654
KENT.
interests of the see^ having esta- blished a large hospital, an orphan- age, two magnificent convents, numerous schools and charitable institutions, and one of the most extensive and beautiful cemeteries in the United States. Besides the translations already referred to, and editions of devotional works, the Archbishop has published " The Holy House of Loretto; or, an Examination of the Historical Evi- dence of its Miraculous Transla- tion ; " and " Anglican Ordina- tions." Archbishop £enrick was present at the Vatican Council, and was reported to have maintained the inopportuneness of defining the dogma of Papal Infallibility. He, however, acquiesced in the definition, and published it, to- gether with the other decrees of the Council, in his diocese.
KENT, William Chablss Mark (better Imown as Chaslss Kint), poet and journalist, was born in London, Nov. 3, 1823, and educated at Prior Park and Oscott Colleges. His father, the late William Kent, R.N., who, in 1816, was a midship- man on board the Leander at the battle of Algiers, under Lord Exmouth, was the only son of Captain William Kent, R.N., the discoverer of Kent's Group, the Qxdf of St. Vincent, &g., as the earliest Government Surveyor of the Coast of New South Wales. Captain Kent died off Toulon in 1812, while in command of H.M.S. Union, 98 guns, one of the grandest line-of-battle ships then afloat, and which was at that time stationed up the Mediterranean. Mr. Charles Kent's mother (Ellen) was the only daughter of Judge Baggs, of Deme- rara, and sister of the late Bishop Baggs, Vicar Apostolic of the Western District of England and Cameriere d'Onore to His Holiness Pope Gregory XVI. At an early age Mr. Kent adopted literature as a profession, and was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1859. When he was nineteen he published
some thirty-six essays, sketches, and tales, in three series; among the stories being Napoleon's Slipper," Shakspere's Frolic on the Thames," "The Seagull of lona" (a tale of the escape of the Young Pretender, Prince Charles Edward), and " The Camel Driver's Turban," founded on an incident in the life of Mahomet. His first work, "Aletheia, or the Doom of Mythology," with other poems, was published in 1850, and in 1853 elicited a remarkable letter from M. de Lamartine, in which he expressed a wish that the poem addressed to himself might form ' his epitaph. " Dreamland, or j Poets in their Haunts," with other , poems, appeared in 1862, there being issued from the press at the same time, in a companion volume, a new edition of " Aletheia." His prose works include among them
- ' The Vision of Cagliostro, a Tale
of the Five Senses," repriiited in the first series of "Tales from Blackwood;" "The Derby Minis- try," a series of Cabinet pictures, under the nom de guerre of Mark Kochester, which upon the morrow of its appearance ran into a second edition ; " A Mythological Dic- tionary ; " a politico-religious trea- tise entitled "Catholicity in the Dark Ages," by an Osootian ; in 1864 "Footprints on the Road," included in the " Select Library of Popular Authors;" and in 1869 " The Gladstone Government," by a Templar, another series of Cabinet pictures, or sketches ai ccmtem- porary statesmen. His poem of welcome to "Longfellow in Eng- land," which appeared in the Times on July 3, 1868, with the initials C. K., went the round of the news- i papers on both sides of the Atlantic j It was to him that Charles Dickens addressed the last letter he ever wrote, appointing a meeting be- tween them for the next day almost at the very hour when the great novelist expired. A facsimile of it is given at the close of the
