42 THE METHODIST HYMN-BOOK ILLUSTRATED
Christmas and Easter hymns) ; most of his works are sup plicatory, and his defects are connected with the same habit of mind. He is apt to repeat the same thoughts, and to lose force by redundancy he runs sometimes even to a tedious length ; his hymns are not always symmetrically constructed, or well balanced and finished off. But he has great truth, depth, and variety of feeling ; his diction is manly, and always to the point ; never florid, though sometimes passionate and not free from exaggeration ; often vivid and picturesque.
Canon Overton says, Regarded merely as literary com positions, many of Charles Wesley s hymns attain a very high standard of excellence. They will bear, and indeed require, the closest analysis, in order to discover their hidden beauties. The Evangelical Revival, Chap. VI.
Hymn 2. All people that on earth do dwell.
WILLIAM KETHE.
Appeared first in Dayis Psalter, 1560-1. In the Angk-Genevan Psalter of 1561 twenty-five Psalm versions of Kethe s are given, including Psalm c. It is not in the English Psalter of 1562, but was added to the Appendix in 1564.
Ver. I. Mirth, in the Scottish Psalter of 1650, is taken from the common metre version of the psalm in the older English Psalters.
Ver. 2. Kethe wrote, We are His folcke, or people. The printer turned it into flocke by error, and it has kept its place.
Kethe is said to have been a Scotchman. He was an exile at Frankfurt 1555, at Geneva 1557, Rector of Childe, Okeford, near Blandford, in 1561 ; his connexion with that living ceased about 1593.
Dr. Julian says the Old Hundredth first appeared in the enlarged edition of the French Genevan Psalter of 1551 as the tune to Psalm cxxxiv. The first half of the tune is a musical phrase found in various combinations, but the latter part and the form of the whole was by Louis Bourgeois, editor of the Psalter. Kethe s version was apparently written for this tune.
In Merry Wives of Windsor (Act ii. sc. i) Mrs. Ford says, I would have sworn his disposition would have gone to the truth of his words ; but they do no more adhere and keep place together than the Hundredth Psalm to the tune of Green Sleeves. Bunyan makes our country birds sing the last verse to Christiana before she goes down into the Valley of Humiliation.
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