the barbarity and botching, which every where occurreti in the translation of Sternhold and Hopkins; which notwithstanding being allowed for private devotion, they were by little and little brought into the use of the Church and permitted, rather than allowed to be sung before and after sermons. Afterwards they were printed and bound up in the Common Prayer-Book, and at last added by the stationers to the end of the Bible. For though it be expressed in the title of these singing psalins, that they were set forth and allowed to be sung in all churches before and after morning and evening prayer, and also before and after sermons, yet this allowance seems rather to have been a connivance than an approbation; no such allowance being any where found by such as have been most industrious and concerned in the search thereof. At first it was pretended only that the said psalms should be sung before and after morning and evening prayer, and also before and after sermons; which shews they were not to be intermingled with the public liturgy; but in some tract of time, they prevailed in most places to thrust the Te Deum, the Benedictus, Magnificat, and the. Nunc Dimittis, quite out of our church." Although there be much truth in this relation of Heylyn's, yet his censure is too general and severe; for many, of the psalins in this version are truly excellent, and far superior to any other poetical translation. The old hundredth infinitely exceeds that in Tate and Brady's Version. Good Bishop Beveridge wrote a little book in defence of Sternhold and Hopkins; and a living prelate of pre-eminent learning and judgment, has pronounced this version to be more exact and agreeable to the original than the other. ALEXANDER NOWELL. IN Brasenose-college Oxford, is a portrait of this learned divine, with fishing tackle about him; he having been a great angler. He became principal of that house, and dean of St. Paul's, "For thirty years together," says Wood, "he preached the first and last sermons in the time of Lent before Queen Elizabeth, wherein he dealt plainly and faithfully with her without dislike; only at one time speaking less reverently of the sign of the cross, she called aloud to him from her closet window, commanding him to retiré from from that ungodly digression, and stick to his text. He wrote several pieces, the most noted of which was his Catechism in Latin, and translated into Greek and English. He died in 1601. ROBERT BURTON. THE Anatomy of Melancholy, written by this author, was printed first in quarto, and several times afterwards in folio to the great profit of the booksellers, who got an estate by it. It was the favourite book of Dr. Johnson; in consequence of whose recommendation it became an object of much enquiry, and soon rose in value. A new edition of it has been published; but it is very inaccu rately printed, from the ignorance of the editor. Wood justly says, "It is a book so full of variety of reading, that gentlemen who have lost their time, and are put to a push for invention, may furnish themselves with matter for common or scholastical discourse and writing." Several authors have unmercifully stolen matter from the said book without the least mention. Sterne in particular has pillaged many of his best passages from it. Burton was born in Leicestershire in 1576, and educated at Brasenose-college, from whence he was elected student of Christ Church, Oxford. He was presented to the vicarage of St. Thomas in that city, and died in 1639. He was a good mathematician, but much attached to the vanity of judicial astrology; and is said to have predicted the time of his death. There is a monument to his memory, with his bust, in Christ-church cathedral. BISHOP BEDELL. THIS excellent prelate, to whom the Irish are indebted for the translation of the Bible into their language, was bishop of Kilmore. Like the good Bishop Berkeley, he would never be translated to another see, thinking with him, that his church was his wife, and his diocese his children, from whom he should never be divorced. "Bishop Bedell lived with his clergy," says his biographer, "as if they had been his brethren. When he went his visitations he would not accept of the invitations that were made to him by the great men of the country, but he he would needs eat with his brethren, in such poor inns, and of such coarse fare, as the places afforded. He went about always on foot when he was at Dublin (one servant only attending him,) except upon public occasions, that obliged him to ride in procession with his brethren. He never kept a coach in his life; his strength always enabling him to ride on horseback. Many poor Irish families about him were entertained out of his kitchen, and in the Christmas time he had the poor always eating with him at his own table, and he brought himself to endure both the sight of their rags and of their rudeness. He by his will ordered that his body should be buried in a church-yard, with this incription : Depositum Gulielmi quondam Episcopi Kilmorensis. He did not like the burying in a church; for, as he observed, there was much both of superstition and pride in it; so he believed it was a great annoyance to the living, where there was so much of the steam of dead bodies rising about them. He was likewise much offended at the rudeness which the crowding the dead bodies in a small parcel of ground occasioned, for the bodies already laid there, and not yet quite rotten, were often raised and mangled; so that he made a canon in his synod against burying in churches, and recommended that buryingplaces should be removed out of towns." In this he agreed with the pious and exemplary Bishop Hall, who, in a sermon preached at the consecration of a burying-ground at Exeter, delivers the same sentiments against interments in churches. WILLIAM PRYNNE. THIS voluminous and scurrilous writer published near two hundred pieces on various subjects, theological, political, legal, &c. all of which, bound in forty volumes folio and quarto, he gave to the Library of Lincoln's-inn. Wood says, "I verily believe, that if rightly computed, he wrote a sheet for every day of his life, reckoning from the time when he came to the use of reason, and the state of man. His custom when he studied was to put on a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from too much light; and selVol. X. Churchm. Mag. March 1806. Ff dom dom eating a dinner, would every three hours or more, be maunching a roll of bread, and now and then refresh his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant. Thus Hudibras Thou that with ale or viler liquors Didst inspire Withers, Prynne, and Vicars, He was a right sturdy and doughty champion for the cause, a Puritan Beutifew, an inveterate enemy against the hierarchy of bishops, especially upon his imprisonment and sufferings for his Histrio Mastix; a busy, pragmatical, and meddling man, without end, and one that had brought his body into an ill habit, and so consequently had shortned his days by too much habit and concernment day and night." But how a man can be said to have shortened his days by excessive application who lived sixty-nine years, is a matter which the biographer does not explain. Prynne was buried in the walk under Lincoln's-inn chapel, but without a monument. Some one wrote this whimsical epitaph for him: Here lies the corpse of William Prynne, This grand scripturient paper-spiller, His brains' career was never stopping, Nor would he yet surcease such themes, But whilst he this hot humour hugs, WILLIAM SEDGWICK AND KING CHARLES I. WILLIAM SEDGWICK, a Puritan divine of some notoriety, was a native of Bedfordshire, and educated at Pembroke-college, Oxford, where he took his degrees in On entering into orders he obtained the rectory of Farnham Farnham in Essex; but on the breaking out of the Rebellion he joined the Presbyterians, and afterwards became an Independent, and then an Anabaptist. He alarmed weak people by his predictions from the pulpit; and going once to the house of a gentleman in Cambridgeshire, he saw a company of persons at bowls, to whom he addressed an exhortation, calling upon them to prepare for their dissolution, as he had lately received a revelation - that Doomsday would happen in the next week. At this the gentlemen laughed, and gave the prophet the nickname of Doomsday Sedgewick, by which he became generally distinguished. Having printed a book, entituled "The Leaves of the Tree of Life, for the healing of the Nations, opening all Wounds of this Kingdom, and of every Party, and applying a Remedy to them, &c." he went to Carisbrook Castle in the Isle of Wight, and desired the Governor's leave to see King Charles the First, then a prisoner there. His desire being communicated to the King, his majesty came out to Sedgewick, who presented his book. After the King had read a page or two, he returned it with this observation-" By what I have read in this book, I believe the author stands in some need of sleep." These words being taken by the author in the best sense, he departed with seeming satisfaction. REVIEW OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. Disunion in Religion unfriendly to the Ends of Edification and Peace. Its Consequences, and the Means to check its Progress. By J. SYMONS, B. D. Rector of Whitburn, Durham. 12mo. Pp. 118. THE Author in his Dedication to the Bishop of St. TH formance: "To reduce the size and price of a work, entitled UNITY THE BOND OF PEACE AND THE FRIEND OF VIRTUE, OR THE CONSEQUENCES OF SCHISM MORALLY AND POLITICALLY CONSIDERED, the following, which comprises the first and second chapters on the consequences as they affect the ends of edifi Ff2 fication |