It is hardly fair even to note the Elizabethan Shakespeare as under the influence of the King James version. The Bible influenced him markedly, but it was the Genevan version prepared during the exile of the scholars under Bloody Mary, or the Bishops' Bible prepared under Elizabeth. Those versions were familiar as household facts to him. "No writer has assimilated the thoughts and reproduced the words of Holy Scripture more copiously than Shakespeare." Dr. Furnivall says that "he is saturated with the Bible story," and a century ago Capel Lloft said quaintly that Shakespeare "had deeply imbibed the Scriptures." But the King James version appeared only five years before his death, and it is in some sense fairer to say that Shakespeare and the King James version are formed by the same influence as to their English style. The Bishop of St. Andrews even devotes the first part of his book on Shakespeare and the Bible to a study of parallels between the two in peculiar forms of speech, and thinks it "probable that our translators of 1611 owed as much to Shakespeare as, or rather far more than, he owed to them."[1] It is generally agreed that only two of his works were written after our version appeared. Several other writers have devoted separate volumes to noting the frequent use by Shakespeare of Biblical phrases and allusions and characters taken from early versions. It is a very tempting field, and we pass it by only because it is hardly in the range of the study we are now making. [1] Wordsworth, Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible, p. 9. When, however, we come to John Milton (1608-1674), we remember he was only three years old when our version was issued; that when at fifteen, an undergraduate in Cambridge, he made his first paraphrases, casting two of the Psalms into meter, the version he used was this familiar one. A biographer says he began the day always with the reading of Scripture and kept his memory deeply charged with its phrases. In later life the morning chapter was generally from the Hebrew, and was followed by an hour of silence for meditation, an exercise whose influence no man's style could escape. As a writer he moved steadily toward the Scripture and the religious teaching which it brought his age. His earlier writing is a group of poems largely secular, which yet show in phrases and expressions much of the influence of his boyhood study of the Bible, as well as the familiar use of mythology. The memorial poem "Lycidas," for example, contains the much-quoted reference to Peter and his two keys-- "Last came and last did go The pilot of the Galilean lake; Two massy keys he bore of metals twain, (The golden opes, the iron shuts amain)."