life of the Canadians are so similar to those of the States gives a great advantage to American manufacturers. The latter are already making articles for their own immense market which are equally suitable for Canadian requirements. The English manufac

turer, on the other hand, is in a very different position, as, in order fully to meet the Canadian demand, he would have to establish special departments, new designs, models and patterns adapted to the local conditions of what is for him, up to the present, a relatively small market. When in Canada I heard many complaints of a certain want of adaptability on the part of British manufacturers to the requirements of their Canadian customers, and of an unwillingness either to study or to comply with local requirements, with the result that many merchants who preferred English goods owing to their superior workmanship were unable to sell them. Another advantage enjoyed by the American manufacturer is proximity to his customer, which enables both to enter more easily into direct personal relations.

To compensate for these natural disadvantages, English manufacturers will have to devote more money and thought to the establishment in Canada of stocks, warehouses, and other facilities with the object of enabling their customers readily to obtain supplies of spare parts and all those little details that mean so much in the conduct of industrial enterprises, and in the smooth working of their daily routine. Our firms would also need to organize a more energetic propaganda for British goods in the Dominion, and to take into account the necessity of relieving themselves as far as circumstances permit of the handicap imposed by the difference in currency and weights in Canada. They should accommodate themselves to Canadian requirements in those respects, and base The English Review.

their calculations on the dollar currency and on the short ton of 2000 lb., which is universally adopted on the North-American continent. There can be no doubt that a certain revision of the methods of British manufacturers in these respects would do much to increase the sale of English goods, the solidity and high quality of which are fully appreciated by the Canadians, who would be glad to do business with our firms in preference to any other if a greater attention to their requirements made it possible for them. There is a huge business awaiting our manufacturers in the Dominion, a vast country with unlimited resources, and a rapidly growing market, in which closer attention and greater energy will do far more to foster their trade than tariff crutches, with their paralyz ing influence on enterprise.

The

Although it may be a long time before a state of absolute Free Trade comes into existence between the two great kindred States of North America, it is now quite clear that there the apostles of high protection have had their day. How far this swing of the pendulum may lead in the immediate future to a further demolition of tariff walls it is difficult to forecast. moral effect, however, of the practical proof in both countries that the free exchange of products leads to greater prosperity and not to mutual destruction, cannot, if properly emphasized, be lost upon the intelligent democracies of the two most progressive States of the American Continent. All those who hold that an increase in the world's trade, the reduction of artificial barriers, and the most economic use of the varied potentialities of the earth are a gain for humanity must rejoice to think that a great step in the direction of universal Free Trade has been taken in the conclusion of the Reciprocity Agreement between Canada and the United States.

The tercentenary of the publication of the Authorized Version of the Bible is an occasion that calls for grateful commemoration. Not only has the Authorized Version a rightful claim to be regarded as the first great English classic-not only, as Hallam admits, is it "the perfection of our English language" but its influence on the religious and social life of successive generations of English-speaking peoples at home, in the colonies, and in America can hardly be exaggerated. It is the purpose of the present paper to trace the history of this great Version and to consider its beneficent influence on the life and language of the English people.

It is a curious fact, as has been pointed out that the origin of this Version should have been of an incidental, almost an accidental, character. The Hampton Court Conference, it will be remembered, was held soon after the accession of James I. to consider "things pretended to be amiss in the Church." On the second day of the Conference-Monday, January 16, 1604-Dr. Reynolds, the Puritan leader, the learned President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, suggested: "May your Majesty be pleased that the Bible be new translated, such as are extant not answering the original," and he instanced two or three particulars. The Bishop of London broke in with the remark that "if every man's humor be followed there would be no end of translating"; but the suggestion commended itself to the King. "I wish," he said "some special pains were taken for an uniform translation, which should be done by the best-learned in both Universities, then reviewed by the Bishops, presented to the Privy Council, lastly ratified by Royal authority, to be read in the whole

Church, and no other." He further added that no marginal notes should be added thereto, for, he said, "in the Geneva translation some notes are partial, untrue, seditious, and savoring of traitorous conceits." The practical outcome of this debate was the appointment in 1607 of a body of revisers, some forty-seven in number, which was divided into six companies, of which two were to sit at Cambridge, two at Oxford, and two at Westminster. Many of the revisers are otherwise unknown to fame, but the company included the saintly Dean Andrewes, afterwards Bishop of Winchester; Dean Overal, the author of the latter portion of the Church Catechism; Dr. Reynolds, in some sense "the father of the Version"; Dr. Saravia, the friend of Hooker; Dr. Abbott, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury; Dr. Barlow, the historian of the Hampton Court Conference; Dr. Miles Smith, who wrote "the learned and religious preface to the translation"; and Mr. Bedwell, of Cambridge, the tutor of the famous Oriental scholar, Pococke. But few details as to the exact order of procedure have come down to us, and never perhaps, as Dr. Scrivener says, has a great enterprise of a like nature been carried out with less knowledge handed down to posterity of the laborers, their method, and manner of working. We learn, however, that the work of revision occupied two years and nine months, and some time in 1611, "after long expectation and great desire," says Fuller, the new Version was published. Here again it is curious that we do not know the exact

date of publication. There were, it appears, two distinct issues of the work in 1611, but the precise date of neither is known, and it has even been

a matter of much dispute as to which was the earlier. The number of slightly variant copies still extant seems to show that the original publication cannot have been made very late in the year; and beyond that, writes Dr. Kenyon of the British Museum in a letter, it is not possible to go. It may be, as some have suggested, that the record of the publication was destroyed in the Great Fire.

Among the rules laid down for the guidance of the revisers was the following: "The ordinary Bible read in the Church, commonly called the Bishops' Bible, to be followed and as little altered as the truth of the Original will permit. These translations to be used when they agree better with the text than the Bishops' Bible: Tindale's, Matthews', Coverdale's, Whitchurch's [i.e. the Great Bible], Geneva." And that they strictly followed their instructions is clear. In their Preface, now unfortunately often omitted in modern copies of the Authorized Version, while the fulsome dedication to King James is retained, the revisers say: "Truly, good Christian reader we never thought, from the beginning, that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one

but to make a good one better or out of many good ones one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against-that hath been our endeavor, that our mark." And it is to this principle that the Authorized Version owes its unrivalled merits. It was the very aim of the revisers to appropriate the chief excellences of each former version with which they were acquainted. It has thus come to pass, as Trench says, that our Version, "like a costly mosaic," besides having its own felicities, is the inheritor of the successes in language of all the translations which went before. Indeed, so anxious were the revisers to profit by existing translations

that they did not decline to use the Rheimish Version, and from that source we get the felicitous phrase, "the ministry of reconciliation," and the happy rendering, "a profane person," in the twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

But though King James's translators made good use of the various English Versions which during the preceding eighty-five years had followed that of Tyndale in 1526, yet Tyndale's translation remains the foundation of our Authorized Version. Indeed, every English Version that had since appeared was a mere revision or correction of Tyndale's Bible. "It is agreed on all hands," writes Professor Cook in the "Cambridge History of English Literature," "that the English of the Authorized Version is, in essentials, that of Tyndale's. Minor modifications were made by translators and revisers for the next eighty years or so; but, broadly speaking the Authorized Version is Tyndale's." In connection with this point the singularly beautiful passage in Froude's "History of England" must be quoted

Of the translation itself (he writes), though since that time it has been many times revised and altered, we may say that it is substantially the Bible with which we are all familiar. The peculiar genius-if such a word may be permitted-which breathes through it, the mingled tenderness and majesty, the Saxon simplicity-the preternatural grandeur-unequalled, unapproached, in the attempted improvements of modern scholars-all are here, and bear the impress of the mind of one man-William Tyndale. Lying, while engaged in that great office, under the shadow of death, the sword above his head and ready at any moment to fall, he worked, under circumstances alone perhaps truly worthy of the task which was laid upon him-his spirit, as it were, divorced from the world, moved in a purer element than common air.

And

In what sense King James's Bible came to be called the Authorized Version has been much disputed, for, though the words "Appointed to be read in Churches” appeared upon the title-page, yet there is no evidence to show that the Version was ever publicly sanctioned by Convocation or by Parliament, or by Privy Council, or by the King. It appears, however, that the new Version speedily superseded the Bishops' Bible (which was not again reprinted) as the official version of the Scriptures in public worship, although the Geneva Bible continued for some time longer to be "the familiar volume of the fireside and the closet." At length by virtue of its own inherent superiority, it gained a general currency, and from the middle of the seventeenth century the Authorized Version has remained "the undisputed Bible" of the English people. that it deserved the place to which by its own merits it attained is nowhere better recognized than in the Preface to the Revised Version of the New Testament, published in 1881. The revisers, who included such men as Lightfoot, Westcott, Hort, Ellicott, Scrivener, Tregelles, and Vaughan, there say: "We have had to study this great Version (the A. V.) carefully and minutely, line by line; and the longer we have been engaged upon it the more we have learned to admire its simplicity, ts dignity, its power, its happy turns of expression, its general accuracy, and, we must not forget to add, the music of its cadences and the felicities of its rhythm." Similar testimony to the marvellous beauty of the language has been borne by many distinguished writers. Archbishop Trenchand no one is more qualified to speak on this aspect of the Authorized Version than the author of "The Study of Words"-declares that the language is "nearly as perfect as possible." All the words used, he says, are of "the

noblest stamp, alike removed from vulgarity and pedantry; they are neither too familiar, nor, on the other side, not familiar enough; they never crawl on the ground, as little are they stilted and far-fetched." In like manner the Roman Catholic Faber, in a passage of high eloquence thus speaks of the Authorized Version:

It lives on the ear like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells which the convert scarcely knows how he can forego.

The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. It is the representative of a man's best moments; all that there is about him of soft and gentle and pure and penitent and good speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing which doubt never dimmed and controversy never soiled; and in the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of re ligiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Biblę.

The influence of the Bible on the religious and social life of the people, and on the English language can scarcely be overestimated. Its popularity, as John Richard Green has pointed out, had been growing fast from the day when the copies of the Great Bible had been set up in St. Paul's Cathedral. Even then we are told:

many well-disposed people used much to resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any that had an audible voice to read to them. One John Porter used sometimes to be occupied in that godly exercise, to the edifying of himself as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and of a big stature, and great multitudes would resort thither to hear him, because he could read well and had an audible voice.

As time went on the repeated revisions of the Bible had helped to make men more familiar with the text. The

Bible became at length a national possession. "No other book has so penetrated and permeated the hearts and speech of the English race as has the Bible. What Homer was to the Greeks and the Koran to the Arabs, that, or something not unlike it," says Professor Cook, "the Bible has become to the English." Its influence is alike supreme on the literature, on the social life, and on the religious instincts of the English people.

It is generally allowed by all competent authorities that the Authorized Version of the Bible is the first great English classic. With the exception of a few forgotten tracts of Wyclif, all the prose literature of England, wrote John Richard Green, has grown up since Tyndale's translation of the Scriptures (the foundation of the Authorized Version) was made. "So far as the nation at large was concerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry save the little-known verse of Chaucer existed in the English tongue when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches." And considered simply as a "literary monument" it will be allowed that "the English version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the English tongue." "The English of the Authorized Version," says Dr. Kenyon, "is the finest specimen of our prose literature at a time when English prose wore its stateliest and most majestic form." Lord Macaulay, in his Essay on John Dryden, bears similar testimony. He speaks of "that stupendous work, the English Bible, a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power." And that the English Version, especially of the New Testament, which bears in particular the impress of the genius of Tyndale, is a greater literary work than the original

Greek will again be generally allowed. Lord Tennyson, we are told in his biography, would sometimes insist on this point. Some parts of the New Testament, he would say, are finer in English than in Greek, especially in the Apocalypse; and he would instance the passage, "And again they said Alleluia: and her smoke rose up for ever and ever." Magnificent conception, he would say-darkness and fire rolling together, for ever and ever! Or he would quote with boundless admiration the opening passage of the tenth chapter, "And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire." Mr. Lionel Tollemache tells us that one day Benjamin Jowett praised to him the Authorized Version of the New Testament, which he regarded as sometimes, especially in the Apocalypse, superior to the Greek original. By way of illustration Jowett repeated the text, "And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." As he quoted these magnificent words, says Mr. Tollemache, "his voice betrayed more of saintly emotion than I ever observed in it before or since."

The influence of the Authorized Version upon subsequent English literature has been considerable. This influence is seen in diction, of which perhaps Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" affords the most remarkable example, in quotations, in incidental allusions, and in the numberless scriptural phrases which have passed into colloquial language. When Spenser and Shakespeare quote the Bible it is not, of course, the Version of 1611, and the same is true of most of Bacon's allusions, and of many of John Milton's.