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Updated: June 13, 2025
The French Calvinist peasantry, like the Scotch, were great in their preachers and their prophets. Both devoted themselves with enthusiasm to psalmody, insomuch that "psalm-singers" was their nickname in both countries. The one had their Clement Marot by heart, the other their Sternhold and Hopkins.
The innovation of hymn-books was as yet undreamed of; even the New Version was regarded with a sort of melancholy tolerance, as part of the common degeneracy in a time when prices had dwindled, and a cotton gown was no longer stout enough to last a lifetime; for the lyrical taste of the best heads in Shepperton had been formed on Sternhold and Hopkins.
So great was his awakened interest in the sacred songs that Sternhold resolved to write in verse for him still further of the psalms. The dedication reads: "Seeing that your tender and godly zeale dooth more delight in the holye songs of veritie than in any fayncd rymes of vanytie, I am encouraged to travayle further in the said booke of Psalmes."
Sternhold and Hopkins, and psalmodic versions of a more doubtful authorship.
Surrey's versions of some of the Psalms, and those of his contemporary, Sir Thomas Wyatt, are the most polished of the many similar attempts made at that time, among which was the collection of Sternhold and Hopkins. From his "Induction," or preparatory poem, later writers have drawn many suggestions.
This defect, in religious architecture, arises from a strict adherence to the custom of the ancients, who fixed their altars towards the east. It is amasing, that even weakness itself, by long practice, becomes canonical; it gains credit by its age and its company. Hence, Sternhold and Hopkins, by being long bound up with scripture, acquired a kind of scripture authority.
"Singing with woful noise Like a crack'd saints bell jarring in the steeple, Tom Sternhold's wretched prick-song for the people." Another poet, a courtier, wrote: "Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms When they translated David's psalms." But I see no signs of qualmishness; they show to me rather a healthy sturdiness as one of their strongest characteristics. Pope at a later day wrote:
Salem church had a peculiar connection in its origin with the church of Plymouth, which would account, doubtless, for its protracted use of the version so loved by the Pilgrims; but the Puritans of the Bay, coming directly from England, must have brought with them the version which they had used in England, that of Sternhold and Hopkins; and they would hardly have wished, nor would it have been possible for them to acquire speedily in the new land the Ainsworth's Version used by the Pilgrims from Holland.
Sternhold and Hopkins did, generally, write in the alternate measure of eight and six syllables; but Hopkins commonly rhymed the first and third; Sternhold, only the second and fourth: so that Sternhold may be considered, as writing couplets of long lines; but Hopkins wrote regular stanzas.
To such a condition had church-music been reduced by "lining the psalm" and by the lack of musical instruments to guide and control the singers. Hood says, "There is almost a certainty that no other version than Ainsworth was ever used in the colonies until the New England Version was published. But if any one was used in one or two of the churches it was Sternhold and Hopkins."
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