Bishops' BIBLE. Archbishop Parker resolved on a new translation for the public use of the church, and engaged the bishops and other learned men to take each a share or portion. These being afterwards joined together, and printed with short annotations in 1568, in a large folio, composed what was afterwards called the Bishops' Bible. The following year it was also published in octavo, in a small but fine black letter; and here the chapters were divided into verses, but without any breaks for them, in which the method of the Geneva Bible was followed, which was the first English Bible where any distinction of verses was made. It was afterwards printed in large folio, with corrections and several prologomena, in 1572. This was called Matthew Parker's Bible. The initial letters of each translator's name were put at the end of his part; as, for example, at the end of the Pentateuch, W. E. for William Exon, or William bishop of Exeter, whose allotment ended there; at the end of Samuel, R. M. for Richard Menevensis, or bishop of St David's, to whom the second allotment fell; and so of the rest. The archbishop superintended, directed, examined, and completed the whole. This translation was used in the churches for forty years, though the Geneva Bible was more read in private houses, having been printed above thirty times in as many years. King James bore it an inveterate hatred on account of the notes, which at the Hampton Court conference he charged as partial, untrue, seditious, and so forth. The Bishops' Bible too had its faults. The king frankly owned he had yet seen no good translation of the Bible in English; but he thought that of Geneva the worst of all.