[Reid, Sir George], a distinguished portrait-painter, born in Aberdeen; his portraits are true to the life, and are not surpassed by those of any other living artist; b. 1841.
[Reid, Right Hon. G. H.], Premier of Australia, born at Johnstone, Renfrewshire; emigrated with his parents in 1852; adopted law as his profession; became Minister of Education in 1883; became Premier of N.S.W. in 1894; is a great Free Trader, and visited England for the Jubilee in 1897; Prime Minister of the Australian Commonwealth, 1904; b. 1845.
[Reid, Captain Mayne], novelist, born in Co. Down; led a life of adventure in America, and served in the Mexican War, but settled afterwards in England to literary work, and wrote a succession of tales of adventure (1819-1883).
[Reid, Thomas], Scottish philosopher, and chief of the Scottish school, born in Kincardineshire, and bred for the Scotch Church, in which he held office as a clergyman for a time; was roused to philosophical speculation by the appearance in 1730 of David Hume's "Treatise on Human Nature," and became professor of Philosophy in Aberdeen in 1752, and in Glasgow in 1763, where the year after he published his "Inquiry into the Human Mind," which was followed in course of time by his "Philosophy of the Intellectual and Active Powers"; his philosophy was a protest against the scepticism of Hume, founded on the idealism of Berkeley, by appeal to the "common-sense" of mankind, which admits of nothing intermediate between the perceptions of the mind and the reality of things (1710-1796).
[Reid, Sir Wemyss], journalist and man of letters, born in Newcastle-on-Tyne; editor of the Leeds Mercury (1870-86), and of the Speaker since 1890; has written novels and biographies; is President of the Institute of Journalists, and was knighted in 1894; b. 1842.
[Reid, Sir William], soldier and scientist; served in the Royal Engineers with distinction under Wellington; became Governor successively of Bermudas, Barbadoes, and Malta, and was the author of a scientific work on "The Law of Storms" (1791-1858).
[Reigate] (23), a flourishing market-town in Surrey, 21 m. S. of London; is a busy railway centre; has interesting historic ruins; an old church, among others containing the grave of Lord Howard of Effingham.
[Reign of a Hundred Days], the period during which Napoleon reigned in Paris from his return from Elba in the beginning of March till he left on the 12th June 1815 to meet the Allies in the Netherlands.
[Reign of Terror], the name given to the bloody consummation of the fiery French Revolution, including a period which lasted 420 days, from the fall of the Girondists on the 31st May 1793 to the overthrow of Robespierre and his accomplices on 27th July 1794, the actors in which at length, seeing nothing but "Terror" ahead, had in their despair said to themselves, "Be it so. Que la Terreur soit à l'ordre du jour (having sown the wind, come let us reap the whirlwind). One of the frightfulest things ever born of Time. So many as four thousand guillotined, fusilladed, noyaded, done to dire death, of whom nine hundred were women."
[Reimarus], a philosopher of the [Aufklärung] (q. v.), born at Hamburg; author of the "Wolfenbüttel Fragments," published by Lessing in 1777, and written to disprove the arguments for the historical truth of the Bible, and in the interest of pure deism and natural religion (1694-1768).