KING, CLARENCE (1842-1901), American geologist, was born at Newport, Rhode Island, U.S.A., on the 6th of January 1842. He graduated at Yale in 1862. His most important work was the geological exploration of the fortieth parallel, of which the main reports (1876 and 1877) comprised the geological and topographical atlas of the Rocky Mountains, the Green River and Utah basins, and the Nevada plateau and basin. When the United States Geological Survey was consolidated in 1879 King was chosen director, and he vigorously conducted investigations in Colorado, and in the Eureka district and on the Comstock lode in Nevada. He held office for a year only; in later years his only noteworthy contribution to geology was an essay on the age of the earth, which appeared in the annual report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1893. He died at Phoenix, Arizona, on the 24th of December 1901.
KING, EDWARD (1612-1637), the subject of Milton’s Lycidas, was born in Ireland in 1612, the son of Sir John King, a member of a Yorkshire family which had migrated to Ireland. Edward King was admitted a pensioner of Christ’s College, Cambridge, on the 9th of June 1626, and four years later was elected a fellow. Milton, though two years his senior and himself anxious to secure a fellowship, remained throughout on terms of the closest friendship with his rival, whose amiable character seems to have endeared him to the whole college. King served from 1633 to 1634 as praelector and tutor of his college, and was to have entered the church. His career, however, was cut short by the tragedy which inspired Milton’s verse. In 1637 he set out for Ireland to visit his family, but on the 10th of August the ship in which he was sailing struck on a rock near the Welsh coast, and King was drowned. Of his own writings many Latin poems contributed to different collections of Cambridge verse survive, but they are not of sufficient merit to explain the esteem in which he was held.
A collection of Latin, Greek and English verse written in his memory by his Cambridge friends was printed at Cambridge in 1638, with the title Justa Edouardo King naufrago ab amicis moerentibus amoris et μνείας χάριν. The second part of this collection has a separate title-page, Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr Edward King, Anno Dom. 1638, and contains thirteen English poems, of which Lycidas[1] (signed J. M.) is the last.
[1] J. W. Hales, in the Athenaeum for the 1st of August 1891, suggests that in writing King’s elegy Milton had in his mind, besides the idylls of Theocritus, a Latin eclogue of Giovanni Baptista Amalteo entitled Lycidas, in which Lycidas bids farewell to the land he loves and prays for gentle breezes on his voyage. He was familiar with the Italian Latin poets of the Renaissance, and he may also have been influenced in his choice of the name by the shepherd Lycidas in Sannazaro’s eclogue Phillis.
KING, EDWARD (1829-1910), English bishop, was the second son of the Rev. Walter King, archdeacon of Rochester and rector of Stone, Kent. Graduating from Oriel College, Oxford, he was ordained in 1854, and four years later became chaplain and lecturer at Cuddesdon Theological College. He was principal at Cuddesdon from 1863 to 1873, when he became regius professor of pastoral theology at Oxford and canon of Christ Church. To the world outside he was only known at this time as one of Dr Pusey’s most intimate friends and as a leading member of the English Church Union. But in Oxford, and especially among the younger men, he exercised an exceptional influence, due, not to special profundity of intellect, but to his remarkable charm in personal intercourse, and his abounding sincerity and goodness. In 1885 Dr King was made bishop of Lincoln. The most eventful episode of his episcopate was his prosecution (1888-1890) for ritualistic practices before the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Benson, and, on appeal, before the judicial committee of the Privy Council (see [Lincoln Judgment]). Dr King, who loyally conformed his practices to the archbishop’s judgment, devoted himself unsparingly to the work of his diocese; and, irrespective of his High Church views, he won the affection and reverence of all classes by his real saintliness of character. The bishop, who never married, died at Lincoln on the 8th of March 1910.
See the obituary notice in The Times, March 9, 1910.