Greek words. "An analysis of the variations in the First Epistle of St. John," says Westcott, "may furnish a type of the general character of the New Testament. As nearly as I can reckon them, there are seventy-one differences between Tyndale's text and that of the Great Bible. Of these forty-three come directly from Coverdale's earlier revision (and in a great measure indirectly from the Vulgate); seventeen from the Vulgate, where Coverdale before had not followed it; the remaining eleven variations are from other sources. But among the most objectionable changes are the interpolations from the Vulgate, which are not found in the Greek. I have observed twelve such interpolations in the Epistle to the Romans. It is also worthy of note that in the second edition of the Great Bible, published in April, 1540, a considerable number of new readings, taken from Münster's version, were inserted in the Old Testament, especially in the prophetical books. In the New Testament changes were also made in this edition, taken principally from the Latin of Erasmus, and the Complutensian Polyglott. Such a mode of revision was decidedly retrograde, as the original texts ought to be the sole ultimate standards, and no word or clause ought to be admitted to a version which is not based upon them. The book of Psalms was carefully revised with the aid of Luther's version and the SwissGerman. The language is smooth and flowing, but often paraphrastic; it is perhaps for this reason better adapted for chanting, and it is still retained in the English Prayer Book. The printing of the Bible was begun in Paris towards the close of 1538 by royal licence, but before it was completed the licence was withdrawn, and the sheets already printed were seized by order of the Inquisition, and condemned to the flames. Many were burnt, but a number were sold, as Foxe quaintly says, "to a haberdasher to rap caps in." Grafton heard of them, bought them through his agents, and had them taken to London. He afterwards succeeded in importing presses, type, paper, and workmen; and the book was published in April, 1539, a huge folio volume, whence its name-THE GREAT BIBLE. As first issued it had no prologue; in November of the same year, however, a prologue was written by Cranmer and inserted in the copies remaining, and in subsequent editions; this gave it the name CRANMER'S BIBLE. It has a beautifully engraved titlepage, representing the king on his throne receiving the Word of God from the Saviour, and handing it to Cranmer and Cromwell. Below this Cranmer is figured on the one side handing the Bible to the clergy, and Cromwell on the other giving it to the laity. The Bible has no dedication and no notes. An injunction was issued by the vicar-general to the clergy "to provide one book of the Bible in the largest volume in English, and set up the same in some convenient place within the church that ye have care of, whereat your parishioners may most commodiously resort to the same and read it." During the years 1540 and 1541 at least six folio editions were printed. It is interesting to observe on the title-page of one of them that it was "overseen and perused at the commandment of the King's highness, by Cuthbert, Bishop of Durham," the same Cuthbert Tunstal who, a few years before, had denounced and burnt Tyndale's New Testament. From the time of the printing of Tyndale's Testament in 1526 to 1560 there were, as nearly as I can estimate, about sixty editions of the New Testament, and thirty of the entire Bible published; and it shows how the sterling qualities of Tyndale's Testament were appreciated, that of the sixty editions no less than forty were Tyndale's. The effects produced by the English Bible upon the minds, sentiments, and acts of all classes of the community were wonderful. The prejudices of ages were dissipated, freedom of thought assumed its legitimate sway, and England took the lead among nations as the champion and guardian of civil and religious liberty. Yet the fate of the men to whom England was indebted for all this was terrible. Tyndale was strangled at Vilvorde, Coverdale escaped death by exile, Rogers was the first victim of the Marian persecution, and Cranmer was burnt at the stake. Three other versions followed. 1. The Breeches Bible, so called from the peculiar rendering of Gen. iii. 7. It was translated by English exiles in Geneva, and published there in 1560. 2. The Bishops' Bible, prepared by a committee of prelates, under Archbishop Parker, published 1568. 3. The Authorised Version, translated by forty-seven eminent scholars, and issued in 1611. Now, after an interval of two hundred and seventyfour years, a fresh revision is issued to the English nation. MOWBRAY is discovered at the writingtable, adding a few sentences to a letter to Miss Isabel Lee, which his wife had begun. "Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." Health and a day! This is what Mr. Emerson says in that rhapsody on Nature, which I still think his finest work; HIGHLAND RESTING-PLACES. BY "SHIRLEY." III. THE PEAKS OF ARRAN. panied with any healing power. The impatience of emaciated saint or stiffnecked Puritan with mere secular joys (as compared with the glory to follow) is not more manifest or intelligible than the inability of the philosopher, to whom this fair world is but a ghostly mask, to take comfort from the picturesque. To such an one there is something distinctly impertinent in smiling skies, and laughing seas, and prattling brooks; and he says in the bitterness of his heart, as Beddoes said in his singular "Death's Jest Book,"" The face of the world's a lie." Castail Abhail. and certainly the pomp of emperors is ridiculous when compared with the view which from our bedroom window I looked on this morning. With few and cheap elements what a feast does nature provide for us! and how supremely blest is the man who with a light heart, a clear The moody moralist is wrong-as he finds conscience, and a sound liver can seat him- to his cost. Emerson's immense enjoyment self at her bountiful table. Alas! so much" the dawn is my Assyria, the sunset and depends upon the liver. Real exhilaration moonrise my Paphos and unimaginable realms has become so rare and difficult in these times that it is like to die out altogether, like the Dodo. Black care sits behind the swiftest horseman-a cloud of doubt darkens the brightest day-the fever is in our blood, and we take it with us to the cool summit of Alp or Apennine. The sadness of a moralist, like Carlyle, indeed, is not entirely due to dyspepsia. The man who after dining with Sidney Smith must needs write in his journal, "To me through these thin cobwebs "-Thin cobwebs! Alas! poor Yorick!" "Death and Eternity sat glaring," is clearly beyond the reach of any medicine that nature can provide. To the Seer, who apprehends the unseen with an almost morbid vividness, who feels that only a frail and perishable crust separates him from the fathomless abysses, the ministry of sun and moon and stars, of woods and fields and seas and rivers, is not likely to be accom of faerie "-indicates a truer and deeper outlook. The inexhaustible loveliness of our world is not altogether a vain show. It may be, as you say, only a frail perch above the bottomless gulf; but, such as it is, it has been fashioned by a divine hand, by an architect who is never at fault. He has made it, as you see, very good, beautiful exceedingly; devised it with matchless skill, adjusted it with incomparable precision. Is it possible that you can think or believe that it has no message for you, and that without hurt or damage to your immortal soul you can turn your back upon the sea and sky, the mountain and meadow and woodland, of this astonishing universe? Mrs. Mowbray (née May Maxwell) enters from behind, sees how her letter has been tampered with, inflicts condign punishment, and taking the pen, continues O Bell! what an altogether too delightful And, better still, it cannot be bought with place this Vale of Tears is on a day like this, money. There is a fearful and wonderful when the shadows are chasing each other creature across the Sound, who pays three round the mountain hollows; and now Ben thousand a year for his forest; but the exGhoul, now Ben Tarsuin, now Keer Vhor, is clusive enjoyment of the beautiful is not struck into sudden glory by the sunlight. included in his lease, and even if it were, he Inside, our little cottage is homely enough in wouldn't be a bit the richer. For the poor all conscience; but outside, it is the palace of a man cares for the picturesque as little as Mr. king! Everything hereabouts, you know, Carlyle cared. Ralph says that I am cribbing belongs to the Duke, the grouse, the deer, from Emerson again. I don't care if I am; the woods, the mountains-everything except but in fact I never saw the passage till he what is best; and that belongs to nobody in read it to me this moment. Here it is: particular, and the merest beggar may have "The charming landscape which I saw this it for the asking. (What an advantageous morning is indubitably made up of some arrangement for poor people like ourselves!) | twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has, but He whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their land-deeds give them no title." So you see Ralph and I are poets, and in virtue of that gift the whole lordship of Arran belongs to us in a much more real way than it does to the Duke. What we see every morning when we look out of our window you will find in Ralph's sketchy pen and ink* See the sketch in the March number of GOOD WORDS, page 185. at the top of our first page (correct so far as it goes) a semicircle of giant peaks, with the blue sea all about their feet. We have bathed and boated and flirted (O Bell! people will flirt with me, do what I can), and dawdled about to our heart's content; but yesterday a great longing seized me to get to the top of that far-away battlement-sometimes it looks miles away, sometimes close at handand Ralph in his good-natured way-for to do him justice he is as a rule delightfully lazy, and just as ready to lie in the sun at my feet, as he was before we were engagedpromised to give us a hand up if we likedsister Euphame; for Mabel Graham-Mabel us" being me and Mabel, and Mabel's little From Ben Tarsuin. Gray that was, you remember?-is our nearest neighbour, and lives only a couple of fields away. So we see each other ten times a day, and she is just as simple and roundeyed as when we lost ourselves on the Äletch glacier, and takes just as much fresh and innocent delight in everything and everybody, as if she were still running wild about her Yorkshire moorland. She was born and bred among the moors, you know, like Charlotte Brontë. And Euphame is a beauty. The men are all crazy about her, and poor Mr. Puffy Brown, the Edinburgh writer, who is as stiff as a poker, and as stupid as an owl, would kiss the ground she treads, I believe, if there were any case in point. The wail of an infant is heard from The short and the long of it is that our himself. You don't have anything like it anywhere else. There is a certain dinginess and poverty about the fine weather of the East Coast; the sun that professes to shine upon the Calton Hill has, as your poet Campbell once remarked, a "sickly glare" at its best. I have little doubt indeed that on further inquiry Mr. Ruskin will find that the mean and disreputable "Storm cloud of the Nineteenth Century" was born and brought up in the Lothians.* But here we don't stick at trifles. Wet or dry, the clerk of our weather has no taste for the compromises that are in fashion at Westminster and elscwhere. The cats and dogs of popular meteorology are a joke to our waterspouts. But when the storm has once spent its passion, there is an end of it. And who indeed can object to an "ootbrak" which is accompanied with such Lear-like sublimities-the thunder-cloud trailing up the bay, the incredible rainbow that arches Ben Ghoil? It doesn't hang about the place, and mutter and sputter, and mizzle and drizzle, and make everything uncomfortable for everybody for days. The clouds roll away to the Atlantic, and the sun shines out-jovially, royally-as he used to shine elsewhere when Mr. Ruskin's papa lived at Herne Hill, and our eloquent Jeremiah was still a little boy in bib and tucker. "Ach Gott!" as Mr. Carlyle says, "it is a queer world. Our Jeremiah in bib and tucker!-indisputable bib and Poor Puffy, to do him justice, is not worse than his neighbours, and his lugubrious vivacity is considered quite lively, I understand, in the select society of the metropolis. Why is it, Bell, that your eminent big-wigs, young and old, are all stiff and stupid? Our witty friend, Mr. Justice Jawkins, told me once but you know the story. What do you say to that, Miss Bell Lee? Shade of Scott, or Wilson, or Jeffrey !-to say nothing of David Hume and Principal Robertson, on whom you always retreat in extremitywhat is your famous Edinburgh select society coming to, I would like to know? Why, my dear, if you go down-down-down at this rate, why in the course of the next century or two, you won't be so very much superior to all the rest of the world. "The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century." Py John Ruskin. Allen, 1884. tucker of the Anglo-Saxon race-and cartloads of æsthetic gabble-barrenest of all gabble in this gabbling universe-still nebulous in chaos. Ach Gott! Ach Gott!" The earth in short has had a famous washing, and the hoary old mountains themselves look as clean and fresh as last night's daisy. Allons, mes enfants !-a march like the Marseillaise is beating in the blood, and we shall carry Keer Vhor at a canter. This way of putting it is all very well in a letter to your wife's dearest friend; but in point of fact it was an uncommonly stiff pull. You must understand that there are two deep clefts by which the inner circle of stormbeaten crag and corrie which lies behind Ben Ghoil may be approached-Glen Rosa and Glen Sannox. Except Glen Rosa there is nothing in the way of valleys finer than Glen Sannox, and nothing finer than Glen Rosa except Glen Sannox. There are one or two points in Glen Sannox-where you get Sui Ferghus, and the Carlin's Step, and Keer Vhor in a bee-line-which it is difficult to beat. But Glen Rosa leads direct to the innermost sanctuary, and so we went up Glen Rosa. There is a pool on the Rosa beside which we took our first breakfast. The morning, let me say in passing, consisted largely of breakfasts the afternoon, until it gently and imperceptibly declined into five-o'clock tea, being mainly devoted to lunch. But I anticipate. This pool on the Rosa may or may not be historic; we know indeed that Robert the Bruce, and the good Sir James of Douglas, and the rest of the heroic outlaws, hunted the red deer in this identical valley, and I cannot believe for my own part that on a sweltering summer afternoon even the patriot king, gazing longingly into its cool translucent depths, could have resisted the temptation to a dip. It is a noble granite bath fashioned by nature herself; and from a polished slab that runs right across the stream you dive into twelve feet of water that bubbles like sparkling hock. Well, we breakfasted here, and thereafter the ladies magnanimously suggested that they would wait until our Serene Highness had finished his |