A new version by two Irishmen, Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, appeared in 1696. Tate was a literary man, a playwright, a poet, and finally poet laureate. Brady had a rather varied clerical career in Ireland and in England, becoming chaplain to King William. This will partly explain why this version received royal endorsement and gradually replaced Sternhold and Hopkins in the English Church. It was adopted by the Protestant Episcopal Church of America in 1789. The fact that the Nonconformist churches remained faithful to the “Old Version” and to Rous’ version, no doubt had its bearing on the final acceptance of the “New Version” by the Established Church. This “New Version” was a little smoother than the “Old Version,” and had a little more literary grace, but still was shackled by devotion to “purity”—to the exact thought and phraseology of the Hebrew Psalms. Nevertheless, as Gillman says, “this book contained a plentiful supply of chaff, but perhaps a few more grains of golden corn than Sternhold’s.” “As pants the hart for cooling streams” and “Through all the changing scenes of life” are still highly prized, and Tate’s Christmas Carol, “While shepherds watched their flocks by night” (which appeared in a supplement to the “New Version”) is a masterly adaptation of the Nativity story. On the other hand, Montgomery, in comparing the “New Version” with the “Old Version,” remarks: “It is nearly as inanimate as the former, though a little more refined.” Of the “Old Version” he says: “The merit of faithful adherence to the original has been claimed for this version and need not be denied, but it is the resemblance which the dead bear to the living.” Old Thomas Fuller wittily says of Sternhold and Hopkins that “They are men whose piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more of Jordan than of Helicon.” Thomas Campbell even more harshly exclaims: “With the best intensions and the worst taste, they degraded the spirit of Hebrew poetry by flat and homely phraseology, and, mistaking vulgarity for simplicity, turned into bathos what they found sublime.” From the literary point of view these dicta are correct enough, but they overlook what is vastly more important—the high moral and spiritual uses which these homely versions so amply served. X. AMERICAN PSALMODY The Pilgrims brought with them from Leyden Ainsworth’s version of the Psalms, published in Amsterdam—Genevan rather than English in character. Its use was largely confined to the Pilgrims and their descendants. Presently the copies of both versions became rare and the service of song depended on the “lining out” of the verses.