210 NOTES ON STYLE 



wound ; and if thou never hear more of me, pray for my soul.' But 

 evermore the queens and ladies wept and shrieked that it was pity for 

 *o hear them. And as soon as Sir Bedivere had lost sight of the barge, 

 he wept and wailed ; and so he went all the night, and in the morn- 

 ing he was ware between two hills of a chapel and a hermitage. 



Translation played a very important part in the moulding 

 of English literature. The 'Morte d' Arthur' was avowedly 

 a condensed version of several French romances, executed at 

 a time when French had hardly ceased to be the language of 

 the court and law. During the first quarter of the sixteenth 

 century, the English Bible assumed that shape which is 

 familiar to every one in the old authorised version. It was 

 the translation of books already well known through the 

 Latin of the Vulgate; and though the translators went at 

 first hand to the original languages of both Old and New 

 Testaments, their choice of rhythm, phrase, and vocable was 

 to a great extent determined by Jerome's example. 



Why died I not from the womb ? why did I not give up the ghost 

 when I came out of the belly? 



Why did the knees prevent me ? or why the breasts that I should 

 suck? 



For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept : 

 then had I been at rest. 



With kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places 

 for themselves ; 



Or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver : 



Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been ; as infants which 

 never saw light. 



There the wicked cease from troubling ; and there the weary be at 

 rest. 



The mixture of native with French or Latin words with 

 present, quiet, counsellor, desolate, prince, infant, cease has 

 been accomplished ; but the syntax still retains its early 

 English simplicity. 



While the Bible was circulating among the people through 

 the medium of the press, England awoke to the new learning, 

 and submitted to the charm of Italian humanism. A third 

 process of fusion now further modified our prose style. 



