Francis Quarles had a place assigned him in the Dunciad, by Alexander Pope, but is by Campbell admitted into “the laurelled fraternity,” and has lately recovered somewhat of his original renown. He wrote a paraphrase of the Book of Ecclesiastes, which was published in 1645, just after his death, but the Emblems, for which he is still so celebrated, appeared as early as 1635; and, although earlier than our period, may be noticed here in passing, because they seem to have been largely read for fifty years, or so, after their first publication. They strikingly reflect the poetical taste, most popular, under the Commonwealth, and amongst a large number of religious people for some time afterwards. Quarles furnishes an example of the combination of pictorial devices with the printed text. He tells his readers at the outset, “Before the knowledge of letters, God was known by hieroglyphics,” and then asks, “Indeed, what are the heavens, the earth, nay every creature, but hieroglyphics and emblems of His glory?”
Leaving this border land of religious poetry—which, although in the seventeenth century large in itself, appears small in comparison with religious prose, and, for the most part, inferior in its literary pretensions—we enter the province of hymnology proper, where we find much to interest us. Yet here we must remember, that within the era prescribed in these chapters, we do not reach what may be called the land of Beulah in the regions of English sacred song. Before we can approach that region, we must pass over another half century. The position of hymnology in the history of our literature since the Reformation is a little remarkable. Hymnology was late before it appeared in any thing like vigorous efflorescence, and in this respect it exhibits a contrast to what we notice with regard to poetical literature in earlier times and other respects. Poetry came before philosophy in Greece. Homer composed his Iliad and Odyssey long ere Plato wrote his Dialogues. Something of the same order meets us in the succession of authorship when we turn to the Biblical and sacred literature of our own country in the middle ages. Versification rose into life much earlier than prose. Between the metrical paraphrase of Scripture by Cædmon, the Whitby monk, and the theology of the Anglo-Norman schoolmen, five centuries elapsed; the prose translations and treatises of Wycliffe came two centuries later still. Romantic and dramatic poetry took the lead at the close of the sixteenth century. Spencer and Shakespere are a little in advance of Raleigh and Bacon. But when we look at our religious literature since the Reformation, we notice an inversion of such order. The Church under Elizabeth and the earlier Stuarts produced prose theology in abundance, some of it of a high order; but it yielded comparatively few verses strictly religious. The Augustan age of divinity is comparatively poor in the hymnal department, poorer in quality than it is in quantity. When, however, doctrinal divinity had declined in the eighteenth century, and the most intellectual theologians were those who defended the outworks of Christian evidence, and no such men as Thorndike, Bull and Pearson appeared among Churchmen; and no Divines equal to Owen, Baxter, and Howe could be found in the ranks of Nonconformity,—hymn-writers arose in greater numbers, and with sweeter notes, than at any earlier season. We must not anticipate them, but confine ourselves to the scanty collections of psalms and hymns contributed between the commencement of the Civil Wars and the epoch of the Revolution.
POETRY.
First we shall glance at books simply intended for use in public worship. New versions of the Psalms were early prepared by Rous and Barton—the first was published in 1641, the second in 1644. The Psalter, with titles and collects, attributed to Jeremy Taylor, appeared in the same year, and afterwards ran through several editions. “The Psalms of David from the New Translation of the Bible, turned into metre by Henry King,” Bishop of Chichester between 1641 and 1669—James I.’s “king of preachers,” and who to his fame as a preacher added some reputation as a poet—issued from the press under the Commonwealth, in 1651 or 1654. In the following year, the Rev. John White published “David’s Psalms in metre, agreeable to the Hebrew;” and it may be mentioned, as an indication of the alliance of instrumental music with psalmody under the Protectorate, that on the 22nd of November, 1655, according to a printed quarto sheet still in existence, there were select Psalms of a new translation, arranged to be “sung in verse, and chorus, of five parts, with symphonies of violins, organ, and other instruments.” The Psalms were paraphrased and turned into English verse by Thomas Garthwaite in 1664, by Dr. Samuel Woodford in 1667, and by Miles Smyth in 1668. In 1671 there came out “Psalms and Hymns, in solemn music, in four parts, on the common tunes to Psalms in metre used in parish churches, by John Playford;” and in 1679, “A Century of Select Psalms in verse, for the use of the Charter House, by Dr. John Patrick.” J. Chamberlayne Gent, Richard Goodridge, and Simon Ford added, before the Revolution, volumes of paraphrases; and in the year of that great event, we find another volume, bearing the title of “The whole Book of Psalms, as they are now sung in the churches, with the singing notes of time and tune to every syllable, never before done in England, by T. M.” These are the principal, if not all the Psalm-books, produced from the opening of the Commonwealth to the legal establishment of toleration. Public worship was, from the time of passing the Act of Uniformity, until its modification under William III., forbidden by constitutional law to be celebrated anywhere but in the churches and chapels of the Establishment; and therefore it was for them expressly, and for them alone, that the various translations and editions of the Psalter were designed. Specimens of these productions need not be given, as they are more or less close and unpoetical renderings in rhyme of the Book of Psalms.
Besides these publications, translations of particular Psalms appeared in detached forms. John Milton translated several. Some, indeed, are only classical renderings of the thoughts contained in those sacred compositions; but under date April, 1648, we find, under his hand, “Nine of the Psalms, done into metre, wherein all, but what is in a different character, are the very words of the text, translated from the original.” This method of versification put such chains on the wings of poetry that it was impossible for it to do otherwise than stretch them with awkwardness; yet, notwithstanding such an incumbrance, there may be noticed a few movements in the bard’s verses which are free and graceful. The paraphrase of the 136th Psalm, which he wrote in his fifteenth year, contains strokes of magnificent diction, and expresses adoration and praise in some of its very highest strains. Milton, as a boy, there struck a key-note which must lead off a chorus of Divine music wherever it is heard:—
“Let us, with a gladsome mind,
Praise the Lord, for He is kind;
For His mercies aye endure,
Ever faithful, ever sure.
Who by His wisdom did create