Edmund Prys appears to have discharged faithfully the duties connected with his various offices down to his death in 1623. Although a Justice of the Peace, the tall handsome figure of the Archdeacon was welcome in the houses of all his poorer parishioners. He was a great scholar, well versed, it was said, in eight languages. Wales possessed, at that time, a notable band of Hebrew scholars, men who knew not only Hebrew, but Syriac, Arabic, and Chaldaic as well. It is, of course, as an author that the fame of Edmund Prys endures. That he was master of a sound Welsh prose style is apparent from the few fragments of his writing which remains; but he left no prose works behind him. It is as a poet, and especially as the composer of a metrical version of the Psalms, that he will always be remembered. He wrote much poetry of every description, the topics ranging from Heaven to tobacco. Most of it is interesting, and some of it beautiful; but it seldom rises much above a common level of mediocrity. It is upon the Psalms, and upon them alone, that his reputation rests. Hymn singing in public worship was {158} the peculiar product of the Reformation; for although a few magnificent hymns had been composed in the Middle Ages, by men like St. Bernard, they occupied no conspicuous place. In churches and monasteries chanting had been universal; but the popular hymn, which the whole congregation sang in its own language, was unknown. It would hardly be going too far to say that, upon the use which it made of the hymn, the early success of the Reformation depended. German Protestants marched into battle shouting the great hymns of Luther. The French Huguenots sang those of Clement Marot and Marguerite de Valois. The sombre Calvinist services of Geneva were transformed under the influence of the hymns introduced by Beza. In England a metrical version of a few of the Psalms had been published by Sternhold, Groom of the Robes to Henry VIII, in 1548. Then in 1562 appeared the version of John Hopkins, which, for a hundred and fifty years, remained the only hymn-book possessed by the English Church. For years no special tunes were composed to be sung with the new hymns; they were simply set to the airs of popular songs and ballads. Edmund Prys published his Welsh Metrical Psalms in 1621. Something similar, {159} but on a much smaller scale, had been attempted previously by Dafydd Ddu Hiraddug, and by Edmund Kyffin; but Prys greatly excelled them in mastery of rhythm and rhyme. The metre is quasi-ballad, simple and direct, the very thing that would appeal to the uneducated. It is not surprising to hear that, in a very few years, the plowman in the field, and the shepherd on the mountain side, were singing lustily the Psalms of Edmund Prys.