Or take this:
Now as they were going along and talking, they espied a Boy
feeding his Father's Sheep. The Boy was in very mean
Cloaths, but of a very fresh and well-favoured Countenance,
and as he sate by himself he Sung.... Then said their Guide,
Do you hear him? I will dare to say, that this Boy lives a
merrier Life, and wears more of that Herb called Heart's-ease
in his Bosom, than he that is clad in Silk and Velvet.
I choose ordinary passages, not solemn ones in which Bunyan is
consciously scriptural. But you cannot miss the accent.
That is Bunyan, of course; and I am far from saying that the
labouring men among whom I grew up, at the fishery or in the
hayfield, talked with Bunyan's magic. But I do assert that they
had something of the accent; enough to be _like,_ in a child's
mind, the fishermen and labourers among whom Christ found his
first disciples. They had the large simplicity of speech, the
cadence, the accent. But let me turn to Ireland, where, though
not directly derived from our English Bible, a similar scriptural
accent survives among the peasantry and is, I hope, ineradicable.
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