William Cruden 

William Cruden (1725-85) was a Scottish Presbyterian minister at Loggie Pert and Glasgow (1753-74). He published Divine Hymns Originally Composed by Mr William Cruden in Aberdeen in 1761. Cruden’s relation, Alexander Cruden (b. 1701), also from Scotland, was the author of the popular A Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testament (1737).  Cruden’s Divine Hymns was republished in London c. 1795 by the Methodist lay-preacher from Lincolnshire, Robert Carr Brackenbury (1752-1818). Brackenbury added to Cruden’s original preface some remarks of his own, in which he remarked that the original publication appeared some thirty years previously in a part of Great Britain ‘where divine poetry had been little cultivated and improved’.