ABSTRACT
The extraordinary merit of the Authorized Version as literature, and the variety of accomplishment displayed in it, could not escape such an age as that which followed its appearance. There are passages in Donne and Greville and Sir Walter Raleigh of higher excellence still, but it is by no means certain that most of these were not written later than the Authorized Version. Not even in the seventeenth century has the influence of the English Bible been more powerful in literature than in that other, now dead, century which saw Newman's magnificent and pathetic panegyric of regret. Bunyan, though it is very doubtful whether his study was so exclusively Biblical as has been thought, is equally a specialist. The phraseology and style of the Bible in the Version, which by no very slow degrees superseded all the others, supplied as it were a "publica materies", a universally known common stock and ground of literary expression.
