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made the sentence obscure, but set it in such letters, as may easily be discerned from the common text1.” The same expedient was adopted by the translators of the Bishops’ Bible (1568, 1572), somewhat too freely indeed in parts. It is one of the most considerable faults of this not very successful version, that its authors assumed a liberty of running into paraphrase, the ill effects of which this very difference in the type tended to conceal from themselves. From these two preceding versions, then held in the best repute, the Geneva and the Bishops’ Bibles, the small Roman as distinguished from the black letter (now respectively represented by the Italic and Roman type) was brought naturally enough into the Bible of 1611, and forms a prominent feature of it, whether for good or ill.

On this last point, namely, the wisdom or convenience of printing different words in the same verse or line in different kinds of type, with a view to the purpose explained above, it is not necessary for an editor of the Authorized Bible to express, or even to hold, an opinion. Italics, or whatever corresponds with them, may possibly be dispensed with altogether (though in practice this abstinence will be found hard to maintain); or they may be reserved for certain extreme cases, where marked difference in idiom between the two languages, or else some obscurity or corruption of the original text, seems to forbid a strict and literal translation. It is enough for the present purpose to say that our existing version was plainly constructed on another principle: those who made it saw no objection to the free use of a typographical device which custom had sanctioned, and would have doubtless given a different turn to many a sentence had they been debarred from indicating to the unlearned what they had felt obliged to add of their own to the actual words of the original; the addition being always either involved and implied in the Hebrew or Greek, or at any rate so necessary to the sense that the English reader would be perplexed or go wrong without it. Taking for granted, therefore, the right of the Translators thus to resort to the italic type, and the general propriety of the mode of their exercising it, the only inquiry now open to us is whether they were uniform, or reasonably consistent, in their use of it.

And in the face of patent and well-ascertained facts it is impossible to answer such a question in the affirmative. That undue haste and scarcely venial carelessness on the part of the persons engaged in carrying through the press the issues of 1611, which are only too visible in other matters (above, p. xii.), are nowhere more conspicuous than with regard to this difference in the type. If it be once conceded that the Translators must have intended to use or refrain from using italics in the selfsame manner in all cases that are absolutely identical (and the contrary supposition would be strange and unreasonable indeed), their whole case in this matter must be given up as indefensible. There is really no serious attempt to avoid palpable inconsistencies on the same page, in the same verse: and those who have gone over this branch of their work will be aware that even comparative uniformity can be secured only in one way, by the repeated comparison of the version with the sacred originals, by unflagging attention so that nothing however minute may pass unexamined. This close and critical examination was evidently entered upon, with more or less good results, by those who prepared the Cambridge Bibles of 1629 and more especially of 1638 (for before these appeared the italics of 1611, with all their glaring faults, were reprinted without change2), and in the next century by Dr Paris in 1762, by Dr Blayney and his friends in 17693. The rules to be observed in such researches, and the principles on which they are grounded, must be gathered from the study of the standard of 1611, exclusively of subsequent changes, regard being paid to what its authors intended, rather than to their actual practice.

The cases in which the italic character has been employed by the Translators of our Authorized Bible may probably be brought under the following heads:—

(1) When words quite or nearly necessary to complete the sense of the sacred writers have been introduced into the text from parallel places of Scripture. Six such instances occur in the second book of Samuel: