The three revisers, all of them poets of some distinction, and the first famous for his history of the wars in the Low Countries, had to steer a middle course in the matter of revision. None of them were radical humanists after the fashion of Zacharia Ferreri; that fashion, indeed, had gone out with the rise of the counter-reformation and of the great order to which they belonged. Yet in the matter of “metre and Latinity,” of which Ferreri boasted on his title page a hundred years before, the revival of classical scholarship had established a standard to which the old hymns even of the Ambrosian period did not conform. The revisers profess their anxiety to make as few changes as possible; but Pope Urban, in his bull _Psalmodiam sanctam_ prefixed to the book, announces that all the hymns—except the very few which made no pretension to metrical form—had been conformed to the laws of prosody and of the Latin tongue, those which could not be amended in any milder way being rewritten throughout. Bartolomeo Gavanti, a member of the Commission of Revision, but laboring in another department, tells us that more than nine hundred alterations were made for the sake of correct metre, with the result of changing the first lines of more than thirty of the ninety-six hymns the Breviary then contained; that the three by Aquinas on the sacrament, the _Ave Maris stella_, the _Custodes hominum_, and a very few others, were left as they were. This, then, is the genesis of the class of hymns designated in the collections as traceable no farther back than the Roman Breviary. Some of them are original, being the work of Silvius Antonianus, Bellarmine, or Urban VIII. himself, or of authors of that age whose authorship has not been traced. But the greater part are recasts of ancient hymns to meet the demands of the humanist standards of metre and Latinity. It is not easy to give a merely English reader any adequate idea of the sort of changes by which Strada and his associates adapted the old hymns to modern use. But for those who can read Latin some specimens are worth giving. Take first the great sacramental hymn of the eighth or ninth century: Ad coenam Agni providi Et stolis albis candidi, Post transitum maris Rubri Christo canamus principi, Cujus corpus sanctissimum In ara crucis torridum, Cruore ejus roseo Gustando vivimus Deo Protecti paschae vespero A devastante angelo Erepti de durissimo Pharaonis imperio. Jam pascha nostrum Christus est Qui immolatus agnus est, Sinceritatis azyma Caro ejus oblata est. O vera digna hostia Per quam fracta sunt tartara Redempta plebs captivata, Reddita vitae praemia Cum surgit Christus tumulo Victor redit de barathro, Tyrannum trudens vinculo, Et reserans paradisum Quaesumus, auctor omnium In hoc paschali gaudio: Ab omni mortis impetu Tuum defende populum. Ad regias Agni dapes Stolis amicti candidis Post transitum maris Rubri Christo canamus principi: