Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/97

Rh there is added those in which Bacon's language echoes Biblical thought, the number would be considerably greater. Bacon's familiarity with the Bible was great and at the same time catholic in its range. The only parts of it that did not occur to him for apt quotation were the books dealing with Jewish ceremonial law, the minor prophets, and the general epistles. The reading is more inclusive, but it is not unlike the list of books Ruskin gives in Praeterita as those his mother required him largely to commit to memory, while he read the Bible through every year from Genesis to the Apocalypse. "Once knowing," says Ruskin, "the 32d of Deuteronomy, the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, the Sermon on the Mount, and most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by heart, and having a way of thinking with myself what words meant, it was not possible for me, even in the foolishest times of youth, to write entirely superficial or formal English." It cannot be said that Bacon's literary style owes as much to the Bible as that of Ruskin, a conscious stylist, but in the Bible he undoubtedly found that union of naturalness and dignity which is so inimitably his own. It has been suggested as one explanation of the noble English of the Bible that the translators of the Authorized Version had been brought up in the old religion, and that in consequence their English unconsciously caught and retained something of the music of the Latin service, as they had often heard it reverberating from hymn and chant through the lofty arches and down the long aisles Rh