Ernest, as the nearest male heir of the late king, became king of Hanover. At once cancelling the constitution which William had given to his kingdom in 1833, he acted as an absolute monarch, and the constitution which he sanctioned in 1840 was permeated with his own illiberal ideas. In German politics he was vigilant and active, and mindful of the material interests of his country. His reign, however, was a stormy one, and serious trouble between king and people had arisen when he died at Herrenhausen on the 18th of November 1851 (see HANOVER: _History_). In spite of his arbitrary rule and his reactionary ideas the king was popular among his subjects, and his statue in Hanover bears the words "_Dem Landes Vater sein treues Volk_." Ernest, who is generally regarded as the ablest of the sons of George III., left an only child, George, who succeeded him as king of Hanover. See C.A. Wilkinson, _Reminiscences of the Court and Times of King Ernest of Hanover_ (London, 1886); von Malortie, _Konig Ernst August_ (Hanover, 1861); and the various histories of Great Britain and Hanover for the period. ERNESTI, JOHANN AUGUST (1707-1781), German theologian and philologist, was born on the 4th of August 1707, at Tennstadt in Thuringia, of which place his father was pastor, besides being superintendent of the electoral dioceses of Thuringia, Salz and Sangerhausen. At the age of sixteen he was sent to the celebrated Saxon cloister school of Pforta (Schulpforta). At twenty he entered the university of Wittenberg, and studied afterwards at the university of Leipzig. In 1730 he was made master in the faculty of philosophy. In the following year he accepted the office of conrector in the Thomas school of Leipzig, of which J.M. Gesner was then rector, an office to which Ernesti succeeded in 1734. He was, in 1742, named professor _extraordinarius_ of ancient literature in the university of Leipzig, and in 1756 professor _ordinarius_ of rhetoric. In the same year he received the degree of doctor of theology, and in 1759 was appointed professor _ordinarius_ in the faculty of theology. Through his learning and his manner of discussion, he co-operated with S.J. Baumgarten of Halle (1706-1757) in disengaging the current dogmatic theology from its many scholastic and mystical excrescences, and thus paved a way for a revolution in theology. He died, after a short illness, in his seventy-sixth year, on the 11th of September 1781.