It is the first and greatest piece of English prose.
[Footnote 3: There is a graphic little pen-picture of their method in Selden's "Table Talk."] Its influence is one of those things on which it is profitless to comment or enlarge simply because they are an understood part of every man's experience.

In its own time it helped to weld England, for where before one Bible was read at home and another in churches, all now read the new version.

Its supremacy was instantaneous and unchallenged, and it quickly coloured speech and literature; it could produce a Bunyan in the century of its birth.

To it belongs the native dignity and eloquence of peasant speech.

It runs like a golden thread through all our writing subsequent to its coming; men so diverse as Huxley and Carlyle have paid their tribute to its power; Ruskin counted it the one essential part of its education.