DEAN PLUMPTRE'S LIFE OF BISHOP KEN.* BISHOP KEN, whose "Morning"

and "Evening" hymns are household words in English ears, was a man of ascetic purity and brave conscientiousness. He was also a man of ardent beliefs and of considerable abilities, and he played a part in some notable transactions of English history, which made him intermittently the observed of all observers. But his faith was of a kind which is prone to wander perilously near the confines of credulity ; and of his writings, with the exception of the famous hymns, it must be said that * The Life of Thomas Ken, D.D., Bishop of Bath and Welts. By E. H. Plamptre, D.D., Dean of Wells. 2 vols. London: William Isbistor. 1888.

the world has long most willingly let them die. He was a good but not a great man, and the monument which Dean Plumptre has raised to his memory, in these finely printed and prettily illustrated volumes, is too much of a, pyramid. Had Ken been a man of fifty times the calibre he was, this would hardly justify Dean Plumptre for printing the nothings which his hero wrote to or for nobodies, and for identify- ing or failing to identify the aforesaid nobodies. My very good Lord," wrote Ken once to Viscount Weymouth, your Lord- ship was pleased to offer me a generous kindness by Dr. Bellsted, which I am very confident you designed I should make use of : and it is upon the strength of that, I have sent my servant to beg half a buck." Small-beer chronicles are too much spurned, if Dean Plumptre is right in recording the insignificant fact that he has not been able to learn who Dr. Belated was, or to what kindness Ken refers. He errs, of course, in company with so vast a majority of biographers, that his errors of this sort may be said to come by kind, and. to lie beyond criticism. Requiescant, by all means !

Bishop Ken, as we have already hinted, was prone to that credulity from which men of stronger brains are frequently not altogether free. His dispute with Pepys, the diarist, during their voyage from Portsmouth to Tangier, shows this And when Dean Plumptre quotes, in favour of the clergyman, Milton's—

"Myriads of spiritual beings walk the earth By us unseen,"

he seems to forget the obvious reply that the layman might have made,—" De non apparentibus et non existen- tibus eadem est ratio." Here, however, we are treading upon "treacherous ashes," as Horace calls them ; as, per- haps, we are, when we notice unsympathetically how Ken cockered poor James II.'s veiled appetite for latter-day miracles by telling him, says Evelyn, our other great diarist, of "a great miracle happening in Westminster to his certain knowledge, of a poor miserably sick and decrepit child (as I remember, long kept unbaptised), who immediately on his baptism recovered ; as also of the salutary effect of K. Charles his Majesty's father's blood, in healing one that was blind." We trust, however, that we are not overstepping the modesty of respectful criticism in asking the Dean if he thinks that the attack of small-pox which killed Queen Mary had any- thing more to do with her behaviour towards her father, than the fall of the tower of Siloam bad to do with the virtues or vices of its victims. Time is the "gentle god" who justi- fies Wisdom of her children, and Time, pace Dean Plumptre, has brought most Englishmen to feel that Ken was wrong in warning Anne to repent, "lest God should be provoked to cut her life as short as her sister's." And Time, we may add, has gone nigh to show that the Prince of Orange was right in thinking that the Church of England ought to have opened her gates more widely to admit Dissenters, and that Arch- bishop Tillotson was not wrong in wishing that "we were well rid of" the Athanasian Creed. On all these points, however, there is clearly room for opinions to differ. It is not so with regard to the respectable failing which saddened, and probably shortened, Ken's life. This failing, in Dryden's energetic phrase, "made almost a sin of abstinence ;" and there is nothing to add to Dean Plumptre's description of the victim of this quasi-sin, as succumbing in agony to a disease, presumably lithiasis, which was the result of "over- study, under-feeding, and many vigils." Opium, it seems, was the only drug available to relieve his severe sufferings. And opium Ken would not take, because he looked upon it, says his biographer, as an attempt to avoid the discipline of appointed suffering. It is sweet and commendable in the Dean to find something "infinitely touching" in the wrong- headedness which made "verse the only laudanum " for the Bishop's pains. But in this wrongheadedness others may see the cause which made Ken's life, on the whole, a splendid failure, and may reach the conclusion that with all his courage, in addition to a host of other fine qualities, this noble fellow suffered from "a plentiful lack" of sound common-sense.

Unless, therefore, our estimate of Bishop Ken be egregiously- wrong, it is plain on the face of it that a biography on such a scale as Dean Plumptre's would serve as a bushel for his light, and would probably prove to be very hard reading. And so far, indeed, as Ken himself is concerned, this is the case. But Dean Plumptre's literary skill is so great, and his knowledge is so wide and various, that his pages are, for the most part, very easy reading, and if we may use the American- ism, delightful "at that." We shall content ourselves with saying that the proper title for his book would be "The Life and Times of Bishop Ken," and with this premised shall notice, for agreement or disagreement, a few passages which will serve, we hope, to show that it is a book that is well worth reading and well worth buying for one's own delecta- tion, or as a gift for that of another.

We cannot affirm or deny the truth of the facts alleged in the following sketch of Ken's view of William III.,—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, of Dean Plumptre's estimate of Ken's view of that monarch. But, in any case, it may be regarded, if the metaphor be not too homely, as furnishing excellent caper-sauce for Lord Macaulay's boiled leg of mutton :—

" As a man, I imagine, Ken could scarcely have felt much affection for the Prince. He knew that he was as unfaithful to his wife as James was to Mary Beatrice. He knew that he had treated that wife as James had not treated his, with boorish roughness, had sneered at her religion and insulted her chaplains. If he had broken her in to a complete submission to his will, and that will was united with affection, it was, in great part, due to Ken's own teaching, when he had impressed on her the wisdom of patience, and had taught her that, subject to the supreme authority of conscience, passive obedience and non-resistance were as much the duty of the wife to her husband as of subjects to their King. The morals of the Court of the Hague were not one whit better than those of the Court of Whitehall under Charles II. There also was the reign of harlots, and, in the homely language of Dr. Cowell, the chaplain who suc- ceeded Ken, pimps and panders' were the only people who won the Prince's favour. William had frowned on Ken, had almost dismissed him, because he had prevailed on Zulestein to make to the English lady whom he had wronged the reparation which James, under like circumstances, had made to Clarendon's daughter. His religion, too, was of the type most alien to Ken's mind. His Calvinism was not like that of Morley, whom Ken had loved ; nor like that of the Huguenots, whom he honoured and helped ; nor like that of Leighton and Bunyan, one which tends to closer communion with God and greater holiness of life. William's faith in the dogma had more affinity with the faith of the Bonapartes in their star, and may have seemed to Ken simply that kind of fatalism which narcotises conscience. What do you think of predestination now, Doctor ?' was the question which he put to Burnet, when he landed in Torbay."

But was not this question asked in jest "Dutch William,"

however, has been so thoroughly whitewashed by a master- hand, that a sprinkling of soot from so skilful a manipulator as Dean Plumptre need raise no outcry. And a little white- wash from the same manipulator for that much-abused "Nell Gwyn Defender of the Faith," Charles II., is welcome rather than otherwise. Ken had sternly refused, as Court Chaplain,

to give Mrs. Eleanor Gwyn chambers in his prebendal house. Yet within a year of that refusal, the King, when the See of Bath and Wells became vacant, stopped the months of all appli- cants for it by saying.—" Odd's fish ! Who shall have Bath

and Wells but the little black fellow who would not give poor Nelly a lodging?" Ken's own friends were told that they

need not trouble themselves. Dr. Ken should succeed, said Charles, but" I design it to be my Own peculiar appointment."

Dean Plumptre follows Anderson and Markland, and we gladly follow Dean Plumptre in quoting from Boswell, John-

son's estimate of this monarch :—" He was licentious in his practice, but he always had a reverence for what was good. He knew his people and rewarded merit. The Church was at no time better filled than in his reign." The brains of James

II., for that is what it comes to, were greatly inferior to those of his brother. The song which "drove him from his Kingdom," branded him as an ass ; and as an ass he may be blamed or excused. So it is with a very strong feeling that the Dean's " analogies " are "lees applicable," that we con- clude with a sentence from his attempt to whitewash this asinine King : —" If I were to illustrate my meaning by analogies, more or less applicable, I should say that, mutatis mutandis, Ken felt towards James as Wilberforce felt towards Pitt, and Lord Shaftesbury towards Palmerston." This is suggestive writing, no doubt, but the "allusion" hardly

"holds in the exchange." We must not, however, leave these pleasant volumes without congratulating their learned, able, and industrious author upon the additional evidence which

they give of his literary skill and grace.