Nicolas, SIR NICHOLAS HARRIS

Nicolas, SIR NICHOLAS HARRIS, antiquary, was born 10th March 1799, of a Cornish family of Breton origin. He entered the navy, and had reached the rank of lieutenant by 1815, but at the close of the war left the service to study law, and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1825. He devoted himself chiefly to genealogical and historical studies, and his great work, the History of the Orders of Knighthood of the British Empire (4 vols. 1841-42), remains a solid monument of learning. Harris was made K.H. in 1831, and K.C.M.G. in 1840, and died at Cape Curé, near Boulogne, August 3, 1848. He devoted the energies of his later years to works on the naval history of England: Dispatches and Letters of Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson (7 vols. 1844-46), and the unfinished History of the British Navy (2 vols. 1847), as well as the papers of Sir Hudson Lowe. Harris wrote biographical notices of many of the poets in Pickering's Aldine edition, as well as many useful historical handbooks, as a Synopsis of the Peerage of England (1825), Testamenta Vetusta (1826), the Chronology of History (1835). Other works are Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England (7 vols. 1833-37); a Life of William Davison, Queen Elizabeth's secretary and scapegoat in the execution of Mary, and an ancestor of his wife's (1823); Memoirs of Ritson (1833); and a host of books and papers—and all of value—on heraldic, genealogical, antiquarian, and historical questions. A list of these is given in the Gentleman's Magazine for October 1848.