13 



HAGLAN, BARON. 



RAIKES, ROBERT. 



critical edition of the ' Krakamal,' the celebrated death-song of the 

 pirate Ragnar Lodbrok, said to have been sung by him when, being 

 taken prisoner by Ella, king of Northumberland, he was shut up in a 

 barrel with snakes, and concluding with the famous line " Laughing 

 will I die." Rafn has of course had much to do as secretary with the 

 publication of the ' Transactions ' of the Society of which he is the 

 founder, and with the issue of the volumes of ' Me*moires,' in which 

 select essays from the number are translated in German, French, or 

 English. It is to his exertions, commencing as early as 1818, that the 

 Icelanders are indebted for the foundation of a public library for their 

 benefit at Reikiavik; he also carried out in 1827 the establishment 

 of a library at Thorehavn, the capital of the Feroe Islands, and in 

 1829 of another at Godthaab in Greenland. He is a doctor of philosophy, 

 has the title of Etatsraad or ' State Counsellor ' and has been since 

 1828 a knight of the order of Dannebrog. 



RAGLAN, JAMES HENRY FITZROY, BARON (previously Lord 

 FITZBOY SOMERSET), was the younger son of Henry, fifth duke of Beau- 

 fort, by Elizabeth, daughter of Admiral the Hon. E. Boscawen, and 

 was born in 1788. He received his early education at Westminster 

 School, but before completing his sixteenth year obtained a commission 

 in the 4th Light Dragoons. In 1807 he attended the late Sir Arthur 

 Paget in his embassy to Constantinople; and was in the same year placed 

 on the staff of the Duke of Wellington. Two years later he became 

 aide-de-camp to the duke, in which capacity Lord Fitzroy Somerset 

 was present in every engagement throughout the Peninsular campaign. 

 He was wounded at Busaco, and he was among the first who mounted 

 the breach at the storming of Badajoz. Having been promoted to the 

 rank of lieutenant-colonel, he attended the Duke of Wellington as 

 aide-de-camp at Waterloo, where he lost his right arm ; and in conse- 

 quence of his military services he was made a K.C.B. and a colonel in 

 the army. In 1814 he had acted for a short time as secretary to the 

 embassy at Paris, and so great was the confidence reposed in him that 

 he remained in that city as minister plenipotentiary ad interim from 

 the following January to March. He continued to act as secretary to 

 the embassy at Paris until 1819, when he was appointed by the Duke 

 of Wellington, then master of the ordnance, to be his military secre- 

 tary. This post he retained until 1827, when he accompanied the 

 duke to the Horse Guards as military secretary. Here he remained 

 until after the duke's death in September 1852. He had accompanied 

 the duke to the congresses of Vienna and Verona in 1822, and to St. 

 Petersburg in 1826, and on another occasion was sent on a special 

 mission to Madrid. He also represented the borough of Truro in the 

 parliaments of 1818 and 1826. 



Upon the death of the Duke of Wellington, and the promotion of 

 Viscount Hardinge to the command of the army, Lord Fitzroy 

 Somerset was appointed Master -General of the Ordnance, and 

 raised to the peerage as Baron Raglan, a title derived from Raglan 

 Castle, a ruin in possession of the ducal family of Beaufort. He had 

 been little more than a year at the head of the Ordnance when war 

 broke out between England and Russia, and Lord Raglan was 

 appointed to command the forces sent out to the east, with the rank 

 of full general. He left England hi March 1854, and after spending 

 some months at Varna and Constantinople, during which time the 

 army suffered very severely from sickness, he landed on the shores of 

 the Crimea in the September following. In conjunction with Marshal 

 St. Arnaud, who commanded the forces of our French allies, he fought 

 the battle of the Alma on the 20th of that month. It has been 

 stated that he wished to attempt carrying Sebastopol by a coup-de- 

 main, but this not being agreed to by his colleagues, it was determined 

 that it should be invested. Unfortunately, the siege proved one of 

 longer duration than either of the generals had calculated. Diffi- 

 culties in furnishing provisions and clothing for the troops, which 

 appear to have been for a long time but feebly attempted to be over- 

 come, resulted in a large portion of both the English and French 

 troops perishing in the trenches before Sebastopol during the sub- 

 sequent winter, 1854-55. The failure of more than one assault 

 upon that city, and the consequent loss of his men, for whose 

 sufferings he felt most tenderly, together with the censures of the 

 English press upon his line of conduct, unhappily increased the 

 symptoms of diarrhoea, by which he was attacked in the following 

 June, and he died in camp before Sebastopol on the 28th of that 

 month, leaving behind him the memory of an able and brave soldier 

 and a general of high ability, who commanded at once the confidence 

 and respect of his men. The general orders issued by the commander- 

 in-chief at home, and by Marshal Pelissier, his colleague in the divided 

 command over the allied troops in the Crimea, bore testimony to his 

 great and important services. His body was carried back to England, 

 and interred in the church of Badminton, Gloucestershire. A life 

 pension of 1000. a year was settled on his widow, and 2000Z. a year 

 on his son, who succeeded him in his title. He married, in 1814, 

 Harriet, daughter of the third earl of Mornington, and niece of the 

 Duke of Wellington, by whom he left two daughters and an only son, 

 Richard Henry Fitzroy, now second Lord Raglan, who was formerly 

 in the civil service at Ceylon, and afterwards held the post of secretary 

 to the King of Hanover. His eldest son, a major in the army, was 

 killed in the first Punjab campaign, while serving on the staff of Lord 

 Gough, in December 1845. 



RAHBEK, KNUD LYNE, a Danish author, whose name is con- 



etantly recurring in the literary history of Denmark for an entire half 

 century, was born at Copenhagen on the 18th of December 1760. 

 His father, who held the office of ' Toll-inspector,' gave him an 

 excellent education, sending him to the school of Herlufsholm and the 

 University. His father's maternal uncle, Knud Lyne, after whom he 

 was named, had made a fortune of what is called in Denmark " a ton of 

 gold " 20,000 rix-dollars, or about 2,400 and of this he bequeathed 

 12,000 to his namesake, who proposed to live on the interest and 

 spend his time in literature, and in the theatre, to which he was 

 ardently attached. The scheme turned out impracticable, and the 

 money oozed through his hands, but he obtained in 1790 the pro- 

 fessorship of Esthetics at the University of Copenhagen ; from 1798 

 to 1805 he was teacher of history at an institute, and from 1806 to 

 1816 he was lecturer to the actors at the theatre on the dramatic art, 

 becoming afterwards an active member of the managing committee. 

 Above all he was indefatigable with his pen. By these means com- 

 bined, he obtained a position which enabled him to extend a good- 

 natured hospitality to nearly all the literary men of the capital, to 

 whom the " Bakkehuus," as it was called, or " House on the Hill," 

 Rahbek's residence, just outside of the gates of Copenhagen, became 

 the ordinary point of assemblage. The honours were done by his 

 wife, Karen Margrethe Heger, or ' Gamma,' as he called her from the 

 first two syllables of her Christian name. Oehlenschlager [OEHLEN- 

 SCHLAGER], who married Gamma's sister, first saw her at the Bakke- 

 huus. From 1798 to 1829 it continued to be the " Holland-House " 

 of Copenhagen ; it was then deprived of one of its chief attractions by 

 the death of Gamma, and in about a twelvemonth after, on the 22nd 

 of April 1830, Rahbek followed her to the grave in his seventieth 

 year. 



Rahbek's works are very numerous. That which is generally con- 

 sidered the best is the ' Danske Tilskuer,' or ' Danish Spectator,' an 

 imitation of its English namesake. It lasted from 1791 to 1806. A 

 magazine, called ' Minerva,' which he commenced hi 1785, was for a 

 long period a leading periodical in it Rahbek had an opportunity of 

 developing his political sentiments, which, strange as they were, were 

 shared by many Danes; an equally ardent attachment to Jacobinism 

 in France and to despotism in Denmark. His Lectures on the Drama 

 delivered to actors are couched in a tone of somewhat ludicrous 

 solemnity ; his own plays are not considered of much value ; his tales 

 and lyric poems have a higher reputation. His ' Erindringer,' or 

 ' Recollections," written late hi life, are, for a book of biography, far 

 from entertaining. Some specimens will be found in William and 

 Mary Hewitt's 'Literature and Romance of Northern "Europe.' Rahbek 

 wrote a whole library of translations ; among those from the English 

 we remark Shakspere's 'Macbeth,' and .'Merchant of Venice,' 

 Colman's ' Jealous Wife,' Byron's ' Marino Faliero,' Scott's ' Halidon 

 Hill,' &c. 



RAIKES, ROBERT, was born at Gloucester in 1735. His father 

 was a printer and conductor of the ' Gloucester Journal/ who, after 

 giving his son a liberal education, brought him up to his own business, 

 in which after a time he succeeded his father, and by care and diligence 

 rendered the business prosperous. The events of his life present 

 nothing beyond those of a successful tradesman in general ; but as 

 conductor of a newspaper he could not but have his attention fre- 

 quently directed to peculiar conditions of society. The state of the 

 County Bridewell wag the first in which he prominently interfered. 

 He found in it the indiscriminate mixture of offenders of all degrees 

 of criminality, unprovided with food, clothing, or instruction of any 

 kind, except what was bestowed in charity by the curious or benevo- 

 lent who visited the prison. To remedy these evils he called attention, 

 to them in his newspaper, and he furnished means to provide the 

 inmates with instruction and the means of labour from his own 

 resources. As regarded Gloucester prison his efforts were in a great 

 degree successful, but the evils against which he contended are unfor- 

 tunately not yet uniformly removed from our places of confinement. 

 In 1781, as he relates himself in a letter written in 1784, he was 

 struck with the number of wretched children whom he found in the 

 suburbs, chiefly in the neighbourhood of a pin-manufactory where 

 their parents were employed, wholly abandoned to themselves, half- 

 clothed, half -fed, and growing up in the practice of the most degrading 

 vices. The state of the streets, he was told, was always worst on the 

 Sunday, as of course children of somewhat advanced ages were employed 

 iu the factory, and on Sunday joined their old associates. Mr. Raikes 

 determined to make an effort at some improvement. He began in 

 a very unpretending manner. He found three or four decent women 

 in the neighbourhood who were capable of teaching children to read, 

 to each of whom he agreed to give a shilling for the day's employment ; 

 and then, with the assistance of the clergyman, endeavoured to induce 

 the children to go to the schools so established. The success was 

 extraordinary : children were not only eager to learn to read, but, on. 

 being supplied with Testaments, they began of their own accord to 

 frequent places of religious worship. At first, he says, many children 

 were deterred from attending the schools by want of decent clothing; 

 to such he represented that " clean hands, clean faces, and combed 

 hair," were all that was required at the school. The beneficial effects 

 were so evident, that in a very short time Sunday-schools were 

 established in all directions; and Mr. Raikes, before his death on 

 April 5, 1811, had the satisfaction of seeing his first humble endeavour 



