VIII. ROUS’ VERSION
Rous’ version was made by Francis Rous, Provost of Eton College, Oxford, a Presbyterian lawyer and a man of public affairs. It was an improvement on Sternhold and Hopkins, but still left much to be desired in smoothness of versification and grace of diction, owing to the continued loyalty to the original phraseology of the Psalms. Hence it had some “awful examples,” to use Matthew Arnold’s phrase, whose repetition here might amuse but not edify. But it also had some happy stanzas that we still are glad to sing, e.g.:
“The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want;
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green; he leadeth me
The quiet waters by.”
Compare this with Archbishop Parker’s version of the Shepherd Psalm written in 1557:
“To feed my neede: he will me leade
To pastures green and fat:
He forth brought me: in libertie
To waters delicate.”
But with the blindness of the versifiers to the need of diversifying their meters in the interest of varied and attractive tunes, all the psalms were written in Common Meter.[2]