By grace celestial.
For John Goddis grace it is,
Who list till expone the same:
O John, thou did amiss
When that thou lost this name.
My prophets call, my preachers cry
John, come kiss me now
John, come kiss me by and by
And make nae mair ado.
A similar book appeared in 1642, called: Psalms, or Songs of Zion, turned into the language and set to the tunes of a strange land, by William Slatyer, intended for Christmas Carols and fitted to divers of the most noted and common but solemn tunes, everywhere in this land familiarly used and known. That the Puritans of that century did not invariably confine themselves to “solemn tunes” is indicated by Shakespeare when the Clown in The Winter’s Tale, in praising the vocal prowess of the shearers, assembled for the sheep-shearing feast, says: “Three-man song-men, all, and very good ones...; but one Puritan amongst them, and he sings Psalms to hornepipes.” In the New Variorium Shakespeare, H. H. Furness, in commenting on the passage, says: “He sings Psalms to the lively tunes to which horn-pipes were danced,—a practice which, we know was extremely popular in France, and from allusions like the present we can infer that it was not unknown in England.”