else for writing it in the English tongue, this answer I may make him,
that what the best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I, one
of the meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write... And
as for the Latin or Greek tongue, everything is so excellently done in
them that none can do better. In the English tongue, contrary,
everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter and the handling,
that no man can do worse.

On the other hand you have Euphuism with its antithetical tricks and
poises, taking all prose by storm for a time: Euphuism, to be revived two
hundred years later, and find a new avatar in the Johnsonian balance;
Euphuism, dead now, yet alive enough in its day.

For all these writers were alive: and I tell you it is an inspiriting
thing to be alive and trying to write English. All these authors were
alive and trying to _do_ something. Unconsciously for the most part they
were striving to philosophise the vocabulary of English prose and find a
rhythm for its periods.

And then, as already had happened to our Verse, to our Prose too there
befel a miracle.

You will not ask me 'What miracle?' I mean, of course, the Authorised
Version of the Bible.

I grant you, to be sure, that the path to the Authorised Version was made
straight by previous translators, notably by William Tyndale. I grant you
that Tyndale was a man of genius, and Wyclif before him a man of genius.
I grant you that the forty-seven men who produced the Authorised Version
worked in the main upon Tyndale's version, taking that for their basis.