KNOWLES, James Sheridan (1784-1862), dramatic author, was born at Cork, 21st May 1784. His father was the lexicographer James Knowles, cousin-german of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Not long after the removal of the family to London in 1793, young Knowles began his dramatic career by composing a play which was performed by himself and his juvenile companions. At the age of fourteen he published a ballad entitled The Welsh Harper, which was set to music and obtained great popularity; and about the same time his precocious talents secured him the friendship of Hazlitt, through whom he also formed an intimacy with Lamb and Coleridge. Of his early career little else is known except that for some time he served in the Wilts and afterwards in the Tower Hamlets militia, and that he left the latter corps to become pupil of Dr Willan the physician, through whom he was appointed vaccinator to the Jennerian Society. Although, however, he was generously offered by Dr Willan a share in his practice, he resolved to forsake medicine for the stage, making his debut at the Crow Theatre, Dublin. At Wexford he in October 1809 married Maria Charteris, an actress from the Edinburgh Theatre. About this time he wrote Leo, which was played at Waterford with great success by Edmund Kean; but, although another piece, Brian Boroihme, which he wrote for the Belfast Theatre also drew crowded houses, his labours as an actor and author secured him so little pecuniary return that he found it advisable to become assistant to his father at the Belfast Academical Institution. In 1817 he removed from Belfast to Glasgow, where, besides conducting a flourishing school, he continued his dramatic authorship. His first important dramatic success was Caius Gracchus, produced at Belfast in 1815; and by Virginius, ...