years. He published in 1744 three treatises—on art; on music, painting and poetry; and on happiness. In 1751 appeared the work by which he became best known, Hermes, a philosophical inquiry concerning universal grammar. He also published Philosophical Arrangements and Philosophical Inquiries. Harris was a great lover of music, and adapted the words for a selection from Italian and German composers, published by the cathedral organist, James Corfe. He died on the 22nd of December 1780.
His works were collected and published in 1801, by his son, the first earl of Malmesbury, who prefixed a brief biography.
HARRIS, JOEL CHANDLER (1848–1908), American author, was born in Eatonton, Putnam county, Georgia, on the 8th of December 1848. He started as an apprentice to the printer’s trade in the office of the Countryman, a weekly paper published on a plantation not far from his home. He then studied law, and practised for a short time in Forsyth, Ga., but soon took to journalism. He joined the staff of the Savannah Daily News in 1871, and in 1876 that of the Atlanta Constitution, of which he was an editor from 1890 to 1901, and in this capacity did much to further the cause of the New South. But his most distinctive contribution to this paper, and to American literature, consisted of his dialect pieces dealing with negro life and folk-lore. His stories are characterized by quaint humour, poetic feeling and homely philosophy; and “Uncle Remus,” the principal character of most of them, is a remarkably vivid and real creation. The first collection of his stories was published in 1880 as Uncle Remus: his Songs and his Sayings. Among his later works are Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White (1884), Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches (1887), Balaam and His Master and Other Sketches and Stories (1891), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), On the Plantation (1892), which is partly autobiographic, Sister Jane (1896), The Chronicles of Aunt Minervy Ann (1899), and The Tar-Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904). More purely juvenile are Daddy Jake the Runaway and Other Stories (1889), Little Mr Thimblefinger and his Queer Country (1894) and its sequel Mr Rabbit at Home (1895), Aaron in the Wildwoods (1897), Plantation Pageants (1899), Told by Uncle Remus (1905), and Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit (1907). He was one of the compilers of the Life of Henry W. Grady, including his Writings and Speeches (1890) and wrote Stories of Georgia (1896), and Georgia from the Invasion of De Soto to Recent Times (1899). He died in Atlanta on the 3rd of July 1908.
HARRIS, JOHN (c. 1666–1719), English writer. He is best known as the editor of the Lexicon technicum, or Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences (1704), which ranks as the earliest of the long line of English encyclopaedias, and as the compiler of the Collection of Voyages and Travels which passes under his name. He was born about 1666, probably in Shropshire, and was a scholar of Trinity College, Oxford, from 1684 to 1688. He was presented to the vicarage of Icklesham in Sussex, and subsequently to the rectory of St Thomas, Winchelsea. In 1698 he was entrusted with the delivery of the seventh series of the Boyle lectures—Atheistical Objections against the Being of God and His Attributes fairly considered and fully refuted. Between 1702 and 1704 he delivered at the Marine Coffee House in Birchin Lane the mathematical lectures founded by Sir Charles Cox, and advertised himself as a mathematical tutor at Amen Corner. The friendship of Sir William Cowper, afterwards lord chancellor, secured for him the office of private chaplain, a prebend in Rochester cathedral (1708), and the rectory of the united parishes of St Mildred, Bread Street and St Margaret Moses, in addition to other preferments. He showed himself an ardent supporter of the government, and engaged in a bitter quarrel with the Rev. Charles Humphreys, who afterwards was chaplain to Dr Sacheverel. Harris was one of the early members of the Royal Society, and for a time acted as vice-president. At his death on the 7th of September 1719, he was busy completing an elaborate History of Kent. He is said to have died in poverty brought on by his own bad management of his affairs.
HARRIS, THOMAS LAKE (1823–1906), American spiritualistic “prophet,” was born at Fenny Stratford in Buckinghamshire, England, on the 15th of May 1823. His parents were Calvinistic Baptists, and very poor. They settled at Utica, New York, when Harris was five years old. When he was about twenty Harris became a Universalist preacher, and then a Swedenborgian. He became associated about 1847 with a spiritualist of indifferent character named Davis. After Davis had been publicly exposed, Harris established a congregation in New York. About 1850 he professed to receive inspirations, and published some long poems. He had the gift of improvisation in a very high degree. About 1859 he preached in London, and is described as a man “with low, black eyebrows, black beard, and sallow countenance.” He was an effective speaker, and his poetry was admired by many; Alfred Austin in his book The Poetry of the Period even devoted a chapter to Harris. He founded in 1861 a community at Wassaic, New York, and opened a bank and a mill, which he superintended. There he was joined by about sixty converts, including five orthodox clergymen, some Japanese people, some American ladies of position, and especially by Laurence Oliphant (q.v.) with his wife and mother. The community—the Brotherhood of the New Life—decided to settle at the village of Brocton on the shore of Lake Erie. Harris established there a wine-making industry. In reply to the objections of teetotallers he said that the wine prepared by himself was filled with the divine breath so that all noxious influences were neutralized. Harris also built a tavern and strongly advocated the use of tobacco. He exacted complete surrender from his disciples—even the surrender of moral judgment. He taught that God was bi-sexual, and apparently, though not in reality, that the rule of society should be one of married celibacy. He professed to teach his community a change in the mode of respiration which was to be the visible sign of possession by Christ and the seal of immortality. The Oliphants broke away from the restraint about 1881, charging him with robbery and succeeding in getting back from him many thousands of pounds by legal proceedings. But while losing faith in Harris himself, they did not abandon his main teaching. In Laurence Oliphant’s novel Masollam his view of Harris will be found. Briefly, he held that Harris was originally honest, greatly gifted, and possessed of certain psychical powers. But in the end he came to practise unbridled licence under the loftiest pretensions, made the profession of extreme disinterestedness a cloak to conceal his avarice, and demanded from his followers a blind and supple obedience. Harris in 1876 discontinued for a time public activities, but issued to a secret circle books of verse dwelling mainly on sexual questions. On these his mind ran from the first. In 1891 he announced that his body had been renewed, and that he had discovered the secret of the resuscitation of humanity. He published a book, Lyra triumphalis, dedicated to A. C. Swinburne. He also made a third marriage, and visited England intending to remain there. He was called back by a fire which destroyed large stocks of his wine, and remained in New York till 1903, when he visited Glasgow. His followers believed that he had attained the secret of immortal life on earth, and after his death on the 23rd of March 1906 declared that he was only sleeping. It was three months before it was acknowledged publicly that he was really dead. There can be little or no doubt as to the real character of Harris. His teaching was esoteric in form, but is a thinly veiled attempt to alter the ordering of sexual relations.
The authoritative biography from the side of his disciples is the Life by A. A. Cuthbert, published in Glasgow in 1908. It is full of the jargon of Harris’s sect, but contains some biographical facts as well as many quotations. Mrs Oliphant’s Life of Laurence Oliphant (1891) has not been shaken in any important particular, and Oliphant’s own portrait of Harris in Masollam is apparently unexaggerated. But Harris had much personal magnetism, unbounded self-confidence, along with endless fluency, and to the last was believed in by some disciples of character and influence. (W. R. Ni.)
HARRIS, SIR WILLIAM SNOW (1791–1867), English electrician, was descended from an old family of solicitors at Plymouth, where he was born on the 1st of April 1791. He received his early education at the Plymouth grammar-school,
