Aut disce. [A mitre and crosier, as the expected rewards of learning.]
Aut discede. [An inkhorn and sword, the emblems of the civil and military professions.]
Manet sors tertia caedi. [A rod.]
Which may be freely translated, "Either learn, or depart hence, or remain and be chastised," though the pithy, alliterative rendering in vogue among the boys is better, "Work, or walk, or be whopped" (h silent in the last word). American boys would probably have rendered it, "Learn, or leave, or be licked."
The school has revenues of nearly $100,000 per annum. There are 420 pupils. A number of them were having their supper as we passed through the dining-hall, eating from square beech-wood trenchers instead of plates, talking in shrill tones, and nudging and pushing each other just like American boys, unimpressed by the fact that the heavy, narrow tables from which they were eating were five hundred years old. How like boys it was to call the water pipe in the quadrangle, at which they wash their hands and faces, "Moab," and the place where they blacked their shoes, "Edom," because in Psalm lx. 8, it is said, "Moab is my wash-pot, I will cast my shoe over Edom."
A Lovely Churchman.
As we walked through the ancient cloisters we came upon another characteristically boyish thing, a name cut on one of the stone pillars in clear, strong letters—"Tho Ken 1665"—and hardly anything in Winchester interested me so much as this, for the boy who cut it there, nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, became afterwards the author of what we call "the long metre doxology," four lines which have been sung more frequently than any other four lines in the English language, and which for generations to come will express the praise of increasing millions. This doxology was written by Ken as a concluding stanza to his famous Morning, Evening and Midnight Hymns, the best known of which, perhaps, is his evening hymn, "Glory to thee, my God, this night."
But there are other reasons why it was a pleasure to be vividly reminded of Ken at Winchester. He was a man of singularly modest, sweet, and lovable disposition. Macaulay says that his character approached, "as near as human infirmity permits, to the ideal perfection of Christian virtue." Yet he was no weakling, and on two notable occasions he showed that, mild and gentle as he was, he was also firm and fearless.
When the profligate Charles II. was at Winchester, waiting for the completion of his palace there, he requested Ken, then prebendary at Winchester, to lend his house temporarily to the notorious Nell Gwynn, the King's mistress. Ken refused to let such a person have his house. Charles does not seem to have resented the affront, for he afterwards made Ken Bishop of Bath and Wells. It is one of the abominations of the English union of Church and State, that a thoroughly depraved man like Charles II., if he succeeds to the throne, becomes ipso facto the head of the Church of England. By the way, the altar books in black letter in Winchester Cathedral were presented to the church by this same graceless Charles II. Things get badly mixed under such a system as that of the Church of England.
Ken's Defiance of James II.