Wickliffe had made his translation from the Vulgate, and his work is sadly marred by Latin idioms most strange to English ears; Tyndale, being a ripe Greek and Hebrew scholar, went right to the fountain-head.[1] His New Testament has become the Standard of our tongue; the first ten verses of the Fourth Gospel are a good sample of his manly Teutonic pith. It is amusing to think how differently one of our penny-a-liners would handle the passage; he would deem that so lofty a subject could be fairly expressed in none but the finest Romance words to be found in Johnson or Gibbon.[2] Most happily, our authorized version of the Scriptures was built upon the translation which Tyndale had almost completed before his martyrdom. When we read our Bibles, we are in truth taken back far beyond the days of Bacon and Andrewes to the time of Wolsey and More.
Tyndale, a man well known alike at Oxford, Cambridge, and London, may be said to have fixed our tongue once for all; a few words were now changing for the worse. He it was who brought in the corrupt Yorkshire those (isti) instead of the old tha or tho, though the latter also may be found now and then in his Testament. He thus established a vicious form, which had been used almost three hundred years earlier in the
- ↑ Mr. Demaus has lately written his life. Tyndale in prison wrote a letter, still extant, beseeching his Flemish gaolers to let him have his Hebrew books — the ruling passion strong in death. Of all our great writers, he is the one about whom most mistakes have been made by later enquirers.
- ↑ A scribe in the Daily Telegraph, July 14, 1873, speaks thus, in a leader on the Duke of Edinburgh: ‘He ranks next in geniture to the heir of our throne.’ Hoc fonte derivata clades, &c.
