The rise of an English hymnody corresponding to that of Germany was, therefore, delayed for more than one hundred and fifty years. English religious song-books were exclusively psalm-books down to the eighteenth century. Poetic activity among the non-conformists consisted in translations of the psalms in metre, or rather versions of the existing translations in the English Bible, for these sectaries, as a rule, were not strong in Hebrew. The singular passion in that period for putting everything into rhyme and metre, which produced such grotesque results as turning an act of Parliament into couplets, and paraphrasing “Paradise Lost” in rhymed stanzas in order, as the writer said, “to make Mr. Milton plain,” gave aid and comfort to the peculiar Puritan views. The first complete metrical version of the psalms was the celebrated edition of Sternhold and Hopkins, the former a gentleman of the privy chamber to Edward VI., the latter a clergyman and schoolmaster in Suffolk. This version, published in 1562, was received with universal satisfaction and adopted into all the Puritan congregations, maintaining its credit for full two hundred and thirty years, until it came at last to be considered as almost equally inspired with the original Hebrew text. So far as poetic merit is concerned, the term is hardly applicable to the lucubrations of these honest and prosaic men. As Fuller said, “their piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more of Jordan than of Helicon.” In fact the same comment would apply to all the subsequent versifiers of the psalms. It would seem that the very nature of such work precludes all real literary success. The sublime thought and irregular, vivid diction of the Hebrew poets do not permit themselves to be parcelled out in the cut and dried patterns of conventional metres. Once only does Sternhold rise into grandeur—in the two stanzas which James Russell Lowell so much admired: The Lord descended from above, And bowed the heavens most high, And underneath his feet he cast The darkness of the sky. On cherub and on cherubim Full royally he rode; And on the wings of all the winds Came flying all abroad. The graces of style, however, were not greatly prized by the Puritan mind. Sternhold and Hopkins held the suffrages of their co-religionists so long on account of their strict fidelity to the thought of the original, the ruggedness and genuine force of their expression, and their employment of the simple homely phraseology of the common people. The enlightened criticism of the present day sees worth in these qualities, and assigns to the work of Sternhold and Hopkins higher credit than to many smoother and more finished versions.