led to an animated correspondence in the Athenaeum); The Natural History of Precious Stones and Gems and of the Precious Metals (1865); The Handbook of Engraved Gems (2nd ed., 1885); Early Christian Numismatics (1873). King was thoroughly familiar with the works of Greek and Latin authors, especially Pausanias and the elder Pliny, which bore upon the subject in which he was most interested; but he had little taste for the minutiae of verbal criticism. In 1869 he brought out an edition of Horace, illustrated from antique gems; he also translated Plutarch’s Moralia (1882) and the theosophical works of the Emperor Julian (1888) for Bonn’s Classical Library.
KING, CLARENCE (1842–1901), American geologist, was
born at Newport, Rhode Island, U.S.A., on the 6th of January
1842. He graduated at Yale in 1862. His most important
work was the geological exploration of the fortieth parallel, of
which the main reports (1876 and 1877) comprised the geological
and topographical atlas of the Rocky Mountains, the Green River
and Utah basins, and the Nevada plateau and basin. When the
United States Geological Survey was consolidated in 1879 King
was chosen director, and he vigorously conducted investigations
in Colorado, and in the Eureka district and on the Comstock
lode in Nevada. He held office for a year only; in later years
his only noteworthy contribution to geology was an essay on the
age of the earth, which appeared in the annual report of the
Smithsonian Institution for 1893. He died at Phoenix, Arizona,
on the 24th of December 1901.
KING, EDWARD (1612–1637), the subject of Milton’s Lycidas,
was born in Ireland in 1612, the son of Sir John King, a member
of a Yorkshire family which had migrated to Ireland. Edward
King was admitted a pensioner of Christ’s College, Cambridge,
on the 9th of June 1626, and four years later was elected a fellow.
Milton, though two years his senior and himself anxious to
secure a fellowship, remained throughout on terms of the closest
friendship with his rival, whose amiable character seems to have
endeared him to the whole college. King served from 1633 to
1634 as praelector and tutor of his college, and was to have
entered the church. His career, however, was cut short by the
tragedy which inspired Milton’s verse. In 1637 he set out for
Ireland to visit his family, but on the 10th of August the ship in
which he was sailing struck on a rock near the Welsh coast, and
King was drowned. Of his own writings many Latin poems
contributed to different collections of Cambridge verse survive,
but they are not of sufficient merit to explain the esteem in
which he was held.
A collection of Latin, Greek and English verse written in his memory by his Cambridge friends was printed at Cambridge in 1638, with the title Justa Edouardo King naufrago ab amicis moerentibus amoris et μνείας χάριν. The second part of this collection has a separate title-page, Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr Edward King, Anno Dom. 1638, and contains thirteen English poems, of which Lycidas[1] (signed J. M.) is the last.
KING, EDWARD (1829–1910), English bishop, was the second
son of the Rev. Walter King, archdeacon of Rochester and
rector of Stone, Kent. Graduating from Oriel College, Oxford,
he was ordained in 1854, and four years later became chaplain
and lecturer at Cuddesdon Theological College. He was principal
at Cuddesdon from 1863 to 1873, when he became regius professor
of pastoral theology at Oxford and canon of Christ Church. To
the world outside he was only known at this time as one of
Dr Pusey’s most intimate friends and as a leading member of the
English Church Union. But in Oxford, and especially among the
younger men, he exercised an exceptional influence, due, not to
special profundity of intellect, but to his remarkable charm in
personal intercourse, and his abounding sincerity and goodness.
In 1885 Dr King was made bishop of Lincoln. The most
eventful episode of his episcopate was his prosecution (1888–1890)
for ritualistic practices before the archbishop of Canterbury,
Dr Benson, and, on appeal, before the judicial committee of the
Privy Council (see Lincoln Judgment). Dr King, who loyally
conformed his practices to the archbishop’s judgment, devoted
himself unsparingly to the work of his diocese; and, irrespective
of his High Church views, he won the affection and reverence
of all classes by his real saintliness of character. The bishop,
who never married, died at Lincoln on the 8th of March 1910.
See the obituary notice in The Times, March 9, 1910.
KING, HENRY (1591–1669), English bishop and poet, eldest
son of John King, afterwards bishop of London, was baptized
on the 16th of January 1591. With his younger brother John
he proceeded from Westminster School to Christ Church, Oxford,
where both matriculated on the 20th of January 1609. Henry
King entered the church, and after receiving various ecclesiastical
preferments he was made bishop of Chichester in 1642, receiving
at the same time the rich living of Petworth, Sussex. On the
29th of December of that year Chichester surrendered to the
Parliamentary army, and King was among the prisoners. After
his release he found an asylum with his brother-in-law, Sir
Richard Hobart of Langley, Buckinghamshire, and afterwards
at Richkings near by, with Lady Salter, said to have been a
sister of Dr Brian Duppa (1588–1662). King was a close friend
of Duppa and personally acquainted with Charles I. In one of
his poems dated 1649 he speaks of the Eikon Basilike as the
king’s own work. Restored to his benefice at the Restoration,
King died at Chichester on the 30th of September 1669. His
works include Poems, Elegies, Paradoxes and Sonets (1657), The Psalmes of David from the New Translation of the Bible, turned into Meter (1651), and several sermons. He was one of the
executors of John Donne, and prefixed an elegy to the 1663
edition of his friend’s poems.
King’s Poems and Psalms were edited, with a biographical sketch, by the Rev. J. Hannah (1843).
KING, RUFUS (1755–1827), American political leader, was
born on the 24th of March 1755 at Scarborough, Maine, then
a part of Massachusetts. He graduated at Harvard in 1777,
read law at Newburyport, Mass., with Theophilus Parsons, and
was admitted to the bar in 1780. He served in the Massachusetts
General Court in 1783–1784 and in the Confederation Congress
in 1784–1787. During these critical years he adopted the
“states’ rights” attitude. It was largely through his efforts
that the General Court in 1784 rejected the amendment to the
Articles of Confederation authorizing Congress to levy a 5%
impost. He was one of the three Massachusetts delegates in
Congress in 1785 who refused to present the resolution of the
General Court proposing a convention to amend the articles.
He was also out of sympathy with the meeting at Annapolis in
1786. He did good service, however, in opposing the extension
of slavery. Early in 1787 King was moved by the Shays
Rebellion and by the influence of Alexander Hamilton to take a
broader view of the general situation, and it was he who introduced
the resolution in Congress, on the 21st of February 1787,
sanctioning the call for the Philadelphia constitutional convention.
In the convention he supported the large-state party,
favoured a strong executive, advocated the suppression of the
slave trade, and opposed the counting of slaves in determining
the apportionment of representatives. In 1788 he was one of
the most influential members of the Massachusetts convention
which ratified the Federal Constitution. He married Mary
Alsop (1769–1819) of New York in 1786 and removed to that
city in 1788. He was elected a member of the New York
Assembly in the spring of 1789, and at a special session of the
legislature held in July of that year was chosen one of the first
representatives of New York in the United States Senate. In
this body he served in 1789–1796, supported Hamilton’s financial
measures, Washington’s neutrality proclamation and the Jay
Treaty, and became one of the recognized leaders of the Federalist
party. He was minister to Great Britain in 1796–1803 and
again in 1825–1826, and was the Federalist candidate for vice-president
in 1804 and 1808, and for president in 1816, when he
- ↑ J. W. Hales, in the Athenaeum for the 1st of August 1891, suggests that in writing King’s elegy Milton had in his mind, besides the idylls of Theocritus, a Latin eclogue of Giovanni Baptista Amalteo entitled Lycidas, in which Lycidas bids farewell to the land he loves and prays for gentle breezes on his voyage. He was familiar with the Italian Latin poets of the Renaissance, and he may also have been influenced in his choice of the name by the shepherd Lycidas in Sannazaro’s eclogue Phillis.
