Andrewes was Bishop successively of Chichester, Ely and Winchester, and one of the most learned men of his age — he is said to have had fifteen languages. He chaired the First Westminster Company of translators for the King James Bible, responsible for Genesis through Second Kings, and much of the cadence readers still hear in those books is owed to his committee.
His sermons, dense and word-by-word in their attention to the text, were greatly admired in their own time and again three centuries later, when T. S. Eliot took the opening of one of them almost verbatim into 'Journey of the Magi'. The Preces Privatae, his private prayers, were written in Greek, Latin and Hebrew for his own use and published after his death; they have never been out of use since.