1867. Lord Kingsdown never married, and his title became extinct.

See _Recollections of Life at the Bar and in Parliament_, by Lord Kingsdown (privately printed for friends, 1868); _The Times_ (8th of October 1867). KING'S EVIL, an old, but not yet obsolete, name given to the scrofula, which in the popular estimation was deemed capable of cure by the royal touch. The practice of "touching" for the scrofula, or "King's Evil," was confined amongst the nations of Europe to the two Royal Houses of England and France. As the monarchs of both these countries owned the exclusive right of being anointed with the pure chrism, and not with the ordinary sacred oil, it has been surmised that the common belief in the sanctity of the chrism was in some manner inseparably connected with faith in the healing powers of the royal touch. The kings both of France and England claimed a sole and special right to this supernatural gift: the house of France deducing its origin from Clovis (5th century) and that of England declaring Edward th e Confessor the first owner of this virtue. That the Saxon origin of the royal power of healing was the popular theory in England is evident from the striking and accurate description of the ceremony in _Macbeth_ (act vi. scene iii.). Nevertheless the practice of this rite cannot be traced back to an earlier date than the reign of Edward III. in England, and of St Louis (Louis IX.) in France; consequently, it is believed that the performance of healing by the touch emanated in the first instance from the French Crusader-King, whose miraculous powers were subsequently transmitted to his descendant and representative, Isabella of Valois, wife of Edward II. of England. In any case, Queen Isabella's son and heir, Edward III., claimant to the French throne through his mother, was the first English king to order a public display of an attribute that had hitherto been associated with the Valois kings alone. From his reign dates the use of the "touch-piece," a gold medal given to the sufferer as a kind of talisman, which was originally the angel coin, stamped with designs of St Michael and of a three-masted ship. The actual ceremony seems first to have consisted of the sovereign's personal act of washing the diseased flesh with water, but under Henry VII. the use of an ablution was omitted, and a regular office was drawn up for insertion in the Service Book. At the "Ceremonies for the Healing" the king now merely touched his afflicted subject in the presence of the court chaplain who offered up certain prayers and afterwards presented the touch-piece, pierced so that it might be suspended by a ribbon round the patient's neck. Henry VII.'s office was henceforth issued with variations from time to time under successive kings, nor did it disappear from certain editions of the Book of Common Prayer until the middle of the 18th century. The practice of the Royal Healing seems to have reached the height of its popularity during the reign of Charles II., who is stated on good authority to have touched over 100,000 strumous persons. So great a number of applicants becoming a nuisance to the Court, it was afterwards enacted that special certificates should in future be granted to individuals demanding the touch, and such certificates are occasionally to be found amongst old parish registers of the close of the 17th century. After the Revolution, William of Orange refused to touch, and referred all applicants to the exiled James II. at St Germain; but Queen Anne touched frequently, one of her patients being Dr Samuel Johnson in his infancy. The Hanoverian kings declined to touch, and there exists no further record of any ceremony of healing henceforward at the English court. The practice, however, was continued by the exiled Stuarts, and was constantly performed in Italy by James Stuart, "the Old Pretender," and by his two sons, Charles and Henry (Cardinal York). (H. M. V.) KINGSFORD, WILLIAM (1819-1898), British engineer and Canadian historian, was born in London on the 23rd of December 1819. He first studied architecture, but disliking the confinement of an office enlisted in the 1st Dragoon Guards, obtaining his discharge in Canada in 1841. After serving for a time in the office of the city surveyor of Montreal he made a survey for the Lachine canal (1846-1848), and was employed in the United States in the building of the Hudson River railroad in 1849, and in Panama on the railroad being constructed there in 1851. In 1853 he was surveyor and, afterwards district superintendent for the Grand Trunk railroad, remaining in the employment of that company until 1864. The following year he went to England but returned to Canada in 1867 in the hope of taking part in the construction of the Intercolonial Railway. In this he was unsuccessful, but from 1872 to 1879 he held a government post in charge of the harbours of the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence. He had previously written books on engineering and topographical subjects, and in 1880 he began to study the records of Canadian history at Ottawa. Among other books he published _Canadian Archaeology_ (1886) and _Early Bibliography of Ontario_ (1892). But the great work of his life was a _History of Canada_ in 10 volumes (1887-1897), ending with the union of Upper and Lower Canada in 1841. Kingsford died on the 28th of September 1898. KINGSLEY, CHARLES (1819-1875), English clergyman, poet and novelist, was born on the 12th of June 1819, at Holne vicarage, Dartmoor, Devon. His early years were spent at Barnack in the Fen country and at Clovelly in North Devon. The scenery of both made a great impression on his mind, and was afterwards described with singular vividness in his writings. He was educated at private schools and at King's College, London, after his father's promotion to the rectory of St Luke's, Chelsea. In 1838 he entered Magdalene College, Cambridge, and in 1842 he was ordained to the curacy of Eversley in Hampshire, to the rectory of which he was not long afterwards presented, and this, with short intervals, was his home for the remaining thirty-three years of his life. In 1844 he married Fanny, daughter of Pascoe Grenfell, and in 1848 he published his first volume, _The Saint's Tragedy_. In 1859 he became chaplain to Queen Victoria; in 1860 he was appointed to the professorship of modern history at Cambridge, which he resigned in 1869; and soon after he was appointed to a canonry at Chester. In 1873 this was exchanged for a canonry at Westminster. He died at Eversley on the 23rd of January 1875. With the exception of occasional changes of residence in England, generally for the sake of his wife's health, one or two short holiday trips abroad, a tour in the West Indies, and another in America to visit his eldest son settled there as an engineer, his life was spent in the peaceful, if active, occupations of a clergyman who did his duty earnestly, and of a vigorous and prolific writer. But in spite of this apparently uneventful life, he was for many years one of the most prominent men of his time, and by his personality and his books he exercised considerable influence on the thought of his generation. Though not profoundly learned, he was a man of wide and various information, whose interests and sympathies embraced many branches of human knowledge. He was an enthusiastic student in particular of natural history and geology. Sprung on the father's side from an old English race of country squires, and on his mother's side from a good West Indian family who had been slaveholders for generations, he had a keen love of sport and a genuine sympathy with country-folk, but he had at the same time something of the scorn for lower races to be found in the members of a dominant race. With the sympathetic organization which made him keenly sensible of the wants of the poor, he threw himself heartily into the movement known as Christian Socialism, of which Frederick Denison Maurice was the recognized leader, and for many years he was considered as an extreme radical in a profession the traditions of which were conservative. While in this phase he wrote his novels _Yeast_ and _Alton Locke_, in which, though he pointed out unsparingly the folly of extremes, he certainly sympathized not only with the poor, but with much that was done and said by the leaders in the Chartist movement. Yet even then he considered that the true leaders of the people were a peer and a dean, and there was no real inconsistency in the fact that at a later period he was among the most strenuous defenders of Governor Eyre in the measures adopted by him to put down the Jamaican disturbances. He looked rather to the extension of the co-operative principle and to sanitary reform for the amelioration of the condition of the people than to any radical political change. His politics might therefore have been described as Toryism tempered by sympathy, or as Radicalism tempered by hereditary scorn of subject races. He was bitterly opposed to what he considered to be the medievalism and narrowness of the Oxford Tractarian Movement. In _Macmillan's Magazine_ for January 1864 he asserted that truth for its own sake was not obligatory with the Roman Catholic clergy, quoting as his authority John Henry Newman (q.v.). In the ensuing controversy Kingsley was completely discomfited. He was a broad churchman, who held what would be called a liberal theology, but the Church, its organization, its creed, its dogma, had ever an increasing hold upon him. Although at one period he certainly shrank from reciting the Athanasian Creed in church, he was towards the close of his life found ready to join an association for the defence of this formulary. The more orthodox and conservative elements in his character gained the upper hand as time went on, but careful students of him and his writings will find a deep conservatism underlying the most radical utterances of his earlier years, while a passionate sympathy for the poor, the afflicted and the weak held possession of him till the last hour of his life. Both as a writer and in his personal intercourse with men, Kingsley was a thoroughly stimulating teacher. As with his own teacher, Maurice, his influence on other men rather consisted in inducing them to think for themselves than in leading them to adopt his own views, never, perhaps, very definite. But his healthy and stimulating influence was largely due to the fact that he interpreted the thoughts which were stirring in the minds of many of his contemporaries. As a preacher he was vivid, eager and earnest, equally plain-spoken and uncompromising when preaching to a fashionable congregation or to his own village poor. One of the very best of his writings is a sermon called _The Message of the Church to Working Men_; and the best of his published discourses are the _Twenty-five Village Sermons_ which he preached in the early years of his Eversley life. As a novelist his chief power lay in his descriptive faculties. The descriptions of South American scenery in _Westward Ho!_, of the Egyptian desert in _Hypatia_, of the North Devon scenery in _Two Years Ago_, are among the most brilliant pieces of word-painting in English prose-writing; and the American scenery is even more vividly and more truthfully described when he had seen it only by the eye of his imagination than in his work _At Last_, which was written after he had visited the tropics. His sympathy for children taught him how to secure their interests. His version of the old Greek stories entitled _The Heroes_, and _Water-babies_ and _Madam How and Lady Why_, in which he deals with popular natural history, take high rank among books for children. As a poet he wrote but little, but there are passages in _The Saint's Tragedy_ and many isolated lyrics, which are worthy of a place in all standard collections of English literature. _Andromeda_ is a very successful attempt at naturalizing the hexameter as a form of English verse, and reproduces with great skill the sonorous roll of the Greek original. In person Charles Kingsley was tall and spare, sinewy rather than powerful, and of a restless excitable temperament. His complexion was swarthy, his hair dark, and his eye bright and piercing. His temper was hot, kept under rigid control; his disposition tender, gentle and loving, with flashing scorn and indignation against all that was ignoble and impure; he was a good husband, father and friend. One of his daughters, Mary St Leger Kingsley (Mrs Harrison), has become well known as a novelist under the pseudonym of "Lucas Malet." Kingsley's life was written by his widow in 1877, entitled _Charles Kingsley, his Letters and Memories of his Life_, and presents a very touching and beautiful picture of her husband, but perhaps hardly does justice to his humour, his wit, his overflowing vitality and boyish fun. The following is a list of Kingsley's writings:--_Saint's Tragedy_, a drama (1848); _Alton Locke_, a novel (1849); _Yeast_, a novel (1849); _Twenty-five Village Sermons_ (1849); _Phaeton, or Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers_ (1852); _Sermons on National Subjects_ (1st series, 1852); _Hypatia_, a novel (1853); _Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore_ (1855); _Sermons on National Subjects_ (2nd series, 1854); _Alexandria and her Schools_ (1854); _Westward Ho!_ a novel (1855); _Sermons for the Times_ (1855); _The Heroes_, Greek fairy tales (1856); _Two Years Ago_, a novel (1857); _Andromeda and other Poems_ (1858); _The Good News of God_, sermons (1859); _Miscellanies_ (1859); _Limits of Exact Science applied to History_ (Inaugural Lectures, 1860); _Town and Country Sermons_ (1861); _Sermons on the Pentateuch_ (1863); _Water-babies_ (1863); _The Roman and the Teuton_ (1864); _David and other Sermons_ (1866); _Hereward the Wake_, a novel (1866); _The Ancient Regime_ (Lectures at the Royal Institution, 1867); _Water of Life and other Sermons_ (1867); _The Hermits_ (1869); _Madam How and Lady Why_ (1869); _At last_ (1871); _Town Geology_ (1872); _Discipline and other Sermons_ (1872); _Prose Idylls_ (1873); _Plays and Puritans_ (1873); _Health and Education_ (1874); _Westminster Sermons_ (1874); _Lectures delivered in America_ (1875). He was a large contributor to periodical literature; many of his essays are included in _Prose Idylls_ and other works in the above list. But no collection has been made of some of his more characteristic writings in the _Christian Socialist_ and _Politics for the People_, many of them signed by the pseudonym he then assumed, "Parson Lot." KINGSLEY, HENRY (1830-1876), English novelist, younger brother of Charles Kingsley, was born at Barnack, Northamptonshire, on the 2nd of January 1830. In 1853 he left Oxford, where he was an undergraduate at Worcester College, for the Australian goldfields. This venture, however, was not a success, and after five years he returned to England. He achieved considerable popularity with his _Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn_ (1859), a novel of Australian life. This was the first of a series of novels of which _Ravenshoe_ (1861) and _The Hillyars and The Burtons_ (1865) are the best known. These stories are characterized by much vigour, abundance of incident, and healthy sentiment. He edited for eighteen months the _Edinburgh Daily Review_, for which he had acted as war correspondent during the Franco-German War. He died at Cuckfield, Sussex, on the 24th of May 1876. KINGSLEY, MARY HENRIETTA (1862-1900), English traveller, ethnologist and author, daughter of George Henry Kingsley (1827-1892), was born in Islington, London, on the 13th of October 1862. Her father, though less widely known than his brothers, Charles and Henry (see above), was a man of versatile abilities, with a passion for travelling which he managed to indulge in combination with his practice as a doctor. He wrote one popular book of travel, _South Sea Bubbles, by the Earl and the Doctor_ (1872), in collaboration with the 13th earl of Pembroke. Mary Kingsley's reading in history, poetry and philosophy was wide if desultory, but she was most attracted to natural history. Her family moved to Cambridge in 1886, where she studied the science of sociology. The loss of both parents in 1892 left her free to pursue her own course, and she resolved to study native religion and law in West Africa with a view to completing a book which her father had left unfinished. With her study of "raw fetish" she combined that of a scientific collector of fresh-water fishes. She started for the West Coast in August 1893; and at Kabinda, at Old Calabar, Fernando Po and on the Lower Congo she pursued her investigations, returning to England in June 1894. She gained sufficient knowledge of the native customs to contribute an