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KENYON, LLOYD KENYON, LORD (1732-1802), an English lawyer and lord chief-justice of England, was de scended by his father's side from an old Lancashire family, and his mother was the daughter of a small proprietor in Wales. He was born at Gredington, Flintshire, 5th October 1732. After studying five years at Ruthin gram mar school, he was in his fifteenth year articled to an attorney at Nantwich, Cheshire. In 1750 he was entered a student of Lincoln's Inn, London, and in 1756 was called to the bar. As for several years he was left almost un employed, he utilized his leisure in taking notes of the cases argued in the court of Queen's Bench, which he after wards published. Through answering the cases of his friend John Dunning, afterwards Lord Ashburton, he gradually became known to the attorneys, after which his success was so rapid that in 1780 he was made king's counsel, his promotion being assisted to some extent through his friendship with Thurlow. He manifested conspicuous ability in the cross-examination of the witnesses at the trial of Lord George Gordon, but his speech was so deficient in tact that the verdict of acquittal was solely due to the extraordinary and brilliant effort of Erskine, the junior counsel. Through the influence of Lord Thurlow, Kenyon in September 1780 entered the House of Commons as member for Hindoo, and in April 1782 he was, through the same friendship, appointed attorney-general in Lord Buckingham's administration, an office which he also con tinued to hold under Pitt. In 1784 he received the master ship of the rolls, and was created a baronet. His position at the bar had been achieved chiefly by hard work, a good knowledge of law, and several lucky friendships. As an advocate he was not only deficient in manner and in ability of statement, but frequently made striking blunders from want of tact. As his rough and irritable temper had also gained him several enemies, his elevation in 1788 to the lord chief-justiceship as successor to Lord Mansfield was by no means popular with the bar. The same year he was raised to the peerage as Baron Kenyon of Gredington. On the bench he not unfrequently displayed a capricious and choleric temper towards both the pleaders and his brother judges. Still he proved himself, not only an able lawyer, but a judge of rare and inflexible impartiality. The de cisions of no other judge in the court of Queen's Bench have been more seldom overruled, but, as they were accom panied with only a very imperfect and short statement of his reasons, his judgments are of little value as expositions of the principles of law. He died at Bath, 4th April 1802. See Life by Hon. G. T. Kenyon, 1873.
KEOKUK, chief city of Lee county, Iowa, U.S., occupies a lofty site on the west bank of the Mississippi, 2 miles above the mouth of the Des Moines tributary, and about 200 miles above St Louis. It is situated in the extreme south-east corner of the State (whence its name "gate city"); its streets are spacious, and its houses handsome, although mostly of brick. Keokuk contains several churches, a medical college (founded in 1849), a good system of public schools, and a public library. Pork-packing, iron-founding, and smaller industries are carried on. The city is at the junction of seven railways, which, with its advantages of water communication, bring it an important trade. A canal, 9 miles in length, round the lower rapids of the Mississippi, which formerly obstructed the navigation, has been constructed by the United States Government at a cost of $8,000,000. Keokuk has been a port of entry since 1854. Population in 1880, 12,117.
KEPLER, John (1571-1630), one of the founders of modern astronomy, was born, December 27, 1571, at Weil, in the duchy of Würtemberg, of which town his grandfather was burgomaster. He was the eldest child of an ill-assorted and ill-starred union. His father, Henry Kepler, was a reckless soldier of fortune; his mother, Catherine Guldenmann, the daughter of a small proprietor of Leonberg, had a violent temper, unmitigated by even the rudiments of culture. Under these circumstances her husband found campaigning in Flanders under Alva a welcome relief from domestic life; and, after having lost his fortune by a forfeited security and tried without success the trade of tavern-keeping in the village of Elmendingen, he finally, in 1589, severed an irksome tie by the desertion of his family. The misfortune and misconduct of his parents were not the only troubles of young Kepler's childhood. He recovered from small-pox in his fourth year with crippled hands and eyesight permanently impaired; and a constitution enfeebled by premature birth had to withstand successive shocks of severe illness. His schooling began at Leonberg in 1577 – the year, as he himself tells us, of a great comet; domestic bankruptcy, however, occasioned his transference to field-work, in which he was exclusively employed for several years. Bodily infirmity, combined with mental aptitude, were eventually considered to indicate a theological vocation; he was accordingly, in 1584, placed at the seminary of Adelberg, and thence removed, two years later, to that of Maulbronn. A brilliant examination for the degree of bachelor procured him, in 1588, admittance on the foundation to the university of Tübingen, where he laid up a copious store of classical erudition, and imbibed Copernican principles from the private instructions of his teacher and life-long friend, Michael Maestlin. As yet, however, he had little knowledge of, and less inclination for, astronomy; and it was with extreme reluctance that he turned aside from the more promising career of the ministry to accept, early in 1594, the vacant chair of that science at Gratz, placed at the disposal of the Tübingen professors by the Lutheran states of Styria.
The best-recognized function of German astronomers in that day was the construction of prophesying almanacs, greedily bought by a credulous public, and quickly belied by the future they pretended to disclose. Kepler thus found that the first duties required of him were of an astrological nature, and set himself with characteristic alacrity to master the rules of the art as laid down by Ptolemy and Cardan. He, moreover, sought in the events of his own life a verification of the theory of planetary influences; and it is to this practice that we owe the summary record of each year's occurrences which, continued almost to his death, affords for his biography a slight but sure foundation. His thoughts, however, were already working in a higher sphere. He early attained to the settled conviction that for the actual disposition of the solar system some abstract intelligible reason must exist, and this, after much meditation, he believed himself to have found in an imaginary relation between the "five regular solids" and the number and distances of the planets. He notes with exultation July 9, 1595, as the date of the pseudo-discovery, the publication of which in Prodromus Dissertationum Cosmographicarum seu Mysterium Cosmographicum (Tübingen, 1596) procured him much fame, and a friendly correspondence with the two most eminent astronomers of the time, Tycho Brahe and Galileo.
Soon after his arrival at Gratz, Kepler contracted an engagement with Barbara von Mühleck, a wealthy Styrian heiress, who, at the age of twenty-three, had already survived one husband and been divorced from another. Before her relatives could be brought to countenance his pretensions, Kepler was obliged to undertake a journey to Würtemberg to obtain documentary evidence of the somewhat obscure nobility of his family, and it was thus not until April 27, 1597, that the marriage was celebrated. In the following year the archduke Ferdinand, on assuming the government of his hereditary dominions, issued an edict
