204 KNIGHTS ERRANT..KNIGHTS TEMPLARS. manded, whether he was a knight? Renaud, replied, that he had not yet attained that honor. "Then I make you one," answered Suffolk; giving him the blow with his sword, which dubbed him into that fraternity; and immediately surrendering himself his prisoner.... Stuart. KNIGHTS ERRANT, a class of knights who were continually travelling from place to place, for the purpose of relieving oppressed innocence. Some centuries ago, when the nobility in Europe lived in fortified castles, and were continually making war upon one another; when the public roads were infested with robbers and assassins; when wives and damsels, especially the most beautiful, were frequently carried off by force, and confined in some fortified castle : in those times of horrible anarchy, the ardor of redressing wrongs seized many knights so powerfully, that, attended by esquires, they wandered about in search of objects whose misfortunes and misery required their assistance and succor. And as ladies engaged more particularly their attention, the relief of unfortunate damsels was the achievement they most courted. This was the rise of the knights errant, or wandering knights; whose adventures produced those extravagant Romances, which Cervantes ridiculed in his inimitable Don Quixotte.Thousands of years before this the Grecians witnessed a sort of knight errantry. Perseus, Hercules, and Theseus, were in reality knights errant in ancient Greece, about thirteen or fourteen hundred years before our Saviour's nativity. There was then no travelling with safety from one district to another, or even from place to place, within any particular district. Every deep cave was the den of some savage plunderer, who obstructed social intercourse, and preyed without remorse upon the surrounding country. And then it was that the heroes aforenamed, stood forth as the champions of oppressed innocence and violated beauty; which procured their deification among their idolatrous country men. KNIGHTS TEMPLARS, a religious and military order of knight-hood, which took its rise during the fervor of the crusades. The first knights templars, by KNOUT....KORIACS. 205 their zeal and valor against the infidels, had made rapid advances in credit, authority and wealth; and their oppulent successors, scorning the occupations of a monastic life, passed their time wholly in the fashionable amusements of hunting, gallantry, and the pleasures of the table. The mal-administration of Philip IV, of France, occasioned a sedition in Paris; and the knights templars were accused of being concerned in the tumult. Philip, who was equally avaricious and vindictive, determined to involve the whole order in one undistinguished ruin. He ordered all the templars in France to be committed to prison, on one day, charging them with murder, robbery, and the vices most shocking to nature. Many of them perished on the rack; many others were burnt alive; all their treasures were confiscated, and the order was abolished by Philip, in the year 1311.... Russell. KNOUT, a horribly cruel kind of punishment common in Russia. In what is called the double knout, the hands are bound behind the prisoner's back, and the cord being fixed to a pully, lifts him from the ground, with the dislocation of both his shoulders; and then his back is in a manner scarified by the executioner, with a hard thong, cut from a wild ass's skin. In the single knout, the prisoner is stripped naked to the waist, with the whole back quite exposed to the strokes of the executioner; who, with a long strap of leather prepared for the purpose, gives a stroke in such a manner as to carry away a strip of skin from the neck to the bottom of the back. Then taking aim again with great exactness, he applies a second blow parallel to the former; and thus proceeds till all the skin of the back is cut away. By the order of the late empress Elizabeth, this punishment was inflicted on Madame Lapouchin, a court lady of exquisite beauty and sweetness of manners, for an alledged concern in a conspiracy. Her tongue was cut out immediately after the punishment of the knout was inflicted; and she was banished to Siberia....Morse, L'Abbe, Chappe. KORIACS, an Asiatic nation on the borders of Kamptskatka, tributary to the Russian empire. According to T 206 KOWRY SHELLS....KRAKEN. : Walker's account they were formerly very numerous; but have greatly diminished by the small-pox, and by frequent contests with their neighbors. Some of them have a fixed residence; others are wanderers: their regular occupation is hunting and fishing. They live on dried fish, and the flesh and fat of the whale and sea wolf, together with that of the rein-deer, which is their favorite dish they greedily devour raw flesh. Their characteristic features are sunken eyes, flat noses, and prominent cheeks. The men are almost entirely beardless: the women carry their children in a basket arched over, in which the infant is placed in a sitting posture, and sheltered from the weather. They have an unconquerable thirst for strong liquors, and are generally addicted to drunkenness. Two remarks are here obvious: the first is, that these people remarkably resemble the native savages of America; and the second, that the continents of Asia and America, in the neighborhood of the Koriacs, approach so near together, that the passage from one to the other is easy, in summer by small boats or canoes, and in winter on the ice. KOWRY SHELLS, a species of shell-money, so exceedingly small in value, that, in Bengal, about two thousand and four hundred of them are equal to a shil. ling; and yet notwithstanding the exceeding smallness of the denomination, some article in the market may be purchased for a single Kowry.... Rennel. KRAKEN, a monster of incredible magnitude, in the Norwegian sea: he is represented as appearing in size like a small island, and as rising and sinking in the water very slowly. When the fishermen find a more than usual plenty of cod, and the water to be shoaler than could have been expected, they judge that the kraken is at the bottom; and if they find by their lines that the water still shallows on them, they know that he is rising to the surface, and row off with the greatest speed till they come into the usual soundings of the place; when lying on their oars, in a few minutes the monster emerges in a short time he sinks, causing such a swell or whirlpool, as draws every thing down with it. He is said to feed on cod, and other fish, which constantly sur KURBULO....LAMA. 207 round him in great abundance, being attracted by his excrements. The real existence of an animal so vastly disproportionate in bulk to all others, seems incredible : yet its existence is confidently affirmed by bishop Pontoppidam, in his Natural History of Norway. Milton must have meant the kraken, in the following lines in his Paradise Lost. “ Him haply slumbering on the Norway foam "Moors by his side under the lee, while night KURBULO, a bird of the size of the sparrow, variously coloured. It inhabits the banks of the river Senegal, in Africa; and makes its nest on a fluviatic tree, the leaves of which are thorny, and the branches pendant in form of an arch. The bill of these little birds is very long, and armed with teeth resembling a saw. They build a nest, of the bulk of a pear, composed of earth, feathers, straw, and moss; and attach it to a long thread, suspended from the extremity of the branches which project over the river, in order to secure it from the serpents and monkeys, which sometimes contrive to clamber up after them. Some of these trees contain to the number of a thousand nests....St. Pierre. L. LAMA, an animal of Peru and Chili, resembling the camel. Like the camel they have the faculty of abstaining from water, and like that animal their food is coarse and scanty. They travel, though slowly, long journies in countries impassible to most other animals, and are much employed in transporting the rich ores, dug out of the mines of Potosi, over the rugged hills and narrow paths of the Andes. They lie down to be` 208 LAMAS....LAND SLIPS. loaded, and, when weary, no blows can excite them to quicken their pace. They neither defend themselves with their feet nor teeth: when angry, they have no other method of avenging injuries but by spitting. They can throw out their saliva to the distance of ten paces; and if it fall on the skin, it raises an itching, accompanied with a slight inflammation.... Winterbotham. LAMAS, the priests of Thibet, a large country of Asia. The chief priest, or grand lama, resides on a mountain. He passes a great part of his life on a kind of altar, where he sits motionless, in a cross-legged posture, on a large and magnificent cushion; and receives with the greatest gravity the adoration, not only of the Thibetians, but also of prodigious multitudes of strangers and pilgrims, who undertake long and difficult journies, that they may worship him on their bended knees, and receive from him the remission of their sins. They are persuaded that he knows the secret thoughts of men, and that he is immortal; dying merely in appearance; and that when he seems to die, his soul and his divinity only change their place of residence, and pass into another body.... Winterbotham. LAND SLIPS, the loosened fragments of hills and mountains sliding down upon and overwhelming the vallies below. In the year 1618, the town of Fleurus, in Italy was buried by a part of the Alps falling on it, and twenty-two hundred persons were destroyed. On the 17th of February, 1751, Markeley hill, in England, was moved from its situation, and continued its motion for three days; during which time it carried along with it the trees and cattle on its surface, and did much damage. A similar event had happened in England, in 1583; when a field of three acres, with the trees and fences, passed over other fields, and settled at the distance of some miles from its original station. Few land slips have been more remarkable, or attended with more dreadful consequences than the following which lately happened in Swisserland. The sides of the lofty mountain called Spitzenbull, from the base half way up, were covered in the most romantic manner with pastures, orchards, houses, and dispersed castles; farther to |