manœuvres which, in the opinion of the officials at the Adjutant-General's office, it is desirable should be taught to the infantry regiments of the British army. The labour expended in trying to attain proficiency in these exercises, which seems an odd nautical accomplishment, might, if bestowed upon other subjects of absolutely pressing importance, result in considerably raising the efficiency of our fleets. It may bethough we doubt it-a harmless practice to employ many precious hours in making seamen learn how to execute that valuable performance, a 'march past in double companies;' but those who advocate such expenditure of time ought certainly to adduce irrefragable proof that there is nothing left to teach either our officers or our men about their ships, or the proper management of them. It may be desirable to work hard in acquiring a knowledge of manoeuvres, in the performance of which those belonging to the Naval Service can, in the nature of things, never hope to attain any higher than the second place; yet those who remember what our fleets have done, and who think upon what they may be called upon to do hereafter, may be excused for believing that the study of the recent developments of ocean warfare is likely to add more to the dignity and the honour of the British Navy, and to prove a far better guarantee for that essential of our national security -the maintenance of our pre-eminence as a maritime power.

*The following is a specimen of the lengths to which this extraordinary mania for 'soldiering'-as it is still called by seamenhas gone. An admirable and much-wanted little book, 'The Sailor's 'Pocket-Book,' by Commander F. Bedford, has just been published; to no single subject is so much of its space devoted as to this very 'soldiering.' A 'Naval Review,' in the popular language of the seaports, has come to mean, not a review of ships, but of a battalion of sailors, headed by a more or less harmonious brass band and armed with the weapons of infantry-soldiers, on dry land.

ART. II.-The Holy Bible according to the Authorized Version (A.D. 1611), with an Explanatory and Critical Commentary, and a Revision of the Translation, by Bishops and other Clergy of the Anglican Church. Edited by F. C. Cook, M.A., Canon of Exeter. Vols. I.-IV. London: 1871-1873.

No allusion is found in the preface to these volumes to the immediate circumstances to which they owe their origin. At the same time it is not hard to divine what were the considerations which exercised the greatest influence upon the mind of the late Speaker when he first suggested the design of this Commentary. On the one hand, views inconsistent with the truth of the historical books of the Old Testament had, for the first time, been openly avowed and defended by a bishop of the English Church. On the other hand, numerous discoveries had recently been made, the importance of which, as bearing upon the Inspiration of Holy Scripture, was generally admitted, whilst the results were claimed with equal confidence both by the advocates and by the impugners of the claims of Revelation. Such, we may fairly presume, were some of the considerations which had weight with the late Lord Ossington when he conceived the plan of the work, which, so far as it has already advanced, we now propose to examine. We will only add, by way of further introduction to our subject, that whatever may be our estimate of the merits of this Commentary, its appearance marks an epoch in the history of our Biblical literature; while the designation which it has commonly received, and by which it will be distinguished from other works of a similar character, will serve to associate the memory of that most excellent and amiable man the late Speaker of the House of Commons with an undertaking of more than ordinary importance.

The general character and design of this work, and the means adopted with a view to its execution, cannot be better described than in the preliminary notice to the first volume :—

'The want of a plain explanatory commentary on the Bible, more complete and accurate than any now accessible to English readers, has been long felt by men of education. In 1863 the Speaker of the House of Commons consulted some of the bishops as to the best way of supplying the deficiency; and the Archbishop of York undertook to organise a plan for producing such a work, by the co-operation of scholars selected for their Biblical learning.

'The great object of such a commentary must be to put the general reader in full possession of whatever information may be requisite to

enable him to understand the Holy Scriptures, to give him, as far as possible, the same advantages as the scholar, and to supply him with satisfactory answers to objections resting upon misrepresentation of the text.'

In the application to the field of Biblical interpretation of this plan for the subdivision of labour amongst writers owning allegiance to a central authority, but responsible only for their respective portions of the common work, the Speaker's Commentary had already been anticipated in Germany-in design, and partly in execution-by Lange's comprehensive and elaborate Bibelwerk.' In this commentary, the critical and exegetical portions are separated both from the doctrinal and also from the homiletical. The English translation, published in America under the general editorship of Dr. Schaff, has followed very closely upon the appearance of each volume of the original work in Germany; and although there is much in the contents of this commentary, as well as in the typography of the earlier volumes, which renders it unsuitable as a work of reference to the wants of the ordinary English reader, we hail its publication as a valuable addition to the stores of our Biblical literature; and we hold ourselves greatly indebted to the enterprise of the indefatigable firm of Messrs. Clark of Edinburgh for the arrangements which they have made for its circulation in this country. The same remarks which have been made with reference to Lange's Bibelwerk' apply, in some measure, to the Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament by Professors Keil and Delitzsch, the greater portion of which has also appeared in an English translation. This work, which is one of great importance to the Biblical scholar, is issued from the same firm to which we have already referred, and, as regards its general execution, it leaves little or nothing to be desired. It is designed, however, to meet the wants of the Biblical scholar rather than those of the ordinary English reader, to whom the frequent occurrence of Hebrew words and of Hebrew criticisms, throughout the whole of the work, must present an insuperable difficulty.

Nor are we altogether without precedents for Biblical commentaries of a composite authorship in our own country. Undeterred by the abortive efforts made by Crumwell to obtain the sanction of King Henry VIII. to the publication of certain explanatory notes made by learned men,* some of the exiles of

It is not unworthy of notice that the 'pointing hands' which were designed to direct the reader to these explanatory notes, are to be found in the editions of the Great Bible published during Crumwell's life; VOL. CXL. NO. CCLXXXV.

D

Queen Mary's reign, amongst whom Whittingham, who married Calvin's sister, held a distinguished place, devoted the space of two years and more, day and night,' not only to the careful revision of the text of the English Bible, but also to the preparation of a marginal commentary upon it. In this commentary it was proposed to omit nothing unexpounded whereby he that is anything exercised in the Scriptures of God might 'justly complain of hardness.' The result of these labours was the publication in 1560 of the celebrated Genevan Bible. The cost of this undertaking was defrayed by the English congregation at Geneva; and Queen Elizabeth, to whom the work was dedicated, granted a patent in the following year to John Bodley, the father of the founder of the Bodleian Library, for the exclusive right of printing it in England for the space of seven years. The advantages of the Genevan Bible over its ponderous predecessors, in size, in type, in the division of the chapters into verses, and, more particularly, in the addition of explanatory notes-whatever their errors or defects were so many and so great, that it is no matter of surprise that it should at once have secured, and even after the appearance of King James's Bible have continued to retain, a firm hold upon the bulk of the English nation.

The next attempt to elucidate the meaning of the Bible by the joint labours of duly qualified men, was made by Archbishop Parker in 1563-4, which issued in the publication in 1568 of the Bible generally known as the Bishops' Bible, comprising not only marginal notes explanatory of the text, but also a complete revision of the English text itself. Independently, however, of the facts that the best and oldest manuscripts were then undiscovered, and, as regards the Old Testament, that an undue amount of reliance was placed upon the Septuagint Version, the correspondence between Archbishop Parker and some of the bishops engaged in the work sufficiently proves how inadequately the responsibility which attaches both to the translation and to the exposition of the Bible was then appreciated. Thus, we find Bishop Guest proposing to change the tense of a verb in the first Psalm from the past to the present, because the former gives too harsh' a sense; whilst Bishop Cox, who seems to have considered a rigid uniformity the highest aim of the Biblical interpreter, proposes that the translation of the verbs throughout the Psalter should be uniformly

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and that corresponding marks appear, even in those editions which were published subsequently to Crumwell's execution in 1540, i.e. up to May 1541.

' in one tense.' Although the Bishops' Bible appears to have entirely displaced the Great Bible, insomuch that no edition of the latter was published after the year 1569, there is no evidence that it ever came into general use, even amongst the clergy; and when in the year 1582 Martin assailed, and Fulke defended, the English versions of the Bible then in use, we find that the assaults of the one, and the defence of the other, refer alike to the Great Bible, the Bishops' Bible, and the Genevan Bible.

At the Hampton Court Conference, in 1604, King James expressed, in strong language, his dislike of the Genevan notes asseditious and savouring too much of dangerous ' and traitorous conceits,' and his desire that in the new revision then resolved upon, no marginal notes of any kind should be admitted, but that special pains should be taken for a uniform translation, to be done by the best learned in both 'universities; after them to be reviewed by the bishops and the chief learned of the Church; from them to be presented 'to the Privy Council; and lastly, to be ratified by his royal ' authority, and so this whole Church to be bound unto it, and none other.' †

Great, however, as were the advantages of King James's Bible over all its predecessors, the loss of those spectacles of 'annotations' which had been provided for the unlearned reader in the Genevan Bible soon began to be generally deplored, and divers applications were made by the stationers and printers of London for permission to reprint the Genevan notes, or some other notes adapted to the new translation. Thus, in one of the editions of the Authorised Version, published in 1649 by the Company of Stationers, the Old Testament is printed with the Genevan notes, and the New Testament with those of Beza and Junius, which notes,' it is stated in the title-page, 'have never before been set forth with 'this new translation;' and so late, at least, as the year 1715

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The sixth of the rules subsequently drawn up under the direction of Bancroft for the guidance of the revisers is as follows: No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew 'or Greek words, which cannot, without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text.'

It is a somewhat singular fact that no law, civil or ecclesiastical, is known to exist, enforcing the use of the Authorised Version of 1611; whilst the retention of the Version of the Great Bible in the Psalter, and in some other parts of the Book of Common Prayer, renders the adoption of that Version binding upon the Clergy of the English Church

to the same extent.