Of all these men there are no books that take high rank in Literature proper--unless we except the _Utopia_ of More, and the New Testament of Tyndale: but their lives and thought were welded by stout blows into the intellectual texture of the century and are not to be forgotten. _Verse-Writing and Psalmodies._ And now, was there really no dalliance with the Muses in times that brought to the front such fighting Gospellers as we have talked of? Yes, even Thomas More did write poems--having humor in them and grammatic proprieties, and his Latin prosody is admired of Classicists: then there were the versifiers of the Psalms, Sternhold and Hopkins, and the Whittingham who succeeded John Knox at Geneva--sharing that Scotchman’s distaste for beautiful rubrics, and we suspect beautiful verses also--if we may judge by his version of the Creed. This is a sample:-- “The Father, God is; God, the Son; God--Holy Ghost also; Yet are not three gods in all But one God and no mo.” From the Apostles’ Creed again, we excerpt this:-- “From thence, shall he come for to judge All men both dead and quick. I, in the Holy Ghost believe And Church thats Catholick.” Hopkins,[79] who was a schoolmaster of Suffolk, and the more immediate associate of Sternhold, thus expostulates with the Deity:-- “Why doost withdraw thy hand aback And hide it in thy lappe? Oh, plucke it out, and be not slacke To give thy foes a rap!” As something worthier from these old psalmists’ versing, I give this of Sternhold’s:-- “The earth did shake, for feare did quake, The hills their bases shook Removed they were, in place most fayre At God’s right fearful looks. He rode on hye and did so flye Upon the Cherubins, He came in sight, and made his flight Upon the wings of winds,” etc. It may well be that bluff King Harry relished more the homely Saxonism of such psalms than the _Stabat Maters_ and _Te Deums_ and _Jubilates_, which assuredly would have better pleased the Princess Katharine of Aragon. Yet even at a time when the writers of such psalmodies received small crumbs of favor from the Court, the English Bible was by no means a free-goer into all companies. “A nobleman or gentleman may read it”--(I quote from a Statute of Henry VIII.’s time)--“in his house, or in his garden, or orchard, yet quietly and without disturbance of order. A merchant may read it to himself privately: But the common people, women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen and servingmen, are to be punished with one month’s imprisonment, as often as they are detected in reading the Bible, either privately or openly.”[80]