CHAPTER II.

E have had our glimpse of the first (Eng

WR

lish) Stuart King, as he made his shambling way to the throne - beset by spoilsmen; we had our glimpse, too, of that haughty, high-souled, unfortunate Sir Walter Raleigh, whose memory all Americans should hold in honor. We had our little look through the magic-lantern of Scott at the toilet and the draggled feathers of the pedant King James, and upon all that hurly-burly of London where the Scotch Nigel adventured; and through the gossipy Harrison we set before ourselves a great many quaint figures of the time. We saw a bride whose silken dresses whisked along those balusters of Crosby Hall, which brides of our day may touch reverently now; we followed Ben Jonson, afoot, into Scotland, and among the pretty scenes of Eskdale; and thereafter we sauntered down

Ludgate Hill, and so, by wherry, to Bankside and the Globe, where we paid our shilling, and passed the time o' day with Ben Jonson; and saw young Francis Beaumont, and smelt the pipes; and had a glimpse of Shakespeare. But we must not, for this reason, think that all the world of London smoked, or all the world of London went to the Globe Theatre.

Gosson and Other Puritans.

There was at this very time, living and preaching, in the great city, a certain Stephen Gosson*well-known, doubtless, to Ben Jonson and his fellows who had received a university education, who had written delicate pastorals and other verse, which - with many people — ranked him with Spenser and Sidney ; who had written plays too, but who, somehow conscience-smitten, and having gone over from all dalliance with the muses to extremest Puritanism, did thereafter so inveigh against "Poets, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth"-as he called them -as made him rank, for fierce invective, with that Stubbes

* Gosson was an Oxford man; b. 1555 d. 1624.

whose onslaught upon the wickedness of the day I cited. He had called his discourse, "pleasant for Gentlemen that favor Learning, and profitable for all that will follow Vertue." He represented the Puritan feeling which was growing in force-in respect to poetry and the drama; and, I have no doubt, regarded Mr. William Shakespeare as one of the best loved and trusted emissaries of Satan.

But between the rigid sectarians and those of easy-going faith who were wont to meet at the Mermaid Tavern, there was a third range of thinking and of thinkers;-not believing all poetry and poets Satanic, and yet not neglectful of the offices of Christianity. The King himself would have ranked with these; and so also would the dignitaries of that English Church of which he counted himself, in some sense, the head. It was in the first year of his reign, 1603 -- he having passed a good part of the summer in hunting up and down through the near counties partly from his old love of such things, partly to be out of reach of the plague which ravaged London that year (carrying off over thirty thousand people); it was, I say, in that first year that, at the instance of some good Anglicans,

he issued a proclamation-"Touching a meeting for the hearing and for the determining things pretended to be amiss in the Church.”

Out of this grew a conference at Hampton Court, in January, 1604. Twenty-five were called to that gathering, of whom nine were Bishops. On no one day were they all present; nor did there seem promise of any great outcome from this assemblage, till one Rainolds, a famous Greek scholar of Oxford, "moved his Majesty that there might be a new translation of the Bible, because previous ones were not answerable altogether to the truth of the Original."

King James Bible.

There was discussion of this; my Lord Bancroft, Bishop of London, venturing the sage remark that if every man's humor should be followed, there would be no end of translating. In the course of the talk we may well believe that King James nodded approval of anything that would flatter his kingly vanities, and shook his big unkempt head at what would make call for a loosening of his pursestrings But out of this slumberous conference,

and out of these initial steps, did come the scriptural revision; and did come that noble monument of the English language, and of the Christian faith, sometimes called "King James' Bible," thoughfor anything that the old gentleman had to do vitally or specifically with the revision-it might as well have been called the Bible of King James' tailor, or the Bible of King James' cat.

It must be said, however, for the King, that he did press for a prompt completion of the work, and that "it should be done by the best learned in both universities." Indeed, if the final dedication of the translators to the "most High, and Mighty Prince James" (which many a New England boy of fifty years ago wrestled with in the weary lapses of too long a sermon) were to be taken in its literal significance, the obligations to him were immense; after thanking him as "principal mover and author of the work," the dedication exuberantly declares that "the hearts of all your loyal and religious people are so bound and firmly knit unto you, that your very name is precious among them: Their eye doth behold you with comfort, and they bless you in their hearts, as that sanctified person, who,