The relative merits of the "Old" and "New" versions have been very variously estimated. Competent judges have given the old the praise, which certainly cannot be accorded to the new, of fidelity to the Hebrew. In both, it must be admitted, that those parts which have poetical merit are few and far between; but a reverent taste is likely to be more offended by the frequent sacrifice, in the new, of depth of tone and accuracy of sense to a fluent commonplace correctness of versification and diction, than by any excessive homeliness in the old. In both, however, some psalms, or portions of psalms, are well enough rendered to entitle them to a permanent place in the hymn-books--especially the 8th, and parts of the 18th Psalm, by Sternhold; the 57th, 84th and 100th, by Hopkins; the 23rd, 34th and 36th, and part of the 148th, by Tate and Brady. The judgment which a fastidious critic might be disposed to pass upon both these books may perhaps be considerably mitigated by comparing them with the works of other labourers in the same field, of whom Holland, in his interesting volumes entitled _Psalmists of Great Britain_, enumerates above 150. Some of them have been real poets--the celebrated earl of Surrey, Sir Philip Sidney and his sister the countess of Pembroke, George Sandys, George Wither, John Milton and John Keble. In their versions, as might be expected, there are occasional gleams of power and beauty, exceeding anything to be found in Sternhold and Hopkins, or Tate and Brady; but even in the best these are rare, and chiefly occur where the strict idea of translation has been most widely departed from. In all of them, as a rule, the life and spirit, which in prose versions of the psalms are so wonderfully preserved, have disappeared. The conclusion practically suggested by so many failures is that the difficulties of metrical translation, always great, are in this case insuperable; and that, while the psalms like other parts of scripture are abundantly suggestive of motive and material for hymnographers, it is by assimilation and adaptation, and not by any attempt to transform their exact sense into modern poetry, that they may be best used for this purpose.