printers have at length succeeded in printing it, in almost every edition, thus: " after he had offered one sacrifice for sins, for ever sat down," &c., with the comma before "for ever." In this last way of it, the sense is quite changed. Beyond all reasonable doubt, the contrast here drawn between the Jewish high priest and our "great High Priest" is between their having to "offer oftentimes the same sacrifices which could never take away sins" (ver. 11) and His offering one sacrifice for sins for ever," after which (His work being wholly done, and eternally efficacious) He "sat down on the right hand of God" to reap the fruit of it. With us, therefore, there can be no doubt that our translators were right in the punctuation. In this they had no English predecessors, save Wiclif (though his original, the Vulgate, is ambiguous), all succeeding versions placing the comma, as we think, wrong. And this wrong punctuation is followed both by Green and

Alford.

The one example we have room for of imperfection in all the three versions, is in the pronoun used in speaking of the Holy Spirit. In Greek, the word "spirit" being in the neuter gender, we naturally expect a neuter pronoun. So, accordingly, it is in most, but not in all, places. For in John xiv. 26, we read, "But the Comforter, the Holy Ghost, which (ö, 'which') the Father will send in my name, HE (exivos) shall teach you all things;" shewing, beyond all doubt, that it is a Person who is meant by "the Holy Spirit," and consequently, that though a neuter pronoun is in Greek usually employed in speaking of Him, this is merely in compliance with the laws of grammar, the bonds of which are burst in the above case, where the personality of the Spirit is prominently before the Speaker's and the Evangelist's minds; in English that is not in the least called for, and therefore in our language improper. Accordingly, in Rom. viii. 26, our A. V. and the Revision do wrong in rendering the words "the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us"; while, in ver. 27, both come right again" because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God." There being no pronoun here, Green is, unhappily, too consistent with himself "it pleads," &c. In every case "He" and "Himself" should be used.

For the last division of our subject-the peculiarities of Mr Green's revision-we have left so little space, that we can do it no justice, and must compress all we have to say into a couple of paragraphs.

We cannot but think that the author has raised a needless prejudice against his work in the minds of many, by the choice of so purely modern an English style, and so persistently ad

Mr Green's New Translation.

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hering to it. Even so good a word as "concerning" he must change into "about," as in Rom. i. 3, "about his Son"; and "divers diseases" into "various" (Matt. iv. 24). One would think he changes the rendering often for the mere sake of change; and in such cases it is usually for the worse. 1 Cor. xv. 27 ("it is manifest that he is excepted," &c.) is changed into "it is clearly with the saving of him," &c. Acts iii. 6 ("Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have," &c.) becomes "( . . . have I none; what however I have." The rendering of Acts viii. 33 (“ In his humiliation his judgment was taken away") is apt to create a smile: "In his lowly plight his judgment was reft." In very many cases the change is unhappy, and, in some very important cases most obnoxious. This is eminently the case where the article is concerned. Wherever the definite article is wanting in the Greek, it is omitted in the translation, with what results may be judged from the following out of a number of examples we had marked :—Matt. v. 34, 35 : (6 . . . not to swear at all . nor by the earth, for it is a footstool of his feet, . . . nor by Jerusalem, for it is a city of the great King."* James i. 12: "Blest is a man who endures." Matt. xiii. 39: "The harvest is a close of an age"; xxi. 42: "The stone . . . became a head of a corner" (so Acts iv. 11). Acts viii. 39: "a spirit of the Lord caught away Philip." But there are cases in which this way of translating is less endurable. Thus Matt. i. 18: "She was found with child from Holy Spirit”; iii. 11: "He shall baptise you with Holy Spirit"; xii. 36: “ 'David himself said in Holy Spirit." Luke i. 35: "The angel said

to her, Holy Spirit will come on thee"; iv. 1: "Jesus, full of Holy Spirit." And so on, wherever the phrase "Holy Spirit" occurs without the Greek article. We are quite aware of the reasoning of those scholars who hold that there is an important distinction between the phrase with and without the article-the former, in their opinion, denoting the Spirit personally, the latter officially; in other words, that the Person of the Holy Ghost is intended in the one case, and in the other, his operations in man. We think it would be difficult to establish this distinction; on the contrary, that as the Holy Ghost is scarcely in any case mentioned save in relation to His operations in our nature, the article ought, on this theory, to be absent in many cases where it is not so, and therefore, that the distinction is more imaginary than real. But be this as it may, nothing, as it seems to us, can justify such phraseology as the above of Mr Green's; and we are convinced, that with not

* Why, on this principle, have we not, in ver. 34, for it is a throne of God," instead of "God's throne"?

a few, whose judgment in such matters is not to be despised, it will constitute an insuperable objection to the whole version.

Perhaps the most unfavourable way of judging of this work by ordinary yet intelligent readers, would be to take it up at random, and read through one entire chapter, either in the historical or in the epistolary part of the New Testament. Its real merits are best discovered as one comes back, after such a process, and looks closely at particular passages. It will then be seen that the author has translated on fixed principles, to which he steadily adheres; that, as his aim has evidently been to bring out the most delicate shades of thought in the original, in the phraseology with which we are most familiar, so he has in many cases succeeded remarkably well-so well, indeed, that it would be a pleasure to us, if we had space for it, to give selections from the large list of such renderings which we have noted; and consequently, that though not prepared with any such view, it is well worthy of being regarded as a valuable contribution towards any contemplated improvement of our Authorised Version. Perhaps both this work and the Dean's Revision adhere too rigidly to the aoristic rendering of the Greek aorist into English, where our own version employs the perfect tense. But we cannot at this stage recur to details.

We conclude by repeating a remark made in a former part of this paper, that instead of making a Royal Commission—if ever such a step is to be taken the starting-point, it ought to be regarded as the terminus of many and perhaps protracted efforts, by a body of scholars voluntarily associated for this purpose, and working on definite principles, carefully prepared and agreed on. We are not without good hope of seeing steps taken to originate such an association, nor without expectation of real good from it, whether terminating in the way Dean Alford looks for or not. And certainly, if "every word of God is pure," it will not be easy to estimate the value of any real advances towards a more perfect settlement of the text, and a more perfect expression, in our own tongue, of its precious meaning. DAVID BROWN.

ART. V.-Curiosities of Later Biography-Henry Crabb Robinson and W. Savage Landor.

MUC

UCH noise has been made in the literary world recently by the publication of the biographies of the two men named above, who, notwithstanding very marked differences

Crabb Robinson and Savage Landor.

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of temper and tendency, had yet several things in common. They are both in a sense individual men, and both are representative. The one may be taken as the type of the genial school, whose chief end is complete culture and full-orbed intellectual sympathy; and the other, of the neo-classic or modern-pagan school, whose ideal is mere natural self-enjoyment. Superficially these two classes are directly opposed to each other, the apparent tendency of the one being towards Society, and that of the other towards Solitude. But inasmuch as the social impulse in the case of the first is on investigation discovered to rest on nothing deeper than the necessity for being listened to, and seeing one's self reflected in the eyes of others in order to the projection through all of a dominating egotistic note (the most superficial eye discovering in diaries and the like a mere congeries of details without any ideal unity whatever); and, as in the other case, we perceive that a revolt against society,-its conventional demands and requirements, is justified by the plea of the sacredness of individuality, -our typical men, different as they seem, are yet bound together in a bond of egotism. They are pre-eminently painters of themselves, servants of themselves, and, notwithstanding that "no man can be a hero to his valet," they succeed in being heroes to themselves. Crabb Robinson's whole fame rests on his conversation; but his talk has himself constantly for centre, explicitly or implicitly; he does not select any person, and throw out his whole sympathy towards it, so that the source of the light is overlooked and forgotten in the grateful revelation given to the eye. Mr Walter Savage Landor, in the midst of his isolation,-"the loneliness and isolation of which he at once boasted and complained,"-never ceases to think of himself, and of himself as the object of interest to the very society he has voluntarily escaped from. Mr Crabb Robinson never forgets himself in Goethe; we never lose the sound of Mr Savage Landor's voice in the "Imaginary Conversations" of Milton, and Hooker, and Bacon. In both selfconsciousness rises to an intensity amounting almost to disease, incapacitating both alike for the full and healthy performance of those duties which bring a man closest to the great bulk of his fellow-men,—their common joys and sorrows, wants and gratifications. It has been said, that true solitude can be easiest found amid the crowds of a great city. Certainly when we think of the manner in which some men dissipate and gracefully play away their possibilities in the restlessness of dilettante society, without ever meeting with the polished steel reflector of another faithful heart that would throw back their light upon themselves, we get at least as good a notion of solitude as that afforded by the man who divides his time

between admiring his villa and inditing "Imaginary Conversation," regulating his every act by considerations of how original other folks must think him. Mr Crabb Robinson's desire to be "everybody's body" within a certain circle, including all sorts of notorieties, is not so different, after all, from the strongheaded overbearingness of Savage Landor, who yet persecutes himself with the fear that people may not think him a genius, or may think him "affected." "I love green fields," writes Mr Savage Landor, "and I once loved being wet in the summer or spring. In that season, when I was a boy and a youth, I always walked with my hat in my hand when it rained, and only left off the practice when I read that Bacon did it, fearing to be thought guilty of affectation" (Crabb Robinson's Diary, iii. p. 521.) This short extract is characteristic of both the men, and the fact of its finding a place in the Diary, in preference to so much else which sprung out of their intimacy, almost justifies not only the juxtaposition we have given them, but the mental affinity and essential habitude we have indicated as existing between the two.

It has been the habit of a certain class of writers to speak of Savage Landor as a pagan,-an old Greek,-and by implication to excuse or justify on this ground his terrible aberrations and furious outrages. Nothing could be further from the truth. Never was there a man whose whole activity gave more direct evidence of overweening and diseased self-consciousness. An image of the Walter Savage Landor that was not, was constantly suspended before the mental eye of the Walter Savage Landor that was; and, like a little object set close before the eye, it shut out almost every great and truly liberal prospect. Even Carlyle's pronouncement on Landor was that his "principle was mere rebellion." And what could be more alien to the simple health and spontaneous unconsciousness of the Greek or the early pagan? Nothing. Landor, as we shall try to shew, was a pure product of the artificial but transitional half century before ours, from which, indeed, he drew his chief inspirations. In him we see a vague shadow of pagan ideas imposed upon the impatient reactionary restlessness of the modern spirit; and he presents, perhaps, the most salient instance of a man who made the classic spirit an excuse for shirking the great responsibilities laid upon the men able to interpret the needs of their time. It was one of the most noticeable features of the old Greek life, that it was homogeneous, and, like Wordsworth's Cloud, "moved all together if it moved at all;" its great men advancing before it but only to cast light back upon it, to guide and control it towards what they conceived to be brave and noble issues. There was no escape for them from great questions. They had to interfuse their very