Ken's reputation will never rest upon those poems; whilst his hymns have found a welcome in every land where the English language is spoken; and the Evening Hymn has been translated into Maori, and printed. Ken's longer poems are rugged and inharmonious; John Byrom was urged to revise and polish them, with a view to general circulation; he did revise the good Bishop's Poetical Dedication to Lord Weymouth, and published the same. Byrom held Ken in high estimation, for in speaking of worthy men, he observes:—
"One of the worthiest was Bishop Ken,"
and in subsequent lines, he describes him as a "man of love." He died in peace with all men, at Longleat, after an illness of some months, on the 19th March, 1710, in the 74th year of his age. Ken was interred in the churchyard at Frome, where his last resting-place is marked by an appropriate monumental tomb.
The limited space at command for this sketch has excluded, necessarily, many incidents which would both instruct and delight; but we must briefly refer to the Three Hymns which have done more than anything else to perpetuate the memory of Bishop Ken. These first appeared in a volume in 1697, and again in the eighth edition of the Manual of Prayer in 1700. So highly was the Bishop esteemed, that no less than five different works had their sales promoted by surreptitiously inserting his name on their title-pages; the authors having either abridged, or mutilated, or both, the three Hymns of Ken's, and added them to their own lucubrations. This led the Bishop to issue the ninth edition of the Manual in 1705, with the proper Hymns; and to this he added a disavowal of the erroneous and imperfect copies of his Hymns which had previously appeared. Another spurious edition of the three Hymns appeared in 1709; and in the same year the Bishop issued the tenth edition of his Prayers, with the genuine Hymns added, exactly as they had appeared in 1697, 1700, and 1705 previously. The edition of 1709 is the last which had the direct sanction of the author, who died in March, 1710.
The text of these Hymns was thus sent into the world four times by their author, without any alterations by
