educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and became Congregational minister at Warminster (1871) and a secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society. He was killed by a fall in Switzerland. Sir Charles Reed’s third son, Talbot Baines Reed (1852–1893), educated at the City of London School, became managing director of his father’s firm, and was one of the founders and secretary of the Bibliographical Society. He is best known as the author of popular boys' books.
REED, ISAAC (1742–1807), English Shakespearian editor, son of a baker, was born on New Year’s Day, 1742, in London. He was articled to a solicitor, and eventually set up as a conveyance at Staple Inn, where he had a considerable practice. His first important work was the Biographia dramatica (2 vols., 1782), consisting of biographies of the dramatists and a descriptive dictionary of their plays. This book, which was an
enlargement of David Erskine Baker’s Companion to the Playhouse
(2 vols., 1764), was re-edited (3 vols.) by Stephen Jones in 1811, and is a valuable authority. The original work by Baker had been based on Gerard Langbaine’s Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), Giles Jacob’s Poetical Register
(1719), Thomas Whincop’s “ List of all the Dramatic Authors ” (printed with his tragedy of Scanderbeg, 1747) and the MSS. of
Thomas Coxeter (1689–1747), an industrious antiquary who
had collected much useful material. Reed’s Notitia dramatic (Addit. MSS. 2 5390–2, British Museum), supplementary to the Biographia, was never published. He revised Dodsley’s Collection of Old Plays (12 vols., 1780). He also re-edited Johnson
and Steevens’s edition (1773) of Shakespeare. Reed’s edition
was published in 10 vols. (1785), and he gave great assistance
to Steevens in his edition (1793). He was Steevens’s, literary
executor, and in 1803 published another edition (21 vols.)
based on Steevens’s later collections. This, which is known
as the first variorum, was re-issued ten years later. He died
on the 5th of January 1807. His Valuable library of theatrical
literature was catalogued for sale as Bibliotheca Reediana (1807).
See John Nichol’s Lit. Anec. of the 18th Century (vol. ii., 1812); and Edward Dowden, Essays, Modern and Elizabethan.
REED, JOSEPH (1741–1785), American politician, was born in Trenton, New jersey, on the 27th of August 1741. He graduated at Princeton in 1757, studied law under Richard Stockton and, in 1763–65, at the Middle Temple, London, and practised in Trenton from 1765 until his removal to Philadelphia in 1770. He was president of the second Provincial Congress of Pennsylvania in 1775, was aide-de-camp and military secretary to General Washington in 1775–76, and was adjutant-general with the rank of colonel in 1776–77. He resigned his commission in the autumn of 1777, and in 1777–78 was a delegate to the Continental Congress. From December 1778 to October 1781 he was president of the state Executive Council. During his administration the proprietary rights of the Penn family were abrogated (1779), and provision
was made for the gradual abolition of slavery (1780). During this time Reed led the attack on Benedict Arnold (q.v.) for the latter’s administration of Philadelphia. Reed was elected to Congress in 1784, but died in Philadelphia on the 5th of March 1785.
The Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1874), by his grandson, William B. Reed, is based upon the family papers. It pictures Reed as an heroic patriot and statesman; George Bancroft, on the other hand, in the ninth volume (p. 229) of his History (1866) and in Joseph Reed: an Historical Essay (1867), pictures him as a trimmer of the most pronounced type. Bancroft’s principal charge against Reed was based on a passage in Count Donop’s diary referring to a Col. Reed protected by the British in 1776. In 1876, however, Mr W. S. Stryker discovered that the reference in the diary was really to Col. Charles Read (1715–c. 1780). Bancroft withdrew this definite charge in the 1876 edition of his History, in which, however, his tone towards Joseph Reed was unchanged.
Joseph Reed’s son, Joseph Reed (1772–1846), published the Laws of Pennsylvania (5 vols., 1822–24), continuing the work of Charles Smith, published in 1810–12, which began with the laws of 1700. His grandson, William Bradford Reed (1806–1876), graduated at the university of Pennsylvania in 1822, was a representative in the Pennsylvania legislature in 1834–35, attorney-general of the state in 1838, and a state senator in 1841. He was professor of American history in the university of Pennsylvania in 1850–56, United States minister to China in 1857–58, and in 1858 negotiated a treaty with China, proclaimed in 1860. Besides the biography of his grandfather mentioned above, he published one of Joseph Reed’s wife, Life of Esther De Berdt, afterwards Esther Reed (1853)-
W. B. Reed’s brother, Henry [Hope] Reed (1808–1854), graduated at the university of Pennsylvania in 1825, practised law in Philadelphia, and was assistant-professor of moral philosophy in the university of Pennsylvania in 1831–34 and professor of English literature and rhetoric there in 1835–54. He assisted Wordsworth in the preparation of an American edition of his poems in 1837, edited in America Christopher Wordsworth’s Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851) and published Lectures on English Literature from Chaucer to Tennyson (1855).
REED, THOMAS BRACKETT (1839–1902), American statesman, was born in Portland, Maine, on the 18th of October 1839. He graduated at Bowdoin College in 1860; was acting assistant-paymaster in the U.S. navy from April 1864 to November 1865; and in 1865 was admitted to the bar. He was a member of the Maine House of Representatives in 1868–69 and of the state Senate in 1870, was attorney-general of the state in 1870–72, and was city solicitor of Portland in 1874–77. He was a Republican member of the National House of Representatives from 1877 until 1899; was a member
of the Potter Committee to investigate the disputed presidential election of 1876, and conducted the examination of Samuel J. Tilden; and he was Speaker of the House in 1889–91, and in 1895–99. He was a “strong” speaker in his control of the proceedings, and he developed an organized committee system, making the majority of the Committee
on Rules consist of the speaker and chairman of the, committees
on ways and means and on appropriations. The “Reed
Rules,” drawn up by him, William .McKinley and J. G. Cannon,
were adopted on the 14th of February 1890; they provided
that every member must vote, unless pecuniarily interested in
a measure, that members present and not voting may be
counted for a quorum, and that no dilatory motion be entertained
by the speaker. His parliamentary methods were
bitterly attacked by his political enemies, who called him
“Tsar Reed.” He greatly hastened the passage of the McKinley
Bill in 1890, and of the Dingley Bill in 1897. His rules and
methods of control of legislation were adopted by his successors
in the speakership, and the power of the Rules Committee was
greatly increased under Charles F. Crisp (1845–1896), Democratic speaker in 1891–1895. After the war with Spain Reed broke with the administration on the issue of imperialism. He
resigned his seat in 1899 and practised law in New York City. He died in Washington on the 7th of December 1902. Reed was a remarkable personality, of whom many good stories were told, and opinions varied as to his conduct in the chair; but he was essentially a man of rugged honesty and power, whose death was a loss to American public life.
Reed’s Rules were published as a parliamentary manual. He edited with others a Library of Modern Eloquence (10 vols., 1901). See the chapter on Reed in H. B. Fuller’s Speakers of the House (Boston, 1909).
REED, a term applied to several distinct species of large, water loving grasses. The common or Water-reed, Phragmites communis (also known as Arundo phragmites), occurs along the margins of lakes, fens, marshes and placid streams, not only throughout Britain, but widely distributed in arctic and temperate regions. Another very important species in Ammophila arenaria (also known as A. arundinacea or Psamma arenaria), the sea-reed or marram-grass, a native of the sandy shores of Europe and N. Africa. Both species have been of notable geological importance, the former binding the soil and so impeding denudation, and actually converting swamp into dry land, largely by the
