LOWNDES, THOMAS (1692-1748), founder of the Lowndean professorship of astronomy at Cambridge university, England, was born in 1692, both his father and mother being Cheshire landowners. In 1725 he was appointed provost marshal of South Carolina, a post he preferred to fill by deputy. In 1727 Lowndes claimed to have taken a prominent part in inducing the British government to purchase Carolina, but he surrendered his patent when the transfer of the colony to the crown was completed. His patent was renewed in 1730, but he resigned it in 1733. He then brought various impractical schemes before the government to check the illicit trade in wool between Ireland and France; to regulate the paper currency of New England; and to supply the navy with salt from brine, &c. He died on the 12th of May 1748. By his will he left his inherited Cheshire properties to the university of Cambridge for the foundation of a chair of astronomy and geometry.
LOWNDES, WILLIAM THOMAS (1798-1843), English bibliographer, was born about 1798, the son of a London bookseller. His principal work, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature—the first systematic work of the kind—was published in four volumes in 1834. It took Lowndes fourteen years to compile, but, despite its merits, brought him neither fame nor money. Lowndes, reduced to poverty, subsequently became cataloguer to Henry George Bohn, the bookseller and publisher. In 1839 he published the first parts of The British Librarian, designed to supplement his early manual, but owing to failing health did not complete the work. Lowndes died on the 31st of July 1843.
LOW SUNDAY, the first Sunday after Easter, so called because of its proximity to the “highest” of all feasts and Sundays, Easter. It was also known formerly as White Sunday, being still officially termed by the Roman Catholic Church Dominica in albis, “Sunday in white garments,” in allusion to the white garments anciently worn on this day by those who had been baptized and received into the Church just before Easter. Alb Sunday, Quasimodo and, in the Greek Church, Antipascha, and ἡ δευτεροπρώτη Κυριακή (literally “second-first Sunday,” i.e. the second Sunday after the first) were other names for the day.
LOWTH, ROBERT (1710-1787), English divine and Orientalist, was born at Winchester on the 27th of November 1710. He was the younger son of William Lowth (1661-1732), rector of Buriton, Hampshire, a theologian of considerable ability. Robert was educated on the foundation of Winchester College, and in 1729 was elected to a scholarship at New College, Oxford. He graduated M.A. in 1737, and in 1741 he was appointed professor of poetry at Oxford, in which capacity he delivered the Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum. Bishop Hoadly appointed him in 1744 to the rectory of Ovington, Hampshire, and in 1750 to the archdeaconry of Winchester. In 1753 he was collated to the rectory of East Woodhay, Hampshire, and in the same year he published his lectures on Hebrew poetry. In 1754 he received the degree of doctor of divinity from his university, and in 1755 he went to Ireland for a short time as first chaplain to the lord-lieutenant, the 4th duke of Devonshire. He declined a presentation to the see of Limerick, but accepted a prebendal stall at Durham and the rectory of Sedgefield. In 1758 he published his Life of William of Wykeham; this was followed in 1762 by A Short Introduction to English Grammar. In 1765, the year of his election into the Royal Societies of London and Göttingen, he engaged in controversy with William Warburton on the book of Job, in which he was held by Gibbon to have had the advantage. In June 1766 Lowth was consecrated bishop of St David’s, and about four months afterwards he was translated to Oxford, where he remained till 1777, when he became bishop of London and dean of the Chapel Royal. In 1778 appeared his last work, Isaiah, a new Translation, with a Preliminary Dissertation, and Notes, Critical, Philological, and Explanatory. He declined the archbishopric of Canterbury in 1783, and died at Fulham on the 3rd of November 1787.
The Praelectiones, translated in 1787 by G. Gregory as Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, exercised a great influence both in England and on the continent. Their chief importance lay in the idea of looking at the sacred poetry as poetry, and examining it by the ordinary standards of literary criticism. Lowth’s aesthetic criticism was that of the age, and is now in great part obsolete, a more natural method having been soon after introduced by Herder. The principal point in which Lowth’s influence has been lasting is his doctrine of poetic parallelism, and even here his somewhat mechanical classification of the forms of Hebrew sense-rhythm, as it should rather be called, is open to serious objections. Editions of the Lectures and of the Isaiah have been numerous, and both have been translated into German. A volume of Sermons and other Remains, with memoir by the topographer, Peter Hall (1802-1849), was published in 1834, and an edition of the Popular Works of Robert Lowth in 3 vols. appeared in 1843.
LOXODROME (from Gr. λοξός, oblique, and δρόμος, course), the line on the earth’s surface making a constant angle with the meridian.