preme Being, and to expose the style and sentiments of Scripture, could have done it more skilfully, than by making David call upon God, not to consume his enemies by an irresistible blow, but to give them a rap? Although some shadow of an apology may be suggested for the word rap, that it had not then acquired its present burlesque acceptation, or the idea of a petty stroke, the vulgarity of the following phrase, in which the practice or profession of religion, or more particularly God's covenant with the Jews, is degraded to a trade, cannot easily be vindicated on any consideration of the fluctuating sense of words*.

For why, their hearts were nothing bent,

To him nor to his trade.1

Nor is there greater delicacy or consistency in the following

stanza.

Confound them that apply

And seeke to worke my shame;

And at my harme do laugh, and cry,

So, So, there goeth the game.m

The psalmist says, that God has placed the sun in the heavens, "which cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his cham

Psalms, says he was commanded to perfect that translation by king James, and finished the same about the time of that monarch's translation to a better kingdom, viz. about March 1625. This version is an entirely different work from his "Hymnes and Songs of the Church," published in 1623. It was designed, he tells us, to be brief, plain, and significant; and to combine the fullness of the sense with the relish of the Scripture phrase. In some of his efforts he assuredly has been successful. I will cite two verses from the first psalm.

Blest is he who neither straies

Where the godless man misguideth, Neither stands in sinners waies,

Nor in scorners chair abideth; But in God's pure lawe delights, Thereon musing daies and nights,

ber." Here is a comparison of the sun rising, to a bridegroom; who, according to the Jewish custom, was ushered from his chamber at midnight, with great state, preceded by torches and music. Sternhold has thus metrified the passage".

In them the Lord made for the sun,
A place of great renown,
Who like a bridegroom ready trimm'd
Doth from his chamber come.

The translator had better have spared his epithet to the bridegroom; which, even in the sense of ready-dressed, is derogatory to the idea of the comparison. But ready-trimm'd, in the language of that time, was nothing more than fresh-shaved. Sternhold as often impairs a splendid description by an impotent redundancy, as by an omission or contraction of the most important circumstances.

The miraculous march of Jehovah before the Israelites through the wilderness in their departure from Egypt, with other marks of his omnipotence, is thus imaged by the inspired psalmist. "O God, when thou wentest forth before the people, when thou wentest through the wilderness: the earth shook, and the heavens dropped at the presence of God; even as Sinai also was moved at the presence of God, who is the God of Israel. Thou, O God, sentedst a gracious rain upon thine inheritance, and refreshedst it when it was weary.-The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels; and the Lord is among them, as in the holy place of Sinai,” Sternhold has thus represented these great ideas,

When thou didst march before thy folk

The Egyptians from among,

And brought them from the wildernes,
Which was both wide and long ;

" Ps. xix. 4.

The earth did quake, the raine pourde downe,
Heard were great claps of thunder;

The mount Sinai shooke in such sorte,
As it would cleave in sunder.

Thy heritage with drops of rain
Abundantly was washt,

And if so be it barren was,

By thee it was refresht.

God's army is two millions,

Of warriours good and strong,

The Lord also in Sinai

Is present them among.°

If there be here any merit, it arises solely from preserving the expressions of the prose version. And the translator would have done better had he preserved more, and had given us no He has shewn no feeble or foreign enlargements of his own. independent skill or energy. When once he attempts to add or dilate, his weakness appears. It is this circumstance alone, which supports the two following well-known stanzas.P

The Lord descended from above,
And bowde the heavens high;

And underneath his feet he cast
The darknesse of the skie.

On Cherubs and on Cherubims

Full roiallie he rode;

And on the winges of all the windes *

Came flying all abrode.

Almost the entire contexture of the prose is here literally transferred, unbroken and without transposition, allowing for

the small deviations necessarily occasioned by the metre and rhyme. It may be said, that the translator has testified his judgment in retaining so much of the original, and proved he was sensible the passage needed not any adventitious ornament. But what may seem here to be judgment or even taste, I fear, was want of expression in himself. He only adopted what was almost ready done to his hand.

To the disgrace of sacred music, sacred poetry, and our established worship, these psalms still continue to be sung in the church of England. It is certain, had they been more poetically translated, they would not have been acceptable to the common people. Yet however they may be allowed to serve the purposes of private edification, in administering spiritual consolation to the manufacturer and mechanic, as they are extrinsic to the frame of our liturgy, and incompatible with the genius of our service, there is perhaps no impropriety in wishing, that they were remitted and restrained to that church in which they sprung, and with whose character and constitution they seem so aptly to correspond. Whatever estimation in point of composition they might have attracted at their first appearance in a ruder age, and however instrumental they might have been at the infancy of the reformation in weaning the minds of men from the papistic ritual, all these considerations can now no longer support even a specious argument for their being retained. From the circumstances of the times, and the growing refinements of literature, of course they become obsolete and contemptible. A work grave, serious, and even respectable for its poetry, in the reign of Edward the Sixth, at length in a cultivated age, has contracted the air of an absolute travestie. Voltaire observes, that in proportion as good taste improved, the psalms of Clement Marot inspired only disgust: and that although they charmed the court of Francis the First, they seemed only to be calculated for the populace in the reign of Lewis the Fourteenth".

HIST. MOD. ch. ccvii.

To obviate these objections, attempts have been made from time to time to modernise this antient metrical version, and to render it more tolerable and intelligible by the substitution of more familiar modes of diction. But, to say nothing of the unskilfulness with which these arbitrary corrections have been conducted, by changing obsolete for known words, the texture and integrity of the original style, such as it was, has been destroyed: and many stanzas, before too naked and weak, like a plain old Gothic edifice stripped of its few signatures of antiquity, have lost that little and almost only strength and support which they derived from antient phrases. Such alterations, even if executed with prudence and judgment, only corrupt what they endeavour to explain; and exhibit a motley performance, belonging to no character of writing, and which contains more improprieties than those which it professes to remove. Hearne is highly offended at these unwarrantable and incongruous emendations, which he pronounces to be abominable in any book, "much more in a sacred work;" and is confident, that were Sternhold and Hopkins "now living, they would be so far from owning what is ascribed to them, that they would proceed against the innovators as CHEATS." It is certain, that this translation in its genuine and unsophisticated state, by ascertaining the signification of many radical words now perhaps undeservedly disused, and by displaying original modes of the English language, may justly be deemed no inconsiderable monument of our antient literature, if not of our antient poetry*. In condemning the practice of adulterating this primitive version, I would not be understood to recommend another in its place, entirely new. I reprobate any version at all, more especially if intended for the use of the church †.