A work of such a character as this should be judged not more by its absolute or intrinsic merits than by a comparison of them with the design avowed and the claims advanced by the author. In a task of such magnitude we ought not to expect to find everything perfect. If the completed structure have a symmetry of proportions and excellence of finish approaching reasonably near to the plan proposed, we should not too severely censure minor defects. Critics rarely accord all that authors claim; the former measure the actual achievement,--the latter look to the ideal conception; if the one be in a reasonable degree commensurate with the other, we should be lenient toward the faults of the performance. With this charitable substratum for our critical structure, let us test Mr. Sawyer's new version by contrasting it with his own avowed design and the claims with which he introduces his completed task. In the Preface he says,-- "This is not a work of compromises, or of conjectural interpretations of the Sacred Scriptures, neither is it a paraphrase, but a strict [strictly] literal rendering. It neither adds nor takes away; but aims to express the original with the utmost clearness and force, and with the utmost precision." This is a somewhat pretentious claim. A strictly literal rendering of any language into another is by no means always an easy task; and it is especially difficult to couple, as the translator in this case asserts he has done, the utmost clearness, force, and precision in the expression of the thought, with minute exactness of version. We are surprised that Mr. Sawyer should have rested his claim for the excellence and superiority of his translation mainly upon this quality of literalism, for it is often the case that the closest literalist is the worst translator. It is often impossible to render the thoughts expressed in the peculiar idioms of one tongue into exactly corresponding idioms of another. There are idiomatic forms, especially in the Greek, which have no precisely correspondent forms in the English, and yet these are not unfrequently the most forcible expressions of any to be found in the original; any attempt to render these literally must be abortive; and a literal rendering, or as nearly literal as possible, is the worst translation, because it sacrifices the clearness, force, and precision, to say nothing of the grace and delicacy, of the original. The French language abounds in words and phrases the literal translation of which into English perverts the meaning and destroys the force of the original. Still more is a strictly literal rendering incompatible with the preservation and transference of the beauties of style and the strength of diction. The widest range of the thought, its more delicate shades and subtiler connections, often depend in great part upon the peculiar forms of the language in which they are first clothed; and by a strictly literal translation the scope