Page:Imperialdictiona03eadi Brandeis Vol3a.pdf/62

KNI and editorial labour £80,000, and contributed to the revenue £50,000 in paper duty. On the completion of the Penny Cyclopædia, as Mr. Knight has elsewhere informed the public, the balance upon the outlay above the receipts was £30,788. During the progress of the Penny Magazine and the Penny Cyclopædia, Mr. Knight, as author, editor, and publisher, had found time and energy for many other enterprises more or less important. The Pictorial Bible, 1838, was followed in 1839 by his elaborate and beautiful Pictorial Shakspeare, genially edited by himself, and succeeded by his "William Shakspeare, a biography," a complete life and times of the great dramatist. Between 1841-44 appeared his massive "London," a topographical, historical, and descriptive work on the great metropolis; and during the same year the still more massive "Pictorial History of England," since supplemented in 1849 by Miss Martineau's History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace. A long article might be filled by a catalogue of Mr. Knight's almost innumerable and always useful serials, such as his weekly and his monthly volumes, to which he contributed an instructive biography of Caxton and Lord Brougham, the historical sketches of statesmen—not to speak of English Classics, English Miscellanies, Library for the Times, Excursion Companions, Half Hours of English History, Half Hours with the best Authors, Store of Knowledge for all Readers, the Land we Live in, Museum of Animated Nature, and others whose name is "Legion." On the death of his partner Mr. Young, Mr. Knight in 1853 began to part gradually with many of his copyrights, to withdraw from the general publishing business, and to limit himself to publications of an official character. Since that time it is as an editor and author that Mr. Knight has been chiefly known In 1847 he had published a cheap abridgment of the Penny Cyclopædia; and in 1854 Messrs. Bradbury & Evans began to issue a complete recast of the Penny Cyclopædia "in divisions," each embracing one department only, such as Geography, Natural History, &c. The original articles were rewritten where required, and much new matter was added, the whole bearing the title of the English Cyclopædia, and being conducted by Mr. Charles Knight. In 1856 the same firm commenced the publication of a "Popular History of England," written entirely by Mr. Knight, and the distinctive aim of which is to give prominence to the social development of the people. In 1854 appeared "The Old Printer and the Modern Press," and "Once upon a Time," the latter a pleasant work, partly antiquarian, consisting of sketches and essays contributed to periodicals, Household Words among them. Mr. Knight has been frequently examined as a witness by parliamentary committees; and the Blue Books for many years contain much interesting evidence by him on the progress and development of the cheap and useful literature of which he has been so distinguished a promoter.—F. E.  KNIGHT,, a social and literary notability of last century, was the daughter of Admiral Sir Joseph Knight, and born about 1757. Carefully educated, she was familiar as a girl with Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, Reynolds, and other celebrities of the time. After the death of her father in 1775 she removed with her mother to the continent, where she remained for more than twenty years, chiefly in Italy. Among her intimates were the Hamiltons and Lord Nelson. She returned to England in 1799 with a high reputation, literary as well as social; for in the interval she had published several works, among them in 1790 the once well known "Dinarbus," a supplement to Johnson's Rasselas. Mr. Pitt admired her character, and in 1806 she became one of the attachées of Queen Charlotte, a position which after seven years she exchanged for that of lady-companion to the Princess Charlotte. From 1816 to 1837 she resided on the continent, mixing in the best society, and died in Paris in 1837. In 1861 appeared her "Autobiography," which contains much new and interesting matter, especially with reference to the Princess Charlotte.—F. E.  KNIGHT,, doctor of medicine, fellow of the Royal Society, and librarian of the British museum, died in London on the 9th of June, 1772. He cultivated the science of magnetism, and constructed artificial magnets of power unprecedented in his time. His researches are described in papers which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions, 1774-76.—W. J. M. R.  KNIGHT,, author and connoisseur, was born in December, 1786. He succeeded in 1808 to large family estates, which allowed him to indulge his love of travel and taste for art. He made an extended tour on the continent, one of the results of which was an anonymous poem on the struggle in the Peninsula, "Iberia's Crisis," 1809. His "Persian Tales" were read in MS. and admired by Lord Byron. These and his other verses (so late as 1839 he published "Hannibal in Bithynia," a dramatic poem) are now forgotten. He is remembered as the author of a series of elaborate works, chiefly on architecture; "An Architectural Tour in Normandy, with some remarks on Norman architecture," 1836, disproving the antiquity assigned by French archæologists to certain churches in Normandy; "The Normans in Sicily," architectural and historical, a sequel to the preceding; and the "Ecclesiastical Architecture of Italy from the time of Constantine to the fifteenth century." Mr Knight was for many years a member of the house of commons. He died on the 9th of February, 1846.—F. E.  KNIGHT,, an English navigator, was in 1719 intrusted by the Hudson Bay Company with two ships for the purpose of visiting a supposed mine of copper, reported to exist by the Indians; and also for the prosecution of the endeavour to find a north-west passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Neither ships nor men ever returned, and their fate remained unknown until Hearne, fifty years later (1769), learnt it from the Esquimaux.—(See .) It appears that Knight's vessels reached Marble Island, on the west side of Hudson Bay (lat. 62° 45´), and in getting into harbour sustained such injuries as unfitted them for sea. The English, about fifty in number, passed the winter on that spot. Before a second winter had set in, sickness and famine had reduced their number to twenty. In the summer of 1721 only five survivors were found, and these eagerly devoured the raw seals' flesh and blubber which the Esquimaux gave them. Within a few days the five were reduced to two, who "frequently went to the top of an adjacent rock and earnestly looked to the south and east as if in expectation of some vessels coming to their relief After continuing there a considerable time together and nothing appearing in sight, they sat down close together and wept bitterly. At length one of the two died, and the other's strength was so far exhausted that he fell down and died also, in attempting to dig a grave for his companion."—W. H.  KNIGHT,, a classical scholar and archæologist, was born in 1750. He was the eldest son of the Rev. Thomas Knight of Wormesley Grange, Herefordshire, and grandson of a very wealthy iron-master. His early education was much neglected. On the death of his father, when he was fourteen, he inherited the estate of Dounton, near Ludlow, and was sent to school. He became a good Latin scholar, and afterwards taught himself Greek, of which through life he was a zealous student. Visiting Italy, he acquired a taste for art, ancient and modern, and became a collector on a large scale. He sat in parliament for Leominster and Ludlow, from 1780-1800, and is described as a genuine whig, and a vehement though silent opponent of what he considered to be Mr. Pitt's profusion. His first work was on a topic so singular, that it is only to be found in the recesses of the libraries of the curious—"An account of the remains of the worship of Priapus, lately existing at Isernia, in the kingdom of Naples; to which is added a discourse on the worship of Priapus, and its connection with the mystic theology of the ancients." This was published, or rather printed by the Dilettante Society in 1786. The symbolism of antiquity was a favourite study of Mr. Knight's; and another of his contributions to its literature was his "Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Mythology," which was to have been prefixed to the second volume of the Select Specimens of Ancient Sculpture, published by the Dilettante Society; Mr. Knight, however, printed a few copies of it at his own expense. His "Analytical Essay on the Greek Alphabet," 1790, is described as "chiefly remarkable for an exposure of the forgery of certain Greek inscriptions which Fourmont professed to have found in Laconia." Of Mr. Knight's pompous poems, the "Progress of Civil Society" is alone remembered, and that chiefly as the subject of a parody in the Anti-Jacobin, the result of a combination of no fewer than five wits. Canning, Gifford, Frere, Hammond, and George Ellis. In 1805 he published his "Analytical Inquiry into the principles of Taste," a work of great discursiveness. In 1808 he printed fifty copies of "Prolegomena" to a new edition of Homer, and in 1820 the work itself appeared. The text has some interest from Mr. Knight's introduction into it of the obsolete digamma, and his theory of the interpolation of the Homeric original by later poets or minstrels, while he rejected 