The English versions of the Bible, and the various linguistic influences which affected their language and style.

As Sir WaIter Scott, when he drew near his end, sat by the window of his library looking down on his beloved Tweed, he expressed a wish to his son-in-law Lockhart that he should have something read to him. Lockhart asked him from what book it should be. "Need you ask?" said Sir Walter, "there is but one." That book was the Bible, and it was the Bible in the Authorized Version of James the First. We may apply the words with perfect fitness to the place which the Bible holds in the rich treasure-house of our English Literature. Of all the books that have been written in our noble English tongue, "there is but one." If we could imagine some strange convulsion of nature in which all other books, even from "King Shakespere himself" down to the latest volume, were lost, and if only a copy of the English Bible were preserved our race would not be without its literary as well as its spiritual food,--its daily bread sufficient not only for the day but for the production of a new literature as glorious as the old. [...