Lucknow

(lük'no,) a famous city of Hindostan, C. of former kingdom of Oude, on the Goomtee, 150 m. N.W. of Benares. In its architecture it presents the very type of a magnificent Oriental metropolis. Historically it is memorable for the siege of 4 months sustained by its small British garrison of 300 men against a force of 30,000 Sepoy mutineers, 1857. Pop. 300,000. Lucou, in the Philippine Islands. See LUZON. Lucretia, (loo-kre's he-ah,)aRoman lady, wife of Coll at in us, and eminent for her beauty and virtues, slew herself, 507 B. c., after suffering base outrage from Sextus Tarquinius, king of Rome; the latter's crime, so says the legend, caused his dethronement, and the substitution ofa republic under Junius Brutus. Lucretius, TITUS LUCRETIUS CARUS, (loo-kre's hus,) a great Latin poet, contemporary with Cicero,was B. in Italy, 95 B. c. The events of his life, and the time and manner of his death, are involved in obscurity. His fame rests on his sublime philosophical didactic poem (in six books) De Rerum Natura, which, regarded merely as a literary composition, stands unrivalled among didactic poems. With his master, Epicurus, L. adopted the atomic theory of Leu cippus, which taught that certain elemen-Lunacy, tary particles, existing from all eternity, and governed by fixed laws, combined to form the universe of matter; that the existence and active interference of a supreme overruling deity was not nece ary to be supposed in order to account for the marvellous an dab-LunaMoth. normal in nature; and that whatever appeared to be Lunar, miraculous, was in reality not so, but was merely the result of certain fixed laws which operated with unerring precision, and in a natural proce . [s. 559]