to help them. In the third place, they had in the earlier English
versions excellent quarries of suitable English terms, if not very
accomplished models of style. These, however, were not in any way
advantages peculiar to themselves. The advantages which, in a manner at
least, were peculiar to themselves may be divided into two classes. They
were in the very centre of the great literary ferment of which in this
volume I am striving to give a history as little inadequate as possible.
They had in the air around them an English purged of archaisms and
uncouthnesses, fully adapted to every literary purpose, and yet still racy
of the soil, and free from that burden of hackneyed and outworn literary
platitudes and commonplaces with which centuries of voluminous literary
production have vitiated and loaded the English of our own day. They were
not afraid of Latinising, but they had an ample stock of the pure
vernacular to draw on. These things may be classed together. On the other
side, but equally healthful, may be put the fact that the style and
structure of the originals and earlier versions, and especially that verse
division which has been now so unwisely abandoned, served as safeguards
against the besetting sin of all prose writers of their time, the habit of
indulging in long wandering sentences, in paragraphs destitute of
proportion and of grace, destitute even of ordinary manageableness and
shape. The verses saved them from that once for all; while on the other
hand their own taste, and the help given by the structure of the original
in some cases, prevented them from losing sight of the wood for the trees,
and omitting to consider the relation of verse to verse, as well as the
antiphony of the clauses within the verse. Men without literary faculty
might no doubt have gone wrong; but these were men of great literary
faculty, whose chief liabilities to error were guarded against precisely by
the very conditions in which they found their work. The hour had come
exactly, and so for once had the men.

The result of their labours is so universally known that it is not
necessary to say very much about it; but the mere fact of the universal
knowledge carries with it a possibility of under-valuation. In another
place, dealing with the general subject of English prose style, I have
selected the sixth and seventh verses of the eighth chapter of Solomon's
Song as the best example known to me of absolutely perfect English
prose--