DICTIONARY OF MUSIC - El Atril

HYMN HYMN 455
us, Lord ' ; hut here the hospitality of the
Appendix came to an end, and the metrical
Psalter atimitted for a hundred years or more
no new guests.
Hymns existing apart from the metrical
Psalter had little chance of being taken into
public use. The Elizabethan period "was not
unproductive of such compositions, e.g. Hunnis's
Handfiill of HiyiiisueHes (16S3), but they gained
no entrance to the Church Services. In 1623
a bold attempt to widen the sphere failed,
though it was an attempt of a very high order.
George Wither then published his Htiinns and
Songs of the Chureh ,—a volume in which he was
prudent enough to begin with paraphrases of
Scripture, of the recognised sort, before coming
to the Hymns for Festivals or Special Occasions.
He also secured for the music the co-operation
of Orlando Gibbons, who provided sixteen tunes,
set in two p)art3 only, treble and bass, thus
differing from the usual method of setting the
psalm tunes. But in spite of these advantages
the book was a failure. The work of Withers
and Gibbons fell flat ; subsequent generations
recognised its worth, but it is only in the 1904
edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern that
Gibbons's tunes have received the full welcome
due to them.
484.) When
(See Xos. 6, 124, 266, 267, 450,
Pla3'ford tried to recover the
church music after the Restoration, he was not
content merely to re^iroduce the old Psalter, but
he began to enlarge its scope. In his Psalms
and Hymns of 1671, he introduced a hymn for
Good Friday as well as ' Six divine songs for one
voice to the organ.' Finding this publication too
elaborate and musicianly for the low state of
musical efficiency prevalent since the Rebellion,
he published his simpler Whole Book of Psalms
in 1677, which became the standard edition of
Sternhold and Hopkins. To this he made further
additions, including the translation which Fushop
Cosin had made in 1627 of the hymn, ' Jam lucis
orto sidere, ' for his Collection of PrivateDevotions.
Already his version of the ' Veni Creator ' had
been adopted into the Prayer Book of 1661,
from the same source ; and no doubt this reflected
a sort of authority on the other hymns in the
same book.
When the New Version of the Psalter, written
by Tate and Brady, was issued in 1696, it
drew a sharper line at the Psalms and cast
the additional matter more definitely into a
' Supjileraent.' Within this section simultane-
ously, the number of hymns began a little to
increase ; and the Su]iplement was definitely
authorised, with the Psalter, by the Crown in
1703. Thus there appeared for the first time
the familiar hymn, 'AVhile shepherds watched
their flocks by night, ' and with it, Easter hymns
and Hymns for Holy Communion. Hymns
for the latter occasion had ajipeared occasion-
ally in the early Psalters— for example in
Daman's Fsalmes of 1579, but henceforward
they came into regular use throughout the
18th century.
The end of the 17th century had already seen
one book win success in \vhich the Hymns had
crept out from beneath the shelter of the Psalms,
and taken up a stand on their own account.
This was Select Psalms and Hymns for St.
James's, Westminster, 1697. But with the new
century the position began entirely to change,
and the Hymns began a new career of selfassertion,
which has ended in their ousting
almost entirely the metrical Psalms. The years
immediately preceding had witnessed the real
beginnings of English creative hjTunody. John
Austin had followed Cosin in setting hymns
in his book of Devotions, and had gone beyond
him in appending a larger collection. Bishop
Ken had written his three immortal hj'uins ;
and, most important of all, the new liberty of
worship conceded to Nonconformists had set free
among them a great creative force of sacred
verse and song. Baxter and Mason had begun
the traditions, which were taken up by Watts
and Doddridge, and handed on to the Wesleys.
Among the Nonconformists, at any rate, the
monopoly of the metrical Psalter was now broken
down, and the hymns had won an established
place for themselves.
Simultaneousl}', Playford and others began to
gather up the results of a parallel activity on
the part of the musicians. The first edition of
The Divine Companion was designed as a supplement
to the Psalter, and contained only
novelties. These included six tunes by Dr. Blow,
several by Jer. Clarke, and one by Croft. Of
these, one by Clarke has since held the field
viz. the fine tune later called Uftingham Hymns
Ancient and Modern, No. 453. In the second
edition of 1709 there w^ere great additions, including
Clarke's Brockham, 'I will extol,' and
St. Magnus, with Croft's 14Sth (Hymns Ancient
and Modern, Nos. 3, 90, 171, 234).
The new hymn tune was marked by the
same solidity and sterling character which had
made the old Psalm tunes so satisfying ; and
later books carried on these good traditions.
Thus Gawthorn's Harmonia Perfecta of 1730
contains a large part of the Ravenscroft Psalm
tunes, together with a collection of the best new
hymn tunes in the same style. Some tunes of
earlier date were also recovered and perpetuated,
such as Tallis's 'Canon,' and Gibbons's 'Angels.'
A fine example of the new accessions is the
massive tune Eltham (see Hymns Ancient and
Modern, No. 322). Side by side ivith the
h}unn- books there were also collections of
tunes by individual authors, such as Battis-
hill's "Twelve Hymns' (1765), Hayes's 'Sixteen
Psalms' (1774), and others. These made
valuable contributions to the succeeding general
collections.
But already before this there were signs that
the frivolity which had spoilt the music of the