Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/332

Rh and be clothed with fall power over the English press in our own day. Many a penny-a-lining quack would he yoke to the cart's tail.

It is well known that those who revised the English Bible in 1611 were bidden to keep as near as they could to the old versions, such as Tyndale's: this behest is one of the few good things that we owe to our Northern Solomon, the great inventor of kingcraft. The diction of the Bible seemed most archaic in the mouths of the Puritans in 1642, as their foes tell us; this could hardly have been the case had the version been a work of Bacon's time. The Book's influence upon all English-speaking men has been most astounding; the Koran alone can boast an equal share of reverence, spread far and wide. Of the English Bible's 6,000 words, only 250 are not in common use now; and almost all of these last are readily understood. Every good English writer has drawn finely upon the great Version: we know the skill with which Lord Macaulay and others interweave its homely, pithy diction with their prose. Even men who have left the English Church acknowledge that Rome herself cannot conjure away the old spell laid upon their minds by Tyndale's Bible. This book it is that affords the first lessons lisped by the English child at its mother's knee; this book it is that prompts the last words faltered by the English grey-beard on his death-bed. In this book we have found our strongest breakwater against the tides of silly novelties, ever