110 K N I K N I
some accounts say 1726. He was buried in Twickenham church, and has a monument in Westminster Abbey. An elder brother, John Zachary Kneller, an ornamental painter, had accompanied Godfrey to England, and had died in 1702. The style of Kneller as a portrait painter repre sented the decline of the art as practised by Vandyck; Lely marks the first grade of descent, and Kneller the second. His works have much freedom, and are well drawn and coloured; but they are essentially slight in manner, and to a great extent monotonous, this arising partly from the habit which he had of lengthening the oval of all his heads. The colouring may be called brilliant rather than true. He indulged much in the commonplaces of allegory; and, though he had a quality of dignified elegance not unallied with simplicity, genuine simple nature is seldom to be traced in his works. His fame has greatly declined now, and could not but do so after the advent of Reynolds. Among Kneller's principal paintings are the Forty-three Celebrities of the Kit-Cat Club, and the Ten Beauties of the Court of William III., now at Hampton court; these were painted by order of the queen; they match, but match unequally, the Beauties of the Court of Charles II., painted by Lely. He executed altogether the likenesses of ten sovereigns. It is said that Kneller's own favourite performance was the portrait of the Converted Chinese in Windsor Castle. His works are confined almost entirely to England, not more than two or three specimens having gone abroad after he had settled there.
KNIGHT, Charles (1791-1873), publisher and author, was the son of a bookseller and printer at Windsor, where he was born 15th March 1791. After acquiring some knowledge of Latin and French at a common day school, he was sent at the age of twelve to the classical school of Dr Nicholas of Ealing. There, according to his own account, he imbibed such a tincture of learning as made him desirous to be a scholar; and it was very much in opposition to his wishes that in 1805 he was withdrawn from school to be bound apprentice to his father. In editing The Windsor and Eton Express, commenced by his father in 1812, some gratification was afforded to his literary ambition, and this received additional stimulus when he became the publisher of The Etonian, edited by Praed, with Macaulay, Moultrie, and Derwent and Nelson Coleridge as principal contributors. After editing The Guardian from 1820 to 1822, Knight was induced by the Etonians already mentioned, now undergraduates at Cambridge, to set up in business at Pall-Mall East, and to become for them editor of Knight's Quarterly Magazine. As far as the magazine was concerned the venture was unsuccessful, for it was brought to a close with its sixth number, but it initiated for Knight a literary career as publisher and author which extended over forty years, and the unselfish enterprise of which conferred lasting intellectual benefit on the general mass of his fellow countrymen. In 1827 Knight became the superintendent of the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, for whom he projected and edited The British Almanac and Companion, commenced in 1828. In 1829 he began the publication of The Library of Entertaining Knowledge, he himself writing several volumes of the series. 1832 and 1833 saw respectively the commencement of The Penny Magazine and The Penny Cyclopædia, two literary ventures which so far as circulation was concerned were highly satisfactory in their results, but the latter of which, on account of the heavy excise duty, was completed at a great pecuniary sacrifice. Besides a considerable number of illustrated editions of other standard works, Knight completed in 1842 The Pictorial Shakespeare, which, although now superseded in regard to critical scholarship, is still valued for the research and taste displayed in its illustrations. The Pictorial Shakespeare was followed by various other editions of the same author. The energy of Knight also found scope in the compilation of a variety of illustrated series, such as Old England and The Land We Live in. In 1853 he became editor of The English Cyclopædia, and conjointly with the multifarious duties of such an office he was also engaged in writing his Popular History of England, published in eight volumes, 1854-61. In 1864 he withdrew from the business of publisher, but he continued his active literary career nearly to the close of his long life, publishing The Shadows of the Old Booksellers (1865), an autobiography under the title Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century (3 vols., 1864-65), an historical novel Begg'd at Court (1868) and subsequently various papers in The British Almanac and Companion. He died at Addlestone, Surrey, March 9, 1873.
KNIGHTHOOD
KNIGHTHOOD and CHIVALRY are two words which are nearly but not quite synonymous; that is, they may often, although they cannot always, be used precisely in the same way and exactly in the same sense. What we mean by the order of knighthood is to all intents and pur poses what we mean by the order of chivalry. But in some of the more special applications of the several terms diversi ties in their respective significations manifest themselves. We could not, for example, say of anybody that he had received the honour of chivalry, or that he had lived in the age of knighthood. Again, we should speak of lands as held in chivalry not in knighthood, and of the rank or degree of knighthood not of chivalry. But taken together the two words knighthood and chivalry designate a single subject of inquiry, which presents itself under three dif ferent although connected and in a measure intermingled aspects. It may be regarded in the first place as a mode or variety of feudal tenure, in the second place as a personal attribute or dignity, and in the third place as a scheme of manners or social arrangements. It is under these three general aspects that the subject is to be dealt with here. For the more important religious as distinguished from the military orders of knighthood or chivalry the reader is
referred to the headings ST JOHN (KNIGHTS OF), TEUTONIC KNIGHTS, and TEMPLARS.
Our words knight and knighthood are merely the modern forms of the Anglo-Saxon or Old English cniht and cnihthád. Of these the primary signification of the first was a boy or youth, and of the second that period of life which intervenes between childhood and manhood. But some time before the middle of the 12th century they had acquired the meaning they still retain of the French chevalier and chevalerie. In a secondary sense cniht meant a servant or attendant answering to the German Knecht, and in the Anglo-Saxon Gospels a disciple is described as a leorning cniht. In a tertiary sense the word appears to have been occasionally employed as equivalent to the Latin miles – usually translated by thegn – which in the earlier Middle Ages was used as the designation of the domestic as well as of the martial officers or retainers of sovereigns and princes or great personages.[1] Sharon Turner suggests that cniht from meaning an attendant simply may have come to mean more especially a military attendant, and that in this sense it may have gradually superseded the word thegn.[2] But the word thegn
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