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.

This marks the end of the literary evolution of the Bible. Everything that
has since been done has only been in the direction of retrogression, of
injury to the text. We have now a great many later versions, much more
scholarly, so far as correct scholarship is concerned, than the King James
version, but none having any claim to literary importance. Unfortunately,
exact scholars are very seldom men of literary ability; the two faculties