Coleridge to Tennyson, the greatest of our poets have drawn from its pages their loftiest wisdom." Really, one is tempted to ask whether such stuff as this is possible in any other country than England, or perhaps America; and whether, even in England or America, it is possible outside churches, chapels, and Sunday-schools. Sixty pages later--Dr. Farrar could not sober down in that long interval--he declares that "It was the Bible which created the prose literature of England." Now if this were true it would not serve Dr. Farrar's ostensible purpose. It would not prove that the Bible is a divine revelation. It would only prove the historical--that is to say, the largely accidental--importance of the Authorised Version of the Bible in the development of English literature. But this declaration of Dr. Farrar's is _not_ true. The Authorised Version did not initiate, it rather closed, a period of our literary history. The English of the translators in their Preface is vastly different from the English of their translation. Indeed, they were rather collators than translators. They took the older versions as the basis of their work, they altered as little as possible, and the alterations they did make were strictly in harmony with the time-honored style of those older versions, a style which was even then very archaic. Dr. Marsh, himself a devout Christian, contends that "the dialect of this translation was not, at the time of the revision, or, indeed, at any other period, the actual current book-language nor the colloquial speech of the English people." He maintains that it was "a consecrated diction" which had been "gradually built up" from the time of Wycliffe.* Its language was not the language of Chaucer's prose, nor even of Wycliffe's own prose, any more than it was the language of Bacon's or Shakespeare's, or even that of divines like Hooker. The Authorised Version is indeed a monument of English, but of special English. It has always stood aside from the main development of English prose. Of course it has exercised a considerable influence, but that influence has been chiefly indirect. From the young naive prose of Malory to the mature and calculated prose of Swift--not to come farther--there is a clear stream of development, to which the language and style of the English Bible have contributed infinitely less than is generally assumed. With the single exception of Bunyan's masterpiece, which stands apart and alone, it is difficult to name a first-class prose competition that was greatly indebted to our Authorised Version. Even the divines disregarded it as a literary model, and perhaps most conspicuously so in the seventeenth century, immediately after its publication. * George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language (Murray), pp. 441, 445.