(Vol. iii., pp. 119. 198.)
In reply to your correspondent ARUN, who inquired about the origin and
authority of metrical psalms and hymns in churches, in addition to an
extract from one of Bishop Cosin's letters on the subject, I referred also
to the treatise commonly known as Watson's _Deduction_, but of which
treatise Heylin was in fact the author. I have recently met with a passage
in Heylin's _History of the Reformation_ (ann. 1552, Lond., 1674, p. 127.)
which seems to contain the rudiment or first germ of the _Deduction_, and
to which ARUN therefore (if not already acquainted with it) may be glad to
be referred:
"About this time (says Heylin) the Psalms of David did first begin to
be composed in English meetter by one Thomas Sternhold, one of the
grooms of the Privy Chamber; who, translating no more than
thirty-seven, left both example and encouragement to John Hopkins and
others to dispatch the rest:--a device first taken up in France by one
Clement Marot, one of the grooms of the bedchamber to King Francis the
First; who, being much addicted to poetry, and having some acquaintance
with those which were thought to have enclined to the Reformation, was
persuaded by the learned Vatablus (professor of the Hebrew tongue in
the University of Paris) to exercise his poetical phancies in
translating some of David's Psalms. For whose satisfaction, and his
own, he translated the first fifty of them; and, after flying to
Geneva, grew acquainted with Beza, who in some tract of time translated
the other hundred also, and caused them to be fitted unto several
times; which hereupon began to be sung in private houses, and by
degrees to be taken up in all the churches of the French, and other
nations which followed the Genevian platform. Marot's translation is
said by Strada to have been ignorantly and perversely done, as being
but the work of a man altogether unlearned; but not to be compared with
that barbarity and botching, which everywhere occurreth in the
translation of Sternhold and Hopkins. Which notwithstanding being first
allowed for private devotion, they were by little and little brought
into the use of the church, _permitted rather than allowed_ to be sung
before and after sermons; afterwards printed and bound up with the
Common Prayer Book, and at last added by the stationers at the end of
the Bible. For, though it is expressed in the title of those singing
psalms, that they were set forth and allowed to be sung in all churches
before and after Morning and Evening Prayer, and also before and after
sermons; yet this allowance seems rather to have been a _connivance_
than an _approbation_: no such allowance being anywhere found by such
as have been most industrious and concerned in the search thereof. At
first it was pretended only that the said Psalms should be sung before
and after Morning and Evening Prayer, and also before and after
sermons; which shows they were not to be intermingled in the public
Liturgie. But in some tract of time, as the Puritan faction grew in
strength and {461} confidence, they prevailed so far in most places, to
thrust the _Te Deum_, the _Benedictus_, the _Magnificat_, and the _Nunc
Dimittis_, quite out of the church. But of this more perhaps hereafter,
when we shall come to the discovery of the Puritan practices in the
times succeeding."