Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849), son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, speaking of the King James Bible as the perfection of English language prose, while commenting on Quaker Anthony Parver’s translation of the Bible.
“We doubt, indeed, whether any new translation, however learned, exact, or truly orthodox, will ever appear to English Christians to be the real Bible. The language of the authorised version is the perfection of English, and it can never be written again, for the language of prose is one of the few things in which the English have really degenerated. Our tongue has lost its holiness.”
Hartley Coleridge, Biographia Borealis, or Lives of Distinguished Northerns, London: Whitaker, Treacher, & Company, 1833, p. 718.
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