138 PUBLICATION OF KING JAMES'S BIBLE. would be out of place here to describe how, during the three days of conference, amid the titters of the courtiers and the gratified smiles of the clergy, the conceited king called the Puritan doctors "dunces fit to be whipped," and indulged in other similar flights of his peculiar, knock-down style of oratory. The scene, ridiculous in most respects, is memorable to us, because it led to the publication of our English Bible. During one of the pauses of the fusilade, when the royal orator was out of breath, Dr. Reynolds proposed a new version of the Scriptures; and James saw fit, by-and-by, to yield his gracious consent. A.D. Fifty-four scholars were appointed to the great work, but only forty-seven of these actually engaged in the translation. Taking the Bishop's Bible as the basis of the new version, they set to their task in divisions, Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster being the centres of their labour; and, often meeting to compare notes and correct one another's manuscripts, they completed their translation in about three years. Our Bible was therefore pub1611 lished, with a dedication to King James, in the year 1611. Of late years there has been some talk of a new translation. No doubt, a revisal, by which manifest misprints or inaccuracies in translation might be remedied, would be a good thing; but a completely new translation would so utterly destroy those solemn associations which, rooted in every heart, are twined, closer than the ivy around its elm-tree, round the antique English of our Bibles, that to attempt it would be dangerous and wrong. During the ascendency of the Puritans in Cromwell's day, the same scheme was mooted, for the Puritans long preferred the Geneva Bible to that of King James; but on the proposal being laid before the leading scholars of that time, they pronounced the translation of 1611 "best of any in the world;" and so the matter dropped. Hallam reminds us that, even in the days of King James, the language of this translation was older than the prevailing speech. "It may," this great critic says, "in the eyes of many, be a better English, but it is not the English of Daniel, or Raleigh, or Bacon, as any one may easily perceive. It abounds, in fact, especially in THE ENGLISH OF THE BIBLE. 139 the Old Testament, with obsolete phraseology, and with single words long since abandoned, or retained only in provincial use." This may all be true; yet, in the face of Hallam's implied disparagement, we hold, with scores of better judges, that the English of the Bible is unequalled in the full range of our literature. Whether we take the subtile argument of Paul's Epistles, the sublime poetry of Job and the Psalms, the beautiful imagery of the Parables, the simple narrative of the Gospels, the magnificent eloquence of Isaiah, or the clear plain histories of Moses and Samuel, but one impression deepens as we read, and remains as we close the volume,—that, without regard to its infinite greatness as the written word of God, taken simply as a literary work, there is no English book like our English Bible. CLOSE by the river Avon in Warwickshire, a tall grey spire, springing from amid embowering elms and lime-trees, marks the position of the parish church of Stratford, in the chancel of which sleeps the body of our greatest poet. The proud roof of Westminster has been deemed by England the fitting vault for her illustrious dead; but Shakspere's dust rests in a humbler tomb. By his own loved river, whose gentle music fell sweet upon his childish ear, he dropped into his last long sleep; and still its melancholy murmur, as it sweeps between its willowy banks, seems to sing the poet's dirge. Four lines, carved upon the flat stone which lies over his grave, are ascribed to his own pen. Whoever wrote them, they have served their purpose well, for a religious horror of disturbing the honoured dust has ever since hung about the place : Good friend, for Jesus' sake, forbeare, To digg the dust encloased heare. A niche in the wall above holds a bust of the poet, whose high arching brow, and sweet oval face, fringed with a peaked beard and small moustache, are so familiar to us all. How well we know his face and his spirit; and yet, how little of the man's real life has descended to our day! Not very far from Shakspere's tomb part of the house in which he was born still stands. Sun and rain and air have BIRTH AND PARENTAGE OF SHAKSPERE, 141 gradually reduced the plastered timber of its old neighbours into powder; but its wood and lime still hold together, and the room is still shown in which baby Shakspere's voice uttered its first feeble wail. The dingy walls of the little chamber are scribbled all over with the names of visitors, known and unknown to fame. It is pleasant to think that this shrine, sacred to the memory of the greatest English writer, has been lately purchased by the English nation; so that lovers of Shakspere have now the satisfaction of feeling that the relics, which tell so picturesque a story of the poet's earliest days, are in safe and careful keeping. Here, then, was born in April 1564 William, son of John Shakspere and Mary Arden, his wife. The gossiping Aubrey, no great authority, certainly, who came into the 1564 world about ten years after Shakspere's death, says that A.D. the poet's father was a butcher; others make out the honest man to have been a wool-comber or a glover, while an ingenious writer strives to reconcile all accounts by supposing that since good John held some land in the neighbourhood of Stratford, whenever he killed a sheep, he sold the mutton, the wool, and the skin, adding to his other occupations the occasional dressing of leather and fashioning of gloves. Perhaps John Shakspere's chief occupation was dealing in wool. At any rate, whatever may have been his calling, he ranked high enough among the burgesses of Stratford to sit on the bench as High Bailiff or Mayor of the. town. Mary Arden, who should perhaps interest us more, if the commonly received rule be true, that men more strongly resemble their mothers in nature and genius, seems to have belonged to an old county family, and to have possessed what was then a considerable fortune. The beautiful woodland scenery amid which the boy grew to early manhood made a deep impression on his soul. The beds of violets and banks of wild thyme, whose fragrance seems to mingle with the music of the lines that paint their beauty, blossomed richly by the Avon. The leafy glades, from which were pictured those through whose cool green light the melancholy Jacques wandered, and under whose arching boughs Bully Bottom and his. 142 THE POET'S SCHOOL DAYS. friends rehearsed their "very tragical mirth," were not in the dales of Middlesex or Surrey, but in the Warwickshire Valley of the Red Horse. But of all men or boys, Shakspere was no mere dreamer, fit only "To pore upon the brook that babbles by." We have no doubt that, when the daily tasks were done in the Free Grammar School of Stratford, where Will probably got all the regular instruction he ever had, the said Will might often have been spied on Avon banks, rod in hand, thinking more of trout and dace than of violets or wild thyme. And, as we shall shortly see, there is a strong suspicion, not far removed from certainty, that more than once he saw the moon rise over the dark oak woods of Charlecote Park, while he lurked in the shadow, waiting for the deer, with more of the poacher than the poet in his guise. And, while he was receiving from Hunt and Jenkins, then the masters of the school, that education which his friend Jonson characterizes as consisting of "little Latin and less Greek," an occasional visit to scenes of a different kind, not far away, may have mingled the colouring of town life and courtly pageants with those pictures of woodland sweetness which his mind caught from the home landscape. Warwick and Coventry-Godiva's town-were near; and in the grand castle of Kenilworth in the year 1575, when the princely Leicester feasted the Queen for nineteen days, why may we not suppose that Alderman or ExBailiff Shakspere, his wife Dame Mary, and his little son Will, then aged eleven, were among the crowd of people who had travelled from all the country round to see the Queen, the masquers, and the fire-works? Strolling players, too, sometimes knocked up their crazy stage, hung with faded curtains, in the market-place of Stratford, and there flourished their wooden swords, and raved through their parts to the immense delight of the gaping rustics. Such visits, dear to all the boys of a country town, were, no doubt, longed for and intensely enjoyed by young Shakspere. How he spent his life after he had left school, and before he went to London, we know as dimly as we know the calling of his |