Urban VIII., Maffeo Barberini, was a poet of no mean rank.  Before his election to the papacy, he was a recognised lover of classical literature and an adept in following classic themes and classic forms.  Our Breviaries contain some few of his compositions and they show correctness of form, poetic merit, and piety.  They are the hymns, Martinae celebri, Tu natale solum (January 20); Nullis te genitor, Regali solio fortis (April 13).  His great desire was the correction of the Breviary hymns.  This work of correction was not beyond the personal power of the Pope himself, if we judge him by his hymns.  His views are expressed in the Bull Divinam Psalmodiam, issued to promulgate the corrected hymns.  It found a place in all copies of the Roman Breviary in the last century.  To carry out the corrections outlined by the Pope, four Jesuits were appointed, and whether the result of the corrections is the Pope’s or the Jesuits’ is a highly and hotly disputed point.  First of all, the task set to the Jesuits was a very difficult one, and one demanding much prudence as well as learning.  It may seem to us that to begin the correction, mutilation and reconstruction of the works and words of men so great in church history and liturgy as Prudentius, Sedulius, St. Ambrose, St. Paulinus, was a work of rashness, a sort of sacrilege, attempting to remodel the glowing piety of their poems to the pattern of Horace’s verse.  But the Jesuits had got their commands and they were bound to obey.  They were chosen on account of their classical scholarship, which was kept sharp by their daily teaching in college, and they were specially bound by a vow of loyal obedience to Papal orders.  “It is only fair to give them the credit that out of respect for the wishes of Urban VIII, they treated these ancient compositions with extreme reserve and, while they made some impressions clearer, they maintained the primitive unction in a large number of passages” (Baudot, op. cit., p. 185).

They corrected more than nine hundred false quantities found scattered through the Breviary, 58 in the psalter per hebdomadam, 359 in the proper de Tempore, 283 in the proper of Saints, and 252 in the common of Saints.  They changed the opening words of more than thirty hymns.  Some hymns were untouched—­e.g., the three hymns of the Blessed Sacrament, the Ave Maris Stella, which is rhythmic prose, not verse, and the hymn of the Angels, which was sufficiently perfect.  The metre of three hymns, Tibi Christe splendor Patris, and the Urbs Jerusalem and Angularis fundamentum were changed.

The Jesuits have been censured very bitterly for their work of correction.  Perhaps they merited some censure, but surely they did not merit the censures heaped on them by hostile critics like Thiers, Henri Valois, and the Franciscan, Cavalli.  They answered their critics splendidly and triumphantly by the works of Father Arevalo, S.J.  But the wordy war lasts to the present day.  Students who wish to see the unrevised and the revised hymnal of Urban VIII. may consult Daniel’s Thesaurus hymnologicus for examples.  Other examples are given in Monsignor Battifol’s work, and others in Dom Baudot’s.  If the reader read in the Breviary, the hymn Te lucis ante terminum, he may note a difference in that, the revised form, and this, the unrevised:—­