Page:Our Hymns.djvu/42

 22 OUR HYMNS :

&quot; Being a most zealous reformer, and a very strict liver, he became so scandalized at the amorous and obscene songs used in the Court, that he, forsooth, turned into English metre fifty-one of David s psalms, and caused musical notes to be set to them, thinking thereby that the courtiers would sing them instead of their sonnets ; but they did not, some few excepted. However, the poetry and music being admirable, and the best that was made and composed in these times, they were thought fit to be sung in all parochial churches.&quot;

The melodies to which the psalms were to be sung, many of them adopted from the German and French, were also given in this latter edition. Sternhold was also the author of &quot;Certain Chapters of the Proverbs of Solomon, drawn into metre.&quot; Of Sternhold and Hopkins, old Thomas Fuller says, &quot; They were men whose piety was better than their poetry, and they had drank more of Jordan than of Helicon : &quot; and Thomas Campbell says, &quot; with the best intentions and the worst taste, they degraded the spirit of Hebrew psalmody by flat and homely phraseology ; and, mistaking vulgarity for simplicity, turned into bathos what they found sublime.&quot; Sternhold usually makes only the second and fourth lines rhyme, and not always those. Yet the great churchmen of those days maintained the unapproachable excellence of Sternhold and Hopkins. These writers may be taken as the representatives of the strong tendency to versify Scripture that came with the Reformation into England a work men eagerly entered on without the talent requisite for its successful accom plishment. The tendency went so far that even the &quot; Acts of the Apostles &quot; was put into rhyme, and set to music by Dr. Chris topher Tye.

&quot; God, my strength and fortitude.&quot; No. 16.

Stemhold s rendering of Psalm xviii possesses poetic excel lence, and is above his average style. The original piece extends to foity-nine stanzas.

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