The use of hymns for purposes of private devotion preceded their insertion in the liturgical books of the pre-Reformation Church. Up to the seventh century the Breviaries which contained the prayers to be offered at the canonical hours had as matter to be sung only the words of Scripture. But the Spanish Council which met at Toledo in A.D. 633, laid down the general principle, that if in the worship of the sanctuary prayers may be offered in the words of uninspired men, so also may praise be sung. From that time the Churches of Western Christendom inserted hymns in their service-books, some of these compositions being of earlier date, but the larger number being of more recent times and of purely local interest. As every diocese and religious order claimed and exercised the right to construct its own ritual, Missal, and Breviary, there was endless variety of contents, considerable alterations of old compositions, and a general deterioration of quality. By the time Leo X. reached St. Peter’s chair the need for revision had become clamant. Under the direction of that Medicean Pope, the collection of hymns in use at Rome was recast; and ultimately the entire Breviary appeared in revised form, when Urban VIII. was Pope, in 1631. In this revised Roman Breviary, which is now in general use throughout the Papal communion, the hymns of earliest composers—say from Hilary to Gregory—are for the most part allowed to remain, although in some cases altered without real amendment; but in the case of those pieces which could not be conformed to the laws of correct Latinity there was an entire recasting. According to one authority, himself a revisionist, upwards of nine hundred alterations were made in the interests of metre, and the first lines of more than thirty hymns were altered. The Marquis of Bute executed a translation of the Roman Breviary in 1879, and then gave it as his deliberate judgment that the revisers, “with deplorable taste made a series of changes in the texts of the hymns which has been disastrous both to the literary merit and the historical interest of the poems.” The Breviary of Paris has been subjected to revisions in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The third and latest revision was intrusted to a commission of three ecclesiastics, one of whom belonged to the Jansenist party, while another was Charles Coffin, then Rector of the University of Paris, who did the greater part of the work of editing, altering, and tinkering. Under Coffin’s manipulation only twenty-one hymns of the earlier period were retained, and the number of those from the pens of comparatively modern French writers was largely increased.