The Geneva psalter had a very singular origin. In 1538 Clement Marot, a notable poet at the court of Francis I. of France, began for his amusement to make translations of the psalms into French verse, and had them set to popular tunes. Marot was not exactly in the odor of sanctity. The popularization of the Hebrew lyrics was a somewhat remarkable whim on the part of a writer in whose poetry is reflected the levity of his time much more than its virtues. As Van Laun says, he was “at once a pedant and a vagabond, a scholar and a merry-andrew. He translated the penitential psalms and Ovid’s Metamorphoses; he wrote the praises of St. Christina and sang the triumphs of Cupid.” His psalms attained extraordinary favor at the dissolute court. Each of the royal family and the courtiers chose a psalm. Prince Henry, who was fond of hunting, selected “Like as the hart desireth the water brooks.” The king’s mistress, Diana of Poitiers, chose the 130th psalm, “Out of the depths have I cried to thee, O Lord.” This fashion was, however, short-lived, for the theological doctors of the Sorbonne, those keen heresy hunters, became suspicious that there was some mysterious connection between Marot’s psalms and the detestable Protestant doctrines, and in 1543 the unfortunate poet fled for safety to Calvin’s religious commonwealth at Geneva. Calvin had already the year before adopted thirty-five of Marot’s psalms for the use of his congregation. Marot, after his arrival at Geneva, translated twenty more, which were characteristically dedicated to the ladies of France. Marot died in 1544, and the task of translating the remaining psalms was committed by Calvin to Theodore de Beza (or Bèze), a man of a different stamp from Marot, who had become a convert to the reformed doctrines and had been appointed professor of Greek in the new university at Lusanne. In the year 1552 Beza’s work was finished, and the Geneva psalter, now complete, was set to old French tunes which were taken, like many of the German chorals, from popular secular songs. The attribution of certain of these melodies, adopted into modern hymn-books, to Guillaume Franc and Louis Bourgeois is entirely unauthorized. The most celebrated of these anonymous tunes is the doxology in long metre, known in England and America as the Old Hundredth, although it is set in the Marot-Beza psalter not to the 100th psalm but to the 134th. These psalms were at first sung in unison, unharmonized, but between 1562 and 1565 the melodies were set in four-part counterpoint, the melody in the tenor according to the custom of the day. This was the work of Claude Goudimel, a Netherlander, one of the foremost musicians of his time, who, coming under suspicion of sympathy with the Huguenot party, perished in the massacre on St. Bartholomew’s night in 1572.