Abide With Me And Other Favourite Hymns

Succeeding generations brought additions to the repertoire of popular hymns, enjoying varied success. George Wither, in 1623, managed to ensure that his The Hymnes and Songs of the Church, a collection to which Orlando Gibbons contributed, should be bound together with all copies of the metrical psalms, but his attempts, with his own feeble verses, were frustrated by the Stationers' Company, which had its own monopoly to protect. Collections of hymns were published later in the seventeenth century by Playford, and in 1700 came Tate and Brady's Supplement to the New Version of the Psalms, a compilation that included a small number of hymns. Nahum Tate, the librettist of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and poet laureate, survives as a hymnodist in his While shepherds watched, and with Nicholas Brady in As pants the hart, Through all the changing scenes of life, and Have mercy, Lord, on me.