MINOR PROSE WRITERS 203 yet attained by their own language. The translators of the Bible, of Plutarch, of Camden's History of Elizabeth, of many other books that might be named, were to find themselves similarly braced and stimulated. A great translation may sometimes effect more for the language than a great original work. Another translator of a celebrated book of English origin has not left us Minor prose in ignorance of his name. We are indebted to JOHN DE TREVISA (1326-1412) writers for a translation of Higden's Polychronicon, printed in the fifteenth century by Caxton, and reprinted along with the original in the "Rolls Series." Trevisa also made a version of Bartholomew de Glanville's De Proprietatibus Rerum, of which the first printed edition was one of the earliest and finest books from the press of Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde. He is credited also with several other translations which have remained in manuscript. All his work was performed for Thomas, Baron Berkeley, whose chaplain he was. The only original prose treatise of the age deserving of any notice is The Testament of Love, by THOMAS USK, and this not on account of its own merits, but from the singular fortunes of the author, and the circumstance of its having been ascribed to Chaucer. He had turned in 1384 evidence against John de Northampton, the seditious Mayor of London, whose instrument he had been, and composed this treatise to justify himself. He thus regained the favour of King Richard, only to incur the animosity of the party headed by the Duke of Gloucester, who compassed his execution in 1388. The book was composed somewhere between these dates. It is in form an imitation of the Consolation of Boethius, translated by Chaucer, and, the writer's name being for centuries disguised under an unsuspected anagram, it was attributed to Chaucer himself by his early uncritical editors (mainly because in Gower's Confessio Amantis Venus bids Chaucer make his Testament of Love in quite a different sense), and has actually been used as an authority for his life.. It was not until our days that Professors Skeat and Bradley between them discovered and deciphered the anagram, and proved the author to be Usk. The book has been thought to evince symptoms of a desire to gain Chaucer's intercession; if so, it must have been written. before December 1386, when Chaucer himself fell into disgrace. A more interesting book is "The Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love," and mystical meditations of the hermitess Juliana of Norwich, composed early in the fifteenth century. They are full of tender feeling, and have been four times printed. 3 CHAPTER VII THE ENGLISH BIBLE-THE MIRACLE PLAY The Bible and English Literature THERE is no literature, at least no important literature, so largely indebted as the English to a collection of writings in a foreign language, produced under circumstances exceedingly dissimilar to any that ever existed in England, and which may for practical purposes be regarded as a single book. These writings arose in nations which not merely appear to have little in common with either the Teutonic or the Celtic forefathers of the modern British, but which actually belonged to a different race of mankind. Large as is the infusion of the Hellenic mind into the later books of the BIBLE, every individual author is not merely an Oriental, but one absolutely estranged in blood from all the families which have combined to form the British race. Yet, were it possible to eliminate from British literature whatever it owes to the Bible, the residuum would be like "the shorn and parcelled Oxus" in comparison with The majestic stream that flowed Yet, on the other hand, if the literature of Britain is to some extent a derivative literature, there is no such other example of a literature having assimilated a foreign element so completely to itself. Latin literature owes everything to Greece, but Greek literature was by no means so thoroughly appropriated by it as the Scriptures have been appropriated by the Englishspeaking peoples. Reversing what has just been said, it may be asserted with equal truth that, could the Bible be erased from the consciousness of those peoples, it would forfeit well-nigh half of its influence over the world. If it is still a mighty power, it owes this, humanly speaking, to the reverence, and hardly less to the free handling, of England and the nations most closely allied to her in blood. The obligation thus conferred has been repaid by an elevation. a picturesqueness, and an affluence of beautiful sentiment which confers on the literatures of these peoples a great advantage over those which, whether from national incompatibility, or the impediments created by sinister interests, have been more or less debarred from this treasury of grandeur. All modern nations, indeed, have borrowed more or less from the Scriptures, and been more or less influenced by them as literature; but the Northern nations. ASSIMILATION OF THE BIBLE 205 alone, and more particularly the British, have so thoroughly assimilated them that they seem to have naturalised patriarchs and prophets as their own countrymen. tures on This complete naturalisation of the Scriptures in Britain is, of course, Vast influence mainly to be accounted for by religious considerations, and may be paralleled of the Scripin some measure by the corresponding phenomena of the influence of the England Buddhist sacred writings, works of Indian origin, in China, Tartary, and Japan; and of the Arabic Koran in Turkey and Persia. It is, indeed, an astonishing circumstance that the Turanian Turks and the Aryan Persians should have consented to receive not only their religion, but their law from the Semites; yet there is every reason to believe that the national thought and life in those countries have been far less permeated by the foreign element than the national life and thought of Protestant Europe have been by the Bible. For this there is an obvious reason: the Bible, in admirable vernacular renderings, has passed into European literature, while the Koran, for all practical purposes, may be said to have never been translated at all. It is even asserted that the Koran cannot be translated, that its beauties are incapable of transfusion into any foreign idiom. How differently the case stands with Britain and the Bible is known to every person competent to read English, and this very familiarity blinds us to the extraordinary and unique position of our literature in claiming as one of its two supreme glories translations of books which were ancient before it had itself so much as an existence. It would have been nearly a parallel case if Virgil, instead of composing an original epic, had translated Homer; if his version had become as thoroughly national a poem as his Eneid has; and if Cicero could have occupied the place in the literature of Rome which Shakespeare fills in the literature of England. The history of the English Bible from Caedmon to the Authorised Version History of the of 1611 is full of literary and personal interest. It is divided into two clearly English Bible distinguished periods by the Reformation. Before this great epoch translations were made from the Latin Vulgate, which in the general ignorance of Greek and Hebrew was invested with the respect due to the original. After the Reformation, versions were made from the languages of the writers. No longer proscribed, but encouraged by authority; no longer confined to manuscript, but disseminated by the printing-press; the Bible took a position and exerted an influence which had until then been unattainable. There is, notwithstanding, sufficient evidence that throughout the Middle Ages the national life had been largely leavened by the knowledge of the Scriptures which indirectly reached the people through liturgical services, ecclesiastical legends, dramatic performances, and the vernacular homilies of priests and friars. Not, however, until the time of Wycliffe do they become ostensibly an important factor in the mind of England, or assume a position in great English literature. The literary history of the English Bible practically begins with him; before, however, entering upon his relation to it, which is itself only a section of a wider sphere of activity, it will be desirable to trace The English with brevity, as far as possible, the Bible's subterranean course through the mediæval age. The almost exclusively religious character of Anglo-Saxon literature after the conversion of the people to Christianity has already been remarked. Several poetical compositions of considerable beauty upon secular themes remain, but the works of the chief literary representatives of the age, Caedmon, Cynewulf, and their disciples, are entirely Biblical or ecclesiastical. The poems attributed to Caedmon are mainly paraphrases of Scripture, and it is no more than justice to style them the first English Bibles. More precise Portrait of Wycliffe and literal versions followed. Beda died while translating the Gospel of John, and translations of other portions are attributed by tradition to Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne, and to Alcuin in the eighth century, and to Alfred in the ninth. These, if they ever existed, have perished; but the translated Psalter of Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury and Bishop of Sherborne, at the beginning of the eighth century, survives in a single copy, edited by Thorpe in 1835. It is partly in prose and partly in verse. Next come some highly interesting examples of vernacular Scripture in the interlinear translations of the Vulgate text which are found in ancient manuscripts of the Gospels. The most important are the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Rushworth Gospels, priceless MSS. each provided with an interlinear Saxon rendering, most probably added early in the tenth century. These labours of solitary monks cannot be appealed to as proofs of a desire for Biblical knowledge among the people at large, but show at least that there were those who desired that the Scriptures should be accessible to those unacquainted with Latin. Such was the aim of Aelfric, the most celebrated Saxon ecclesiastic of his day, of whose extensive versions from the Bible we have already spoken. These would probably have yielded abundant fruit if Alfred had been upon the throne, but in the stagnant period immediately preceding the Conquest there was not enough mental oxygen to support combustion. The Conquest occasioned a great solution of continuity. The Normans do not appear to have at that time taken any interest in the Scriptures, and when at length the more thoughtful and devout portion of the community recovered in some measure from the blow that had laid it prostrate, the language of the old versions had become obsolete, and the foreign hierarchy discouraged the preparation of new ones. Cranmer and More nevertheless declare that such versions existed, and Foxe attributes their disappearance to the havoc wrought at the dis From Bale's "Illustrium Scriptorum Majoris Britannia," 1548 NEED OF A VERNACULAR ENGLISH BIBLE 207 solution of the monasteries. These statements appear groundless: at all events, though there is sufficient evidence of a fair acquaintance with the leading events and personages of Scripture history among all classes, two Psalters by William de Shoreham and Richard Rolle are the only noticeable vestiges of vernacular Biblical translation between the age of Aelfric and the age of Wycliffe. Even these belong to the first half of the fourteenth century, a period when the influences pregnant with a Wycliffe were already manifesting themselves. Bishop Stubbs, as we have seen, remarks a considerable deterioration in the ideals of the fourteenth century as compared with those of the preceding age. It would perhaps be more correct to say that new ideals were taking the place of the old. The mediæval conception of life had in the thirteenth century attained its highest development. Innocent the Third, Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, St. Dominic, had in their respective ways developed it to the greatest possible extent, and Dante had enshrined it in a monument which, like other sacred fanes, might serve equally for shrine or sepulchre. Had From William of Shoreham's Psalter British Museum, Add. MSS. 17376 promoting a vernacular version of the Scriptures Europe been China, the system thus wrought out might have been stereotyped Influences for ages but every thinking European admitted the possibility of improvement in the departments of secular information; and although to most contemporaries of Dante belief and knowledge appeared perfectly compatible, it was soon discovered that the extension of the one involved the modification of the other. The full exposition of this simple but momentous circumstance would lead us too far from our actual theme of the English Bible, but in one |