"
Though these words seem prophetic, the gay and volatile Marot could never
have foreseen what has proved one of the most curious facts in religious
history,--that from the airy and unsubstantial seed sown by the French
courtier in such a careless, thoughtless manner, would spring the
great-spreading and deep-rooted tree of sacred song.
Little volumes of the metrical rendering of the Psalms, known as "Tate and
Brady's Version," are frequently found in New England. It was the first
English collection of psalms containing any smoothly flowing verses. Many
of the descendants of the Puritans clung with affection to the more literal
renderings of the "New England Psalm-Book," and thought the new verses were
"tasteless, bombastic, and irreverent." The authors of the new book were
certainly not great poets, though Nahum Tate was an English Poet-Laureate.
It is said of him that he was so extremely modest that he was never able
to make his fortune or to raise himself above necessity. He was not too
modest, however, to dare to make a metrical version of the Psalms, to write
an improvement of King Lear, and a continuation of Absalom and Achitophel.
Brady--equally modest--translated the Aeneid in rivalry of Dryden. "This
translation," says Johnson, "when dragged into the world did not live long
enough to cry."
Such commonplace authors could hardly compose a version that would have a
stable foundation or promise of long existence.
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