REID, SIR WEMYSS, journalist and man of letters, born in Newcastle-on-Tyne; editor of the Leeds Mercury (1870-86), and of the Speaker since 1890; has written novels and biographies; is President of the Institute of Journalists, and was knighted in 1894; b. 1842.

REID, SIR WILLIAM, soldier and scientist; served in the Royal Engineers with distinction under Wellington; became Governor successively of Bermudas, Barbadoes, and Malta, and was the author of a scientific work on “The Law of Storms” (1791-1858).

REIGATE (23), a flourishing market-town in Surrey, 21 m.  S. of London; is a busy railway centre; has interesting historic ruins; an old church, among others containing the grave of Lord Howard of Effingham.

REIGN OF A HUNDRED DAYS, the period during which Napoleon reigned in Paris from his return from Elba in the beginning of March till he left on the 12th June 1815 to meet the Allies in the Netherlands.

REIGN OF TERROR, the name given to the bloody consummation of the fiery French Revolution, including a period which lasted 420 days, from the fall of the Girondists on the 31st May 1793 to the overthrow of Robespierre and his accomplices on 27th July 1794, the actors in which at length, seeing nothing but “Terror” ahead, had in their despair said to themselves, “Be it so. Que la Terreur soit a l’ordre du jour (having sown the wind, come let us reap the whirlwind).  One of the frightfulest things ever born of Time.  So many as four thousand guillotined, fusilladed, noyaded, done to dire death, of whom nine hundred were women.”

REIMARUS, a philosopher of the AUFKLAeRUNG (q. v.), born at Hamburg; author of the “Wolfenbuettel Fragments,” published by Lessing in 1777, and written to disprove the arguments for the historical truth of the Bible, and in the interest of pure deism and natural religion (1694-1768).

REIS EFFENDI, one of the chief Ministers of State in Turkey, who is Lord Chancellor, and holds the bureau of foreign affairs.

REITERS, the cavalry of the German Empire in the 14th and 15th centuries.

RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE, the doctrine that all knowledge is of things as they appear to us and not of things as they are in themselves, is subjective and not objective, is phenomenal and not noumenal.

RELIEF, prominence of a sculpture from a plain surface; works in relief are of three kinds:  alto-relievo, high relief; mezzo-relievo, medium relief; basso-relievo, low relief.

RELIGIO MEDICI, a celebrated work of Sir Thomas Browne’s, characterised as a “confession of intelligent, orthodox, and logical supernaturalism couched in some of the most exquisite English ever written.”

RELIGION, a sense, affecting the whole character and life, of dependence on, reverence for, and responsibility to a Higher Power; or a mode of thinking, feeling, and acting which respects, trusts in, and strives after God, and determines a man’s duty and destiny in this universe, or “the manner in which a man feels himself to be spiritually related to the unseen world.”