Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 34.djvu/97

 system of musical instruction.' These pretensions were extravagant, but his object was good, and what he did has undoubtedly had a beneficial influence on pianoforte teaching, though his system and invention are no longer used.



LOINGSECH (d. 704), king of Ireland, succeeded Finachta Fleadhach as ardrigh in 695. His father was Œngus, grandson of Aedh mac Ainmire, king of Ireland from 568 to 595. The first mention of him in the annals (, Annals of Ireland, p. 68) is in 672, when he won a battle at Tulachard over the king of Banagh, co. Donegal. In 699 there was a severe murrain, while in three subsequent years plague and famine were epidemic. The establishment of the Cain Adhamhnain, which exempted women from military service, took place in his reign, and may have been a result of these misfortunes. In 704 Loingsech led a plundering expedition into Connaught. Ceallach mac Raghallaigh, king of Connaught, an aged man whose infirmities had been satirised by the poets of Loingsech, assembled his tribes and led them to battle in his chariot with such spirit that Loingsech and his three sons were slain. The battle was fought at Corann in the north of Connaught, and was celebrated in a satirical poem beginning, 'Basa adhaigh i ccorann, basa uacht, basa omum,' of which the best version, obviously an ancient one, is in a fragment of annals preserved by Mac Firbisigh (, Three Fragments, pp. 106-8).



LOK, LOCK, or LOCKE, HENRY (1553?–1608?), poet, was third son of Henry Lok, a London mercer (d. 1571), by his wife Anne Vaughan. The latter is doubtless the 'A. L.,' i.e. Anne Lok or Locke, who translated into English verse Calvin's 'Sermons upon the Song that Ezechias made after he had been sick and afflicted by the Hand of God'(London, John Daye, 1550). At the close of the book a fresh title-page introduces 'A Meditation of a penitent Sinner, written in manner of a Paraphrase after the 51 Psalm of David.' A copy of the volume belonged to Bright, the book-collector, and contained the inscription 'Liber Henrici Lock ex dono Anne uxoris 1559.' [q. v.] the traveller was the poet's uncle, and Sir [q. v.] was his grandfather; [q. v.] was his cousin. According to Wood, Lok spent some time in Oxford between his sixteenth and twenty-first year, but does not seem to have matriculated in the university, and certainly took no degree. Wood states that on leaving Oxford he went to court and 'was received into the patronage of a noble Mæcænas.' In 1591 he contributed a sonnet to the 'Essayes of a Prentice,' by James VI of Scotland. In the years following Lok seems to have been a persistent petitioner for place about the court. Early in 1597 he was, according to his own account, encouraged by the Countess of Warwick to make application to Sir Robert Cecil for 'some pension, till an office or forfeiture may fall to my relief.' Early in 1598 he petitioned for the 'collectorship of Devon.' In 8 June 1598 he begged for the appointment of keeper of the queen's bears and mastiffs. 'It is better to be a bear herd,' he wrote, 'than to be baited daily with great exclamations for small debts.' Lok's appeals resulted in his obtaining some confidential employment. In 1599, when Cecil made him a present of a gelding, he spent the spring at Bayonne and the neigbourhood, collecting political gossip. He was skilled in cipher, but his zeal in seeking 'intelligence' exposed him to the hostile suspicions of the inhabitants, and at one time his life seems to have been in danger (State Paper MSS. Dom. Eliz. cclxxi. 91, 125, 273). A year later he was living in the Strand, and seems to have fallen into bad repute with Cecil, whom he vainly implored to employ him again in secret service in foreign ports. In March 1606 he was imprisoned as an insolvent debtor in the Westminster Gatehouse, and in May 1608 he was similarly situated in the Clink in Southwark. Piteous appeals for relief to his old protector, now Earl of Salisbury, seem to have been unavailing.

Lok married Ann Moyle of Cornwall, and had two sons, Henry, born in 1592, and Charles.

In 1593 Richard Field obtained a license to print a work entitled 'The first Parte of Christian Passions, conteyninge a hundred Sonnets of Meditation, Humiliation, and Prayer.' No copy of this book is now extant. In 1597 Richard Field printed 'Ecclesiasticus, otherwise called the Preacher, compendiously abridged, and also paraphristically dilated in English Poesie &hellip; composed by H. L., Gentleman. Whereunto are annexed sundrie Sonets of Christian Passions heretofore printed, and now corrected and augmented, with other affectionate Sonets of a feeling Conscience of the same Authors' (London, 4to).