Born in Hampshire towards the latter half of the fifteenth century. He had his education at Oxford, was chosen groom of the robes to Henry VIII. and retained the same office under his successor, and died in August 1549.
Sternhold’s only claim to distinction is his having executed part of an English metrical version of the Psalms usually attached to the Book of Common Prayer, and characterized by all the bad taste and vulgar bathos of a street-ballad. His version of fifty-one of the Psalms was published after his death in 1549, and bore the title of, All such Psalm of David as Thomas Sternholde did in his Lyfe drawe into English Metre, 8vo, London. Sternhold was likewise the author of Certain Chapters of the Proverbs of Solomon drawen into metre, 8vo, London, 1549. Sternhold found even a ruder hand than his own to continue the metrical labour which he had begun. The edition of Sternhold and Hopkins appeared in 1562 with the title of The whole Booke of Psalmes, collected into English metre. As Campbell observes, in his Specimens of English Poetry, these men, “with the best intentions and the worst taste, degraded the spirit of Hebrew Psalmody by flat and homely phraseology, and, mistaking vulgarity for simplicity, turned into bathos what they found sublime.” (See also Warton’s History of English Poetry, vol. iii., edition of 1840.) See also Literary Criticism.
