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LIT of Newbury is supposed to have died in 1208. His "History," after passing through three incorrect editions between 1567 and 1587, was at length printed in 1719 by Hearne, who added as an appendix three homilies ascribed to the same writer.—W. C. H.  LITTLER,, G.C.B., Lieut.-General, a gallant and able officer, who won his laurels in the service of the East India Company. He was born at Jarvin in Cheshire on the 6th January, 1783. and was educated at Acton grammar-school, near Nantwich. In 1800 he entered the company's service, and took his passage in the Kent East Indiaman, which was captured by a French privateer. He and the other passengers were embarked in a small pinnace to find their way as they best could, in which they happily succeeded. Mr. Littler went through the campaigns of 1804 and 1805 under Lord Lake. He volunteered for the expedition to Java in 1811, and by 1841 he had won his way to the rank of major-general. He shortly after was in command of the forces in the district of Agra, and at the head of the army of Gwalior carried the batteries of Maharajpore and Chounda. For his conduct on this occasion he received the thanks of parliament, and was made K.C.B. In the war of the Punjab of 1845 he distinguished himself by holding Ferozeshah with seven thousand men against fifty thousand Sikhs; but in the terrible battle near that place on the 21st of December he was not so fortunate. The division which he commanded fell back before the enemy. The troops redeemed their character on the following day. Sir John Littler became G.C.B., president of the council in 1849, and deputy-governor of Bengal. In 1851 he returned to England, and died at his seat in Devonshire on February 18, 1856.—R. H.  LITTLETON,, a divine and philologist, was born at Hales Owen in Shropshire in 1627. In 1644 he became student of Christ church, Oxford, but was ejected in 1648. In 1658 he became second master in Westminster school, having been an usher before. He became rector of Chelsea in 1674, a prebendary of Westminster, and afterwards sub-dean. In 1685 he was licensed to the church of St. Botolph. His death took place in 1694. Dr. Littleton was a learned and laborious divine, who published a great variety of works, generally in Latin. He was well acquainted with the Greek and Latin languages, and appears to have studied several oriental tongues—Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic. He is best known as the author of a Latin dictionary, which appeared first in 1678, 4to, and passed through several editions. He began a Greek lexicon, but did not live to complete it. His Latin dictionary was superseded by Ainsworth's. He is the author of "Tragicomœdia Oxoniensis;" "Pasor Metricus;" "Elementa Religionis;" "Complicatio Radicum in Primæva Hebræorum Lingua;" "Solomon's Gate;" sixty-one sermons; preface to Cicero's works, &c.—S. D.  LITTLETON,, Lord, sometime lord-keeper of the great seal, a collateral descendant of the author of the Treatise on Tenures, was born in 1589 at Munslow in Shropshire. His father was a Welsh judge, and he himself, after graduating at Oxford, entered the Inner temple, and went to the bar. A skilful lawyer, as well as an eminent antiquary, he acquired a large practice in the common law courts, and in 1621 succeeded his father as chief-justice of North Wales. He was a member of Charles I.'s second parliament in 1626, in which he was active against the duke of Buckingham; and in that of 1628 he was chairman of the committee of grievances, presenting to the house their report on which was founded the famous petition of right. Liberal, but not violent in his liberalism, he seemed a man worth gaining over by the court, and, on the recommendation of the king, he was elected recorder of London at the close of 1631. In October, 1634, he was made solicitor-general, and in his new capacity the quondam "patriot" delivered an elaborate argument against Hampden in the affair of ship-money. In 1640 he was raised to the chief-justiceship of the common pleas, and on the flight of Lord-keeper Finch to escape the wrath of the parliament, the great seal was intrusted to his custody, and he was created a peer. Though a good chief-justice, he seems to have made, from a legal point of view, but an indifferent lord-keeper. The king next placed him at the head of a commission to execute the office of lord high-treasurer. Littleton began to trim. His votes with and speeches for the anti-court party were so decided that his royal master grew indignant. At last he made up his mind to throw in his lot with Charles, and fled with the great seal to the king at York. Charles was pacified, and placed him again at the head of the treasury. But Littleton's was not a nature to be at ease in the storms of civil war. He grew melancholy, and easily succumbing to an attack of illness, died at Oxford on the 27th August, 1645, and was buried in his own college of Christ Church. Clarendon describes him as "a handsome and a proper man, of a very graceful presence, and notorious courage, which in his youth he had manifested with his sword." His courage, however, was more physical than moral, and at the crisis of the controversy between Charles and the Long parliament, he was wanting in consistency and decision.—F. E.  LITTLETON,, LL.D., a divine and poet, was educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 1720. Among other verses he wrote a poem on a spider, printed in Isaac Reed's edition (1782) of Dodsley's collection. He became an assistant-master and fellow of Eton, vicar of Maple-Durham, and a chaplain-in-ordinary to the king. He died in 1734. His "Sermons upon several Practical Subjects" were printed in 1735, and to a subsequent edition was prefixed a brief memoir of his life by Dr. Morell.—F. E.  LITTLETON,, M. P., one of the Worcestershire Littletons who represented his native county in parliament in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. He was attached to Essex, and shared his disgrace; was imprisoned, condemned as a conspirator, and only saved from execution on the interference of Raleigh. He died in prison in 1600.—P. E. D.  LITTLETON,, one of the judges of the court of common pleas in the reign of Edward IV., author of the famous "Treatise on Tenures," was born at Frankley in Worcestershire, probably in the first decade of the fifteenth century. There are traces of the family of the Littletons as extant in the parish of South Littleton in Worcestershire so far back as the reign of Henry II. One of them, Thomas de Littleton, Esquire of the body to Richard II. and his two successors, left an only daughter Elizabeth, who married Thomas Westcote, Esq., of Westcote, near Barnstaple, in Devonshire. A proud and spirited woman, Dame Elizabeth covenanted with her husband before marriage, that the issue of their union should be called by her maiden name, Littleton, not Westcote. Hence the surname by which the celebrated lawyer is known. He was educated at one of the universities, entered at the Inner temple, and went to the bar, becoming afterwards one of the recorders of his inn. The earliest trace of Sir Thomas Littleton at the bar, according to Mr. Foss in his Judges of England (whom and which we chiefly follow), is in 1445, when a suitor is found petitioning the chancellor to assign to him Littleton as counsel in proceedings against the widow of Judge Paston, whom none of the other men of court were willing to oppose. Thus Littleton probably both was early known as a courageous advocate, and practised in the court of chancery. Five years later (Easter of 1450), he is first mentioned in the year-books. Two years afterwards his legal services are paid for in land by Sir William Trussel, who grants to him for life the manor of Sheriff-Hales in Staffordshire, "pro bono et notabili consilio," an interesting memorial of the ancient relations between advocate and client. On the 2nd of July, 1453, he was called to the degree of the coif, and appointed steward or judge of the court of Marshalsea of the king's household. On the 13th of May, 1455, his services were further retained for the crown by the bestowal on him of a patent as king's Serjeant. In the first parliament of Edward IV. he was named an arbitrator in a difference between the bishop of Winchester and his tenants. Two years afterwards he was in such favour at court as to be in personal attendance with the two chief justices on the king, in one of the royal progresses, and on the 17th April, 1466, he was appointed a judge of the common pleas. He held this office till his death at Frankley on the 23rd of August, 1481, when he was buried in Worcester cathedral. In the fifteenth year of Edward IV. he had been made a knight of the bath, on the occasion of the admission of the prince of Wales into that order. In his will is the following clause, which, although the "Treatise on Tenures" is written in Norman-French, has been conjectured to refer to that celebrated work, "Also I wulle that my grete English Boke be sold by myn executors, and the money thereof to be disposed for my soul." From the lapse of centuries since it was written, and the consequent revolutions in the law of real property, the interest of the "Treatise of Tenures" is now chiefly historical and antiquarian; but with the commentary on it of Sir Edward Coke, Coke upon Littleton, the name of the author is likely to live as long as English jurisprudence.—F. E. 