THE TEXT OF DR. WATTS.
rTo THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Hymn-books, more is the pity, are no authority on this subject, editors in general having been unmindful of the anticipatory warning given in most incisive terms by John Wesley when he published the compositions of himself and of his brother Charles. Before me are two editions of Watts's psalms and hymns, and in both is a trifling and merely verbal difference from the reading quoted from common sources by Mrs. Wood. But there is another, and I believe universal, error of some importance in Psalm xo. as printed in every collection that I have met with (not excluding so recent and careful a volume as the English Hymnal), which your correc- tion would do much to set right. That the line— "Time, like an ever-rolling stream," should run— "Time, like an over-rolling stream," is obvious, on the most casual reference to the Authorized Version, and in. the older of my editions (1758) the term is so printed, as well as in the preceding alternative rendering of the Psalm :— "Death, like an overflowing stream" g but while this line is preserved in the later edition (1819), I am bound to say that, even so early, in the other and popular version the noble " over-rolling " had become the weak and irrelevant "ever-rolling." Modern editors therefore are not quite without excuse, but it is time that justice was done to Dr. Watts. It may be added that the hymn almost always made to begin with the interjection " 0 " should commence with the appropriative pronoun " Our." This amendment is much called for,—I am, Sir, &o., W. HOLMDEN. " The Knap," Ilfracombe..
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