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 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.”