With the development of a more fastidious taste, through the study of the Latin classics as literary models, there arose in the sixteenth century, and even before the Reformation, a demand for a reformation of the Breviary. Besides its defects of form, such as violations of Latin grammar, the constant use of terms which grated on the ears of the humanists, and the use of hymns in which rhyme rather added to the offence of want of correct metre, the contents of the Breviary were found faulty by a critical age. The selections from the Fathers to be read by way of homily were in some cases from spurious works; and the narratives of saints’ lives for the days dedicated to them were not always edifying, and in some cases palpably untrue. It became a proverbial saying that a person lied like the second nocturn office of the Breviary, that being the service in which these legends are found. But the badness of the Latin and the metrical faults of the hymns counted for quite as much with the critics of that day. We hear of a cardinal warning a young cleric not to be too constant in reading his Breviary, if he wished to preserve his ear for correct Latinity. As might have been expected, it was the elegant Medicean Pope Leo X. who first put his hand to the work of reform. He selected for this purpose Zacharia Ferreri, Bishop of Guarda-Alfieri, a man of fine Latin scholarship and some ability as a poet. By 1525 Ferreri had the hymns for a new Breviary ready, and published them with the promise of the Breviary itself on the title-page.[19] Clement VII., also of the house of Medici, was Pope when the book appeared, and he authorized the substitution of these new hymns for the old, but did not command this. The book is furnished with an introduction by Marino Becichemi, a forgotten humanist, who was then professor of eloquence at Padua. It is worth quoting as exhibiting the attitude of the Renaissance to the earlier Christian literature. He praises Ferreri as a shining light in every kind of science, human and divine, prosaic and poetical. He cannot say too much of the beauty of his style, its gravity and dignity, its purity, its spontaneity and freedom from artificiality. “That his hymns and odes, beyond all doubt, will secure him immortality, I need not conceal. Certainly I have read nothing in Christian poets sweeter, purer, terser, or brighter. How brief and how copious, each in its place—how polished! Everywhere the stream flows in full channel with that antique Roman mode of speech, except where of full purpose it turns in another direction.” That means how Ciceronian Ferreri’s speech, except where he remembers that he is a Christian poet and bishop writing for Christian worshippers. “More than once have I exhorted him that it belonged to the duty and dignity of his episcopal (_pontificii_) office to make public these Church hymns.”