But between the rigid sectarians and those of easy-going faith who were wont to meet at the Mermaid Tavern, there was a third range of thinking and of thinkers;--not believing all poetry and poets Satanic, and yet not neglectful of the offices of Christianity. The King himself would have ranked with these; and so also would the dignitaries of that English Church of which he counted himself, in some sense, the head. It was in the first year of his reign, 1603--he having passed a good part of the summer in hunting up and down through the near counties--partly from his old love of such things, partly to be out of reach of the plague which ravaged London that year (carrying off over thirty thousand people); it was, I say, in that first year that, at the instance of some good Anglicans, he issued a proclamation--“_Touching a meeting for the hearing and for the determining things pretended to be amiss in the Church._” Out of this grew a conference at Hampton Court, in January, 1604. Twenty-five were called to that gathering, of whom nine were Bishops. On no one day were they all present; nor did there seem promise of any great outcome from this assemblage, till one Rainolds, a famous Greek scholar of Oxford, “moved his Majesty that there might be a new translation of the Bible, because previous ones were not answerable altogether to the truth of the Original.” _King James’ Bible._ There was discussion of this; my Lord Bancroft, Bishop of London, venturing the sage remark that if every man’s humor should be followed, there would be no end of translating. In the course of the talk we may well believe that King James nodded approval of anything that would flatter his kingly vanities, and shook his big unkempt head at what would make call for a loosening of his purse-strings. But out of this slumberous conference, and out of these initial steps, did come the scriptural revision; and did come that noble monument of the English language, and of the Christian faith, sometimes called “King James’ Bible,” though--for anything that the old gentleman had to do vitally or specifically with the revision--it might as well have been called the Bible of King James’ tailor, or the Bible of King James’ cat.