style of his tragedies is stiff and stilted; his comedies are lively and natural. "The Boaster" and "The Eccentric Men" continue to be favourites. His collected works were published at St. Petersburg in 1822, in 5 volumes.—R. H.
KNIBB, William, an eminent Baptist missionary, was born at Kettering in 1803. Being intended for business, he and his brother Thomas were apprenticed to a printer. In this situation they took part in printing the periodical accounts of the Baptist mission, an occupation which seems to have had a powerful influence over their minds. Thomas offered himself to the Baptist Society, and was sent to Jamaica, where he arrived in January, 1823. He conducted a British school in addition to preaching, but suddenly died on April 25th, 1824, leaving a widow, who returned to England only to die, and an infant son. William Knibb at once offered to go to Jamaica to take his brother's place, and was accepted. In November, 1824, he and his wife set sail, and arrived at their destination in February, 1825. He reorganized and directed his brother's school, and met with great success both as a teacher and as a preacher. In 1831 he admitted into the church at Falmouth three hundred and six new members; his inquirers were put down at two thousand eight hundred and forty-seven, and the full members at six hundred and seventy. At the close of that year there was a great insurrection of the slaves. He and his fellow-ministers did all in their power, first to prevent, and then to suppress it; but when they were enrolled in the militia, on December 31, they declined to serve. Two days later they were arrested, and, without any specific charge, were sent to head-quarters at Montego Bay. It was asserted that they had provoked the insurrection, but they soon obtained their release. Soon after they were indicted by the crown for sedition; and before their trial the grand jury expressed their conviction that the Baptist missionaries had in a culpable degree been the cause of the late rebellion by mixing politics with religion. Nevertheless, at the trial a nolle prosequi was entered for want of evidence, and they were acquitted. Knibb soon after came to England, and took part in the annual meeting of the Baptist Society at Spitalfields chapel. There and elsewhere he produced a deep impression by his statements and appeals. The crisis had now come, and he threw his whole soul into the cause of emancipation. In 1833 he reappeared in England, and by his courage and eloquence excited the fears as well as the admiration of many. He avowed his resolve to speak, whatever the consequences might be, and not to desist till "slavery, the greatest of crimes, was removed." The emancipation act was passed; and in 1834 he returned to Jamaica. On his arrival in October, his reception was one of overwhelming enthusiasm. His chapel had been laid in ashes, but he re-erected it, and went on zealously with his work for the welfare of the negroes. These labours were eminently successful; and when he came to London again in 1840, at the great general antislavery convention held in June at Exeter Hall, he spoke with extraordinary power and effect. At that time he had with him two christian negroes for whom he undertook to raise, and actually raised, £1000, to send them as missionaries to Africa. He then collected £2000 for the support often new missionaries in Jamaica; and obtained a large sum towards removing a debt of £3000 upon the society he belonged to. This was the work of six months; and in November he re-embarked for Jamaica, where he arrived in January following. He again visited England in the interests of his mission, and to promote the general welfare of the negroes. His last journey to this country was early in 1845, for objects similar in character to those which had so often brought him hither. He went back in July of that year, and resumed his labours, but on November 11th he caught cold after preaching; fever ensued, and on the 10th he died. It is said that eight thousand persons attended his funeral.—B. H. C.
KNIEP, Christoph Heinrich, German painter, was born at Hildesheim in 1748, and instructed by his father, a scene painter in the Hanover theatre. Young Kniep maintained himself for some time by painting portraits in various German cities, when he was sent to Rome by Count Krasinski. The death of his patron shortly after reduced him to poverty, and he went to Naples as assistant to Tischbein. By the latter he was introduced to Göthe, with whom he travelled in Sicily (1787), drawing spots which most interested the poet. Göthe, in his Italian Letters, makes frequent and very laudatory mention of his companion's skill and good-nature. Kniep now settled in Naples, his chief employment being that of making drawings in seppia of Neapolitan scenery, architecture, and antiquities. These drawings, which are at once faithful and beautiful, were in much request with visitors and collectors. Kniep also made drawings with the pen and in crayons, and painted some pictures; but being a feeble colourist, his paintings are inferior to his drawings. He was member and honorary professor in the academy of Naples. He died in that city, July 9, 1825.—J. T—e.
KNIGGE, Adolf Franz Friedrich Ludwig, Freiherr von, a distinguished German author, was born on his paternal estate of Bredenbeck, near Hanover, on the 16th October, 1752; and after a troublous life, died at Bremen on the 6th of May, 1796. He was an active member of the order of the Illuminati. Among his writings his "Über den Umgang mit Menschen," is still held in great esteem, as it abounds in shrewd observations and precepts of practical philosophy. Collected works in 12 vols., Hanover, 1804-6.—(See Gödeke, Adolf Freiherr v. Knigge; Hanover, 1849.)—K. E.
* KNIGHT, Charles, publisher, editor, and author, one of the founders of the cheap periodical press, was born at Windsor in 1791. His father was a bookseller and printer there, who had been the publisher of the Microcosm, the periodical started in 1786 by George Canning and his young friends, then schoolboys at Eton.—(See Frere, John Hookham.) Mr. Charles Knight was educated at Ealing, and at sixteen began to assist his father in the business. Four years later, having obtained meanwhile in London a practical acquaintance with newspaper management, he founded the Windsor and Eton Express, a newspaper which still lives, but Mr. Knight's editorship of which terminated in 1826. In 1820 he published the short-lived Etonian, Mackworth Praed and the poet Moultrie being among its contributors. In the same year he published, and in conjunction with Mr. Locker edited, the Plain Englishman, a cheap and instructive miscellany, the precursor of more famous enterprises of the same kind. The Plain Englishman ceased to exist in 1822, and in the following year Mr. Knight removed to London, and commencing business as a publisher in Pall Mall, started Knight's Quarterly Magazine, named after and edited by himself. Mr. Knight's own pen was busy in the new magazine, which he conducted genially until its death in 1824. Mackworth Praed and Derwent Coleridge were also among the contributors; but the chief glory of Knight's Quarterly Magazine was that in its pages appeared the young Thomas Babington Macaulay's early prose and verse, including the two spirited lyrical series of Songs of the Huguenots and Songs of the Civil War. In 1827 was founded the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, with which Mr. Knight immediately formed a connection fruitful of literacy results. In the year following the formation of the society he published for it the British Almanac, and more important, the Companion to the Almanac, an annual publication which he still edits, and which was and is full of useful general information on the legislative statistics, &c., of each year, not procurable elsewhere, and united to valuable original papers, all of an instructive kind. In 1831 he wrote and published, in opposition to the clamour against machinery and capitalists, a very popular and useful work, "The Results of Machinery," followed in 1831 by "The Rights of Industry, Capital, and Labour." In 1831, also, he began for the Useful Knowledge Society the publication of the Library of Entertaining Knowledge, to which he himself contributed two treatises on "Menageries" and on "the Elephant." In 1832 Mr. Knight founded the famous Penny Magazine, which he published at his own risk, and which, according to his own statement, soon reached a circulation of two hundred thousand, and retained one of twenty-five thousand when its existence terminated in 1846. A still greater enterprise was commenced by Mr. Knight on the 1st of January, 1833—the Penny Cyclopædia, in which at the price of a penny a number, the public was offered an encyclopædia at once popular, original, and exhaustive. Begun and continued entirely at Mr. Knight's own cost and risk, without any pecuniary assistance from the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the Penny Cyclopædia, with Supplement, was completed in 1846. In his little pamphlet, published some years afterwards, "The Struggle of a Book against Excessive Taxation," Mr. Knight stated that, in the case of the Penny Cyclopædia, the total cost of authorship and engraving had been no less than £42,000, and the excise duty for the paper used in it £16,500. He calculated that during the preceding twenty years of active publishing, he had spent on copyright
