16 DECEMBER 1949, Page 5

The visit of the King and Queen to the Bible

House last week gives a kind of oblique appropriateness to the following, which I have lately filched. In Edinburgh, where booksellers' assistants are said to be as erudite as professors, they tell a story of someone who went into a bookshop in another university town which I firmly refuse to identify and asked for a Greek Testament. " Certainly, Sir," replied the assistant; and retired to a back region in search of it. After a surprisingly long interval he returned, deprecating and apologetic, with his finger on a long column in a catalogue and the explanation: " Very oddly Greek seems to be about the only language the New Testament has not been translated into." Very