er setting right a tense here, and there
transferring a rendering from text to margin or from margin to text. But
the work of the unrevised version will remain unaffected by each of these
futile exercitations. All the elements, all the circumstances of a
translation as perfect as can be accomplished in any circumstances and with
any elements, were then present, and the workers were worthy of the work.
The plays of Shakespere and the English Bible are, and will ever be, the
twin monuments not merely of their own period, but of the perfection of
English, the complete expressions of the literary capacities of the
language, at the time when it had lost none of its pristine vigour, and had
put on enough but not too much of the adornments and the limitations of
what may be called literary civilisation.

The boundary between the prose of this period and that which we shall treat
later as "Caroline" is not very clearly fixed. Some men, such as Hall and
Donne, whose poetical work runs parallel to that in prose which we are now
noticing, come as prose writers rather under the later date; others who
continued to write till long after Elizabeth's death, and even after that
of James, seem, by their general complexion, to belong chiefly to the
earlier day. The first of these is Ben Jonson, whose high reputation in
other ways has somewhat unduly damaged, or at least obscured, his merits as
a prose writer. His two chief works in this kind are his _English Grammar_,
in which a sound knowledge of the rules of English writing is discovered,
and the quaintly named _Explorata_ or _Discoveries_ and _Timber_--a
collection of notes varying from a mere aphorism to a respectable essay.
In these latter a singular power of writing prose appears. The book was not
published till after Ben's death, and is thought to have been in part at
least written during the last years of his life. But there can be no
greater contrast than exists between the prose style usual at that time--a
_style tourmente_, choked with quotation, twisted in every direction by
allusion and conceit, and marred by perpetual confusions of English with
classical grammar--and the straightforward, vigorous English of these
_Discoveries_. They come, in character as in time, midway between Hooker
and Dryden, and they incline rather to the more than to the less modern
form. Here is found the prose character of Shakespere which, if less
magniloquent than that in verse, has a greater touch o