BAKER, Sir Richard, author of the Chronicle of the Kings of England, was born at Sissinghurst, in Kent, about the year 1568. After going through the usual course at Hart Hall, Oxford, he travelled abroad. Upon his return he took his degree as master of arts, and in 1603 received the honour of knighthood. In 1620 he was made high sheriff of Oxfordshire: but having engaged to pay some debts of his wife's family, he was reduced to poverty, and obliged to betake himself for shelter to the Fleet prison, where he died, February 18. 1645. During his confinement, he composed numerous works, historical, poetical, and miscellaneous. Amongst these are Meditations and Disquisitions on the Lord's Prayer; Meditations, &c., on several of the Psalms of David; Meditations and Prayers upon the Seven Days of the Week; Cato Variegatus, or Cato's Moral Distichs; Theatrum Triumphans, or Theatrum Redivivus, being a reply to Prynne's Histrionastix, &c. His principal work, the Chronicle of the Kings of England, long maintained its reputation among the less critical class of readers, but is now in little esteem. The author seems to have been sometimes more studious to please than to inform, and with that view to have sacrificed even chronology itself to method. In 1658, Edward Philips, nephew to Milton, published a third edition of this work, with the addition of the reign of Charles I. Sir Richard also translated several works from the French and Italian.