all occasions to his favourite tune. Henry II. being a sportsman, chose the forty-second, Ainsi qu'on vit le cerf bruyre, "Like as the hart for water brooks," &c., which he sung when he went to the chase. The King of Navarre selected Revenge moi, prens la querelle, "Plead my cause, O God," which he sung to a dance of Poitou. This odd fashion was not likely to last long, and hardly deserved it; but it was better than the practice of singing profane and lascivious ballads, in which the Court of France had previously indulged, or than the shameful expedient by which it was superseded. The Cardinal of Lorraine, alarmed lest this popular freak should familiarise the minds of the people with Scripture, contrived to get the obscene odes of Horace and Tibullus translated into French verse, and substituted in the room of the Psalms of David. Marot, suspected of heresy, fell under the ban of the priesthood, and fled to Geneva, where he translated other fifty of the psalms; but he was more of the gay songster than the grave confessor, and found it necessary to transfer his foibles to a climate more favourable to them than that of Geneva. Theodore Beza, a more congenial spirit, at the request of Calvin and his brethren, translated the remaining hundred psalms. In the course of a few years they were set to beautiful harmonies, by the joint labours of Claude Goudimel, Louis Bourgeois, and Claude le Jeune. Goudimel, who is allowed to have been the best musician of his day in France, and who had the honour of being the teacher of the famous Palestrina,* perished in the infamous massacre of St Bartholomew, at Lyons, a victim to the Popish rabble, who dragged his body through the streets, and threw it into the Rhone. Poor Goudimel may thus be well regarded as the martyr of Protestant psalmody.

Nothing contributed more to the progress of the Reformation in France than its psalmody. "This one ordinance," says Quick," contributed mightily to the downfall of Popery, and the propagation of the Gospel in France. It took so much with the genius of the nation, that all ranks and degrees of men practised it, in the temples, and in their families. No gentleman professing the reformed religion would sit down at his table without praising God by singing. Yea, it was a special part of their morning and evening worship."+ Now that they had been set to suitable tunes, and clothed in beautiful harmony, the singing of psalms became a favourite relaxation with the people, as well as a regular part of divine service. Teachers of church music were employed to train the people; concerts were held in private houses, in public proSee this placed beyond all dispute, by Keisewetter, Hist. of Music, p. 160. + Quick's Synodicon, Intr. v.

menades, in boating parties; and as all could easily take a part in the simple counterpoint, large multitudes occasionally joined spontaneously in swelling the sacred chorus. The populace found high delight in a pastime which, without pandering to their evil passions, gratified their taste, and seemed to blend them, for the time, into one mass of living harmony. But all this awakened the alarm of the Romish priesthood. In Paris, these meetings, in which persons of high rank often mingled, and which behaved most inoffensively, were misrepresented by the priests as seditious assemblies, and they procured a royal edict putting them down under severe penalties. During the long, bitter, and bloody persecutions of the Huguenots, nothing more incensed the malice of their adversaries than their psalmody. They might preach and pray, without being overheard; but the voice of psalms bewrayed them. The most rigorous edicts were issued against the practice. They began by ordering the congregational anthem to be suspended, while a Popish procession was passing the doors of the chapel, lest the ears of the priests should be offended by the heretical music; they ended by interdicting the singing of psalms even in private houses.

This mad crusade against a practice so scriptural, so primitive, and so much in accordance with the dictates of piety, was not accomplished without some opposition. Attempts were made by some of the better-disposed prelates to introduce it into the Romish Church. Montluc, Bishop of Valence, employed all his eloquence with the Queen-Mother, Catherine de Medicis, to banish profane songs from the court, and substitute the hymns of Scripture. "If the version of Marot and Beza is objected to," said he, "let us by all means have a better one made, and not put down the whole work."+ Bishop Godeau tried his hand on a Catholic paraphrase of the Psalmist; and one Poictevin, a chanter, translated the hundred psalms. left by Marot in 1551, dedicating his version to the Cardinal de Lorraine, anointed Archbishop of Rheims! In 1561, such was the temporary success of Protestantism, that the Psalms of Marot and Beza were actually published with the royal privilegium of Charles IX., as "translated according to the genuine Hebrew text, and put into French rhyme and good music, under the superintendence of persons well skilled in holy Scripture, the languages, and art of music." But all these attempts to supersede the "unknown tongue" of the Romish service proved ineffectual. "The common people," they said,

*To this day the calumnies of the priests against those assemblies are repeated; but De Thou, the standard historian of France, himself a Romanist, gives the true version of the story. Thuan. Hist. lib. xx. 15.

+ Thuan. Hist., lib. xxv. 11. Hist. de l'Edit de Nantes, tom. iii. 278, Ruchat, Hist. de la Ref. Suisse, tom. vi. 536.

"would begin to despise the rites of the church, if they understood the language in which they were celebrated." Congregational psalmody and Romanism were declared incompatible things. The efforts, however, to put down the practice among the Protestants were equally unsuccessful. Their psalms served them on all occasions; they sung them in the dungeon, on the scaffold, on the battle-field! During the civil wars of 1562, the town of Bourges was nearly equally divided between the two contending parties. A body of cavalry was seen approaching. Those who know the bloody reprisals which the Romanists took in the hour of victory over the Huguenots, may conceive the trembling suspense into which the latter were thrown before they could ascertain whether the advancing troops were friends or foes. On entering the town, the cavalcade struck up the 124th Psalm, "Or peut bien dire Israel, &c." "It was," says Sismondi, "a cry of deliverance to which all the Huguenots responded." We may form a faint idea of the effect of this noble psalm when sung, under such circumstances, by a whole regiment, to the old martial tune which we have borrowed from the French psalter, and which is still sung to our second version of the psalm, "Now Israel may say, and that truly," &c.

The following sentiments, put by a late writer into the mouth of a Huguenot pastor, are no less truthful than beautiful:

"Ah! how these rude chants of our ancestors go to the heart at such times! The psalms are our epic, but an epic more deep and real than was ever written or sung by any people; an interminable poem: of which each one of us becomes in his turn the author; a sacred treasure of personal and individual remembrances: joys, sorrows, desires, heaped up with national associations-not a verse, not a strophe, but is quite a history or a poem. This was sung by a mother beside the cradle of her first-born; this other, one of our martyrs sang on his way to death; this is the psalm of the Vaudois returning in arms to their country; this that of the Camisards marching to battle. This verse is one that the balls of our enemies interrupted; that other, is one of which a father when expiring, murmured the half, and went to finish it with the angels! Oh! our psalms, our psalms! who could ever express in human words what your language is to us, in our solitudes, on that soil red with our blood, and under the vault of that heaven from whence they look down upon us, who have prayed, and wept, and sung before us!"*

Our Scottish reformers at an early period resolved to follow the example of the Reformed Churches abroad, in making congregational psalmody a stated portion of public worship. For this purpose the English metrical version of the psalms pub

* Bungener's France before the Revolution, vol. i., p. 110.

lished in 1563, by Sternhold and Hopkins, was adopted by the General Assembly.

"Sternhold and Hopkins," says Fuller, in his quaint way, "were men whose piety was better than their poetry, and had drank more of Jordan than of Helicon." A few specimens may suffice to show the improvements that have been made on this old version.

PSALME LVII. 1.—BY ROBERT PONT.

(From the edition printed at Edinburgh, by Robert Lekprevik, 1565.)
"Be merciful to me, O God,

be merciful to me:

For why? my soule in all assaultes

shall ever trust in thee.

And till these wicked stormes be past,

which ryse on every syde:

Under the shaddowe of thy wings

my hope shall always byde."

PSALME XC. 1, 3.—BY WILLIam Kethe.

"O Lord, thou hast been our refuge
and kept us safe and sounde:
From age to age, as witness can
all we, which true is founde.

"Thou dost vaine man shake down to dust,
though he be in his floure,

Againe thou saist, Ye Adam's sonnes,

returne, to show your power."

Some of the attempts at rhyme in this version are ridiculous enough. Witness the following:

PSALME XLIX. 20.

"Thus man to honour God hath called,
Yet doth he not consider,

That like brute beasts so doth he live,
Which turn to dust and pouder."

PSALME XVI. 4.

"They shall heap sorrows on their head,
which run as they were mad,

To offer to their idol gods

alas, it is too bad!"

Still there are some fine lines in this old version, among which the following have been often admired :—

PSALME XVIII. 9, 10.

"The Lord descended from above

and bowed the heavens high,

And underneath his feet he cast

the darkness of the sky.

"On cherubs and on cherubims

full royally he rode;

And on the wings of all the winds

came flying all abroad."

If the poetry of this old version was beneath par, the music to which it was set was very superior. In England, Daye published, in 1563, a psalter in four parts, in which the tunes were beautifully harmonised; he was followed by Tallis, Este, Ravenscroft, and others, whose collections embraced a number of tunes

of native English origin, besides those sung on the continent. In Scotland, the greatest attention was paid to this department of study. In proof of this it may be mentioned that nearly all the editions of the old version, previous to that of 1650 now in use, were printed with the tunes, and these frequently in all the four parts. The psalms being translated in a great variety of metres, the music of every psalm was printed under the first verse; so that every one who had a psalmbook had also a book of psalm tunes. And what is more, every psalm had its own tune, so that, as in the case of ordinary songs, the music and the words were inseparably associated together, and recalled each other. In one rare edition which we have seen, in order to save the expense of books, (at that time no small consideration), the different parts of the tune, which are given "in reports," (a Scottish term for en rapport), are printed reversedly, so that the book on being opened, the two pages could be read simultaneously by two persons sitting opposite each other in the same pew. To this practice, which brought the singers en rapport-into affinity with each other-Scott refers in some of his tales, where one of his characters, inveighing against an old companion, sums up the indictment by saying, "And him and me had sung aff the same psalm-buik!" This of itself would imply a much more general knowledge of sacred music than now prevails; but we are able to point to facts still more explicit. Instruction in church music formed, from a very early period, an ordinary branch of education in Scotland. James, the nephew of the famous Andrew Melville, gives us a very graphic account of his acquirements in this branch:

"Mairover, in these years, I learnt my music, wherein I tuk graitar delyt, of ane Alexander Smith, wha had been trained up among the monks in the Abbey. I learnit of him the gam (gamut), plain-song (tenor), and monie of the trebles of the psalms, whereof some I could weill sing in the kirk; but my naturalitie and easy learning by the ear maid me the mair unsolid and unready to use the form of the art. I lovit singing and playing on instruments passing weill, and wald gladlie spend tyme when the exercise thairof was within the college; for twa or three of our condisciples played fellon weill on the virginals, and another on the lute and githorn (guitar.) Our regent had also the pinalds (spinet) in his chalmer, and learnit something, and I after him. Bot it was the grait mercie of my God that keipit me from any great progress in singing and playing on instruments; for giff I had atteaned to aine reasonable measure therein, I had never don guid utherways, in respect of my amorous disposition; but my God gave me a piece of his fear and great natural shamefacedness, quhilk by his grace was my preservatives.'

* James Melville's Diary, Ban. ed., p. 24.