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an easy one, yet the eminent success of the whole enterprise is largely due to the simple dignity of their style, and the mingled prudence and boldness wherewith they so blended together the idioms of two very diverse languages, that the reader is almost tempted to believe that the genius of his native tongue must have some subtil affinity with the Hebrew. Not inferior to theirs in merit, but far surpassing it in difficulty, is the work of the third, or first Oxford Company, the prophets from Isaiah to Malachi inclusive. This body was presided over by Dr John Harding, Regius Professor of Hebrew [1591–8; 1604–10], in the room of the great Puritan John Reynolds, President of Corpus Christi College [ob. 1607], who is reputed to have first suggested the new translation at the Hampton Court Conference (1603–4), full three years before it was actually commenced. This party included Dr Richard Kilbye, Rector of Lincoln College [1590–1620], afterwards Regius Professor of Hebrew [1610–1620], whose testimony to the anxious pains devoted to this version, as preserved by Isaac Walton, will be most readily credited by those whose privilege it has been to bear a part in similar conferences, directed to the same great end1. It needs but the comparison of a single chapter of Isaiah, for instance, as rendered by the Authorized translation, with that in the Bishops’ Bible which was adopted as the ground of their labours, to estimate very highly the manifold improvements effected by this Company. The common notion that the Minor Prophets are less felicitously rendered than the four Greater, must be modified by the consideration that three or four of the Twelve, as well from their pregnant brevity as from the obscurity of their allusions, are among the very hardest books of the Bible in the original, whose difficulties no faithful translator would wish to dissemble or conceal. Respecting the second, or first Cambridge Company, which sustained irreparable loss by the death of Edward Lively, Regius Professor of Hebrew [1580–1606], before their task was fairly begun, his successor also, R. Spalding, apparently dying a year after, it may be confessed that its version of Job is very unsatisfactory, nor indeed could it well be otherwise before the breaking forth of that flood of light which Albert Schultens long afterwards (1737) shed upon it from the cognate languages. A more legitimate subject of complaint is the prosaic tone of its translation of the Psalms, which, however exact and elaborate, is so spiritless as to be willingly used by but few that are familiar with the version in the Book of Common Prayer; a recension which, though derived immediately from the Great Bible, is in substance the work of that consummate master of rhythmical prose, Bishop Miles Coverdale. Of the other three Companies it will suffice to re-echo the general verdict, that the Epistles, entrusted to persons sitting at Westminster of whom little is now known, are worse done than any other part of the Canonical Scriptures, and bear no comparison with the Gospels, the Acts (which book is especially good, as indeed is its prototype in the preceding version, from the hand of Bishop Cox of Ely), and Apocalypse, as revised by the second Oxford Company, on which served Sir Henry Savile, then the most famous Greek scholar in England. In the New Testament, as was both right and almost necessary, the renderings of the older English versions were more closely adhered to than in the Old. Of the performance of the fourth, or second Cambridge Company, to which the Apocrypha was consigned, little favourable can be said. It was the earliest party to complete its share, as appears from the fact that John Bois (above, pp. xiii., xiv.) was transferred to the first Cambridge Company after his proper task herein was completed2. A formal correction of the text, often so