The Story of the Psalters. By Henry Alexander Glass. (Began
Paul, Trench, and Co.)—The various metrical versions of the Psalms that have been published in Great Britain and America between 1549 and 1885 are the subject of this book. Of single versions no account is given ; to have done so would have been a gigantic work. The entire Psalters are very numerous, though, unhappily, for the most past of little merit. The first was the work of Robert Crowley, Rector of St. Giles's, Cripplegate ; the second, that of Archbishop Parker; the third was due to the labours of Sternhold, Hopkins, and some five or six other con- tributors, the first two supplying two-thirds of the whole. This appeared in 1564. George Buchanan, who rendered the Psalms into Latin, and Sir Philip Sidney, with his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, complete the tale of sixteenth-century translators. The next century produced twenty-seven, the most famous names among them being James I., George Wither, Sir John Denham, Baxter, and Tate and Brady (1661) ; the eighteenth, twenty-one (Watts, Sir R. Blackmore, Charles Wesley, and Christopher Smart). The nineteenth-century list begins with Joseph Cottle, and exceeds all the others put together. James Montgomery, Bishop Mant, H. F. Lyto, Keble, Professor Kennedy, and Lord Lorne are perhaps the most conspicuous names. Mr. Glass has given as a specimen of each version two brief passages (Psalm i., 1, and Psalm xxiii., 1-2), for the most part without any criticism of
his own, but letting the writers speak for themselves. He has made an interesting volume ; but our opinion of the literary taste of our countrymen is not raised by it.
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