Shakespeare’s Works. Besides editions of English classics his works include a Life of Queen Victoria (1902), Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century (1904), based on his Lowell Institute lectures at Boston, Mass., in 1903, and Shakespeare and the Modern Stage (1906).
LEE, SOPHIA (1750–1824), English novelist and dramatist, daughter of John Lee (d. 1781), actor and theatrical manager, was born in London. Her first piece, The Chapter of Accidents, a one-act-opera based on Diderot’s Père de famille, was produced by George Colman at the Haymarket Theatre on the 5th of August 1780. The proceeds were spent in establishing a school at Bath, where Miss Lee made a home for her sisters. Her subsequent productions included The Recess, or a Tale of other Times (1785), a historical romance; and Almeyda, Queen of Grenada (1796), a tragedy in blank verse; she also contributed to her sister’s Canterbury Tales (1797). She died at her house near Clifton on the 13th of March 1824.
Her sister, Harriet Lee (1757–1851), published in 1786 a novel written in letters, The Errors of Innocence. Clara Lennox followed in 1797. Her chief work is the Canterbury Tales (1797–1805), a series of twelve stories which became very popular. Lord Byron dramatized one of the tales, “Kruitzner,” as Werner, or the Inheritance. She died at Clifton on the 1st of August 1851.
LEE, STEPHEN DILL (1833–1908), Confederate general in the American Civil War, came of a family distinguished in the history of South Carolina, and was born at Charleston, S.C., on the 22nd of September 1833. Graduating from West Point in 1854, he served for seven years in the United States army and resigned in 1861 on the secession of South Carolina. He was aide de camp to General Beauregard in the attack on Fort Sumter, and captain commanding a light battery in General Johnston’s army later in the year 1861. Thereafter, by successive steps, each gained by distinguished conduct on the field of battle, he rose to the rank of brigadier-general in November 1862, being ordered to take command of defences at Vicksburg. He served at this place with great credit until its surrender to General Grant in July 1863, and on becoming a prisoner of war, he was immediately exchanged and promoted major-general. His regimental service had been chiefly with artillery, but he had generally worked with and at times commanded cavalry, and he was now assigned to command the troops of that arm in the south-western theatre of war. After harassing, as far as his limited numbers permitted, the advance of Sherman’s column on Meridian, he took General Polk’s place as commander of the department of Mississippi. In June 1864, on Hood’s promotion to command the Army of Tennessee, S. D. Lee was made a lieutenant-general and assigned to command Hood’s old corps in that army. He fought at Atlanta and Jonesboro and in the skirmishing and manœuvring along middle Tennessee which ended in the great crisis of Nashville and the “March to the Sea.” Lee’s corps accompanied Hood in the bold advance to Nashville, and fought in the battles of Franklin and Nashville, after which, in the rout of the Confederate army Lee kept his troops closed up and well in hand, and for three consecutive days formed the fighting rearguard of the otherwise disintegrated army. Lee was himself wounded, but did not give up the command until an organized rearguard took over the post of danger. On recovery he joined General J. E. Johnston in North Carolina, and he surrendered with Johnston in April 1865. After the war he settled in Mississippi, which was his wife’s state and during the greater part of the war his own territorial command, and devoted himself to planting. He was president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Mississippi from 1880 to 1899, took some part in state politics and was an active member—at the time of his death commander-in-chief—of the “United Confederate Veterans” society. He died at Vicksburg on the 28th of May 1908.
LEE, a township of Berkshire county, in western Massachusetts, U.S.A. Pop. (1900) 3596; (1905) 3972; (1910) 4106. The township is traversed by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railway, covers an area of 2212 sq. m., and includes the village of Lee, 10 m. S. of Pittsfield, East Lee, adjoining it on the S.E., and South Lee, about 3 m. to the S.W. Lee and South Lee are on, and East Lee is near, the Housatonic river. The eastern part of the township is generally hilly, reaching a maximum altitude of about 2200 ft., and there are two considerable bodies of water—Laurel Lake in the N.W. (partly in Lenox) and Goose Pond, in the S.E. (partly in Tyringham). The region is healthy as well as beautiful, and is much frequented as a summer resort. Memorial Hall was built in memory of the soldiers from Lee who died during the Civil War. The chief manufactures are paper and wire, and from the quarries near the village of Lee is obtained an excellent quality of marble; these quarries furnished the marble for the extension of the Capitol at Washington, for St Patrick’s cathedral in New York City and for the Lee High School and the Lee Public Library (1908). Lime is quarried in the township. Lee was formerly a paper-manufacturing place of great importance. The first paper mill in the township was built in South Lee in 1806, and for a time more paper was made in Lee than in any other place in the United States; the Housatonic Mill in Lee was probably the first (1867) in the United States to manufacture paper from wood pulp.
The first settlement within the present township of Lee was made in 1760. The township was formed from parts of Great Barrington and Washington, was incorporated in 1777 and was named in honour of General Charles Lee (1731–1782). In the autumn of 1786 there was an encounter near the village of East Lee between about 250 adherents of Daniel Shays (many of them from Lee township) and a body of state troops under General John Paterson, wherein the Shays contingent paraded a bogus cannon (made of a yarn beam) with such effect that the state troops fled.
See Amory Gale, History of the Town of Lee (Lee, 1854), and Lee, The Centennial Celebration and Centennial History of the Town of Lee (Springfield, Mass., 1878), compiled by Charles M. Hyde and Alexander Hyde.
LEE. (1) (In O. Eng. hléo; cf. the pronunciation lew-ward of “leeward”; the word appears in several Teutonic languages; cf. Dutch lij, Dan. lae), properly a shelter or protection, chiefly used as a nautical term for that side of a ship, land, &c., which is farthest from the wind, hence a “lee shore,” land under the lee of a ship, i.e. one on which the wind blows directly and which is unsheltered. A ship is said to make “leeway” when she drifts laterally away from her course. (2) A word now always used in the plural “lees,” meaning dregs, sediment, particularly of wine. It comes through the O. Fr. lie from a Gaulish Lat. lia, and is probably of Celtic origin.
LEECH, JOHN (1817–1864), English caricaturist, was born in London on the 29th of August 1817. His father, a native of Ireland, was the landlord of the London Coffee House on Ludgate Hill, “a man,” on the testimony of those who knew him, “of fine culture, a profound Shakespearian, and a thorough gentleman.” His mother was descended from the family of the famous Richard Bentley. It was from his father that Leech inherited his skill with the pencil, which he began to use at a very early age. When he was only three, he was discovered by Flaxman, who had called on his parents, seated on his mother’s knee, drawing with much gravity. The sculptor pronounced his sketch to be wonderful, adding, “Do not let him be cramped with lessons in drawing; let his genius follow its own bent; he will astonish the world”—an advice which was strictly followed. A mail-coach, done when he was six years old, is already full of surprising vigour and variety in its galloping horses. Leech was educated at Charterhouse, where Thackeray, his lifelong friend, was his schoolfellow, and at sixteen he began to study for the medical profession at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where he won praise for the accuracy and beauty of his anatomical drawings. He was then placed under a Mr Whittle, an eccentric practitioner, the original of “Rawkins” in Albert Smith’s Adventures of Mr Ledbury, and afterwards under Dr John Cockle; but gradually the true bent of the youth’s mind asserted itself, and he drifted into the artistic profession. He was eighteen when his first designs were published, a quarto of four pages, entitled Etchings and Sketchings by A. Pen, Esq., comic character
