Lyte's 'Abide with Me.' (Henry Francis Lyte's Hymn )

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There is indeed a great gulf fixed between what highbrows consider significant and what pleases lesser mortals. One wonders how much, and what, academic English Literature textbooks will find to say in 2093 about Betjeman or Coward or Catherine Cookson or Paul Macartney, whose works have gone round the world in our time, the first two achieving a stone each in Westminster Abbey. Probably not much!

These thoughts are prompted by a consideration of the case of Rev. Henry Francis Lyte (1793-1847) whose tiny verse output has been a solace and inspiration for generations to millions of ordinary people while as a man he remains unknown except to a handful of hymnology students. Perhaps in this his bicentenary year a word or two in his honour may not be out of place. For Lyte wrote the words of two of our favourite English hymns, Abide with Me and Praise my Soul the King of Heaven, which annually jostle each …