The Life of Thomas Ken D D - 1890 Author:Edward Hayes Plumptre Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SCHOOL LIFE AT WINCHESTER, A.D. 1651—1656. " Blessings in boyhood's marvelling hour, Bright dreams, and faneyings strange ; Blessings, when... more » reason's awful power Gave thought a bolder range." /. N. Newman. Thr analysis of the elements in the surroundings of Ken'a early years which was the subject of the last chapter anticipated, as was inevitable, some of the facts that belong to a later period in his life. We have now to go back to the time, to give the precise date, January 30, 165, the third anniversary of Charles I.'s execution, when " Thomas Ken of Berk- hampstead, in the county of Hertford," was admitted on the foundation of Winchester College as a scholar. His election had taken place on September 26, 1651. Biographers for the most part record the fact as if it were of much the same character as that of any other boy going to any other school at any other time. They forget to take into account that the public school-life of that period was utterly unlike anything that had preceded or that has followed it. It was the school of the Puritan Revolution, and the change which passed over the methods of English education, so far as it affected the religious life of boys, was nearly as great, though of a different character, as that which passed over the education of France under the influence of the anti-Christian, if not atheistic,1 French Revolution. There, at Winchester, as elsewhere, there had been a great upheaving of the traditions ofthe past.1 The soldiers of the Parliament profaned the Cathedral with their rough horse-play, and paraded the streets in surplices till their disorders were stopped by their commander, Colonel Fiennes. The Cathedral services and those of the school chapel, if not suspended altogether, must have been entirely altere...« less