ichester,

The eldest son of Dr. John King lord bishop of London, whom Winstanley
calls a person well fraught with episcopal qualities, was born at
Wornal in Bucks, in the month of January 1591. He was educated partly
in grammar learning in the free school at Thame in Oxfordshire, and
partly in the College school at Westminster, from which last he was
elected a student in Christ Church 1608[1], being then under the
tuition of a noted tutor. Afterwards he took the degrees in arts, and
entered into holy orders, and soon became a florid preacher, and
successively chaplain to King James I. archdeacon of Colchester,
residentiary of St. Paul's cathedral, canon and dean of Rochester, in
which dignity he was installed the 6th of February 1638. In 1641, says
Mr. Wood, he was made bishop of Chichester, being one of those persons
of unblemished reputation, that his Majesty, tho' late, promoted to
that honourable office; which he possessed without any removal, save
that by the members of the Long Parliament, to the time of his death.

When he was young he delighted much in the study of music and poetry,
which with his wit and fancy made his conversation very agreeable, and
when he was more advanced in years he applied himself to oratory,
philosophy, and divinity, in which he became eminent.

It happened that this bishop attending divine service in a church at
Langley in Bucks, and hearing there a psalm sung, whose wretched
expression, far from conveying the meaning of the Royal Psalmist, not
only marred devotion, but turned what was excellent in the original
into downright burlesque; he tried that evening if he could not
easily, and with plainness suitable to the lowest understanding,
deliver it from that garb which rendered it ridiculous. He finished
one psalm, and then another, and found the work so agreeable and
pleasing, that all the psalms were in a short time compleated; and
having shewn the version to some friends of whose judgment he had a
high opinion, he could not resist their importunity (says Wood) of
putting it to the press, or rather he was glad their sollicitations
coincided with his desire to be thought a poet.

He was the more discouraged, says the antiquary, as Mr. George
Sandys's version and another by a reformer had failed in two different
extremes; the first too elegant for the vulgar use, changing both
metre and tunes, wherewith they had been long acquainted; the other as
flat and poor, and as lamely exe