pressure of the Stuart dynasty, and every Nonconformist home was
the center of anxieties that influenced every member of it from
the baby to the grandsire, whose memory covered more astonishing
changes than any later day has known.

The year preceding Anne Dudley's birth, had seen the beginning of
the most powerful influence ever produced upon a people, made
ready for it, by long distrust of such teaching as had been
allowed. With the translation of the Bible into common speech, and
the setting up of the first six copies in St. Pauls, its
popularity had grown from day to day. The small Geneva Bibles soon
appeared and their substance had become part of the life of every
English family within an incredibly short space of time. Not only
thought and action but speech itself were colored and shaped by
the new influence. We who hold to it as a well of English
undefiled, and resent even the improvements of the new Version as
an infringement on a precious possession, have small conception of
what it meant to a century which had had no prose literature and
no poetry save the almost unknown verse of Chaucer.

"Sunday after Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered
round the Bible in the nave of St. Pauls, or the family group that
hung on its words in the devotional exercises at home, were
leavened with a new literature. Legend and annal, war song and
psalm, State-roll and biography, the mighty voices of prophets,
the parables of Evangelists, stories of mission-journeys, of
perils by the sea and among the heathens, philosophic arguments,
apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast over minds
unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The disclosure
of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution of