with the fair penitent, that it was a kind
of reading not adapted for her sex, containing dangerous matters: if she
was uneasy in her mind she should hear two masses instead of one, and
rest contented with her Paternosters and her Primer, which were not only
devotional but ornamented with a variety of elegant forms, from the most
exquisite pencils of France." Such is the story drawn from a curious
letter, written by a Huguenot, and a former friend of Catharine de'
Medici, and by which we may infer that the reformed religion was making
considerable progress in the French Court,--had the Cardinal of Lorraine
not interfered by persuading the mistress, and she the king, and the
king his queen, at once to give up psalm-singing and reading the Bible!

"This infectious frenzy of psalm-singing," as Warton describes it,
"under the Calvinistic preachers, had rapidly propagated itself through
Germany as well as France. It was admirably calculated to kindle the
flame of fanaticism, and frequently served as the trumpet to rebellion.
These energetic hymns of Geneva excited and supported a variety of
popular insurrections in the most flourishing cities of the Low
Countries, and what our poetical antiquary could never forgive,
"fomented the fury which defaced many of the most beautiful and
venerable churches of Flanders."

At length it reached our island at that critical moment when it had
first embraced the Reformation; and here its domestic history was
parallel with its foreign, except, perhaps, in the splendour of its
success. Sternhold, an enthusiast for the Reformation, was much
offended, says Warton, at the lascivious ballads which prevailed among
the courtiers, and, with a laudable design to check these indecencies,
he undertook to be our Marot--without his genius: "thinking thereby,"
says our cynical literary historian, Antony Wood, "that the courtiers
would sing them instead of their sonnets, _but did not_, only some few
excepted." They were practised by the Puritans in the reign of
Elizabeth; for Shakspeare notices the Puritan of his day "singing psalms
to hornpipes,"[303] and more particularly during the protectorate of
Cromwell, on the same plan of accommodating them to popular tunes and
jigs, which one of them said "were too good for the devil." Psalms were
now sang at Lord Mayors' dinners and city feasts; soldiers sung them on
their march and at parade; and few houses, which had windows fronting
the streets, but had thei