other "rude mechanicals" obsess over the need for a prologue "written in eight and sixe". The three meters then in use: Common Meter (8,6,8,6), Long Meter (8,8,8,8), and Short Meter (6,6,8,6) remain in widespread use in hymnals today. Other English metrical psalters Later writers attempted to repair the literary inadequacies of the Sternhold and Hopkins version. The Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book published in the British colonies in America, was a new metrical psalter: The earth Jehovah’s is, and the fullness of it: the habitable world, and they that there upon do sit Because upon the seas, he hath it firmly laid: and it upon the water-floods most solidly hath stayed In the 1640s, the English Parliamentarians Francis Rous and William Barton both authored their own metrical paraphrases. Their translations were scrutinised by the Westminster Assembly and heavily edited. Rous's original version of Psalm 24 read: After much alteration, a much-altered translation based on Rous's work was approved by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and published in 1650 as the Scottish Metrical Psalter, to be used throughout the Church of Scotland. This showed some improvements, but ballad metre remained ubiquitous: The earth belongs unto the Lord, and all that it contains; The world that is inhabited, and all that there remains. For the foundations thereof he on the seas did lay, And he hath it established upon the floods to stay. One of the most widely known hymns in Christian worship, "The Lord's my Shepherd", is a translation of Psalm 23 appearing in the 1650 Scottish Psalter. Isaac Watts produced a metrical psalter, in which he breaks out of the ballad metre in his 1719 The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and Apply'd to the Christian State and Worship, which, as the title indicates, was intended as an interpretation rather than a strict translation of the psalms. This spacious earth is all the Lord's, And men, and worms, and beasts, and birds: He raised the building on the seas, And gave it for their dwelling-place. But by the time better metrical psalms were made in English, the belief that every hymn sung in church had to be a Biblical translation had been repudiated by the Church of England. A flowering of English hymnody had occurred under writers such as Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, but their hymns were freed