Verse-Writing and Psalmodies.
And now, was there really no dalliance with the Muses in times that brought to the front such fighting Gospellers as we have talked of?
Yes, even Thomas More did write poems—having humor in them and grammatic proprieties, and his Latin prosody is admired of Classicists: then there were the versifiers of the Psalms, Sternhold and Hopkins, and the Whittingham who succeeded John Knox at Geneva—sharing that Scotchman’s distaste for beautiful rubrics, and we suspect beautiful verses also—if we may judge by his version of the Creed. This is a sample:—
“The Father, God is; God, the Son;
God—Holy Ghost also;
Yet are not three gods in all
But one God and no mo.”
From the Apostles’ Creed again, we excerpt this:—
“From thence, shall he come for to judge
All men both dead and quick.
I, in the Holy Ghost believe
And Church thats Catholick.”
Hopkins,[79] who was a schoolmaster of Suffolk, and the more immediate associate of Sternhold, thus expostulates with the Deity:—
“Why doost withdraw thy hand aback
And hide it in thy lappe?
Oh, plucke it out, and be not slacke
To give thy foes a rap!”
As something worthier from these old psalmists’ versing, I give this of Sternhold’s:—
“The earth did shake, for feare did quake,
The hills their bases shook
Removed they were, in place most fayre
At God’s right fearful looks.
He rode on hye and did so flye
Upon the Cherubins,
He came in sight, and made his flight
Upon the wings of winds,” etc.
It may well be that bluff King Harry relished more the homely Saxonism of such psalms than the Stabat Maters and Te Deums and Jubilates, which assuredly would have better pleased the Princess Katharine of Aragon. Yet even at a time when the writers of such psalmodies received small crumbs of favor from the Court, the English Bible was by no means a free-goer into all companies.
“A nobleman or gentleman may read it”—(I quote from a Statute of Henry VIII.’s time)—“in his house, or in his garden, or orchard, yet quietly and without disturbance of order. A merchant may read it to himself privately: But the common people, women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen and servingmen, are to be punished with one month’s imprisonment, as often as they are detected in reading the Bible, either privately or openly.”[80]
Truly this English realm was a strange one in those times, and this a strange King—who has listened approvingly to Hugh Latimer’s sermons—who harries Tyndale as he had harried Tyndale’s enemy—More; who fights the Pope, fights Luther, holds the new Bible (even Cranmer’s) in leash, who gives pension to Sternhold, works easy riddance of all the wives he wishes, pulls down Religious Houses for spoils, calls himself Defender of the Faith, and maybe goes to see (if then on show) Gammer Gurton’s Needle,[81] and is hilariously responsive to such songs as this:—
“I cannot eat but little meat
My Stomach is not good
But sure I think, that I can drink
With him that wears a hood;
Tho’ I go bare, take ye no care
I nothing am a colde,
I stuffe my skin so full within
Of jolly good ale and olde.”