harmonious, modulated, yet in no sense trespassing the limits of
prose and becoming poetry. I have in the same place selected, as a
companion passage from a very different original, the Charity passage of
the First Epistle to the Corinthians, which has been so miserably and
wantonly mangled and spoilt by the bad taste and ignorance of the late
revisers. I am tempted to dwell on this because it is very germane to our
subject. One of the blunders which spoils this passage in the Revised
Version is the pedantic substitution of "mirror" for "glass," it having
apparently occurred to some wiseacre that glass was not known to the
ancients, or at least used for mirrors. Had this wiseacre had the slightest
knowledge of English literature, a single title of Gascoigne's, "The Steel
Glass," would have dispensed him at once from any attempt at emendation;
but this is ever and always the way of the sciolist. Fortunately such a
national possession as the original Authorised Version, when once
multiplied and dispersed by the press, is out of reach of vandalism. The
improved version, constructed on very much the same principle as Davenant's
or Ravenscroft's improvements on Shakespere, may be ordered to be read in
churches, and substituted for purposes of taking oaths. But the original
(as it may be called in no burlesque sense such as that of a famous story)
will always be the text resorted to by scholars and men of letters for
purposes of reading, and will remain the authentic lexicon, the recognised
source of English words and constructions of the best period. The days of
creation; the narratives of Joseph and his brethren, of Ruth, of the final
defeat of Ahab, of the discomfiture of the Assyrian host of Sennacherib;
the moral discourses of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and the Book of
Wisdom; the poems of the Psalms and the prophets; the visions of the
Revelation,--a hundred other passages which it is unnecessary to
catalogue,--will always be the _ne plus ultra_ of English composition in
their several kinds, and the storehouse from which generation after
generation of writers, sometimes actually hostile to religion and often
indifferent to it, will draw the materials, and not unfrequently the actual
form of their most impassioned and elaborate passages. Revision after
revision, constructed in corrupt following of the transient and embarrassed
phantoms of ephemeral fashion in scholarship, may sink into the Great
Mother of Dead Dogs aft