its Librarian, on the leaf of a hymn-book makes a memorandum in reference to this Psalm, to the effect that it has been sung at Cambridge on Commencement day “from time immemorial.”  The late Rev. Dr. John Pierce, a graduate of the class of 1793, referring to the same subject, remarks:  “The Seventy-eighth Psalm, it is supposed, has, from the foundation of the College, been sung in the common version of the day.”  In a poem, entitled Education, delivered at Cambridge before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, by Mr. William Biglow, July 18th, 1799, speaking of the conduct and manners of the students, the author says:—­

 “Like pigs they eat, they drink an ocean dry,
  They steal like France, like Jacobins they lie,
  They raise the very Devil, when called to prayers,
  ‘To sons transmit the same, and they again to theirs’”;

and, in explanation of the last line, adds this note:  “Alluding to the Psalm which is always sung in Harvard Hall on Commencement day.”  In his account of some of the exercises attendant upon the Commencement at Harvard College in 1848, Professor Sidney Willard observes:  “At the Commencement dinner the sitting is not of long duration; and we retired from table soon after the singing of the Psalm, which, with some variation in the version, has been sung on the same occasion from time immemorial.”—­Memoirs of Youth and Manhood, Vol.  II. p. 65.

But that we cannot take these accounts as correct in their full extent, appears from an entry in the MS. Diary of Chief Justice Sewall relating to a Commencement in 1685, which he closes with these words:  “After Dinner ye 3d part of ye 103d Ps. was sung in ye Hall.”

In the year 1793, at the dinner on Commencement Day, the Rev. Joseph Willard, then President of the College, requested Mr. afterwards Dr. John Pierce, to set the tune to the Psalm; with which request having complied to the satisfaction of all present, he from that period until the time of his death, in 1849, performed this service, being absent only on one occasion.  Those who have attended Commencement dinners during the latter part of this period cannot but associate with this hallowed Psalm the venerable appearance and the benevolent countenance of this excellent man.

In presenting a list of the different versions in which this Psalm has been sung, it must not be supposed that entire correctness has been reached; the very scanty accounts which remain render this almost impossible, but from these, which on a question of greater importance might be considered hardly sufficient, it would appear that the following are the versions in which the sons of Harvard have been accustomed to sing the Psalm of the son of Jesse.

1.—­The New England Version.

“In 1639 there was an agreement amo. ye Magistrates and Ministers to set aside ye Psalms then printed at ye end of their Bibles, and sing one more congenial to their ideas of religion.”  Rev. Mr. Richard Mather of Dorchester, and Rev. Mr. Thomas Weld and Rev. Mr. John Eliot of Roxbury, were selected to make a metrical translation, to whom the Rev. Thomas Shepard of Cambridge gives the following metrical caution:—­