1786] REV. WILLIAM SMITH, D. D. 169 



You will also take his hymn, on Gratitude, from No. 453 to be inserted 

 among the hymns where I left a blank in copying, for want of time. 



As I do not know in what order you have arranged the metres in 

 publishing the singing psalms, I must beg you to fill up the blanks I 

 have left for the metres of the Gloria Fatfi, so as to answer to our 

 select psalms, for it will not do to say as formerly — such a metre as Ps. 

 25, Ps. 123, Ps. 148, etc., as our psalms and metres will not now 

 answer to those numbers, but to metre first, second, third, etc., as you 

 may place. I believe I said before (but have not time to look back) 

 that 1 beg to see the first proof-sheet of the singing psalms before it goes 

 to the press, I hope by next post — I will try by that time to send you 

 the preface or address nearly upon the plan you have sketched. You 

 speak in some former letter of collecting for the feasts and fasts some 

 passages of psalms to supply the place of the Venite on different festi- 

 vals. Will not this take too much from the reading psalms of those 



days? Might of Scripture in the Old and New Testament 



• Easter Day the substitute for the Venite is wholly so . . . 



such a choice as this may interfere with the lessons, and the epistles and 

 gospels of the day. There are difficulties both ways, I leave to your 

 own judgment. And where anything we had before (as the old Venite 

 a little altered) will do, I would not introduce, for the present at 

 least, any very great alterations. All the hymns, etc., except a few 

 from Watts and Addison, have long been in use in the Church in the 

 supplement to Tate and Brady's Psalms and other collections, printed 

 with different prayer books, by religious societies, etc. The hymns, 

 therefore, are only a more copious collection, arranged more properly, 

 of such as have been long in use, for even some of Watts's are not new 

 in our Church, and you know Dr. Johnson gives them a high name in 

 his "Lives of the Poets." I wish I could have found more than about 

 six or eight of Watts's to introduce, or that I could glean from him 

 what is yet wanted on the last Judgment and the Kingdom of Glory. 

 I know not where else to look. If you know of any on those subjects, 

 I wish you to point them out. I have got two or three funeral hymns 

 to be copied out in my next, and also hymns proper for the service of 

 the Church at Sea and after Storms, etc., etc. 



It is now four o'clock in the morning. I am drowsy and half-blind — 

 cannot stay to read what I have written — believe I have forgot nothing 

 material. I shall be ruined if the packet does not come safe to your 

 hand. I have no copy, nor even a list or table of the hymns which I 

 intend should be added at the end, after we know the pages to which 

 we must refer. This may be done by the printer. You will therefore 

 not fail to acknowledge the receipt of them by the return of post. If I 

 have no letter, I shall conclude you have not receivetl them, and be 

 very unhappy till I hear that you have. 



Yours, with great regard, Wm. Smith. 



