The Glory of English Prose | Page 4

than the direction of Boaz, the great land-owner, to his
men, after he had espied Ruth in her beauty gleaning in his fields:--
"And when she was risen up to glean, Boaz commanded his young men,
saying, Let her glean even among the sheaves, and reproach her not:
"And let fall also some of the handfuls on purpose for her, and leave
them, that she may glean them, and rebuke her not."
This little gem in the books of the Bible inspired Hood to write one of
his most perfect lyrics:--
"She stood breast high amid the corn
Clasped by the golden light of
morn,
Like the sweetheart of the sun,
Who many a glowing kiss had
won.

Thus she stood amid the stocks,
Praising God with sweetest looks.
Sure, I said, Heaven did not mean
Where I reap thou should'st but
glean;
Lay thy sheaf adown and come,
Share my harvest and my
home."

That the Bible was translated into English at the time when the
language was spoken and written in its most noble form, by men whose
style has never been surpassed in strength combined with simplicity,
has been a priceless blessing to the English-speaking race. The land of
its birth, once flowing with milk and honey, has been for long centuries
a place of barren rocks and arid deserts: Persians and Greeks and
Romans and Turks have successively swept over it; the descendants of
those who at different times produced its different books are scattered
to the ends of the earth; but the English translation has for long years
been the head corner-stone in homes innumerable as the sands of the
sea in number.
No upheavals of the earth, no fire, pestilence, famine, or slaughter, can
ever now blot it out from the ken of men.
When all else is lost we may be sure that the old English version of the
Bible will survive. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words
shall not pass away."
Do not think it enough therefore, Antony, to hear it read badly and
without intelligence or emotion, in little detached snippets, in church
once a week.
Read it for yourself, and learn to rejoice in the perfect balance,
harmony, and strength of its noble style.
Your loving old
G.P.
3
MY DEAR ANTONY,
I could write you many letters like my last one about the Bible, and
perhaps some day I will go back to that wonderful Book and write you
some more letters about it; but now I will go on and tell you about
some of the great writers of English prose that came after the
translation of the Bible.

Those translators were the great founders of the English language,
which is probably on the whole the most glorious organ of human
expression that the world has yet known.
It blends the classic purity of Greek and the stately severity of Latin
with the sanguine passions and noble emotions of our race.
A whole life devoted to its study will not make you or me perfectly
familiar with all the splendid passages that have been spoken and
written in it. But I shall show in my letters, at least some of the glorious
utterances scattered around me here in my library, so that you may
recognise, as you ought, the pomp and majesty of the speech of
England.
One of the great qualities that was always present in the writings of
Englishmen from the time of Elizabeth down to the beginning of the
nineteenth century was its restraint.
Those men never became hysterical or lost their perfect self-control.
The deeper the emotion of the writer the more manifest became the
noble mastery of himself.
When Sir Walter Ralegh, that glorious son of Devon, from which
county you and I, Antony, are proud to have sprung, lay in the Tower
of London awaiting his cowardly and shameful execution the next day
at the hands of that miserable James I., writing to his beloved wife,
with a piece of coal, because they even denied him pen and ink, face to
face with death, he yet observed a calm and noble language that is truly
magnifical--to use the old Bible word.
"For the rest," he wrote, "when you have travailed and wearied your
thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall sit down by
sorrow in the end. Teach your son also to serve and fear God while he
is young, that the fear of God may grow up in him. Then will God be a
Husband unto you and a Father unto him; a Husband and a Father
which can never be taken from you.

"I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time when all
sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world.
"Beg my dead body, which living