on the lute. The first two of these hymns or part of them are in every collection of sacred poetry and in the memory of almost every English child. There must be few who do not know by heart at least one verse: Awake, my soul, and with the sun, In 1674 Ken published a Manual of Prayers for the use of the Scholars of Winchester College. It was in this work the three famous hymns, subsequently altered in wording, were first published. In 1679 he was appointed chaplain to the Princess Mary, but was horribly dissatisfied' with the THOMAS KEN. After an Engraving from a Drawing by Scheffier. Prince of Orange's behaviour to her, and returning to England next year, was made chaplain to Charles II. He refused the use of his house to Nell Gwynne when the court visited Winchester, where he was a prebendary. In 1683 he went to Tangiers as army chaplain, and in 1684 was made Bishop of Bath and Wells. Having refused to publish the Declaration of Indulgence issued by James II., Ken was one of the seven bishops sent to the Tower. He nevertheless found himself unable with a good conscience to take the oath of allegiance to William III., and was deprived. He had then saved a sum of £700, and in lieu of this his friend Lord Weymouth guaranteed him £80 a year and residence at his mansion of Longleat, where Ken lived till his death. In his later years he interested himself in collecting subscriptions for relief of the poor Nonjurors. He was esteemed a great preacher in his own day, but is remembered now only for his three hymns and his saintly character. His chief prose work is his Practice of Divine Love, an exposition of the Church Catechism (1685), the others being mainly sermons. From the following specimens of his other poetical works it will be easily understood why only the three hymns are remembered. This is the beginning of the hymn for Good Friday: A song of Jesus I design, But stumble at the leading line; 'Twixt grief and love, which me divide. When Jesus' sufferings I review, But when sweet Jesus to my sight O then my heart with love runs o'er, The Easter Day hymn commences: Say, blessed angels, say, How could you silent be to-day? Your hymn the shepherds waked that morn, When great God-man was born, But when He rose again, You saw God-man expire, Had you His rise admired, It all poetic force restrains. And this is the first verse of the hymn for Christmas: Celestial harps prepare To sound your loftiest air; To sute a hymn, to study chords combine. Ken's epic style may be illustrated by a fragment from Edmund, in which Prince Edmund thus confers with Saint Hubert about marriage: O father, you can unperplex my mind, Contemplatives have easy loads to bear, To pluck them back, but unmolested die; Our Lord that state commands not, but commends. Hawkins published the prose works, with a Life, in 1713, as did Round in 1838, and Benham in 1889. Several works attributed to Ken are by most authorities regarded as spurious. Ken's poetical works included hymns; poems on gospel subjects and the attributes of God; two epics, Edmund and Hymnothes or the Penitent, each in thirteen books; Anodynes; Preparations for Death; and Damonet and Devilla, or Chaste Love, a pastoral. They were collected by Hawkins in 4 vols. (1721), and are mostly awkward and tedious. A selection of his Hymns and Poems for the Holy Days and Festivals of the Church was published in 1868 as Bishop Ken's Christian Year. It is known that these hymns were highly prized by Keble, who apparently took thence the idea of his own Christian Year. See Lives by Bowles (1831), Anderdon (1851-54), Plumptre (2 vols. 1888), and Clarke (1896). He Jeremy Collier (1650–1726) is less remembered as the conscientious and persecuted Nonjuring bishop than as the trenchant and unsparing castigator of the corrupt stage of his time. was born at Stow-cum-Quy, Cambridgeshire, son of a clerical schoolmaster at Ipswich; and here and at Caius College, Cambridge, he was educated, afterwards becoming rector of Ampton near Bury St Edmunds, and lecturer at Gray's Inn. His reply to Burnet's Inquiry into the State of Affairs (1688) cost him some months in Newgate. He next waged warfare on the crown with incisive pamphlets, and was arrested in 1692 on suspicion of being involved in a Jacobite plot. In 1696 he gave absolution to the would-be assassins Friend and Parkyns on the scaffold, for which offence he was outlawed. In 1698 he published his Short View of the Immorality of the English Stage, which fell like a thunderbolt among the wits. It is inspiriting,' says Macaulay, 'to see how gallantly the solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies, formidable separately, and, it might have been thought, irresistible when combined, distributes his swashing blows right and left among Wycherley, Congreve, and Vanbrugh, treads the wretched D'Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet, and strikes with all his strength full at the towering crest of Dryden.' Collier's argument carried the country with it, and helped to bring back the English drama to good morals and good sense. That excessive stage-profligacy which was partly a reaction against the rigidity of Puritanism, and had far outrun the parallel laxity of contemporary social morals, was immediately to some extent checked. But it was not without a struggle that the wits consented to be worsted. Congreve and Vanbrugh, with many of the smaller fry, answered angrily but weakly, and were crushed anew by the redoubtable Nonjuror, who was 'complete master of the rhetoric of honest indignation.' 'Contest,' says Dr Johnson, 'was his delight; he was not to be frighted from his purpose or his prey.' There were not merely replies but defences, second defences, and vindications of the Short View by the irrepressible Censor Morum. Even Congreve and Vanbrugh condescended to omit 'several expressions' from the Double Dealer and the Provoked Wife. The great Dryden stood apart at first, but at length in the preface to his Fables (1700) acknowledged he had been justly reproved. 'I shall say the less of Mr Collier,' he says, 'because in many things he has taxed me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all thoughts and expressions of mine which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance. It becomes me not to draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one.' But Dryden complained, and fairly, that his antagonist had often perverted his meaning, that he was too much given to horse-play in his raillery, and came to battle like a dictator from the plough;' and that 'if zeal for God's house had not eaten him up, it had at least devoured some part of his good manners and civility.' No doubt Collier erred by pedantry and want of discrimination. He treats with as fierce indignation whatever appears to him 'profanity' as he does the grossest offences against decency. And amongst sins of profaneness he reckons not merely all light allusions to religious words, phrases, and subjects, but any disrespectful comments on Churchmen or ecclesiastical affairs. He does not merely protest against speaking of the clergy at large as hypocrites and impostors; even to assume that some of the clergy were unworthy of their cloth was with him a sin, and the usual ejaculations of impatience were treated as heinous examples of blasphemy. It must have been trying to him, a partisan of the Stewart cause, to have to attack an institution so intimately bound up as was the theatre with the principles of the Restoration; and painful to the High Churchman to be spokesman of an argument usually associated with censorious Presbyterians or narrow-minded Puritans. To a 'well-conducted and moral stage,' recommending virtue and discountenancing vice, he was in no ways hostile ; though it may be doubted whether any theatre could successfully be conducted precisely in accordance with his canons of virtue and propriety. He is indignant at making fun of Mohammed or the heathen gods; to speak of a hackney-coachman as Jehu is a heavy piece of profaneness;' to say playfully that if 'marriage makes man and wife one flesh, it leaves them two fools,' is unpardonable. Swearing in any case is 'playing with edge tools. To go to Heaven in jest is the way to go to Hell in earnest.' Unquestionably he at times sees offences where none were intended and none committed. But he had very ample justification for his main charges; and in spite of pedantry, overstatement, and lack of proportion, the Short View was a noble protest against evil, and was only less effective than it deserved to be. It should be remembered that Collier was not the first to make such a protest from amongst the ranks of those who were not Puritans. Thirty-four years earlier Flecknoe, bred a Jesuit and himself a dramatist, had earned the hatred and contempt of Dryden by a severe impeachment in prose and in verse of the immorality of the contemporary stage (see Vol. I. page 784). And Blackmore had in 1695 commented on the same subject in the preface to his Prince Arthur. But Collier ransacked Plautus and Terence, Sophocles and Euripides, to prove that the classical tragedy-nay, classical comedy-was more pure and reverent than that of professed Christians of the Reformed Church; that Seneca and even Aristophanes were less blameworthy than the playwrights of his own time. Plautus where he is most a poet is generally least a buffoon ;' even Terence's 'strumpets are better behaved than our women of quality of the English stage.' 'A very indifferent Religion well believed will go a great way.' Shakespeare 'is too guilty to make an evidence' on modesty; 'the English stage has been always out of order,' but Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher were careful and considerate compared with their successors. Corneille and Molière might teach their English compeers decency and decorum. Collier does not explicitly attack all theatrical entertainments as such; he admits that a play may have a moral purpose. But with evident satisfaction and full approval he cites a long catena of denunciations of the stage in every shape and form from the earliest Christian councils, by way of the Fathers Clemens Alexandrinus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, and Jerome, down to the contemporary Catholic Church in Spain and France; and gives in full, in French and in English, a mandate of the Bishop of Arras in 1695 saying that the Church has always abominated stage plays, and disapproved the scandalous profession of actors, who, though not formally expelled by formal excommunication, are and ought to be refused admission to the sacraments. Hence it seems clear that Collier's argument hardly goes as far as his dislike to the stage; that he regards no stage as fit for Christians; and that plays approved by him would hardly have had a strong chance of popularity either in England in the seventeenth century, or anywhere else at any date. This dramatic critic with a mission sometimes writes with admirable point, and occasionally ventures on quite non-ethical criticisms; thus in one place, ridiculing the piling up of tautological words and phrases, he says, 'This Litter of Epithets makes the Poem look like a Bitch overstock'd with Puppies, and sucks the Sence almost to Skin and Bone.' When it is convenient for his argument, he insists on the unities of time, place, and action. Thus Vanbrugh's Relapse appears ‘a Heap of Irregularities. There is neither Propriety in the Name nor Contrivance in the Plot, nor Decorum in the Characters. 'Tis a thorough Contradiction to Nature, and impossible in Time and Place.' Collier continued to preach to a congregation of Nonjurors, and was consecrated bishop in 1713. He upheld the 'usages,' and laid himself open to a charge of holding Romish views. Of his forty-two books and pamphlets, those on the stage alone are still remembered. His largest works were the Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical, and Poetical Dictionary (4 vols. folio, 1701-21, based on the encyclopædic work of Moreri, and not improved), and An Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (a work of really great learning, 2 vols. folio, 1708–14; new ed. by Lathbury, with Life, 1852). From the 'Short View.' The business of plays is to recommend virtue and discountenance vice; to shew the uncertainty of humane greatness, the suddain turns of fate, and the unhappy conclusions of violence and injustice: 'tis to expose the singularities of pride and fancy, to make folly and falsehood contemptible, and to bring every thing that is ill under infamy and neglect. This design has been oddly pursued by the English stage. Our poets write with a different view, and are gone into an other interest. 'Tis true, were their intentions fair, they might be serviceable to this purpose. They have in a great measure the springs of thought and inclination in their power. Show, musick, action, and rhetorick are moving entertainments; and rightly employ'd would be very significant. But force and motion are things indifferent, and the use lies chiefly in the application. These advantages are now in the enemies hand and under a very dangerous management. Like cannon seized they are pointed the wrong way, and by the strength of the defence the mischief is made the greater. That this complaint is not unreasonable I shall endeavour to prove by shewing the misbehaviour of the stage with respect to morality and religion. Their liberties in the following particulars are intolerable, viz. their smuttiness of expression; their swearing, prophaneness, and lewd application of Scripture; their abuse of the clergy; their making their top characters libertines, and giving them success in their debauchery. This charge, with some other irregularities, I shall make good against the stage, and shew both the novelty and scandal of the practice. And first, I shall begin with the rankness and indecency of their language. In treating of this head, I hope the reader does not expect that I should set down chapter and page, and give him the citations at length. To do this would be a very unacceptable and foreign employment. Indeed the passages, many of them, are in no condition to be handled: he that is desirous to see these flowers let him do it in their own soil: 'tis my business rather to kill the root than transplant it. But that the poets may not complain of injustice, I shall point to the infection at a distance, and refer in general to play and person. Now among the curiosities of this kind we may reckon Mrs Pinchwife, Horner, and Lady Fidget in the Country Wife; Widow Blackacre and Olivia in the Plain Dealer. These, tho' not all the exceptionable characters, are the most remarkable. I'm sorry the author should stoop his wit thus low, and use his understanding so unkindly. Some people appear coarse and slovenly out of poverty: they can't well go to the charge of sense. They are offensive like beggars for want of necessaries. But this is none of the Plain Dealer's case; he can afford his muse a better dress when he pleases. But then the rule is, where the motive is the less the fault is the greater. To proceed. Jacinta, Elvira, Dalinda, and Lady Plyant, in the Mock Astrologer, Spanish Friar, Love Triumphant and Double Dealer, forget themselves extreamly and almost all the characters in the Old Batchelour are foul and nauseous. Love for Love and the Relapse strike sometimes upon this sand, and so likewise does Don Sebastian. ... I grant the abuse of a thing is no argument against the use of it. However, young people particularly should not entertain themselves with a lewd picture; especially when 'tis drawn by a masterly hand. For such a liberty may probably raise those passions which can neither be discharged without trouble, nor satisfyed without a crime: tis not safe for a man to trust his virtue too far, for fear it should give him the slip! But the danger of such an entertainment is but part of the objection: 'tis all scandal and meanness into the bargain: it does in effect degrade human nature, sinks reason into appetite, and breaks down the distinctions between man and beast. Goats and monkeys, if they could speak, would express their brutality in such language as this. To argue the matter more at large. Smuttiness is a fault in behaviour as well as in religion. 'Tis a very coarse diversion, the entertainment of those who are generally least both in sense and station. The looser part of the mob have no true relish of decency and honour, and want education and thought to furnish out a gentile conversation. Barrenness of fancy makes them often take up with those scandalous liberties. A vitious imagination may blot a great deal of paper at this rate with ease enough: and 'tis possible convenience may sometimes invite to the expedient. The modern poets seem to use smut as the old ones did machines, to relieve a fainting invention. When Pegasus is jaded and would stand still, he is apt like other tits to run into every puddle. Obscenity in any company is a rustick uncreditable talent; but among women 'tis particularly rude. Such talk would be very affrontive in conversation, and not endur'd by any lady of reputation. Whence then comes it to pass that those liberties which disoblige so much in conversation should entertain upon the stage? Do the women leave all the regards to decency and conscience behind them when they come to the play-house? Or does the place transform their inclinations, and turn their former aversions into pleasure? Or were their pretences to sobriety elsewhere nothing but hypocrisy and grimace? Such suppositions as these are all satyr and invective: they are rude imputations upon the whole sex. To treat the ladies with such stuff is no better than taking their money to abuse them. It supposes their imagination vitious, and their memories ill furnish'd: that they are practised in the language of the stews, and pleas'd with the scenes of brutishness. When at the same time the customs of education and the laws of decency are so very cautious and reserv'd in regard to women: I say so very reserv'd, that 'tis almost a fault for them to understand they are ill used. They can't discover their disgust without disadvantage, nor blush without disservice to their modesty. To appear with any skill in such cant looks as if they had fallen upon ill conversation, or managed their curiosity amiss. In a word, he that treats the ladies with such discourse must conclude either that they like it, or they do not. To suppose the first is a gross reflection upon their virtue. And as for the latter case, it entertains them with their own aversion; which is ill nature, and ill manners enough in all conscience. And in this particular custom and conscience, the forms of breeding and the maxims of religion are on the same side. In other instances vice is often too fashionable; but here a man can't be a sinner without being a clown. In this respect the stage is faulty to a scandalous degree of nauseousness and aggravation. For to make their Certainly this Such raptures Are these the 1st. The poets make women speak smuttily. Of this the places before mention'd are sufficient evidence and if there was occasion they might be multiplyed to a much greater number: indeed the comedies are seldom clear of these blemishes and sometimes you have them in tragedy. For instance. The Orphans Monimia makes a very improper description; and the royal Leonora in the Spanish Friar runs a strange length in the history of love. And do princesses use reports with such fulsom freedoms? Leonora was the first queen of her family. are too lascivious for Joan of Naples. tender things Mr Dryden says the ladies call on him for? I suppose he means the ladies that are too modest to show their faces in the pit. This entertainment can be fairly design'd for none but such. Indeed it hits their palate exactly. It regales their lewdness, graces their character, and keeps up their spirits for their vocation: now to bring women under such misbehaviour is violence to their native modesty, and a mispresentation of their sex. For modesty, as Mr Rapin observes, is the character of women. To represent them without this quality is to make monsters of them and throw them out of their kind. Euripides, who was no negligent observer of humane nature, is always careful of this decorum. Thus Phædra when possess'd with an infamous passion, takes all imaginable pains to conceal it. She is as regular and reserv'd in her language as the most virtuous matron. 'Tis true, the force of shame and desire, the scandal of satisfying and the difficulty of parting with her inclinations, disorder her to distraction. However, her frensy is not lewd; she keeps her modesty even after she has lost her wits. Had Shakespear secur'd this point for his young virgin Ophelia, the play had been better contriv'd. Since he was resolv'd to drown the lady like a kitten, he : should have set her a swimming a little sooner. Το keep her alive only to sully her reputation and discover the rankness of her breath was very cruel. But it may be said the freedoms of distraction go for nothing, a feaver has no faults, and a man non compos may kill without murther. It may be so: but then such people ought to be kept in dark rooms and without company. To shew them or let them loose is somewhat unreasonable. But after all, the modern stage seems to depend upon this expedient. Women are sometimes represented silly and sometimes mad, to enlarge their liberty and screen their impudence from censure: this politick contrivance we have in Marcella, Hoyden, and Miss Prue. However, it amounts to this confession; that women when they have their understandings about them ought to converse otherwise. In fine, modesty is the distinguishing vertue of that sex, and serves both for ornament and defence modesty was design'd by Providence as a guard to virtue; and that it might be always at hand, 'tis wrought into the mechanism of the body. 'Tis likewise proportion'd to the occasions of life, and strongest in youth when passion is so too. 'Tis a quality as true to innocence, as the sences are to health; whatever is ungrateful to the first, is prejudicial to the latter. The enemy no sooner approaches, but the blood rises in opposition, and looks defyance to an indecency. It supplys the room of reasoning and collection: intuitive knowledge can scarcely make a quicker impression; and what then can be a surer guide to the unexperienced? It teaches by suddain instinct and aversion; this is both a ready and a powerful method of instruction. The tumult of the blood and spirits and the uneasiness of the sensation are of singular use. They serve to awaken reason and prevent surprize. Thus the distinctions of good and evil are refresh'd, and the temptation kept at proper distance. 2ly. They represent their single ladies, and persons of condition, under these disorders of liberty. This makes the irregularity still more monstrous and a greater contradiction to nature and probability: but rather than not be vitious, they will venture to spoil a character. This mismanagement we have partly seen already. Jacinta and Belinda are farther proof. And the Double Dealer is particularly remarkable. There are but four ladies in this play, and three of the biggest of them are whores. A great compliment to quality to tell them there is not above a quarter of them honest! This was not the Roman breeding, Terence and Plautus his strumpets were little people; but of this more hereafter. 3ly. They have oftentimes not so much as the poor refuge of a double meaning to fly to. So that you are under a necessity either of taking ribaldry or nonsence. And when the sentence has two handles, the worst is generally turn'd to the audience. The matter is so contrived that the smut and scum of the thought now rises uppermost, and like a picture drawn to sight, looks always upon the company. 4ly. And which is still more extraordinary: the prologues and epilogues are sometimes scandalous to the last degree. . . What is more frequent then their wishes of Hell, and confusion, devils and diseases, all the plagues of this world, and the next, to each other? And as for swearing; 'tis used by all persons, and upon all occasions: by heroes and paltroons; by gentlemen and clowns: love and quarrels, success and disappointment, temper and passion, must be varnish'd, and set off with oaths. At some times, and with some poets, swearing is no ordinary relief. It stands up in the room of sense, gives spirit to a flat expression, and makes a period musical and round. In short, 'tis almost all the rhetorick and reason some people are masters of the manner of performance is different. Some times they mince the matter, change the letter, and keep the sense, as if they had a mind to steal a swearing, and break the commandment without sin. At another time the oaths are clipt, but not so much within the ring, but that the image and superscription are visible. These expedients, I conceive, are more for variety than conscience: for when the fit comes on them, they make no difficulty of swearing at length. Instances of all these kinds may be met with in the Old Batchelour, Double Dealer, and Love for Love. They There's The poets are of all people most to blame. want even the plea of bullies and sharpers. no rencounters, no starts of passion, no suddain acci dents to discompose them. They swear in solitude and cool blood, under thought and deliberation, for business, and for exercise: this is a terrible circumstance; it makes all malice prepence, and enflames the guilt and the reckoning. A woman will start at a soldiers oath, almost as much as at the report of his pistol: and therefore a well bred man will no more swear than fight in the company of ladies. The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer are both by Wycherley; The Old Bachelor, The Double Dealer, and Love for Love by Congreve; The Mock Astrologer, The Spanish Friar, Love Triumphant, and Don Sebastian by Dryden; The Orphan by Otway; and The Relapse by Vanbrugh. William Penn (1644-1718), son of an English admiral, is notable as Quaker author and as founder of the state of Pennsylvania. He was born in his father's house on Tower Hill in London. In his fifteenth year, while a student at Oxford, he embraced the doctrines of the Society of Friends; he was sent down from Christ Church, and sent abroad by his father to travel on the Continent. He returned at the end of two years, accomplished in all the graces of the fine gentleman and courtier; but soon the plague broke out in London, and the 'modish' youth's serious impressions were renewed. He ceased to frequent the court and to visit his gay friends, employing himself in the study of divinity. His father conceived that it was time he should again interfere. An estate in Ireland had been presented to the admiral by the king; it required superintendence, and William Penn was despatched to Dublin, furnished with letters to the Viceroy, the Duke of Ormonde. Again the cloud passed off; Penn was a favourite in all circles, and he even served for a short time as a volunteer officer in the army. But in the city of Cork he one day went to hear a sermon by the same Quaker preacher he had heard in Oxford. The effect was irresistible: Penn became a Quaker for life. Having assisted in expelling a soldier from the meeting, he was imprisoned; and on his return to England he not unnaturally found his father bitterly incensed against his Quaker views. He began to |