John Bacchus Dykes

John Bacchus Dykes was an English Anglican priest, organist, choir director, theologian, and hymn-tune composer born at Kingston upon Hull in 1823. He learned violin, piano, and organ as a child and studied classics at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, while pursuing music with Thomas Attwood Walmisley. After ordination he became a minor canon of Durham Cathedral in 1849 and soon served as precentor, working to strengthen the cathedral choir and its musical discipline. In 1862 he became vicar of St Oswald's, Durham, where his High Church sympathies later brought him into serious conflict with Bishop Charles Baring.

Dykes wrote roughly three hundred hymn tunes and became one of the most influential Victorian contributors to English congregational music. His enduring melodies include NICAEA for Holy, Holy, Holy, MELITA for Eternal Father, Strong to Save, HOLLINGSIDE, DOMINUS REGIT ME, and LUX BENIGNA. He composed ST. AGNES for the English hymn Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee, and it was published in John Grey's Hymnal for Use in the English Church in 1866.

Dykes died in 1876, more than forty years before John Oxenham's 'Mid All the Traffic of the Ways appeared. ST. AGNES is therefore a later pairing with Oxenham's text, not music composed specifically for it.