Page:The Methodist Hymn-Book Illustrated.djvu/470

 458 THE METHODIST HYMN-BOOK ILLUSTRATED

sixty-nine pages. Ken advises the boys : Be sure to sing the Morning and Evening Hymn in your chamber devoutly, remembering that the Psalmist, upon happy experience, assures you that it is a good thing to tell of the loving-kindness of the Lord early in the morning and His truth in the night season. The hymns are not printed in the Manual till they are added as an Appendix to the edition of 1695, when the title reads, A Manual of Prayers for the Use of the Scholars of Winchester College, and all other Devout Christians : To which is added three hymns for Morning, Evening, and Midnight ; not in former editions. False and incorrect copies of the hymns had been issued, and Ken published them in 1694 as a tract. The advertisement says that had not these incorrect and surreptitious copies been printed, he should not have sent things so very in considerable to the press. The piracy was repeated, and Ken published a new edition of his tract in 1705-7, giving a revised text.

Ken was a good musician, and often used to sing his morning and evening hymns to tunes which he had composed, accom panying himself on the viol or spinet. His great-nephew, William Hawkins, says he sang the Morning Hymn to his lute before he put on his clothes. He had an organ in his chambers at Winchester. James Montgomery said, Had the bishop endowed three hospitals, he might have been less a benefactor to posterity.

The tune by Tallis, organist to Elizabeth s Chapel Royal, who died in 1585, is older than Ken s hymn.

A very interesting note in the Dictionary of Hymnology deals with Ken s use of earlier material. It is probable that three Latin hymns (especially the old Compline hymn, Salvator mundi, Domine, with which both Ken and Browne were familiar, as it formed part of the daily worship in Winchester School) may have suggested them, but only as a text of Holy Scripture suggests a sermon. Sir Thomas Browne was also a Wykehamist, and in his Religio Medici, 1643, gives the dormitive I take to bedward, which has some striking touches of similarity to Ken, such as Let no dreams my head infest.

Ken s Doxology is more widely used than any other verse of poetry. During revivals the doxology has sometimes been sung after every conversion. Once at Sheffield, William Dawson had it sung thirty-five times in a single service. William Grimshaw, the incumbent of Haworth, used to sing it every

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