Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/66

 58 PRZEMYSL PSALMS was discharged from his office of recorder of Bath in 1654, but was reflected after the res- toration. He was one of the excluded mem- bers who sat in the house of commons early in 1660, and was zealous in furthering the restoration, after which he was appointed keeper of records in the tower. Wood, in his AthencB Oxonienses, gives a catalogue of his writings, which comprises nearly 200 volumes. The most valuable are his " Collection of Rec- ords," " Calendar of Parliamentary Writs," and "Observations on the Fourth Part of Coke's Institutes." His " Records " he in- tended to bring down as late as the reign of Elizabeth, but he lived only long enough to complete the work as far as that of Henry III. PRZEMYSL, a town of Austrian Galicia, on the San, at the junction of the Lemberg and Cracow and the Hungaro-Galician railways, 55 m. W. of Lemberg; pop. in 1870, 15,184 (against 9,800 in 1857), including more than 5,000 Jews. It is one of the oldest towns of Poland. It has many Gothic churches, inclu- ding two ancient cathedrals, is the seat of a Catholic and a Greek United bishop, and has a gymnasium and other schools. The principal trade is in timber, leather, and linens. PsLM lYl/AR, George, the assumed name of a French impostor, born about 1679, died in London in 1753 or 1703. Ho travelled over various parts of France, Germany, and the Netherlands ; was a soldier, a beggar, and a servant, pretending at first to be a Japanese and afterward a Formosan ; and at length went to England with one Innes, a chaplain in a Scotch regiment, who claimed the credit of converting him to Christianity. In 1704 he published at London a pretended " History and Description of the Island of Formosa off the Coast of China," in which the description of the island was given with such apparent fidelity, the manners and customs were illus- trated with so many engravings, and such copious specimens were given of a new lan- guage, that the belief in the story was general until the author revealed the imposition. He now applied himself seriously to study, and wrote a largo portion of the " Universal His- tory," a true account as far as known of For- mosa for the " Complete System of Geogra- phy," an " Essay on Miracles," and a version of the Psalms. He left in manuscript his own memoirs, published in London in 1765. PSALMS, Book of (in the Septuagint, *a?,/io/, hymns sung to the accompaniment of stringed instruments; in Hebrew collections, Tehillim, praise songs), one of the canonical books of the Old Testament, containing a copious col- lection of religious songs. Religious poetry among the Hebrews, as among the oriental nations in general, can be traced to a high antiquity. The Pentateuch contains several hymns and fragments of hymns ; in the book of Psalms we find one psalm which is as- cribed to Moses; and in the time of the judges we meet with the beautiful song of Deborah (Judges v.). But the religious poetry of the Hebrews attained its principal development through King David, who is represented in the Scriptures as having practised it from early youth until his death, and in particular as having introduced the singing of hymns into the service in the tabernacle. In the Hebrew original 73 psalms are ascribed to David, but none of the old ecclesiastical trans- lations, as the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the Peshito, agree in this respect. Besides Moses and David, several other authors of psalms are named in the headings; thus, 2 psalms are ascribed to Solomon, 12 to Asaph, 11 to the sons of Eorah, a Levitic family, and one each to Heman and Ethan. The Alexandrine and Syriac versions mention also the prophets Haggai and Zechariah as the authors of some psalms. The collection of psalms, in the form in which it appears in the Old Testament, can- not have been completed until after the cap- tivity, as some of the psalms are obviously of subsequent origin. According to Hitzig, Len- gerke, and Olshausen, some of the psalms be- long to a time as late as that of the Macca- bees. The possibility of Maccabtean psalms is admitted by Delitzsch, while their existence is denied by Hengstenberg, Havernick, Keil, Ewald, and others. Particular collections, which were afterward embodied in the book of Psalms, may possibly have existed as early as the time of David. The book of Psalms is, according to the analogy of the Pentateuch, divided into five books, each of which closes with a doxology. The second book has a post- script, which seems to have been the conclu- sion of an old particular collection. The Sep- tuagint and the Vulgate, which follows it, dif- fer somewhat from the Hebrew in number- ing the psalms, the difference beginning with the 10th and extending to the 147th ; the en- tiro number in all these is 150. The contents of the book of Psalms are manifold. With re- gard to their object, they may be divided into six classes: 1, hymns to God, in which he is praised as the creator, preserver, and governor of the world, and in particular as the protector of his chosen people ; 2, national psalms, in which the people are reminded of the ancient history of Israel from the time of the patriarchs, especially of the history of Moses, of the many favors received from God, of the occupation of the promised land, of the signal assistance of God, and of the gratitude therefore due to him ; 3, the king's psalms, in which the theo- cratic king is praised as the representative of Jehovah, and the assistance of the Lord is in- voked for him ; 4, moral hymns, in which the fate of the pious and the wicked is described ; 5, the psalms of lamentation, in which, some- times by individuals, sometimes by the entire people, misery and calamity, especially op- pression experienced from foreign or domestic foes, are lamented, with a prayer to God for deliverance ; a subdivision of this class is the penitential psalms, describing the Bufferings