272 HYMN

TUNES.

branch of the Holy Catholie Church, to which the “ devo-
tions,” &c., &e., of late years bear about the resemblance
of a farthing rushlight to the sun,—the music-books and
psalm tunes of the Tudor period were in great demand, and
the grand, massive, and sublime harmonies of Talys, Bird,
Morley, Gibbons, Purcell, and their successors in the true
English school of composition, were considered fit and
proper artistic evidences of Church music to rank side by
side with the works of Overall, Cosin, Johnson, Water-
land, Bull, Hammond, Thorndike, Andrewes, and the great
English theologians. The taste and requirements of the
time was a breadth and flavour of the sterling sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries antiquarianism, and, as the
theological works written then were not only sound in
faith and of mature scholarship, but most elevating read-
ing, heightened by a quaintness of diction, metaphor, and
illustration, that rather added zest to than detracted

Plame C ThoSier.

Fulyoyce Himderue with fear

FOVRE
SCOR ELLAND “S'Ee
VEN PSALMES OF DA.
IN ENGLISH MITRE
by T homas ftereholde and others

VID

from them, so Church musicians hoped and laboured hard
to reproduce the works, or new tunes in the spirit and
style, of the composers of the same era, as fitting corol-

laries. However perfect this was in theory, it failed in|
practice, because the conditions were unequal and the|

parallel could not be maintained.

Two tunes by Talys, from Archbishop Parker’s psalter,
are all that have kept their hold of the people from his time
to the present day. The majestic “ Veni Creator,” and
that canon, popularly known as “ The Evening Hymn,”
are sung wherever the English language is spoken. The
other six tunes of the great Reformation harmonist and
composer are known only to the musical antiquarian.
Similar limited recognition appertains to the psalters of
Crowley, Day, Este, Damon, Ravenscroft, and even to
Dr. Slayter’s, who, to please the Puritans, adapted psalms
to the popular secular tunes of the day, totally neglecting

the spirit of Queen Elizabeth’s injunctions, wherein she
ordered that singing should be “in the best melody ang
music that may be conveniently devised: and this
| disregard, no doubt, gave rise to honest John Playford’s
remark, that “Our late and solemn music is now jostled
out of esteem by the new courants and jigs of foreigners,
to the grief of all sober and judicious understanders of
that formerly solid and good music ;” and then he proceeds
to say, ‘ Nor must we expect harmony in people’s minds,
so long as pride, vanity, faction, and discords are go
predominant in their lives.” This, then, was the style
and character of the music the early Tractarians enlisted
on their side, and the writer remembers what a stxide the
incumbent of St. Paul’s, Oxford, imagined he had made
in Church music, when, on the occasion of Dr, Pusey
preaching his first sermon after his suspension, the old
113th Psalm was sung to Allison’s arrangement. But,

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his praife forthetel,C omeye before

himandreioyce.

M. D. LXi.

jas before stated, this was untenable, for the conditions
| between the theology and music of the Reformation were
| unequal ; the former flourished, whilst the latter lan-
guished; the theologians gained by their learning and
quaintness, the musicians lost by the practice being
entirely changed.

During three hundred years or so, the tune had be-
come a melody in the upper part. It was no longer an
inner part, and the evidence of this old usage may be
seen above in the fac-simile of the earliest printed
version of the hundredth psalm, which the writer dis-
/covered in 1842, and pointed out to his friend the late
| Rey. R. H. Barham (of Ingoldsby Legendary fame), who
was then librarian of the library in St. Paul’s Cathedral,
where the psalter from which the reproduction is taken
yet exists.

The melody here is in the tenor, “the voice of the |

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