workers and the plough boys. At the seats of learning, in the churches and in the homes of the people, the music of the book fell upon listening ears and produced marvellous effect."
Mr. George Philip Krapp seeks to account for the success of Tyndale's translation in his Rise of English Literary Prose.
"Tyndale uses language mainly as a thinker, intent on making his meaning clear and thus cultivates compactness rather than variety or amplitude of expression. If he is eloquent at all, it is by virtue of the deep feeling which lends warmth and color to what otherwise might seem naked simplicity. Tyndale's sentences are usually short, but well constructed and only slightly more formal than the sentences of colloqiual discourse. His vocabulary is plain, but without affectation of rudeness or quaintness. The perfect sense of idiom which distinguishes his translation of the Bible, appears in his other English writings. Although nearly four hundred years have passed since his treatises were written, a reader to-day is seldom brought to a pause by an unfamiliar word or locution, certainly less often than in reading Spenser or Shakespeare or almost any of the greater Elizabethans. The reason for this is partly that Tyndale's writings have been potent factors in the development of the modern
