Domino quoniam bonus_, because it was his favourite psalm.
And the Spanish as well as French composers hastened to set the Psalms
of Marot to music. The fashion lasted, for Henry the Second set one to
an air of his own composing. Catharine de' Medici had her psalm, and it
seems that every one at court adopted some particular psalm for
themselves, which they often played on lutes and guitars, &c. Singing
psalms in verse was then one of the chief ingredients in the happiness
of social life.

The universal reception of Marot's Psalms induced Theodore Beza to
conclude the collection, and ten thousand copies were immediately
dispersed. But these had the advantage of being set to music, for we are
told they were "admirably fitted to the violin and other musical
instruments." And who was the man who had thus adroitly taken hold of
the public feeling to give it this strong direction? It was the solitary
Thaumaturgus, the ascetic Calvin, who from the depths of his closet at
Geneva had engaged the finest musical composers, who were, no doubt,
warmed by the zeal of propagating his faith to form these simple and
beautiful airs to assist the psalm-singers. At first this was not
discovered, and Catholics as well as Huguenots were solacing themselves
on all occasions with this new music. But when Calvin appointed these
psalms, as set to music, to be sung at his meetings, and Marot's formed
an appendix to the Catechism of Geneva, this put an end to all
psalm-singing for the poor Catholics! Marot himself was forced to fly to
Geneva from the fulminations of the Sorbonne, and psalm-singing became
an open declaration of what the French called "Lutheranisme," when it
became with the reformed a regular part of their religious discipline.
The Cardinal of Lorraine succeeded in persuading the lovely patroness of
the "holy song-book," Diane de Poictiers, who at first was a
psalm-singer and an heretical reader of the Bible, to discountenance
this new fashion. He began by finding fault with the Psalms of David,
and revived the amatory elegances of Horace: at that moment even the
reading of the Bible was symptomatic of Lutheranism; Diane, who had
given way to these novelties, would have a French Bible, because the
queen, Catharine de' Medici, had one, and the Cardinal finding a Bible
on her table, immediately crossed himself, beat his breast, and
otherwise so well acted his part, that "having thrown the Bible down and
condemned it, he remonstrated