KINGLAKE, ALEXANDER WILLIAM (1800-1891), English historian and traveller, was born at Taunton on the 5th of August 1809. His father, a successful solicitor, intended his son for a legal career. Kinglake went to Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1828, being a contemporary and friend of Tennyson and Thackeray. After leaving Cambridge he joined Lincoln’s Inn, and was called to the bar in 1837. While still a student he travelled, in 1835, throughout the East, and the impression made upon him by his experiences was so powerful that he was seized with a desire to record them in literature. Eothen, a sensitive and witty record of impressions keenly felt and remembered, was published in 1844, and enjoyed considerable reputation. In 1854 he went to the Crimea, and was present at the battle of the Alma. During the campaign he made the acquaintance of Lord Raglan, who was so much attracted by his talents that he suggested to Kinglake the plan for an elaborate History of the Crimean War, and placed his private papers at the writer’s disposal. For the rest of his life Kinglake was engaged upon the task of completing this monumental history. Thirty-two years elapsed between its commencement and the publication of the last volume, and eight volumes in all appeared at intervals between 1863 and 1887. Kinglake lived principally in London, and sat in parliament for Bridgwater from 1857 until the disfranchisement of the borough in 1868. He died on the 2nd of January 1891. Kinglake’s life-work, The History of the Crimean War, is in scheme and execution too minute and conscientious to be altogether in proportion, but it is a wonderful example of painstaking and talented industry. It is not without errors of partisanship, but it shows remarkable skill in the moulding of vast masses of despatches and technical details into an absorbingly interesting narrative; it is illumined by natural descriptions and character-sketches of great fidelity and acumen; and, despite its length, it remains one of the most picturesque, most vivid and most actual pieces of historical narrative in the English language.
KINGLET, a name applied in many books to the bird called by Linnaeus Motacilla regulus, and by most modern ornithologists Regulus cristatus, the golden-crested or golden-crowned wren of ordinary persons. This species is the type of a small group which has been generally placed among the Sylviidae or true warblers, but by certain systematists it is referred to the titmouse family, Paridae. That the kinglets possess many of the habits and actions of the latter is undeniable, but on the other hand they are not known to differ in any important points of organization or appearance from the former—the chief distinction being that the nostril is covered by a single bristly feather directed forwards. The golden-crested wren is the smallest of British birds, its whole length being about 3½ in., and its wing measuring only 2 in. from the carpal joint. Generally of an olive-green colour, the top of its head is bright yellow, deepening into orange, and bounded on either side by a black line, while the wing coverts are dull black, and some of them tipped with white, forming a somewhat conspicuous bar. The cock has a pleasant but weak song. The nest is a beautiful object, thickly felted of the softest moss, wool, and spiders’ webs, lined with feathers, and usually built under and near the end of the branch of a yew, fir or cedar, supported by the interweaving of two or three laterally diverging and pendent twigs, and sheltered by the rest. The eggs are from six to ten in number, of a dull white sometimes finely freckled with reddish-brown. The species is particularly social, living for the most part of the year in family parties, and often joining bands of any species of titmouse in a common search for food. Though to be met with in Britain at all seasons, the bird in autumn visits the east coast in enormous flocks, apparently emigrants from Scandinavia, while hundreds perish in crossing the North Sea, where they are well known to the fishermen as “woodcock’s pilots.” A second and more local European species is the fire-crested wren, R. ignicapillus, easily recognizable by the black streak on each side of the head, before and behind the eye, as well as by the deeper colour of its crown. A third species, R. maderensis, inhabits the Madeiras, to which it is peculiar; and examples from the Himalayas and Japan have been differentiated as R. himalayensis and R. japonicus. North America has two well-known species, R. satrapa, very like the European R. ignicapillus, and the ruby-crowned wren, R. calendula, which is remarkable for a loud song that has been compared to that of a canary-bird or a skylark, and for having the characteristic nasal feather in a rudimentary or aborted condition.
(A. N.)
KINGS, FIRST AND SECOND BOOKS OF, two books of the Bible, the last of the series of Old Testament histories known as the Earlier or Former Prophets. They were originally reckoned as a single book (Josephus; Origen ap. Eus., H.E. vi. 25; Peshitta; Talmud), though modern Bibles follow the bipartition which is derived from the Septuagint. In that version they are called the third and fourth books of “kingdoms” (βασιλειῶν), the first and second being our books of Samuel. The division into two books is not felicitous, and even the old Hebrew separation between Kings and Samuel must not be taken to mean that the history from the birth of Samuel to the exile was treated by two distinct authors in independent volumes. We cannot speak of the author of Kings or Samuel, but only of an editor or of successive editors whose main work was to arrange in a continuous form extracts or abstracts from earlier sources. The introduction of a chronological scheme and of a series of editorial comments and additions, chiefly designed to enforce the religious meaning of the history, gives a kind of unity to the book of Kings as we now read it; but beneath this we can still distinguish a variety of documents, which, though sometimes mutilated in the process of piecing together, retain sufficient individuality of style and colour to prove their original independence.
Of these documents one of the best defined is the vivid picture of David’s court at Jerusalem (2 Sam. ix.-xx.) from which the first two chapters of 1 Kings manifestly cannot be separated. As it would be unreasonable to suppose that the editor of the history of David closed his work abruptly before the death of the king, breaking off in the middle of a valuable memoir which lay before him, this observation leads us to conclude that the books of Samuel and Kings are not independent histories. They have at least one source in common, and a single editorial hand was at work on both. From an historical point of view, however, the division which makes the beginning of Solomon’s reign the beginning of a new book is very convenient. The conquest of Palestine by the Israelite tribes, recounted in the book of Joshua, leads up to the era of the “judges” (Judg. ii. 6-23; iii. sqq.), and the books of Samuel follow with the institution of the monarchy and the first kings. The books of Kings bring to a close the life of David (c. 975 B.C.), which forms the introduction to the reign of Solomon (1 Kings ii. 12-xi.), the troubles in whose time prepared the way for the separation into the two distinct kingdoms, viz. Judah and the northern tribes of Israel (xii. sqq.). After the fall of Samaria, the history of these Israelites is rounded off with a review (2 Kings xvii.-xviii. 12). The history of the surviving kingdom of Judah is then carried down to the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile (5 and 6), and, after an account of the Chaldean governorship, concludes with the release of the captive king Jehoiachin (561 B.C.) and with an allusion to his kind treatment during the rest of his lifetime.
The most noticeable feature in the book is the recurring interest in the centralization of worship in the Temple at Jerusalem as prescribed in Deuteronomy and enforced by Josiah. Amidst the great variety in style and manner which marks the several parts of the history, features which are imbued with the teaching of Deuteronomy recur regularly in similar stereotyped forms. They point in fact to a specific redaction, and thus it would seem that the editor who treated the foundation of the Temple, the central event of Solomon’s life, as a religious epoch of the first importance, regarded this as the beginning of a new era—the history of Israel under the one sanctuary.
When we assume that the book of Kings was thrown into its present form by a Deuteronomistic redactor we do not affirm that he was the first who digested the sources of the history into a continuous work, nor must we ascribe Successive Redactions. absolute finality to his work. He gave the book a definite shape and character, but the recognized methods of Hebrew literature left it open to additions and modifications by later hands. Even the redaction in the spirit of Deuteronomy seems itself to have had more than one stage, as Ewald long ago recognized.