Excerpt from The Life of Thomas Ken, D. D Bishop of Bath and Wells, Vol. 1 of 2 IT will be well, I think, to begin with a brief outline of the genesis and growth of these volumes. In 1884 I was led to appeal to those who either revered Bishop Ken for the saintliness of his life, or simply loved him as the writer of the Morning and Evening Hymns, to join with me in an effort to place in our Cathedral at Wells some adequate memorial of one whose name was held in honour in all the Churches, but of whom, at that time, we had no outward and visible recognition, where it might most have been expected. I was naturally led, in doing this, to study the life of Ken more closely than I had done before, and it was not long before I came to the conviction that there was more than room for another biography. I have no' desire to undervalue the labours of my predecessors. The life published by the Bishop's great-nephew, William Hawkins, in 1713, contained much interesting material, which probably came to him from the Bishop's own lips. On the other hand it was singularly meagre, and Often singularly inaccurate, transposing events in his great uncle's life out of their right order.' It served, however. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.