prose work in any language--the Authorised Version of the Bible in
English. Now that there is at any rate some fear of this masterpiece
ceasing to be what it has been for three centuries--the school and training
ground of every man and woman of English speech in the noblest uses of
English tongue--every one who values that mother tongue is more especially
bound to put on record his own allegiance to it. The work of the Company
appears to have been loyally performed in common; and it is curious that
such an unmatched result should have been the result of labours thus
combined, and not, as far as is known, controlled by any one guiding
spirit. Among the translators were many excellent writers,--an advantage
which they possessed in a much higher degree than their revisers in the
nineteenth century, of whom few would be mentioned among the best living
writers of English by any competent authority. But, at the same time, no
known translator under James has left anything which at all equals in
strictly literary merit the Authorised Version, as it still is and as long
may it be. The fact is, however, less mysterious after a little examination
than it may seem at first sight. Putting aside all questions as to the
intrinsic value of the subject-matter as out of our province, it will be
generally admitted that the translators had in the greater part of the Old
Testament, in a large part of the Apocrypha, and in no small part of the
New Testament, matter as distinguished from form, of very high literary
value to begin with in their originals. In the second place, they had, in
the Septuagint and in the Vulgate, versions also of no small literary
merit