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Title: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 9, Slice 6 - "English Language" to "Epsom Salts"
Author: Various
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 9, Slice 6 - "English Language" to "Epsom Salts"" ***
Transcriber's notes:
(1) Numbers following letters (without space) like C2 were originally
printed in subscript. Letter subscripts are preceded by an
underscore, like C_n.
(2) Characters following a carat (^) were printed in superscript.
(3) Side-notes were relocated to function as titles of their respective
paragraphs.
(4) Macrons and breves above letters and dots below letters were not
inserted.
(5) [root] stands for the root symbol; [alpha], [beta], etc. for greek
letters.
(6) The following typographical errors have been corrected:
ARTICLE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: "The writers of each district wrote in
the dialect familiar to them; and between extreme forms the
difference was so great as to amount to unintelligibility ..."
'familiar' amended from 'familar'.
ARTICLE ENGLISH LITERATURE: "Even more portentous in its superhuman
dignity was the style of Edward Gibbon, who combined with the
unspiritual optimism of Hume and Robertson a far more concentrated
devotion to his subject ..." 'combined' amended from 'conbined'.
ARTICLE ENTERITIS: "The chief symptom is diarrhoea. The term
"enteric fever" has recently come into use instead of "typhoid" for
the latter disease; but see Typhoid Fever." 'symptom' amended from
'sympton'.
ARTICLE ENTRE MINHO E DOURO: "The methods and implements of the
farmers are, however, most primitive, and at the beginning of the
20th century it was not unusual to see a mule, or even a woman,
harnessed with the team of oxen to an old-fashioned wooden plough."
'it' amended from 'is'.
ARTICLE ENTRE RIOS: "... a province of the eastern Argentine
Republic, forming the southern part of a region sometimes described
as the Argentine Mesopotamia ..." 'southern' amended from
'sourthern'.
ARTICLE EPHRAIM: "... and Ephraim's proud and ambitious character
is indicated in its demands as narrated in Josh. xvii. 14; Judg.
viii. 1-3, xii. 1-6. throughout, Ephraim played a distinctive and
prominent part; it probably excelled Manasseh in numerical strength
..." 'throughout' amended from 'thoughout'.
ARTICLE EPIC POETRY: "... and Teofilo Folengo (1491-1544),
ridiculed the whole school in an Orlandino of 1526." 'Folengo'
amended from 'Folango'.
ARTICLE EPIDAURUS: "It was abandoned during the middle ages; its
inhabitants took possession of the promontory of Minoa ..."
'possession' amended from 'posession'.
ARTICLE EPILOGUE: "... and then explained to the audience what an
extremely interesting play it had been. In the second case, when
the author was less confident ..." 'extremely' amended from
'exremely'.
ARTICLE EPITHELIAL, ENDOTHELIAL: "It will be sufficient here to
give the more general characters possessed by these cells."
'sufficient' amended from 'sufficent'.
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE
AND GENERAL INFORMATION
ELEVENTH EDITION
VOLUME IX, SLICE VI
English Language to Epsom Salts
ARTICLES IN THIS SLICE:
ENGLISH LANGUAGE EPHEBI
ENGLISH LAW EPHEMERIS
ENGLISH LITERATURE EPHESIANS, EPISTLE TO THE
ENGLISHRY EPHESUS
ENGRAVING EPHESUS, COUNCIL OF
ENGROSSING EPHOD
ENGYON EPHOR
ENID EPHORUS
ENIGMA EPHRAEM SYRUS
ENKHUIZEN EPHRAIM
ENNEKING, JOHN JOSEPH EPHTHALITES
ENNIS ÉPI
ENNISCORTHY EPICENE
ENNISKILLEN, WILLIAM COLE EPICHARMUS
ENNISKILLEN EPIC POETRY
ENNIUS, QUINTUS EPICTETUS
ENNODIUS, MAGNUS FELIX EPICURUS
ENNS EPICYCLE
ENOCH EPICYCLOID
ENOCH, BOOK OF EPIDAURUS
ENOMOTO, BUYO EPIDIORITE
ENOS EPIDOSITE
ENRIQUEZ GOMEZ, ANTONIO EPIDOTE
ENSCHEDE EPIGONI
ENSENADA, CENON DE SOMODEVILLA EPIGONION
ENSIGN EPIGRAM
ENSILAGE EPIGRAPHY
ENSTATITE EPILEPSY
ENTABLATURE EPILOGUE
ENTADA EPIMENIDES
ENTAIL ÉPINAL
ENTASIS EPINAOS
ENTERITIS ÉPINAY, LOUISE D'ESCLAVELLES D'
ENTHUSIASM EPIPHANIUS, SAINT
ENTHYMEME EPIPHANY, FEAST OF
ENTOMOLOGY EPIRUS
ENTOMOSTRACA EPISCOPACY
ENTRAGUES, CATHERINE DE BALZAC D' EPISCOPIUS, SIMON
ENTRECASTEAUX, BRUNI D' EPISODE
ENTRE MINHO E DOURO EPISTAXIS
ENTREPÔT EPISTEMOLOGY
ENTRE RIOS EPISTLE
ENVOY EPISTYLE
ENZIO EPISTYLIS
ENZYME EPITAPH
EOCENE EPITHALAMIUM
EON DE BEAUMONT EPITHELIAL and GLANDULAR TISSUES
EÖTVÖS, JÓZSEF EPITOME
EPAMINONDAS EPOCH
EPARCH EPODE
EPAULETTE EPONA
ÉPÉE, CHARLES-MICHEL EPONYMOUS
ÉPÉE-DE-COMBAT EPPING
EPERJES EPPS
ÉPERNAY ÉPRÉMESNIL, JEAN JACQUES DUVAL D'
ÉPERNON EPSOM
EPHEBEUM EPSOM SALTS
ENGLISH LANGUAGE. In its historical sense, the name _English_ is now
conveniently used to comprehend the language of the English people from
their settlement in Britain to the present day, the various stages
through which it has passed being distinguished as Old, Middle, and New
or Modern English. In works yet recent, and even in some still current,
the term is confined to the third, or at most extended to the second and
third of these stages, since the language assumed in the main the
vocabulary and grammatical forms which it now presents, the oldest or
inflected stage being treated as a separate language, under the title of
_Anglo-Saxon_, while the transition period which connects the two has
been called _Semi-Saxon_. This view had the justification that, looked
upon by themselves, either as vehicles of thought or as objects of study
and analysis, Old English or Anglo-Saxon and Modern English are, for all
practical ends, distinct languages,--as much so, for example, as Latin
and Spanish. No amount of familiarity with Modern English, including its
local dialects, would enable the student to read Anglo-Saxon,
three-fourths of the vocabulary of which have perished and been
reconstructed within 900 years;[1] nor would a knowledge even of these
lost words give him the power, since the grammatical system, alike in
accidence and syntax, would be entirely strange to him. Indeed, it is
probable that a modern Englishman would acquire the power of reading and
writing French in less time than it would cost him to attain to the same
proficiency in Old English; so that if the test of distinct languages be
their degree of practical difference from each other, it cannot be
denied that "Anglo-Saxon" is a distinct language from Modern English.
But when we view the subject historically, recognizing the fact that
living speech is subject to continuous change in certain definite
directions, determined by the constitution and circumstances of mankind,
as an evolution or development of which we can trace the steps, and
that, owing to the abundance of written materials, this evolution
appears so gradual in English that we can nowhere draw distinct lines
separating its successive stages, we recognize these stages as merely
temporary phases of an individual whole, and speak of the English
language as used alike by Cynewulf, by Chaucer, by Shakespeare and by
Tennyson.[2] It must not be forgotten, however, that in this wide sense
the English language includes, not only the literary or courtly forms of
speech used at successive periods, but also the popular and, it may be,
altogether unwritten dialects that exist by their side. Only on this
basis, indeed, can we speak of Old, Middle and Modern English as the
same _language_, since in actual fact the precise _dialect_ which is now
the cultivated language, or "Standard English," is not the descendant of
that dialect which was the cultivated language or "Englisc" of Alfred,
but of a sister dialect then sunk in comparative obscurity,--even as the
direct descendant of Alfred's Englisc is now to be found in the
non-literary rustic speech of Wiltshire and Somersetshire. Causes which,
linguistically considered, are external and accidental, have shifted
the political and intellectual centre of England, and along with it
transferred literary and official patronage from one form of English to
another; if the centre of influence had happened to be fixed at York or
on the banks of the Forth, both would probably have been neglected for a
third.
The English language, thus defined, is not "native" to Britain, that is,
it was not found there at the dawn of history, but was introduced by
foreign immigrants at a date many centuries later. At the Roman Conquest
of the island the languages spoken by the natives belonged all (so far
as is known) to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European or Indo-Germanic
family, modern forms of which still survive in Wales, Ireland, the
Scottish Highlands, Isle of Man and Brittany, while one has at no
distant date become extinct in Cornwall (see CELT: Language). Brythonic
dialects, allied to Welsh and Cornish, were apparently spoken over the
greater part of Britain, as far north as the firths of Forth and Clyde;
beyond these estuaries and in the isles to the west, including Ireland
and Man, Goidelic dialects, akin to Irish and Scottish Gaelic,
prevailed. The long occupation of south Britain by the Romans (A.D.
43-409)--a period, it must not be forgotten, equal to that from the
Reformation to the present day, or nearly as long as the whole duration
of modern English--familiarized the provincial inhabitants with Latin,
which was probably the ordinary speech of the towns. Gildas, writing
nearly a century and a half after the renunciation of Honorius in 410,
addressed the British princes in that language;[3] and the linguistic
history of Britain might have been not different from that of Gaul,
Spain and the other provinces of the Western Empire, in which a local
type of Latin, giving birth to a neo-Latinic language, finally
superseded the native tongue except in remote and mountainous
districts,[4] had not the course of events been entirely changed by the
Teutonic conquests of the 5th and 6th centuries.
The Angles, Saxons, and their allies came of the Teutonic stock, and
spoke a tongue belonging to the Teutonic or Germanic branch of the
Indo-Germanic (Indo-European) family, the same race and form of speech
being represented in modern times by the people and languages of
Holland, Germany, Denmark, the Scandinavian peninsula and Iceland, as
well as by those of England and her colonies. Of the original home of
the so-called primitive Aryan race (q.v.), whose language was the parent
Indo-European, nothing is certainly known, though the subject has called
forth many conjectures; the present tendency is to seek it in Europe
itself. The tribe can hardly have occupied an extensive area at first,
but its language came by degrees to be diffused over the greater part of
Europe and some portion of Asia. Among those whose Aryan descent is
generally recognized as beyond dispute are the Teutons, to whom the
Angles and Saxons belonged.
The Teutonic or Germanic people, after dwelling together in a body,
appear to have scattered in various directions, their language gradually
breaking up into three main groups, which can be already clearly
distinguished in the 4th century A.D., North Germanic or Scandinavian,
West Germanic or Low and High German, and East Germanic, of which the
only important representative is Gothic. Gothic, often called
Moeso-Gothic, was the language of a people of the Teutonic stock, who,
passing down the Danube, invaded the borders of the Empire, and obtained
settlements in the province of Moesia, where their language was
committed to writing in the 4th century; its literary remains are of
peculiar value as the oldest specimens, by several centuries, of
Germanic speech. The dialects of the invaders of Britain belonged to the
West Germanic branch, and within this to the Low German group,
represented at the present day by Dutch, Frisian, and the various
"Platt-Deutsch" dialects of North Germany. At the dawn of history the
forefathers of the English appear to have been dwelling between and
about the estuaries and lower courses of the Rhine and the Weser, and
the adjacent coasts and isles; at the present day the most English or
Angli-form dialects of the European continent are held to be those of
the North Frisian islands of Amrum and Sylt, on the west coast of
Schleswig. It is well known that the greater part of the ancient
Friesland has been swept away by the encroachments of the North Sea, and
the _disjecta membra_ of the Frisian race, pressed by the sea in front
and more powerful nationalities behind, are found only in isolated
fragments from the Zuider Zee to the coasts of Denmark. Many Frisians
accompanied the Angles and Saxons to Britain, and Old English was in
many respects more closely connected with Old Frisian than with any
other Low German dialect. Of the Geatas, Eotas or "Jutes," who,
according to Bede, occupied Kent and the Isle of Wight, and formed a
third tribe along with the Angles and Saxons, it is difficult to speak
linguistically. The speech of Kent certainly formed a distinct dialect
in both the Old English and the Middle English periods, but it has
tended to be assimilated more and more to neighbouring southern
dialects, and is at the present day identical with that of Sussex, one
of the old Saxon kingdoms. Whether the speech of the Isle of Wight ever
showed the same characteristic differences as that of Kent cannot now be
ascertained, but its modern dialect differs in no respect from that of
Hampshire, and shows no special connexion with that of Kent. It is at
least entirely doubtful whether Bede's Geatas came from Jutland; on
linguistic grounds we should expect that they occupied a district lying
not to the north of the Angles, but between these and the old Saxons.
The earliest specimens of the language of the Germanic invaders of
Britain that exist point to three well-marked dialect groups: the
Anglian (in which a further distinction may be made between the
Northumbrian and the Mercian, or South-Humbrian); the Saxon, generally
called West-Saxon from the almost total lack of sources outside the
West-Saxon domain; and the Kentish. The Kentish and West-Saxon are
sometimes, especially in later times, grouped together as southern
dialects as opposed to midland and northern. These three groups were
distinguished from each other by characteristic points of phonology and
inflection. Speaking generally, the Anglian dialects may be
distinguished by the absence of certain normal West-Saxon vowel-changes,
and the presence of others not found in West-Saxon, and also by a strong
tendency to confuse and simplify inflections, in all which points,
moreover, Northumbrian tended to deviate more widely than Mercian.
Kentish, on the other hand, occupied a position intermediate between
Anglian and West-Saxon, early Kentish approaching more nearly to
Mercian, owing perhaps to early historical connexion between the two,
and late Kentish tending to conform to West-Saxon characteristics, while
retaining several points in common with Anglian. Though we cannot be
certain that these dialectal divergences date from a period previous to
the occupation of Britain, such evidence as can be deduced points to the
existence of differences already on the continent, the three dialects
corresponding in all likelihood to Bede's three tribes, the Angles,
Saxons and Geatas.
As it was amongst the _Engle_ or Angles of Northumbria that literary
culture first appeared, and as an Angle or _Englisc_ dialect was the
first to be used for vernacular literature, _Englisc_ came eventually to
be a general name for all forms of the vernacular as opposed to Latin,
&c.; and even when the West-Saxon of Alfred became in its turn the
literary or classical form of speech, it was still called Englisc or
_English_. The origin of the name _Angul-Seaxan_ (Anglo-Saxons) has been
disputed, some maintaining that it means a union of Angles and Saxons,
others (with better foundation) that it meant _English Saxons_, or
Saxons of England or of the Angel-cynn as distinguished from Saxons of
the Continent (see _New English Dictionary_, s.v.). Its modern use is
mainly due to the little band of scholars who in the 16th and 17th
centuries turned their attention to the long-forgotten language of
Alfred and Ælfric, which, as it differed so greatly from the English of
their own day, they found it convenient to distinguish by a name which
was applied to themselves by those who spoke it.[5] To these scholars
"Anglo-Saxon" and "English" were separated by a gulf which it was
reserved for later scholarship to bridge across, and show the historical
continuity of the English of all ages.
As already hinted, the English language, in the wide sense, presents
three main stages of development--Old, Middle and Modern--distinguished
by their inflectional characteristics. The latter can be best summarized
in the words of Dr Henry Sweet in his _History of English Sounds_:[6]
"Old English is the period of _full_ inflections (_nama_, _gifan_,
_caru_), Middle English of _levelled_ inflections (_naame_, _given_,
_caare_), and Modern English of _lost_ inflections (_name_, _give_,
_care_ = _nam_, _giv_, _car_). We have besides two periods of
transition, one in which _nama_ and _name_ exist side by side, and
another in which final e [with other endings] is beginning to drop." By
_lost_ inflections it is meant that only very few remain, and those
mostly non-syllabic, as the _-s_ in stones and loves, the _-ed_ in
loved, the _-r_ in their, as contrasted with the Old English stán_-as_,
lufað, luf_-od-e_ and luf_-od-on_, þá_-ra_. Each of these periods may
also be divided into two or three; but from the want of materials it is
difficult to make any such division for all dialects alike in the first.
As to the chronology of the successive stages, it is of course
impossible to lay down any exclusive series of dates, since the
linguistic changes were inevitably gradual, and also made themselves
felt in some parts of the country much earlier than in others, the north
being always in advance of the midland, and the south much later in its
changes. It is easy to point to periods at which Old, Middle and Modern
English were fully developed, but much less easy to draw lines
separating these stages; and even if we recognize between each part a
"transition" period or stage, the determination of the beginning and end
of this will to a certain extent be a matter of opinion. But bearing
these considerations in mind, and having special reference to the
midland dialect from which literary English is mainly descended, the
following may be given as approximate dates, which if they do not
demarcate the successive stages, at least include them:--
Old English or Anglo-Saxon to 1100
Transition Old English ("Semi-Saxon") 1100 to 1150
Early Middle English 1150 to 1250
(Normal) Middle English 1250 to 1400
Late and Transition Middle English 1400 to 1485
Early Modern or Tudor English 1485 to 1611
Seventeenth century transition 1611 to 1688
Modern or current English 1689 onward
Dr Sweet has reckoned Transition Old English (Old Transition) from 1050
to 1150, Middle English thence to 1450, and Late or Transition Middle
English (Middle Transition) 1450 to 1500. As to the Old Transition see
further below.
The OLD ENGLISH or Anglo-Saxon tongue, as introduced into Britain, was
highly inflectional, though its inflections at the date when it becomes
known to us were not so full as those of the earlier Gothic, and
considerably less so than those of Greek and Latin during their
classical periods. They corresponded more closely to those of modern
literary German, though both in nouns and verbs the forms were more
numerous and distinct; for example, the German _guten_ answers to
_three_ Old English forms,--_gódne_, _gódum_, _gódan_; _guter_ to
_two_--_gódre_, _gódra_; _liebten_ to _two_,--_lufodon_ and _lufeden_.
Nouns had four cases. _Nominative_, _Accusative_ (only sometimes
distinct), _Genitive_, _Dative_, the latter used also with prepositions
to express locative, instrumental, and most ablative relations; of a
distinct _instrumental_ case only vestiges occur. There were several
declensions of nouns, the main division being that known in Germanic
languages generally as strong and weak,--a distinction also extending to
adjectives in such wise that every adjective assumed either the strong
or the weak inflection as determined by associated grammatical forms.
The first and second personal pronouns possessed a dual number = _we
two_, _ye two_; the third person had a complete declension of the stem
he, instead of being made up as now of the three stems seen in _he_,
_she_, _they_. The verb distinguished the subjunctive from the
indicative mood, but had only two inflected tenses, present and past
(more accurately, that of incomplete and that of completed or "perfect"
action)--the former also used for the future, the latter for all the
shades of past time. The order of the sentence corresponded generally to
that of German. Thus from King Alfred's additions to his translation of
Orosius: "Donne þy ylcan dæge hi hine to þæm ade beran wyllað þonne
todælað hi his feoh þaet þær to lafe bið æfter þæm gedrynce and þæm
plegan, on fif oððe syx, hwilum on ma, swa swa þaes feos andefn bið"
("Then on the same day [that] they him to the pile bear will, then
divide they his property that there to remainder shall be after the
drinking and the sports, into five or six, at times into more, according
as the property's value is").
The poetry was distinguished by alliteration, and the abundant use of
figurative and metaphorical expressions, of bold compounds and archaic
words never found in prose. Thus in the following lines from Beowulf
(ed. Thorpe, l. 645, Zupitza 320):--
Stræt wæs stán-fáh, stig wisode
Gumum ætgædere. gúð-byrne scán
Heard hond-locen. hring-iren scir
Song in searwum, þa hie to sele furðum
In hyra gry're geatwum gangan cwomon.
Trans.:--
The street was stone-variegated, the path guided
(The) men together; the war-mailcoat shone,
Hard hand-locked. Ring-iron sheer (bright ring-mail)
Sang in (their) cunning-trappings, as they to hall forth
In their horror-accoutrements going came.
The Old English was a homogeneous language, having very few foreign
elements in it, and forming its compounds and derivatives entirely from
its own resources. A few Latin appellatives learned from the Romans in
the German wars had been adopted into the common West Germanic tongue,
and are found in English as in the allied dialects. Such were _stræte_
(street, _via strata_), _camp_ (battle), _cásere_ (Cæsar), _míl_ (mile),
_pín_ (punishment), _mynet_ (money), _pund_ (pound), _wín_ (wine);
probably also _cyrice_ (church), _biscop_ (bishop), _læden_ (Latin
language), _cése_ (cheese), _butor_ (butter), _pipor_ (pepper), _olfend_
(camel, elephantus), _ynce_ (inch, uncia), and a few others. The
relations of the first invaders to the Britons were to a great extent
those of destroyers; and with the exception of the proper names of
places and prominent natural features, which as is usual were retained
by the new population, few British words found their way into the Old
English. Among these are named _broc_ (a badger), _bréc_ (breeches),
_clút_ (clout), _púl_ (pool), and a few words relating to the employment
of field or household menials. Still fewer words seem to have been
adopted from the provincial Latin, almost the only certain ones being
castra, applied to the Roman towns, which appeared in English as
_cæstre_, _ceaster_, now found in composition as -_caster_, -_chester_,
-_cester_, and _culina_ (kitchen), which gave _cylen_ (kiln). The
introduction and gradual adoption of Christianity, brought a new series
of Latin words connected with the offices of the church, the
accompaniments of higher civilization, the foreign productions either
actually made known, or mentioned in the Scriptures and devotional
books. Such were _mynster_ (monasterium), _munuc_ (monk), _nunne_ (nun),
_maesse_ (mass), _schol_ (school), _oelmesse_ (eleemosyna), _candel_
(candela), _turtle_ (turtur), _fic_ (ficus), _cedar_ (cedrus). These
words, whose number increased from the 7th to the 10th century, are
commonly called _Latin of the second period_, the Latin of the first
period including the Latin words brought by the English from the
continent, as well as those picked up in Britain either from the Roman
provincials or the Welsh. The Danish invasions of the 8th and 10th
centuries resulted in the establishment of extensive Danish and
Norwegian populations, about the basin of the Humber and its
tributaries, and above Morecambe Bay. Although these Scandinavian
settlers must have greatly affected the language of their own
localities, but few traces of their influence are to be found in the
literature of the Old English period. As with the greater part of the
words adopted from the Celtic, it was not until after the dominion of
the Norman had overlaid all preceding conquests, and the new English
began to emerge from the ruins of the old, that Danish words in any
number made their appearance in books, as equally "native" with the
Anglo-Saxon.
The earliest specimens we have of English date to the end of the 7th
century, and belong to the Anglian dialect, and particularly to
Northumbrian, which, under the political eminence of the early
Northumbrian kings from Edwin to Ecgfrið, aided perhaps by the learning
of the scholars of Ireland and Iona, first attained to literary
distinction. Of this literature in its original form mere fragments
exist, one of the most interesting of which consists of the verses
uttered by Bede on his deathbed, and preserved in a nearly contemporary
MS.:--
Fore there neid faerae . naenig uuiurthit
thonc snotturra . than him tharf sie,
to ymb-hycggannæ . aer his hin-iongae,
huaet his gastae . godaes aeththa yflaes,
aefter deoth-daege . doemid uueorthae.
Trans.:--
Before the inevitable journey becomes not any
Thought more wise than (that) it is needful for him,
To consider, ere his hence-going,
What, to his ghost, of good or ill,
After death-day, doomed may be.
But our chief acquaintance with Old English is in its West-Saxon form,
the earliest literary remains of which date to the 9th century, when
under the political supremacy of Wessex and the scholarship of King
Alfred it became the literary language of the English nation, the
classical "Anglo-Saxon." If our materials were more extensive, it would
probably be necessary to divide the Old English into several periods; as
it is, considerable differences have been shown to exist between the
"early West-Saxon" of King Alfred and the later language of the 11th
century, the earlier language having numerous phonetic and inflectional
distinctions which are "levelled" in the later, the inflectional changes
showing that the tendency to pass from the synthetical to the analytical
stage existed quite independently of the Norman Conquest. The northern
dialect, whose literary career had been cut short in the 8th century by
the Danish invasions, reappears in the 10th in the form of glosses to
the Latin gospels and a service-book, often called the _Ritual of
Durham_, where we find that, owing to the confusion which had so long
reigned in the north, and to special Northumbrian tendencies, e.g. the
dropping of the inflectional n in both verbs and nouns, this dialect had
advanced in the process of inflection-levelling far beyond the sister
dialects of Mercian and the south, so as already to anticipate the forms
of Early Middle English.
Among the literary remains of the Old English may be mentioned the epic
poem of Beowulf, the original nucleus of which has been supposed to date
to heathen and even continental times, though we now possess it only in
a later form; the poetical works of Cynewulf; those formerly ascribed to
Cædmon; several works of Alfred, two of which, his translation of
Orosius and of _The Pastoral Care_ of St Gregory, are contemporary
specimens of his language; the Old English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; the
theological works of Ælfric (including translations of the Pentateuch
and the gospels) and of Wulfstan; and many works both in prose and
verse, of which the authors are unknown.
The earliest specimens, the inscriptions on the Ruthwell and Bewcastle
crosses, are in a Runic character; but the letters used in the
manuscripts generally are a British variety of the Roman alphabet which
the Anglo-Saxons found in the island, and which was also used by the
Welsh and Irish.[7] Several of the Roman letters had in Britain
developed forms, and retained or acquired values, unlike those used on
the continent, in particular [glyphs] (d f g r s t). The letters _q_
and _z_ were not used, _q_ being represented by _cw_, and _k_ was a rare
alternative to _c_; _u_ or _v_ was only a vowel, the consonantal power
of _v_ being represented as in Welsh by _f_. The Runes called _thorn_
and _wen_, having the consonantal values now expressed by _th_ and _w_,
for which the Roman alphabet had no character, were at first expressed
by _th_, ð (a contraction for [g][g] or [g]h), and _v_ or _u_; but at a
later period the characters þ and [p] were revived from the old Runic
alphabet. Contrary to Continental usage, the letters _c_ and [g] (_g_)
had originally only their hard or guttural powers, as in the
neighbouring Celtic languages; so that words which, when the Continental
Roman alphabet came to be used for Germanic languages, had to be written
with _k_, were in Old English written with _c_, as _cêne_ = keen,
_cynd_ = kind.[8] The key to the values of the letters, and thus to the
pronunciation of Old English, is also to be found in the Celtic tongues
whence the letters were taken.
The Old English period is usually considered as terminating 1120, with
the death of the generation who saw the Norman Conquest. The Conquest
established in England a foreign court, a foreign aristocracy and a
foreign hierarchy.[9] The French language, in its Norman dialect, became
the only polite medium of intercourse. The native tongue, despised not
only as unknown but as the language of a subject race, was left to the
use of boors and serfs, and except in a few stray cases ceased to be
written at all. The natural results followed.[10] When the educated
generation that saw the arrival of the Norman died out, the language,
ceasing to be read and written, lost all its literary words. The words
of ordinary life whose preservation is independent of books lived on as
vigorously as ever, but the literary terms, those that related to
science, art and higher culture, the bold artistic compounds, the
figurative terms of poetry, were speedily forgotten. The practical
vocabulary shrank to a fraction of its former extent. And when,
generations later, English began to be used for general literature, the
only terms at hand to express ideas above those of every-day life were
to be found in the French of the privileged classes, of whom alone art,
science, law and theology had been for generations the inheritance.
Hence each successive literary effort of the reviving English tongue
showed a larger adoption of French words to supply the place of the
forgotten native ones, till by the days of Chaucer they constituted a
notable part of the vocabulary. Nor was it for the time being only that
the French words affected the English vocabulary. The Norman French
words introduced by the Conquest, as well as the Central or Parisian
French words which followed under the early Plantagenets, were mainly
Latin words which had lived on among the people of Gaul, and, modified
in the mouths of succeeding generations, had reached forms more or less
remote from their originals. In being now adopted as English, they
supplied precedents in accordance with which other Latin words might be
converted into English ones, whenever required; and long before the
Renascence of classical learning, though in much greater numbers after
that epoch, these precedents were freely followed.
While the eventual though distant result of the Norman Conquest was thus
a large reconstruction of the English vocabulary, the grammar of the
language was not directly affected by it. There was no reason why it
should--we might almost add, no way by which it could. While the English
used their own _words_, they could not forget their own _way_ of using
them, the inflections and constructions by which alone the words
expressed ideas--in other words, their grammar; when one by one French
words were introduced into the sentence they became English by the very
act of admission, and were at once subjected to all the duties and
liabilities of English words in the same position. This is of course
precisely what happens at the present day: _telegraph_ and _telegram_
make participle _telegraphing_ and plural _telegrams_, and _naïve_ the
adverb _naïvely_, precisely as if they had been in the language for
ages.
But indirectly the grammar was affected very quickly. In languages in
the inflected or synthetic stage the terminations must be pronounced
with marked distinctness, as these contain the correlation of ideas; it
is all-important to hear whether a word is _bonus_ or _bonis_ or _bonas_
or _bonos_. This implies a measured and distinct pronunciation, against
which the effort for ease and rapidity of utterance is continually
struggling, while indolence and carelessness continually compromise it.
In the Germanic languages, as a whole, the main stress-accent falls on
the radical syllable, or on the prefix of a nominal compound, and thus
at or near the beginning of the word; and the result of this in English
has been a growing tendency to suffer the concluding syllables to fall
into obscurity. We are familiar with the cockney _winder_, _sofer_,
_holler_, _Sarer_, _Sunder_, _would yer_, for wind_ow_, sof_a_, holl_a_,
Sar_ah_, Sund_ay_, would y_ou_, the various final vowels sinking into an
obscure neutral one now conventionally spelt _er_, but formerly
represented by final _e_. Already before the Conquest, forms originally
_hatu_, _sello_, _tunga_, appeared as _hate_, _selle_, _tunge_, with the
terminations levelled to obscure e; but during the illiterate period of
the language after the Conquest this careless obscuring of terminal
vowels became universal, all unaccented vowels in the final syllable
(except _i_) sinking into e. During the 12th century, while this change
was going on, we see a great confusion of grammatical forms, the full
inflections of Old English standing side by side in the same sentence
with the levelled ones of Middle English. It is to this state of the
language that the names _Transition_ and _Period of Confusion_ (Dr
Abbott's appellation) point; its appearance, as that of Anglo-Saxon
broken down in its endings, had previously given to it the suggestive if
not logical appellation of Semi-Saxon.
Although the written remains of the transition stage are few, sufficient
exist to enable us to trace the course of linguistic change in some of
the dialects. Within three generations after the Conquest, faithful pens
were at work transliterating the old homilies of Ælfric, and other
lights of the Anglo-Saxon Church, into the current idiom of their
posterity.[11] Twice during the period, in the reigns of Stephen and
Henry II., Ælfric's gospels were similarly modernized so as to be
"understanded of the people."[12] Homilies and other religious works of
the end of the 12th century[13] show us the change still further
advanced, and the language passing into Early Middle English in its
southern form. While these southern remains carry on in unbroken
sequence the history of the Old English of Alfred and Ælfric, the
history of the northern English is an entire blank from the 11th to the
13th century. The stubborn resistance of the north, and the terrible
retaliation inflicted by William, apparently effaced northern English
culture for centuries. If anything was written in the vernacular in the
kingdom of Scotland during the same period, it probably perished during
the calamities to which that country was subjected during the
half-century of struggle for independence. In reality, however, the
northern English had entered upon its transition stage two centuries
earlier; the glosses of the 10th century show that the Danish inroads
had there anticipated the results hastened by the Norman Conquest in the
south.
Meanwhile a dialect was making its appearance in another quarter of
England, destined to overshadow the old literary dialects of north and
south alike, and become the English of the future. The Mercian kingdom,
which, as its name imports, lay along the _marches_ of the earlier
states, and was really a congeries of the outlying members of many
tribes, must have presented from the beginning a linguistic mixture and
transition; and it is evident that more than one intermediate form of
speech arose within its confines, between Lancashire and the Thames. The
specimens of early Mercian now in existence consist mainly of glosses,
in a mixed Mercian and southern dialect, dating from the 8th century;
but, in a 9th-century gloss, the so-called Vespasian Psalter,
representing what is generally held to be pure Mercian. Towards the
close of the Old English period we find some portions of a gloss to the
Rushworth Gospels, namely St Matthew and a few verses of St John xviii.,
to be in Mercian. These glosses, with a few charters and one or two
small fragments, represent a form of Anglian which in many respects
stands midway between Northumbrian and Kentish, approaching the one or
the other more nearly as we have to do with North Mercian or South
Mercian. And soon after the Conquest we find an undoubted midland
dialect in the transition stage from Old to Middle English, in the
eastern part of ancient Mercia, in a district bounded on the south and
south-east by the Saxon Middlesex and Essex, and on the east and north
by the East Anglian Norfolk and Suffolk and the Danish settlements on
the Trent and Humber. In this district, and in the monastery of
Peterborough, one of the copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
transcribed about 1120, was continued by two succeeding hands to the
death of Stephen in 1154. The section from 1122 to 1131, probably
written in the latter year, shows a notable confusion between Old
English forms and those of a Middle English, impatient to rid itself of
the inflectional trammels which were still, though in weakened forms, so
faithfully retained south of the Thames. And in the concluding section,
containing the annals from 1132 to 1154, and written somewhere about the
latter year, we find Middle English fairly started on its career. A
specimen of this new tongue will best show the change that had taken
place:
1140 A.D.--_And_[14] te eorl of Angæu wærd ded, and his sune Henri toc
to þe rice. And te cuen of France to-dælde fra þe king, and scæ co_m_
to þe iunge eorl Henri. _and_ he toc hire to wiue, _and_ al Peitou mid
hire. þa ferde he mid micel færd into Engleland _and_ wan
castles--_and_ te king ferde agenes hi_m_ mid micel mare ferd.
þoþwæthere fuhtten hi noht. oc ferden þe ærceb_iscop and_ te wise men
betwux heo_m_, and makede _that_ sahte _that_ te king sculde ben
lauerd _and_ king wile he liuede. _and_ æft_er_ his dæi ware Henri
king. _and_ he helde hi_m_ for fader, _and_ he hi_m_ for sune, _and_
sib and sæhte sculde ben betwyx heo_m_, and on al Engleland.[15]
With this may be contrasted a specimen of southern English, from 10 to
20 years later (Hatton Gospels, Luke i. 46[16]):
Da cwæð Maria: Min saule mersed drihten, and min gast geblissode on
gode minen hælende. For þam þe he geseah his þinene eadmodnysse.
Soðlice henen-forð me eadige seggeð alle cneornesse; for þam þe me
mychele þing dyde se þe mihtyg ys; _and_ his name is halig. _And_ his
mildheortnysse of cneornisse on cneornesse hine ondraedende. He worhte
maegne on hys earme; he to-daelde þa ofermode, on moda heora heortan.
He warp þa rice of setlle, and þa eadmode he up-an-hof. Hyngriende he
mid gode ge-felde, _and_ þa ofermode ydele for-let. He afeng israel
his cniht, and gemynde his mildheortnysse; Swa he spræc to ure
fæderen, Abrahame _and_ his sæde on a weorlde.
To a still later date, apparently close upon 1200, belongs the versified
chronicle of Layamon or Laweman, a priest of Ernely on the Severn, who,
using as his basis the French _Brut_ of Wace, expanded it by additions
from other sources to more than twice the extent: his work of 32,250
lines is a mine of illustration for the language of his time and
locality. The latter was intermediate between midland and southern, and
the language, though forty years later than the specimen from the
Chronicle, is much more archaic in structure, and can scarcely be
considered even as Early Middle English. The following is a specimen
(lines 9064-9079):
On Kinbelines daeie ... þe king wes inne Bruttene, com a þissen middel
aerde ... anes maidenes sune, iboren wes in Beþleem ... of bezste alre
burden. He is ihaten Jesu Crist ... þurh þene halie gost, alre worulde
wunne ... walden englenne; faeder he is on heuenen ... froure
moncunnes; sune he is on eorðen ... of sele þon maeidene, & þene halie
gost ... haldeð mid him seoluen.
The MIDDLE ENGLISH was pre-eminently the _Dialectal_ period of the
language. It was not till after the middle of the 14th century that
English obtained official recognition. For three centuries, therefore,
there was no standard form of speech which claimed any pre-eminence over
the others. The writers of each district wrote in the dialect familiar
to them; and between extreme forms the difference was so great as to
amount to unintelligibility; works written for southern Englishmen had
to be translated for the benefit of the men of the north:--
"In sotherin Inglis was it drawin,
And turnid ic haue it till ur awin
Langage of þe northin lede
That can na nothir Inglis rede."
_Cursor Mundi_, 20,064.
Three main dialects were distinguished by contemporary writers, as in
the often-quoted passage from Trevisa's translation of Higden's
_Polychronicon_ completed in 1387:--
"Also Englysche men ... hadde fram þe bygynnynge þre maner speche,
Souþeron, Norþeron _and_ Myddel speche (in þe myddel of þe lond) as hy
come of þre maner people of Germania.... Also of þe forseyde Saxon
tonge, þat ys deled a þre, and ys abyde scarslyche wiþ feaw
uplondysche men _and_ ys gret wondur, for men of þe est wiþ men of þe
west, as hyt were under þe same part of heyvene, acordeþ more in
sounynge of sþeche þan men of þe norþ wiþ men of þe souþ; þerfore hyt
ys þat Mercii, þat buþ men of myddel Engelond, as hyt were parteners
of þe endes, undurstondeþ betre þe syde longages Norþeron and
Souþeron, þan Norþern _and_ Souþern undurstondeþ oyþer oþer."
The modern study of these Middle English dialects, initiated by the
elder Richard Garnett, scientifically pursued by Dr Richard Morris, and
elaborated by many later scholars, both English and German, has shown
that they were readily distinguished by the conjugation of the present
tense of the verb, which in typical specimens was as follows:---
_Southern._
Ich singe. We singeþ.
Þou singest. [Gh]e singeþ.
He singeþ. Hy singeþ.
_Midland._
Ich, I, singe. We singen.
Þou singest. [Gh]e singen.
He singeþ. Hy, thei, singen.
_Northern._
Ic. I, sing(e) (I þat singes). We sing(e). We þat synges.
Þu singes. [Gh]e sing(e), [Gh]e foules synges.
He singes. Thay sing(e). Men synges.
Of these the southern is simply the old West-Saxon, with the vowels
levelled to _e_. The northern second person in _-es_ preserves an older
form than the southern and West-Saxon _-est_; but the _-es_ of the third
person and plural is derived from an older _-eth_, the change of _-th_
into _-s_ being found in progress in the Durham glosses of the 10th
century. In the plural, when accompanied by the pronoun subject, the
verb had already dropped the inflections entirely as in Modern English.
The origin of the _-en_ plural in the midland dialect, unknown to Old
English, is probably an instance of _form-levelling_, the inflection of
the present indicative being assimilated to that of the past, and the
present and past subjunctive, in all of which _-en_ was the plural
termination. In the declension of nouns, adjectives and pronouns, the
northern dialect had attained before the end of the 13th century to the
simplicity of Modern English, while the southern dialect still retained
a large number of inflections, and the midland a considerable number.
The dialects differed also in phonology, for while the northern
generally retained the hard or guttural values of _k_, _g_, _sc_, these
were in the two other dialects palatalized before front vowels into
_ch_, _j_ and _sh_. _Kirk_, _chirche_ or _church_, _bryg_, _bridge_;
_scryke_, _shriek_, are examples. Old English _hw_ was written in the
north _qu_(h), but elsewhere _wh_, often sinking into _w_. The original
long _á_ in _stán_, _már_, preserved in the northern _stane_, _mare_,
became _o_ elsewhere, as in _stone_, _more_. So that the north presented
a general aspect of conservation of old sounds with the most
thorough-going dissolution of old inflections; the south, a tenacious
retention of the inflections, with an extensive evolution in the sounds.
In one important respect, however, phonetic decay was far ahead in the
north: the final e to which all the old vowels had been levelled during
the transition stage, and which is a distinguishing feature of Middle
English in the midland and southern dialects, became mute, _i.e._,
disappeared, in the northern dialect before that dialect emerged from
its three centuries of obscuration, shortly before 1300. So thoroughly
modern had its form consequently become that we might almost call it
Modern English, and say that the Middle English stage of the northern
dialect is lost. For comparison with the other dialects, however, the
same nomenclature may be used, and we may class as Middle English the
extensive literature which northern England produced during the 14th
century. The earliest specimen is probably the Metrical Psalter in the
Cotton Library,[17] copied during the reign of Edward II. from an
original of the previous century. The gigantic versified paraphrase of
Scripture history called the _Cursor Mundi_,[18] is held also to have
been composed before 1300. The dates of the numerous alliterative
romances in this dialect have not been determined with exactness, as all
survive in later copies, but it is probable that some of them were
written before 1300. In the 14th century appeared the theological and
devotional works of Richard Rolle the anchorite of Hampole, Dan Jon
Gaytrigg, William of Nassington, and other writers whose names are
unknown; and towards the close of the century, specimens of the language
also appear from Scotland both in official documents and in the poetical
works of John Barbour, whose language, barring minute points of
orthography, is identical with that of the contemporary northern English
writers. From 1400 onward, the distinction between northern English and
Lowland Scottish becomes clearly marked.
In the southern dialect one version of the work called the _Ancren
Riwle_ or "Rule of Nuns," adapted about 1225 for a small sisterhood at
Tarrant-Kaines, in Dorsetshire, exhibits a dialectal characteristic
which had probably long prevailed in the south, though concealed by the
spelling, in the use of _v_ for _f_, as _valle_ fall, _vordonne_ fordo,
_vorto_ for to, _veder_ father, _vrom_ from. Not till later do we find a
recognition of the parallel use of _z_ for _s_. Among the writings which
succeed, _The Owl and the Nightingale_ of Nicholas de Guildford, of
Portesham in Dorsetshire, before 1250, the _Chronicle_ of Robert of
Gloucester, 1298, and Trevisa's translation of Higden, 1387, are of
special importance in illustrating the history of southern English. The
earliest form of Langland's _Piers Ploughman_, 1362, as preserved in the
Vernon MS., appears to be in an intermediate dialect between southern
and midland.[19] The Kentish form of southern English seems to have
retained specially archaic features; five short sermons in it of the
middle of the 13th century were edited by Dr Morris (1866); but the
great work illustrating it is the _Ayenbite of Inwyt_ (Remorse of
Conscience), 1340,[20] a translation from the French by Dan Michel of
Northgate, Kent, who tells us--
"Þet þis boc is y-write mid engliss of Kent;
Þis boc is y-mad uor lewede men,
Vor uader, and uor moder, and uor oþer ken,
Ham uor to ber[gh]e uram alle manyere zen,
Þet ine hare inwytte ne bleue no uoul wen."
In its use of _v_ (_u_) and _z_ for [s] and _s_, and its grammatical
inflections, it presents an extreme type of southern speech, with
peculiarities specially Kentish; and in comparison with contemporary
Midland English works, it looks like a fossil of two centuries earlier.
Turning from the dialectal extremes of the Middle English to the midland
speech, which we left at the closing leaves of the Peterborough
_Chronicle_ of 1154, we find a rapid development of this dialect, which
was before long to become the national literary language. In this, the
first great work is the _Ormulum_, or metrical Scripture paraphrase of
Orm or Ormin, written about 1200, somewhere near the northern frontier
of the midland area. The dialect has a decided smack of the north, and
shows for the first time in English literature a large percentage of
Scandinavian words, derived from the Danish settlers, who, in adopting
English, had preserved a vast number of their ancestral forms of speech,
which were in time to pass into the common language, of which they now
constitute some of the most familiar words. _Blunt_, _bull_, _die_,
_dwell_, _ill_, _kid_, _raise_, _same_, _thrive_, _wand_, _wing_, are
words from this source, which appear first in the work of Orm, of which
the following lines may be quoted:--
"Þe Judewisshe folkess boc
hemm se[gh][gh]de, þatt hemm birrde
Twa bukkes samenn to þe preost
att kirrke-dure brinngenn;
_And_ te[gh][gh] þa didenn bliþeli[gh],
swa summ þe boc hemm tahhte,
And brohhtenn twe[gh][gh]enn bukkess þær
Drihhtin þærwiþþ to lakenn.
And att[21] te kirrke-dure toc
þe preost ta twe[gh][gh]enn bukkess,
_And_ o þatt an he le[gh][gh]de þær
all þe[gh][gh]re sake _and_ sinne,
_And_ lét itt eornenn for þwiþþ all
út inntill wilde wesste;
_And_ toc _and_ snaþ þatt oþerr bucc
Drihhtin þaerwiþþ to lakenn.
All þiss wass don forr here ned,
_and_ ec forr ure nede;
For hemm itt hallp biforenn Godd
to clennssenn hemm of sinne;
_And_ all swa ma[gh][gh] itt hellpenn þe
[gh]iff þatt tu willt [itt] foll[gh]henn.
[Gh]iff þatt tu willt full innwarrdli[gh]
wiþþ fulle trowwþe lefenn
All þatt tatt wass bitacnedd tær,
to lefenn _and_ to trowwenn."
_Ormulum_, ed. White, l. 1324.
The author of the _Ormulum_ was a phonetist, and employed a special
spelling of his own to represent not only the quality but the
_quantities_ of vowels and consonants--a circumstance which gives his
work a peculiar value to the investigator. He is generally assumed to
have been a native of Lincolnshire or Notts, but the point is a disputed
one, and there is somewhat to be said for the neighbourhood of Ormskirk
in Lancashire.
It is customary to differentiate between east and west midland, and to
subdivide these again into north and south. As was natural in a tract of
country which stretched from Lancaster to Essex, a very considerable
variety is found in the documents which agree in presenting the leading
midland features, those of Lancashire and Lincolnshire approaching the
northern dialect both in vocabulary, phonetic character and greater
neglect of inflections. But this diversity diminishes as we advance.
Thirty years after the _Ormulum_, the east midland rhymed _Story of
Genesis and Exodus_[22] shows us the dialect in a more southern form,
with the vowels of modern English, and from about the same date, with
rather more northern characteristics, we have an east midland
_Bestiary_.
Different tests and different dates have been proposed for subdividing
the Middle English period, but the most important is that of Henry
Nicol, based on the observation that in the early 13th century, as in
Ormin, the Old English short vowels in an open syllable still retained
their short quantity, as _nama_, _over_, _mete_; but by 1250 or 1260
they had been lengthened to _na-me_, _o-ver_, _me-te_, a change which
has also taken place at a particular period in all the Germanic, and
even the Romanic languages, as in _buo-no_ for _bo-num_, _pa-dre_ for
_pa-trem_, &c. The lengthening of the penult left the final syllable by
contrast shortened or weakened, and paved the way for the disappearance
of final e in the century following, through the stages _na-me_,
_na-me_, _na-m'_, _nam_, the one long syllable in _nam(e)_ being the
quantitative equivalent of the two short syllables in _na-me_; hence the
notion that mute _e_ makes a preceding vowel long, the truth being that
the lengthening of the vowel led to the e becoming mute.
After 1250 we have the _Lay of Havelok_, and about 1300 the writings of
Robert of Brunne in South Lincolnshire. In the 14th century we find a
number of texts belonging to the western part of the district.
South-west midland is hardly to be distinguished from southern in its
south-western form, and hence texts like _Piers Plowman_ elude any
satisfactory classification, but several metrical romances exhibit what
are generally considered to be west midland characteristics, and a
little group of poems, _Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knighte_, the _Pearl_,
_Cleanness_ and _Patience_, thought to be the work of a north-west
midland writer of the 14th century, bear a striking resemblance to the
modern Lancashire dialect. The end of the century witnessed the prose of
Wycliff and Mandeville, and the poetry of Chaucer, with whom Middle
English may be said to have culminated, and in whose writings its main
characteristics as distinct from Old and Modern English may be studied.
Thus, we find final e in full use representing numerous original vowels
and terminations as
Him thoughtè that his hertè woldè brekè,
in Old English--
Him þuhte þæt his heorte wolde brecan,
which may be compared with the modern German--
Ihm däuchte dass sein Herze wollte brechen.
In nouns the -_es_ of the plural and genitive case is still syllabic--
Reede as the berstl-es of a sow-es eer-es.
Several old genitives and plural forms continued to exist, and the
dative or prepositional case has usually a final _e_. Adjectives retain
so much of the old declension as to have -_e_ in the definite form and
in the plural--
The tend-re cropp-es and the yong-e sonne.
And smal-e fowl-es maken melodie.
Numerous old forms of comparison were in use, which have not come down
to Modern English, as _herre_, _ferre_, _lenger_, _hext_ = higher,
farther, longer, highest. In the pronouns, _ich_ lingered alongside of
_I_; _ye_ was only nominative, and _you_ objective; the northern _thei_
had dispossessed the southern _hy_, but _her_ and _hem_ (the modern
'_em_) stood their ground against _their_ and _them_. The verb is _I
lov-e_, _thou lov-est_, _he lov-eth_; but, in the plural, _lov-en_ is
interchanged with _lov-e_, as rhyme or euphony requires. So in the
plural of the past _we love-den_ or _love-de_. The infinitive also ends
in _en_, often _e_, always syllabic. The present participle, in Old
English -_ende_, passing through -_inde_, has been confounded with the
verbal noun in -_ynge_, -_yng_, as in Modern English. The past
participle largely retains the prefix _y_- or _i_-, representing the Old
English _ge_-, as in _i-ronne_, _y-don_, Old English _zerunnen_,
_zedón_, run, done. Many old verb forms still continued in existence.
The adoption of French words, not only those of Norman introduction, but
those subsequently introduced under the Angevin kings, to supply
obsolete and obsolescent English ones, which had kept pace with the
growth of literature since the beginning of the Middle English period,
had now reached its climax; later times added many more, but they also
dropped some that were in regular use with Chaucer and his
contemporaries.
Chaucer's great contemporary, William Langland, in his _Vision of
William concerning Piers the Ploughman_, and his imitator the author of
_Pierce the Ploughman's Crede_ (about 1400) used the Old English
alliterative versification for the last time in the south. Rhyme had
made its appearance in the language shortly after the Conquest--if not
already known before; and in the south and midlands it became decidedly
more popular than alliteration; the latter retained its hold much longer
in the north, where it was written even after 1500: many of the northern
romances are either simply alliterative, or have both alliteration and
rhyme. To these characteristics of northern and southern verse
respectively Chaucer alludes in the prologue of the "Persone," who, when
called upon for his tale said:--
"But trusteth wel; I am a sotherne man,
I cannot geste _rom_, _ram_, _ruf_, by my letter.
And, God wote, rime hold I but litel better:
And therefore, if you list, I wol not glose,
I wol you tell a litel tale in prose."
The changes from Old to Middle English may be summed up thus: Loss of a
large part of the native vocabulary, and adoption of French words to
fill their place; not infrequent adoption of French words as synonyms of
existing native ones; modernization of the English words preserved, by
vowel change in a definite direction from back to front, and from open
to close, _[=a,]_ becoming _[=o,]_, original _e_, _o_ tending to _ee_,
_oo_, monophthongization of the old diphthongs _eo_, _ea_, and
development of new diphthongs in connexion with _g_, _h_, and _w_;
adoption of French orthographic symbols, e.g. _ou_ for _u_, _qu_,
_v_, _ch_, and gradual loss of the symbols [j], þ, ð, Þ; obscuration of
vowels after the accent, and especially of final _a_, _o_, _u_ to _e_;
consequent confusion and loss of old inflections, and their replacement
by prepositions, auxiliary verbs and rules of position; abandonment of
alliteration for rhyme; and great development of dialects, in
consequence of there being no standard or recognized type of English.
But the recognition came at length. Already in 1258 was issued the
celebrated English proclamation of Henry III., or rather of Simon de
Montfort in his name, which, as the only public recognition of the
native tongue between William the Conqueror and Edward III., has
sometimes been spoken of as the first specimen of English. It runs:--
"Henr_i_ þur[gh] godes fultume king on Engleneloande Lhoauerd on
Yrloand_e_. Duk on Norm_andie_ on Aquitaine and eorl on Aniow. Send
igretinge to alle hise holde ilærde and ileawede on
Huntendoneschir_e_. þæt witen [gh]e wel alle þæt _we_ willen and
vnne_n_ þæt þæt vre rædesmen alle oþer þe moare dæl of heom þæt beoþ
ichosen þur[gh] us and þur[gh] þæt loandes folk on vre kuneriche.
habbeþ idon and schullen don in þe worþnesse of gode and on vre
treowþe. for þe freme of þe loande. þur[gh] þe besi[gh]te of þan
to-foren-iseide redesmen. beo stedefæst and ilestinde in alle þinge a
buten ænde. And we hoaten alle vre treowe in þe treowþe þæt heo vs
o[gh]en. þæt heo stedefæstliche healden and swerien to healden and to
werien þo isetnesses þæt ben imakede and beon to makien þur[gh] þan
to-foren iseide rædesmen. oþer þur[gh] þe moare dæl of heom alswo alse
hit is biforen iseid. And þæt æhc oþer helpe þæt for to done bi þan
ilche oþe a[gh]enes alle men. Ri[gh]t for to done and to foangen. And
noan ne nime of loande ne of e[gh]te. wherþur[gh] þis besi[gh]te
mu[gh]e beon ilet oþer iwersed on onie wise.' And [gh]if oni oþer onie
cumen her on[gh]enes; we willen and hoaten þæt alle vre treowe heom
healden deadliche ifoan. And for þæt we willen þæt þis beo stedefæst
and lestinde; we senden [gh]ew þis writ open iseined wiþ vre seel. to
halden amanges [gh]ew ine hord. Witnesse vs seluen æt Lunden_e_. þane
E[gh]tetenþe day. on þe Monþe of Octobr_e_ In þe Two-and-fowerti[gh]þe
[gh]eare of vre cruninge. And þis wes idon ætforen vre isworene
redesmen....
"And al on þo ilche worden is isend in to æurihce oþre shcire ouer al
þære kuneriche on Engleneloande. and ek in tel Irelonde."
The dialect of this document is more southern than anything else, with a
slight midland admixture. It is much more archaic inflectionally than
the _Genesis and Exodus_ or _Ormulum_; but it closely resembles the old
Kentish sermons and _Proverbs of Alfred_ in the southern dialect of
1250. It represents no doubt the London speech of the day. London being
in a Saxon county, and contiguous to Kent and Surrey, had certainly at
first a southern dialect; but its position as the capital, as well as
its proximity to the midland district, made its dialect more and more
midland. Contemporary London documents show that Chaucer's language,
which is distinctly more southern than standard English eventually
became, is behind the London dialect of the day in this respect, and is
at once more archaic and consequently more southern.
During the next hundred years English gained ground steadily, and by the
reign of Edward III. French was so little known in England, even in the
families of the great, that about 1350 "John Cornwal, a maystere of
gramere, chaungede þe lore (= teaching) in gramere scole _and_
construccion of [i.e. _from_] Freynsch into Englysch";[23] and in
1362-1363 English by statute took the place of French in the pleadings
in courts of law. Every reason conspired that this "English" should be
the midland dialect. It was the intermediate dialect, intelligible, as
Trevisa has told us, to both extremes, even when these failed to be
intelligible to each other; in its south-eastern form, it was the
language of London, where the supreme law courts were, the centre of
political and commercial life; it was the language in which the
Wycliffite versions had given the Holy Scriptures to the people; the
language in which Chaucer had raised English poetry to a height of
excellence admired and imitated by contemporaries and followers. And
accordingly after the end of the 14th century, all Englishmen who
thought they had anything to say to their countrymen generally said it
in the midland speech. Trevisa's own work was almost the last literary
effort of the southern dialect; henceforth it was but a rustic patois,
which the dramatist might use to give local colouring to his creations,
as Shakespeare uses it to complete Edgar's peasant disguise in _Lear_,
or which 19th century research might disinter to illustrate obscure
chapters in the history of language. And though the northern English
proved a little more stubborn, it disappeared also from literature in
England; but in Scotland, which had now become politically and socially
estranged from England, it continued its course as the national language
of the country, attaining in the 15th and 16th centuries a distinct
development and high literary culture, for the details of which readers
are referred to the article on SCOTTISH LANGUAGE.
The 15th century of English history, with its bloody French war abroad
and Wars of the Roses at home, was a barren period in literature, and a
transition one in language, witnessing the decay and disappearance of
the final _e_, and most of the syllabic inflections of Middle English.
Already by 1420, in Chaucer's disciple Hoccleve, final _e_ was quite
uncertain; in Lydgate it was practically gone. In 1450 the writings of
Pecock against the Wycliffites show the verbal inflections in _-en_ in a
state of obsolescence; he has still the southern pronouns _her_ and
_hem_ for the northern _their_, _them_:--
"And here-a[gh]ens holi scripture wole þat men schulden lacke þe
coueryng which wommen schulden haue, & thei schulden so lacke bi þat
þe heeris of her heedis schulden be schorne, & schulde not growe in
lengþe doun as wommanys heer schulde growe....
"Also here-wiþal into þe open si[gh]t of ymagis in open chirchis, alle
peple, men & wommen & children mowe come whanne euere þei wolen in ech
tyme of þe day, but so mowe þei not come in-to þe vce of bokis to be
delyuered to hem neiþer to be red bifore hem; & þerfore, as for to
soone & ofte come into remembraunce of a long mater bi ech oon
persoon, and also as forto make þat þe mo persoones come into
remembraunce of a mater, ymagis & picturis serven in a specialer maner
þan bokis doon, þou[gh] in an oþer maner ful substanciali bokis seruen
better into remembrauncing of þo same materis þan ymagis & picturis
doon; & þerfore, þou[gh] writing is seruen weel into remembrauncing
upon þe bifore seid þingis, [gh]it not at þe ful: Forwhi þe bokis han
not þe avail of remembrauncing now seid whiche ymagis han."[24]
The change of the language during the second period of Transition, as
well as the extent of dialectal differences, is quaintly expressed a
generation later by Caxton, who in the prologue to one of the last of
his works, his translation of Virgil's _Eneydos_ (1490), speaks of the
difficulty he had in pleasing all readers:--
"I doubted that it sholde not please some gentylmen, whiche late
blamed me, sayeng, y^t in my translacyons I had ouer curyous termes,
whiche coud not be vnderstande of comyn peple, and desired me to vse
olde and homely termes in my translacyons. And fayn wolde I satysfy
euery man; and so to doo, toke an olde boke and redde therein; and
certaynly the englysshe was so rude and brood that I coude not wele
vnderstande it. And also my lorde abbot of Westmynster ded do shewe to
me late certayn euydences wryton in olde englysshe for to reduce it in
to our englysshe now vsid. And certaynly it was wreton in suche wyse
that it was more lyke to dutche than englysshe; I coude not reduce ne
brynge it to be vnderstonden. And certaynly, our langage now vsed
varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was borne.
For we englysshemen ben borne vnder the domynacyon of the mone, whiche
is neuer stedfaste, but euer wauerynge, wexynge one season, and waneth
and dycreaseth another season. And that comyn englysshe that is spoken
in one shyre varyeth from a nother. In so much that in my days
happened that certayn marchauntes were in a ship_e_ in tamyse, for to
haue sayled ouer the sea into zelande, and for lacke of wynde thei
taryed atte forlond, and wente to lande for to refreshe them. And one
of theym named sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows and axed for
mete, and specyally he axyd after eggys, And the goode wyf answerde,
that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he
also coulde speke no frenshe, but wolde haue hadde egges; and she
vnderstode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde
haue eyren; then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel. Loo!
what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren? certaynly,
it is harde to playse euery man, by cause of dyuersite & chaunge of
langage. For in these dayes, euery man that is in ony reputacyon in
his countre wyll vtter his comynycacyon and maters in suche maners &
termes that fewe men shall vnderstonde theym. And som honest and grete
clerkes haue ben wyth me, and desired me to wryte the moste curyous
termes that I coude fynde. And thus bytwene playn, rude and curyous, I
stande abasshed; but in my Iudgemente, the comyn termes that be dayli
vsed ben lyghter to be vnderstonde than the olde and auncyent
englysshe."
In the productions of Caxton's press we see the passage from Middle to
Early Modern English completed. The earlier of these have still an
occasional verbal plural in _-n_, especially in the word _they ben_; the
southern _her_ and _hem_ of Middle English vary with the northern and
Modern English _their_, _them_. In the late works, the older forms have
been practically ousted, and the year 1485, which witnessed the
establishment of the Tudor dynasty, may be conveniently put as that
which closed the Middle English transition, and introduced Modern
English. Both in the completion of this result, and in its comparative
permanence, the printing press had an important share. By its exclusive
patronage of the midland speech, it raised it still higher above the
sister dialects, and secured its abiding victory. As books were
multiplied and found their way into every corner of the land, and the
art of reading became a more common acquirement, the man of
Northumberland or of Somersetshire had forced upon his attention the
book-English in which alone these were printed. This became in turn the
model for his own writings, and by-and-by, if he made any pretensions to
education, of his own speech. The written _form_ of the language also
tended to uniformity. In previous periods the scribe made his own
spelling with a primary aim at expressing his own speech, according to
the particular values attached by himself or his contemporaries to the
letters and combinations of the alphabet, though liable to disturbance
in the most common words and combinations by his ocular recollections of
the spelling of others. But after the introduction of printing, this
ocular recognition of words became ever more and more an aim; the book
addressed the mind directly through the eye, instead of circuitously
through eye and ear; and thus there was a continuous tendency for
written words and parts of words to be reduced to a single form, and
that the most usual, or through some accident the best known, but not
necessarily that which would have been chosen had the _ear_ been called
in as umpire. Modern English spelling, with its rigid uniformity as to
individual results and whimsical caprice as to principles, is the
creation of the printing-office, the victory which, after a century and
a half of struggle, mechanical convenience won over natural habits.
Besides eventually creating a uniformity in writing, the introduction of
printing made or at least ratified some important changes. The British
and Old English form of the Roman alphabet has already been referred to.
This at the Norman Conquest was superseded by an alphabet with the
French forms and values of the letters. Thus _k_ took the place of the
older _c_ before _e_ and _i_; _qu_ replaced _cw_; the Norman _w_ took
the place of the _wén_ (Þ), &c.; and hence it has often been said that
Middle English stands nearer to Old English in pronunciation, but to
Modern English in spelling. But there were certain sounds in English for
which Norman writing had no provision; and for these, in writing
English, the native characters were retained. Thus the Old English g
([g]), beside the sound in _go_, had a guttural sound as in German
ta_g_, Irish ma_gh_, and in certain positions a palatalized form of this
approaching _y_ as in _y_ou (if pronounced with aspiration _hy_ou or
_gh_you). These sounds continued to be written with the native form of
the letter as _bur[gh]_, _[gh]our_, while the French form was used for
the sounds in _go_, _age_,--one original letter being thus represented
by two. So for the sounds of _th_, especially the sound in _th_at, the
Old English _thorn_ (þ) continued to be used. But as these characters
were not used for French and Latin, their use even in English became
disturbed towards the 15th century, and when printing was introduced,
the founts, cast for continental languages, had no characters for them,
so that they were dropped entirely, being replaced, [gh] by _gh_, _yh_,
_y_, and _þ_ by _th_. This was a real loss to the English alphabet. In
the north it is curious that the printers tried to express the _forms_
rather than the powers of these letters, and consequently [gh] was
represented by _z_, the black letter form of which was confounded with
it, while the þ was expressed by _y_, which its MS. form had come to
approach or in some cases simulate. So in early Scotch books we find
_zellow_, _ze_, _yat_, _yem_ = _yellow_, _ye_, _that_, _them_; and in
Modern Scottish, such names as _Menzies_, _Dalziel_, _Cockenzie_, and
the word _gaberlunzie_, in which the _z_ stands for _y_.
MODERN ENGLISH thus dates from Caxton. The language had at length
reached the all but flectionless state which it now presents. A single
older verbal form, the southern _-eth_ of the third person singular,
continued to be the literary prose form throughout the 16th century, but
the northern form in _-s_ was intermixed with it in poetry (where it
saved a syllable), and must ere long, as we see from Shakespeare, have
taken its place in familiar speech. The fuller _an_, _none_, _mine_,
_thine_, in the early part of the 16th century at least, were used in
positions where their shortened forms _a_, _no_, _my_, _thy_ are now
found (_none other_, _mine own_ = _no other_, _my own_). But with such
minute exceptions, the accidence of the 16th century was the accidence
of the 19th. While, however, the older inflections had disappeared,
there was as yet no general agreement as to the mode of their
replacement. Hence the 16th century shows a syntactic licence and
freedom which distinguishes it strikingly from that of later times. The
language seems to be in a plastic, unformed state, and its writers, as
it were, experiment with it, bending it to constructions which now seem
indefensible. Old distinctions of case and mood have disappeared from
noun and verb, without custom having yet decided what prepositions or
auxiliary verbs shall most fittingly convey their meaning. The laxity of
word-order which was permitted in older states of the language by the
_formal_ expression of relations was often continued though the
inflections which expressed the relations had disappeared. Partial
analogy was followed in allowing forms to be identified in one case,
because, in another, such identification was accidentally produced, as
for instance the past participles of _write_ and _take_ were often made
_wrote_ and _took_, because the contracted participles of _bind_ and
_break_ were _bound_ and _broke_. Finally, because, in dropping
inflections, the former distinctions even between parts of speech had
disappeared, so that _iron_, e.g., was at once noun, adjective and verb,
_clean_, adjective, verb and adverb, it appeared as if any word whatever
might be used in any grammatical relation, where it conveyed the idea of
the speaker. Thus, as has been pointed out by Dr Abbott, "you can
_happy_ your friend, _malice_ or _foot_ your enemy, or _fall_ an axe on
his neck. You can speak and act _easy_, _free_, _excellent_, you can
talk of _fair_ instead of beauty (fairness), and a _pale_ instead of a
_paleness_. A _he_ is used for a man, and a lady is described by a
gentleman as 'the fairest _she_ he has yet beheld.' An adverb can be
used as a verb, as 'they _askance_ their eyes'; as a noun, 'the
_backward_ and abyss of time'; or as an adjective, a '_seldom_
pleasure.'"[25] For, as he also says, "clearness was preferred to
grammatical correctness, and brevity both to correctness and clearness.
Hence it was common to place words in the order in which they came
uppermost in the mind without much regard to syntax, and the result was
a forcible and perfectly unambiguous but ungrammatical sentence, such as
The prince that feeds great natures they will slay him.
_Ben Jonson._
or, as instances of brevity,
Be guilty of my death since of my crime.
_Shakespeare._
It cost more to get than to lose in a day.
_Ben Jonson._"
These characteristics, together with the presence of words now obsolete
or archaic, and the use of existing words in senses different from our
own, as general for specific, literal for metaphorical, and vice versa,
which are so apparent to every reader of the 16th-century literature,
make it useful to separate _Early Modern_ or _Tudor_ English from the
subsequent and still existing stage, since the consensus of usage has
declared in favour of individual senses and constructions which are
alone admissible in ordinary language.
The beginning of the Tudor period was contemporaneous with the
Renaissance in art and literature, and the dawn of modern discoveries in
geography and science. The revival of the study of the classical writers
of Greece and Rome, and the translation of their works into the
vernacular, led to the introduction of an immense number of new words
derived from these languages, either to express new ideas and objects or
to indicate new distinctions in or grouping of old ideas. Often also it
seemed as if scholars were so pervaded with the form as well as the
spirit of the old, that it came more natural to them to express
themselves in words borrowed from the old than in their native tongue,
and thus words of Latin origin were introduced even when English already
possessed perfectly good equivalents. As has already been stated, the
French words of Norman and Angevin introduction, being principally Latin
words in an altered form, when used as English supplied models whereby
other Latin words could be converted into English ones, and it is after
these models that the Latin words introduced during and since the 16th
century have been fashioned. There is nothing in the _form_ of the words
_procession_ and _progression_ to show that the one was used in England
in the 11th, the other not till the 16th century. Moreover, as the
formation of new words from Latin had gone on in French as well as in
English since the Renaissance, we often cannot tell whether such words,
e.g. as _persuade_ and _persuasion_, were borrowed from their French
equivalents or formed from Latin in England independently. With some
words indeed it is impossible to say whether they were formed in England
directly from Latin, borrowed from contemporary late French, or had been
in England since the Norman period, even _photograph_, _geology_ and
_telephone_ have the form that they would have had if they had been
living words in the mouths of Greeks, Latins, French and English from
the beginning, instead of formations of the 19th century.[26] While
every writer was thus introducing new words according to his notion of
their being needed, it naturally happened that a large number were not
accepted by contemporaries or posterity; a long list might be formed of
these mintages of the 16th and 17th centuries, which either never became
current coin, or circulated only as it were for a moment. The revived
study of Latin and Greek also led to modifications in the spelling of
some words which had entered Middle English in the French form. So
Middle English _doute_, _dette_, were changed to _doubt_, _debt_, to
show a more immediate connexion with Latin _dubitum_, _debitum_; the
actual derivation from the French being ignored. Similarly, words
containing a Latin and French _t_, which might be traced back to an
original Greek [theta], were remodelled upon the Greek, e.g. _theme_,
_throne_, for Middle English _teme_, _trone_, and, by false association
with Greek, _anthem_, Old English _antefne_, Latin _antiphona_;
_Anthony_, Latin _Antonius_; _Thames_, Latin _Tamesis_, apparently after
_Thomas_.
The voyages of English navigators in the latter part of the 16th century
introduced a considerable number of Spanish words, and American words in
Spanish forms, of which _negro_, _potato_, _tobacco_, _cargo_,
_armadillo_, _alligator_, _galleon_ may serve as examples.
The date of 1611, which nearly coincides with the end of Shakespeare's
literary work, and marks the appearance of the Authorized Version of the
Bible (a compilation from the various 16th-century versions), may be
taken as marking the close of Tudor English. The language was
thenceforth Modern in structure, style and expression, although the
spelling did not settle down to present usage till about the revolution
of 1688. The latter date also marks the disappearance from literature of
a large number of words, chiefly of such as were derived from Latin
during the 16th and 17th centuries. Of these nearly all that survived
1688 are still in use; but a long list might be made out of those that
appear for the last time before that date. This sifting of the literary
vocabulary and gradual fixing of the literary spelling, which went on
between 1611, when the language became modern in structure, and 1689,
when it became modern also in form, suggests for this period the name of
Seventeenth-Century Transition. The distinctive features of Modern
English have already been anticipated by way of contrast with preceding
stages of the language. It is only necessary to refer to the fact that
the vocabulary is now much more composite than at any previous period.
The immense development of the physical sciences has called for a
corresponding extension of terminology which has been supplied from
Latin and especially Greek; and although these terms are in the first
instance _technical_, yet, with the spread of education and general
diffusion of the rudiments and appliances of science, the boundary line
between _technical_ and _general_, indefinite at the best, tends more
and more to melt away--this in addition to the fact that words still
technical become general in figurative or metonymic senses. _Ache_,
_diamond_, _stomach_, _comet_, _organ_, _tone_, _ball_, _carte_, are
none the less familiar because once technical words. Commercial, social,
artistic or literary contact has also led to the adoption of numerous
words from modern European languages, especially French, Italian,
Portuguese, Dutch (these two at a less recent period): thus from French
_soirée_, _séance_, _dépôt_, _débris_, _programme_, _prestige_; from
Italian _bust_, _canto_, _folio_, _cartoon_, _concert_, _regatta_,
_ruffian_; from Portuguese _caste_, _palaver_; from Dutch _yacht_,
_skipper_, _schooner_, _sloop_. Commercial intercourse and colonization
have extended far beyond Europe, and given us words more or fewer from
Hindostani, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Malay, Chinese, and from American,
Australian, Polynesian and African languages.[27] More important even
than these, perhaps, are the dialect words that from time to time obtain
literary recognition, restoring to us obsolete Old English forms, and
not seldom words of Celtic or Danish origin, which have been preserved
in local dialects, and thus at length find their way into the standard
language.
As to the actual proportion of the various elements of the language, it
is probable that original English words do not now form more than a
fourth or perhaps a fifth of the total entries in a full English
dictionary; and it may seem strange, therefore, that we still identify
the language with that of the 9th century, and class it as a member of
the _Low German_ division. But this explains itself, when we consider
that of the total words in a dictionary only a small portion are used by
any one individual in speaking or even in writing; that this portion
includes the great majority of the Anglo-Saxon words, and but a minority
of the others. The latter are in fact almost all _names_--the vast
majority names of _things_ (nouns), a smaller number names of
_attributes_ and _actions_ (adjectives and verbs), and, from their very
nature, names of the things, attributes and actions which come less
usually or, it may be, very rarely under our notice. Thus in an ordinary
book, a novel or story, the foreign elements will amount to from 10 to
15% of the whole; as the subject becomes more recondite or technical
their number will increase; till in a work on chemistry or abstruse
mathematics the proportion may be 40%. But after all, it is not the
question whence words _may_ have been taken, but _how they are used_ in
a language that settles its character. If new words when adopted conform
themselves to the manner and usage of the adopting language, it makes
absolutely no difference whether they are taken over from some other
language, or invented off at the ground. In either case they are _new_
words to begin with; in either case also, if they are needed, they will
become as thoroughly native, i.e. familiar from childhood to those who
use them, as those that possess the longest native pedigree. In this
respect English is still the same language it was in the days of Alfred;
and, comparing its history with that of other Low German tongues, there
is no reason to believe that its grammar or structure would have been
very different, however different its vocabulary might have been, if the
Norman Conquest had never taken place.
A general broad view of the sources of the English vocabulary and of the
dates at which the various foreign elements flowed into the language, as
well as of the great change produced in it by the Norman Conquest, and
consequent influx of French and Latin elements, is given in the
accompanying chart. The transverse lines represent centuries, and it
will be seen how limited a period after all is occupied by modern
English, how long the language had been in the country before the Norman
Conquest, and how much of this is prehistoric and without any literary
remains. Judging by what has happened during the historic period, great
changes may and indeed _must_ have taken place between the first arrival
of the Saxons and the days of King Alfred, when literature practically
begins. The chart also illustrates the continuity of the main stock of
the vocabulary, the body of primary "words of common life," which,
notwithstanding numerous losses and more numerous additions, has
preserved its corporate identity through all the periods. But the
"poetic and rhetorical," as well as the "scientific" terms of Old
English have died out, and a new vocabulary of "abstract and general
terms" has arisen from French, Latin and Greek, while a still newer
"technical, commercial and scientific" vocabulary is composed of words
not only from these, but from every civilized and many uncivilized
languages.
[Illustration]
The preceding sketch has had reference mainly to the grammatical changes
which the language has undergone; distinct from, though intimately
connected with these (as where the confusion or loss of inflections was
a consequence of the weakening of final sounds) are the great phonetic
changes which have taken place between the 8th and 19th centuries, and
which result in making modern English words very different from their
Anglo-Saxon originals, even where no element has been lost, as in words
like _stone_, _mine_, _doom_, _day_, _nail_, _child_, _bridge_,
_shoot_, Anglo-Saxon _stán_, _mín_, _dóm_, _dæg_, _nægel_, _cild_,
_brycg_, _scéot_. The history of English sounds (see PHONETICS) has been
treated at length by Dr A.J. Ellis and Dr Henry Sweet; and it is only
necessary here to indicate the broad facts, which are the following, (1)
In an accented closed syllable, original short vowels have remained
nearly unchanged; thus the words _at_, _men_, _bill_, _God_, _dust_ are
pronounced now nearly as in Old English, though the last two were more
like the Scotch _o_ and North English _u_ respectively, and in most
words the short _a_ had a broader sound like the provincial _a_ in
_man_. (2) Long accented vowels and diphthongs have undergone a regular
sound shift towards closer and more advanced positions, so that the
words _bán_, _hær_, _soece_ or _séce_, _stól_ (_bahn_ or _bawn_, _hêr_,
_sök_ or _saik_, _stole_) are now _bone_, _hair_, _seek_, _stool_; while
the two high vowels _ú_ (= _oo_) and _i_ (_ee_) have become diphthongs,
as _hús_, _scír_, now _house_, _shire_, though the old sound of _u_
remains in the north (_hoose_), and the original _i_ in the
pronunciation _sheer_, approved by Walker, "as in mach_i_ne, and
sh_i_re, and magaz_i_ne." (3) Short vowels in an open syllable have
usually been lengthened, as in _na-ma_, _co-fa_, now _name_, _cove_; but
to this there are exceptions, especially in the case of _i_ and _u_. (4)
Vowels in terminal unaccented syllables have all sunk into short obscure
_e_, and then, if final, disappeared; so _oxa_, _séo_, _wudu_ became
_ox-e_, _se-e_, _wud-e_, and then _ox_, _see_, _wood_; _oxan_, _lufod_,
now _oxen_, _loved_, _lov'd_; _settan_, _setton_, later _setten_,
_sette_, _sett_, now _set_. (5) The back consonants, _c_, _g_, _sc_, in
connexion with front vowels, have often become palatalized to _ch_, _j_,
_sh_, as _circe_, _rycg_, _fisc_, now _church_, _ridge_, _fish_. A
medial or final _g_ has passed through a guttural or palatal continuant
to _w_ or _y_, forming a diphthong or new vowel, as in _boga_, _laga_,
_dæg_, _heg_, _drig_, now _bow_, _law_, _day_, _hay_, _dry_. _W_ and _h_
have disappeared before _r_ and _l_, as in _write_, _(w)lisp_,
_(h)ring_; _h_ final (=_gh_) has become _f_, _k_, _w_ or nothing, but
has developed the glides _u_ or _i_ before itself, these combining with
the preceding vowel to form a diphthong, or merging with it into a
simple vowel-sound, as _ruh_, _hoh_, _boh_, _deah_, _heah_, _hleah_, now
_rough_, _hough_, _bough_, _dough_, _high_, _laugh=ruf_, _hok_, _bow_,
_do_, _hi_, _lâf_. _R_ after a vowel has practically disappeared in
standard English, or at most become vocalized, or combined with the
vowel, as in _hear_, _bar_, _more_, _her_. These and other changes have
taken place gradually, and in accordance with well-known phonetic laws;
the details as to time and mode may be studied in special works. It may
be mentioned that the total loss of grammatical _gender_ in English, and
the almost complete disappearance of _cases_, are purely phonetic
phenomena. _Gender_ (whatever its remote origin) was practically the use
of adjectives and pronouns with certain distinctive terminations, in
accordance with the _genus_, _genre_, _gender_ or _kind_ of nouns to
which they were attached; when these distinctive terminations were
uniformly levelled to final _e_, or other weak sounds, and thus ceased
to distinguish nouns into kinds, the distinctions into genders or kinds
having no other existence disappeared. Thus when _þæt godé hors_, _þone
godan hund_, _þa godan bóc_, became, by phonetic weakening, _þe gode
hors_, _þe gode hownd_, _þe gode boke_, and later still the _good
horse_, the _good hound_, the _good book_, the words _horse_, _hound_,
_book_ were no longer grammatically different kinds of nouns;
grammatical gender had ceased to exist. The concord of adjectives has
entirely disappeared; the concord of the pronouns is now regulated by
_rationality_ and _sex_, instead of grammatical gender, which has no
existence in English. The man _who_ lost _his_ life; the bird _which_
built _its_ nest.
Our remarks from the end of the 14th century have been confined to the
standard or literary form of English, for of the other dialects from
that date (with the exception of the northern English in Scotland,
where it became in a social and literary sense a distinct language), we
have little history. We know, however, that they continued to exist as
local and popular forms of speech, as well from occasional specimens and
from the fact that they exist still as from the statements of writers
during the interval. Thus Puttenham in his _Arte of English Poesie_
(1589) says:--
"Our maker [i.e. poet] therfore at these dayes shall not follow Piers
Plowman, nor Gower, nor Lydgate, not yet Chaucer, for their language
is now not of use with us: neither shall he take the termes of
Northern-men, such as they use in dayly talke, whether they be noble
men or gentle men or of their best clarkes, all is a [= one] matter;
nor in effect any speach used beyond the river of Trent, though no man
can deny but that theirs is the purer English Saxon at this day, yet
it is not so Courtly nor so currant as our _Southerne_ English is, no
more is the far Westerne mans speach: ye shall therefore take the
usual speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying
about London within lx myles, and not much above. I say not this but
that in every shyre of England there be gentlemen and others that
speake but specially write as good Southerne as we of Middlesex or
Surrey do, but not the common people of every shire, to whom the
gentlemen, and also their learned clarkes do for the most part
condescend, but herein we are already ruled by th' English
Dictionaries and other bookes written by learned men."--_Arber's
Reprint_, p. 157.
In comparatively modern times there has been a revival of interest in
these forms of English, several of which following in the wake of the
revival of Lowland Scots in the 18th and 19th centuries, have produced a
considerable literature in the form of local poems, tales and
"folk-lore." In these respects Cumberland, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Devon,
Somerset and Dorset, the "far north" and "far west" of Puttenham, where
the dialect was felt to be so independent of literary English as not to
be branded as a mere vulgar corruption of it, stand prominent. More
recently the dialects have been investigated philologically, a
department in which, as in other departments of English philology, the
elder Richard Garnett must be named as a pioneer. The work was carried
out zealously by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte and Dr A.J. Ellis, and
more recently by the English Dialect Society, founded by the Rev.
Professor Skeat, for the investigation of this branch of philology. The
efforts of this society resulted in the compilation and publication of
glossaries or word-books, more or less complete and trustworthy, of most
of the local dialects, and in the production of grammars dealing with
the phonology and grammatical features of a few of these, among which
that of the Windhill dialect in Yorkshire, by Professor Joseph Wright,
and that of West Somerset, by the late F.T. Elworthy, deserve special
mention. From the whole of the glossaries of the Dialect Society, and
from all the earlier dialect works of the 18th and 19th centuries,
amplified and illustrated by the contributions of local collaborators in
nearly every part of the British Isles, Professor Joseph Wright has
constructed his _English Dialect Dictionary_, recording the local words
and senses, with indication of their geographical range, their
pronunciation, and in most cases with illustrative quotations or
phrases. To this he has added an _English Dialect Grammar_, dealing very
fully with the phonology of the dialects, showing the various sounds
which now represent each Old English sound, and endeavouring to define
the area over which each modern form extends; the accidence is treated
more summarily, without going minutely into that of each dialect-group,
for which special dialect grammars must be consulted. The work has also
a very full and valuable index of every word and form treated.
The researches of Prince L.L. Bonaparte and Dr Ellis were directed
specially to the classification and mapping of the existing
dialects,[28] and the relation of these to the dialects of Old and
Middle English. They recognized a _Northern_ dialect lying north of a
line drawn from Morecambe Bay to the Humber, which, with the kindred
Scottish dialects (already investigated and classed),[29] is the direct
descendant of early northern English, and a _South-western_ dialect
occupying Somerset, Wilts, Dorset, Gloucester and western Hampshire,
which, with the _Devonian_ dialect beyond it, are the descendants of
early southern English and the still older West-Saxon of Alfred. This
dialect must in the 14th Century have been spoken everywhere south of
Thames; but the influence of London caused its extinction in Surrey,
Sussex and Kent, so that already in Puttenham it had become "far
western." An _East Midland_ dialect, extending from south Lincolnshire
to London, occupies the cradle-land of the standard English speech, and
still shows least variation from it. Between and around these typical
dialects are ten others, representing the old Midland proper, or
dialects between it and the others already mentioned. Thus "north of
Trent" the _North-western_ dialect of south Lancashire, Cheshire, Derby
and Stafford, with that of Shropshire, represents the early West Midland
English, of which several specimens remain; while the _North-eastern_ of
Nottingham and north Lincolnshire represents the dialect of the _Lay of
Havelok_. With the _North Midland_ dialect of south-west Yorkshire,
these represent forms of speech which to the modern Londoner, as to
Puttenham, are still decidedly northern, though actually intermediate
between northern proper and midland, and preserving interesting traces
of the midland pronouns and verbal inflections. There is an _Eastern_
dialect in the East Anglian counties; a _Midland_ in Leicester and
Warwick shires; a _Western_ in Hereford, Worcester and north
Gloucestershire, intermediate between south-western and north-western,
and representing the dialect of _Piers Plowman_. Finally, between the
east midland and south-western, in the counties of Buckingham, Oxford,
Berks, Hants, Surrey and Sussex, there is a dialect which must have once
been south-western, but of which the most salient characters have been
rubbed off by proximity to London and the East Midland speech. In east
Sussex and Kent this _South-eastern_ dialect attains to a more
distinctive character. The _Kentish_ form of early Southern English
evidently maintained its existence more toughly than that of the
counties immediately south of London. It was very distinct in the days
of Sir Thomas More; and even, as we see from the dialect attributed to
Edgar in _Lear_, was still strongly marked in the days of Shakespeare.
In the south-eastern corner of Ireland, in the baronies of Forth and
Bargy, in county Wexford, a very archaic form of English, of which
specimens have been preserved,[30] was still spoken in the 18th century.
In all probability it dated from the first English invasion. In many
parts of Ulster forms of Lowland Scotch dating to the settlement under
James I. are still spoken; but the English of Ireland generally seems to
represent 16th and 17th century English, as in the pronunciation of
_tea_, _wheat_ (_tay_, _whait_), largely affected, of course, by the
native Celtic. The subsequent work of the English Dialect Society, and
the facts set forth in the _English Dialect Dictionary_, confirm in a
general way the classification of Bonaparte and Ellis; but they bring
out strongly the fact that only in a few cases can the boundary between
dialects now be determined by precise lines. For every dialect there is
a central region, larger or smaller, in which its characteristics are at
a maximum; but towards the edges of the area these become mixed and
blended with the features of the contiguous dialects, so that it is
often impossible to define the point at which the one dialect ends and
the other begins. The fact is that the various features of a dialect,
whether its distinctive words, characteristic pronunciations or special
grammatical features, though they may have the same centre, have not all
the same circumference. Some of them extend to a certain distance round
the centre; others to a much greater distance. The only approximately
accurate way to map the area of any dialect, whether in England, France,
Germany or elsewhere, is to take a well-chosen set of its characteristic
features--words, senses, sounds or grammatical peculiarities, and draw a
line round the area over which each of these extends; between the
innermost and outermost of these there will often be a large border
district. If the same process be followed with the contiguous dialects,
it will be found that some of the lines of each intersect some of the
lines of the other, and that the passing of one dialect into another is
not effected by the formation of intermediate or blended forms of any
one characteristic, but by the overlapping or intersecting of more or
fewer of the features of each. Thus a definite border village or
district may use 10 of the 20 features of dialect A and 10 of those of
B, while a village on the one side has 12 of those of A with 8 of those
of B, and one on the other side has 7 of those of A with 13 of those of
B. Hence a dialect boundary line can at best indicate the line within
which the dialect has, on the whole, more of the features of A than of B
or C; and usually no single line can be drawn as a dialect boundary, but
that without it there are some features of the same dialect, and within
it some features of the contiguous dialects.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF THE PERIODS AND DIALECTS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
CHRONOLOGICAL NOMENCLATURE.
Divisions. Subdivisions. Dates
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
OLD ENGLISH
(Full Inflections.) EARLY OLD ENGLISH. 500-850
TYPICAL OLD ENGLISH, 850-1000
or ANGLO-SAXON.
LATE OLD ENGLISH 1000-1150
and OLD ENGLISH
TRANSITION.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MIDDLE ENGLISH.
(Levelled Inflections.)
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH. 1150-1250
MIDDLE ENGLISH (typical). 1250-1400
LATE MIDDLE ENGLISH
and MIDDLE ENGLISH
TRANSITION. 1400-1485
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MODERN ENGLISH.
(Lost Inflections.)
EARLY MODERN ENGLISH
(Tudor English). 1450-1611
TRANSITIONAL MODERN or
17TH CENTURY ENGLISH. 1611-1689
CURRENT ENGLISH. 1689-
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
LITERARY DEVELOPMENT OF THE LEADING DIALECTS.
Northern English. Midland English. Southern English.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Anglian. Anglian. Saxon. Kentish.
------- ------- ----- -------
Cædmon, 660. (Charter Glosses), 736-800. (Charter Glosses), 692-780. (Charter Glosses), 679-770.
Beda, 734. Beowulf(?) (Laws of Ine, 700) Charters_, 805-840.
Leiden Riddle_. Mercian. Literary West-Saxon Lorica Prayer.
Cynewulf, c. 750. ------- or Anglo-Saxon. Psalm 50, c. 860.
Old Northumbrian. (Charter Glosses), 805--. Charter, 847.
---------------- Vespasian Ps., c. 825. Alfred, 885.
Durham Glosses, 950-975. Charters, 836-840. Judith, 900-910.
Lindisfarne Gospel Gloss. Lorica Glosses. Poems in O.E. Chron., 937-979.
Rushworth Gloss, St. Battle of Maldon, 993.
Matthew, ? 975-1000. Ælfric, 1000.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Peterborough Chronicle Wulfstan, 1016.
1123-31. O.E. Chron., Parker MS.
ends, 1070.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Early Northern English Early Midland. Early Southern and Middle Kentish.
and Early Scotch. ------------- S.W. English --------------
---------------------- Chronicle, 1154. ------------------ Hatton Gospels, 1170.
Ormulum, 1200. Cotton Homilies, 1160. Kentish Sermons, 1250.
Genesis & Exodus, c. 1250. Layamon, 1203.
Middle English. Ancren Riwle, 1220.
-------------- --------------------------
Cursor Mundi (?). Harrowing of Hell, 1280. Shoreham, 1320.
Hampole, 1350. Robt. of Brunne, 1303-30. Procl. of Henry III., 1258. Ayenbite, 1340.
Barbour, 1375. Pearl, Sir Gawayne. Robt. Gloucester, 1300.
Mandeville (Northern Wycliffe. Trevisa, 1387.
version) Wyntoun, 1420. Chaucer, Gower.
Townley Mysteries. Lydgate.
Henryson, 1470. Caxton, 1477-90.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Middle Sccotch. Tudor English. South-Western Dialect. Kentish Dialect.
-------------- ------------- --------------------- ---------------
Dunbar, 1500--. Tyndal, 1525. Cornishman in A. Boorde, (in Sir. T. More.)
Lyndesay. Homilies, 1547-63. 1547. (Edgar in Lear, 1605.)
Archbp. Hamilton, 1552. Shakspere, 1590-1613. Gammer Gurton, 1575. (in Ben Jonson.)
James VI., 1590. King James's Bible, 1611. Somersetsh. Man's Complaynt, Kentish Wooing Song, 1611
Montgomery, c. 1600. Milton, 1626-71. c. 1645.
Sir W. Mure, 1617-57. Dryden, 1663-1700.
Yorkshire Dialogue, 1673.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Modern Scotch and Current English. Exmoor Scolding, 1746. Nairne, Kentish Tales,
North Eng. Dial. --------------- Barnes, 1844. 1700.
----------------- Addison, 1717. Elworthy, 1875-88. Dick and Sal, 1821.
Allan Ramsay, 1717. Johnson, 1750.
Burns, 1790. Coleridge, 1805.
Scott, 1815. Macaulay, 1825.
Ian Maclaren, Barrie, Tennyson, 1830.
Crockett, etc.
The vertical lines represent the four leading forms of
English--_Northern_, _Midland_, _Southern_, and _Kentish_--and the
names occurring down the course of each are those of writers and works
in that form of English at the given date. The thickness of the line
shows the comparative literary position of this form of speech at the
time: _thick_ indicating a _literary language_; _medium_, a _literary
dialect_; _thin_, a _popular dialect_ or _patois_; a _dotted_ line
shows that this period is _unrepresented_ by specimens. The horizontal
lines divide the periods; these (after the first two) refer mainly to
the Midland English; in inflectional decay the Northern English was at
least a century in advance of the Midland, and the Southern nearly as
much behind it.
Beyond the limits of the British Isles, English is the language of
extensive regions, now or formerly colonies. In all these countries the
presence of numerous new objects and new conditions of life has led to
the supplementing of the vocabulary by the adoption of words from native
languages, and special adaptation and extension of the sense of English
words. The use of a common literature, however, prevents the overgrowth
of these local peculiarities, and also makes them more or less familiar
to Englishmen at home. It is only in the older states of the American
Union that anything like a local dialect has been produced; and even
there many of the so-called Americanisms are quite as much archaic
English forms which have been lost or have become dialectal in England
as developments of the American soil.
The steps by which English, from being the language of a few thousand
invaders along the eastern and southern seaboard of Britain, has been
diffused by conquest and colonization over its present area form a
subject too large for the limits of this article. It need only be
remarked that within the confines of Britain itself the process is not
yet complete. Representatives of earlier languages survive in Wales and
the Scottish Highlands, though in neither case can the substitution of
English be very remote. In Ireland, where English was introduced by
conquest much later, Irish is still spoken in patches all over the
country; though English is understood, and probably spoken after a
fashion, almost everywhere. At opposite extremities of Britain, the
Cornish of Cornwall and the Norse dialects of Orkney and Shetland died
out very gradually in the course of the 18th century. The Manx, or
Celtic of Man, is even now in the last stage of dissolution; and in the
Channel Isles the Norman _patois_ of Jersey and Guernsey have largely
yielded to English.
The table on p. 599 (a revision of that brought before the Philological
Society in Jan. 1876) graphically presents the chronological and
dialectal development of English. Various names have been proposed for
the different stages; it seems only necessary to add to those in the
table the descriptive names of Dr Abbott, who has proposed (_How to
Parse_, p. 298) to call the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, the
"Synthetical or Inflexional Period"; the Old English Transition (Late
Anglo-Saxon of Dr Skeat), the "Period of Confusion"; the Early Middle
English, "Analytical Period" (1250-1350); the normal Middle English,
"National Period" (1350-1500); the Tudor English, "Period of Licence";
and the Modern English, "Period of Settlement."
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--As the study of English has made immense advances
within the last generation, it is only in works recently published
that the student will find the subject satisfactorily handled. Among
the earlier works treating of the whole subject or parts of it may be
mentioned--_A History of English Rhythms_, by Edwin Guest (London,
1838); the _Philological Essays_ of Richard Garnett (1835-1848),
edited by his son (London, 1859); _The English Language_, by R.G.
Latham (5th ed., London, 1862); _Origin and History of the English
Language_, by G.P. Marsh (revised 1885); _Lectures on the English
Language_, by the same (New York and London, 1863); _Historische
Grammatik der englischen Sprache_, by C.F. Koch (Weimar, 1863, &c.);
_Englische Grammatik_, by Eduard Mätzner (Berlin, 1860-1865), (an
English translation by C.J. Grece, LL.B., London, 1874); _The
Philology of the English Tongue_, by John Earle, M.A. (Oxford, 1866,
5th ed. 1892); _Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language_, by
F.A. March (New York, 1870); _Historical Outlines of English
Accidence_, by the Rev. R. Morris, LL.D. (London, 1873), (new ed. by
Kellner); _Elementary Lessons in Historical English Grammar_, by the
same (London, 1874); _The Sources of Standard English_, by T.L.
Kington Oliphant, M.A. (London, 1873); _Modern English_, by F. Hall
(London, 1873); _A Shakespearian Grammar_, by E.A. Abbott, D.D.
(London, 1872); _How to Parse_, by the same (London, 1875); _Early
English Pronunciation_, &c., by A.J. Ellis (London, 1869); _The
History of English Sounds_, by Henry Sweet (London, 1874, 2nd ed.
1888); as well as many separate papers by various authors in the
_Transactions of the Philological Society_, and the publications of
the Early English Text Society.
Among more recent works are: M. Kaluza, _Historische Grammatik der
englischen Sprache_ (Berlin, 1890); Professor W.W. Skeat, _Principles
of English Etymology_ (Oxford, 1887-1891); Johan Storm, _Englische
Philologie_ (Leipzig, 1892-1896); L. Kellner, _Historical Outlines of
English Syntax_ (London, 1892); O.F. Emerson, _History of the English
Language_ (London and New York, 1894); Otto Jespersen, _Progress in
Language_, with special reference to English (London, 1894); Lorenz
Morsbach, _Mittelenglische Grammatik_, part i. (Halle, 1896); Paul,
"Geschichte der englischen Sprache," in _Grundriss der german.
Philologie_ (Strassburg, 1898); Eduard Sievers, _Angelsächsische
Grammatik_ (3rd ed., Halle, 1898); Eng. transl. of same (2nd ed.), by
A.S. Cook (Boston, 1887); K.D. Bülbring, _Altenglisches Elementarbuch_
(Heidelberg, 1902); Greenough and Kittredge, _Words and their Ways in
English Speech_ (London and New York, 1902); Henry Bradley, _The
Making of English_ (London, 1904). Numerous contributions to the
subject have also been made in _Englische Studien_ (ed. Kölbing, later
Hoops; Leipzig, 1877 onward); _Anglia_ (ed. Wülker, Flügel, &c.;
Halle, 1878 onward); publications of Mod. Lang. Assoc. of America
(J.W. Bright; Baltimore, 1884 onward), and A.M. Elliott, _Modern
Language Notes_ (Baltimore, 1886 onward).
(J. A. H. M.; H. M. R. M.)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A careful examination of several letters of Bosworth's
Anglo-Saxon dictionary gives in 2000 words (including derivatives and
compounds, but excluding orthographic variants) 535 which still exist
as modern English words.
[2] The practical convenience of having one name for what was the
same thing in various stages of development is not affected by the
probability that (E.A. Freeman notwithstanding) _Engle_ and _Englisc_
were, at an early period, _not_ applied to the whole of the
inhabitants of Teutonic Britain, but only to a part of them. The
dialects of _Engle_ and _Seaxan_ were alike old forms of what was
afterwards English speech, and so, viewed in relation to it, _Old
English_, whatever their contemporary names might be.
[3] The works of Gildas in the original Latin were edited by Mr
Stevenson for the English Historical Society. There is an English
translation in _Six Old English Chronicles_ in Bohn's Antiquarian
library.
[4] As to the continued existence of Latin in Britain, see further in
Rhys's _Lectures on Welsh Philology_, pp. 226-227; also Dogatschar,
_Lautlehre d. gr., lat. u. roman. Lehnworte im Altengl._ (Strassburg,
1888).
[5] Æthelstan in 934 calls himself in a charter "Ongol-Saxna cyning
and Brytaenwalda eallaes thyses iglandes"; Eadred in 955 is
"Angul-seaxna cyning and cásere totius Britanniae," and the name is
of frequent occurrence in documents written in Latin. These facts
ought to be remembered in the interest of the scholars of the 17th
century, who have been blamed for the use of the term Anglo-Saxon, as
if they had invented it. By "Anglo-Saxon" language they meant the
language of the people who _sometimes at least_ called themselves
"Anglo-Saxons." Even now the name is practically useful, when we are
dealing with the subject _per se_, as is _Old English_, on the other
hand, when we are treating it historically or in connexion with
English as a whole.
[6] _Transactions of the Philological Society_ (_1873-1874_), p. 620;
new and much enlarged edition, 1888.
[7] See on this Rhys, _Lectures on Welsh Philology_, v.
[8] During the Old English period both _c_ and [g] appear to have
acquired a palatal value in conjunction with front or palatal
vowel-sounds, except in the north where _c_, and in some cases [g],
tended to remain guttural in such positions. This value was never
distinguished in Old English writing, but may be deduced from certain
phonetic changes depending upon it, and from the use of _c_, _cc_, as
an alternative for _tj_ (as in _ort_[g]_eard_, _orceard_ = orchard,
_fetian_, _feccean_ = fetch), as well as from the normal occurrence
of _ch_ and _y_ in these positions in later stages of the language,
e.g. _cild_ = child, _taècean_ = teach, [g]_iellan_ = yell, _dae_[g]
= day, &c.
[9] For a discriminating view of the effects of the Norman Conquest
on the English Language, see Freeman, _Norman Conquest_, ch. xxv.
[10] There is no reason to suppose that any attempt was made to
proscribe or suppress the native tongue, which was indeed used in
some official documents addressed to Englishmen by the Conqueror
himself. Its social degradation seemed even on the point of coming to
an end, when it was confirmed and prolonged for two centuries more by
the accession of the Angevin dynasty, under whom everything French
received a fresh impetus.
[11] MS. Cotton Vesp. A. 22.
[12] Gospels in Anglo-Saxon, &c., ed. for Cambridge Press, by W.W.
Skeat (1871-1887), second text.
[13] _Old English Homilies of Twelfth Century_, first and second
series, ed. R. Morris (E.E.T.S.), (1868-1873).
[14] The article _þe_ becomes _te_ after a preceding _t_ or _d_ by
assimilation.
[15] Earle, _Two of the Saxon Chronicles parallel_ (1865), p. 265.
[16] Skeat, _Anglo-Saxon and Northumbrian Gospels_ (1874).
[17] Edited for the Surtees Society, by Rev. J. Stevenson.
[18] Edited for the Early English Text Society, by Rev. Dr Morris.
[19] _The Vision of William concerning Piers the Ploughman_ exists in
three different recensions, all of which have been edited for the
Early English Text Society by Rev. W.W. Skeat.
[20] Edited by Rev. Dr Morris for Early English Text Society, in
1866.
[21] Here, and in _tatt_, _tu_, _taer_, for _þatt_, _þu_, _þaet_,
after _t_, _d_, there is the same phonetic assimilation as in the
last section of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle above.
[22] Edited for the Early English Text Society by Dr Morris (1865).
[23] Trevisa, _Translation of Higden's Polychronicon_.
[24] Skeat, _Specimens of English Literature_, pp. 49, 54.
[25] _A Shakspearian Grammar_, by Dr E.A. Abbott. To this book we are
largely indebted for its admirable summary of the characters of Tudor
English.
[26] _Evangelist_, _astronomy_, _dialogue_, are words that have so
lived, of which their form is the result. _Photograph_, _geology_,
&c., take this form as _if_ they had the same history.
[27] See extended lists of the foreign words in English in Dr
Morris's _Historical Outlines of English Accidence_, p. 33.
[28] See description and map in _Trans. of Philol. Soc._, 1875-1876,
p. 570.
[29] _The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, its
Pronunciation, Grammar and Historical Relations, with an Appendix on
the present limits of the Gaelic and Lowland Scotch, and the
Dialectal Divisions of the Lowland Tongue; and a Linguistical Map of
Scotland_, by James A.H. Murray (London, 1873).
[30] _A Glossary (with some pieces of Verse) of the Old Dialect of
the English Colony of Forth and Bargy_, collected by Jacob Poole,
edited by W. Barnes, B.D. (London, 1867).
ENGLISH LAW (_History_). In English jurisprudence "legal memory" is said
to extend as far as, but no further than the coronation of Richard I.
(Sept. 3, 1189). This is a technical doctrine concerning prescriptive
rights, but is capable of expressing an important truth. For the last
seven centuries, little more or less, the English law, which is now
overshadowing a large share of the earth, has had not only an extremely
continuous, but a matchlessly well-attested history, and, moreover, has
been the subject matter of rational exposition. Already in 1194 the
daily doings of a tribunal which was controlling and moulding the whole
system were being punctually recorded in letters yet legible, and from
that time onwards it is rather the enormous bulk than any dearth of
available materials that prevents us from tracing the transformation of
every old doctrine and the emergence and expansion of every new idea. If
we are content to look no further than the text-books--the books written
by lawyers for lawyers--we may read our way backwards to Blackstone (d.
1780), Hale (d. 1676), Coke (d. 1634), Fitzherbert (d. 1538), Littleton
(d. 1481), Bracton (d. 1268), Glanvill (d. 1190), until we are in the
reign of Henry of Anjou, and yet shall perceive that we are always
reading of one and the same body of law, though the little body has
become great, and the ideas that were few and indefinite have become
many and explicit.
Beyond these seven lucid centuries lies a darker period. Nearly six
centuries will still divide us from the dooms of Æthelberht (c. 600),
and nearly seven from the _Lex Salica_ (c. 500). We may regard the
Norman conquest of England as marking the confluence of two streams of
law. The one we may call French or Frankish. If we follow it upwards we
pass through the capitularies of Carlovingian emperors and Merovingian
kings until we see Chlodwig and his triumphant Franks invading Gaul,
submitting their Sicambrian necks to the yoke of the imperial religion,
and putting their traditional usages into written Latin. The other
rivulet we may call Anglo-Saxon. Pursuing it through the code of Canute
(d. 1035) and the ordinances of Alfred (c. 900) and his successors, we
see Ine publishing laws in the newly converted Wessex (c. 690), and,
almost a century earlier, Æthelberht doing the same in the newly
converted Kent (c. 600). This he did, says Beda, in accordance with
Roman precedents. Perhaps from the Roman missionaries he had heard
tidings of what the Roman emperor had lately been doing far off in New
Rome. We may at any rate notice with interest that in order of time
Justinian's law-books fall between the _Lex Salica_ and the earliest
Kentish dooms; also that the great pope who sent Augustine to England is
one of the very few men who between Justinian's day and the 11th century
lived in the Occident and yet can be proved to have known the Digest.
In the Occident the time for the Germanic "folk-laws" (_Leges
Barbarorum_) had come, and a Canon law, ambitious of independence, was
being constructed, when in the Orient the lord of church and state was
"enucleating" all that was to live of the classical jurisprudence of
pagan Rome. It was but a brief interval between Gothic and Lombardic
domination that enabled him to give law to Italy: Gaul and Britain were
beyond his reach.
The Anglo-Saxon laws that have come down to us (and we have no reason to
fear the loss of much beyond some dooms of the Mercian Offa) are best
studied as members of a large Teutonic family. Those that proceed from
the Kent and Wessex of the 7th century are closely related to the
continental folk-laws. Their next of kin seem to be the _Lex Saxonum_
and the laws of the Lombards. Then, though the 8th and 9th centuries are
unproductive, we have from Alfred (c. 900) and his successors a series
of edicts which strongly resemble the Frankish capitularies--so strongly
that we should see a clear case of imitation, were it not that in
Frankland the age of legislation had come to its disastrous end long
before Alfred was king. This, it may be noted, gives to English legal
history a singular continuity from Alfred's day to our own. The king of
the English was expected to publish laws at a time when hardly any one
else was attempting any such feat, and the English dooms of Canute the
Dane are probably the most comprehensive statutes that were issued in
the Europe of the 11th century. No genuine laws of the sainted Edward
have descended to us, and during his reign England seems but too likely
to follow the bad example of Frankland, and become a loose congeries of
lordships. From this fate it was saved by the Norman duke, who, like
Canute before him, subdued a land in which kings were still expected to
publish laws.
In the study of early Germanic law--a study which now for some
considerable time has been scientifically prosecuted in Germany--the
Anglo-Saxon dooms have received their due share of attention. A high
degree of racial purity may be claimed on their behalf. Celtic elements
have been sought for in them, but have never been detected. At certain
points, notably in the regulation of the blood-feud and the construction
of a tariff of atonements, the law of one rude folk will always be
somewhat like the law of another; but the existing remains of old Welsh
and old Irish law stand far remoter from the dooms of Æthelberht and Ine
than stand the edicts of Rothari and Liutprand, kings of the Lombards.
Indeed, it is very dubious whether distinctively Celtic customs play any
considerable part in the evolution of that system of rules of Anglian,
Scandinavian and Frankish origin which becomes the law of Scotland.
Within England itself, though for a while there was fighting enough
between the various Germanic folks, the tribal differences were not so
deep as to prevent the formation of a common language and a common law.
Even the strong Scandinavian strain seems to have rapidly blended with
the Anglian. It amplified the language and the law, but did not
permanently divide the country. If, for example, we can to-day
distinguish between _law_ and _right_, we are debtors to the Danes; but
very soon _law_ is not distinctive of eastern or _right_ of western
England. In the first half of the 12th century a would-be expounder of
the law of England had still to say that the country was divided between
the Wessex law, the Mercian law, and the Danes' law, but he had also to
point out that the law of the king's own court stood apart from and
above all partial systems. The local customs were those of shires and
hundreds, and shaded off into each other. We may speak of more Danish
and less Danish counties; it was a matter of degree; for rivers were
narrow and hills were low. England was meant by nature to be the land of
one law.
Then as to Roman law. In England and elsewhere Germanic law developed in
an atmosphere that was charged with traditions of the old world, and many
of these traditions had become implicit in the Christian religion. It
might be argued that all that we call progress is due to the influence
exercised by Roman civilization; that, were it not for this, Germanic law
would never have been set in writing; and that theoretically unchangeable
custom would never have been supplemented or superseded by express
legislation. All this and much more of the same sort might be said; but
the survival in Britain, or the reintroduction into England, of anything
that we should dare to call Roman jurisprudence would be a different
matter. Eyes, carefully trained, have minutely scrutinized the
Anglo-Saxon legal texts without finding the least trace of a Roman rule
outside the ecclesiastical sphere. Even within that sphere modern
research is showing that the church-property-law of the middle ages, the
law of the ecclesiastical "benefice," is permeated by Germanic ideas.
This is true of Gaul and Italy, and yet truer of an England in which
Christianity was for a while extinguished. Moreover, the laws that were
written in England were, from the first, written in the English tongue;
and this gives them a unique value in the eyes of students of Germanic
folk-law, for even the very ancient and barbarous _Lex Salica_ is a Latin
document, though many old Frankish words are enshrined in it. Also we
notice--and this is of grave importance--that in England there are no
vestiges of any "Romani" who are being suffered to live under their own
law by their Teutonic rulers. On the Continent we may see Gundobad, the
Burgundian, publishing one law-book for the Burgundians and another for
the Romani who own his sway. A book of laws, excerpted chiefly from the
Theodosian code, was issued by Alaric the Visigoth for his Roman subjects
before the days of Justinian, and this book (the so-called _Breviarium
Alarici or Lex Romana Visigothorum_) became for a long while the chief
representative of Roman law in Gaul. The Frankish king in his expansive
realm ruled over many men whose law was to be found not in the _Lex
Salica_ or _Lex Ribuaria_, but in what was called the _Lex Romana_. "A
system of personal law" prevailed: the _homo Romanus_ handed on his Roman
law to his children, while Frankish or Lombardic, Swabian or Saxon law
would run in the blood of the _homo barbarus_. Of all this we hear
nothing in England. Then on the mainland of Europe Roman and barbarian
law could not remain in juxtaposition without affecting each other. On
the one hand we see distinctively Roman rules making their way into the
law of the victorious tribes, and on the other hand we see a decay and
debasement of jurisprudence which ends in the formation of what modern
historians have called a Roman "vulgar-law" (_Vulgarrecht_). For a short
age which centres round the year 800 it seemed possible that Frankish
kings, who were becoming Roman emperors, would be able to rule by their
capitularies nearly the whole of the Christian Occident. The dream
vanished before fratricidal wars, heathen invaders, centrifugal
feudalism, and a centripetal church which found its law in the newly
concocted forgeries of the Pseudo-Isidore (c. 850). The "personal laws"
began to transmute themselves into local customs, and the Roman
vulgar-law began to look like the local custom of those districts where
the Romani were the preponderating element in the population. Meanwhile,
the Norse pirates subdued a large tract of what was to be northern
France--a land where Romani were few. Their restless and boundless vigour
these Normans retained; but they showed a wonderful power of
appropriating whatever of alien civilization came in their way. In their
language, religion and law, they had become French many years before they
subdued England. It is a plausible opinion that among them there lived
some sound traditions of the Frankish monarchy's best days, and that
Norman dukes, rather than German emperors or kings, of the French, are
the truest spiritual heirs of Charles the Great.
The Norman age.
In our own day, German historians are wont to speak of English law as a
"daughter" of French or Frankish law. This tendency derived its main
impulse from H. Brunner's proof that the germ of trial by jury, which
cannot be found in the Anglo-Saxon laws, can be found in the prerogative
procedure of the Frankish kings. We must here remember that during a
long age English lawyers wrote in French and even thought in French, and
that to this day most of the technical terms of the law, more especially
of the private law, are of French origin. Also it must be allowed that
when English law has taken shape in the 13th century it is very like one
of the _coutumes_ of northern France. Even when linguistic difficulties
have been surmounted, the Saxon Mirror of Eike von Repgow will seem far
less familiar to an Englishman than the so-called Establishments of St
Louis. This was the outcome of a slow process which fills more than a
century (1066-1189), and was in a great measure due to the reforming
energy of Henry II., the French prince who, in addition to England,
ruled a good half of France. William the Conqueror seems to have
intended to govern Englishmen by English law. After the tyranny of
Rufus, Henry I. promised a restoration of King Edward's law: that is,
the law of the Confessor's time (_Lagam Eadwardi regis vobis reddo_).
Various attempts were then made, mostly, so it would seem, by men of
French birth, to state in a modern and practicable form the _laga
Eadwardi_ which was thus restored. The result of their labours is an
intricate group of legal tracts which has been explored of late years by
Dr Liebermann. The best of these has long been known as the _Leges
Henrici Primi_, and aspires to be a comprehensive law-book. Its author,
though he had some foreign sources at his command, such as the _Lex
Ribuaria_ and an epitome of the Breviary of Alaric, took the main part
of his matter from the code of Canute and the older English dooms.
Neither the Conqueror nor either of his sons had issued many ordinances:
the invading Normans had little, if any, written law to bring with them,
and had invaded a country where kings had been lawgivers. Moreover,
there was much in the English system that the Conqueror was keenly
interested in retaining--especially an elaborate method of taxing the
land and its holders. The greatest product of Norman government, the
grandest feat of government that the world had seen for a long time
past, the compilation of _Domesday Book_, was a conservative effort, an
attempt to fix upon every landholder, French or English, the amount of
geld that was due from his predecessor in title. Himself the rebellious
vassal of the French king, the duke of the Normans, who had become king
of the English, knew much of disruptive feudalism, and had no mind to
see England that other France which it had threatened to become in the
days of his pious but incompetent cousin. The sheriffs, though called
_vice-comites_, were to be the king's officers; the shire-moots might be
called county courts, but were not to be the courts of counts. Much that
was sound and royal in English public law was to be preserved if William
could preserve it.
Royal justice.
The gulf that divides the so-called _Leges Henrici_ (c. 1115) from the
text-book ascribed to Ranulf Glanvill (c. 1188) seems at first sight
very wide. The one represents a not easily imaginable chaos and clash of
old rules and new; it represents also a stage in the development of
feudalism which in other countries is represented chiefly by a
significant silence. The other is an orderly, rational book, which
through all the subsequent centuries will be readily understood by
English lawyers. Making no attempt to tell us what goes on in the local
courts, its author, who may be Henry II.'s chief justiciar, Ranulf
Glanvill, or may be Glanvill's nephew, Hubert Walter, fixes our
attention on a novel element which is beginning to subdue all else to
its powerful operation. He speaks to us of the justice that is done by
the king's own court. Henry II. had opened the doors of his
French-speaking court to the mass of his subjects. Judges chosen for
their ability were to sit there, term after term; judges were to travel
in circuits through the land, and in many cases the procedure by way of
"an inquest of the country," which the Norman kings had used for the
ascertainment of their fiscal rights, was to be at the disposal of
ordinary litigants. All this had been done in a piecemeal, experimental
fashion by ordinances that were known as "assizes." There had not been,
and was not to be, any enunciation of a general principle inviting all
who were wronged to bring in their own words their complaints to the
king's audience. The general prevalence of feudal justice, and of the
world-old methods of supernatural probation (ordeals, battle, oaths
sworn with oath-helpers), was to be theoretically respected; but in
exceptional cases, which would soon begin to devour the rule, a royal
remedy was to be open to any one who could frame his case within the
compass of some carefully-worded and prescript formula. With allusion to
a remote stage in the history of Roman law, a stage of which Henry's
advisers can have known little or nothing, we may say that a "formulary
system" is established which will preside over English law until modern
times. Certain actions, each with a name of its own, are open to
litigants. Each has its own formula set forth in its original (or, as we
might say, originating) writ; each has its own procedure and its
appropriate mode of trial. The litigant chooses his writ, his action,
and must stand or fall by his choice. Thus a book about royal justice
tends to become, and Glanvill's book already is, a commentary on
original writs.
The precipitation of English law in so coherent a form as that which it
has assumed in Glanvill's book is not to be explained without reference
to the revival of Roman jurisprudence in Italy. Out of a school of
Lombard lawyers at Pavia had come Lanfranc the Conqueror's adviser, and
the Lombardists had already been studying Justinian's Institutes. Then
at length the Digest came by its rights. About the year 1100 Irnerius
was teaching at Bologna, and from all parts of the West men were eagerly
flocking to hear the new gospel of civilization. About the year 1149
Vacarius was teaching Roman law in England. The rest of a long life he
spent here, and faculties of Roman and Canon law took shape in the
nascent university of Oxford. Whatever might be the fate of Roman law in
England, there could be no doubt that the Canon law, which was
crystallizing in the _Decretum Gratiani_ (c. 1139) and in the decretals
of Alexander III., would be the law of the English ecclesiastical
tribunals. The great quarrel between Henry II. and Thomas of Canterbury
brought this system into collision with the temporal law of England, and
the king's ministers must have seen that they had much to learn from the
methodic enemy. Some of them were able men who became the justices of
Henry's court, and bishops to boot. The luminous _Dialogue of the
Exchequer_ (c. 1179), which expounds the English fiscal system, came
from the treasurer, Richard Fitz Nigel, who became bishop of London; and
the treatise on the laws of England came perhaps from Glanvill, perhaps
from Hubert Walter, who was to be both primate and chief justiciar.
There was healthy emulation of the work that was being done by Italian
jurists, but no meek acceptance of foreign results.
Bracton.
A great constructive era had opened, and its outcome was a large and
noble book. The author was Henry of Bratton (his name has been corrupted
into Bracton), who died in 1268 after having been for many years one of
Henry III.'s justices. The model for its form was the treatise of Azo of
Bologna ("master of all the masters of the laws," an Englishman called
him), and thence were taken many of the generalities of jurisprudence:
maxims that might be regarded as of universal and natural validity. But
the true core of the work was the practice of an English court which had
yearly been extending its operations in many directions. For half a
century past diligent record had been kept on parchment of all that this
court had done, and from its rolls Bracton cited numerous decisions. He
cited them as precedents, paying special heed to the judgments of two
judges who were already dead, Martin Pateshull and William Raleigh. For
this purpose he compiled a large Note Book, which was discovered by
Prof. Vinogradoff in the British Museum in 1884. Thus at a very early
time English "common law" shows a tendency to become what it afterwards
definitely became, namely, "case law." The term "common law" was being
taken over from the canonists by English lawyers, who used it to
distinguish the general law of the land from local customs, royal
prerogatives, and in short from all that was exceptional or special.
Since statutes and ordinances were still rarities, all expressly enacted
laws were also excluded from the English lawyers' notion of "the common
law." The Great Charter (1215) had taken the form of a grant of
"liberties and privileges," comparable to the grants that the king made
to individual men and favoured towns. None the less, it was in that age
no small body of enacted law, and, owing to its importance and
solemnity, it was in after ages regarded as the first article of a
statute book. There it was followed by the "provisions" issued at Merton
in 1236 and by those issued at Marlborough after the end of the Barons'
War. But during Henry III.'s long reign the swift development of English
law was due chiefly to new "original writs" and new "forms of action"
devised by the chancery and sanctioned by the court. Bracton knew many
writs that were unknown to Glanvill, and men were already perceiving
that limits must be set to the inventive power of the chancery unless
the king was to be an uncontrollable law-maker. Thus the common law was
losing the power of rapid growth when Bracton summed the attained
results in a book, the success of which is attested by a crowd of
manuscript copies. Bracton had introduced just enough of Roman law and
Bolognese method to save the law of England from the fate that awaited
German law in Germany. His book was printed in 1569, and Coke owed much
to Bracton.
The comparison that is suggested when Edward I. is called the English
Justinian cannot be pressed very far. Nevertheless, as is well known, it
is in his reign (1272-1307) that English institutions finally take the
forms that they are to keep through coming centuries. We already see the
parliament of the three estates, the convocations of the clergy, the
king's council, the chancery or secretarial department, the exchequer or
financial department, the king's bench, the common bench, the
commissioners of assize and gaol delivery, the small group of
professionally learned judges, and a small group of professionally
learned lawyers, whose skill is at the service of those who will employ
them. Moreover, the statutes that were passed in the first eighteen
years of the reign, though their bulk seems slight to us nowadays, bore
so fundamental a character that in subsequent ages they appeared as the
substructure of huge masses of superincumbent law. Coke commented upon
them sentence by sentence, and even now the merest smatterer in English
law must profess some knowledge of _Quia emptores_ and _De donis
conditionalibus_. If some American states have, while others have not,
accepted these statutes, that is a difference which is not unimportant
to citizens of the United States in the 20th century. Then from the
early years of Edward's reign come the first "law reports" that have
descended to us: the oldest of them have not yet been printed; the
oldest that has been printed belongs to 1292. These are the precursors
of the long series of Year Books (Edw. II.-Hen. VIII.) which runs
through the residue of the middle ages. Lawyers, we perceive, are
already making and preserving notes of the discussions that take place
in court; French notes that will be more useful to them than the formal
Latin records inscribed upon the plea rolls. From these reports we learn
that there are already, as we should say, a few "leading counsel," some
of whom will be retained in almost every important cause. Papal
decretals had been endeavouring to withdraw the clergy from secular
employment. The clerical element had been strong among the judges of
Henry III.'s reign: Bracton was an archdeacon, Pateshull a dean, Raleigh
died a bishop. Their places begin to be filled by men who are not in
orders, but who have pleaded the king's causes for him--his serjeants or
servants at law--and beside them there are young men who are
"apprentices at law," and are learning to plead. Also we begin to see
men who, as "attorneys at law," are making it their business to appear
on behalf of litigants. The history of the legal profession and its
monopoly of legal aid is intricate, and at some points still obscure;
but the influence of the canonical system is evident: the English
attorney corresponds to the canonical proctor, and the English barrister
to the canonical advocate. The main outlines were being drawn in Edward
I.'s day; the legal profession became organic, and professional opinion
became one of the main forces that moulded the law.
The study of English law fell apart from all other studies, and the
impulse that had flowed from Italian jurisprudence was ebbing. We have
two comprehensive text-books from Edward's reign: the one known to us as
_Fleta_, the other as _Britton_; both of them, however, quarry their
materials from Bracton's treatise. Also we have two little books on
procedure which are attributed to Chief-Justice Hengham, and a few other
small tracts of an intensely practical kind. Under the cover of fables
about King Alfred, the author of the _Mirror of Justices_ made a bitter
attack upon King Edward's judges, some of whom had fallen into deep
disgrace. English legal history has hardly yet been purged of the leaven
of falsehood that was introduced by this fantastic and unscrupulous
pamphleteer. His enigmatical book ends that literate age which begins
with Glanvill's treatise and the treasurer's dialogue. Between Edward
I.'s day and Edward IV.'s hardly anything that deserves the name of book
was written by an English lawyer.
14th and 15th centuries.
During that time the body of statute law was growing, but not very
rapidly. Acts of parliament intervened at a sufficient number of
important points to generate and maintain a persuasion that no limit, or
no ascertainable limit, can be set to the legislative power of king and
parliament. Very few are the signs that the judges ever permitted the
validity of a statute to be drawn into debate. Thus the way was being
prepared for the definite assertion of parliamentary "omnicompetence"
which we obtain from the Elizabethan statesman Sir Thomas Smith, and for
those theories of sovereignty which we couple with the names of Hobbes
and Austin. Nevertheless, English law was being developed rather by
debates in court than by open legislation. The most distinctively
English of English institutions in the later middle ages are the
Year-Books and the Inns of Court. Year by year, term by term, lawyers
were reporting cases in order that they and their fellows might know how
cases had been decided. The allegation of specific precedents was indeed
much rarer than it afterwards became, and no calculus of authority so
definite as that which now obtains had been established in Coke's day,
far less in Littleton's. Still it was by a perusal of reported cases
that a man would learn the law of England. A skeleton for the law was
provided, not by the Roman rubrics (such as public and private, real and
personal, possessory and proprietary, contract and delict), but by the
cycle of original writs that were inscribed in the chancery's _Registrum
Brevium_. A new form of action could not be introduced without the
authority of Parliament, and the growth of the law took the shape of an
explication of the true intent of ancient formulas. Times of inventive
liberality alternated with times of cautious and captious conservatism.
Coke could look back to Edward III.'s day as to a golden age of good
pleading. The otherwise miserable time which saw the Wars of the Roses
produced some famous lawyers, and some bold doctrines which broke new
ground. It produced also Sir Thomas Littleton's (d. 1481) treatise on
Tenures, which (though it be not, as Coke thought it, the most perfect
work that ever was written in any human science) is an excellent
statement of law in exquisitely simple language.
Legal education.
Meanwhile English law was being scholastically taught. This, if we look
at the fate of native and national law in Germany, or France, or
Scotland, appears as a fact of primary importance. From beginnings, so
small and formless that they still elude research, the Inns of Court had
grown. The lawyers, like other men, had grouped themselves in gilds, or
gild-like "fellowships." The fellowship acquired property; it was not
technically incorporate, but made use of the thoroughly English
machinery of a trust. Behind a hedge of trustees it lived an autonomous
life, unhampered by charters or statutes. There was a hall in which its
members dined in common; there was the nucleus of a library; there were
also dormitories or chambers in which during term-time lawyers lived
celibately, leaving their wives in the country. Something of the college
thus enters the constitution of these fellowships; and then something
academical. The craft gild regulated apprenticeship; it would protect
the public against incompetent artificers, and its own members against
unfair competition. So the fellowship of lawyers. In course of time a
lengthy and laborious course of education of the medieval sort had been
devised. He who had pursued it to its end received a call to the bar of
his inn. This call was in effect a degree. Like the doctor or master of
a university, the full-blown barrister was competent to teach others,
and was expected to read lectures to students. But further, in a manner
that is still very dark, these societies had succeeded in making their
degrees the only steps that led to practice in the king's courts. At the
end of the middle ages (c. 1470) Sir John Fortescue rehearsed the
praises of the laws of England in a book which is one of the earliest
efforts of comparative politics. Contrasting England with France, he
rightly connects limited monarchy, public and oral debate in the law
courts, trial by jury, and the teaching of national law in schools that
are thronged by wealthy and well-born youths. But nearly a century
earlier, the assertion that English law affords as subtle and civilizing
a discipline as any that is to be had from Roman law was made by a man
no less famous than John Wycliffe. The heresiarch naturally loathed the
Canon law; but he also spoke with reprobation of the "paynims' law," the
"heathen men's law," the study of which in the two universities was
being fostered by some of the bishops. That study, after inspiring
Bracton, had come to little in England, though the canonist was
compelled to learn something of Justinian, and there was a small demand
for learned civilians in the court of admiralty, and in what we might
call the king's diplomatic service. No medieval Englishman did anything
considerable for Roman law. Even the canonists were content to read the
books of French and Italian masters, though John Acton (c. 1340) and
William Lyndwood (1430) wrote meritorious glosses. The Angevin kings, by
appropriating to the temporal forum the whole province of ecclesiastical
patronage, had robbed the decretists of an inexhaustible source of
learning and of lucre. The work that was done by the legal faculties at
Oxford and Cambridge is slight when compared with the inestimable
services rendered to the cause of national continuity by the schools of
English law which grew within the Inns of Court.
Chancery.
A danger threatened: the danger that a prematurely osseous system of
common law would be overwhelmed by summary justice and royal equity.
Even when courts for all ordinary causes had been established, a reserve
of residuary justice remained with the king. Whatever lawyers and even
parliaments might say, it was seen to be desirable that the king in
council should with little regard for form punish offenders who could
break through the meshes of a tardy procedure and should redress wrongs
which corrupt and timid juries would leave unrighted. Papal edicts
against heretics had made familiar to all men the notion that a judge
should at times proceed _summarie et de plano et sine strepitu et figura
justitiae_. And so extraordinary justice of a penal kind was done by the
king's council upon misdemeanants, and extraordinary justice of a civil
kind was ministered by the king's chancellor (who was the specially
learned member of the council) to those who "for the love of God and in
the way of charity," craved his powerful assistance. It is now well
established that the chancellors started upon this course, not with any
desire to introduce rules of "equity" which should supplement, or
perhaps supplant, the rules of law, but for the purpose of driving the
law through those accidental impediments which sometimes unfortunately
beset its due course. The wrongs that the chancellor redressed were
often wrongs of the simplest and most brutal kind: assaults, batteries
and forcible dispossessions. However, he was warned off this field of
activity by parliament; the danger to law, to lawyers, to trial by jury,
was evident. But just when this was happening, a new field was being
opened for him by the growing practice of conveying land to trustees.
The English trust of land had ancient Germanic roots, and of late we
have been learning how in far-off centuries our Lombard cousins were in
effect giving themselves a power of testation by putting their lands in
trust. In England, when the forms of action were crystallizing, this
practice had not been common enough to obtain the protection of a writ;
but many causes conspired to make it common in the 14th century; and so,
with the general approval of lawyers and laity, the chancellors began to
enforce by summary process against the trustee the duty that lay upon
his conscience. In the next century it was clear that England had come
by a new civil tribunal. Negatively, its competence was defined by the
rule that when the common law offered a remedy, the chancellor was not
to intervene. Positively, his power was conceived as that of doing what
"good conscience" required, more especially in cases of "fraud, accident
or breach of confidence." His procedure was the summary, the
heresy-suppressing (not the ordinary and solemn) procedure of an
ecclesiastical court; but there are few signs that he borrowed any
substantive rules from legist or decretist, and many proofs that within
the new field of trust he pursued the ideas of the common law. It was
long, however, before lawyers made a habit of reporting his decisions.
He was not supposed to be tightly bound by precedent. Adaptability was
of the essence of the justice that he did.
The Tudor Age.
A time of strain and trial came with the Tudor kings. It was
questionable whether the strong "governance" for which the weary nation
yearned could work within the limits of a parliamentary system, or would
be compatible with the preservation of the common law. We see new courts
appropriating large fields of justice and proceeding _summarie et de
plano_; the star chamber, the chancery, the courts of requests, of
wards, of augmentations, the councils of the North and Wales; a little
later we see the high commission. We see also that judicial torture
which Fortescue had called the road to hell. The stream of law reports
became intermittent under Henry VIII.; few judges of his or his son's
reign left names that are to be remembered. In an age of humanism,
alphabetically arranged "abridgments" of medieval cases were the best
work of English lawyers: one comes to us from Anthony Fitzherbert (d.
1538), and another from Robert Broke (d. 1558). This was the time when
Roman law swept like a flood over Germany. The modern historian of
Germany will speak of "the Reception" (that is, the reception of Roman
law), as no less important than the Renaissance and Reformation with
which it is intimately connected. Very probably he will bestow hard
words on a movement which disintegrated the nation and consolidated the
tyranny of the princelings. Now a project that Roman law should be
"received" in England occurred to Reginald Pole (d. 1558), a humanist,
and at one time a reformer, who with good fortune might have been either
king of England or pope of Rome. English law, said the future cardinal
and archbishop, was barbarous; Roman law was the very voice of nature
pleading for "civility" and good princely governance. Pole's words were
brought to the ears of his majestic cousin, and, had the course of
events been somewhat other than it was, King Henry might well have
decreed a reception. The rôle of English Justinian would have perfectly
suited him, and there are distinct traces of the civilian's Byzantinism
in the doings of the Church of England's supreme head. The academic
study of the Canon law was prohibited; regius professorships of the
civil law were founded; civilians were to sit as judges in the
ecclesiastical courts. A little later, the Protector Somerset was deeply
interested in the establishment of a great school for civilians at
Cambridge. Scottish law was the own sister of English law, and yet in
Scotland we may see a reception of Roman jurisprudence which might have
been more whole-hearted than it was, but for the drift of two British
and Protestant kingdoms towards union. As it fell out, however, Henry
could get what he wanted in church and state without any decisive
supersession of English by foreign law. The omnicompetence of an act of
parliament stands out the more clearly if it settles the succession to
the throne, annuls royal marriages, forgives royal debts, defines
religious creeds, attaints guilty or innocent nobles, or prospectively
lends the force of statute to the king's proclamations. The courts of
common law were suffered to work in obscurity, for jurors feared fines,
and matter of state was reserved for council or star chamber. The Inns
of Court were spared; their moots and readings did no perceptible harm,
if little perceptible good.
Coke.
Yet it is no reception of alien jurisprudence that must be chronicled,
but a marvellous resuscitation of English medieval law. We may see it
already in the Commentaries of Edward Plowden (d. 1585) who reported
cases at length and lovingly. Bracton's great book was put in print, and
was a key to much that had been forgotten or misunderstood. Under
Parker's patronage, even the Anglo-Saxon dooms were brought to light;
they seemed to tell of a Church of England that had not yet been
enslaved by Rome. The new national pride that animated Elizabethan
England issued in boasts touching the antiquity, humanity, enlightenment
of English law. Resuming the strain of Fortescue, Sir Thomas Smith,
himself a civilian, wrote concerning the Commonwealth of England a book
that claimed the attention of foreigners for her law and her polity.
There was dignified rebuke for the French jurist who had dared to speak
lightly of Littleton. And then the common law took flesh in the person
of Edward Coke (1552-1634). With an enthusiastic love of English
tradition, for the sake of which many offences may be forgiven him, he
ranged over nearly the whole field of law, commenting, reporting,
arguing, deciding,--disorderly, pedantic, masterful, an incarnate
national dogmatism tenacious of continuous life. Imbued with this new
spirit, the lawyers fought the battle of the constitution against James
and Charles, and historical research appeared as the guardian of
national liberties. That the Stuarts united against themselves three
such men as Edward Coke, John Selden and William Prynne, is the measure
of their folly and their failure. Words that, rightly or wrongly, were
ascribed to Bracton rang in Charles's ears when he was sent to the
scaffold. For the modern student of medieval law many of the reported
cases of the Stuart time are storehouses of valuable material, since the
lawyers of the 17th century were mighty hunters after records. Prynne
(d. 1669), the fanatical Puritan, published ancient documents with
fervid zeal, and made possible a history of parliament. Selden (d. 1654)
was in all Europe among the very first to write legal history as it
should be written. His book about tithes is to this day a model and a
masterpiece. When this accomplished scholar had declared that he had
laboured to make himself worthy to be called a common lawyer, it could
no longer be said that the common lawyers were _indoctissimum genus
doctissimorum hominum_. Even pliant judges, whose tenure of office
depended on the king's will, were compelled to cite and discuss old
precedents before they could give judgment for their master; and even at
their worst moments they would not openly break with medieval tradition,
or declare in favour of that "modern police-state" which has too often
become the ideal of foreign publicists trained in Byzantine law.
Hale.
The current of legal doctrine was by this time so strong and voluminous
that such events as the Civil War, the Restoration and the Revolution
hardly deflected the course of the stream. In retrospect, Charles II.
reigns so soon as life has left his father's body, and James II. ends a
lawless career by a considerate and convenient abdication. The statute
book of the restored king was enriched by leaves excerpted from the acts
of a lord protector; and Matthew Hale (d. 1676), who was, perhaps, the
last of the great record-searching judges, sketched a map of English law
which Blackstone was to colour. Then a time of self-complacency came for
the law, which knew itself to be the perfection of wisdom, and any
proposal for drastic legislation would have worn the garb discredited by
the tyranny of the Puritan Cæsar. The need for the yearly renewal of the
Mutiny Act secured an annual session of parliament. The mass of the
statute law made in the 18th century is enormous; but, even when we have
excluded from view such acts as are technically called "private," the
residuary matter bears a wonderfully empirical, partial and minutely
particularizing character. In this "age of reason," as we are wont to
think it, the British parliament seems rarely to rise to the dignity of
a general proposition, and in our own day the legal practitioner is
likely to know less about the statutes of the 18th century than he knows
about the statutes of Edward I., Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. Parliament,
it should be remembered, was endeavouring directly to govern the nation.
There was little that resembled the permanent civil service of to-day.
The choice lay between direct parliamentary government and royal
"prerogative"; and lengthy statutes did much of that work of detail
which would now be done by virtue of the powers that are delegated to
ministers and governmental boards. Moreover, extreme and verbose
particularity was required in statutes, for judges were loath to admit
that the common law was capable of amendment. A vague doctrine,
inherited from Coke, taught that statutes might be so unreasonable as to
be null, and any political theory that seemed to derive from Hobbes
would have been regarded with not unjust suspicion. But the doctrine in
question never took tangible shape, and enough could be done to protect
the common law by a niggardly exposition of every legislating word. It
is to be remembered that some main features of English public law were
attracting the admiration of enlightened Europe. When Voltaire and
Montesquieu applauded, the English lawyer had cause for complacency.
The common law was by no means stagnant. Many rules which come to the
front in the 18th century are hardly to be traced farther. Especially is
this the case in the province of mercantile law, where the earl of
Mansfield's (d. 1793) long presidency over the king's bench marked an
epoch. It is too often forgotten that, until Elizabeth's reign, England
was a thoroughly rustic kingdom, and that trade with England was mainly
in the hands of foreigners. Also in medieval fairs, the assembled
merchants declared their own "law merchant," which was considered to
have a supernational validity. In the reports of the common law courts
it is late in the day before we read of some mercantile usages which can
be traced far back in the statutes of Italian cities. Even on the basis
of the excessively elaborated land law--a basis which Coke's Commentary
on Littleton seemed to have settled for ever--a lofty and ingenious
superstructure could be reared. One after another delicate devices were
invented for the accommodation of new wants within the law; but only by
the assurance that the old law could not be frankly abolished can we be
induced to admire the subtlety that was thus displayed. As to procedure,
it had become a maze of evasive fictions, to which only a few learned
men held the historical clue. By fiction the courts had stolen business
from each other, and by fiction a few comparatively speedy forms of
action were set to tasks for which they were not originally framed. Two
fictitious persons, John Doe and Richard Roe, reigned supreme. On the
other hand, that healthy and vigorous institution, the Commission of the
Peace, with a long history behind it, was giving an important share in
the administration of justice to numerous country gentlemen who were
thus compelled to learn some law. A like beneficial work was being done
among jurors, who, having ceased to be regarded as witnesses, had become
"judges of fact." No one doubted that trial by jury was the "palladium"
of English liberties, and popularity awaited those who would exalt the
office of the jurors and narrowly limit the powers of the judge.
Equity.
But during this age the chief addition to English jurisprudence was made
by the crystallization of the chancellor's equity. In the 17th century
the chancery had a narrow escape of sharing the fate that befell its
twin sister the star chamber. Its younger sister the court of requests
perished under the persistent attacks of the common lawyers. Having
outlived troubles, the chancery took to orderly habits, and administered
under the name of "equity" a growing group of rules, which in fact were
supplemental law. Stages in this process are marked by the
chancellorships of Nottingham (1673-1675) and Hardwicke (1737-1756).
Slowly a continuous series of Equity Reports began to flow, and still
more slowly an "equity bar" began to form itself. The principal outlines
of equity were drawn by men who were steeped in the common law. By way
of ornament a Roman maxim might be borrowed from a French or Dutch
expositor, or a phrase which smacked of that "nature-rightly" school
which was dominating continental Europe; but the influence exercised by
Roman law upon English equity has been the subject of gross
exaggeration. Parliament and the old courts being what they were,
perhaps it was only in a new court that the requisite new law could be
evolved. The result was not altogether satisfactory. Freed from contact
with the plain man in the jury-box, the chancellors were tempted to
forget how plain and rough good law should be, and to screw up the legal
standard of reasonable conduct to a height hardly attainable except by
those whose purses could command the constant advice of a family
solicitor. A court which started with the idea of doing summary justice
for the poor became a court which did a highly refined, but tardy
justice, suitable only to the rich.
Blackstone.
About the middle of the century William Blackstone, then a disappointed
barrister, began to give lectures on English law at Oxford (1758), and
soon afterwards he began to publish (1765) his _Commentaries_. Accurate
enough in its history and doctrine to be an invaluable guide to
professional students and a useful aid to practitioners, his book set
before the unprofessional public an artistic picture of the laws of
England such as had never been drawn of any similar system. No nation
but the English had so eminently readable a law-book, and it must be
doubtful whether any other lawyer ever did more important work than was
done by the first professor of English law. Over and over again the
_Commentaries_ were edited, sometimes by distinguished men, and it is
hardly too much to say that for nearly a century the English lawyer's
main ideas of the organization and articulation of the body of English
law were controlled by Blackstone. This was far from all. The Tory
lawyer little thought that he was giving law to colonies that were on
the eve of a great and successful rebellion. Yet so it was. Out in
America, where books were few and lawyers had a mighty task to perform,
Blackstone's facile presentment of the law of the mother country was of
inestimable value. It has been said that among American lawyers the
_Commentaries_ "stood for the law of England," and this at a time when
the American daughter of English law was rapidly growing in stature, and
was preparing herself for her destined march from the Atlantic to the
Pacific Ocean. Excising only what seemed to savour of oligarchy, those
who had defied King George retained with marvellous tenacity the law of
their forefathers. Profound discussions of English medieval law have
been heard in American courts; admirable researches into the recesses of
the Year-Books have been made in American law schools; the names of the
great American judges are familiar in an England which knows little
indeed of foreign jurists; and the debt due for the loan of Blackstone's
_Commentaries_ is being fast repaid. Lectures on the common law
delivered by Mr Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States
may even have begun to turn the scale against the old country. No
chapter in Blackstone's book nowadays seems more antiquated than that
which describes the modest territorial limits of that English law which
was soon to spread throughout Australia and New Zealand and to follow
the dominant race in India.
Bentham.
Long wars, vast economic changes and the conservatism generated by the
French Revolution piled up a monstrous arrear of work for the English
legislature. Meanwhile, Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832) had laboured for the
overthrow of much that Blackstone had lauded. Bentham's largest projects
of destruction and reconstruction took but little effect. Profoundly
convinced of the fungibility and pliability of mankind, he was but too
ready to draw a code for England or Spain or Russia at the shortest
notice; and, scornful as he was of the past and its historic deposit, a
code drawn by Bentham would have been a sorry failure. On the other
hand, as a critic and derider of the system which Blackstone had
complacently expounded he did excellent service. Reform, and radical
reform, was indeed sadly needed throughout a system which was encumbered
by noxious rubbish, the useless leavings of the middle ages: trial by
battle and compurgation, deodands and benefit of clergy, John Doe and
Richard Roe. It is perhaps the main fault of "judge-made law" (to use
Bentham's phrase) that its destructive work can never be cleanly done.
Of all vitality, and therefore of all patent harmfulness, the old rule
can be deprived, but the moribund husk must remain in the system doing
latent mischief. English law was full of decaying husks when Bentham
attacked it, and his persistent demand for reasons could not be
answered. At length a general interest in "law reform" was excited;
Romilly and Brougham were inspired by Bentham, and the great changes in
constitutional law which cluster round the Reform Act of 1832 were
accompanied by many measures which purged the private, procedural and
criminal law of much, though hardly enough, of the medieval dross. Some
credit for rousing an interest in law, in definitions of legal terms,
and in schemes of codification, is due to John Austin (d. 1859) who was
regarded as the jurist of the reforming and utilitarian group. But,
though he was at times an acute dissector of confused thought, he was
too ignorant of the English, the Roman and every other system of law to
make any considerable addition to the sum of knowledge; and when
Savigny, the herald of evolution, was already in the field, the day for
a "Nature-Right"--and Austin's projected "general jurisprudence" would
have been a Nature-Right--was past beyond recall. The obsolescence of
the map of law which Blackstone had inherited from Hale, and in which
many outlines were drawn by medieval formulas, left intelligent English
lawyers without a guide, and they were willing to listen for a while to
what in their insularity they thought to be the voice of cosmopolitan
science. Little came of it all. The revived study of Germanic law in
Germany, which was just beginning in Austin's day, seems to be showing
that the scheme of Roman jurisprudence is not the scheme into which
English law will run without distortion.
Recent changes.
In the latter half of the 19th century some great and wise changes were
made by the legislature. Notably in 1875 the old courts were merged in a
new Supreme Court of Judicature, and a concurrent administration of law
and equity was introduced. Successful endeavours have been made also to
reduce the bulk of old statute law, and to improve the form of acts of
parliament; but the emergence of new forces whose nature may be
suggested by some such names as "socialism" and "imperialism" has
distracted the attention of the British parliament from the commonplace
law of the land, and the development of obstructive tactics has caused
the issue of too many statutes whose brevity was purchased by
disgraceful obscurity. By way of "partial codification" some branches of
the common law (bills of exchange, sale of goods, partnership) have been
skilfully stated in statutes, but a draft criminal code, upon which much
expert labour was expended, lies pigeon-holed and almost forgotten.
British India has been the scene of some large legislative exploits, and
in America a few big experiments have been made in the way of
code-making, but have given little satisfaction to the bulk of those who
are competent to appreciate their results. In England there are large
portions of the law which, in their present condition, no one would
think of codifying: notably the law of real property, in which may still
be found numerous hurtful relics of bygone centuries. So omnipresent are
statutes throughout the whole field of jurisprudence that the
opportunity of doing any great feat in the development of law can come
but seldom to a modern court. More and more, therefore, the fate of
English law depends on the will of parliament, or rather of the
ministry. The quality of legal text-books has steadily improved; some of
them are models of clear statement and good arrangement; but no one has
with any success aspired to be the Blackstone of a new age.
Law reporting.
The Council of Law Reporting was formed in the year 1863. The council
now consists of three _ex-officio_ members--the attorney-general, the
solicitor-general and the president of the Incorporated Law Society, and
ten members appointed by the three Inns of Court, the Incorporated Law
Society and the council itself on the nomination of the general council
of the bar. The practitioner and the student now get for a subscription
of four guineas a year the reports in all the superior courts and the
House of Lords, and the judicial committee of the privy council issued
in monthly parts a king's printer's copy of the statutes, and weekly
notes, containing short notes of current decisions and announcements of
all new rules made under the Judicature Acts and other acts of
parliament, and other legal information. In addition the subscriber
receives the chronological index of the statutes published from time to
time by the Stationery Office, and last, but not least, the Digests of
decided cases published by the council from time to time. In 1892 a
Digest was published containing the cases and statutes for twenty-five
years, from 1865 to 1890, and this was supplemented by one for the
succeeding ten years, from 1891 to 1900. The digesting is now carried on
continuously by means of "Current Indexes," which are published monthly
and annually, and consolidated into a digest at stated intervals (say)
of five years. The Indian appeals series, which is not required by the
general practitioner, is supplied separately at one guinea a year.
Legal education.
In the 16th and 17th centuries the corporate life of the Inns of Court in
London became less and less active. The general decay of the organization
of crafts and gilds showed itself among lawyers as among other craftsmen.
Successful barristers, sharing in the general prosperity of the country,
became less and less able and willing to devote their time to the welfare
of their profession as a whole. The Inns of Chancery, though some of
their buildings still remain--picturesque survivals in their
"suburbs"--ceased to be used as places for the education of students. The
benchers of the Inns of Court, until the revival towards the middle of
the 19th century, had wholly ceased to concern themselves with the
systematic teaching of law. The modern system of legal education may be
said to date from the establishment, in 1852, of the council of legal
education, a body of twenty judges and barristers appointed by the four
Inns of Court to control the legal education of students preparing to be
called to the bar. The most important feature is the examination which a
student must pass before he can be called. The examination (which by
degrees has been made "stiffer") serves the double purpose of fixing the
compulsory standard which all must reach, and of guiding the reading of
students who may desire, sooner or later, to carry their studies beyond
this standard. The subjects in which the examination is held are divided
into Roman law; Constitutional law and legal history; Evidence, Procedure
and Criminal law; Real and Personal Property; Equity; and Common law. The
council of legal education also appoint a body of readers and assistant
readers, practising barristers, who deliver lectures and hold classes.
Meanwhile the custom remains by which a student reads for a year or more
as a pupil in the chambers of some practising barrister. In the 18th
century it first became usual for students to read with a solicitor or
attorney, and after a short time the modern practice grew up of reading
in the chambers of a conveyancer, equity draftsman or special pleader,
or, in more recent times, in the chambers of a junior barrister. Before
the modern examination system, a student required to have a certificate
from the barrister in whose chambers he had been a pupil before he could
be "called," but the only relic of the old system now is the necessity
of "eating dinners," six (three for university men) in each of the four
terms for three years, at one of the Inns of Court.
The education of solicitors suffered from the absence of any
professional organization until the Incorporated Law Society was
established in 1825 and the following years. So far as any professional
education is provided for solicitors or required from them, this is due
to the efforts of the Law Society. As early as 1729 it was required by
statute that any person applying for admission as attorney or solicitor
should submit to examination by one of the judges, who was to test his
fitness and capacity in consideration of a fee of one shilling. At the
same time regular preliminary service under articles was required, that
is to say, under a contract by which the clerk was bound to serve for
five years. The examination soon became, perhaps always was, an empty
form. The Law Society, however, soon showed zeal for the education of
future solicitors. In 1833 lectures were instituted. In 1836 the first
regular examinations were established, and in 1860 the present system of
examinations--preliminary, intermediate and final--came into effect. Of
these only the last two are devoted to law, and both are of a strictly
professional character. The final examination is a fairly severe test of
practical acquaintance with all branches of modern English law. The Law
Society makes some provision for the teaching of students, but this
teaching is designed solely to assist in preparation for the
examinations.
At the universities of Oxford and Cambridge there has, since 1850, been
an attempt to promote the study of law. The curriculum of legal subjects
in which lectures are given and examinations held is calculated to give
a student a sound fundamental knowledge of general principles, as well
as an elementary acquaintance with the rules of modern English law.
Jurisprudence, Roman law, Constitutional law and International law are
taught, as well as the law of Real and Personal Property, the Law of
Contract and Tort, Criminal law, Procedure and Evidence. But the law
tripos and the law schools suffer from remoteness from the law courts,
and from the exclusively academical character of the teaching. Law is
also taught, though not on a very large scale, at Manchester and at
Liverpool. London University has encouraged the study of law by its
examinations for law degrees, at which a comparatively high standard of
knowledge is required; and at University College, London, and King's
College, London, teaching is given in law and jurisprudence.
AUTHORITIES.--F. Liebermann, _Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen_ (1898);
K.E. Digby, _History of the Law of Real Property_; Sir W. Dugdale,
_Origines juridicales_ (1671); O.W. Holmes, _The Common Law_ (Boston,
1881); H. Hallam, _Constitutional History_; W.S. Holdsworth, _History
of English Law_, 3 vols. (1903-9); J. Reeves, _History of English
Law_, ed. W.F. Finlason (1869); T. Madox, _History and Antiquities of
the Exchequer_ (1769); C. de Franqueville, _Le Système judiciaire de
la Grande-Bretagne_ (Paris, 1893); Sir F. Pollock and F.W. Maitland,
_History of English Law_ (2 vols., 1898); H. Brunner, _The Sources of
the Law of England_, trans. by W. Hastie (1888); Sir R.K. Wilson,
_History of Modern English Law_ (1875); A.V. Dicey, _Law and Public
Opinion in England_ (1905); Sir J.F. Stephen, _History of the Criminal
Law of England_ (3 vols., 1883); W. Stubbs, _Select Charters,
Constitutional History_; the Publications of the Selden Society and
the Year Books in the Rolls Series. (F. W. M.)
ENGLISH LITERATURE. The following discussion of the evolution of English
literature, i.e. of the contribution to literature made in the course of
ages by the writers of England, is planned so as to give a comprehensive
view, the details as to particular authors and their work, and special
consideration of the greater writers, being given in the separate
articles devoted to them. It is divided into the following sections: (1)
Earliest times to Chaucer; (2) Chaucer to the end of the middle ages;
(3) Elizabethan times; (4) the Restoration period; (5) the Eighteenth
century; (6) the Nineteenth century. The object of these sections is to
form connecting links among the successive literary ages, leaving the
separate articles on individual great writers to deal with their special
interest; attention being paid in the main to the gradually developing
characteristics of the product, quâ literary. The precise delimitation
of what may narrowly be called "English" literature, i.e. in the English
language, is perhaps impossible, and separate articles are devoted to
American literature (q.v.), and to the vernacular literatures of
Scotland (see SCOTLAND; and CELT: _Literature_), Ireland (see CELT:
_Literature_), and Wales (see CELT: _Literature_); see also CANADA:
_Literature_. Reference may also be made to such general articles on
particular forms as NOVEL; ROMANCE; VERSE, &c.
I. EARLIEST TIMES TO CHAUCER
English literature, in the etymological sense of the word, had, so far
as we know, no existence until Christian times. There is no evidence
either that the heathen English had adopted the Roman alphabet, or that
they had learned to employ their native monumental script (the runes) on
materials suitable for the writing of continuous compositions of
considerable length.
It is, however, certain that in the pre-literary period at least one
species of poetic art had attained a high degree of development, and
that an extensive body of poetry was handed down--not, indeed, with
absolute fixity of form or substance--from generation to generation.
This unwritten poetry was the work of minstrels who found their
audiences in the halls of kings and nobles. Its themes were the exploits
of heroes belonging to the royal houses of Germanic Europe, with which
its listeners claimed kinship. Its metre was the alliterative long line,
the lax rhythm of which shows that it was intended, not to be sung to
regular melodies, but to be recited--probably with some kind of
instrumental accompaniment. Of its beauty and power we may judge from
the best passages in _Beowulf_ (q.v.); for there can be little doubt
that this poem gained nothing and lost much in the process of literary
redaction.
The conversion of the people to Christianity necessarily involved the
decline of the minstrelsy that celebrated the glories of heathen times.
Yet the descendants of Woden, even when they were devout Christians,
would not easily lose all interest in the achievements of their kindred
of former days. Chaucer's knowledge of "the song of Wade" is one proof
among others that even so late as the 14th century the deeds of Germanic
heroes had not ceased to be recited in minstrel verse. The paucity of
the extant remains of Old English heroic poetry is no argument to the
contrary. The wonder is that any of it has survived at all. We may well
believe that the professional reciter would, as a rule, be jealous of
any attempt to commit to writing the poems which he had received by
tradition or had himself composed. The clergy, to whom we owe the
writing and the preservation of the Old English MSS., would only in rare
instances be keenly interested in secular poetry. We possess, in fact,
portions of four narrative poems, treating of heroic legend--_Beowulf_,
_Widsith_, _Finnesburh_ and _Waldere_. The second of these has no
poetical merit, but great archaeological interest. It is an enumeration
of the famous kings known to German tradition, put into the mouth of a
minstrel (named Widsith, "far-travelled"), who claims to have been at
many of their courts and to have been rewarded by them for his song. The
list includes historical persons such as Ermanaric and Alboin, who
really lived centuries apart, but (with the usual chronological
vagueness of tradition) are treated as contemporaries. The extant
fragment of _Finnesburh_ (50 lines) is a brilliant battle piece,
belonging to a story of which another part is introduced episodically in
_Beowulf_. _Waldere_, of which we have two fragments (together 68 lines)
is concerned with Frankish and Burgundian traditions based on events of
the 5th century; the hero is the "Waltharius" of Ekkehart's famous Latin
epic. The English poem may possibly be rather a literary composition
than a genuine example of minstrel poetry, but the portions that have
survived are hardly inferior to the best passages of _Beowulf_.
It may reasonably be assumed that the same minstrels who entertained the
English kings and nobles with the recital of ancient heroic traditions
would also celebrate in verse the martial deeds of their own patrons and
their immediate ancestors. Probably there may have existed an abundance
of poetry commemorative of events in the conquest of Britain and the
struggle with the Danes. Two examples only have survived, both belonging
to the 10th century: The _Battle of Brunanburh_, which has been greatly
over-praised by critics who were unaware that its striking phrases and
compounds are mere traditional echoes; and the _Battle of Maldon_, the
work of a truly great poet, of which unhappily only a fragment has been
preserved.
One of the marvels of history is the rapidity and thoroughness with
which Christian civilization was adopted by the English. Augustine
landed in 597; forty years later was born an Englishman, Aldhelm, who in
the judgment of his contemporaries throughout the Christian world was
the most accomplished scholar and the finest Latin writer of his time.
In the next generation England produced in Bede (Bæda) a man who in
solidity and variety of knowledge, and in literary power, had for
centuries no rival in Europe. Aldhelm and Bede are known to us only from
their Latin writings, though the former is recorded to have written
vernacular poetry of great merit. The extant Old English literature is
almost entirely Christian, for the poems that belong to an earlier
period have been expurgated and interpolated in a Christian sense. From
the writings that have survived, it would seem as if men strove to
forget that England had ever been heathen. The four deities whose names
are attached to the days of the week are hardly mentioned at all. The
names Thunor and Tiw are sometimes used to translate the Latin Jupiter
and Mars; Woden has his place (but not as a god) in the genealogies of
the kings, and his name occurs once in a magical poem, but that is all.
Bede, as a historian, is obliged to tell the story of the conversion;
but the only native divinities he mentions are the goddesses Hreth and
Eostre, and all we learn about them is that they gave their names to
Hrethemonath (March) and Easter. That superstitious practices of heathen
origin long survived among the people is shown by the acts of church
councils and by a few poems of a magical nature that have been
preserved; but, so far as can be discovered, the definite worship of the
ancient gods quickly died out. English heathenism perished without
leaving a record.
The Old English religious poetry was written, probably without
exception, in the cloister, and by men who were familiar with the Bible
and with Latin devotional literature. Setting aside the wonderful _Dream
of the Rood_, it gives little evidence of high poetic genius, though
much of it is marked by a degree of culture and refinement that we
should hardly have expected. Its material and thought are mainly derived
from Latin sources; its expression is imitated from the native heroic
poetry. Considering that a great deal of Latin verse was written by
Englishmen in the 7th and succeeding centuries, and that in one or two
poems the line is actually composed of an English and a Latin hemistich
rhyming together, it seems strange that the Latin influence on Old
English versification should have been so small. The alliterative long
line is throughout the only metre employed, and although the laws of
alliteration and rhythm were less rigorously obeyed in the later than in
the earlier poetry, there is no trace of approximation to the structure
of Latin verse. It is true that, owing to imitation of the Latin hymns
of the church, rhyme came gradually to be more and more frequently used
as an ornament of Old English verse; but it remained an ornament only,
and never became an essential feature. The only poem in which rhyme is
employed throughout is one in which sense is so completely sacrificed to
sound that a translation would hardly be possible. It was not only in
metrical respects that the Old English religious poetry remained
faithful to its native models. The imagery and the diction are mainly
those of the old heroic poetry, and in some of the poems Christ and the
saints are presented, often very incongruously, under the aspect of
Germanic warriors. Nearly all the religious poetry that has any
considerable religious value seems to have been written in Northumbria
during the 8th century. The remarkably vigorous poem of _Judith_,
however, is certainly much later; and the _Exodus_, though early, seems
to be of southern origin. For a detailed account of the Old English
sacred poetry, the reader is referred to the articles on CÆDMON and
CYNEWULF, to one or other of whom nearly every one of the poems, except
those of obviously late date, has at some time been attributed.
The Riddles (q.v.) of the Exeter Book resemble the religious poetry in
being the work of scholars, but they bear much more decidedly the
impress of the native English character. Some of them rank among the
most artistic and pleasing productions of Old English poetry. The Exeter
Book contains also several pieces of a gnomic character, conveying
proverbial instruction in morality and worldly wisdom. Their morality is
Christian, but it is not unlikely that some of the wise sayings they
contain may have come down by tradition from heathen times. The very
curious _Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn_ may be regarded as belonging to
the same class.
The most original and interesting portion of the Old English literary
poetry is the group of dramatic monologues--_The Banished Wife's
Complaint_, _The Husband's Message_, _The Wanderer_, _The Seafarer_,
_Deor_ and _Wulf and Eadwacer_. The date of these compositions is
uncertain, though their occurrence in the Exeter Book shows that they
cannot be later than the 10th century. That they are all of one period
is at least unlikely, but they are all marked by the same peculiar tone
of pathos. The monodramatic form renders it difficult to obtain a clear
idea of the situation of the supposed speakers. It is not improbable
that most of these poems may relate to incidents of heroic legend, with
which the original readers were presumed to be acquainted. This,
however, can be definitely affirmed only in the case of the two short
pieces--_Deor_ and _Wulf and Eadwacer_--which have something of a lyric
character, being the only examples in Old English of strophic structure
and the use of the refrain. _Wulf and Eadwacer_, indeed, exhibits a
still further development in the same direction, the monotony of the
long line metre being varied by the admission of short lines formed by
the suppression of the second hemistich. The highly developed art
displayed in this remarkable poem gives reason for believing that the
existing remains of Old English poetry very inadequately represent its
extent and variety.
While the origins of English poetry go back to heathen times, English
prose may be said to have had its effective beginning in the reign of
Alfred. It is of course true that vernacular prose of some kind was
written much earlier. The English laws of Æthelberht of Kent, though it
is perhaps unlikely that they were written down, as is commonly
supposed, in the lifetime of Augustine (died A.D. 604), or even in that
of the king (d. 616), were well known to Bede; and even in the
12th-century transcript that has come down to us, their crude and
elliptical style gives evidence of their high antiquity. Later kings of
Kent and of Wessex followed the example of publishing their laws in the
native tongue. Bede is known to have translated the beginning of the
gospel of John (down to vi. 9). The early part of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (q.v.) is probably founded partly on prose annals of
pre-Alfredian date. But although the amount of English prose written
between the beginning of the 7th and the middle of the 9th century may
have been considerable, Latin continued to be regarded as the
appropriate vehicle for works of any literary pretension. If the English
clergy had retained the scholarship which they possessed in the days of
Aldhelm and Bede, the creation of a vernacular prose literature would
probably have been longer delayed; for while Alfred certainly was not
indifferent to the need of the laity for instruction, the evil that he
was chiefly concerned to combat was the ignorance of their spiritual
guides.
Of the works translated by him and the scholars whom he employed, _St
Gregory's Pastoral Care_ and his _Dialogues_ (the latter rendered by
Bishop Werferth) are expressly addressed to the priesthood; if the other
translations were intended for a wider circle of readers, they are all
(not excepting the secular _History of Orosius_) essentially religious
in purpose and spirit. In the interesting preface to the _Pastoral
Care_, in the important accounts of Northern lands and peoples inserted
in the _Orosius_, and in the free rendering and amplification of the
_Consolation_ of Boethius and of the _Soliloquies_ of Augustine, Alfred
appears as an original writer. Other fruits of his activity are his Laws
(preceded by a collection of those of his 7th-century predecessor, Ine
of Wessex), and the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Old
English prose after Alfred is entirely of clerical authorship; even the
Laws, so far as their literary form is concerned, are hardly to be
regarded as an exception. Apart from the Chronicle (see ANGLO-SAXON
CHRONICLE), the bulk of this literature consists of translations from
Latin and of homilies and saints' lives, the substance of which is
derived from sources mostly accessible to us in their original form; it
has therefore for us little importance except from the philological
point of view. This remark may be applied, in the main, even to the
writings of Ælfric, notwithstanding the great interest which attaches to
his brilliant achievement in the development of the capacities of the
native language for literary expression. The translation of the gospels,
though executed in Ælfric's time (about 1000), is by other hands. The
sermons of his younger contemporary, Archbishop Wulfstan, are marked by
earnestness and eloquence, and contain some passages of historical
value.
From the early years of the 11th century we possess an encyclopaedic
manual of the science of the time--chronology, astronomy, arithmetic,
metre, rhetoric and ethics--by the monk Byrhtferth, a pupil of Abbo of
Fleury. It is a compilation, but executed with intelligence. The
numerous works on medicine, the properties of herbs, and the like, are
in the main composed of selections from Latin treatises; so far as they
are original, they illustrate the history of superstition rather than
that of science. It is interesting to observe that they contain one or
two formulas of incantations in Irish.
Two famous works of fiction, the romance of _Apollonius of Tyre_ and the
_Letter of Alexander_, which in their Latin form had much influence on
the later literature of Europe, were Englished in the 11th century with
considerable skill. To the same period belongs the curious tract on _The
Wonders of the East_. In these works, and some minor productions of the
time, we see that the minds of Englishmen were beginning to find
interest in other than religious subjects.
The crowding of the English monasteries by foreigners, which was one of
the results of the Norman Conquest, brought about a rapid arrest of the
development of the vernacular literature. It was not long before the
boys trained in the monastic schools ceased to learn to read and write
their native tongue, and learned instead to read and write French. The
effects of this change are visible in the rapid alteration of the
literary language. The artificial tradition of grammatical correctness
lost its hold; the archaic literary vocabulary fell into disuse; and
those who wrote English at all wrote as they spoke, using more and more
an extemporized phonetic spelling based largely on French analogies. The
12th century is a brilliant period in the history of Anglo-Latin
literature, and many works of merit were written in French (see
ANGLO-NORMAN). But vernacular literature is scanty and of little
originality. The _Peterborough Chronicle_, it is true, was continued
till 1154, and its later portions, while markedly exemplifying the
changes in the language, contain some really admirable writing. But it
is substantially correct to say that from this point until the age of
Chaucer vernacular prose served no other purpose than that of popular
religious edification. For light on the intellectual life of the nation
during this period we must look mainly to the works written in Latin.
The homilies of the 12th century are partly modernized transcripts from
Ælfric and other older writers, partly translations from French and
Latin; the remainder is mostly commonplace in substance and clumsy in
expression. At the beginning of the 13th century the _Ancren Riwle_
(q.v.), a book of counsel for nuns, shows true literary genius, and is
singularly interesting in its substance and spirit; but notwithstanding
the author's remarkable mastery of English expression, his culture was
evidently French rather than English. Some minor religious prose works
of the same period are not without merit. But these examples had no
literary following. In the early 14th century the writings of Richard
Rolle and his school attained great popularity. The profound influence
which they exercised on later religious thought, and on the development
of prose style, has seldom been adequately recognized. The _Ayenbite of
Inwyt_ (see MICHEL, DAN), a wretchedly unintelligent translation
(finished in 1340) from Frère Lorens's _Somme des vices et des vertus_,
is valuable to the student of language, but otherwise worthless.
The break in the continuity of literary tradition, induced by the
Conquest, was no less complete with regard to poetry than with regard to
prose. The poetry of the 13th and the latter part of the 12th century
was uninfluenced by the written works of Old English poets, whose
archaic diction had to a great extent become unintelligible. But there
is no ground to suppose that the succession of popular singers and
reciters was ever interrupted. In the north-west, indeed, the old
recitative metre seems to have survived in oral tradition, with little
more alteration than was rendered necessary by the changes in the
language, until the middle of the 14th century, when it was again
adopted by literary versifiers. In the south this metre had greatly
degenerated in strictness before the Conquest, but, with gradually
increasing laxity in the laws of alliteration and rhythm, it continued
long in use. It is commonly believed, with great intrinsic probability
but with scanty actual evidence, that in the Old English period there
existed, beside the alliterative long line, other forms of verse adapted
not for recitation but for singing, used in popular lyrics and ballads
that were deemed too trivial for written record. The influence of native
popular poetic tradition, whether in the form of recited or of sung
verse, is clearly discernible in the earliest Middle English poems that
have been preserved. But the authors of these poems were familiar with
Latin, and probably spoke French as easily as their mother tongue; and
there was no longer any literary convention to restrain them from
adopting foreign metrical forms. The artless verses of the hermit
Godric, who died in 1170, exhibit in their metre the combined influence
of native rhythm and of that of Latin hymnology. The _Proverbs of
Alfred_, written about 1200, is (like the later _Proverbs of Hendyng_)
in style and substance a gnomic poem of the ancient Germanic type,
containing maxims some of which may be of immemorial antiquity; and its
rhythm is mainly of native origin. On the other hand, the solemn and
touching meditation known as the _Moral Ode_, which is somewhat earlier
in date, is in a metre derived from contemporary Latin verse--a line of
seven accents, broken by a caesura, and with feminine end-rhymes. In the
_Ormulum_ (see ORM) this metre (known as the septenarius) appears
without rhyme, and with a syllabic regularity previously without example
in English verse, the line (or distich, as it may be called with almost
equal propriety) having invariably fifteen syllables. In various
modified forms, the septenarius was a favourite measure throughout the
Middle English period. In the poetry of the 13th century the influence
of French models is conspicuous. The many devotional lyrics, some of
which, as the _Luve Ron_ of Thomas of Hales, have great beauty, show
this influence not only in their varied metrical form, but also in their
peculiar mystical tenderness and fervour. The _Story of Genesis and
Exodus_, the substance of which is taken from the Bible and Latin
commentators, derives its metre chiefly from French. Its poetical merit
is very small. The secular poetry also received a new impulse from
France. The brilliant and sprightly dialogue of the _Owl and
Nightingale_, which can hardly be dated later than about 1230, is a
"contention" of the type familiar in French and Provençal literature.
The "Gallic" type of humour may be seen in various other writings of
this period, notably in the _Land of Cockaigne_, a vivacious satire on
monastic self-indulgence, and in the fabliau of _Dame Siviz_, a story of
Eastern origin, told with almost Chaucerian skill. Predominantly, though
not exclusively French in metrical structure, are the charming love
poems collected in a MS. (Harl. 2253) written about 1320 in
Herefordshire, some of which (edited in T. Wright's _Specimens of Lyric
Poetry_) find a place in modern popular anthologies. It is noteworthy
that they are accompanied by some French lyrics very similar in style.
The same MS. contains, besides some religious poetry, a number of
political songs of the time of Edward II. They are not quite the
earliest examples of their kind; in the time of the Barons' War the
popular cause had had its singers in English as well as in French.
Later, the victories of Edward III. down to the taking of Guisnes in
1352, were celebrated by the Yorkshireman Laurence Minot in alliterative
verse with strophic arrangement and rhyme.
At the very beginning of the 13th century a new species of composition,
the metrical chronicle, was introduced into English literature. The huge
work of Layamon, a history (mainly legendary) of Britain from the time
of the mythical Brutus till after the mission of Augustine, is a free
rendering of the Norman-French _Brut_ of Wace, with extensive additions
from traditional sources. Its metre seems to be a degenerate survival of
the Old English alliterative line, gradually modified in the course of
the work by assimilation to the regular syllabic measure of the French
original. Unquestionable evidence of the knowledge of the poem on the
part of later writers is scarce, but distinct echoes of its diction
appear in the chronicle ascribed to Robert of Gloucester, written in
rhymed septenary measures about 1300. This work, founded in its earlier
part on the Latin historians of the 12th century, is an independent
historical source of some value for the events of the writer's own
times. The succession of versified histories of England was continued by
Thomas Bek of Castleford in Yorkshire (whose work still awaits an
editor), and by Robert Mannyng of Brunne (Bourne, Lincolnshire).
Mannyng's chronicle, finished in 1338, is a translation, in its earlier
part from Wace's _Brut_, and in its later part from an Anglo-French
chronicle (still extant) written by Peter Langtoft, canon of
Bridlington.
Not far from the year 1300 (for the most part probably earlier rather
than later) a vast mass of hagiological and homiletic verse was produced
in divers parts of England. To Gloucester belongs an extensive series
of Lives of Saints, metrically and linguistically closely resembling
Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle, and perhaps wholly or in part of the
same authorship. A similar collection was written in the north of
England, as well as a large body of homilies showing considerable poetic
skill, and abounding in exempla or illustrative stories. Of _exempla_
several prose collections had already been made in Anglo-French, and
William of Wadington's poem _Manuel des péchés_, which contains a great
number of them, was translated in 1303 by Robert Mannyng already
mentioned, with some enlargement of the anecdotic element, and frequent
omissions of didactic passages. The great rhyming chronicle of Scripture
history entitled _Cursor Mundi_ (q.v.) was written in the north about
this time. It was extensively read and transcribed, and exercised a
powerful influence on later writers down to the end of the 14th century.
The remaining homiletic verse of this period is too abundant to be
referred to in detail; it will be enough to mention the sermons of
William of Shoreham, written in strophic form, but showing little either
of metrical skill or poetic feeling. To the next generation belongs the
_Pricke of Conscience_ by Richard Rolle, the influence of which was not
less powerful than that of the author's prose writings.
Romantic poetry, which in French had been extensively cultivated, both
on the continent and in England from the early years of the 12th
century, did not assume a vernacular form till about 1250. In the next
hundred years its development was marvellously rapid. Of the vast mass
of metrical romances produced during this period no detailed account
need here be attempted (see ROMANCE, and articles, &c. referred to;
ARTHURIAN ROMANCE). Native English traditions form the basis of _King
Horn_, _Guy of Warwick_, _Bevis of Hamtoun_ and _Havelok_, though the
stories were first put into literary form by Anglo-Norman poets. The
popularity of these home-grown tales (with which may be classed the
wildly fictitious _Coer de Lion_) was soon rivalled by that of
importations from France. The English rendering of _Floris and
Blancheflur_ (a love-romance of Greek origin) is found in the same MS.
that contains the earliest copy of _King Horn_. Before the end of the
century, the French "matter of Britain" was represented in English by
the Southern _Arthur and Merlin_ and the Northern _Tristram_ and _Yvaine
and Gawin_, the "matter of France" by _Roland and Vernagu_ and _Otuel_;
the _Alexander_ was also translated, but in this instance the immediate
original was an Anglo-French and not a continental poem. The tale of
Troy did not come into English till long afterwards. The Auchinleck MS.,
written about 1330, contains no fewer than 14 poetical romances; there
were many others in circulation, and the number continued to grow. About
the middle of the 14th century, the Old English alliterative long line,
which for centuries had been used only in unwritten minstrel poetry,
emerges again in literature. One of the earliest poems in this revived
measure, _Wynnere and Wastour_, written in 1352, is by a professional
reciter-poet, who complains bitterly that original minstrel poetry no
longer finds a welcome in the halls of great nobles, who prefer to
listen to those who recite verses not of their own making. About the
same date the metre began to be employed by men of letters for the
translation of romance--_William of Palerne_ and _Joseph of Arimathea_
from the French, _Alexander_ from Latin prose. The later development of
alliterative poetry belongs mainly to the age of Chaucer.
The extent and character of the literature produced during the first
half of the 14th century indicate that the literary use of the native
tongue was no longer, as in the preceding age, a mere condescension to
the needs of the common people. The rapid disuse of French as the
ordinary medium of intercourse among the middle and higher ranks of
society, and the consequent substitution of English for French as the
vehicle of school instruction, created a widespread demand for
vernacular reading. The literature which arose in answer to this demand,
though it consisted mainly of translations or adaptations of foreign
works, yet served to develop the appreciation of poetic beauty, and to
prepare an audience in the near future for a poetry in which the genuine
thought and feeling of the nation were to find expression.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Only general works need be mentioned here. Those cited
contain lists of books for more detailed information. (1) For the
literature from the beginnings to Chaucer:--B. ten Brink, _Geschichte
der englischen Litteratur_, vol. i. 2nd ed., by A. Brandl (Strassburg,
1899) (English translation from the 1st ed. of 1877, by H.M. Kennedy,
London, 1883); _The Cambridge History of English Literature_, vol. i.
(1907). (2) For the Old English period:--R. Wülker, _Grundriss zur
Geschichte der angelsachsischen Litteratur_ (Leipzig, 1885); Stopford
A. Brooke, _English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman
Conquest_ (London, 1898); A. Brandl, "Altenglische Litteratur," in H.
Paul's _Grundriss der germanischen Philologie_, vol. ii. (2nd ed.,
Strassburg, 1908). (3) For the early Middle English Period:--H.
Morley, _English Writers_, vol. iii. (London, 1888; vols. i. and ii.,
dealing with the Old English period, cannot be recommended); A.
Brandl, "Mittelenglische Litteratur," in H. Paul's _Grundriss der
germanischen Philologie_, vol. ii. (1st ed., Strassburg, 1893); W.H.
Schofield, _English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer_
(London, 1906). (H. Br.)
II. CHAUCER TO THE RENAISSANCE
The age of Chaucer is of peculiar interest to the student of literature,
not only because of its brilliance and productiveness but also because
of its apparent promise for the future. In this, as in other aspects,
Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) is its most notable literary figure. Beginning as
a student and imitator of the best French poetry of his day, he was for
a time, like most of his French contemporaries, little more than a
skilful maker of elegant verses, dealing with conventional material in a
conventional way, arranging in new figures the same flowers and bowers,
sunsets and song-birds, and companies of fair women and their lovers,
that had been arranged and rearranged by every poet of the court circle
for a hundred years, and celebrated in sweet phrases of almost unvarying
sameness. Even at this time, to be sure, he was not without close and
loving observation of the living creatures of the real world, and his
verses often bring us flowers dewy and fragrant and fresh of colour as
they grew in the fields and gardens about London, and birds that had
learned their music in the woods; but his poetry was still not easily
distinguishable from that of Machault, Froissart, Deschamps, Transoun
and the other "courtly makers" of France. But while he was still
striving to master perfectly the technique of this pretty art of
trifling, he became acquainted with the new literature of Italy, both
poetry and prose. Much of the new poetry moved, like that of France,
among the conventionalities and artificialities of an unreal world of
romance, but it was of wider range, of fuller tone, of far greater
emotional intensity, and, at its best, was the fabric, not of elegant
ingenuity, but of creative human passion,--in Dante, indeed, a wonderful
visionary structure in which love and hate, and pity and terror, and the
forms and countenances of men were more vivid and real than in the world
of real men and real passions. The new prose--which Chaucer knew in
several of the writings of Boccaccio--was vastly different from any that
he had ever read in a modern tongue. Here were no mere brief anecdotes
like those _exempla_ which in the middle ages illustrated vernacular as
well as Latin sermons, no cumbrous, slow-moving treatises on the Seven
Deadly Sins, no half-articulate, pious meditations, but rapid, vivid,
well-constructed narratives ranging from the sentimental beauty of
stories like Griselda and the Franklin's Tale to coarse mirth and
malodorous vulgarity equal to those of the tales told later by Chaucer's
Miller and Reeve and Summoner. All these things he studied and some he
imitated. There is scarcely a feature of the verse that has not left
some trace in his own; the prose he did not imitate as prose, but there
can be little doubt that the subject matter of Boccaccio's tales and
novels, as well as his poems, affected the direction of Chaucer's
literary development, and quickened his habit of observing and utilizing
human life, and that the narrative art of the prose was influential in
the transformation of his methods of narration.
This transformation was effected not so much through the mere
superiority of the Italian models to the French as through the stimulus
which the differences between the two gave to his reflections upon the
processes and technique of composition, for Chaucer was not a careless,
happy-go-lucky poet of divine endowment, but a conscious, reflective
artist, seeking not merely for fine words and fine sentiments, but for
the proper arrangement of events, the significant exponent of character,
the right tone, and even the appropriate background and atmosphere,--as
may be seen, for example, in the transformations he wrought in the
_Pardoner's Tale_. It is therefore in the latest and most original of
the _Canterbury Tales_ that his art is most admirable, most
distinguished by technical excellences. In these we find so many
admirable qualities that we almost forget that he had any defects. His
diction is a model of picturesqueness, of simplicity, of dignity, and of
perfect adaptation to his theme; his versification is not only correct
but musical and varied, and shows a progressive tendency towards freer
and more complex melodies; his best tales are not mere repetitions of
the ancient stories they retell, but new creations, transformed by his
own imaginative realization of them, full of figures having the
dimensions and the vivacity of real life, acting on adequate motives,
and moving in an atmosphere and against a background appropriate to
their characters and their actions. In the tales of the Pardoner, the
Franklin, the Summoner, the Squire, he is no less notable as a
consummate artist than as a poet.
Chaucer, however, was not the only writer of his day remarkable for
mastery of technique. Gower, indeed, though a man of much learning and
intelligence, was neither a poet of the first rank nor an artist.
Despite the admirable qualities of clearness, order and occasional
picturesqueness which distinguish his work, he lacked the ability which
great poets have of making their words mean more than they say, and of
stirring the emotions even beyond the bounds of this enhanced meaning;
and there is not, perhaps, in all his voluminous work in English, French
and Latin, any indication that he regarded composition as an art
requiring consideration or any care beyond that of conforming to the
chosen rhythm and finding suitable rhymes.
There were others more richly endowed as poets and more finely developed
as artists. There was the beginner of the _Piers Plowman_ cycle[1], the
author of the Prologue and first eight passus of the A-text, a man of
clear and profound observation, a poet whose imagination brought before
him with distinctness and reality visual images of the motley
individuals and masses of men of whom he wrote, an artist who knew how
to organize and direct the figures of his dream-world, the movement of
his ever-unfolding vision. There was the remarkable successor of this
man, the author of the B-text, an almost prophetic figure, a great
poetic idealist, and, helpless though he often was in the direction of
his thought, an absolute master of images and words that seize upon the
heart and haunt the memory. Besides these, an unknown writer far in the
north-west had, in _Gawayne and the Grene Knight_, transformed the
medieval romance into a thing of speed and colour, of vitality and
mystery, no less remarkable for its fluent definiteness of form than for
the delights of hall-feast and hunt, the graceful comedy of temptation,
and the lonely ride of the doomed Gawayne through the silence of the
forest and the deep snow. In the same region, by its author's power of
visual imagination, the Biblical paraphrase, so often a mere humdrum
narrative, had been transformed, in _Patience_, into a narrative so
detailed and vivid that the reader is almost ready to believe that the
author himself, rather than Jonah, went down into the sea in the belly
of the great fish, and sat humbled and rebuked beside the withered
gourd-vine. And there also, by some strange chance, blossomed, with
perhaps only a local and temporary fragrance until its rediscovery in
the 19th century, that delicate flower of loneliness and aspiration,
_Pearl_, a wonder of elaborate art as well as of touching sentiment.
All these writings are great, not only relatively, but absolutely. There
is not one of them which would not, if written in our own time,
immediately mark its author as a man of very unusual ability. But the
point of special concern to us at the present moment is not so much that
they show remarkable poetic power, as that they possess technical merits
of a very high order. And we are accustomed to believe that, although
genius is a purely personal and incommunicable element, technical gains
are a common possession; that after Marlowe had developed the technique
of blank verse, this technique was available for all; that after Pope
had mastered the heroic couplet and Gray the ode, and Poe the short
story, all men could write couplets and odes and short stories of
technical correctness; that, as Tennyson puts it,
"All can grow the flower now,
For all have got the seed."
But this was singularly untrue of the technical gains made by Chaucer
and his great contemporaries. _Pearl_ and _Patience_ were apparently
unknown to the 15th century, but _Gawayne_ and _Piers Plowman_ and
Chaucer's works were known and were influential in one way or another
throughout the century. _Gawayne_ called into existence a large number
of romances dealing with the same hero or with somewhat similar
situations, some of them written in verse suggested by the remarkable
verse of their model, but the resemblance, even in versification, is
only superficial. _Piers Plowman_ gave rise to satirical allegories
written in the alliterative long line and furnished the figures and the
machinery for many satires in other metres, but the technical excellence
of the first _Piers Plowman_ poem was soon buried for centuries under
the tremendous social significance of itself and its successors. And
Chaucer, in spite of the fact that he was praised and imitated by many
writers and definitely claimed as master by more than one, not only
transmitted to them scarcely any of the technical conquests he had made,
but seems also to have been almost without success in creating any
change in the taste of the public that read his poems so eagerly, any
demand for better literature than had been written by his predecessors.
Wide and lasting Chaucer's influence undoubtedly was. Not only was all
the court-poetry, all the poetry of writers who pretended to cultivation
and refinement, throughout the century, in England and Scotland, either
directly or indirectly imitative of his work, but even the humblest
productions of unpretentious writers show at times traces of his
influence. Scotland was fortunate in having writers of greater ability
than England had (see SCOTLAND: _Literature_). In England the three
chief followers of Chaucer known to us by name are Lydgate, Hoccleve
(see OCCLEVE) and Hawes. Because of their praise of Chaucer and their
supposed personal relations to him, Lydgate and Hoccleve are almost
inseparable in modern discussions, but 15th century readers and writers
appear not to have associated them very closely. Indeed, Hoccleve is
rarely mentioned, while Lydgate is not only mentioned continually, but
continually praised as Chaucer's equal or even superior. Hoccleve was
not, to be sure, as prolific as Lydgate, but it is difficult to
understand why his work, which compares favourably in quality with
Lydgate's, attracted so much less attention. The title of his greatest
poem, _De regimine principum_, may have repelled readers who were not
princely born, though they would have found the work full of the moral
and prudential maxims and illustrative anecdotes so dear to them; but
his attack upon Sir John Oldcastle as a heretic ought to have been
decidedly to the taste of the orthodox upper classes, while his
lamentations over his misspent youth, his tales and some of his minor
poems might have interested any one. Of a less vigorous spirit than
Lydgate, he was, in his mild way, more humorous and more original. Also
despite his sense of personal loss in Chaucer's death and his care to
transmit to posterity the likeness of his beloved master, he seems to
have been less slavish than Lydgate in imitating him. His memory is full
of Chaucer's phrases, he writes in verse-forms hallowed by the master's
use, and he tries to give to his lines the movement of Chaucer's
decasyllables, but he is comparatively free from the influence of those
early allegorical works of the Master which produced in the 15th century
so dreary a flock of imitations.
Lydgate's productivity was enormous,--how great no man can say, for, as
was the case with Chaucer also, his fame caused many masterless poems to
be ascribed to him, but, after making all necessary deductions, the
amount of verse that has come down to us from him is astonishing. Here
it may suffice to say that his translations are predominantly epic
(140,000 lines), and his original compositions predominantly allegorical
love poems or didactic poems. If there is anything duller than a dull
epic it is a dull allegory, and Lydgate has achieved both. This is not
to deny the existence of good passages in his epics and ingenuity in his
allegories, but there is no pervading, persistent life in either. His
epics, like almost all the narrative verse of the time, whether epic,
legend, versified chronicle or metrical romance, seem designed merely to
satisfy the desire of 15th century readers for information, the craving
for facts--true or fictitious--the same craving that made possible the
poems on alchemy, on hunting, on manners and morals, on the duties of
parish priests, on the seven liberal arts. His allegories, like most
allegories of the age, are ingenious rearrangements of old figures and
old machinery, they are full of what had once been imagination but had
become merely memory assisted by cleverness. The great fault of all his
work, as of nearly all the literature of the age, is that it is merely a
more or less skilful manipulation of what the author had somewhere read
or heard, and not a faithful transcript of the author's own peculiar
sense or conception of what he had seen or heard or read. The fault is
not that the old is repeated, that a twice-told tale is retold, but that
it is retold without being re-imagined by the teller of the tale,
without taking on from his personality something that was not in it
before. Style, to be sure, was a thing that Lydgate and his fellows
tried to supply, and some of them supplied it abundantly according to
their lights. But style meant to them external decoration, classical
allusions, personifications, an inverted or even dislocated order of
words, and that famous "ornate diction," those "aureate terms," with
which they strove to surpass the melody, picturesqueness and dignity
which, for all its simplicity, they somehow dimly discerned in the
diction of Chaucer.
Stephen Hawes, with his allegorical treatise on the seven liberal
sciences, came later than these men, only to write worse. He was a
disciple of Lydgate rather than of Chaucer, and is not only lacking in
the vigour and sensitiveness which Lydgate sometimes displays, but
exaggerates the defects of his master. If it be a merit to have
conceived the pursuit of knowledge under the form of the efforts of a
knight to win the hand of his lady, it is almost the sole merit to which
Hawes can lay claim. Two or three good situations, an episode of low
comedy, and the epitaph of the Knight with its famous final couplet,
exhaust the list of his credits. The efforts that have been made to
trace through Hawes the line of Spenser's spiritual ancestry seem not
well advised. The resemblances that have been pointed out are such as
arise inevitably from the allegories and from the traditional material
with which both worked. There is no reason to believe that Spenser owed
his general conception to Hawes, or that the _Faëry Queene_ would have
differed in even the slightest detail from its present form if the
_Pastime of Pleasure_ had never been written. The machinery of chivalric
romance had already been applied to spiritual and moral themes in Spain
without the aid of Hawes.
It is obvious that the fundamental lack of all these men was imaginative
power, poetic ability. This is a sufficient reason for failure to write
good poetry. But why did not men of better ability devote themselves to
literature in this age? Was it because of the perturbed conditions
arising from the prevalence of foreign and civil wars? Perhaps not,
though it is clear that if Sir Thomas Malory had perished in one of the
many fights through which he lived, the chivalric and literary impulses
which he perhaps received from the "Fadre of Curteisy," Richard
Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, would have gone for nothing and we should
lack the _Morte Darthur_. But it may very well be that the wars and the
tremendous industrial growth of England fixed the attention of the
strongest and most original spirits among the younger men and so
withdrew them from the possible attractions of literature. But, after
all, whatever general truth may lie in such speculations, the way of a
young man with his own life is as incalculable as any of the four things
which Agur son of Jakeh declared to be past finding out; local and
special accidents rather than general communal influences are apt to
shape the choice of boys of exceptional character, and we have many
instances of great talents turning to literature or art when war or
commerce or science was the dominant attraction of social life.
But even recognizing that the followers of Chaucer were not men of
genius, it seems strange that their imitation of Chaucer was what it
was. They not only entirely failed to see what his merits as an artist
were and how greatly superior his mature work is to his earlier in point
of technique; they even preferred the earlier and imitated it almost
exclusively. Furthermore, his mastery of verse seemed to them to consist
solely in writing verses of approximately four or five stresses and
arranging them in couplets or in stanzas of seven or eight lines. Their
preference for the early allegorical work can be explained by their lack
of taste and critical discernment and by the great vogue of allegorical
writing in England and France. Men who are just beginning to think about
the distinction between literature and ordinary writing usually feel
that it consists in making literary expression differ as widely as
possible from simple direct speech. For this reason some sort of
artificial diction is developed and some artificial word order devised.
Allegory is used as an elegant method of avoiding unpoetical plainness,
and is an easy means of substituting logic for imagination. The failure
to reproduce in some degree at least the melody and smoothness of
Chaucer's decasyllabic verse, and the particular form which that failure
took in Lydgate, are to be explained by the fact that Lydgate and his
fellows never knew how Chaucer's verse sounded when properly read. It is
a mistake to suppose that the disappearance of final unaccented _e_ from
many words or its instability in many others made it difficult for
Lydgate and his fellows to write melodious verse. Melodious verse has
been written since the disappearance of all these sounds, and the
possibility of a choice between a form with final _e_ and one without it
is not a hindrance but an advantage to a poet, as Goethe, Schiller,
Heine and innumerable German poets have shown by their practice. The
real difficulty with these men was that they pronounced Chaucer's verse
as if it were written in the English of their own day. As a matter of
fact all the types of verse discovered by scholars in Lydgate's poems
can be discovered in Chaucer's also if they be read with Lydgate's
pronunciation. Chaucer did not write archaic English, as some have
supposed,--that is, English of an earlier age than his own,--it would
have been impossible for him to do so with the unfailing accuracy he
shows; he did, however, write a conservative, perhaps an old-fashioned,
English, such as was spoken by the conservative members of the class of
society to which he was attached and for which he wrote. An English with
fewer final _e_'s was already in existence among the less conservative
classes, and this rapidly became standard English in consequence of the
social changes which occurred during his own life. We know that a
misunderstanding of Chaucer's verse existed from the 16th century to the
time of Thomas Tyrwhitt; it seems clear that it began even earlier, in
Chaucer's own lifetime.
There are several poems of the 15th century which were long ascribed to
Chaucer. Among them are:--the _Complaint of the Black Knight_, or
_Complaint of a Lover's Life_, now known to be Lydgate's; the _Mother of
God_, now ascribed to Hoccleve; the _Cuckoo and the Nightingale_, by
Clanvowe; _La Belle Dame sans merci_, a translation from the French of
Alain Chartier by Richard Ros; _Chaucer's Dream, or the Isle of Ladies_;
the _Assembly of Ladies_; the _Flower and the Leaf_; and the _Court of
Love_. The two poems of Lydgate and Hoccleve are as good as Chaucer's
poorest work. The _Assembly of Ladies_ and the _Flower and the Leaf_ are
perhaps better than the _Book of the Duchess_, but not so good as the
_Parliament of Fowls_. The _Flower and the Leaf_, it will be remembered,
was very dear to John Keats, who, like all his contemporaries, regarded
it as Chaucer's. An additional interest attaches to both it and the
_Assembly of Ladies_, from the fact that the author may have been a
woman; Professor Skeat is, indeed, confident that he knows who the woman
was and when she wrote. These poems, like the _Court of Love_, are
thoroughly conventional in material, all the figures and poetical
machinery may be found in dozens of other poems in England and France,
as Professor Neilson has shown for the _Court of Love_ and Mr Marsh for
the _Flower and the Leaf_; but there are a freshness of spirit and a
love of beauty in them that are not common; the conventional birds and
flowers are there, but they seem, like those of Chaucer's _Legend_, to
have some touch of life, and the conventional companies of ladies and
gentlemen ride and talk and walk with natural grace and ease. The _Court
of Love_ is usually ascribed to a very late date, as late even as the
middle of the 16th century. If this is correct, it is a notable instance
of the persistence of a Chaucerian influence. An effort has been made,
to be sure, to show that it was written by Scogan and that the writing
of it constituted the offence mentioned by Chaucer in his _Envoy to
Scogan_, but it has been clearly shown that this is impossible, both
because the language is later than Scogan's time and because nothing in
the poem resembles the offence clearly described by Chaucer.
Whatever may be true of the authorship of the _Assembly of Ladies_ and
the _Flower and the Leaf_, there were women writers in England in the
middle ages. Juliana of Norwich wrote her _Revelations of Divine Love_
before 1400. The much discussed Dame Juliana Berners, the supposed
compiler of the treatise on hunting in the _Book of St Albans_, may be
mythical, though there is no reason why a woman should not have written
such a book; and a shadowy figure that disappears entirely in the
sunlight is the supposed authoress of the _Nut Brown Maid_, for if
language is capable of definite meaning, the last stanza declares
unequivocally that the poem is the work of a man. But there is a poem
warning young women against entering a nunnery which may be by a woman,
and there is an interesting entry among the records of New Romney for
1463-1464, "Paid to Agnes Forde for the play of the Interlude of our
Lord's Passion, 6s. 8d.," which is apparently the earliest mention of a
woman dramatist in England. Finally, Margaret, countess of Richmond, the
mother of Henry VII., not only aided scholars and encouraged writers,
but herself translated the (spurious) fourth book of St Thomas à
Kempis's _Imitatio Christi_. Another Margaret, the duchess of Burgundy,
it will be remembered, encouraged Caxton in his translation and
printing. Women seem, indeed, to have been especially lovers of books
and patrons of writers, and Skelton, if we may believe his _Garland of
Laurel_, was surrounded by a bevy of ladies comparable to a modern
literary club; Erasmus's Suffragette Convention may correspond to no
reality, but the Learned Lady arguing against the Monk for the
usefulness and pleasure derived from books was not an unknown type.
Women were capable of many things in the middle ages. English records
show them to have been physicians, churchwardens, justices of the peace
and sheriffs, and, according to a satirist, they were also priests.
The most original and powerful poetry of the 15th century was composed
in popular forms for the ear of the common people and was apparently
written without conscious artistic purpose. Three classes of productions
deserve special attention,--songs and carols, popular ballads and
certain dramatic compositions. The songs and carols belong to a species
which may have existed in England before the Norman Conquest, but which
certainly was greatly modified by the musical and lyric forms of France.
The best of them are the direct and simple if not entirely artless
expressions of personal emotion, and even when they contain, as they
sometimes do, the description of a person, a situation, or an event,
they deal with these things so subjectively, confine themselves so
closely to the rendering of the emotional effect upon the singer, that
they lose none of their directness or simplicity. Some of them deal with
secular subjects, some with religious, and some are curious and
delightful blendings of religious worship and aspiration with earthly
tenderness for the embodiments of helpless infancy and protecting
motherhood which gave Christianity so much of its power over the
affections and imagination of the middle ages. Even those which begin as
mere expressions of joy in the Yule-tide eating and drinking and
merriment catch at moments hints of higher joys, of finer emotions, and
lift singer and hearer above the noise and stir of earth. Hundreds of
songs written and sung in the 15th century must have perished; many, no
doubt, lived only a single season and were never even written down; but
chance has preserved enough of them to make us wonder at the age which
could produce such masterpieces of tantalizing simplicity.
The lyrics which describe a situation form a logical, if not a real
transition to those which narrate an episode or an event. The most
famous of the latter, the _Nut Brown Maid_, has often been called a
ballad, and "lyrical ballad" it is in the sense established by Coleridge
and Wordsworth, but its affinities are rather with the song or carol
than with the folk-ballad, and, like Henryson's charming _Robin and
Malkin_, it is certainly the work of a man of culture and of conscious
artistic purpose and methods. Unaccompanied, as it is, by any other work
of the same author, this poem, with its remarkable technical merits, is
an even more astonishing literary phenomenon than the famous single
sonnet of Blanco White. It can hardly be doubted that the author learned
his technique from the songs and carols.
The folk-ballad, like the song or carol, belongs in some form to
immemorial antiquity. It is doubtless a mistake to suppose that any
ballad has been preserved to us that is a purely communal product, a
confection of the common knowledge, traditions and emotions of the
community wrought by subconscious processes into a song that finds
chance but inevitable utterance through one or more individuals as the
whole commune moves in its molecular dance. But it is equally a mistake
to argue that ballads are essentially metrical romances in a state of
decay. Both the matter and the manner of most of the best ballads forbid
such a supposition, and it can hardly be doubted that in some of the
folk-ballads of the 15th century are preserved not only traditions of
dateless antiquity, but formal elements and technical processes that
actually are derived from communal song and dance. By the 15th century,
however, communal habits and processes of composition had ceased, and
the traditional elements, formulae and technique had become merely
conventional aids and guides for the individual singer. Ancient as they
were, conventional as, in a sense, they also were, they exercised none
of the deadening, benumbing influence of ordinary conventions. They
furnished, one may say, a vibrant framework of emotional expression,
each tone of which moved the hearers all the more powerfully because it
had sung to them so many old, unhappy, far-off things, so many battles
and treacheries and sudden griefs; a framework which the individual
singer needed only to fill out with the simplest statement of the event
which had stirred his own imagination and passions to produce, not a
work of art, but a song of universal appeal. Not a work of art, because
there are scarcely half a dozen ballads that are really works of art,
and the greatest ballads are not among these. There is scarcely one that
is free from excrescences, from dulness, from trivialities, from
additions that would spoil their greatest situations and their greatest
lines, were it not that we resolutely shut our ears and our eyes, as we
should, to all but their greatest moments. But at their best moments the
best ballads have an almost incomparable power, and to a people sick, as
we are, of the ordinary, the usual, the very trivialities and
impertinences of the ballads only help to define and emphasize these
best moments. In histories of English literature the ballads have been
so commonly discussed in connexion with their rediscovery in the 18th
century, that we are apt to forget that some of the very best were
demonstrably composed in the 15th and that many others of uncertain date
probably belong to the same time.
Along with the genuine ballads dealing with a recent event or a
traditional theme there were ballads in which earlier romances are
retold in ballad style. This was doubtless inevitable in view of the
increasing epic tendency of the ballad and the interest still felt in
metrical romances, but it should not mislead us into regarding the
genuine folk-ballad as an out-growth of the metrical romance.
Besides the ordinary epic or narrative ballad, the 15th century produced
ballads in dramatic form, or, perhaps it were better to say, dramatized
some of its epic ballads. How commonly this was done we do not know,
but the scanty records of the period indicate that it was a widespread
custom, though only three plays of this character (all concerning Robin
Hood) have come down to us. These plays had, however, no further
independent development, but merely furnished elements of incident and
atmosphere to later plays of a more highly organized type. With these
ballad plays may also be mentioned the Christmas plays (usually of St
George) and the sword-dance plays, which also flourished in the 15th
century, but survive for us only as obscure elements in the masques and
plays of Ben Jonson and in such modern rustic performances as Thomas
Hardy has so charmingly described in _The Return of the Native_.
The additions which the 15th century made to the ancient cycles of
Scripture plays, the so-called Mysteries, are another instance of a
literary effort which spent itself in vain (see DRAMA). The most notable
of these are, of course, the world renowned comic scenes in the
_Towneley_ (or _Wakefield_) _Plays_, in the pageants of Cain, of Noah
and of the Shepherds. In none of these is the 15th century writer
responsible for the original comic intention; in the pageants of Cain
and of the Shepherds fragments of the work of a 14th century writer
still remain to prove the earlier existence of the comic conception, and
that it was traditional in the Noah pageant we know from the testimony
of Chaucer's Miller; but none the less the 15th century writer was a
comic dramatist of original power and of a skill in the development of
both character and situation previously unexampled in England. The
inability of Lydgate to develop a comic conception is strikingly
displayed if one compares his _Pageant for Presentation before the King
at Hereford_ with the work of this unknown artist. But in our admiration
for this man and his famous episode of Mak and the fictitious infant, we
are apt to forget the equally fine, though very different qualities
shown in some of the later pageants of the _York Plays_. Such, for
example, is the final pageant, that of the _Last Judgment_, a drama of
slow and majestic movement, to be sure, but with a large and fine
conception of the great situation, and a noble and dignified elocution
not inadequate to the theme.
The _Abraham and Isaac_ play of the Brome MS., extant as a separate play
and perhaps so performed, which has been so greatly admired for its
cumulative pathos, also belongs demonstrably to this century. It is not,
as has been supposed, an intermediate stage between French plays and the
Chester _Abraham and Isaac_, but is derived directly from the latter by
processes which comparison of the two easily reveals. Scripture plays of
a type entirely different from the well-known cyclic mysteries,
apparently confined to the Passion and Resurrection and the related
events, become known to us for the first time in the records of this
century. Such plays seem to have been confined to the towns of the
south, and, as both their location and their structure suggest, may have
been borrowed from France. In any event, the records show that they
flourished greatly and that new versions were made from time to time.
Another form of the medieval drama, the Morality Play, had its origin in
the 15th century,--or else very late in the 14th. The earliest known
examples of it in England date from about 1420. These are the _Castle of
Perseverance_ and the _Pride of Life_. Others belonging to the century
are _Mind, Will and Understanding_, _Mankind_ and Medwall's _Nature_.
There are also parts of two pageants in the _Ludus Coventriae_ (c. 1460)
that are commonly classed as Moralities, and these, together with the
existence of a few personified abstractions in other plays, have led
some critics to suppose that the Morality was derived from the Mystery
by the gradual introduction of personified abstractions in the place of
real persons. But the two kinds of plays are fundamentally different,
different in subject and in technique; and no replacement of real
persons by personifications can change a Mystery into a Morality.
Moreover, the Morality features in Mysteries are later than the origin
of the Morality itself and are due to the influence of the latter. The
Morality Play is merely a dramatized allegory, and derives its
characters and its peculiar technique from the application of the
dramatic method to the allegory, the favourite literary form of the
middle ages. None of the 15th century Moralities is literature of the
first rank, though both the _Castle of Perseverance_ and _Pride of Life_
contain passages ringing with a passionate sincerity that communicates
itself to the hearer or reader. But it was not until the beginning of
the 16th century that a Morality of permanent human interest appeared in
_Everyman_, which, after all, is a translation from the Dutch, as is
clearly proved by the fact that in the two prayers near the end of the
play the Dutch has complicated but regular stanzas, whereas the English
has only irregularly rhymed passages.
Besides the Mysteries and Moralities, the 15th century had also Miracle
Plays, properly so called, dealing with the lives, martyrdoms and
miracles of saints. As we know these only from records of their
performance or their mere existence--no texts have been preserved to us,
except the very curious _Play of the Sacrament_--it is impossible to
speak of their literary or dramatic qualities. The Miracle Play as a
form was, of course, not confined to the 15th century. Notwithstanding
the assertions of historians of literature that it died out in England
soon after its introduction at the beginning of the 12th century, its
existence can be demonstrated from c. 1110 to the time of Shakespeare.
But records seem to indicate that it flourished especially during this
period of supposed barrenness.
What was the nature of the "Komedy of Troylous and Pandor" performed
before Henry VIII. on the 6th of January 1516 we have no means of
knowing. It is very early indeed to assume the influence of either
classical or Italian drama, and although we have no records of similar
plays from the 15th century, it must be remembered that our records are
scanty, that the middle ages applied the dramatic method to all sorts of
material, and that it is therefore not impossible that secular plays
like this were performed at court at a much earlier date. The record at
any rate does not indicate that it was a new type of play, and the
Griselda story had been dramatized in France, Italy and the Netherlands
before 1500.
That not much good prose was written in the 15th century is less
surprising than that so little good verse was written. The technique of
verse composition had been studied and mastered in the preceding age, as
we have seen, but the technique of prose had apparently received no
serious consideration. Indeed, it is doubtful if any one thought of
prose as a possible medium of artistic expression. Chaucer apparently
did not, in spite of the comparative excellence of his Preface to the
_Astrolabe_ and his occasional noteworthy successes with the
difficulties of the philosophy of Boethius; Wycliffe is usually clumsy;
and the translators of Mandeville, though they often give us passages of
great charm, obviously were plain men who merely translated as best they
could. There was, however, a comparatively large amount of prose written
in the 15th century, mainly for religious or educational purposes,
dealing with the same sorts of subjects that were dealt with in verse,
and in some cases not distinguishable from the verse by any feature but
the absence of rhyme. The vast body of this we must neglect; only five
writers need be named: John Capgrave, Reginald Pecock, Sir John
Fortescue, Caxton and Malory. Capgrave, the compiler of the first
chronicle in English prose since the Conquest, wrote by preference in
Latin; his English is a condescension to those who could not read Latin
and has the qualities which belong to the talk of an earnest and sincere
man of commonplace ability. Pecock and Fortescue are more important.
Pecock (c. 1395-c. 1460) was a man of singularly acute and logical mind.
He prided himself upon his dialectic skill and his faculty for
discovering arguments that had been overlooked by others. His writings,
therefore--or at least the _Repressor_--are excellent in general
structure and arrangement, his ideas are presented clearly and simply,
with few digressions or excrescences, and his sentences, though
sometimes too long, are more like modern prose than any others before
the age of Elizabeth. His style is lightened by frequent figures of
speech, mostly illustrative, and really illustrative, of his ideas,
while his intellectual ingenuity cannot fail to interest even those whom
his prejudices and preconceptions repel. Fortescue, like Capgrave, wrote
by preference in Latin, and, like Pecock, was philosophical and
controversial. But his principal English work, the _Difference between
an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy_, differs from Pecock's in being
rather a pleading than a logical argument, and the geniality and glowing
patriotism of its author give it a far greater human interest.
No new era in literary composition was marked by the activity of William
Caxton as translator and publisher, though the printing-press has, of
course, changed fundamentally the problem of the dissemination and
preservation of culture, and thereby ultimately affected literary
production profoundly. But neither Caxton nor the writers whose works he
printed produced anything new in form or spirit. His publications range
over the whole field of 15th century literature, and no doubt he tried,
as his quaint prefaces indicate, to direct the public taste to what was
best among the works of the past, as when he printed and reprinted the
_Canterbury Tales_, but among all his numerous publications not one is
the herald of a new era. The only book of permanent interest as
literature which he introduced to the world was the _Morte Darthur_ of
Sir Thomas Malory, and this is a compilation from older romances (see
ARTHURIAN LEGEND). It is, to be sure, the one book of permanent literary
significance produced in England in the 15th century; it glows with the
warmth and beauty of the old knight's conception of chivalry and his
love for the great deeds and great men of the visionary past, and it
continually allures the reader by its fresh and vivid diction and by a
syntax which, though sometimes faulty, has almost always a certain naïve
charm; "thystorye (i.e. the history) of the sayd Arthur," as Caxton long
ago declared, "is so gloryous and shynyng, that he is stalled in the
first place of the moost noble, beste and worthyest of the Crysten men";
it is not, however, as the first of a new species, but as the final
flower of an old that this glorious and shining book retains its place
in English literature.
Whatever may have been the effect of the wars and the growth of
industrial life in England in withdrawing men of the best abilities from
the pursuit of literature, neither these causes nor any other interfered
with the activity of writers of lesser powers. The amount of writing is
really astonishing, as is also its range. More than three hundred
separate works (exclusive of the large number still ascribed to Lydgate
and of the seventy printed by Caxton) have been made accessible by the
Early English Text Society and other public or private presses, and it
seems probable that an equal number remains as yet unpublished. No list
of these writings can be given here, but it may not be unprofitable to
indicate the range of interests by noting the classes of writing
represented. The classification is necessarily rough, as some writings
belong to more than one type. We may note, first, love poems,
allegorical and unallegorical, narrative, didactic, lyrical and
quasi-lyrical; poems autobiographical and exculpatory; poems of eulogy
and appeal for aid; tales of entertainment or instruction, in prose and
in verse; histories ancient and modern, and brief accounts of recent
historical events, in prose and in verse; prose romances and metrical
romances; legends and lives of saints, in prose and in verse; poems and
prose works of religious meditation, devotion and controversy; treatises
of religious instruction, in prose and in verse; ethical and
philosophical treatises, and ethical and prudential treatises; treatises
of government, of political economy, of foreign travel, of hygiene, of
surgery, of alchemy, of heraldry, of hunting and hawking and fishing, of
farming, of good manners, and of cooking and carving. Prosaic and
intended merely to serve practical uses as many of these were, verse is
the medium of expression as often as prose. Besides this large amount
and variety of English compositions, it must be remembered that much was
also written in Latin, and that Latin and French works of this and other
centuries were read by the educated classes.
Although the intellectual and spiritual movement which we call the
Italian Renaissance was not unknown in England in the 14th and 15th
centuries, it is not strange that it exercised no perceptible influence
upon English literature, except in the case of Chaucer. Chaucer was the
only English man of letters before the 16th century who knew Italian
literature. The Italians who visited England and the Englishmen who
visited Italy were interested, not in literature, but in scholarship.
Such studies as were pursued by Free, Grey, Flemming, Tilly, Gunthorpe
and others who went to Italy, made them better grammarians and
rhetoricians, and no doubt gave them a freer, wider outlook, but upon
their return to England they were immediately absorbed in administrative
cares, which left them little leisure for literary composition, even if
they had had any inclination to write. They prepared the way, however,
for the leaders of the great intellectual awakening which began in
England with Linacre, Colet, More and their fellows, and which finally
culminated in the age of Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson, Gilbert,
Harvey and Harriott.
When the middle ages ceased in England it is impossible to say
definitely. Long after the new learning and culture of the Renaissance
had been introduced there, long after classical and Italian models were
eagerly chosen and followed, the epic and lyric models of the middle
ages were admired and imitated, and the ancient forms of the drama lived
side by side with the new until the time of Shakespeare himself. John
Skelton, although according to Erasmus "unum Britannicarum literarum
lumen ac decus," and although possessing great originality and vigour
both in diction and in versification when attacking his enemies or
indulging in playful rhyming, was not only a great admirer of Lydgate,
but equalled even the worst of his predecessors in aureate pedantries of
diction, in complicated impossibilities of syntax, and in meaningless
inversions of word-order whenever he wished to write elegant and
dignified literature. And not a little of the absurd diction of the
middle of the 16th century is merely a continuation of the bad ideals
and practices of the refined writers of the 15th.
In fine, the 15th century has, aside from its vigorous, though sometimes
coarse, popular productions, little that can interest the lover of
literature. It offers, however, in richest profusion problems for the
literary antiquarian and the student of the relations between social
conditions and literary productivity,--problems which have usually been
attacked only with the light weapons of irresponsible speculation, but
which may perhaps be solved by a careful comparative study of many
literatures and many periods. Moreover, although in the quality of its
literary output it is decidedly inferior to the 14th century, the amount
and the wide range of its productions indicate the gradual extension of
the habit of reading to classes of society that were previously
unlettered; and this was of great importance for the future of English
literature, just as the innumerable dramatic performances throughout
England were important in developing audiences for Marlowe and
Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher.
For bibliography see vol. ii. of the _Cambridge History of Literature_
(1909); and Brandl's _Geschichte der mittelenglischen Literatur_
(reprinted from Paul's _Grundriss der germanischen Philologie_).
Interesting general discussions may be found in the larger histories
of English Literature, such as Ten Brink's, Jusserand's, and (a little
more antiquated) Courthope's and Morley's. (J. M. Ma.)
III. ELIZABETHAN TIMES
_General Influences, and Prologue to 1579._--The history of letters in
England from More's _Utopia_ (1516), the first Platonic vision, to
Milton's _Samson Agonistes_ (1671), the latest classic tragedy, is one
and continuous. That is the period of the English Renaissance, in the
wider sense, and it covers all and more of the literature loosely called
"Elizabethan." With all its complexity and subdivisions, it has as real
a unity as the age of Pericles, or that of Petrarch and Boccaccio, or
the period in Germany that includes both Lessing and Heine. It is
peculiar in length of span, in variety of power, and in wealth of
production, though its master-works on the greater scale are relatively
few. It is distinct, while never quite cut off, from the middle age
preceding, and also from the classical or "Augustan" age that followed.
The coming of Dryden denoted a new phase; but it was still a phase of
the Renaissance; and the break that declared itself about 1660 counts as
nothing beside the break with the middle ages; for this implied the
whole change in art, thought and temper, which re-created the European
mind. It is true that many filaments unite Renaissance and middle ages,
not only in the religious and purely intellectual region, but in that of
art. The matter of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the tales of Arthur and of
Troilus, the old fairy folklore of the South, the topic of the _Falls of
Princes_, lived on; and so did the characteristic medieval form,
allegory and many of the old metres of the 14th century. But then these
things were transformed, often out of knowledge. Shakespeare's use of
the histories of Macbeth, Lear and Troilus, and Spenser's of the
allegoric romance, are examples. And when the gifts of the middle ages
are not transformed, as in the _Mirror for Magistrates_, they strike us
as survivals from a lost world.
So vital a change took long in the working. The English Renaissance of
letters only came into full flower during the last twenty years of the
16th century, later than in any Southern land; but it was all the richer
for delay, and would have missed many a life-giving element could it
have been driven forward sooner. If the actual process of genius is
beyond analysis, we can still notice the subjects which genius receives,
or chooses, to work upon, and also the vesture which it chooses for
them; and we can watch some of the forces that long retard but in the
end fertilize these workings of genius.
General forces.
What, then, in England, were these forces? Two of them lie outside
letters, namely, the political settlement, culminating in the later
reign of Elizabeth, and the religious settlement, whereby the Anglican
Church grew out of the English Reformation. A third force lay within the
sphere of the Renaissance itself, in the narrower meaning of the term.
It was culture--the prefatory work of culture and education, which at
once prepared and put off the flowering of pure genius. "Elizabethan"
literature took its complexion from the circumstance that all these
three forces were in operation at once. The Church began to be fully
articulate, just when the national feeling was at its highest, and the
tides of classical and immigrant culture were strongest. Spenser's
_Faerie Queene_, Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_ and Shakespeare's
_Henry V._ came in the same decade (1590-1600). But these three forces,
political, religious and educational, were of very different duration
and value. The enthusiasm of 1590-1600 was already dying down in the
years 1600-1610, when the great tragedies were written; and soon a
wholly new set of political forces began to tell on art. The religious
inspiration was mainly confined to certain important channels; and
literature as a whole, from first to last, was far more secular than
religious. But Renaissance culture, in its ramifications and
consequences, tells all the time and over the whole field, from 1500 to
1660. It is this culture which really binds together the long and varied
chronicle. Before passing to narrative, a short review of each of these
elements is required.
Politics.
Down to 1579 the Tudor rule was hardly a direct inspiration to authors.
The reign of Henry VII. was first duly told by Bacon, and that of Henry
VIII. staged by Shakespeare and Fletcher, in the time of James I. Sir
Thomas More found in Roper, and Wolsey in Cavendish, sound biographers,
who are nearly the earliest in the language. The later years of Henry
VIII. were full of episodes too tragically picturesque for safe handling
in the lifetime of his children. The next two reigns were engrossed with
the religious war; and the first twenty years of Elizabeth, if they laid
the bases of an age of peace, well-being, and national self-confidence
that was to prove a teeming soil for letters, were themselves poor in
themes for patriotic art. The abortive treason of the northern earls was
echoed only in a ringing ballad. But the voyagers, freebooters, and
explorers reported their experiences, as a duty, not for fame; and
these, though not till the golden age, were edited by Hakluyt, and
fledged the poetic fancies that took wing from the "Indian Peru" to the
"still-vext Bermoothes." Yet, in default of any true historian, the
queen's wise delays and diplomacies that upheld the English power, and
her refusal to launch on a Protestant or a national war until occasion
compelled and the country was ready, were subjects as uninspiring to
poets as the burning questions of the royal marriage or the royal title.
But by 1580 the nation was filled with the sense of Elizabeth's success
and greatness and of its own prosperity. No shorter struggle and no less
achievement could have nursed the insolent, jubilant patriotism of the
years that followed; a feeling that for good reasons was peculiar to
England among the nations, and created the peculiar forms of the
chronicle play and poem. These were borrowed neither from antiquity nor
from abroad, and were never afterwards revived. The same exultation
found its way into the current forms of ode and pastoral, of masque and
allegory, and into many a dedication and interlude of prose. It was so
strong as to outlive the age that gave it warrant. The passion for
England, the passion of England for herself, animates the bulk of
Drayton's _Poly-Olbion_, which was finished so late as 1622. But the
public issues were then changing, the temper was darker; and the civil
struggle was to speak less in poetry than in the prose of political
theory and ecclesiastical argument, until its after-explosion came in
the verse of Milton.
Religious change.
The English Reformation, so long political rather than doctrinal or
imaginative, cost much writing on all sides; but no book like Calvin's
_Institution_ is its trophy, at once defining the religious change for
millions of later men and marking a term of departure in the national
prose. Still, the debating weapons, the axes and billhooks, of
vernacular English were sharpened--somewhat jaggedly--in the pamphlet
battles that dwarfed the original energies of Sir Thomas More and evoked
those of Tyndale and his friends. The powers of the same style were
proved for descriptive economy by Starkey's Dialogue between Pole and
Lupset, and for religious appeal by the blunt sound rhetoric and
forthright jests in the sermons of Latimer (died 1555). Foxe's reports
of the martyrs are the type of early Protestant English (1563); but the
reforming divines seldom became real men of letters even when their
Puritanism, or discontent with the final Anglican settlement and its
temper, began to announce itself. Their spirit, however, comes out in
many a corner of poetry, in Gascoigne's _Steel Glass_ as in Spenser's
_Shepherd's Calendar_; and the English Reformation lived partly on its
pre-natal memories of Langland as well as of Wycliffe. The fruit of the
struggle, though retarded, was ample. Carrying on the work of Fisher and
Cranmer, the new church became the nursing mother of English prose, and
trained it more than any single influence,--trained it so well, for the
purposes of sacred learning, translation and oratory, and also as a
medium of poetic feeling, that in these activities England came to rival
France. How late any religious writer of true rank arose may be seen by
the lapse of over half a century between Henry VIII.'s Act of Supremacy
and Hooker's treatise. But after Hooker the chain of eloquent divines
was unbroken for a hundred years.
Classical culture.
Renaissance culture had many stages and was fed from many streams. At
the outset of the century, in the wake of Erasmus, under the teaching of
Colet and his friends, there spread a sounder knowledge of the Greek and
Latin tongues, of the classic texts, and so of the ancient life and
mind. This period of humanism in the stricter sense was far less
brilliant than in Italy and France. No very great scholar or savant
arose in Britain for a long time; but neo-Latin literature, the
satellite of scholarship, shone brightly in George Buchanan. But
scholarship was created and secured; and in at least one, rather
solitary, work of power, the _Utopia_ (which remained in Latin till
1551), the fundamental process was begun which appropriates the Greek
mind, not only for purposes of schooling, but as a source of new and
independent thinking. In and after the middle of the century the
classics were again put forward by Cheke, by Wilson in his _Art of
Rhetoric_ (1553), and by Ascham in his letters and in his _Schoolmaster_
(1570), as the true staple of humane education, and the pattern for a
simple yet lettered English. The literature of translations from the
classics, in prose and verse, increased; and these works, at first
plain, business-like, and uninspired, slowly rose in style and power,
and at last, like the translations from modern tongues, were written by
a series of masters of English, who thus introduced Plutarch and Tacitus
to poets and historians. This labour of mediation was encouraged by the
rapid expansion and reform of the two universities, of which almost
every great master except Shakespeare was a member; and even Shakespeare
had ample Latin for his purpose.
Italy and France.
The direct impact of the classics on "Elizabethan" literature, whether
through such translations or the originals, would take long to describe.
But their indirect impact is far stronger, though in result the two are
hard to discern. This is another point that distinguishes the English
Renaissance from the Italian or the French, and makes it more complex.
The knowledge of the thought, art and enthusiasms of Rome and Athens
constantly came round through Italy or France, tinted and charged in the
passage with something characteristic of those countries. The early
playwrights read Seneca in Latin and English, but also the foreign
Senecan tragedies. Spenser, when starting on his pastorals, studied the
Sicilians, but also Sannazaro and Marot. Shakespeare saw heroic
antiquity through Plutarch, but also, surely, through Montaigne's
reading of antiquity. Few of the poets can have distinguished the
original fountain of Plato from the canalized supply of the Italian
Neoplatonists. The influence, however, of Cicero on the Anglican pulpit
was immediate as well as constant; and so was that of the conciser Roman
masters, Sallust and Tacitus, on Ben Jonson and on Bacon. Such scattered
examples only intimate the existence of two great chapters of English
literary history,--the effects of the classics and the effects of Italy.
The bibliography of 16th-century translations from the Italian in the
fields of political and moral speculation, poetry, fiction and the
drama, is so large as itself to tell part of the story. The genius of
Italy served the genius of England in three distinctive ways. It
inspired the recovery, with new modulations, of a lost music and a lost
prosody. It modelled many of the chief poetic forms, which soon were
developed out of recognition; such were tragedy, allegory, song,
pastoral and sonnet. Thirdly, it disclosed some of the master-thoughts
upon government and conduct formed both by the old and the new
Mediterranean world. Machiavelli, the student of ancient Rome and modern
Italy, riveted the creed of Bacon. It might be said that never has any
modern people so influenced another in an equal space of time--and
letters, here as ever, are only the voice, the symbol, of a whole life
and culture--if we forgot the sway of French in the later 17th and 18th
centuries. And the power of French was alive also in the 16th. The track
of Marot, of Ronsard and the Pleiad and Desportes, of Rabelais and
Calvin and Montaigne, is found in England. Journeymen like Boisteau and
Belleforest handed on immortal tales. The influence is noteworthy of
Spanish mannerists, above all of Guevara upon sententious prose, and of
the novelists and humorists, headed by Cervantes, upon the drama. German
legend is found not only in Marlowe's _Faustus_, but in the by-ways of
play and story. It will be long before the rich and coloured tangle of
these threads has been completely unravelled with due tact and science.
The presence of one strand may here be mentioned, which appears in
unexpected spots.
Philosophy.
As in Greece, and as in the day of Coleridge and Shelley, the fabric of
poetry and prose is shot through with philosophical ideas; a further
distinction from other literatures like the Spanish of the golden age or
the French of 1830. But these were not so much the ideas of the new
physical science and of Bacon as of the ethical and metaphysical
ferment. The wave of free talk in the circles of Marlowe, Greville and
Raleigh ripples through their writings. Though the direct influence of
Giordano Bruno on English writers is probably limited to a reminiscence
in the _Faerie Queene_ (Book vii.), he was well acquainted with Sidney
and Greville, argued for the Copernican theory at Greville's house,
lectured on the soul at Oxford, and published his epoch-marking Italian
dialogues during his two years' stay (1583-1585) in London. The debates
in the earlier schools of Italy on the nature and tenure of the soul are
heard in the _Nosce Teipsum_ (1599) of Sir John Davies; a stoicism, "of
the schools" as well as "of the blood," animates Cassius and also the
French heroes of Chapman; and if the earlier drama is sown with Seneca's
old maxims on sin and destiny, the later drama, at least in Shakespeare,
is penetrated with the freer reading of life and conduct suggested by
Montaigne. Platonism--with its _vox angelica_ sometimes a little
hoarse--is present from the youthful _Hymns_ of Spenser to the last
followers of Donne; sometimes drawn from Plato, it is oftener the
Christianized doctrine codified by Ficino or Pico. It must be noted that
this play of philosophic thought only becomes marked after 1580, when
the preparatory tunings of English literature are over.
We may now quickly review the period down to 1580, in the departments of
prose, verse and drama. It was a time which left few memorials of form.
Prose to 1580.
Early modern English prose, as a medium of art, was of slow growth. For
long there was alternate strife and union (ending in marriage) between
the Latin, or more rhetorical, and the ancestral elements of the
language, and this was true both of diction and of construction. We need
to begin with the talk of actual life, as we find it in the hands of the
more naïf writers, in its idiom and gusto and unshapen power, to see how
style gradually declared itself. In state letters and reports, in the
recorded words of Elizabeth and Mary of Scotland and public men, in
travels and memoirs, in Latimer, in the rude early versions of Cicero
and Boëthius, in the more unstudied speech of Ascham or Leland, the
material lies. At the other extreme there are the English liturgy (1549,
1552, 1559, with the final fusion of Anglican and Puritan eloquence),
and the sermons of Fisher and Cranmer,--nearly the first examples of a
sinuous, musical and Ciceronian cadence. A noble pattern for
saga-narrative and lyrical prose was achieved in the successive versions
(1526-1540-1568) of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, where a native
simple diction of short and melodious clauses are prescribed by the
matter itself. Prose, in fact, down to Shakespeare's time, was largely
the work of the churchmen and translators, aided by the chroniclers.
About the mid-century the stories, as well as the books of conduct and
maxim, drawn from Italy and France, begin to thicken. Perverted symmetry
of style is found in euphuistic hacks like Pettie. Painter's _Palace of
Pleasure_ (1566) provided the plots of Bandello and others for the
dramatists. Hoby's version (1561) of Castiglione's _Courtier_, with its
command of elate and subtle English, is the most notable imported book
between Berners's _Froissart_ (1523-1525) and North's _Plutarch_ (1579).
Ascham's _Schoolmaster_ is the most typical English book of Renaissance
culture, in its narrower sense, since _Utopia_. Holinshed's _Chronicle_
(1577-1587) and the work of Halle, if pre-critical, were all the fitter
to minister to Shakespeare.
Verse to 1580.
The lyric impulse was fledged anew at the court of Henry VIII. The short
lines and harping burdens of Sir Thomas Wyatt's songs show the revival,
not only of a love-poetry more plangent than anything in English since
Chaucer, but also of the long-deadened sense of metre. In Wyatt's
sonnets, octaves, terzines and other Italian measures, we can watch the
painful triumphant struggles of this noble old master out of the slough
of formlessness in which verse had been left by Skelton. Wyatt's primary
deed was his gradual rediscovery of the iambic decasyllabic line duly
accented--the line that had been first discovered by Chaucer for
England; and next came its building into sonnet and stanza. Wyatt (d.
1542) ended with perfect formal accuracy; he has the honours of victory;
and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (d. 1547), a younger-hearted and more
gracious but a lighter poet, carried on his labour, and caught some of
Chaucer's as well as the Italian tunes. The blank verse of his two
translated _Aeneids_, like all that written previous to Peele, gave
little inkling of the latencies of the measure which was to become the
cardinal one of English poetry. It was already the vogue in Italy for
translations from the classics; and we may think of Surrey importing it
like an uncut jewel and barely conscious of its value. His original
poems, like those of Wyatt, waited for print till the eve of
Elizabeth's reign, when they appeared, with those of followers like
Grimoald, in Tottel's _Miscellany_ (1557), the first of many such
garlands, and the outward proof of the poetical revival dating twenty
years earlier. But this was a false dawn. Only one poem of authentic
power, Sackville's _Induction_ (1563) to that dreary patriotic venture,
_A Mirror for Magistrates_, was published for twenty years. In spirit
medieval, this picture of the gates of hell and of the kings in bale
achieves a new melody and a new intensity, and makes the coming of
Spenser far less incredible. But poetry was long starved by the very
ideal that nursed it--that of the all-sided, all-accomplished "courtier"
or cavalier, to whom verse-making was but one of all the accomplishments
that he must perfect, like fencing, or courting, or equestrian skill.
Wyatt and Surrey, Sackville and Sidney (and we may add Hamlet, a true
Elizabethan) are of this type. One of the first competent professional
writers was George Gascoigne, whose remarks on metric, and whose blank
verse satire, _The Steel Glass_ (1576), save the years between Sackville
and Spenser. Otherwise the gap is filled by painful rhymesters with rare
flashes, such as Googe, Churchyard and Turberville.
Drama to 1580.
The English Renaissance drama, both comic and tragic, illustrates on the
largest scale the characteristic power of the antique at this period--at
first to reproduce itself in imitation, and then to generate something
utterly different from itself, something that throws the antique to the
winds. Out of the Morality, a sermon upon the certainty of death or the
temptations of the soul, acted by personified qualities and supernatural
creatures, had grown up, in the reign of Henry VII., the Interlude, a
dialogue spoken by representative types or trades, who faintly recalled
those in Chaucer's _Prologue_. These forms, which may be termed
medieval, continued long and blended; sometimes heated, as in
_Respublica_, with doctrine, and usually lightened by the comic play of
a "Vice" or incarnation of sinister roguery. John Heywood was the chief
maker of the pure interludes, and Bishop Bale of the Protestant medleys;
his _King Johan_, a reformer's partisan tract in verse, contains the
germs of the chronicle play. In the drama down to 1580 the native talent
is sparse enough, but the historical interest is high. Out of a seeming
welter of forms, the structure, the metres and the species that Kyd and
Marlowe found slowly emerged. Comedy was first delivered from the
interlude, and fashioned in essence as we know it, by the schoolmasters.
Drawing on Plautus, they constructed duly-knitted plots, divided into
acts and scenes and full of homely native fun, for their pupils to
present. In _Thersites_ (written 1537), the oldest of these pieces, and
in Udall's _Ralph Roister Doister_ (1552 at latest), the best known of
them, the characters are lively, and indeed are almost individuals. In
others, like _Misogonus_ (written 1560), the abstract element and
improving purpose remain, and the source is partly neo-Latin comedy,
native or foreign. Romance crept in: serious comedy, with its brilliant
future, the comedy of high sentiment and averted dangers mingled still
with farce, was shadowed forth in _Damon and Pithias_ and in the curious
play _Common Conditions_; while the domestic comedy of intrigue dawned
in Gascoigne's _Supposes_, adapted from Ariosto. Thus were displaced the
ranker rustic fun of _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ (written c. 1559) and
other labours of "rhyming mother-wits." But there was no style, no talk,
no satisfactory metre. The verse of comedy waited for Greene, and its
prose for Lyly. Structure, without style, was also the main achievement
of the early tragedies. The Latin plays of Buchanan, sometimes biblical
in topic, rest, as to their form, upon Euripides. But early English
tragedy was shapen after the Senecan plays of Italy and after Seneca
himself, all of whose dramas were translated by 1581. _Gorboduc, or
Ferrex and Porrex_, acted about 1561, and written by Sackville and
Norton, and Hughes' _Misfortunes of Arthur_ (acted 1588), are not so
much plays as wraiths of plays, with their chain of slaughters and
revenges, their two-dimensional personages, and their lifeless maxims
which fail to sweeten the bloodshot atmosphere. The Senecan form was not
barren in itself, as its sequel in France was to show: it was only
barren for England. After Marlowe it was driven to the study, and was
still written (possibly under the impulse of Mary countess of
Pembroke), by Daniel and Greville, with much reminiscence of the French
Senecans. But it left its trail on the real drama. It set the pattern of
a high tragical action, often motived by revenge, swayed by large ideas
of fate and retribution, and told in blank metre; and it bequeathed,
besides many moral sentences, such minor points of mechanism as the
Ghost, the Chorus and the inserted play. There were many hybrid forms
like _Gismond of Salern_, based on foreign story, alloyed with the mere
personifications of the Morality, and yet contriving, as in the case of
_Promos and Cassandra_ (the foundation of _Measure for Measure_), to
interest Shakespeare. Thus the drama by 1580 had some of its carpentry,
though not yet a true style or versification. These were only to be won
by escape from the classic tutelage. The ruder chronicle play also
began, and the reigns of John and Henry V. amongst others were put upon
the stage.
Spenser.
_Verse from Spenser to Donne_.--Sir Philip Sidney almost shares with
Edmund Spenser the honours of announcing the new verse, for part of his
_Astrophel and Stella_ was written, if not known in unpublished form,
about 1580-1581, and contains ten times the passion and poetry of _The
Shepherd's Calendar_ (1579). This work, of which only a few passages
have the seal of Spenser's coming power, was justly acclaimed for its
novelty of experiment in many styles, pastoral, satiric and triumphal,
and in many measures: though it was criticized for its "rustic" and
archaic diction--a "no language" that was to have more influence upon
poetry than any of the real dialects of England. Spenser's desire to
write high tragedy, avowed in his _October_, was not to be granted; his
nine comedies are lost; and he became the chief non-dramatic poet of his
time and country. Both the plaintive pessimism of Petrarch and du
Bellay, with their favourite method of emblem, and the Platonic theory
of the spiritual love and its heavenly begetting sank into him; and the
_Hymns To Love_ and _To Beauty_ are possibly his earliest verses of
sustained perfection and exaltation. These two strains of feeling
Spenser never lost and never harmonized; the first of them recurs in his
_Complaints_ of 1591, above all in _The Ruins of Time_, the second in
his _Amoretti_ (1595) and _Colin Clout_ and _Epithalamion_, which are
autobiographical. These and a hundred other threads are woven into _The
Faerie Queene_, an unfinished allegorical epic in honour of moral
goodness, of which three books came out in 1590 and three more in 1596,
while the fragment _Of Constancy_ (so-called) is first found in the
posthumous folio of 1609. This poem is the fullest reflex, outside the
drama, of the soul and aspirations of the time. For its scenery and
mechanism the _Orlando Furioso_ of Ariosto furnishes the framework. In
both poems tales of knightly adventure intertwine unconfused; in both
the slaying of monsters, the capture of strong places, and the release
of the innocent, hindered by wizard and sorcerer, or aided by magic
sword and horn and mirror, constitute the quest; and in both warriors,
ladies, dwarfs, dragons and figures from old mythology jostle dreamily
together. To all this pomp Spenser strove to give a moral and often also
a political meaning. Ariosto was not a _vates sacer_; and so Spenser
took Tasso's theme of the holy war waged for the Sepulchre, and expanded
it into a war between good and evil, as he saw them in the world;
between chastity and lust, loyalty and detraction, England and Spain,
England and Rome, Elizabeth and usurpers, Irish governor and Irish
rebel, right and wrong. The title-virtues of his six extant books he
affects to take from Aristotle; but Holiness, Temperance, Chastity,
Justice, Friendship and Courtesy form a medley of medieval, puritanical
and Greek ideals.
Spenser's moral sentiments, often ethereally noble, might well be
contrasted, and that not always to their credit, with those more secular
and naturalistic ones that rule in Shakespeare or in Bernardino Telesio
and Giordano Bruno. But _The Faerie Queene_ lives by its poetry; and its
poetry lives independently of its creed. The idealized figures of
Elizabeth, who is the Faerie Queene, and of the "magnificent" Prince
Arthur, fail to bind the adventures together, and after two books the
poem breaks down in structure. And indeed all through it relies on
episode and pageant, on its prevailing and insuppressible loveliness of
scene and tint, of phrasing and of melody, beside which the inner
meaning is often an interruption. Spenser is not to be tired; in and out
of his tapestry, with its "glooming light much like a shade," pace his
figures on horseback, or in durance, with their clear and pictorial
allegoric trappings; and they go either singly, or in his favourite
masques or pageants, suggested by emblematical painting or civic
procession. He is often duly praised for his lingering and liquid
melodies and his gracious images, or blamed for their langour; but his
ground-tone is a sombre melancholy--unlike that of Jaques--and his
deepest quality as a writer is perhaps his angry power. Few of his forty
and more thousand lines are unpoetical; in certainty of style amongst
English poets who have written profusely, he has no equals but Chaucer,
Milton and Shelley. His "artificial" diction, drawn from middle English,
from dialect or from false analogy, has always the intention and nearly
always the effect of beauty; we soon feel that its absence would be
unnatural, and it has taken its rank among the habitual and exquisite
implements of English poetry. This equality of noble form is Spenser's
strength, as dilution and diffusion of phrase, and a certain monotonous
slowness of _tempo_, are beyond doubt his weaknesses. His chief
technical invention, the nine-line stanza (_ababbcbcC_) was developed
not from the Italian octave (_abababcc_), but by adding an alexandrine
to the eight-line stave (_ababbcbc_) of Chaucer's _Monk's Tale_. It is
naturally articulated twice--at the fifth line, where the turn of
repeated rhyme inevitably charms, and at the ninth, which runs now to a
crashing climax, now to a pensive and sighing close. In rhyming,
Spenser, if not always accurate, is one of the most natural and
resourceful of poets. His power over the heroic couplet or quatrain is
shown in his fable, _Mother Hubbard's Tale_, and in his curious verse
memoir, _Colin Clout_; both of which are medleys of satire and flattery.
With formal tasks so various and so hard, it is wonderful how effortless
the style of Spenser remains. His _Muiopotmos_ is the lightest-handed of
mock-heroics. No writer of his day except Marlowe was so faithful to the
law of beauty.
Spenserians.
The mantle of Spenser fell, somewhat in shreds, upon poets of many
schools until the Restoration. As though in thanks to his master Tasso,
he lent to Edward Fairfax, the best translator of the _Jerusalem
Delivered_ (_Godfrey of Bulloigne_, 1600), some of his own ease and
intricate melody. Harington, the witty translator of Ariosto (1591) and
spoilt child of the court, owed less to Spenser. The allegorical
colouring was nobly caught, if sometimes barbarized, in the _Christ's
Victory and Triumph_ of the younger Giles Fletcher (1610), and Spenser's
emblematic style was strained, even cracked, by Phineas Fletcher in _The
Purple Island_ (1633), an aspiring fable, gorgeous in places, of the
human body and faculties. Both of these brethren clipped and marred the
stanza, but they form a link between Spenser and their student Milton.
The allegoric form, long-winded and broken-backed, survived late in
Henry More's and Joseph Beaumont's verse disquisitions on the soul.
Spenser's pastoral and allusive manner was allowed by Drayton in his
_Shepherd's Garland_ (1593), and differently by William Browne in
_Britannia's Pastorals_ (1613-1616), and by William Basse; while his
more honeyed descriptions took on a mawkish taste in the anonymous
_Britain's Ida_ and similar poems. His golden Platonic style was
buoyantly echoed in _Orchestra_ (1596), Sir John Davies' poem on the
dancing spheres. He is continually traceable in 17th-century verse,
blending with the alien currents of Ben Jonson and of Donne. He was
edited and imitated in the age of Thomson, in the age of William Morris,
and constantly between.
Drayton and Daniel.
The typical Elizabethan poet is Michael Drayton; who followed Spenser in
pastoral, Daniel, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare in sonnet, Daniel
again in chronicle and legend, and Marlowe in mythological story, and
who yet remained himself. His _Endimion and Phoebe_ in passages stands
near _Hero and Leander_; his _England's Heroical Epistles_ (1597) are in
ringing rhetorical couplets; his _Odes_ (1606), like the _Ballad of
Agincourt_ and the _Virginian Voyage_, forestall and equal Cowper's or
Campbell's; his _Nymphidia_ (1627) was the most popular of burlesque
fairy poems; and his pastorals are full of graces and felicities. The
work of Drayton that is least read and most often mentioned is his
_Poly-Olbion_ (1612-1622), a vast and pious effort, now and then nobly
repaid, to versify the scenery, legend, customs and particularities of
every English county. The more recluse and pensive habit of Samuel
Daniel chills his long chronicle poems; but with Chapman he is the
clearest voice of Stoicism in Elizabethan letters; and his harmonious
nature is perfectly expressed in a style of happy, even excellence, free
alike from "fine madness" and from strain. Sonnet and epistle are his
favoured forms, and in his _Musophilus_ (1599) as well as in his
admirable prose _Defence of Rhyme_ (1602), he truly prophesies the hopes
and glories of that _illustre vulgare_, the literary speech of England.
All this patriotic and historic verse, like the earlier and ruder
_Albion's England_ (1586) of William Warner, or Fitzgeoffrey's poem upon
Drake, or the outbursts of Spenser, was written during or inspired by
the last twenty years of the queen's reign; and the same is true of
Shakespeare's and most of the other history plays, which duly eclipsed
the formal, rusty-gray chronicle poem of the type of the _Mirror for
Magistrates_, though editions (1559-1610) of the latter were long
repeated. Patriotic verse outside the theatre, however, full of zeal,
started at a disadvantage compared with love-sonnet, song, or mythic
narrative, because it had no models before it in other lands, and
remained therefore the more shapeless.
Sonnets.
The English love-sonnet, brought in by Wyatt and rifest between 1590 and
1600, was revived as a purely studious imitation by Watson in his
_Hekatompathia_ (1582), a string of translations in one of the
exceptional measures that were freely entitled "sonnets." But from the
first, in the hands of Sidney, whose _Astrophel and Stella_ (1591) was
written, as remarked above, about 1581, the sonnet was ever ready to
pulse into feeling, and to flash into unborrowed beauty, embodying
sometimes dramatic fancy and often living experience. These three fibres
of imitation, imagination and confession are intertwisted beyond
severance in many of the cycles, and now one, now another is uppermost.
Incaution might read a personal diary into Thomas Lodge's _Phillis_
(1593), which is often a translation from Ronsard. Literal judges have
announced that Shakespeare's _Sonnets_ are but his mode of taking
exercise. But there is poetry in "God's plenty" almost everywhere; and
few of the series fail of lovely lines or phrasing or even of perfect
sonnets. This holds of Henry Constable's _Diana_ (1592), of the
_Parthenophil and Parthenophe_ of Barnabe Barnes (1593), inebriate with
poetry, and of the stray minor groups, _Alcilia, Licia, Caelia_; while
the _Caelica_ of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, in irregular form, is full
of metaphysical passion struggling to be delivered. _Astrophel and
Stella_, Drayton's _Idea_ (1594-1619), Spenser's _Amoretti_ and
Shakespeare's _Sonnets_ (printed 1609) are addressed to definite and
probably to known persons, and are charged with true poetic rage,
ecstatic or plaintive, desperate or solemn, if they are also
intermingled with the mere word-play that mocks or beguiles the ebb of
feeling, or with the purely plastic work that is done for solace. In
most of these series, as in Daniel's paler but exquisitely-wrought
_Delia_ (1591-1592), the form is that of the three separate quatrains
with the closing couplet for emotional and melodic climax; a scheme
slowly but defiantly evolved, through traceable gradations, from that
stricter one of Italy, which Drummond and Milton revived, and where the
crisis properly coincides with the change from octave to sestet.
Mythic poems.
The amorous mythologic tale in verse derives immediately from
contemporary Italy, but in the beginning from Ovid, whose
_Metamorphoses_, familiar in Golding's old version (1555-1557),
furnished descriptions, decorations and many tales, while his _Heroides_
gave Chaucer and Boccaccio a model for the self-anatomy of tragic or
plaintive sentiment. Within ten years, between 1588 and 1598, during the
early sonnet-vogue, appeared Lodge's _Scillaes Metamorphosis_,
Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_ and _Rape of Lucrece_, Marlowe's _Hero
and Leander_ and Drayton's _Endimion and Phoebe_. Shakespeare owed
something to Lodge, and Drayton to Marlowe. All these points describe a
love-situation at length, and save in one instance they describe it from
without. The exception is Marlowe, who achieves a more than Sicilian
perfection; he says everything, and is equal to everything that he has
to say. In _Venus and Adonis_ the poet is enamoured less of love than of
the tones and poses of lovers and of the beauty and gallant motion of
animals, while in The _Rape of Lucrece_ he is intent on the gradations
of lust, shame and indignation, in which he has a spectator's interest.
Virtuosity, or the delight of the executant in his own brilliant
cunning, is the mark of most of these pieces.
Lyric.
If we go to the lyrics, the versified mythic tales and the sonnets of
Elizabethan times for the kind of feeling that Molière's Alceste loved
and that Burns and Shelley poured into song, we shall often come away
disappointed, and think the old poetry heartless. But it is not
heartless, any more than it is always impassioned or personal; it is
decorative. The feeling is often that of the craftsman; it is not of the
singer who spends his vital essence in song and commands an answering
thrill so long as his native language is alive or understood. The arts
that deal with ivories or enamelling or silver suggest themselves while
we watch the delighted tinting and chasing, the sense for gesture and
grouping (in _Venus and Adonis_), or the delicate beating out of rhyme
in a madrigal, or the designing of a single motive, or two contrasted
motives, within the panel of the sonnet. And soon it is evident how
passion and emotion readily become plastic matter too, whether they be
drawn from books or observation or self-scrutiny. This is above all the
case in the sonnet; but it is found in the lyric as well. The result is
a wonderful fertility of lyrical pattern, a wonderfully diffused power
of lyrical execution, never to recur at any later time of English
literature. Wyatt had to recover the very form of such verse from
oblivion, and this he did in the school of translation and adaptation.
Not only the decasyllabic, but the lyric, in short lines had almost died
out of memory, and Wyatt brought it back. From his day to Spenser's
there is not much lyric that is noteworthy, though in Gascoigne and
others the impulse is seen. The introduction of Italian music, with its
favourite metrical schemes, such as the madrigal, powerfully schooled
and coloured lyric: in especial, the caressing double ending, regular in
Italian but heavier in English, became common. The Italian poems were
often translated in their own measure, line by line, and the musical
setting retained. Their tunes, or other tunes, were then coupled with
new and original poems; and both appeared together in the song-books of
Dowland the lutanist, of Jones and Byrd (1588), and in chief (1601-1619)
of Thomas Campion. The words of Campion's songs are not only supremely
musical in the wider sense, but are chosen for their singing quality.
Misled awhile by the heresy that rhyme was wrong, he was yet a master of
lovely rhyming, as well as of a lyrical style of great range, gaily or
gravely happy. But, as with most of his fellows, singing is rather his
calling than his consolation. The lyrics that are sprinkled in plays and
romances are the finest of this period, and perhaps, in their kind, of
any period. Shakespeare is the greatest in this province also; but the
power of infallible and unforgettable song is often granted to slighter,
gentler playwrights like Greene and Dekker, while it is denied to men of
weightier build and sterner purpose like Chapman and Jonson. The songs
of Jonson are indeed at their best of absolute and antique finish; but
the irrevocable dew of night or dawn seldom lies upon them as it lies on
the songs of Webster or of Fletcher. The best lyrics in the plays are
dramatic; they must be read in their own setting. While the action
stops, they seize and dally with the dominant emotion of the scene, and
yet relieve it. The songs of Lodge and Breton, of Drayton and Daniel, of
Oxford and Raleigh, and the fervid brief flights of the Jesuit
Southwell, show the omnipresence of the vital gift, whether among
professional writers of the journalistic type, or among poets whose gift
was not primarily song, or among men of action and quality or men of
religion, who only wrote when they were stirred. Lullaby and valentine
and compliment, and love-plaint ranging from gallantry to desperation,
are all there: and the Fortunate Hour, which visits commonly only a few
men in a generation, and those but now and then in their lives, is never
far off. But the master of melody, Spenser, left no songs, apart from
his two insuperable wedding odes. And religious lyric is rarer before
the reign of James. Much of the best lyric is saved for us by the
various Miscellanies, _A Handful of Pleasant Delights_ (1584), the
_Phoenix Nest_ (1593) and Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_ (1602); while
other such collections, like _England's Helicon_ (1600), were chiefly
garlands of verse that was already in print.
There is plenty of satiric anger and raillery in the spirit of the time,
but the most genuine part of it is drawn off into drama. Except for
stray passages in Spenser, Drayton and others, formal satire, though
profuse, was a literary unreal thing, a pose in the manner of Persius or
Juvenal, and tiresome in expression. In this kind only Donne triumphed.
The attempts of Lodge and Hall and Marston and John Davies of Hereford
and Guilpin and Wither are for the most part simply weariful in
different ways, and satire waited for Dryden and his age. The attempt,
however, persisted throughout. Wyatt was the first and last who
succeeded in the genial, natural Horatian style.
Metaphysical or fantastic schools.
_Verse from Donne to Milton_.--As the age of Elizabeth receded, some
changes came slowly over non-dramatic verse. In Jonson, as in John Donne
(1573-1631), one of the greater poets of the nation, and in many writers
after Donne, may be traced a kind of Counter-Renaissance, or revulsion
against the natural man and his claims to pleasure--a revulsion from
which regret for pleasure lost is seldom far. Poetry becomes more
ascetic and mystical, and this feeling takes shelter alike in the
Anglican and in the Roman faith. George Herbert (_The Temple_, 1633),
the most popular, quaint and pious of the school, but the least
poetical; Crashaw, with his one ecstatic vision (_The Flaming Heart_)
and occasional golden stanzas; Henry Vaughan, who wrote from 1646 to
1678, with his mystical landscape and magical cadences; and Thomas
Traherne, his fellow-dreamer, are the best known of the religious
Fantastics. But, earlier than most of these are Lord Herbert of
Cherbury, and Habington with his _Castara_ (1634), who show the same
temper, if a fitful power and felicity. Such writers form the devouter
section of the famous "metaphysical" or "fantastic" school, which
includes, besides Donne its founder, pure amorists like Carew (whose
touch on certain rhythms has no fellow), young academic followers like
Cartwright and Cleveland (in whom survives the vein of satire that also
marks the school), and Abraham Cowley, who wrote from 1633 to 1678, and
was perhaps the most acceptable living poet about the middle of the
century. In his _Life of Cowley_ Johnson tramples on the "metaphysical"
poets and their vices, and he is generally right in detail. The shock of
cold quaintness, which every one of them continually administers, is
fatal. Johnson only erred in ignoring all their virtues and all their
historical importance.
In Donne poetry became deeply intellectualized, and in temper
disquisitive and introspective. The poet's emotion is played with in a
cat-and-mouse fashion, and he torments it subtly. Donne's passion is so
real, if so unheard-of, and his brain so finely-dividing, that he can
make almost any image, even the remotest, even the commonest, poetical.
His satires, his _Valentine_, his _Litany_, and his lyric or odic pieces
in general, have an insolent and sudden daring which is warranted by
deep-seated power and is only equalled by a few of those tragedians who
are his nearest of kin. The recurring contrast of "wit" or intelligence,
and "will" or desire, their struggle, their mutual illumination, their
fusion as into some third and undiscovered element of human nature, are
but one idiosyncrasy of Donne's intricate soul, whose general progress,
so far as his dateless poems permit of its discovery, seems to have been
from a paganism that is unashamed but crossed with gusts of compunction,
to a mystical and otherwordly temper alloyed with covetous regrets. The
_Anatomy of the World_ and other ambitious pieces have the same quality
amid their outrageous strangeness. In Donne and his successors the
merely ingenious and ransacking intellect often came to overbalance
truth and passion; and hence arose conceits and abstract verbiage, and
the difficulty of finding a perfect poem, however brief, despite the
omnipresence of the poetic gift. The "fantastic" school, if it contains
some of the rarest sallies and passages in English, is one of the least
satisfactory. Its faults only exaggerate those of Sidney, Greville and
Shakespeare, who often misuse homely or technical metaphor; and English
verse shared, by coincidence not by borrowing, and with variations of
its own, in the general strain and torture of style that was besetting
so many poets of the Latin countries. Yet these poets well earn the name
of metaphysical, not for their philosophic phrasing, but for the
shuttle-flight of their fancy to and fro between the things of earth and
the realities of spirit that lie beyond the screen of the flesh.
Rhythm.
Between Spenser and Milton many measures of lyrical and other poetry
were modified. Donne's frequent use of roughly-accentual, almost
tuneless lines is unexplained and was not often followed. Rhythm in
general came to be studied more for its own sake, and the study was
rewarded. The lovely cordial music of Carew's amorous iambics, or of
Wither's trochees, or of Crashaw's odes, or of Marvell's octo-syllables,
has never been regained. The formal ode set in, sometimes regularly
"Pindaric" in strophe-grouping, sometimes irregularly "Pindaric" as in
Cowley's experiments. Above all, the heroic couplet, of the isolated,
balanced, rhetorical order, such as Spenser, Drayton, Fairfax and
Sylvester, the translator (1590-1606) of Du Bartas, had often used,
began to be a regular instrument of verse, and that for special purposes
which soon became lastingly associated with it. The flatteries of Edmund
Waller and the Ovidian translations of Sandys dispute the priority for
smoothness and finish, though the fame was Waller's for two generations;
but Denham's overestimated _Cooper's Hill_ (1642), Cowley's _Davideis_
(1656), and even Ogilby's _Aeneid_ made the path plainer for Dryden, the
first sovereign of the rhetorical couplet which throve as blank verse
declined. Sonnet and madrigal were the favoured measures of William
Drummond of Hawthornden, a real and exquisite poet of the studio, who
shows the general drift of verse towards sequestered and religious
feeling. Drummond's _Poems_ of 1616 and _Flowers of Zion_ (1623) are
full of Petrarch and Plato as well as of Christian resignation, and he
kept alive the artistry of phrasing and versification in a time of
indiscipline and conflicting forms. William Browne has been named as a
Spenserian, but his _Britannia's_ Pastorals (1613-1616), with their
slowly-rippling and overflowing couplets which influenced Keats, were a
medley of a novel kind. George Wither may equally rank among the lighter
followers of Spenser, the easy masters of lyrical narrative, and the
devotional poets. But his _Shepherd's Hunting_ and other pieces in his
volume of 1622 contain lovely landscapes, partly English and partly
artificial, and stand far above his pious works, and still further above
the dreary satires which he lived to continue after the Restoration.
Herrick.
The long poem.
Of poets yet unmentioned, Robert Herrick is the chief, with his two
thousand lyrics and epigrams, gathered in _Hesperides_ and _Noble
Numbers_ (1648). His power of song and sureness of cadence are not
excelled within his range of topic, which includes flowers and
maidens--whom he treats as creatures of the same race--and the swift
decay of both their beauties, and secular regret over this decay and his
own mortality and the transience of amorous pleasure, and the virtues of
his friends, and country sports and lore, and religious compunction for
his own paganism. The _Hesperides_ are pure Renaissance work, in natural
sympathy with the Roman elegiac writings and with the Pseudo-Anacreon.
Cowley is best where he is nearest Herrick, and his posy of short lyrics
outlives his "epic and Pindaric art." There are many writers who last by
virtue of one or two poems; Suckling by his adept playfulness, Lovelace
and Montrose by a few gallant stanzas, and many a nameless poet by many
a consummate cadence. It is the age of sudden flights and brief
perfections. All the farther out of reach, yet never wholly despaired of
or unattempted in England, was the "long poem," heroical and noble, the
"phantom epic," that shadow of the ancient masterpieces, which had
striven to life in Italy and France. Davenant's _Gondibert_ (1651),
Cowley's _Davideis_ and Chamberlayne's _Pharonnida_ (1659) attest the
effort which Milton in 1658 resumed with triumph. These works have
between them all the vices possible to epic verse, dulness and flatness,
faintness and quaintness and incoherence. But there is some poetry in
each of them, and in _Pharonnida_ there is far more than enough poetry
to save it.
Milton.
Few writers have found a flawless style of their own so early in life as
John Milton (1608-1674). His youthful pieces show some signs of Spenser
and the Caroline fantastics; but soon his vast poetical reading ran
clear and lay at the service of his talent. His vision and phrasing of
natural things were already original in the _Nativity Ode_, written when
he was twenty; and, there also, his versification was already that of a
master, of a renovator. The pensive and figured beauty of _L'Allegro_
and _Il Penseroso_, two contrasted emblematic panels, the high innocent
Platonism and golden blank verse of the _Comus_ (1634); the birth of
long-sleeping power in the _Lycidas_ (1637), with its unapproached
contrivance both in evolution and detail, where the precious essences of
earlier myth and pastoral seem to be distilled for an offering in honour
of the tombless friend;--the newness, the promise, the sureness of it
all amid the current schools! The historian finds in these poems, with
their echoes of Plato and Sannazzaro, of Geoffrey of Monmouth and St
John, the richest and most perfect instance of the studious, decorative
Renaissance style, and is not surprised to find Milton's scholars a
century later in the age of Gray. The critic, while feeling that the
strictly lyrical, spontaneous element is absent, is all the more baffled
by the skill and enduring charm. The sonnets were written before or
during Milton's long immersion (1637-1658) in prose and warfare, and
show the same gifts. They are not cast in the traditional form of
love-cycle, but are occasional poems; in metre they revert, not always
strictly but once or twice in full perfection, to the Italian scheme;
and they recall not Petrarch but the spiritual elegies or patriot
exaltations of Dante or Guidiccioni.
Milton also had a medieval side to his brain, as the _History of
Britain_ shows. The heroic theme, which he had resolved from his youth
up to celebrate, at last, after many hesitations, proved to be the fall
of man. This, for one of his creed and for the audience he desired, was
the greatest theme of all. Its scene was the Ptolemaic universe with the
Christian heaven and hell inserted. The time, indicated by retrospect
and prophecy, was the whole of that portion of eternity, from the
creation of Christ to the doomsday, of which the history was sacredly
revealed. The subject and the general span of the action went back to
the popular mystery play; and Milton at first planned out _Paradise
Lost_ as such a play, with certain elements of classic tragedy embodied.
But according to the current theory the epic, not the drama, was the
noblest form of verse; and, feeling where his power lay, he adopted the
epic. The subject, therefore, was partly medieval, partly
Protestant,--for Milton was a true Protestant in having a variant of
doctrine shared by no other mortal. But the ordering and presentment,
with their overture, their interpolated episodes or narratives, their
journeys between Olympus, Earth and hell, invocations, set similes,
battles and divine thunderbolts, are those of the classical epic. Had
Milton shared the free thought as well as the scholarship of the
Renaissance, the poem could never have existed. With all his range of
soul and skill, he had a narrower speculative brain than any poet of
equal gift; and this was well for his great and peculiar task. But
whatever Milton may fail to be, his heroic writing is the permanent and
absolute expression of something that in the English stock is
inveterate--the Promethean self-possession of the mind in defeat, its
right to solitude there, its claim to judge and deny the victor. This is
the spirit of his devils, beside whom his divinities, his unfallen
angels (Abdiel excepted), and even his human couple with their radiance
and beauty of line, all seem shadowy. The discord between Milton's
doctrine and his sympathies in _Paradise Lost_ (1667) has never escaped
notice. The discord between his doctrine and his culture comes out in
_Paradise Regained_ (1671), when he has at once to reprobate and
glorify Athens, the "mother of arts." In this afterthought to the
earlier epic the action is slight, the Enemy has lost spirit, and the
Christ is something of a pedagogue. But there is a new charm in its
even, grey desert tint, sprinkled with illuminations of gold and luxury.
In _Samson Agonistes_ (1671) the ethical treatment as well as the
machinery is Sophoclean, and the theology not wholly Christian. But the
fault of Samson is forgotten in his suffering, which is Milton's own;
and thus a cross-current of sympathy is set up, which may not be much in
keeping with the story, but revives the somewhat exhausted interest and
heightens a few passages into a bare and inaccessible grandeur.
The essential solitude of Milton's energies is best seen in his later
style and versification. When he resumed poetry about 1658, he had
nothing around him to help him as an artist in heroic language. The most
recent memories of the drama were also the worst; the forms of Cowley
and Davenant, the would-be epic poets, were impossible. Spenser's manner
was too even and fluid as a rule for such a purpose, and his power was
of an alien kind. Thus Milton went back, doubtless full of Greek and
Latin memories, to Marlowe, Shakespeare and others among the greater
dramatists (including John Ford); and their tragic diction and measure
are the half-hidden bases of his own. The product, however, is unlike
anything except the imitations of itself. The incongruous elements of
the _Paradise Lost_ and its divided sympathies are cemented, at least
superficially, by its style, perhaps the surest for dignity, character
and beauty that any Germanic language has yet developed. If dull and
pedantic over certain stretches, it is usually infallible. It is many
styles in one, and Time has laid no hand on it. In these three later
poems its variety can be seen. It is perfect in personal invocation and
appeal; in the complex but unfigured rhetoric of the speeches; in
narrative of all kinds; for the inlaying work of simile or scenery or
pageant, where the quick, pure impressions of Milton's youth and
prime--possibly kept fresher by his blindness--are felt through the
sometimes conventional setting; and for soliloquy and choric speech of a
might unapproachable since Dante. To these calls his blank verse
responds at every point. It is the seal of Milton's artistry, as of his
self-confidence, for it greatly extends, for the epical purpose, all the
known powers and liberties of the metre; and yet, as has often been
shown, it does so not spasmodically but within fixed technical laws or
rather habits. Latterly, the underlying metrical _ictus_ is at times
hard to detect. But Milton remains by far the surest and greatest
instrumentalist, outside the drama, on the English unrhymed line. He
would, however, have scorned to be judged on his form alone. His soul
and temper are not merely unique in force. Their historic and
representative character ensure attention, so long as the oppositions of
soul and temper in the England of Milton's time remain, as they still
are, the deepest in the national life. He is sometimes said to harmonize
the Renaissance and the Puritan spirit; but he does not do this, for
nothing can do it. The Puritan spirit is the deep thing in Milton; all
his culture only gives immortal form to its expression. The critics have
instinctively felt that this is true; and that is why their political
and religious prepossessions have nearly always coloured, and perhaps
must colour, every judgment passed upon him. Not otherwise can he be
taken seriously, until historians are without public passions and
convictions, or the strife between the hierarch and the Protestant is
quenched in English civilization.
Drama.
_Drama, 1580-1642_.--We must now go back to the drama, which lies behind
Milton, and is the most individual product of all English Literature.
The nascent drama of genius can be found in the "University wits," who
flourished between 1580 and 1595, and the chief of whom are Lyly, Kyd,
Peele, Greene and Marlowe. John Lyly is the first practitioner in
prose--of shapely comic plot and pointed talk--the artificial but actual
talk of courtly masquers who rally one another with a bright and barren
finish that is second nature. _Campaspe_, _Sapho and Phao_, _Midas_, and
Lyly's other comedies, mostly written from 1580 to 1591, are frail
vessels, often filled with compliment, mythological allegory, or topical
satire, and enamelled with pastoral interlude and flower-like song. The
work of Thomas Kyd, especially _The Spanish Tragedy_ (written c. 1585),
was the most violent effort to put new wine into the old Senecan
bottles, and he probably wrote the lost pre-Shakespearian _Hamlet_. He
transmitted to the later drama that subject of pious but ruinous
revenge, which is used by Chapman, Marston, Webster and many others; and
his chief play was translated and long acted in Germany. Kyd's want of
modulation is complete, but he commands a substantial skill of dramatic
mechanism, and he has more than the feeling for power, just as Peele and
Greene have more than the feeling for luxury or grace. To the expression
of luxury Peele's often stately blank verse is well fitted, and it is by
far the most correct and musical before Marlowe's, as his _Arraignment
of Paris_ (1584) and his _David and Bethsabe_ attest. Greene did
something to create the blank verse of gentle comedy, and to introduce
the tone of idyll and chivalry, in his _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_
(1594). Otherwise these writers, with Nashe and Lodge, fall into the
wake of Marlowe.
Marlowe.
_Tamburlaine_, in two parts (part i. c. 1587), _The Life and Death of
Doctor Faustus_, _The Jew of Malta_, _Edward II._ (the first chronicle
play of genius), and the incomplete poem _Hero and Leander_ are
Christopher Marlowe's title-deeds (1564-1593). He established tragedy,
and inspired its master, and created for it an adequate diction and
versification. His command of vibrant and heroic recitative should not
obscure his power, in his greater passages, describing the descent of
Helen, the passing of Mortimer, and the union of Hero and Leander, to
attain a kind of Greek transparency and perfection. The thirst for ideal
beauty, for endless empire, and for prohibited knowledge, no poet has
better expressed, and in this respect Giordano Bruno is nearest him in
his own time. This thirst is his own; his great cartoon-figures,
gigantic rather than heroic, proclaim it for him: their type recurs
through the drama, from Richard III. to Dryden's orotund heroes; but in
_Faustus_ and in _Edward II._ they become real, almost human beings. His
constructive gift is less developed in proportion, though Goethe praised
the planning-out of _Faustus_. The glory and influence of Marlowe on the
side of form rest largely on his meteoric blank lines, which are varied
not a little, and nobly harmonized into periods, and resonant with names
to the point of splendid extravagance; and their sound is heard in
Milton, whom he taught how to express the grief and despair of demons
dissatisfied with their kingdom. Shakespeare did not excel Marlowe in
Marlowe's own excellences, though he humanized Marlowe's Jew, launched
his own blank verse on the tide of Marlowe's oratory, and modulated, in
_Richard II._, his master's type of chronicle tragedy.
Shakespeare.
1590-1595.
As the middle ages receded, the known life of man upon this earth became
of sovereign interest, and of this interest the drama is the freest
artistic expression. If Marlowe is the voice of the impulse to explore,
the plays of Shakespeare are the amplest freight brought home by any
voyager. Shakespeare is not only the greatest but the earliest English
dramatist who took humanity for his province. But this he did not do
from the beginning. He was at first subdued to what he worked in; and
though the dry pedantic tragedy was shattered and could not touch him,
the gore and rant, the impure though genuine force of Kyd do not seem at
first to have repelled him; if, as is likely, he had a hand in _Titus
Andronicus_. He probably served with Marlowe and others of the school at
various stages in the composition of the three chronicle dramas finally
entitled _Henry VI_. But besides the high-superlative style that is
common to them all, there runs through them the rhymed rhetoric with
which Shakespeare dallied for some time, as well as the softer
flute-notes and deeper undersong that foretell his later blank verse. In
_Richard III._, though it is built on the scheme and charged with the
style of Marlowe, Shakespeare first showed the intensity of his original
power. But after a few years he swept out of Marlowe's orbit into his
own vaster and unreturning curve. In _King John_ the lyrical, epical,
satirical and pathetic chords are all present, if they are scarcely
harmonized. Meantime, Lyly and Greene having displaced the uncouther
comedy, Shakespeare learned all they had to teach, and shaped the comedy
of poetic, chivalrous fancy and good-tempered high spirits, which showed
him the way of escape from his own rhetoric, and enabled him to perfect
his youthful, noble and gentle blank verse. This attained its utmost
fineness in _Richard II._, and its full cordiality and beauty in the
other plays that consummate this period--_A Midsummer Night's Dream_,
_The Merchant of Venice_, and one romantic tragedy, _Romeo and Juliet_.
Behind them lay the earlier and fainter romances, with their chivalry
and gaiety, _The Comedy of Errors_, _Love's Labour's Lost_ and _The Two
Gentlemen of Verona_. Throughout these years blank verse contended with
rhyme, which Shakespeare after a while abandoned save for special
purposes, as though he had exhausted its honey. The Italian Renaissance
is felt in the scenery and setting of these plays. The _novella_
furnishes the story, which passes in a city of the Southern type, with
its absolute ruler, its fantastic by-laws on which the plot nominally
turns, and its mixture of real life and marvel. The personages, at first
fainter of feature and symmetrically paired, soon assume sharper
outline: Richard II. and Shylock, Portia and Juliet, and Juliet's Nurse
and Bottom are created. The _novella_ has left the earth and taken
wings: the spirit is now that of youth and Fancy (or love brooding among
the shallows) with interludes of "fierce vexation," or of tragedy, or of
kindly farce. And there is a visionary element, felt in the musings of
Theseus upon the nature of poetry of the dream-faculty itself; an
element which is new, like the use made of fairy folklore, in the poetry
of England.
1596-1600.
Tragedy is absent in the succeeding histories (1597-1599), and the
comedies of wit and romance (1599-1600), in which Shakespeare perfected
his style for stately, pensive or boisterous themes. Falstaff, the most
popular as he is the wittiest of all imaginable comic persons,
dominates, as to their prose or lower world, the two parts of _Henry
IV._, and its interlude or offshoot, _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. The
play that celebrates Henry V. is less a drama than a pageant,
diversified with mighty orations and cheerful humours, and filled with
the love of Shakespeare for England. Here the most indigenous form of
art invented by the English Renaissance reaches its climax. The
Histories are peopled chiefly by men and warriors, of whom Hotspur,
"dying in his excellence and flower," is perhaps more attractive than
Henry of Agincourt. But in the "middle comedies," _As You Like It_,
_Much Ado_, and _Twelfth Night_, the warriors are home at court, where
women rule the scene and deserve to rule it; for their wit now gives the
note; and Shakespeare's prose, the medium of their talk, has a finer
grace and humour than ever before, euphuism lying well in subjection
behind it.
1601-1608.
Mankind and this world have never been so sharply sifted or so sternly
consoled, since Lucretius, as in Shakespeare's tragedies. The energy
which created them evades, like that of the sun, our estimate. But they
were not out of relation to their time, the first few years of the reign
of James, with its conspiracies, its Somerset and Overbury horrors, its
enigmatic and sombre figures like Raleigh, and its revulsion from
Elizabethan buoyancy. In the same decade were written the chief
tragedies of Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Marston, Tourneur; and _The White
Devil_, and _A Yorkshire Tragedy_, and _The Maid's Tragedy_, and _A
Woman Killed with Kindness_. But, in spite of Shakespeare's affinities
with these authors at many points, _Hamlet_, _Macbeth_, _Lear_,
_Othello_, with the three Roman plays (written at intervals and not
together), and the two quasi-antique plays _Troilus and Cressida_, and
_Timon of Athens_, form a body of drama apart from anything else in the
world. They reveal a new tragic philosophy, a new poetic style, a new
dramatic technique and a new world of characters. In one way above all
Shakespeare stands apart; he not only appropriates the ancient pattern
of heroism, of right living and right dying, revealed by North's
Plutarch; others did this also; but the intellectual movement of the
time, though by no means fully reflected, is reflected in his tragedies
far more than elsewhere. The new and troublous thoughts on man and
conduct that were penetrating the general mind, the freedom and play of
vision that Montaigne above all had stimulated, here find their fullest
scope; and Florio's translation (1603) of Montaigne's Essays, coming out
between the first and the second versions of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_,
counted probably for more than any other book. The _Sonnets_ (published
1609) are also full of far-wandering thoughts on truth and beauty and on
good and evil. The story they reveal may be ranked with the situations
of the stranger dramas like _Troilus_ and _Measure for Measure_. But
whether or no it is a true story, and the Sonnets in the main a
confession, they would be at the very worst a perfect dramatic record of
a great poet's suffering and friendship.
Last period.
Shakespeare's last period, that of his tragi-comedies, begins about 1608
with his contributions to _Pericles, Prince of Tyre_. For unknown
reasons he was moved, about the time of his retirement home, to record,
as though in justice to the world, the happy turns by which tragic
disaster is at times averted. _Pericles_, _The Winter's Tale_,
_Cymbeline_, and _The Tempest_ all move, after a series of crimes,
calumnies, or estrangements, to some final scene of enthralling beauty,
where the lost reappear and love is recovered; as though after all the
faint and desperate last partings--of Lear and Cordelia, of Hamlet and
Horatio--which Shakespeare had imagined, he must make retrieval with the
picture of young and happy creatures whose life renews hope even in the
experienced. To this end he chose the loose action and free atmosphere
of the _roman d'aventure_, which had already been adapted by Beaumont
and Fletcher, who may herein have furnished Shakespeare with novel and
successful theatrical effects, and who certainly in turn studied his
handiwork. In _The Tempest_ this tragi-comic scheme is fitted to the
tales brought by explorers of far isles, wild men, strange gods and airy
music. Even if it be true that in Prospero's words the poet bids
farewell to his magic, he took part later nevertheless in the
composition of _Henry VIII._; and not improbably also in _The Two Noble
Kinsmen_. His share in two early pieces, _Arden of Feversham_ (1592) and
_Edward III._, has been urged, never established, and of many other
dramas he was once idly accused.
Shakespeare's throne rests on the foundation of three equal and master
faculties. One is that of expression and versification; the next is the
invention and presentation of human character in action; the third is
the theatrical faculty. The writing of Dante may seem to us more
steadily great and perfect, when we remember Shakespeare's conceits, his
experiments, his haste and impatience in his long wrestle with tragic
language, his not infrequent sheer infelicities. But Dante is always
himself, he had not to find words for hundreds of imaginary persons.
Balzac, again, may have created and exhibited as many types of mankind,
but except in soul he is not a poet. Shakespeare is a supreme if not
infallible poet; his verse, often of an antique simplicity or of a rich,
harmonious, romantic perfection, is at other times strained and
shattered with what it tries to express, and attains beauty only through
discord. He is also many persons in one; in his _Sonnets_ he is even, it
may be thought, himself. But he had furthermore to study a personality
not of his own fancying--with something in it of Caliban, of Dogberry
and of Cleopatra--that of the audience in a playhouse. He belongs
distinctly to the poets like Jonson and Massinger who are true to their
art as practical dramatists, not to the poets like Chapman whose works
chance to be in the form of plays. Shakespeare's mastery of this art is
approved now by every nation. But apart from the skill that makes him
eternally actable--the skill of raising, straining and relieving the
suspense, and bringing it to such an ending as the theatre will
tolerate--he played upon every chord in his own hearers. He frankly
enlisted Jew-hatred, Pope-hatred and France-hatred; he flattered the
queen, and celebrated the Union, and stormed the house with his
_fanfare_ over the national soldier, Henry of Agincourt, and glorified
England, as in _Cymbeline_, to the last. But in deeper ways he is the
chief of playwrights. Unlike another master, Ibsen, he nearly always
tells us, without emphasis, by the words and behaviour of his
characters, which of them we are to love and hate, and when we are to
love and when to hate those whom we can neither love nor hate wholly.
Yet he is not to be bribed, and deals to his characters something of the
same injustice or rough justice that is found in real life. His loyalty
to life, as well as to the stage, puts the crown on his felicity and his
fertility, and raises him to his solitude of dramatic greatness.
Jonson.
Shakespeare's method could not be imparted, and despite reverberations
in Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster and others he left no school. But his
friend Ben Jonson, his nearest equal in vigour of brain, though not in
poetical intuition, was the greatest of dramatic influences down to the
shutting of the theatres in 1642, and his comedies found fresh disciples
even after 1660. He had "the devouring eye and the portraying hand"; he
could master and order the contents of a mighty if somewhat burdensome
memory into an organic drama, whether the matter lay in Roman historians
or before his eyes in the London streets. He had an armoury of doctrine,
drawn from the _Poetics_ and Horace, which moulded his creative
practice. This was also partly founded on a revulsion against the plays
around him, with their loose build and moral improbabilities. But in
spite of his photographic and constructive power, his vision is too
seldom free and genial; it is that of the satirist who thinks that his
office is to improve mankind by derisively representing it. And he does
this by beginning with the "humour," or abstract idiosyncrasy or
quality, and clothing it with accurately minute costume and gesture, so
that it may pass for a man; and indeed the result is as real as many a
man, and in his best-tempered and youthful comedy, _Every Man in his
Humour_ (acted 1598), it is very like life. In Jonson's monumental
pieces, _Volpone or the Fox_ (acted 1605) and _The Alchemist_ (acted
1610), our laughter is arrested by the lowering and portentous
atmosphere, or is loud and hard, startled by the enormous skill and
energy displayed. Nor are the joy and relief of poetical comedy given
for an instant by _The Silent Woman_, _Bartholomew Fair_ (acted 1614),
or _The Staple of News_, still less by topical plays like _Cynthia's
Revels_, though their unfailing farce and rampant fun are less charged
with contempt. The erudite tragedies, _Sejanus_ (acted 1603) and
_Catiline_, chiefly live by passages of high forensic power. Jonson's
finer elegies, eulogies and lyrics, which are many, and his fragmentary
_Sad Shepherd_, show that he also had a free and lovely talent, often
smothered by doctrine and temper; and his verse, usually strong but full
of knots and snags, becomes flowing and graciously finished. His prose
is of the best, especially in his _Discoveries_, a series of ethical
essays and critical maxims; its prevalently brief and emphatic rhythms
suggesting those of Hobbes, and even, though less easy and civil and
various, those of Dryden. The "sons" of Jonson, Randolph and Browne,
Shadwell and Wilson, were heirs rather to his riot of "humours," his
learned method and satiric aim, than to his larger style, his
architectural power, or his relieving graces.
Romantic drama.
As a whole, the romantic drama (so to entitle the remaining bulk of
plays down to 1642) is a vast stifled jungle, full of wild life and
song, with strange growths and heady perfumes, with glades of sunshine
and recesses of poisoned darkness; it is not a cleared forest, where
single and splendid trees grow to shapely perfection. It has "poetry
enough for anything"; passionate situations, and their eloquence; and a
number, doubtless small considering its mass, of living and memorable
personages. Moral keeping and constructive mastery are rarer still; and
too seldom through a whole drama do we see human life and hear its
voices, arranged and orchestrated by the artist. But it can be truly
said in defence that while structure without poetry is void (as it
tended at times to be in Ben Jonson), poetry without structure is still
poetry, and that the romantic drama is like nothing else in this world
for variety of accent and unexpectedness of beauty. We must read it
through, as Charles Lamb did, to do it justice. The diffusion of its
characteristic excellences is surprising. Of its extant plays it is
hardly safe to leave one unopened, if we are searchers for whatsoever is
lovely or admirable. The reasons for the lack of steadfast power and
artistic conscience lay partly in the conditions of the stage.
Playwrights usually wrote rapidly for bread, and sold their rights. The
performances of each play were few. There was no authors' copyright, and
dramas were made to be seen and heard, not to be read. There was no
articulate dramatic criticism, except such as we find casually in
Shakespeare, and in the practice and theory of Jonson, who was deaf or
hostile to some of the chief virtues of the romantic playwrights.
Chapman.
The wealth of dramatic production is so great that only a broad
classification is here offered. George Chapman stands apart, nearest to
the greatest in high austerity of sentiment and in the gracious gravity
of his romantic love-comedies. But the crude melodrama of his tragedies
is void of true theatrical skill. His quasi-historical French tragedies
on Bussy d'Ambois and Biron and Chabot best show his gift and also his
insufferable interrupting quaintness. His versions of Homer (1598-1624),
honoured alike by Jonson and by Keats, are the greatest verse
translations of the time, and the real work of Chapman's life. Their
virtues are only partially Homer's, but the general epic nobility and
the majesty of single lines, which in length are the near equivalent of
the hexameter, redeem the want of Homer's limpidity and continuity and
the translator's imperfect knowledge of Greek. A vein of satiric
ruggedness unites Jonson and Chapman with Marston and Hall, the
professors of an artificial and disgusting invective; and the same
strain spoils Marston's plays, and obscures his genuine command of the
language of feverish and bitter sentiment. With these writers satire and
contempt of the world lie at the root both of their comedy and tragedy.
Dekker and Heywood.
Middleton and Webster.
Beaumont and Fletcher.
Massinger.
The Many.
It is otherwise with most of the romantic dramatists, who may be
provisionally grouped as follows. (_a_) Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood
are writers-of-all-work, the former profuse of tracts and pamphlets, the
latter of treatises and compilations. They are both unrhetorical and
void of pose, and divide themselves between the artless comedy of
bustling, lively, English humours and pathetic, unheroic tragedy. But
Dekker has splendid and poetical dreams, in _Old Fortunatus_ (1600) and
_The Honest Whore_, both of luxury and of tenderness; while Heywood, as
in his _English Traveller_ and _Woman killed with Kindness_ (acted
1603), excels in pictures of actual, chivalrous English gentlemen and
their generosities. The fertility and volubility of these writers, and
their modest carelessness of fame, account for many of their
imperfections. With them may be named the large crowd of professional
journeymen, who did not want for power, but wrote usually in partnership
together, like Munday, Chettle and Drayton, or supplied, like William
Rowley, underplots of rough, lively comedy or tragedy. (_b_) Amongst
dramatists of primarily tragic and sombre temper, who in their best
scenes recall the creator of Angelo, Iago and Timon, must be named
Thomas Middleton (1570?-1627), John Webster, and Cyril Tourneur.
Middleton has great but scattered force, and his verse has the grip and
ring of the best period without a sign of the decadence. He is strong in
high comedy, like _The Old Law_, that turns on some exquisite point of
honour--"the moral sense of our ancestors"; in comedy that is merely
graphic and vigorous; and in detached sketches of lowering wickedness
and lust, like those in _The Changeling_ and _Women beware Women_. He
and Webster each created one unforgettable desperado, de Flores in _The
Changeling_ and Bosola in _The Duchess of Malfi_ (whose "pity," when it
came, was "nothing akin to him"). In Webster's other principal play,
_Vittoria Corombona, or the White Devil_ (produced about 1616), the
title-character is not less magnificent in defiant crime than Goneril or
Lady Macbeth. The style of Webster, for all his mechanical horrors,
distils the essences of pity and terror, of wrath and scorn, and is
profoundly poetical; and his point of view seems to be blank fatalism,
without Shakespeare's ever-arching rainbow of moral sympathy. Cyril
Tourneur, in _The Revenger's Tragedy_, is even more of a poet than
Webster; he can find the phrase for half-insane wrath and nightmare
brooding, but his chaos of impieties revolts the artistic judgment.
These specialists, when all is said, are great men in their dark
province, (_c_) The playwrights who may be broadly called romantic, of
whom Beaumont, Fletcher and Massinger are the chief, while they share in
the same sombre vein, have a wider range and move more in the daylight.
The three just named left a very large body of drama, tragic, comic and
tragi-comic, in which their several shares can partly be discerned by
metrical or other tests. Beaumont (d. 1616) is nearest the prime, with
his vein of Cervantesque mockery and his pure, beautifully-broken and
cadenced verse, which is seen in his contributions to Philaster and _The
Maid's Tragedy_. Fletcher (d. 1625) brings us closest to the actual
gaieties and humours of Jacobean life; he has a profuse comic gift and
the rare instinct for natural dialogue. His verse, with its flood of
vehement and expansive rhetoric, heard at its best in plays like
_Bonduca_, cannot cheat us into the illusion that it is truly dramatic;
but it overflows with beauty, like his silvery but monotonous
versification with its endecasyllabics arrested at the end. In Fletcher
the decadence of form and feeling palpably begins. His personages often
face about at critical instants and bely their natures by sudden
revulsions. Wanton and cheap characters invite not only dramatic but
personal sympathy, as though the author knew no better. There is too
much fine writing about a chastity which is complacent rather than
instinctive, and satisfied with its formal resistances and technical
escapes; so that we are far from Shakespeare's heroines. These faults
are present also in Philip Massinger (d. 1640), who offers in
substantial recompense, not like Beaumont and Fletcher treasures of
incessant vivacious episode and poetry and lyric interlude, but an often
splendid and usually solid constructive skill, and a steady eloquence
which is like a high table-land without summits. _A New Way to Pay Old
Debts_ (1632) is the most enduring popular comedy of the time outside
Shakespeare's, and one of the best. Massinger's interweaving of
impersonal or political conceptions, as in _The Bondman_ and _The Roman
Actor_, is often a triumph of arrangement; and though he wrote in the
reign of Charles, he is saved by many noble qualities from being merely
an artist of the decline, (_d_) A mass of plays, of which the authorship
is unknown, uncertain or attached to a mere name, baffle classification.
There are domestic tragedies, such as _Arden of Feversham_; scions of
the vindictive drama, like _The Second Maiden's Tragedy_; historic or
half-historic tragedies like _Nero_. There are chronicle histories, of
which the last and one of the best is Ford's _Perkin Warbeck_, and
melodramas of adventure such as Thomas Heywood poured forth. There are
realistic citizen comedies akin to _The Merry Wives_, like Porter's
refreshing _Two Angry Women of Abingdon_; there are Jonsonian comedies,
vernacular farces, light intrigue-pieces like Field's and many more. Few
of these, regarded as wholes, come near to perfection; few fail of some
sally or scene that proves once more the unmatched diffusion of the
dramatic or poetic instinct. (_e_) Outside the regular drama there are
many varieties: academic plays, like _The Return from Parnassus_ and
_Lingua_, which are still mirthful; many pastoral plays or
entertainments in the Italian style, like _The Faithful Shepherdess_;
versified character-sketches, of which Day's _Parliament of Bees_, with
its Theocritean grace and point, is the happiest; many masques and
shows, often lyrically and scenically lovely, of which kind Jonson is
the master, and Milton, in his _Comus_, the transfigurer; Senecan dramas
made only to be read, like Daniel's and Fulke Greville's; and Latin
comedies, like _Ignoramus_. All these species are only now being fully
grouped, sifted and edited by scholars, but a number of the six or seven
hundred dramas of the time remain unreprinted.
Ford and Shirley.
There remain two writers, John Ford and James Shirley, who kept the
higher tradition alive till the Puritan ordinance crushed the theatre in
1642. Ford is another specialist, of grave, sinister and concentrated
power (reflected in his verse and diction), to whom no topic, the incest
of Annabella in _'Tis Pity She's a Whore_, or the high crazed heroism of
Calantha in _The Broken Heart_, is beyond the pale, if only he can
dominate it; as indeed he does, without complicity, standing above his
subject. Shirley, a fertile writer, has the general characteristic
gifts, in a somewhat dilute but noble form, of the more romantic
playwrights, and claims honour as the last of them.
_Prose from 1579 to 1660._--With all the unevenness of poetry, the sense
of style, of a standard, is everywhere; felicity is never far off. Prose
also is full of genius, but it is more disfigured than verse by
aberration and wasted power. A central, classic, durable, adaptive prose
had been attained by Machiavelli, and by Amyot and Calvin, before 1550.
In England it was only to become distinct after 1660. Vocabulary,
sentence-structure, paragraph, idiom and rhythm were in a state of
unchartered freedom, and the history of their crystallization is not yet
written. But in more than compensation there is a company of prose
masters, from Florio and Hooker to Milton and Clarendon, not one of whom
clearly or fully anticipates the modern style, and who claim all the
closer study that their special virtues have been for ever lost. They
seem farther away from us than the poets around them. The verse of
Shakespeare is near to us, for its tradition has persisted; his prose,
the most natural and noble of his age, is far away, for its tradition
has not persisted. One reason of this difference is that English prose
tried to do more work than that of France and Italy; it tried the work
of poetry; and it often did that better than it did the normal work of
prose. This overflow of the imaginative spirit gave power and elasticity
to prose, but made its task of finding equilibrium the harder. Moreover,
prose in England was for long a natural growth, never much affected by
critical or academic canons as in France; and when it did submit to
canons, the result was often merely manner. The tendons and sinews of
the language, still in its adolescent power and bewilderment, were long
unset; that is, the parts of speech--noun and verb, epithet and
adverb--were in freer interchange than at any period afterwards. The
build, length and cadence of a complex sentence were habitually
elaborate; and yet they were disorganized, so that only the ear of a
master could regulate them. The law of taste and measure, perhaps
through some national disability, was long unperceived. Prose, in fact,
could never be sure of doing the day's work in the right fashion. The
cross-currents of pedantry in the midst of simplicity, the distrust of
clear plain brevity, which was apt to be affected when it came, the
mimicries of foreign fashions, and the quaintness and cumbrousness of so
much average writing, make it easier to classify Renaissance prose by
its interests than by its styles.
The novel.
Lyly and euphuism.
The Elizabethan novel was always unhappily mannered, and is therefore
dead. It fed the drama, which devoured it. The tales of Boccaccio,
Bandello, Cinthio, Margaret of Navarre, and others were purveyed, as
remarked above, in the forgotten treasuries of Painter, Pettie, Fenton
and Whetstone, and many of these works or their originals filled a shelf
in the playwrights' libraries. The first of famous English novels,
Lyly's _Euphues_ (1578), and its sequel _Euphues and his England_, are
documents of form. They are commended by a certain dapper shrewdness of
observation and an almost witty priggery, not by any real beauty or deep
feeling. Euphuism, of which Lyly was only the patentee, not the
inventor, strikes partly back to the Spaniard Guevara, and was a model
for some years to many followers like Lodge and Greene. It did not
merely provide Falstaff with a pattern for mock-moral diction and
vegetable similes. It genuinely helped to organize the English sentence,
complex or co-ordinate, and the talk of Portia and Rosalind shows what
could be made of it. By the arch-euphuists, clauses and clusters of
clauses were paired for parallel or contrast, with the beat of emphatic
alliteration on the corresponding parts of speech in each constituent
clause. This was a useful discipline for prose in its period of groping.
Sidney's incomposite and unfinished _Arcadia_, written 1580-1581,
despite its painful forced antitheses, is sprinkled with lovely rhythms,
with pleasing formal landscapes, and even with impassioned sentiment and
situation, through which the writer's eager and fretted spirit shines.
Both these stories, like those of Greene and Lodge, show by their
somewhat affected, edited delineation of life and their courtly tone
that they were meant in chief for the eyes of ladies, who were excluded
alike from the stage and from its audience. Nashe's drastic and
photographic tale of masculine life, _Jack Wilton, or The Unfortunate
Traveller_, stands almost alone, but some of the gap is filled by the
contemporary pamphlets, sometimes vivid, often full of fierce or maudlin
declamation, of Nashe himself--by far the most powerful of the
group--and of Greene, Dekker and Nicholas Breton. Thus the English novel
was a minor passing form; the leisurely and amorous romance went on in
the next century, owing largely to French influence and example.
Criticism.
In criticism, England may almost be counted with the minor Latin
countries. Sidney, in his _Defence of Poesy_ (1595, written about 1580),
and Jonson, in his _Discoveries_, offer a well-inspired and lofty
restatement of the current answers to the current questions, but could
give no account of the actual creative writing of the time. To defend
the "truth" of poetry--which was identified with all inventive writing
and not only with verse--poetry was saddled with the work of science and
instruction. To defend its character it was treated as a delightful but
deliberate bait to good behaviour, a theory at best only true of
allegory and didactic verse. The real relation of tragedy to spiritual
things, which is admittedly shown, however hard its definition, in
Shakespeare's plays, no critic for centuries tried to fathom. One of the
chief quarrels turned on metric. A few lines that Sidney and Campion
wrote on what they thought the system of Latin quantity are really
musical. This theory, already raised by Ascham, made a stir, at first in
the group of Harvey, Sidney, Dyer and Spenser, called the "Areopagus,"
an informal attempt to copy the Italian academies; and it was revived on
the brink of the reign of James. But Daniel's firm and eloquent _Defence
of Rhyming_ (1602) was not needed to persuade the poets to continue
rhyming in syllabic verse. The stricter view of the nature and
classification of poetry, and of the dramatic unity of action, is
concisely given, partly by Jonson, partly by Bacon in his _Advancement
of Learning_ and _De Augmentis_; and Jonson, besides passing his famed
judgments on Shakespeare and Bacon, enriched our critical vocabulary
from the Roman rhetoricians. Scholastic and sensible manuals, like
Webbe's _Discourse of Poetry_ and the _Art of English Poesy_ (1589)
ascribed to Puttenham, come in the rear.
Translators.
The translators count for more than the critics; the line of their great
achievements from Berners' _Froissart_ (1523-1525) to Urquhart's
_Rabelais_ (1653) is never broken long; and though their lives are often
obscure, their number witnesses to that far-spread diffusion of the
talent for English prose, which the wealth of English poetry is apt to
hide. The typical craftsman in this field, Philemon Holland, translated
Livy, Pliny, Suetonius, Plutarch's _Morals_ and Camden's _Britannia_,
and his fount of English is of the amplest and purest. North, in his
translation, made from Amyot's classic French, of Plutarch's _Lives_
(1579), disclosed one of the master-works of old example; Florio, in
Montaigne's _Essays_ (1603), the charter of the new freedom of mental
exploration; and Shelton, in _Don Quixote_ (1612), the chief tragi-comic
creation of continental prose. These versions, if by no means accurate
in the letter, were adequate in point of soul and style to their great
originals; and the English dress of Tacitus (1591), Apuleius,
Heliodorus, Commines, _Celestina_ and many others, is so good and often
so sumptuous a fabric, that no single class of prose authors, from the
time of More to that of Dryden, excels the prose translators, unless it
be the Anglican preachers. Their matter is given to them, and with it a
certain standard of form, so that their natural strength and richness of
phrase are controlled without being deadened. But the want of such
control is seen in the many pamphleteers, who are the journalists of the
time, and are often also playwrights or tale-tellers, divines or
politicians. The writings, for instance, of the hectic, satiric and
graphic Thomas Nashe, run at one extreme into fiction, and at the other
into the virulent rag-sheets of the Marprelate controversy, which is of
historical and social but not of artistic note, being only a fragment
of that vast mass of disputatious literature, which now seems grotesque,
excitable or dull.
Hooker.
Richard Hooker's _Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_ (1594-1597), an
accepted defence of the Anglican position against Geneva and Rome, is
the first theological work of note in the English tongue, and the first
of note since Wycliffe written by an Englishman. It is a plea for reason
as one of the safe and lawful guides to the faith; but it also speaks
with admirable temper and large feeling to the ceremonial and aesthetic
sense. The First Book, the scaffolding of the treatise, discusses the
nature of law at large; but Hooker hardly has pure speculative power,
and the language had not yet learnt to move easily in abstract trains of
thought. In its elaboration of clause and period, in its delicate
resonant eloquence, Hooker's style is Ciceronian; but his inversions and
mazes of subordinate sentence somewhat rack the genius of English. Later
divines like Jeremy Taylor had to disintegrate, since they could not
wield, this admirable but over-complex eloquence. The sermons
(1621-1631) of Donne have the mingled strangeness and intimacy of his
verse, and their subtle flame, imaginative tenacity, and hold upon the
springs of awe make them unique. Though without artificial symmetry,
their sentences are intricately harmonized, in strong contrast to such
pellet-like clauses as those of the learned Lancelot Andrewes, who was
Donne's younger contemporary and the subject of Milton's Latin epitaph.
Bacon.
With Francis Bacon (1561-1626) English philosophy began its unbroken
course and took its long-delayed rank in Europe. His prose, of which he
is the first high and various master in English, was shaped and coloured
by his bent as orator and pleader, by his immixture in affairs, by his
speculative brain, and by his use and estimate of Latin. In his
conscious craftsmanship, his intellectual confidence and curiosity, his
divining faith in the future of science, and his resolve to follow the
leadings of nature and experience unswervingly; in his habit of storing
and using up his experience, and in his wide wordly insight,
crystallized in maxim, he suggests a kind of Goethe, without the poetic
hand or the capacity for love and lofty suffering. He saw all nature in
a map, and wished to understand and control her by outwitting the
"idols," or inherent paralysing frailties of the human judgment. He
planned but could not finish a great cycle of books in order to realize
this conception. The _De Augmentis Scientiarum_ (1623) expanded from the
English _Advancement of Knowledge_ (1605) draws the map; the _Novum
Organum_ (1620) sets out the errors of scholasticism and the methods of
inductive logic; the _New Atlantis_ sketches an ideally equipped and
moralized scientific community. Bacon shared with the great minds of his
century the notion that Latin would outlast any vernacular tongue, and
committed his chief scientific writings to a Latin which is alive and
splendid and his own, and which also disciplined and ennobled his
English. The _Essays_ (1597, 1612, 1625) are his lifelong, gradually
accumulated diary of his opinions on human life and business. These
famous compositions are often sadly mechanical. They are chippings and
basketings of maxims and quotations, and of anecdotes, often classical,
put together inductively, or rather by "simple enumeration" of the pros
and cons. Still they are the honest notes of a practical observer and
statesman, disenchanted--why not?--with mankind, concerned with cause
and effect rather than with right and wrong, wanting the finer faith and
insight into men and women, but full of reality, touched with
melancholy, and redeeming some arid, small and pretentious counsels by
many that are large and wise. Though sometimes betraying the workshop,
Bacon's style, at its best, is infallibly expressive; like Milton's
angels, it is "dilated or condensed" according to its purposes. In youth
and age alike, Bacon commanded the most opposite patterns and extremes
of prose--the curt maxim, balanced in antithesis or triplet, or standing
solitary; the sumptuous, satisfying and brocaded period; the movements
of exposition, oratory, pleading and narrative. The _History of Henry
VII._ (1622), written after his fall from office, is in form as well as
insight and mastery of material the one historical classic in English
before Clarendon. Bacon's musical sense for the value and placing of
splendid words and proper names resembles Marlowe's. But the master of
mid-Renaissance prose is Shakespeare; with him it becomes the voice of
finer and more impassioned spirits than Bacon's--the voice of Rosalind
and Hamlet. And the eulogist of both men, Ben Jonson, must be named in
their company for his senatorial weight and dignity of ethical counsel
and critical maxim.
Hobbes.
Funereal prose.
As the Stuart rule declined and fell, prose became enriched from five
chief sources: from philosophy, whether formal or unmethodical; from
theology and preaching and political dispute; from the poetical
contemplation of death; from the observation of men and manners; and
from antiquarian scholarship and history. As in France, where the first
three of these kinds of writings flourished, it was a time rather of
individual great writers than of any admitted pattern or common ideal of
prose form, although in France this pattern was always clearlier
defined. The mental energy, meditative depth, and throbbing brilliant
colour of the English drama passed with its decay over into prose. But
Latin was still often the supplanter: the treatise of Lord Herbert of
Cherbury, _De Veritate_, of note in the early history of Deism, and much
of the writing of the ambidextrous Thomas Hobbes, are in Latin. In this
way Latin disciplined English once more, though it often tempted men of
genius away from English. _The Leviathan_ (1651) with its companion
books on _Human Nature_ and _Liberty_, and Hobbes' explosive dialogue on
the civil wars, _Behemoth_ (1679), have the bitter concision of Tacitus
and the clearness of a half-relief in bronze. Hobbes' speculations on
the human animal, the social contract, the absolute power of the
sovereign, and the subservience owed to the sovereign by the Church or
"Kingdom of Darkness," enraged all parties, and left their track on the
thought and controversial literature of the century. With Ben Jonson and
the jurist Selden (whose English can be judged from his _Table Talk_),
Hobbes anticipates the brief and clear sentence-structure of the next
age, though not its social ease and amenity of form. But his grandeur is
not that of a poet, and the poetical prose is the most distinctive kind
of this period. It is eloquent above all on death and the vanity of
human affairs; its solemn tenor prolongs the reflections of Claudio, of
Fletcher's Philaster, or of Spenser's Despair. It is exemplified in
Bacon's Essay _Of Death_, in the anonymous descant on the same subject
wrongly once ascribed to him, in Donne's plea for suicide, in Raleigh's
_History of the World_, in Drummond's _Cypress Grove_ (1623), in Jeremy
Taylor's sermons and _Holy Dying_ (1651), and in Sir Thomas Browne's
_Urn-Burial_ (1658) and _Letter to a Friend_. Its usual vesture is a
long purple period, freely Latinized, though Browne equally commands the
form of solemn and monumental epigram. He is also free from the
dejection that wraps round the other writers on the subject, and a holy
quaintness and gusto relieve his ruminations. The _Religio Medici_
(1642), quintessentially learned, wise and splendid, is the fullest
memorial of his power. Amongst modern prose writers, De Quincey is his
only true rival in musical sensibility to words.
Jeremy Taylor.
Burton.
Jeremy Taylor, the last great English casuist and schoolman, and one of
the first pleaders for religious tolerance (in his _Liberty of
Prophesying_, 1647), is above all a preacher; tender, intricate,
copious, inexhaustible in image and picturesque quotation. From the
classics, from the East, from the animal world, from the life of men and
children, his illustrations flow, without end or measure. He is a master
of the lingering cadence, which soars upward and onward on its coupled
clauses, as on balanced iridescent wings, and is found long after in his
scholar Ruskin. Imaginative force of another kind pervades Robert
Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ (1621), where the humorous medium
refracts and colours every ray of the recluse's far-travelled spirit.
The mass of Latin citation, woven, not quilted, into Burton's style, is
another proof of the vitality of the cosmopolitan language. Burton and
Browne owe much to the pre-critical learning of their time, which yields
up such precious savours to their fancy, that we may be thankful for the
delay of more precise science and scholarship. Fancy, too, of a
suddener and wittier sort, preserves some of the ample labours of Thomas
Fuller, which are scattered over the years 1631-1662; and the _Lives_
and _Compleat Angler_ (1653) of Izaak Walton are unspoilt, happy or
pious pieces of idyllic prose. No adequate note on the secular or sacred
learning of the time can here be given; on Camden, with his vast
erudition, historical, antiquarian and comparatively critical
(_Britannia_, in Latin, 1586); or on Ussher, with his patristic and
chronological learning, one of the many _savants_ of the Anglican
church. Other divines of the same camp pleaded, in a plainer style than
Taylor, for freedom of personal judgment and against the multiplying of
"vitals in religion"; the chief were Chillingworth, one of the closest
of English apologists, in his _Religion of Protestants_ (1638), and John
Hales of Eton. The Platonists, or rather Plotinists, of Cambridge, who
form a curious digression in the history of modern philosophy, produced
two writers, John Smith and Henry More, of an exalted and esoteric
prose, more directly inspired by Greece than any other of the time; and
their champion of erudition, Cudworth, in his _True Intellectual
System_, gave some form to their doctrine.
Clarendon.
Milton's prose.
Above the vast body of pamphlets and disputatious writing that form the
historian's material stands Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon's _History of
the Rebellion_, printed in 1702-1704, thirty years after his death.
Historical writing hitherto, but for Bacon's _Henry VII._, had been
tentative though profuse. Raleigh's vast disquisition upon all things,
_The History of the World_ (1614), survives by passages and poetic
splendours; gallantly written second-hand works like Knolles's _History of
the Turks_, and the rhetorical _History of the Long Parliament_ by May,
had failed to give England rank with France and Italy. Clarendon's book,
one of the greatest of memoirs and most vivid of portrait-galleries,
spiritually unappreciative of the other side, but full of a subtle
discrimination of character and political motive, brings its author into
line with Retz and Saint-Simon, the watchers and recorders and sometimes
the makers of contemporary history. Clarendon's _Life_, above all the
picture of Falkland and his friends, is a personal record of the
delightful sort in which England was thus far infertile. He is the last
old master of prose, using and sustaining the long, sinuous sentence,
unworkable in weaker hands. He is the last, for Milton's polemic prose,
hurled from the opposite camp, was written between 1643 and 1660. Whether
reviling bishops or royal privilege or indissoluble monogamy, or recalling
his own youth and aims; or claiming liberty for print in _Areopagitica_
(1644); in his demonic defiances, or angelic calls to arms, or his animal
eruptions of spite and hatred, Milton leaves us with a sense of the motive
energies that were to be transformed into _Paradise Lost_ and _Samson_.
His sentences are ungainly and often inharmonious, but often irresistible;
he rigidly withstood the tendencies of form, in prose as in verse, that
Dryden was to represent, and thus was true to his own literary dynasty.
The Authorized Version.
A special outlying position belongs to the Authorized Version (1611) of
the Bible, the late fruit of the long toil that had begun with
Tyndale's, and, on the side of style, with the Wycliffite translations.
More scholarly than all the preceding versions which it utilized, it won
its incomparable form, not so much because of the "grand style that was
in the air," which would have been the worst of models, as because the
style had been already tested and ennobled by generations of
translators. Its effect on poetry and letters was for some time far
smaller than its effect on the national life at large, but it was the
greatest translation--being of a whole literature, or rather of two
literatures--in an age of great translations.
Some other kinds of writing soften the transition to Restoration prose.
The vast catalogue of Characters numbers hundreds of titles. Deriving
from Theophrastus, who was edited by Casaubon in 1592, they are yet
another Renaissance form that England shared with France. But in English
hands, failing a La Bruyère--in Hall's, in Overbury's, even in those of
the gay and skilful Earle (_Microcosmographie_, 1628)--the Character is
a mere list of the attributes and oddities of a type or calling. It is
to the Jonsonian drama of humours what the Pensée, or detached remark,
practised by Bishop Hall and later by Butler and Halifax, is to the
Essay. These works tended long to be commonplace or didactic, as the
popular _Resolves_ of Owen Feltham shows. Cowley was the first essayist
to come down from the desk and talk as to his equals in easy phrases of
middle length. A time of dissension was not the best for this kind of
peaceful, detached writing. The letters of James Howell, the
autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and the memoirs of Kenelm
Digby belong rather to the older and more mannered than to the more
modern form, though Howell's English is in the plainer and quicker
movement.
IV. RESTORATION PERIOD
French influence.
_Literature from 1660 to 1700._--The Renaissance of letters in England
entered on a fresh and peculiar phase in the third quarter of the
century. The balance of intellectual and artistic power in Europe had
completely shifted since 1580. Inspiration had died down in Italy, and
its older classics were no longer a stimulus. The Spanish drama had
flourished, but its influence though real was scattered and indirect.
The Germanic countries were slowly emerging into literature; England
they scarcely touched. But the literary empire of France began to
declare itself both in Northern and Southern lands, and within half a
century was assured. Under this empire the English genius partly fell,
though it soon asserted its own equality, and by 1720 had so reacted
upon France as more than to repay the debt. Thus between 1660 and 1700
is prepared a temporary dual control of European letters. But in the age
of Dryden France gave England more than it received; it gave more than
it had ever given since the age of Chaucer. During Charles II.'s days
Racine, Molière, La Fontaine and Bossuet ran the best of their course.
Cavalier exiles like Waller, Cowley and Hobbes had come back from the
winter of their discontent in Paris, and Saint-Evremond, the typical
_bel esprit_ and critic, settled long in England. A vast body of
translations from the French is recounted, including latterly the works
of the Protestant refugees printed in the free Low Countries or in
England. Naturally this influence told most strongly on the social forms
of verse and prose--upon comedy and satire, upon criticism and maxim and
epigram, while it also affected theology and thought. And this meant the
Renaissance once more, still unexhausted, only working less immediately
and in fresh if narrower channels. Greek literature, Plato and Homer and
the dramatists, became dimmer; the secondary forms of Latin poetry came
to the fore, especially those of Juvenal and the satirists, and the
_pedestris sermo_, epistolary and critical, of Horace. These had some
direct influence, as Dryden's translation of them, accompanying his
Virgil and Lucretius, may show. But they came commended by Boileau,
their chief modernizer, and in their train was the fashion of gallant,
epigrammatic and social verse. The tragedy of Corneille and Racine,
developed originally from the Senecan drama, contended with the
traditions of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and was reinforced by that of
the correcter Jonson, in shaping the new theatre of England. The French
codifiers, who were often also the distorters, of Aristotle's _Poetics_
and Horace's _Ars poëtica_, furnished a canonical body of criticism on
the epic and the drama, to which Dryden is half a disciple and half a
rebel. All this implied at once a loss of the larger and fuller
inspirations of poetry, a decadence in its great and primary forms,
epic, lyric and tragic, and a disposition, in default of such creative
power, to turn and take stock of past production. In England, therefore,
it is the age of secondary verse and of nascent, often searching
criticism.
Science and Letters.
The same critical spirit was also whetted in the fields of science and
speculation, which the war and the Puritan rule had not encouraged. The
activities of the newly-founded Royal Society told directly upon
literature, and counted powerfully in the organization of a clear,
uniform prose--the "close, naked, natural way of speaking," which the
historian of the Society, Sprat, cites as part of its programme. And
the style of Sprat, as of scientific masters like Newton and Ray the
botanist, itself attests the change. A time of profound and peaceful and
fruitful scientific labour began; the whole of Newton's _Principia_
appeared in 1687; the dream of Bacon came nearer, and England was less
isolated from the international work of knowledge. The spirit of method
and observation and induction spread over the whole field of thought and
was typified in John Locke, whose _Essay concerning Human Understanding_
came out in English in 1690, and who applied the same deeply sagacious
and cautious calculus to education and religion and the "conduct of the
understanding." But his works, though their often mellow and dignified
style has been ignorantly underrated, also show the change in
philosophic writing since Hobbes. The old grandeur and pugnacity are
gone; the imaginative play of science, or quasi-science, on the
literature of reflection is gone; the eccentrics, the fantasts, the
dreamers are gone, or only survive in curious transitional writers like
Joseph Glanvil (_Scepsis scientifica_, 1665) or Thomas Burnet (_Sacred
Theory of the Earth_, 1684). This change was in part a conscious and an
angry change, as is clear from the attacks made in Samuel Butler's
_Hudibras_ (1663-1668) upon scholastic verbiage, astrology, fanatical
sects and their disputes, poetic and "heroic" enthusiasm and
intellectual whim.
Courtly and social influence.
Before the Restoration men of letters, with signal exceptions like
Milton and Marvell, had been Cavalier, courtly and Anglican in their
sympathies. The Civil War had scattered them away from the capital,
which, despite Milton's dream in _Areopagitica_ of its humming and
surging energies, had ceased to be, what it now again became, the
natural haunt and Rialto of authors. The taste of the new king and court
served to rally them. Charles II. relished _Hudibras_, used and
pensioned Dryden, sat under Barrow and South and heard them with
appreciation, countenanced science, visited comedies, and held his own
in talk by mother-wit. Letters became the pastime, and therefore one of
the more serious pursuits, of men of quality, who soon excelled in song
and light scarifying verse and comedy, and took their own tragedies and
criticisms gravely. Poetry under such auspices became gallant and
social, and also personal and partisan; and satire was soon its most
vital form, with the accessories of compliment, rhymed popular
argumentation and elegy. The social and conversational instinct was the
master-influence in prose. It produced a subtle but fundamental change
in the attitude of author to reader. Prose came nearer to living speech,
it became more civil and natural and persuasive, and this not least in
the pulpit. The sense of ennui, or boredom, which seemed as unknown in
the earlier part of the century as it is to the modern German, became
strongly developed, and prose was much improved by the fear of provoking
it. In all these ways the Restoration accompanied and quickened a
speedier and greater change in letters than any political event in
English history since the reign of Alfred, when prose itself was
created.
Prose and criticism.
The formal change in prose can thus be assigned to no one writer, for
the good reason that it presupposes a change of spoken style lying
deeper than any personal influence. If we begin with the writing that is
nearest living talk--the letters of Otway or Lady Rachel Russell, or the
diary of Pepys (1659-1669)--that supreme disclosure of our
mother-earth--or the evidence in a state trial, or the dialogue in the
more natural comedies; if we then work upwards through some of the
plainer kinds of authorship, like the less slangy of L'Estrange's
pamphlets, or Burnet's _History of My Own Time_, a solid Whig memoir of
historical value, until we reach really admirable or lasting prose like
Dryden's _Preface_ to his _Fables_ (1700), or the maxims of Halifax;--if
we do this, we are aware, amid all varieties, survivals and reversions,
of a strong and rapid drift towards the style that we call modern. And
one sign of this movement is the revulsion against any over-saturating
of the working, daily language, and even of the language of appeal and
eloquence, with the Latin element. In Barrow and Glanvil, descendants of
Taylor and Browne, many Latinized words remain, which were soon
expelled from style like foreign bodies from an organism. As in the
mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth century, the process is visible by
which the Latin vocabulary and Latin complication of sentence first
gathers strength, and then, though not without leaving its traces, is
forced to ebb. The instinct of the best writers secured this result, and
secured it for good and all. In Dryden's diction there is a nearly
perfect balance and harmony of learned and native constituents, and a
sensitive tact in Gallicizing; in his build of sentence there is the
same balance between curtness or bareness and complexity or ungainly
lengthiness. For ceremony and compliment he keeps a rolling period, for
invective a short sharp stroke without the gloves. And he not only uses
in general a sentence of moderate scale, inclining to brevity, but he
finds out its harmonies; he is a seeming-careless but an absolute master
of rhythm. In delusive ease he is unexcelled; and we only regret that he
could not have written prose oftener instead of plays. We should thus,
however, have lost their prefaces, in which the bulk and the best of
Dryden's criticisms appear. From the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ (1668)
down to the _Preface to Fables_ (1700) runs a series of essays: _On the
Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy_, _On Heroic Plays_, _On Translated
Verse_, _On Satire_ and many more; which form the first connected body
of criticisms in the language, and are nobly written always. Dryden's
prose is literature as it stands, and yet is talk, and yet again is
mysteriously better than talk. The critical writings of John Dennis are
but a sincere application of the rules and canons that were now becoming
conventional; Rymer, though not so despicable as Macaulay said, is still
more depressing than Dennis; and for any critic at once so free, so
generous and so sure as Dryden we wait in vain for a century.
Contributors to the new prose.
Three or four names are usually associated with Dryden's in the work of
reforming or modifying prose: Sprat, Tillotson, Sir William Temple, and
George Savile, marquis of Halifax; but the honours rest with Halifax.
Sprat, though clear and easy, has little range; Tillotson, though lucid,
orderly, and a very popular preacher, has little distinction; Temple,
the elegant essayist, has a kind of barren gloss and fine literary
manners, but very little to say. The political tracts, essays and maxims
of Halifax (died 1695) are the most typically modern prose between
Dryden and Swift, and are nearer than anything else to the best French
writing of the same order, in their finality of epigram, their neatness
and mannerliness and sharpness. The _Character of a Trimmer_ and _Advice
to a Daughter_ are the best examples.
Preachers.
Religious literature, Anglican and Puritan, is the chief remaining
department to be named. The strong, eloquent and coloured preaching of
Isaac Barrow the mathematician, who died in 1677, is a survival of the
larger and older manner of the Church. In its balance of logic, learning
and emotion, in its command alike of Latin splendour and native force,
it deserves a recognition it has lost. Another athlete of the pulpit,
Robert South, who is so often praised for his wit that his force is
forgotten, continues the lineage, while Tillotson and the elder Sherlock
show the tendency to the smoother and more level prose. But the
revulsion against strangeness and fancy and magnificence went too far;
it made for a temporary bareness and meanness and disharmony, which had
to be checked by Addison, Bolingbroke and Berkeley. From what Addison
saved our daily written English, may be seen in the vigorous slangy
hackwork of Roger L'Estrange, the translator and pamphleteer, in the
news-sheets of Dunton, and in the satires of Tom Brown. These writers
were debasing the coinage with their street journalism.
Puritan prose.
Bunyan.
Another and far nobler variety of vernacular prose is found in the
Puritans. Baxter and Howe, Fox and Bunyan, had the English Bible behind
them, which gave them the best of their inspiration, though the first
two of them were also erudite men. Richard Baxter, an immensely fertile
writer, is best remembered by those of his own fold for his _Saint's
Everlasting Rest_ (1650) and his autobiography, John Howe for his
evangelical apologia _The Living Temple of God_ (1675), Fox for his
_Journal_ and its mixture of quaintness and rapturous mysticism. John
Bunyan, the least instructed of them all, is their only born artist. His
creed and point of view were those of half the nation--the half that was
usually inarticulate in literature, or spoke without style or genius.
His reading, consisting not only of the Bible, but of the popular
allegories of giants, pilgrims and adventure, was also that of his
class. _The Pilgrim's Progress_, of which the first part appeared in
1678, the second in 1684, is the happy flowering sport amidst a growth
of barren plants of the same tribe. The _Progress_ is a dream, more
vivid to its author than most men's waking memories to themselves; the
emblem and the thing signified are merged at every point, so that
Christian's journey is not so much an allegory with a key as a spiritual
vision of this earth and our neighbours. _Grace Abounding_, Bunyan's
diary of his own voyage to salvation, _The Holy War_, an overloaded
fable of the fall and recovery of mankind, and _The Life and Death of Mr
Badman_, a novel telling of the triumphal earthly progress of a
scoundrelly tradesman, are among Bunyan's other contributions to
literature. His union of spiritual intensity, sharp humorous vision, and
power of simple speech consummately chosen, mark his work off alike from
his own inarticulate public and from all other literary performance of
his time.
Transitional verse.
Hudibras.
Songsters.
The transition from the older to the newer poetry was not abrupt. Old
themes and tunes were slowly disused, others previously of lesser mark
rose into favour, and a few quite fresh ones were introduced. The poems
of John Oldham and Andrew Marvell belong to both periods. Both of them
begin with fantasy and elegy, and end with satires, which indeed are
rather documents than works of art. The monody of Oldham on his friend
Morwent is poorly exchanged for the _Satires on the Jesuits_ (1681), and
the lovely metaphysical verses of Marvell on gardens and orchards and
the spiritual love sadly give place to his _Last Instructions to a
Painter_ (1669). In his _Horatian Ode_ Marvell had nobly and impartially
applied his earlier style to national affairs; but the time proved too
strong for this delightful poet. Another and a stranger satire had soon
greeted the Restoration, the _Hudibras_ (1663-1678) of Samuel Butler,
with its companion pieces. The returned wanderers delighted in this
horribly agile, boisterous and fierce attack on the popular party and
its religions, and its wrangles and its manners. Profoundly eccentric
and tiresomely allusive in his form, and working in the short rhyming
couplets thenceforth called "Hudibrastics," Butler founded a small and
peculiar but long-lived school of satire. The other verse of the time is
largely satire of a different tone and metre; but the earlier kind of
finished and gallant lyric persisted through the reign of Charles II.
The songs of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, are usually malicious,
sometimes passionate; they have a music and a splendid self-abandonment
such as we never meet again till Burns. Sedley and Dorset and Aphra Behn
and Dryden are the rightful heirs of Carew and Lovelace, those
infallible masters of short rhythms; and this secret also was lost for a
century afterwards.
Dryden.
In poetry, in prose, and to some extent in drama, John Dryden, the
creature of his time, is the master of its expression. He began with
panegyric verse, first on Cromwell and then on Charles, which is full of
fine things and false writing. The _Annus Mirabilis_ (1667) is the chief
example, celebrating the Plague, the Fire and the naval victory, in the
quatrains for which Davenant's pompous _Gondibert_ had shown the way.
The _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_ (1668), a dialogue on the rivalries of
blank verse with rhyme, and of the Elizabethan drama with the French, is
perfect modern prose; and to this perfection Dryden attained at a bound,
while he attained his poetical style more gradually. He practised his
couplet in panegyric, in heroic tragedy, and in dramatic prologue and
epilogue for twenty years before it was consummate. Till 1680 he
supported himself chiefly by his plays, which have not lived so long as
their critical prefaces, already mentioned. His diction and
versification came to their full power in his satires, rhymed arguments,
dedications and translations. _Absalom and Achitophel_ (part i., 1681;
part ii., with Nahum Tate, 1682), as well as _The Medal_ and _Mac
Flecknoe_, marked a new birth of English satire, placing it at once on a
level with that of any ancient or modern country. The mixture of deadly
good temper, Olympian unfairness, and rhetorical and metrical skill in
each of these poems has never been repeated. The presentment of
Achitophel, earl of Shaftesbury, in his relations with Absalom Walters
and Charles the minstrel-king of Judah, as well as the portraits of
Shimei and Barzillai and Jotham, the eminent Whigs and Tories, and of
the poets Og and Doeg, are things whose vividness age has never
discoloured. Dryden's Protestant arguings in _Religio Laici_ (1682) and
his equally sincere Papistical arguings in _The Hind and the Panther_
(1687) are just as skilful. His translations of Virgil and parts of
Lucretius, of Chaucer and Boccaccio (_Fables_, 1700), set the seal on
his command of his favourite couplet for the higher kinds of appeal and
oratory. His _Ode_ on Anne Killigrew, and his popular but coarser
_Alexander's Feast_, have a more lyric harmony; and his songs, inserted
in his plays, reflect the change of fashion by their metrical adeptness
and often thorough-going wantonness. The epithet of "glorious," in its
older sense of a certain conscious and warranted pride of place, not in
that of boastful or pretentious, suits Dryden well. Not only did he
leave a model and a point of departure for Pope, but his influence
recurs in Churchill, in Gray, in Johnson and in Crabbe, where he is seen
counteracting, with his large, wholesome and sincere bluntness, the
acidity of Pope. Dryden was counted near Shakespeare and Milton until
the romantic revival renewed the sense of proportion; but the same sense
now demands his acknowledgment as the English poet who is nearest to
their frontiers of all those who are exiled from their kingdom.
Tragedy.
Otway.
Restoration and Revolution tragedy is nearly all abortive; it is now
hard to read it for pleasure. But it has noble flights, and its historic
interest is high. Two of its species, the rhymed heroic play and the
rehandling of Shakespeare in blank verse, were also brought to their
utmost by Dryden, though in both he had many companions. The heroic
tragedies were a hybrid offspring of the heroic romance and French
tragedy; and though _The Conquest of Granada_ (1669-1670) and _Tyrannic
Love_ would be very open to satire in Dryden's own vein, they are at
least generously absurd. Their intention is never ignoble, if often
impossible. After a time Dryden went back to Shakespeare, after a
fashion already set by Sir William Davenant, the connecting link with
the older tragedy and the inaugurator of the new. They "revived"
Shakespeare; they vamped him in a style that did not wholly perish till
after the time of Garrick. _The Tempest_, _Troilus and Cressida_, and
_Antony and Cleopatra_ were thus handled by Dryden; and the last of
these, as converted by him into _All for Love_ (1678), is loftier and
stronger than any of his original plays, its blank verse renewing the
ties of Restoration poetry with the great age. The heroic plays, written
in one or other metre, lived long, and expired in the burlesques of
Fielding and Sheridan. _The Rehearsal_ (1671), a gracious piece of
fooling partially aimed at Dryden by Buckingham and his friends, did not
suffice to kill its victims. Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee, both of
whom generally used blank verse, are the other tragic writers of note,
children indeed of the extreme old age of the drama. Otway's long-acted
_Venice Preserved_ (1682) has an almost Shakespearian skill in
melodrama, a wonderful tide of passionate language, and a blunt and bold
delineation of character; but Otway's inferior style and verse could
only be admired in an age like his own. Lee is far more of a poet,
though less of a dramatist, and he wasted a certain talent in noise and
fury.
Comedy.
Wycherley.
Restoration comedy at first followed Jonson, whom it was easy to try and
imitate; Shadwell and Wilson, whose works are a museum for the social
antiquary, photographed the humours of the town. Dryden's many comedies
often show his more boisterous and blatant, rarely his finer qualities.
Like all playwrights of the time he pillages from the French, and
vulgarizes Molière without stint or shame. A truer light comedy began
with Sir George Etherege, who mirrored in his fops the gaiety and
insolence of the world he knew. The society depicted by William
Wycherley, the one comic dramatist of power between Massinger and
Congreve, at first seems hardly human; but his energy is skilful and
faithful as well as brutal; he excels in the graphic reckless exhibition
of outward humours and bustle; he scavenges in the most callous good
spirits and with careful cynicism. _The Plain Dealer_ (1677), a skilful
transplantation, as well as a depravation of Molière's _Le Misanthrope_,
is his best piece: he writes in prose, and his prose is excellent,
modern and lifelike.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--General Histories: Hallam, _Introduction to the Lit. of
Europe_ (1838-1839); G. Saintsbury, _Elizabethan Literature_ (1890),
and _History of Literary Criticism_, vol. ii. (1902); W.J. Courthorpe,
_History of English Poetry_, vols. i.-v. (1895-1905); J.J. Jusserand,
_Histoire littéraire du peuple anglais_, vol. ii. (1904); T. Seccombe
and J.W. Allen, _The Age of Shakespeare_ (2 vols., 1903); D. Hannay,
_The Later Renaissance_ (1898); H.J.C. Grierson, _First Half of 17th
Century_; O. Elton, _The Augustan Ages_ (1899); Masson, _Life of
Milton_ (6 vols., London, 1881-1894); R. Garnett, _The Age of Dryden_
(1901); W. Raleigh, _The English Novel_ (1894); J.J. Jusserand, _Le
Roman anglais au temps de Shakespeare_ (1887, Eng. tr., 1901); G.
Gregory Smith, _Elizabethan Critical Essays_ (2 vols., 1904, reprints
and introd.). Classical and Foreign Influences.--Mary A. Scott,
_Elizabethan Translations from the Italian_ (bibliography),
(Baltimore, 1895); E. Koeppel, _Studien zur Gesch. der ital. Novelle
i. d. eng. Litteratur des 16ten Jahrh._ (Strasb., 1892); L. Einstein
_The Italian Renaissance in England_ (New York, 1902); J. Erskine,
_The Elizabethan Lyric_ (New York, 1903); J.S. Harrison, _Platonism in
Eliz. Poetry of the 16th and 17th Centuries_ (New York, 1903); S. Lee,
_Elizabethan Sonnets_ (2 vols., 1904); C.H. Herford, _Literary
Relations of England and Germany in 16th Century_; J.G. Underhill,
_Spanish Lit. in the England of the Tudors_ (New York, 1899); J.E.
Spingarn, _Hist. of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance_ (New York,
1899). Many articles in _Englische Studien_, _Anglia_, &c., on
influences, texts and sources. See too arts. DRAMA; SONNET;
RENAISSANCE. (O. E.*)
V. THE 18TH CENTURY
Social changes.
In the reign of Anne (1702-1714) the social changes which had commenced
with the Restoration of 1660 began to make themselves definitely felt.
Books began to penetrate among all classes of society. The period is
consequently one of differentiation and expansion. As the practice of
reading becomes more and more universal, English writers lose much of
their old idiosyncrasy, intensity and obscurity. As in politics and
religion, so in letters, there is a great development of nationality.
Commercial considerations too for the first time become important. We
hear relatively far less of religious controversy, of the bickering
between episcopalians and nonconformists and of university squabbles.
Specialization and cumbrous pedantry fall into profound disfavour.
Provincial feeling exercises a diminishing sway, and literature becomes
increasingly metropolitan or suburban. With the multiplication of
moulds, the refinement of prose polish, and the development of breadth,
variety and ease, it was natural enough, having regard to the place that
the country played in the world's affairs, that English literature
should make its début in western Europe. The strong national savour
seemed to stimulate the foreign appetite, and as represented by Swift,
Pope, Defoe, Young, Goldsmith, Richardson, Sterne and Ossian, if we
exclude Byron and Scott, the 18th century may be deemed the cosmopolitan
age, _par excellence_, of English Letters. The charms of 18th-century
English literature, as it happens, are essentially of the rational,
social and translatable kind: in intensity, exquisiteness and
eccentricity of the choicer kinds it is proportionately deficient. It is
pre-eminently an age of prose, and although verbal expression is seldom
represented at its highest power, we shall find nearly every variety of
English prose brilliantly illustrated during this period: the
aristocratic style of Bolingbroke, Addison and Berkeley; the gentlemanly
style of Fielding; the keen and logical controversy of Butler,
Middleton, Smith and Bentham; the rhythmic and balanced if occasionally
involved style of Johnson and his admirers; the limpid and flowing
manner of Hume and Mackintosh; the light, easy and witty flow of
Walpole; the divine chit-chat of Cowper; the colour of Gray and
Berkeley; the organ roll of Burke; the detective journalism of Swift and
Defoe; the sly familiarity of Sterne; the dance music and wax candles
of Sheridan; the pomposity of Gibbon; the air and ripple of Goldsmith;
the peeping preciosity of Boswell,--these and other characteristics can
be illustrated in 18th-century prose as probably nowhere else.
But more important to the historian of literature even than the
development of qualities is the evolution of types. And in this respect
the 18th century is a veritable index-museum of English prose.
Essentially, no doubt, it is true that in form the prose and verse of
the 18th century is mainly an extension of Dryden, just as in content it
is a reflection of the increased variety of the city life which came
into existence as English trade rapidly increased in all directions. But
the taste of the day was rapidly changing. People began to read in
vastly increasing numbers. The folio was making place on the shelves for
the octavo. The bookseller began to transcend the mere tradesman. Along
with newspapers the advertizing of books came into fashion, and the
market was regulated no longer by what learned men wanted to write, but
what an increasing multitude wanted to read. The arrival of the octavo
is said to have marked the enrolment of man as a reader, that of the
novel the attachment of woman. Hence, among other causes, the rapid
decay of lyrical verse and printed drama, of theology and epic, in
ponderous tomes. The fashionable types of which the new century was to
witness the fixation are accordingly the essay and the satire as
represented respectively by Addison and Steele, Swift and Goldsmith, and
by Pope and Churchill. Pope, soon to be followed by Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, was the first Englishman who treated letter-writing as an art
upon a considerable scale. Personalities and memoirs prepare the way for
history, in which as a department of literature English letters hitherto
had been almost scandalously deficient. Similarly the new growth of
fancy essay (Addison) and plain biography (Defoe) prepared the way for
the English novel, the most important by far of all new literary
combinations. Finally, without going into unnecessary detail, we have a
significant development of topography, journalism and criticism. In the
course of time, too, we shall perceive how the pressure of town life and
the logic of a capital city engender, first a fondness for landscape
gardening and a somewhat artificial Arcadianism, and then, by degrees,
an intensifying love of the country, of the open air, and of the rare,
exotic and remote in literature.
Locke: Addison.
At the outset of the new century the two chief architects of public
opinion were undoubtedly John Locke and Joseph Addison. When he died at
High Laver in October 1704 at the mature age of seventy-two, Locke had,
perhaps, done more than any man of the previous century to prepare the way
for the new era. Social duty and social responsibility were his two
watchwords. The key to both he discerned in the _Human Understanding_--"no
province of knowledge can be regarded as independent of reason." But the
great modernist of the time was undoubtedly Joseph Addison (1672-1719). He
first left the 17th century, with its stiff euphuisms, its formal
obsequiousness, its ponderous scholasticism and its metaphorical
antitheses, definitely behind. He did for English culture what Rambouillet
did for that of France, and it is hardly an exaggeration to call the
half-century before the great fame of the English novel, the half century
of the _Spectator_.
Steele.
Addison's mind was fertilized by intercourse with the greater and more
original genius of Swift and with the more inventive and more genial
mind of Steele. It was Richard Steele (1672-1729) in the _Tatler_ of
1709-1710 who first realized that the specific which that urbane age
both needed and desired was no longer copious preaching and rigorous
declamation, but homoeopathic doses of good sense, good taste and
good-humoured morality, disguised beneath an easy and fashionable style.
Nothing could have suited Addison better than the opportunity afforded
him of contributing an occasional essay or roundabout paper in praise of
virtue or dispraise of stupidity and bad form to his friend's
periodical. When the _Spectator_ succeeded the _Tatler_ in March 1711,
Addison took a more active share in shaping the chief characters (with
the immortal baronet, Sir Roger, at their head) who were to make up the
"Spectator Club"; and, better even than before, he saw his way, perhaps,
to reinforcing his copious friend with his own more frugal but more
refined endowment. Such a privileged talent came into play at precisely
the right moment to circulate through the coffee houses and to convey a
large measure of French courtly ease and elegance into the more humdrum
texture of English prose. Steele became rather disreputable in his later
years, Swift was banished and went mad, but Addison became a personage
of the utmost consideration, and the essay as he left it became an
almost indispensable accomplishment to the complete gentlemen of that
age. As an architect of opinion from 1717 to 1775 Addison may well rank
with Locke.
Swift.
Arbuthnot.
Bolingbroke.
The other side, both in life and politics, was taken by Jonathan Swift
(1667-1745), who preferred to represent man on his unsocial side. He
sneered at most things, but not at his own order, and he came to defend
the church and the country squirearchy against the conventicle and Capel
court. To undermine the complacent entrenchments of the Whig capitalists
at war with France no sap proved so effectual as his pen. Literary
influence was then exercised in politics mainly by pamphlets, and Swift
was the greatest of pamphleteers. In the _Journal to Stella_ he has left
us a most wonderful portrait of himself in turn currying favour,
spoiled, petted and humiliated by the party leaders of the Tories from
1710-1713. He had always been savage, and when the Hanoverians came in
and he was treated as a suspect, his hate widened to embrace all mankind
(_Gulliver's Travels_, 1726) and he bit like a mad dog. Would that he
could have bitten more, for the infection of English stylists! In wit,
logic, energy, pith, resourcefulness and Saxon simplicity, his prose has
never been equalled. The choicest English then, it is the choicest
English still. Dr John Arbuthnot (1667-1735) may be described as an
understudy of Swift on the whimsical side only, whose malignity, in a
nature otherwise most kindly, was circumscribed strictly by the limits
of political persiflage. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), unorthodox as
he was in every respect, discovered a little of Swift's choice pessimism
in his assault (in _The Fable of the Bees_ of 1723) against the genteel
optimism of the _Characteristics_ of Lord Shaftesbury. Neither the
matter nor the manner of the brilliant Tory chieftain Henry St John,
Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), appears to us now as being of the
highest significance; but, although Bolingbroke's ideas were
second-hand, his work has an historical importance; his dignified,
balanced and decorated style was the cynosure of 18th-century statesmen.
His essays on "History" and on "a Patriot King" both disturb a soil well
prepared, and set up a reaction against such evil tendencies as a
narrowing conception of history and a primarily factious and partisan
conception of politics. It may be noted here how the fall of Bolingbroke
and the Tories in 1714 precipitated the decay of the Renaissance ideal
of literary patronage. The dependence of the press upon the House of
Lords was already an anomaly, and the practical toleration achieved in
1695 removed another obstacle from the path of liberation. The
government no longer sought to strangle the press. It could generally be
tuned satisfactorily and at the worst could always be temporarily
muzzled. The pensions hitherto devoted to men of genius were diverted
under Walpole to spies and journalists. Yet one of the most unscrupulous
of all the fabricators of intelligence, looked down upon as a huckster
of the meanest and most inconsiderable literary wares, established his
fame by a masterpiece of which literary genius had scarcely even
cognizance.
Defoe.
The new trade of writing was represented most perfectly by Daniel Defoe
(1660-1731), who represents, too, what few writers possess, a competent
knowledge of work and wages, buying and selling, the squalor and roguery
of the very hungry and the very mean. From reporting sensations and
chronicling _faits divers_, Defoe worked his way almost insensibly to
the Spanish tale of the old Mendoza or picaresque pattern. _Robinson
Crusoe_ was a true story expanded on these lines, and written down under
stress of circumstance when its author was just upon sixty. Resembling
that of Bunyan and, later, Smollett in the skilful use made of places,
facts and figures, Defoe's style is the mirror of man in his shirt
sleeves. What he excelled in was plain, straightforward story-telling,
in understanding and appraising the curiosity of the man in the street,
and in possessing just the knowledge and just the patience, and just the
literary stroke that would enable him most effectually to satisfy it. He
was the first and cleverest of all descriptive reporters, for he knew
better than any successor how and where to throw in those irrelevant
details, tricks of speech and circumlocution, which tend to give an air
of verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative--the funny little
splutterings and naïvetés as of a plain man who is not telling a tale
for effect, but striving after his own manner to give the plain
unvarnished truth. Defoe contributes story, Addison character, Fielding
the life-atmosphere, Richardson and Sterne the sentiment, and we have
the 18th-century novel complete--the greatest literary birth of modern
time. Addison, Steele, Swift and Defoe, as master-builders of prose
fiction, are consequently of more importance than the "Augustan poets,"
as Pope and his school are sometimes called, for the most that they can
be said to have done is to have perfected a more or less transient mode
of poetry.
Pope.
Thomson.
Collins. Gray.
To the passion, imagination or musical quality essential to the most
inspired kinds of poetry Alexander Pope (1688-1744) can lay small claim.
His best work is contained in the _Satires_ and _Epistles_, which are
largely of the proverb-in-rhyme order. Yet in lucid, terse and pungent
phrases he has rarely if ever been surpassed. His classical fancy, his
elegant turn for periphrasis and his venomous sting alike made him the
idol of that urbane age. Voltaire in 1726 had called him the best poet
living, and at his death his style was paramount throughout the
civilized world. It was the apotheosis of wit, point, lucidity and
technical correctness. Pope was the first Englishman to make poetry pay
(apart from patronage). He was flattered by imitation to an extent which
threatened to throw the school of poetry which he represented into
permanent discredit. Prior, Gay, Parnell, Akenside, Pomfret, Garth,
Young, Johnson, Goldsmith, Falconer, Glover, Grainger, Darwin, Rogers,
Hayley and indeed a host of others--the once famous mob of gentlemen who
wrote with ease--worshipped Pope as their poetic founder. The
second-rate wore his badge. But although the cult of Pope was the
established religion of poetic taste from 1714 to 1798, there were
always nonconformists. The poetic revolt, indeed, was far more versatile
than the religious revival of the century. The _Winter_ (1726) of James
Thomson may be regarded as inaugurating a new era in English poetry.
Lady Winchilsea, John Philips, author of _Cyder_, and John Dyer, whose
_Grongar Hill_ was published a few months before _Winter_, had pleaded
by their work for a truthful and unaffected, and at the same time a
romantic treatment of nature in poetry; but the ideal of artificiality
and of a frigid poetic diction by which English poetry was dominated
since the days of Waller and Cowley was first effectively challenged by
Thomson. At the time when the Popean couplet was at the height of its
vogue he deliberately put it aside in favour of the higher poetic power
of blank verse. And he it was who transmitted the sentiment of natural
beauty not merely to imitators such as Savage, Armstrong, Somerville,
Langhorne, Mickle and Shenstone, but also to his elegist, William
Collins, to Gray and to Cowper, and so indirectly to the lyrical bards
of 1798. By the same hands and those of Shenstone experiments were being
made in the stanza of _The Faerie Queene_; a little later, owing to the
virtuosity of Bishop Percy, the cultivation of the old English and
Scottish ballad literature was beginning to take a serious turn.
Dissatisfaction with the limitations of "Augustan" poetry was similarly
responsible for the revived interest in Shakespeare and Chaucer. Gray
stood not only for a far more intimate worship of wild external nature,
but also for an awakened curiosity in Scandinavian, Celtic and Icelandic
poetry.
To pretend then that the poetic heart of the 18th century was Popean to
the core is nothing short of extravagance. There were a number of true
poets in the second and third quarters of the century to whom all
credit is due as pioneers and precentors of the romantic movement under
the depressing conditions to which innovators in poetry are commonly
subject. They may strike us as rather an anaemic band after the great
Elizabethan poets. Four of them were mentally deranged (Collins, Smart,
Cowper, Blake), while Gray was a hermit, and Shenstone and Thomson the
most indolent of recluses. The most adventurous, one might say the most
virile of the group, was a boy who died at the age of seventeen. Single
men all (save for Blake), a more despondent group of artists as a whole
it would not perhaps be easy to discover. Catacombs and cypresses were
the forms of imagery that came to them most naturally. Elegies and
funeral odes were the types of expression in which they were happiest.
Yet they strove in the main to follow the gleam in poetry, to reinstate
imagination upon its throne, and to substitute the singing voice for the
rhetorical recitative of the heroic couplet. Within two years of the
death of Pope, in 1746, William Collins was content to _sing_ (not say)
what he had in him without a glimpse of wit or a flash of eloquence--and
in him many have discerned the germ of that romantic _éclosion_ which
blossomed in _Christabel_. A more important if less original factor in
that movement was Collins's severe critic Thomas Gray, a man of the
widest curiosities of his time, in whom every attribute of the poet to
which scholarship, taste and refinement are contributory may be found to
the full, but in whom the strong creative energy is fatally
lacking--despite the fact that he wrote a string of "divine truisms" in
his _Elegy_, which has given to multitudes more of the exquisite
pleasure of poetry than any other single piece in the English language.
Shenstone and Percy, Capell, the Wartons and eventually Chatterton,
continued to mine in the shafts which Gray had been the first to sink.
Their laborious work of discovery resembled that which was commencing in
regard to the Gothic architecture which the age of Pope had come to
regard as rude and barbaric. The Augustans had come seriously to regard
all pre-Drydenic poetry as grossly barbarian. One of the greatest
achievements of the mid-eighteenth century was concerned with the
disintegration of this obstinate delusion. The process was manifold; and
it led, among other things, to a realization of the importance of the
study of comparative literature.
The novel.
Richardson.
The literary grouping of the 18th century is, perhaps, the biggest thing
on the whole that English art has to show; but among all its groups the
most famous, and probably the most original, is that of its
proto-novelists Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. All nations
have had their novels, which are as old at least as Greek vases. The
various types have generally had collective appellations such as
Milesian Tales, Alexandrian Romances, Romances of Chivalry, Acta
Sanctorum, Gesta Romanorum, Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, Romances of
Roguery, Arabian Nights; but owing to the rivalry of other more popular
or more respectable or at least more eclectic literary forms, they
seldom managed to attain a permanent lodgment in the library. The taste
in prose fiction changes, perhaps, more rapidly than that in any other
kind of literature. In Britain alone several forms had passed their
prime since the days of Caxton and his Arthurian prose romance of _Morte
d'Arthur_. Such were the wearisome Arcadian romance or pastoral heroic;
the new centos of tales of chivalry like the _Seven Champions of
Christendom_; the utopian, political and philosophical romances
(_Oceana_, _The Man in the Moone_); the grotesque and facetious stories
of rogues retailed from the Spanish or French in dwarf volumes; the
prolix romance of modernized classic heroism (_The Grand Cyrus_); the
religious allegory (Bunyan's _Life and Death of Mr Badman_); the novels
of outspoken French or Italian gallantry, represented by Aphra Behn; the
imaginary voyages so notably adapted to satire by Dr Swift; and last,
but not least, the minutely prosaic chronicle-novels of Daniel Defoe.
The prospect of the novel was changing rapidly. The development of the
individual and of a large well-to-do urban middle class, which was
rapidly multiplying its area of leisure, involved a curious and
self-conscious society, hungry for pleasure and new sensations, anxious
to be told about themselves, willing in some cases even to learn
civilization from their betters. The disrepute into which the drama had
fallen since Jeremy Collier's attack on it directed this society by an
almost inevitable course into the flowery paths of fiction. The novel,
it is true, had a reputation which was for the time being almost as
unsavoury as that of the drama, but the novel was not a confirmed
ill-doer, and it only needed a touch of genius to create for it a vast
congregation of enthusiastic votaries. In the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_
were already found the methods and subjects of the modern novel. The De
Coverley papers in the _Spectator_, in fact, want nothing but a
love-thread to convert them into a serial novel of a high order. The
supreme importance of the sentimental interest had already been
discovered and exemplified to good purpose in France by Madame de la
Fayette, the Marquise de Tencin, Marivaux and the Abbé Prevost. Samuel
Richardson (1689-1762), therefore, when he produced the first two modern
novels of European fame in _Pamela_ (1740) and _Clarissa_ (1748),
inherited far more than he invented. There had been Richardsonians
before Richardson. _Clarissa_ is nevertheless a pioneer work, and we
have it on the high authority of M. Jusserand that the English have
contributed more than any other people to the formation of the
contemporary novel. Of the long-winded, typical and rather chaotic
English novel of love analysis and moral sentiment (as opposed to the
romance of adventure) Richardson is the first successful charioteer.
Fielding.
Smollett.
The novel in England gained prodigiously by the shock of opposition
between the ideals of Richardson and Henry Fielding (1707-1754), his
rival and parodist. Fielding's brutal toleration is a fine corrective to
the slightly rancid morality of Richardson, with its frank insistence
upon the cash-value of chastity and virtue. Fielding is, to be brief,
the succinct antithesis of Richardson, and represents the opposite pole
of English character. He is the Cavalier, Richardson the Roundhead; he
is the gentleman, Richardson the tradesman; he represents church and
county, Richardson chapel and borough. Richardson had much of the
patient insight and intensity of genius, but he lacked the humour and
literary accomplishment which Fielding had in rich abundance. Fielding
combined breadth and keenness, classical culture and a delicate Gallic
irony to an extent rare among English writers. He lacked the delicate
intuition of Richardson in the analysis of women, nor could he compass
the broad farcical humour of Smollett or the sombre colouring by which
Smollett produces at times such poignant effects of contrast. There was
no poetry in Fielding; but there was practically every other ingredient
of a great prose writer--taste, culture, order, vivacity, humour,
penetrating irony and vivid, pervading common sense, and it is
Fielding's chef-d'oeuvre _Tom Jones_ (1749) that we must regard if not
as the fundament at least as the head of the corner in English prose
fiction. Before _Tom Jones_ appeared, the success of the novel had drawn
a new competitor into the field in Tobias Smollett, the descendant of a
good western lowland family who had knocked about the world and seen
more of its hurlyburly than Fielding himself. In _Roderick Random_
(1748) Smollett represents a rougher and more uncivilized world even
than that depicted in _Joseph Andrews_. The savagery and horse-play
peculiar to these two novelists derives in part from the rogue romance
of Spain (as then recently revived by Lesage), and has a counterpart to
some extent in the graphic art of Hogarth and Rowlandson; yet one cannot
altogether ignore an element of exaggeration which has greatly injured
both these writers in the estimation (and still more in the affection)
of posterity. The genius which struggles through novels such as
_Roderick Random_ and _Ferdinand Count Fathom_ was nearly submerged
under the hard conditions of a general writer during the third quarter
of the 18th century, and it speaks volumes for Smollett's powers of
recuperation that he survived to write two such masterpieces of sardonic
and humorous observation as his _Travels_ and _Humphry Clinker_.
Sterne.
The fourth proto-master of the English novel was the antiquarian
humorist Lawrence Sterne. Though they owed a good deal to _Don Quixote_
and the French novelists, Fielding and Smollett were essentially
observers of life in the quick. Sterne brought a far-fetched style, a
bookish apparatus and a deliberate eccentricity into fiction. _Tristram
Shandy_, produced successively in nine small volumes between 1760 and
1764, is the pretended history of a personage who is not born (before
the fourth volume) and hardly ever appears, carried on in an eccentric
rigmarole of old and new, original and borrowed humour, arranged in a
style well known to students of the later Valois humorists as
_fatrasie_. Far more than Molière, Sterne took his literary _bien_
wherever he found it. But he invented a kind of tremolo style of his
own, with the aid of which, in conjunction with the most unblushingly
indecent innuendoes, and with a conspicuous genius for humorous
portraiture, trembling upon the verge of the pathetic, he succeeded in
winning a new domain for the art of fiction.
These four great writers then, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and
Sterne--all of them great pessimists in comparison with the benignant
philosophers of a later fiction--first thoroughly fertilized this
important field. Richardson obtained a European fame during his
lifetime. Sterne, as a pioneer impressionist, gave all subsequent
stylists a new handle. Fielding and Smollett grasped the new instrument
more vigorously, and fashioned with it models which, after serving as
patterns to Scott, Marryat, Cooper, Ainsworth, Dickens, Lever,
Stevenson, Merriman, Weyman and other romancists of the 19th century,
have still retained a fair measure of their original popularity
unimpaired.
Johnson.
Apart from the novelists, the middle period of the 18th century is
strong in prose writers: these include Dr Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith,
Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole. The last three were all influenced
by the sovereign lucidity of the best French style of the day.
Chesterfield and Walpole were both writers of aristocratic experience
and of European knowledge and sentiment. Johnson alone was a
distinctively English thinker and stylist. His knowledge of the world,
outside England, was derived from books, he was a good deal of a
scholar, an earnest moralist, and something of a divine; his style, at
any rate, reaches back to Taylor, Barrow and South, and has a good deal
of the complex structure, the cadence, and the balance of English and
Latinistic words proper to the 17th century, though the later influence
of Addison and Bolingbroke is also apparent; Johnson himself was fond of
the essay, the satire in verse, and the moral tale (_Rasselas_); but he
lacked the creative imagination indispensable for such work and excelled
chiefly as biographer and critic. For a critic even, it must be admitted
that he was singly deficient in original ideas. He upholds authority. He
judges by what he regards as the accepted rules, derived by Dryden,
Rapin, Boileau, Le Bossu, Rymer, Dennis, Pope and such "estimable
critics" from the ancients, whose decisions on such matters he regards
as paramount. He tries to carry out a systematic, motived criticism; but
he asserts rather than persuades or convinces. We go to his critical
works (_Lives of the Poets_ and _Essay on Shakespeare_) not for their
conclusions, but for their shrewd comments on life, and for an
application to literary problems of a caustic common sense. Johnson's
character and conversation, his knowledge and memory were far more
remarkable than his ideas or his writings, admirable though the best of
these were; the exceptional traits which met in his person and made that
age regard him as a nonpareil have found in James Boswell a delineator
unrivalled in patience, dexterity and dramatic insight. The result has
been a portrait of a man of letters more alive at the present time than
that which any other age or nation has bequeathed to us. In most of his
ideas Johnson was a generation behind the typical academic critics of
his date, Joseph and Thomas Warton, who championed against his authority
what the doctor regarded as the finicking notions of Gray. Both of the
Wartons were enthusiastic for Spenser and the older poetry; they were
saturated with Milton whom they placed far above the correct Mr Pope,
they wrote sonnets (thereby provoking Johnson's ire) and attempted to
revive medieval and Celtic lore in every direction. Johnson's one
attempt at a novel or tale was _Rasselas_, a long "Rambler" essay upon
the vanity of human hope and ambition, something after the manner of the
Oriental tales of which Voltaire had caught the idea from Swift and
Montesquieu; but _Rasselas_ is quite unenlivened by humour, personality
or any other charm.
Goldsmith.
This one quality that Johnson so completely lacked was possessed in its
fullest perfection by Oliver Goldsmith, whose style is the supreme
expression of 18th-century clearness, simplicity and easy graceful
fluency. Much of Goldsmith's material, whether as playwright, story
writer or essayist, is trite and commonplace--his material worked up by
any other hand would be worthless. But, whenever Goldsmith writes about
human life, he seems to pay it a compliment, a relief of fun and good
fellowship accompanies his slightest description, his playful and
delicate touch could transform every thought that he handled into
something radiant with sunlight and fragrant with the perfume of youth.
Goldsmith's plots are Irish, his critical theories are French with a
light top dressing of Johnson and Reynolds or Burke, while his prose
style is an idealization of Addison. His versatility was great, and, in
this and in other respects, he and Johnson are constantly reminding us
that they were hardened professionals, writing against time for money.
Chesterfield and Walpole.
Much of the best prose work of this period, from 1740 to 1780, was done
under very different conditions. The increase of travel, of intercourse
between the nobility of Europe, and of a sense of solidarity,
self-consciousness, leisure and connoisseurship among that section of
English society known as the governing class, or, since Disraeli, as
"the Venetian oligarchy," could hardly fail to produce an increasing
crop of those elaborate collections of letters and memoirs which had
already attained their apogee in France with Mme de Sévigné and the duc
de Saint-Simon. England was not to remain far behind, for in 1718
commence the _Letters_ of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; ten years more saw
the commencement of Lord Hervey's _Memoirs of the Reign of George II._;
and Lord Chesterfield and Lord Orford (better known as Horace Walpole)
both began their inimitable series of _Letters_ about 1740. These
writings, none of them written ostensibly for the press, serve to show
the enormous strides that English prose was making as a medium of
vivacious description. The letters are all the recreation of extensive
knowledge and cosmopolitan acquirements; they are not strong on the
poetic or imaginative side of things, but they have an intense
appreciation of the actual and mundane side of fallible humanity. Lord
Chesterfield's _Letters_ to his son and to his godson are far more, for
they introduce a Ciceronian polish and a Gallic irony and wit into the
hitherto uncultivated garden of the literary graces in English prose.
Chesterfield, whose theme is manners and social amenity, deliberately
seeks a form of expression appropriate to his text--the perfection of
tact, neatness, good order and _savoir faire_. After his grandfather,
the marquess of Halifax, Lord Chesterfield, the synonym in the vulgar
world for a heartless exquisite, is in reality the first fine gentleman
and epicurean in the best sense in English polite literature. Both
Chesterfield and Walpole were conspicuous as raconteurs in an age of
witty talkers, of whose talk R.B. Sheridan, in _The School for Scandal_
(1777), served up a _suprême_. Some of it may be tinsel, but it looks
wonderfully well under the lights. The star comedy of the century
represents the sparkle of this brilliant crowd: it reveals no hearts,
but it shows us every trick of phrase, every eccentricity of manner and
every foible of thought. But the most mundane of the letter writers, the
most frivolous, and also the most pungent, is Horace Walpole, whose
writings are an epitome of the history and biography of the Georgian
era. "Fiddles sing all through them, wax lights, fine dresses, fine
jokes, fine plate, fine equipages glitter and sparkle; never was such a
brilliant, smirking Vanity Fair as that through which he leads us." Yet,
in some ways, he was a corrective to the self-complacency of his
generation, a vast dilettante, lover of "Gothic," of curios and
antiques, of costly printing, of old illuminations and stained glass. In
his short miracle-novel, called _The Castle of Otranto_, he set a
fashion for mystery and terror in fiction, for medieval legend,
diablerie, mystery, horror, antique furniture and Gothic jargon, which
led directly by the route of Anne Radcliffe, Maturin, _Vathek_, _St
Leon_ and _Frankenstein_, to _Queenhoo Hall_, to _Waverley_ and even to
Hugo and Poe.
Fanny Burney. Boswell.
Meanwhile the area of the Memoir was widening rapidly in the hands of
Fanny, the sly daughter of the wordly-wise and fashionable musician, Dr
Burney, author of a novel (_Evelina_) most satirical and facete, written
ere she was well out of her teens; not too kind a satirist of her former
patroness, Mrs Thrale (afterwards Piozzi), the least tiresome of the new
group of scribbling sibyls, blue stockings, lady dilettanti and Della
Cruscans. Both, as portraitists and purveyors of _Johnsoniana_, were
surpassed by the inimitable James Boswell, first and most fatuous of all
interviewers, in brief a biographical genius, with a new recipe,
distinct from Sterne's, for disclosing personality, and a deliberate,
artificial method of revealing himself to us, as it were, unawares.
From all these and many other experiments, a far more flexible prose was
developing in England, adapted for those critical reviews, magazines and
journals which were multiplying rapidly to exploit the new masculine
interest, apart from the schools, in history, topography, natural
philosophy and the picturesque, just as circulating libraries were
springing up to exploit the new feminine passion for fiction, which
together with memoirs and fashionable poetry contributed to give the
booksellers bigger and bigger ideas.
The progress of authorship.
It is surprising how many types of literary productions with which we
are now familiar were first moulded into definite and classical form
during the Johnsonian period. In addition to the novel one need only
mention the economic treatise, as exemplified for the first time in the
admirable symmetry of _The Wealth of Nations_, the diary of a faithful
observer of nature such as Gilbert White, the _Fifteen Discourses_
(1769-1791) in which Sir Joshua Reynolds endeavours for the first time
to expound for England a philosophy of Art, the historico-philosophical
tableau as exemplified by Robertson and Gibbon, the light political
parody of which the poetry of _The Rolliad_ and _Anti-Jacobin_ afford so
many excellent models; and, going to the other extreme, the ponderous
archaeological or topographical monograph, as exemplified in Stuart and
Revett's _Antiquities of Athens_, in Robert Wood's colossal _Ruins of
Palmyra_ (1753), or the monumental _History of Leicestershire_ by John
Nichols. Such works as this last might well seem the outcome of Horace
Walpole's maxim: In this scribbling age "let those who can't write,
glean." In short, the literary landscape in Johnson's day was slowly but
surely assuming the general outlines to which we are all accustomed. The
literary conditions of the period dated from the time of Pope in their
main features, and it is quite possible that they were more considerably
modified in Johnson's own lifetime than they have been since. The
booksellers, or, as they would now be called, publishers, were steadily
superseding the old ties of patronage, and basing their relations with
authors upon a commercial footing. A stage in their progress is marked
by the success of Johnson's friend and Hume's correspondent, William
Strahan, who kept a coach, "a credit to literature." The evolution of a
normal status for the author was aided by the definition of copyright
and gradual extinction of piracy.
Historians.
Histories of their own time by Clarendon and Burnet have been in much
request from their own day to this, and the first, at least, is a fine
monument of English prose; Bolingbroke again, in 1735, dwelt memorably
upon the ethical, political and philosophical value of history. But it
was not until the third quarter of the 18th century that English
literature freed itself from the imputation of lagging hopelessly behind
France, Italy and Germany in the serious work of historical
reconstruction. Hume published the first volume of his _History of
England_ in 1754. Robertson's _History of Scotland_ saw the light in
1759 and his _Charles V._ in 1769; Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire_ came in 1776. Hume was, perhaps, the first modernist in
history; he attempted to give his work a modern interest and, Scot
though he was, a modern style--it could not fail, as he knew, to derive
piquancy from its derision of the Whiggish assumption which regarded
1688 as a political millennium. Wm. Robertson was, perhaps, the first
man to adapt the polished periphrases of the pulpit to historical
generalization. The gifts of compromise which he had learned as
Moderator of the General Assembly he brought to bear upon his historical
studies, and a language so unfamiliar to his lips as academic English he
wrote with so much the more care that the greatest connoisseurs of the
day were enthusiastic about "Robertson's wonderful style." Even more
portentous in its superhuman dignity was the style of Edward Gibbon, who
combined with the unspiritual optimism of Hume and Robertson a far more
concentrated devotion to his subject, an industry more monumental, a
greater co-ordinative vigour, and a malice which, even in the 18th
century, rendered him the least credulous man of his age. Of all
histories, therefore, based upon the transmitted evidence of other ages
rather than on the personal observation of the writer's own, Gibbon's
_Decline and Fall_ has hitherto maintained its reputation best. Hume,
even before he was superseded, fell a prey to continuations and
abridgements, while Robertson was supplanted systematically by the
ornate pages of W.H. Prescott.
The increasing transparency of texture in the working English prose
during this period is shown in the writings of theologians such as
Butler and Paley, and of thinkers such as Berkeley and Hume, who, by
prolonging and extending Berkeley's contention that matter was an
abstraction, had shown that mind would have to be considered an
abstraction too, thereby signalling a school of reaction to common sense
or "external reality" represented by Thomas Reid, and with modifications
by David Hartley, Abraham Tucker and others. Butler and Paley are merely
two of the biggest and most characteristic apologists of that day, both
great stylists, though it must be allowed that their very lucidity and
good sense excites almost more doubt than it stills, and both very
successful in repelling the enemy in controversy, though their very
success accentuates the faults of that unspiritual age in which
churchmen were so far more concerned about the title deeds than about
the living portion of the church's estate. Free thought was already
beginning to sap their defences in various directions, and in Tom Paine,
Priestley, Price, Godwin and Mackintosh they found more formidable
adversaries than in the earlier deists. The greatest champion, however,
of continuity and conservation both in church and state, against the new
schools of latitudinarians and radicals, the great eulogist of the
unwritten constitution, and the most perfect master of emotional prose
in this period, prose in which the harmony of sense and sound is
attained to an extent hardly ever seen outside supreme poetry, was
Edmund Burke, one of the most commanding intellects in the whole range
of political letters--a striking contrast in this respect to Junius,
whose mechanical and journalistic talent for invective has a quite
ephemeral value.
Return to nature.
Change in poetic spirit.
Cowper. Blake. Burns.
From 1660 to 1760 the English mind was still much occupied in shaking
off the last traces of feudality. The crown, the parliament, the manor
and the old penal code were left, it is true: but the old tenures and
gild-brotherhoods, the old social habits, miracles, arts, faith,
religion and letters were irrevocably gone. The attempt of the young
Chevalier in 1745 was a complete anachronism, and no sooner was this
generally felt to be so than men began to regret that it should so be.
Men began to describe as "grand" and "picturesque" scenery hitherto
summarized as "barren mountains covered in mist"; while Voltaire and
Pope were at their height, the world began to realize that the Augustan
age, in its zeal for rationality, civism and trim parterres, had
neglected the wild freshness of an age when literature was a wild flower
that grew on the common. Rousseau laid the axe to the root of this
over-sophistication of life; Goldsmith, half understanding, echoed some
of his ideas in "The Deserted Village." Back from books to men was now
the prescription--from the crowded town to the spacious country. From
plains and valleys to peaks and pinewoods. From cities, where men were
rich and corrupt, to the earlier and more primitive moods of earth. The
breath had scarcely left the body of the Grand Monarque before an
intrigue was set on foot to dispute the provisions of his will. So with
the critical testament of Pope. Within a few years of his death we find
Gray, Warton, Hurd and other disciples of the new age denying to Pope
the highest kind of poetic excellence, and exalting imagination and
fancy into a sphere far above the Augustan qualities of correct taste
and good judgment. Decentralization and revolt were the new watchwords
in literature. We must eschew France and Italy and go rather to Iceland
or the Hebrides for fresh poetic emotions: we must shun academies and
classic coffee-houses and go into the street-corners or the hedge-lanes
in search of Volkspoesie. An old muniment chest and a roll of yellow
parchment were the finest incentives to the new spirit of the
picturesque. How else are we to explain the enthusiasm that welcomed the
sham Ossianic poems of James Macpherson in 1760; Percy's patched-up
ballads of 1765 (_Reliques of Ancient Poetry_); the new enthusiasm for
Chaucer; the "black letter" school of Ritson, Tyrrwhitt, George Ellis,
Steevens, Ireland and Malone; above all, the spurious 15th-century poems
poured forth in 1768-1769 with such a wild gusto of archaic imagination
by a prodigy not quite seventeen years of age? Chatterton's precocious
fantasy cast a wonderful spell upon the romantic imagination of other
times. It does not prepare us for the change that was coming over the
poetic spirit of the last two decades of the century, but it does at
least help us to explain it. The great masters of verse in Britain
during this period were the three very disparate figures of William
Cowper, William Blake and Robert Burns. Cowper was not a poet of vivid
and rapturous visions. There is always something of the rusticating
city-scholar about his humour. The ungovernable impulse and imaginative
passion of the great masters of poesy were not his to claim. His motives
to express himself in verse came very largely from the outside. The
greater part, nearly all his best poetry is of the occasional order. To
touch and retouch, he says, in one of his letters--among the most
delightful in English--is the secret of almost all good writing,
especially verse. Whatever is short should be nervous, masculine and
compact. In all the arts that raise the best occasional poetry to the
level of greatness Cowper is supreme. In phrase-moulding, verbal
gymnastic and prosodical marquetry he has scarcely a rival, and the
fruits of his poetic industry are enshrined in the filigree of a most
delicate fancy and a highly cultivated intelligence, purified and thrice
refined in the fire of mental affliction. His work expresses the rapid
civilization of his time, its humanitarian feeling and growing
sensitiveness to natural beauty, home comfort, the claims of animals and
the charms of light literature. In many of his short poems, such as "The
Royal George," artistic simplicity is indistinguishable from the stern
reticence of genius. William Blake had no immediate literary
descendants, for he worked alone, and Lamb was practically alone in
recognizing what he wrote as poetry. But he was by far the most original
of the reactionaries who preceded the Romantic Revival, and he caught
far more of the Elizabethan air in his lyric verse than any one else
before Coleridge. The _Songs of Innocence_ and _Songs of Experience_, in
1789 and 1794, sing themselves, and have a bird-like spontaneity that
has been the despair of all song-writers from that day to this. After
1800 he winged his flight farther and farther into strange and unknown
regions. In the finest of these earlier lyrics, which owe so little to
his contemporaries, the ripple of the stream of romance that began to
gush forth in 1798 is distinctly heard. But the first poetic genius of
the century was unmistakably Robert Burns. In song and satire alike
Burns is racy, in the highest degree, of the poets of North Britain, who
since Robert Sempill, Willy Hamilton of Gilbertfield, douce Allan
Ramsay, the Edinburgh periwig-maker and miscellanist, and Robert
Fergusson, "the writer-chiel, a deathless name," had kept alive the old
native poetic tradition, had provided the strolling fiddlers with merry
and wanton staves, and had perpetuated the daintiest shreds of national
music, the broadest colloquialisms, and the warmest hues of patriotic
or local sentiment. Burns immortalizes these old staves by means of his
keener vision, his more fiery spirit, his stronger passion and his
richer volume of sound. Burns's fate was a pathetic one. Brief, broken
glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete, his poems
wanted all things for completeness: culture, leisure, sustained effort,
length of life. Yet occasional, fragmentary, extemporary as most of them
are, they bear the guinea stamp of true genius. His eye is unerring, his
humour of the ripest, his wit both fine and abundant. His ear is less
subtle, except when dialect is concerned. There he is infallible.
Landscape he understands in subordination to life. For abstract ideas
about Liberty and 1789 he cares little. But he is a patriot and an
insurgent, a hater of social distinction and of the rich. Of the divine
right or eternal merit of the system under which the poor man sweats to
put money into the rich man's pocket and fights to keep it there, and is
despised in proportion to the amount of his perspiration, he had a low
opinion. His work has inspired the meek, has made the poor feel
themselves less of ciphers in the world and given courage to the
down-trodden. His love of women has inspired some of the most ardently
beautiful lyrics in the world. Among modern folk-poets such as Jókai and
Mistral, the position of Burns in the hearts of his own people is the
best assured.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--The dearth of literary history in England makes
it rather difficult to obtain a good general view of letters in
Britain during the 18th century. Much may be gleaned, however, from
chapters of Lecky's _History of England during the 18th Century_, from
Stephen's _Lectures on English Literature and Society in the 18th
Century_ (1904), from Taine's _History of English Literature_ (van
Laun's translation), from vols. v. and vi. of Prof. Courthope's
_History of English Poetry_, and from the second volume of Chambers's
_Cyclopaedia of English Literature_ (1902). The two vols. dealing
respectively with the _Age of Pope_ and the _Age of Johnson_ in Bell's
Handbooks of English Literature will be found useful, and suggestive
chapters will be found in Saintsbury's _Short History_ and in A.H.
Thompson's _Student's History of English Literature_ (1901). The same
may, perhaps, be said of books v. and vi. in the _Bookman Illustrated
History of English Literature_ (1906), by the present writer.
Sidelights of value are to be found in Walter Raleigh's little book on
the _English Novel_, in Beljame's _Le Publique et les hommes de
lettres en Angleterre au XVIII^e siècle_, in H.A. Beers' _History of
English Romanticism in the 18th Century_ (1899), and above all in Sir
Leslie Stephen's _History of English Thought during the 18th Century_;
Stephen's _Hours in a Library_, the monographs dealing with the period
in the English Men of Letters series, the Vignettes and Portraits of
Austin Dobson and George Paston, Elwin's _Eighteenth Century Men of
Letters_, and Thomas Wright's _Caricature History of the Georges_,
must also be kept in mind. (T. Se.)
VI. THE 19TH CENTURY
We have seen how great was the reverence which the 18th century paid to
poetry, and how many different kinds of poetic experiment were going on,
mostly by the imitative efforts of revivalists (Spenserians, Miltonians,
Shakespeareans, Ballad-mongers, Scandinavian, Celtic, Gothic scholars
and the like), but also in the direction of nature study and landscape
description, while the more formal type of Augustan poetry, satire and
description, in the direct succession of Pope, was by no means
neglected.
Wordsworth.
The most original vein in the 19th century was supplied by the
Wordsworth group, the first manifesto of which appeared in the _Lyrical
Ballads_ of 1798. William Wordsworth himself represents, in the first
place, a revolutionary movement against the poetic diction of
study-poets since the first acceptance of the Miltonic model by Addison.
His ideal, imperfectly carried out, was a reversion to popular language
of the utmost simplicity and directness. He added to this the idea of
the enlargement of man by Nature, after Rousseau, and went further than
this in the utterance of an essentially pantheistic desire to become
part of its loveliness, to partake in a mystical sense of the loneliness
of the mountain, the sound of falling water, the upper horizon of the
clouds and the wind. To the growing multitude of educated people who
were being pent in huge cities these ideas were far sweeter than the
formalities of the old pastoral. Wordsworth's great discovery, perhaps,
was that popular poetry need not be imitative, artificial or
condescending, but that a simple story truthfully told of the passion,
affliction or devotion of simple folk, and appealing to the primal
emotion, is worthy of the highest effort of the poetic artist, and may
achieve a poetic value far in advance of conventional descriptions of
strikingly grouped incidents picturesquely magnified or rhetorically
exaggerated. But Wordsworth's theories might have ended very much where
they began, had it not been for their impregnation by the complementary
genius of Coleridge.
Coleridge.
Coleridge at his best was inspired by the supreme poetic gifts of
passion, imagination, simplicity and mystery, combining form and colour,
sound and sense, novelty and antiquity, realism and romanticism,
scholarly ode and popular ballad. His three fragmentary poems _The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_ are the three
spells and touchstones, constituting what is often regarded by the best
judges as the high-standard of modern English poetry. Their subtleties
and beauties irradiated the homelier artistic conceptions of Wordsworth,
and the effect on him was permanent. Coleridge's inspiration, on the
other hand, was irrecoverable; a physical element was due, no doubt, to
the first exaltation indirectly due to the opium habit, but the moral
influence was contributed by the Wordsworths. The steady will of the
Dalesman seems to have constrained Coleridge's imagination from aimless
wandering; his lofty and unwavering self-confidence inspired his friend
with a similar energy. Away from Wordsworth after 1798, Coleridge lost
himself in visions of work that always remained to be "transcribed," by
one who had every poetic gift--save the rudimentary will for sustained
and concentrated effort.
Lamb.
Hazlitt.
Leigh Hunt. De Quincey.
Coleridge's more delicate sensibility to the older notes of that more
musical era in English poetry which preceded the age of Dryden and Pope
was due in no small measure to the luminous yet subtle intuitions of his
friend Charles Lamb. Lamb's appreciation of the imaginative beauty
inhumed in old English literature amounted to positive genius, and the
persistence with which he brought his perception of the supreme
importance of imagination and music in poetry to bear upon some of the
finest creative minds of 1800, in talk, letters, selections and essays,
brought about a gradual revolution in the aesthetic morality of the day.
He paid little heed to the old rhetoric and the _ars poetica_ of
classical comparison. His aim was rather to discover the mystery, the
folk-seed and the old-world element, latent in so much of the finer
ancient poetry and implicit in so much of the new. The _Essays of Elia_
(1820-1825) are the binnacle of Lamb's vessel of exploration. Lamb and
his great rival, William Hazlitt, both maintained that criticism was not
so much an affair of learning, or an exercise of comparative and
expository judgment, as an act of imagination in itself. Hazlitt became
one of the master essayists, a fine critical analyst and declaimer,
denouncing all insipidity and affectation, stirring the soul with
metaphor, soaring easily and acquiring a momentum in his prose which
often approximates to the impassioned utterance of Burke. Like Lamb, he
wanted to measure his contemporaries by the Elizabethans, or still older
masters, and he was deeply impressed by _Lyrical Ballads_. The new
critics gradually found responsible auxiliaries, notably Leigh Hunt, De
Quincey and Wilson of _Blackwood's_. Leigh Hunt, not very important in
himself, was a cause of great authorship in others. He increased both
the depth and area of modern literary sensibility. The world of books
was to him an enchanted forest, in which every leaf had its own secret.
He was the most catholic of critics, but he knew what was poor--at least
in other people. As an essayist he is a feminine diminutive of Lamb,
excellent in fancy and literary illustration, but far inferior in
decisive insight or penetrative masculine wit. The Miltonic quality of
impassioned pyramidal prose is best seen in Thomas De Quincey, of all
the essayists of this age, or any age, the most diffuse, unequal and
irreducible to rule, and which yet at times trembles upon the brink of a
rhythmical sonority which seems almost to rival that of the greatest
poetry. Leigh Hunt supplies a valuable link between Lamb, the sole
external moderator of the Lake school, Byron, Shelley, and the junior
branch of imaginative Aesthetic, represented by Keats.
Keats.
John Keats (1795-1821), three years younger than Shelley, was the
greatest poetic artist of his time, and would probably have surpassed
all, but for his collapse of health at twenty-five. His vocation was as
unmistakable as that of Chatterton, with whose youthful ardour his own
had points of likeness. The two contemporary conceptions of him as a
fatuous Cockney Bunthorne or as "a tadpole of the lakes" were equally
erroneous. But Keats was in a sense the first of the virtuoso or
aesthetic school (caricatured later by the formula of "Art for Art's
sake"); artistic beauty was to him a kind of religion, his expression
was more technical, less personal than that of his contemporaries, he
was a conscious "romantic," and he travelled in the realms of gold with
less impedimenta than any of his fellows. Byron had always himself to
talk about, Wordsworth saw the universe too much through the medium of
his own self-importance, Coleridge was a metaphysician, Shelley hymned
Intellectual Beauty; Keats treats of his subject, "A Greek Urn," "A
Nightingale," the season of "Autumn," in such a way that our thought
centres not upon the poet but upon the enchantment of that which he
sings. In his three great medievalising poems, "The Pot of Basil," "The
Eve of St Agnes" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," even more than in his
Odes, Keats is the forerunner of Tennyson, the greatest of the
word-painters. But apart from his perfection of loveliness, he has a
natural magic and a glow of humanity surpassing that of any other known
poet. His poetry, immature as it was, gave a new beauty to the language.
His loss was the greatest English Literature has sustained.
Landor.
Before Tennyson, Rossetti and Morris, Keats's best disciples in the
aesthetic school were Thomas Lovell Beddoes, George Dailey and Thomas
Hood, the failure of whose "Midsummer Fairies" and "Fair Inez" drove him
into that almost mortific vein of verbal humour which threw up here and
there a masterpiece such as "The Song of a Shirt." The master virtuoso
of English poetry in another department (the classical) during this and
the following age was Walter Savage Landor, who threw off a few
fragments of verse worthy of the Greek Anthology, but in his Dialogues
or "Imaginary Conversations" evolved a kind of violent monologizing upon
the commonplace which descends into the most dismal caverns of egotism.
Carlyle furiously questioned his competence. Mr Shaw allows his
classical amateurship and respectable strenuosity of character, but
denounces his work, with a substratum of truth, as that of a
"blathering, unreadable pedant."
Shelley.
Among those, however, who found early nutriment in Landor's Miltonic
_Gebir_ (1798) must be reckoned the most poetical of our poets. P.B.
Shelley was a spirit apart, who fits into no group, the associate of
Byron, but spiritually as remote from him as possible, hated by the
rationalists of his age, and regarded by the poets with more pity than
jealousy. He wrote only for poets, and had no public during his lifetime
among general readers, by whom, however, he is now regarded as _the
poet_ par excellence. In his conduct it must be admitted that he was in
a sense, like Coleridge, irresponsible, but on the other hand his poetic
energy was irresistible and all his work is technically of the highest
order of excellence. In ideal beauties it is supreme; its great lack is
its want of humanity; in this he is the opposite of Wordsworth who reads
human nature into everything. Shelley, on the other hand, dehumanises
things and makes them unearthly. He hangs a poem, like a cobweb or a
silver cloud, on a horn of the crescent moon, and leaves it to dangle
there in a current of ether. His quest was continuous for figures of
beauty, figures, however, more ethereal and less sensuous than those in
Keats; having obtained such an idea he passed it again and again through
the prism of his mind, in talk, letters, prefaces, poems. The deep sense
of the mystery of words and their lightest variations in the skein of
poetry, half forgotten since Milton's time, had been recovered in a
great measure by Coleridge and Wordsworth since 1798; Lamb, too, and
Hazlitt, and, perhaps, Hogg were in the secret, while Keats had its
open sesame on his lips ere he died. The union of poetic emotion with
verbal music of the greatest perfection was the aim of all, but none of
these masters made words breathe and sing with quite the same
spontaneous ease and fervour that Shelley attained in some of the lyrics
written between twenty-four and thirty, such as "The Cloud," "The
Skylark," the "Ode of the West Wind," "The Sensitive Plant," the "Indian
Serenade."
The path of the new romantic school had been thoroughly prepared during
the age of Gray, Cowper and Burns, and it won its triumphs with little
resistance and no serious convulsions. The opposition was noisy, but its
representative character has been exaggerated. In the meantime, however,
the old-fashioned school and the Popean couplet, the Johnsonian dignity
of reflection and the Goldsmithian ideal of generalized description,
were well maintained by George Crabbe (1754-1832), "though Nature's
sternest painter yet the best," a worsted-stockinged Pope and austere
delineator of village misdoing and penurious age, and Samuel Rogers
(1763-1855), the banker poet, liberal in sentiment, extreme Tory in
form, and dilettante delineator of Italy to the music of the heroic
couplet. Robert Southey, Thomas Campbell and Thomas Moore were a dozen
years younger and divided their allegiance between two schools. In the
main, however, they were still poeticisers of the orthodox old pattern,
though all wrote a few songs of exceptional merit, and Campbell
especially by defying the old anathemas.
Byron.
The great champion of the Augustan masters was himself the architect of
revolution. First the idol and then the outcast of respectable society,
Lord Byron sought relief in new cadences and new themes for his poetic
talent. He was, however, essentially a history painter or a satirist in
verse. He had none of the sensitive aesthetic taste of a Keats, none of
the spiritual ardour of a Shelley, or of the elemental beauty or
artistry of Wordsworth or Coleridge. He manages the pen (said Scott)
with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality. The "Lake
Poets" sought to create an impression deep, calm and profound, Byron to
start a theme which should enable him to pose, travel, astonish,
bewilder and confound as lover of daring, freedom, passion and revolt.
For the subtler symphonic music--that music of the spheres to which the
ears of poets alone are attuned--Byron had an imperfect sympathy. The
delicate ear is often revolted in his poetry by the vices of impromptu
work. He steadily refused to polish, to file or to furbish--the damning,
inevitable sign of a man born to wear a golden tassel. "I am like the
tiger. If I miss the first spring I go growling back to the jungle."
Subtlety is sacrificed to freshness and vigour. The exultation, the
breadth, the sweeping magnificence of his effects are consequently most
appreciated abroad, where the ineradicable flaws of his style have no
power to annoy.
The European fame of Byron was from the first something quite unique. At
Missolonghi people ran through the streets crying "The great man is
dead--he is gone." His corpse was refused entrance at Westminster; but
the poet was taken to the inmost heart of Russia, Poland, Spain, Italy,
France, Germany, Scandinavia, and among the Slavonic nations generally.
In Italy his influence is plainly seen in Berchet, Leopardi, Giusti, and
even Carducci. In Spain the Myrtle Society was founded in Byron's
honour. Hugo in his _Orientales_ traversed Greece. Chateaubriand joined
the Greek Committee. Delavigne dedicated his verse to Byron; Lamartine
wrote another canto to _Childe Harold_; Mérimée is interpenetrated by
Byronesque feeling which also animates the best work of Heine, Pushkin,
Lermontov, and Mickievicz, and even De Musset.
Criticism.
Like Scott, Byron was a man of two eras, and not too much ahead of his
time to hold the Press-Dragon in fee. His supremacy and that of his
satellites Moore and Campbell were championed by the old papers and by
the two new blatant Quarterlies, whose sails were filled not with the
light airs of the future but by the Augustan "gales" of the classical
past. The distinction of this new phalanx of old-fashioned critics who
wanted to confer literature by university degree was that they wrote as
gentlemen for gentlemen: they first gave criticism in England a
respectable shakedown. Francis Jeffrey, a man of extraordinary ability
and editor of _The Edinburgh Review_ from 1803 to 1829 (with the
mercurial Sydney Smith, the first of English conversationists, as his
aide-de-camp), exercised a powerful influence as a standardizer of the
second rate. He was one of the first of the critics to grasp firmly the
main idea of literary evolution--the importance of time, environment,
race and historical development upon the literary landscape; but he was
vigorously aristocratic in his preferences, a hater of mystery,
symbolism or allegory, an instinctive individualist of intolerant
pattern. His chief weapons against the new ideas were social superiority
and omniscience, and he used both unsparingly. The strident political
partisanship of the _Edinburgh_ raised up within six years a serious
rival in the _Quarterly_, which was edited in turn by the good-natured
pedagogue William Gifford and by Scott's extremely able son-in-law John
Gibson Lockhart, the "scorpion" of the infant _Blackwood_. With the aid
of the remnant of the old anti-Jacobins, Canning, Ellis, Barrow,
Southey, Croker, Hayward, Apperley and others, the theory of _Quarterly_
infallibility was carried to its highest point of development about
1845.
The historical and critical work of the _Quarterly_ era, as might be
expected, was appropriate to this gentlemanly censorship. The thinkers
of the day were economic or juristic--Bentham, the great codifier;
Malthus, whose theory of population gave Darwin his main impulse to
theorise; and Mackintosh, whose liberal opposition to Burke deserved a
better fate than it has ever perhaps received. The historians were
mainly of the second class--the judicial Hallam, the ornate Roscoe, the
plodding Lingard, the accomplished Milman, the curious Isaac D'Israeli,
the academic Bishop Thirlwall. Mitford and Grote may be considered in
the light of Tory and Radical historical pamphleteers, but Grote's work
has the much larger measure of permanent value. As the historian of
British India, James Mill's industry led him beyond his thesis of
Benthamism in practice. Sir William Napier's heroic picture of the
Peninsular War is strongly tinged by bias against the Tory
administration of 1808-1813; but it conserves some imperishable scenes
of war. Some of the most magnetic prose of the Regency Period was
contained in the copious and insincere but profoundly emotionalising
pamphlets of the self-taught Surrey labourer William Cobbett, in whom
Diderot's paradox of a comedian is astonishingly illustrated. Lockhart's
Lives of Burns and of Sir Walter Scott--the last perhaps the most
memorable prose monument of its epoch--appeared in 1828 and 1838, and
both formed the subjects of Thomas Carlyle in the _Edinburgh Review_,
where, under the unwelcome discipline of Jeffrey, the new prophet worked
nobly though in harness.
Scott.
Great as the triumph of the Romantic masters and the new ideas was, it
is in the ranks of the Old School after all that we have to look for the
greatest single figure in the literature of this age. Except in the
imitative vein of ballad or folk-song, the poetry of Sir Walter Scott is
never quite first-rate. It is poetry for repetition rather than for
close meditation or contemplation, and resembles a military band more
than a full orchestra. Nor will his prose bear careful analysis. It is a
good servant, no more. When we consider, however, not the intensity but
the vast extent, range and versatility of Scott's powers, we are
constrained to assign him the first place in his own age, if not that in
the next seat to Shakespeare in the whole of the English literary
Pantheon. Like Shakespeare, he made humour and a knowledge of human
nature his first instruments in depicting the past. Unlike Shakespeare,
he was a born antiquary, and he had a great (perhaps excessive) belief
in _mise en scène_, costume, patois and scenic properties generally. His
portraiture, however, is Shakespearean in its wisdom and maturity, and,
although he wrote very rapidly, it must be remembered that his mind had
been prepared by strenuous work for twenty years as a storehouse of
material in which nothing was handled until it had been carefully
mounted by the imagination, classified in the memory, and tested by
experimental use. Once he has got the imagination of the reader well
grounded to earth, there is nothing he loves better than telling a good
story. Of detail he is often careless. But he trusted to a full wallet,
and rightly, for mainly by his abundance he raised the literature of the
novel to its highest point of influence, breathing into it a new spirit,
giving it a fulness and universality of life, a romantic charm, a
dignity and elevation, and thereby a coherence, a power and predominance
which it never had before.
In Scott the various lines of 18th-century conservatism and 19th-century
romantic revival most wonderfully converge. His intense feeling for Long
Ago made him a romantic almost from his cradle. The master faculties of
history and humour made a strong conservative of him; but his Toryism
was of a very different spring from that of Coleridge or Wordsworth. It
was not a reaction from disappointment in the sequel of 1789, nor was it
the result of reasoned conviction. It was indwelling, rooted deeply in
the fibres of the soil, to which Scott's attachment was passionate, and
nourished as from a source by ancestral sentiment and "heather"
tradition. This sentiment made Scott a victorious pioneer of the
Romantic movement all over Europe. At the same time we must remember
that, with all his fondness for medievalism, he was fundamentally a
thorough 18th-century Scotsman and successor of Bailie Nicol Jarvie: a
worshipper of good sense, toleration, modern and expert governmental
ideas, who valued the past chiefly by way of picturesque relief, and was
thoroughly alive to the benefit of peaceful and orderly rule, and deeply
convinced that we are much better off as we are than we could have been
in the days of King Richard or good Queen Bess. Scott had the mind of an
enlightened 18th-century administrator and statesmen who had made a
fierce hobby of armour and old ballads. To expect him to treat of
intense passion or romantic medievalism as Charlotte Brontë or Dante
Gabriel Rossetti would have treated them is as absurd as to expect to
find the sentiments of a Mrs Browning blossoming amidst the horse-play
of _Tom Jones_ or _Harry Lorrequer_. Scott has few niceties or secrets:
he was never subtle, morbid or fantastic. His handling is ever broad,
vigorous, easy, careless, healthy and free. Yet nobly simple and
straightforward as man and writer were, there is something very complex
about his literary legacy, which has gone into all lands and created
bigoted enemies (Carlyle, Borrow) as well as unexpected friends
(Hazlitt, Newman, Jowett); and we can seldom be sure whether his
influence is reactionary or the reverse. There has always been something
semi-feudal about it. The "shirra" has a demesne in letters as broad as
a countryside, a band of mesne vassals and a host of Eildon hillsmen,
Tweedside cottiers, minor feudatories and forest retainers attached to
the "Abbotsford Hunt." Scott's humour, humanity and insistence upon the
continuity of history transformed English literature profoundly.
Transition fiction.
Scott set himself to coin a quarter of a million sterling out of the new
continent of which he felt himself the Columbus. He failed (quite
narrowly), but he made the Novel the paymaster of literature for at
least a hundred years. His immediate contemporaries and successors were
not particularly great. John Galt (1779-1839), Susan Ferrier (1782-1854)
and D.M. Moir (1798-1851) all attempted the delineation of Scottish
scenes with a good deal of shrewdness of insight and humour. The main
bridge from Scott to the great novelists of the 'forties and 'fifties
was supplied by sporting, military, naval and political novels,
represented in turn by Surtees, Smith, Hook, Maxwell, Lever, Marryat,
Cooper, Morier, Ainsworth, Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli. Surtees gave
all-important hints to _Pickwick_, Marryat developed grotesque
character-drawing, Ainsworth and Bulwer attempted new effects in
criminology and contemporary glitter. Disraeli in the 'thirties was one
of the foremost romantic wits who had yet attempted the novel. Early in
the 'forties he received the laying-on of hands from the Young England
party, and attempted to propagandize the good tidings of his mission in
_Coningsby_ and _Sybil_, novels full of _entraînement_ and promise, if
not of actual genius. Unhappily the author was enmeshed in the fatal
drolleries of the English party system, and _Lothair_ is virtually a
confession of abandoned ideals. He completes the forward party in
fiction; Jane Austen (1775-1815) stands to this as Crabbe and Rogers to
Coleridge and Shelley. She represents the fine flower of the expiring
18th century. Scott could do the trumpet notes on the organ. She fingers
the fine ivory flutes. She combines self-knowledge and artistic
reticence with a complete tact and an absolute lucidity of vision within
the area prescribed. Within the limits of a park wall in a country
parish, absolutely oblivious of Europe and the universe, her art is
among the finest and most finished that our literature has to offer. In
irony she had no rival at that period. But the trimness of her plots and
the delicacy of her miniature work have affinities in Maria Edgeworth,
Harriet Martineau and Mary Russell Mitford, three excellent writers of
pure English prose. There is a finer aroma of style in the contemporary
"novels" of Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866). These, however, are rather
tournaments of talk than novels proper, releasing a flood of satiric
portraiture upon the idealism of the day--difficult to be apprehended in
perfection save by professed students. Peacock's style had an
appreciable influence upon his son-in-law George Meredith (1828-1909).
His philosophy is for the most part Tory irritability exploding in
ridicule; but Peacock was one of the most lettered men of his age, and
his flouts and jeers smack of good reading, old wine and respectable
prejudices. In these his greatest successor was George Borrow
(1803-1881), who used three volumes of half-imaginary autobiography and
road-faring in strange lands as a sounding-board for a kind of romantic
revolt against the century of comfort, toleration, manufactures,
mechanical inventions, cheap travel and commercial expansion,
unaccompanied (as he maintains) by any commensurate growth of human
wisdom, happiness, security or dignity.
The Victorian era.
In the year of Queen Victoria's accession most of the great writers of
the early part of the century, whom we may denominate as "late
Georgian," were silent. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb,
Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe and Cobbett were gone. Wordsworth,
Southey, Campbell, Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss
Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers were still
living, but the vital portion of their work was already done. The
principal authors who belong equally to the Georgian and Victorian eras
are Landor, Bulwer, Marryat, Hallam, Milman and Disraeli; none of whom,
with the exception of the last, approaches the first rank in either. The
significant work of Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Dickens,
Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Trollope, the
Kingsleys, Spencer, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Grote, Macaulay, Freeman,
Froude, Lecky, Buckle, Green, Maine, Borrow, FitzGerald, Arnold,
Rossetti, Swinburne, Meredith, Hardy, Stevenson, Morris, Newman, Pater,
Jefferies--the work of these writers may be termed conclusively
Victorian; it gives the era a stamp of its own and distinguishes it as
the most varied in intellectual riches in the whole course of our
literature. Circumstances have seldom in the world been more favourable
to a great outburst of literary energy. The nation was secure and
prosperous to an unexampled degree, conscious of the will and the power
to expand still further. The canons of taste were still aristocratic.
Books were made and unmade according to a regular standard. Literature
was the one form of art which the English understood, in which they had
always excelled since 1579, and in which their originality was supreme.
To the native genius for poetry was now added the advantage of materials
for a prose which in lucidity and versatility should surpass even that
of Goldsmith and Hazlitt. The diversity of form and content of this
great literature was commensurate with the development of human
knowledge and power which marked its age. In this and some other
respects it resembles the extraordinary contemporary development in
French literature which began under the reign of Louis Philippe. The one
signally disconcerting thing about the great Victorian writers is their
amazing prolixity. Not content with two or three long books, they write
whole literatures. A score of volumes, each as long as the Bible or
Shakespeare, barely represents the output of such authors as Carlyle,
Ruskin, Froude, Dickens, Thackeray, Newman, Spencer or Trollope. They
obtained vast quantities of new readers, for the middle class was
beginning to read with avidity; but the quality of brevity, the
knowledge when to stop, and with it the older classic conciseness and
the nobler Hellenic idea of a perfect measure--these things were as
though they had not been. Meanwhile, the old schools were broken up and
the foolscap addressed to the old masters. Singers, entertainers,
critics and historians abound. Every man may say what is in him in the
phrases that he likes best, and the sole motto that compels is "every
style is permissible except the style that is tiresome." The old models
are strangely discredited, and the only conventions which hold are those
concerning the subjects which English delicacy held to be tabooed. These
conventions were inordinately strict, and were held to include all the
unrestrained, illicit impulses of love and all the more violent
aberrations from the Christian code of faith and ethics. Infidel
speculation and the liaisons of lawless love (which had begun to form
the staple of the new French fiction--hence regarded by respectable
English critics of the time as profoundly vitiated and scandalous) had
no recognized existence and were totally ignored in literature designed
for general reading. The second or Goody-two-Shoes convention remained
strictly in force until the penultimate decade of the 19th century, and
was acquiesced in or at least submitted to by practically all the
greatest writers of the Victorian age. The great poets and novelists of
that day easily out-topped their fellows. Society had no difficulty in
responding to the summons of its literary leaders. Nor was their fame
partial, social or sectional. The great novelists of early Victorian
days were aristocratic and democratic at once. Their popularity was
universal within the limits of the language and beyond it. The greatest
of men were men of imagination rather than men of ideas, but such
sociological and moral ideas as they derived from their environment were
poured helter-skelter into their novels, which took the form of huge
pantechnicon magazines. Another distinctive feature of the Victorian
novel is the position it enabled women to attain in literature, a
position attained by them in creative work neither before nor since.
Dickens.
The novelists to a certain extent created their own method like the
great dramatists, but such rigid prejudices or conventions as they found
already in possession they respected without demur. Both Dickens and
Thackeray write as if they were almost entirely innocent of the
existence of sexual vice. As artists and thinkers they were both
formless. But the enormous self-complacency of the England of their
time, assisted alike by the part played by the nation from 1793 to 1815,
evangelicalism, free trade (which was originally a system of
super-nationalism) and later, evolution, generated in them a great
benignity and a strong determination towards a liberal and humanitarian
philosophy. Despite, however, the diffuseness of the envelope and the
limitations of horizon referred to, the unbookish and almost unlettered
genius of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), the son of a poor lower
middle-class clerk, almost entirely self-educated, has asserted for
itself the foremost place in the literary history of the period. Dickens
broke every rule, rioted in absurdity and bathed in extravagance. But
everything he wrote was received with an almost frantic joy by those who
recognized his creations as deifications of themselves, his scenery as
drawn by one of the quickest and intensest observers that ever lived,
and his drollery as an accumulated dividend from the treasury of human
laughter. Dickens's mannerisms were severe, but his geniality as a
writer broke down every obstruction, reduced Jeffrey to tears and Sydney
Smith to helpless laughter.
Thackeray.
The novel in France was soon to diverge and adopt the form of an
anecdote illustrating the traits of a very small group of persons, but
the English novel, owing mainly to the predilection of Dickens for those
Gargantuan entertainers of his youth, Fielding and Smollett, was to
remain anchored to the history. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
was even more historical than Dickens, and most of his leading
characters are provided with a detailed genealogy. Dickens's great
works, excepting _David Copperfield_ and _Great Expectations_, had all
appeared when Thackeray made his mark in 1848 with _Vanity Fair_, and
Thackeray follows most of his predecessor's conventions, including his
conventional religion, ethics and politics, but he avoids his worse
faults of theatricality. He never forces the note or lashes himself into
fury or sentimentality; he limits himself in satire to the polite sphere
which he understands, he is a great master of style and possesses every
one of its fairy gifts except brevity. He creates characters and scenes
worthy of Dickens, but within a smaller range and without the same
abundance. He is a traveller and a cosmopolitan, while Dickens is
irredeemably Cockney. He is often content to criticize or annotate or to
preach upon some congenial theme, while Dickens would be in the flush of
humorous creation. His range, it must be remembered, is wide, in most
respects a good deal wider than his great contemporary's, for he is at
once novelist, pamphleteer, essayist, historian, critic, and the writer
of some of the most delicate and sentimental _vers d'occasion_ in the
language.
Charlotte Brontë.
George Eliot.
Kingsley. Trollope. Reade. Meredith. Hardy.
The absorption of England in itself is shown with exceptional force in
the case of Thackeray, who was by nature a cosmopolitan, yet whose work
is so absorbed with the structure of English society as to be almost
unintelligible to foreigners. The exploration of the human heart and
conscience in relation to the new problems of the time had been almost
abandoned by the novel since Richardson's time. It was for woman to
attempt to resolve these questions, and with the aid of powerful
imagination to propound very different conclusions. The conviction of
Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) was that the mutual passionate love of one
man and one woman is sacred and creates a centre of highest life, energy
and joy in the world. George Eliot (1819-1880), on the other hand,
detected a blind and cruel egoism in all such ecstasy of individual
passion. It was in the autumn of 1847 that _Jane Eyre_ shocked the
primness of the coteries by the unconcealed ardour of its love passages.
Twelve years later _Adam Bede_ astonished the world by the intensity of
its ethical light and shade. The introspective novel was now very
gradually to establish a supremacy over the historical. The romance of
the Brontës' forlorn life colours _Jane Eyre_, colours _Wuthering
Heights_ and colours _Villette_; their work is inseparable from their
story to an extent that we perhaps hardly realize. George Eliot did not
receive this adventitious aid from romance, and her work was, perhaps,
unduly burdened by ethical diatribe, scientific disquisition and moral
and philosophical asides. It is more than redeemed, however, by her
sovereign humour, by the actual truth in the portrayal of that
absolutely self-centred Midland society of the 'thirties and 'forties,
and by the moral significance which she extracts from the smaller
actions and more ordinary characters of life by means of sympathy,
imagination and a deep human compassion. Her novels are generally
admitted to have obtained twin summits in _Adam Bede_ (1859) and
_Middlemarch_ (1872). An even nicer delineator of the most delicate
shades of the curiously remote provincial society of that day was Mrs
Gaskell (1810-1865), whose _Cranford_ and _Wives and Daughters_ attain
to the perfection of easy, natural and unaffected English narrative.
Enthusiasm and a picturesque boyish ardour and partisanship are the
chief features of _Westward Ho!_ and the other vivid and stirring novels
of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), to which a subtler gift in the
discrimination of character must be added in the case of his brother
Henry Kingsley (1830-1876). Charles, however, was probably more
accomplished as a poet than in the to him too exciting operation of
taking sides in a romance. The novels of Trollope, Reade and Wilkie
Collins are, generally speaking, a secondary product of the literary
forces which produced the great fiction of the 'fifties. The two last
were great at structure and sensation: Trollope dogs the prose of
every-day life with a certainty and a clearness that border upon
inspiration. The great novels of George Meredith range between 1859 and
1880, stories of characters deeply interesting who reveal themselves to
us by flashes and trust to our inspiration to do the rest. The wit, the
sparkle, the entrain and the horizon of these books, from _Richard
Feverel_ to the master analysis of _The Egoist_, have converted the
study of Meredith into an exact science. Thomas Hardy occupies a place
scarcely inferior to Meredith's as a stylist, a discoverer of new
elements of the plaintive and the wistful in the vanishing of past
ideals, as a depicter of the old southern rustic life of England and its
tragi-comedy, in a series of novels which take rank with the greatest.
Tennyson.
If Victorian literature had something more than a paragon in Dickens, it
had its paragon too in the poet Tennyson. The son of a Lincolnshire
parson of squirearchal descent, Alfred Tennyson consecrated himself to
the vocation of poesy with the same unalterable conviction that had
characterized Milton, Pope, Thomson, Wordsworth and Keats, and that was
yet to signalize Rossetti and Swinburne, and he became easily the
greatest virtuoso of his time in his art. To lyrics and idylls of a
luxurious and exotic picturesqueness he gave a perfection of technique
which criticism has chastened only to perfect in such miracles of
description as "The Lotus Eaters," "The Dream of Fair Women," and "Morte
d'Arthur." He received as vapour the sense of uneasiness as to the
problems of the future which pervaded his generation, and in the elegies
and lyrics of _In Memoriam_, in _The Princess_ and in _Maud_ he gave
them back to his contemporaries in a running stream, which still
sparkles and radiates amid the gloom. After the lyrical monodrama of
_Maud_ in 1855 he devoted his flawless technique of design, harmony and
rhythm to works primarily of decoration and design (_The Idylls of the
King_), and to experiments in metrical drama for which the time was not
ripe; but his main occupation was varied almost to the last by lyrical
blossoms such as "Frater Ave," "Roman Virgil," or "Crossing the Bar,"
which, like "Tears, Idle Tears" and "O that 'twere possible," embody the
aspirations of Flaubert towards a perfected art of language shaping as
no other verse probably can.
Browning.
Few, perhaps, would go now to _In Memoriam_ as to an oracle for
illumination and guidance as many of Queen Victoria's contemporaries
did, from the Queen herself downwards. And yet it will take very long
ere its fascination fades. In language most musical it rearticulates the
gospel of Sorrow and Love, and it remains still a pathetic expression of
emotions, sentiments and truths which, as long as human nature remains
the same, and as long as calamity, sorrow and death are busy in the
world, must be always repeating themselves. Its power, perhaps, we may
feel of this poem and indeed of most of Tennyson's poetry, is not quite
equal to its charm. And if we feel this strongly, we shall regard Robert
Browning as the typical poet of the Victorian era. His thought has been
compared to a galvanic battery for the use of spiritual paralytics. The
grave defect of Browning is that his ideas, however excellent, are so
seldom completely won; they are left in a twilight, or even a darkness
more Cimmerian than that to which the worst of the virtuosi dedicate
their ideas. Similarly, even in his "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics"
(1845) or his "Men and Women" (1855) he rarely depicts action, seldom
goes further than interpreting the mind of man as he approaches action.
If Dickens may be described as the eye of Victorian literature, Tennyson
the ear attuned to the subtlest melodies, Swinburne the reed to which
everything blew to music, Thackeray the velvet pulpit-cushion, Eliot the
impending brow, and Meredith the cerebral dome, then Browning might well
be described as the active brain itself eternally expounding some point
of view remote in time and place from its own. Tennyson was ostensibly
and always a poet in his life and his art, in his blue cloak and
sombrero, his mind and study alike stored with intaglios of the thought
of all ages, always sounding and remodelling his verses so that they
shall attain the maximum of sweetness and symmetry. He was a recluse.
Browning on the other hand dissembled his poethood, successfully
disguised his muse under the semblance of a stock merchant, was civil to
his fellowmen, and though nervous with bores, encountered every one he
met as if he were going to receive more than he could impart. In
Tennyson's poetry we are always discovering new beauties. In Browning's
we are finding new blemishes. Why he chose rhythm and metre for
seven-eighths of his purpose is somewhat of a mystery. His protest
against the materialistic view of life is, perhaps, a more valid one
than Tennyson's; he is at pains to show us the noble elements valuable
in spite of failure to achieve tangible success. He realizes that the
greater the man, the greater is the failure, yet protests unfailingly
against the despondent or materialist view of life. His nimble
appreciation of character and motive attracts the attentive curiosity of
highly intellectual people; but the question recurs with some
persistence as to whether poetry, after all, was the right medium for
the expression of these views.
Ruskin. Morris. Symonds. Pater.
Many of Browning's ideas and fertilizations will, perhaps, owing to the
difficulty and uncertainty which attaches to their form, penetrate the
future indirectly as the stimulant of other men's work. This is
especially the case with those remarkable writers who have for the first
time given the fine arts a considerable place in English literature,
notably John Ruskin (_Modern Painters_, 1842, _Seven Lamps_, 1849,
_Stones of Venice_, 1853), William Morris, John Addington Symonds and
Walter Pater. Browning, it is true, shared the discipleship of the first
two with Kingsley and Carlyle. But Ruskin outlived all discipleships and
transcended almost all the prose writers of his period in a style the
elements of emotional power in which still preserve their secret.
Arnold.
More a poet of doubt than either Tennyson or the college friend, A.H.
Clough, whose loss he lamented in one of the finest pastoral elegies of
all ages, Matthew Arnold takes rank with Tennyson, Browning and
Swinburne alone among the Dii Majores of Victorian poetry. He is perhaps
a disciple of Wordsworth even more than of Goethe, and he finds in
Nature, described in rarefied though at times intensely beautiful
phrase, the balm for the unrest of man's unsatisfied yearnings, the
divorce between soul and intellect, and the sense of contrast between
the barren toil of man and the magic operancy of nature. His most
delicate and intimate strains are tinged with melancholy. The infinite
desire of what might have been, the _lacrimae rerum_, inspires
"Resignation," one of the finest pieces in his volume of 1849 (_The
Strayed Reveller_). In the deeply-sighed lines of "Dover Beach" in 1867
it is associated with his sense of the decay of faith. The dreaming
garden trees, the full moon and the white evening star of the beautiful
English-coloured _Thyrsis_ evoke the same mood, and render Arnold one of
the supreme among elegiac poets. But his poetry is the most individual
in the circle and admits the popular heart never for an instant. As a
popularizer of Renan and of the view of the Bible, not as a talisman but
as a literature, and, again, as a chastener of his contemporaries by
means of the iteration of a few telling phrases about philistines,
barbarians, sweetness and light, sweet reasonableness, high seriousness,
Hebraism and Hellenism, "young lions of the _Daily Telegraph_," and "the
note of provinciality," Arnold far eclipsed his fame as a poet during
his lifetime. His crusade of banter against the bad civilization of his
own class was one of the most audaciously successful things of the kind
ever accomplished. But all his prose theorizing was excessively
superficial. In poetry he sounded a note which the prose Arnold seemed
hopelessly unable ever to fathom.
Rossetti.
It is easier to speak of the virtuoso group who derived their first
incitement to poetry from Chatterton, Keats and the early exotic ballads
of Tennyson, far though these yet were from attaining the perfection in
which they now appear after half a century of assiduous correction. The
chief of them were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina, William
Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The founders of this school,
which took and acquired the name Pre-Raphaelite, were profoundly
impressed by the Dante revival and by the study of the early Florentine
masters. Rossetti himself was an accomplished translator from Dante and
from Villon. He preferred Keats to Shelley because (like himself) he had
no philosophy. The 18th century was to him as if it had never been, he
dislikes Greek lucidity and the open air, and prefers lean medieval
saints, spectral images and mystic loves. The passion of these students
was retrospective; they wanted to revive the literature of a forgotten
past, Italian, Scandinavian, French, above all, medieval. To do this is
a question of enthusiastic experiment and adventure. Rossetti leads the
way with his sonnets and ballads. Christina follows with _Goblin
Market_, though she subsequently, with a perfected technique, writes
poetry more and more confined to the religious emotions. William Morris
publishes in 1858 his _Defence of Guenevere_, followed in ten years by
_The Earthly Paradise_, a collection of metrical tales, which hang in
the sunshine like tapestries woven of golden thread, where we should
naturally expect the ordinary paperhanging of prose romance.
Swinburne.
From the verdurous gloom of the studio with its mysterious and occult
properties in which Rossetti compounded his colours, Morris went forth
shortly to chant and then to narrate Socialist songs and parables.
Algernon Charles Swinburne set forth to scandalize the critics of 1866
with the roses and lilies of vice and white death in _Poems and
Ballads_, which was greeted with howls and hisses, and reproach against
a "fleshly school of modern poetry." Scandalous verses these were,
rioting on the crests of some of these billows of song. More discerning
persons perceived the harmless impersonal unreality and mischievous
youthful extravagance of all these Cyprian outbursts, that the poems
were the outpourings of a young singer up to the chin in the Pierian
flood, and possessed by a poetic energy so urgent that it could not wait
to apply the touchstones of reality or the chastening planes of
experience. Swinburne far surpassed the promoters of this exotic school
in technical excellence, and in _Atalanta in Calydon_ and its successors
may be said to have widened the bounds of English song, to have created
a new music and liberated a new harmonic scale in his verse. Of the two
elements which, superadded to a consummate technique, compose the great
poet, intensity of imagination and intensity of passion, the latter in
Swinburne much predominated. The result was a great abundance of heat
and glow and not perhaps quite enough defining light. Hence the tendency
to be incomprehensible, so fatal in its fascination for the poets of the
last century, which would almost justify the title of the triumvirs of
twilight to three of the greatest. It is this incomprehensibility which
alienates the poet from the popular understanding and confines his
audience to poets, students and scholars. Poetry is often comparable to
a mountain range with its points and aiguilles, its peaks and crags, its
domes and its summits. But Swinburne's poetry, filled with the sound and
movement of great waters, is as incommunicable as the sea. Trackless and
almost boundless, it has no points, no definite summits. The poet never
seems to know precisely when he is going to stop. His metrical flow is
wave-like, beautiful and rather monotonous, inseparable from the general
effect. His endings seem due to an exhaustion of rhythm rather than to
an exhaustion of sense. A cessation of meaning is less perceptible than
a cessation of magnificent sound.
Newman and the Church.
Akin in some sense to the attempt made to get behind the veil and to
recapture the old charms and spells of the middle ages, to discover the
open sesame of the _Morte D'Arthur_ and the _Mabinogion_ and to reveal
the old Celtic and monastic life which once filled and dominated our
islands, was the attempt to overthrow the twin gods of the 'forties and
'fifties, state-Protestantism and the sanctity of trade. The curiously
assorted Saint Georges who fought these monsters were John Henry Newman
and Thomas Carlyle. The first cause of the movement was, of course, the
anomalous position of the Anglican Church, which had become a province
of the oligarchy officered by younger sons. It stood apart from foreign
Protestantism; its ignorance of Rome, and consequently of what it
protested against, was colossal; it was conscious of itself only as an
establishment--it had produced some very great men since the days of the
non-jurors, when it had mislaid its historical conscience, but these had
either been great scholars in their studies, such as Berkeley, Butler,
Warburton, Thomas Scott, or revivalists, evangelicals and missionaries,
such as Wilson, Wesley, Newton, Romaine, Cecil, Venn, Martyn, who were
essentially Congregationalists rather than historical Churchmen. A new
spiritual beacon was to be raised; an attempt was to be made to realize
the historical and cosmic aspects of the English Church, to examine its
connexions, its descent and its title-deeds. In this attempt Newman was
to spend the best years of his life.
The growth of liberal opinions and the denudation of the English Church
of spiritual and historical ideas, leaving "only pulpit orators at
Clapham and Islington and two-bottle orthodox" to defend it, seemed to
involve the continued existence of Anglicanism in any form in
considerable doubt. Swift had said at the commencement of the 18th
century that if an act was passed for the extirpation of the gospel,
bank stock might decline 1%; but a century later it is doubtful whether
the passing of such a bill would have left any trace, however
evanescent, upon the stability of the money market. The Anglican _via
media_ had enemies not only in the philosophical radicals, but also in
the new caste of men of science. Perhaps, as J.A. Froude suggests, these
combined enemies, _The Edinburgh Review_, Brougham, Mackintosh, the
Reform Ministry, Low Church philosophy and the London University were
not so very terrible after all. The Church was a vested interest which
had a greater stake in the country and was harder to eradicate than they
imagined. But it had nothing to give to the historian and the idealist.
They were right to fight for what their souls craved after and found in
the Church of Andrewes, Herbert, Ken and Waterland. Belief in the divine
mission of the Church lingered on in the minds of such men as Alexander
Knox or his disciple Bishop Jebb; but few were prepared to answer the
question--"What is the Church as spoken of in England? Is it the Church
of Christ?"--and the answers were various. Hooker had said it was "the
nation"; and in entirely altered circumstances, with some
qualifications, Dr Arnold said the same. It was "the Establishment"
according to the lawyers and politicians, both Whig and Tory. It was an
invisible and mystical body, said the Evangelicals. It was the aggregate
of separate congregations, said the Nonconformists. It was the
parliamentary creation of the Reformation, said the Erastians. The true
Church was the communion of the Pope; the pretended Church was a
legalized schism, said the Roman Catholics. All these ideas were
floating about, loose and vague, among people who talked much about the
Church.
One thing was persistently obvious, namely, that the nationalist church
had become opportunist in every fibre, and that it had thrown off almost
every semblance of ecclesiastical discipline. The view was circulated
that the Church owed its continued existence to the good sense of the
individuals who officered it, and to the esteem which possession and
good sense combined invariably engendered in the reigning oligarchy. But
since Christianity was true--and Newman was the one man of modern times
who seems never to have doubted this, never to have overlooked the
unmistakable threat of eternal punishment to the wicked and
unbelieving--modern England, with its march of intellect and its chatter
about progress, was advancing with a light heart to the verge of a
bottomless abyss. By a diametrically opposite chain of reasoning Newman
reached much the same conclusion as Carlyle. Newman sought a haven of
security in a rapprochement with the Catholic Church. The medieval
influences already at work in Oxford began to fan the flame which
kindled to a blaze in the ninetieth of the celebrated _Tracts for the
Times_. It proved the turning of the ways leading Keble and Pusey to
Anglican ritual and Newman to Rome. This anti-liberal campaign was
poison to the state-churchmen and Protestants, and became perhaps the
chief intellectual storm centre of the century. Charles Kingsley in 1864
sought to illustrate by recent events that veracity could not be
considered a Roman virtue.
Scientific cross-currents.
Macaulay.
After some preliminary ironic sparring Newman was stung into writing
what he deliberately called _Apologia pro vita sua_. In this, apart from
the masterly dialectic and exposition in which he had already shown
himself an adept, a volume of autobiography is made a chapter of general
history, unsurpassed in its kind since the _Confessions_ of St
Augustine, combined with a perfection of form, a precision of phrasing
and a charm of style peculiar to the genius of the author, rendering it
one of the masterpieces of English prose. But while Newman was thus
sounding a retreat, louder and more urgent voices were signalling the
advance in a totally opposite direction. The _Apologia_ fell in point of
time between _The Origin of Species_ and _Descent of Man_, in which
Charles Darwin was laying the corner stones of the new science of which
Thomas Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace were to be among the first
apostles, and almost coincided with the _First Principles_ of a
synthetic philosophy, in which Herbert Spencer was formulating a set of
probabilities wholly destructive to the acceptance of positive truth in
any one religion. The typical historian of the 'fifties, Thomas
Babington Macaulay, and the seminal thinker of the 'sixties, John Stuart
Mill, had as determinedly averted their faces from the old conception of
revealed religion. Nourished in the school of the great Whig pamphleteer
historians, George Grote and Henry Hallam, Macaulay combined gifts of
memory, enthusiastic conviction, portraiture and literary expression,
which gave to his historical writing a resonance unequalled (even by
Michelet) in modern literature. In spite of faults of taste and
fairness, Macaulay's resplendent gifts enabled him to achieve for the
period from Charles II. to the peace of Ryswick what Thucydides had done
for the Peloponnesian War. The pictures that he drew with such exultant
force are stamped ineffaceably upon the popular mind. His chief faults
are not of detail, but rather a lack of subtlety as regards
characterization and motive, a disposition to envisage history too
exclusively as a politician, and the sequence of historical events as a
kind of ordered progress towards the material ideals of universal trade
and Whig optimism as revealed in the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Carlyle.
Macaulay's tendency to disparage the past brought his whole vision of
the Cosmos into sharp collision with that of his rival appellant to the
historical conscience, Thomas Carlyle, a man whose despair of the
present easily exceeded Newman's. But Carlyle's despondency was totally
irrespective of the attitude preserved by England towards the Holy
Father, whom he seldom referred to save as "the three-hatted Papa" and
"servant of the devil." It may be in fact almost regarded as the reverse
or complement to the excess of self-complacency in Macaulay. We may
correct the excess of one by the opposite excess of the other. Macaulay
was an optimist in ecstasy with the material advance of his time in
knowledge and power; the growth of national wealth, machinery and means
of lighting and locomotion caused him to glow with satisfaction.
Carlyle, the pessimist, regards all such symptoms of mechanical
development as contemptible. Far from panegyrizing his own time, he
criticizes it without mercy. Macaulay had great faith in rules and
regulations, reform bills and parliamentary machinery. Carlyle regards
them as wiles of the devil. Frederick William of Prussia, according to
Macaulay, was the most execrable of fiends, a cross between Moloch and
Puck, his palace was hell, and Oliver Twist and Smike were petted
children compared with his son the crown prince. In the same bluff and
honest father Carlyle recognized the realized ideal of his fancy and
hugged the just man made perfect to his heart of hearts. Such men as
Bentham and Cobden, Mill and Macaulay, had in Carlyle's opinion spared
themselves no mistaken exertion to exalt the prosperity and happiness of
their own day. The time had come to react at all hazards against the
prevalent surfeit of civilization. Henceforth his literary activity was
to take two main directions. First, tracts for the times against modern
tendencies, especially against the demoralizing modern talk about
progress by means of money and machinery which emanated like a miasma
from the writings of such men as Mill, Macaulay, Brougham, Buckle and
from the Quarterlies. Secondly, a cyclopean exhibition of Caesarism,
discipline, the regimentation of workers, and the convertibility of the
Big Stick and the Bible, with a preference to the Big Stick as a
panacea. The snowball was to grow rapidly among such writers as
Kingsley, Ruskin, George Borrow, unencumbered by reasoning or deductive
processes which they despised. Carlyle himself felt that the condition
of England was one for anger rather than discussion. He detested the
rationalism and symmetry of such methodists of thought as Mill, Buckle,
Darwin, Spencer, Lecky, Ricardo and other demonstrations of the dismal
science--mere chatter he called it. The palliative philanthropy of the
day had become his aversion even more than the inroads of Rome under
cover of the Oxford movement which Froude, Borrow and Kingsley set
themselves to correct. As an historian of a formal order Carlyle's
historical portraits cannot bear a strict comparison with the published
work of Gibbon and Macaulay, or even of Maine and Froude in this period,
but as a biographer and autobiographer Carlyle's caustic insight has
enabled him to produce much which is of the very stuff of human nature.
Surrounded by philomaths and savants who wrote smoothly about the
perfectibility of man and his institutions, Carlyle almost alone refused
to distil his angry eloquence and went on railing against the passive
growth of civilization at the heart of which he declared that he had
discovered a cancer. This uncouth Titan worship and prostration before
brute force, this constant ranting about jarls and vikings trembles
often on the verge of cant and comedy, and his fiddling on the one
string of human pretension and bankruptcy became discordant almost to
the point of chaos. Instinctively destructive, he resents the
apostleship of teachers like Mill, or the pioneer discoveries of men
like Herbert Spencer and Darwin. He remains, nevertheless, a great
incalculable figure, the cross grandfather of a school of thought which
is largely unconscious of its debt and which so far as it recognizes it
takes Carlyle in a manner wholly different from that of his
contemporaries.
New schools.
History.
The deaths of Carlyle and George Eliot (and also of George Borrow) in
1881 make a starting-point for the new schools of historians, novelists,
critics and biographers, and those new nature students who claim to cure
those evil effects of civilization which Carlyle and his disciples had
discovered. History in the hands of Macaulay, Buckle and Carlyle had
been occupied mainly with the bias and tendency of change, the results
obtained by those who consulted the oracle being more often than not
diametrically opposite. With Froude still on the one hand as the
champion of Protestantism, and with E.A. Freeman and J.R. Green on the
other as nationalist historians, the school of applied history was fully
represented in the next generation, but as the records grew and
multiplied in print in accordance with the wise provisions made in 1857
by the commencement of the Rolls Series of medieval historians, and the
Calendars of State Papers, to be followed shortly by the rapidly growing
volumes of Calendars of Historical Manuscripts, historians began to
concentrate their attention more upon the process of change as their
right subject matter and to rely more and more upon documents,
statistics and other impersonal and disinterested forms of material.
Such historical writers as Lecky, Lord Acton, Creighton, Morley and
Bryce contributed to the process of transition mainly as essayists, but
the new doctrines were tested and to a certain extent put into action by
such writers as Thorold Rogers, Stubbs, Gardiner and Maitland. The
theory that History is a science, no less and no more, was propounded in
so many words by Professor Bury in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in
1903, and this view and the corresponding divergence of history from the
traditional pathway of Belles Lettres has become steadily more dominant
in the world of historical research and historical writing since 1881.
The bulk of quite modern historical writing can certainly be justified
from no other point of view.
The novel.
The novel since 1881 has pursued a course curiously analogous to that of
historical writing. Supported as it was by masters of the old régime
such as Meredith and Hardy, and by those who then ranked even higher in
popular esteem such as Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Besant and
Rice, Blackmore, William Black and a monstrous rising regiment of lady
novelists--Mrs Lynn Linton, Rhoda Broughton, Mrs Henry Wood, Miss
Braddon, Mrs Humphry Ward, the type seemed securely anchored to the old
formulas and the old ways. In reality, however, many of these popular
workers were already moribund and the novel was being honeycombed by
French influence.
This is perceptible in Hardy, but may be traced with greater
distinctness in the best work of George Gissing, George Moore, Mark
Rutherford, and later on of H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John
Galsworthy. The old novelists had left behind them a giant's robe.
Intellectually giants, Dickens and Thackeray were equally gigantic
spendthrifts. They worked in a state of fervent heat above a glowing
furnace, into which they flung lavish masses of unshaped metal, caring
little for immediate effect or minute dexterity of stroke, but knowing
full well that the emotional energy of their temperaments was capable of
fusing the most intractable material, and that in the end they would
produce their great downright effect. Their spirits rose and fell, but
the case was desperate; copy had to be despatched at once or the current
serial would collapse. Good and bad had to make up the tale against
time, and revelling in the very exuberance and excess of their humour,
the novelists invariably triumphed. It was incumbent on the new school
of novelists to economize their work with more skill, to relieve their
composition of irrelevancies, to keep the writing in one key, and to
direct it consistently to one end--in brief, to unify the novel as a
work of art and to simplify its ordonnance.
The novel, thus lightened and sharpened, was conquering new fields. The
novel of the 'sixties remained not, perhaps, to win many new triumphs,
but a very popular instrument in the hands of those who performed
variations on the old masters, and much later in the hands of Mr William
de Morgan, showing a new force and quiet power of its own. The novel,
however, was ramifying in other directions in a way full of promise for
the future. A young Edinburgh student, Robert Louis Stevenson, had
inherited much of the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelitic virtuosos, and
combined with their passion for the romance of the historic past a
curiosity fully as strong about the secrets of romantic technique. A
coterie which he formed with W.E. Henley and his cousin R.A.M. Stevenson
studied words as a young art student studies paints, and made studies
for portraits of buccaneers with the same minute drudgery that Rossetti
had studied a wall or Morris a piece of figured tapestry. While thus
forming a new romantic school whose work when wrought by his methods
should be fit to be grafted upon the picturesque historic fiction of
Scott and Dumas, Stevenson was also naturalizing the short story of the
modern French type upon English ground. In this particular field he was
eclipsed by Rudyard Kipling, who, though less original as a man of
letters, had a technical vocabulary and descriptive power far in advance
of Stevenson's, and was able in addition to give his writing an exotic
quality derived from Oriental colouring. This regional type of writing
has since been widely imitated, and the novel has simultaneously
developed in many other ways, of which perhaps the most significant is
the psychological study as manipulated severally by Shorthouse, Mallock
and Henry James.
Criticism.
The expansion of criticism in the same thirty years was not a whit less
marked than the vast divagation of the novel. In the early 'eighties it
was still tongue-bound by the hypnotic influence of one or two copy-book
formulae--Arnold's "criticism of life" as a definition of poetry, and
Walter Pater's implied doctrine of art for art's sake. That two dicta so
manifestly absurd should have cast such an augur-like spell upon the
free expression of opinion, though it may of course, like all such
instances, be easily exaggerated, is nevertheless a curious example of
the enslavement of ideas by a confident claptrap. A few representatives
of the old schools of motived or scientific criticism, deduced from the
literatures of past time, survived the new century in Leslie Stephen,
Saintsbury, Stopford Brooke, Austin Dobson, Courthope, Sidney Colvin,
Watts-Dunton; but their agreement is certainly not greater than among
the large class of emancipated who endeavour to concentrate the
attention of others without further ado upon those branches of
literature which they find most nutritive. Among the finest appreciators
of this period have been Pattison and Jebb, Myers, Hutton, Dowden, A.C.
Bradley, William Archer, Richard Garnett, E. Gosse and Andrew Lang.
Birrell, Walkley and Max Beerbohm have followed rather in the wake of
the Stephens and Bagehot, who have criticized the sufficiency of the
titles made out by the more enthusiastic and lyrical eulogists. In
Arthur Symons, Walter Raleigh and G.K. Chesterton the new age possessed
critics of great originality and power, the work of the last two of whom
is concentrated upon the application of ideas about life at large to the
conceptions of literature. In exposing palpable nonsense as such, no one
perhaps did better service in criticism than the veteran Frederic
Harrison.
In the cognate work of memoir and essay, the way for which has been
greatly smoothed by co-operative lexicographical efforts such as the
_Dictionary of National Biography_, the _New English Dictionary_, the
_Victoria County History_ and the like, some of the most dexterous and
permeating work of the transition from the old century to the new was
done by H.D. Traill, Gosse, Lang, Mackail, E.V. Lucas, Lowes Dickinson,
Richard le Gallienne, A.C. Benson, Hilaire Belloc, while the open-air
relief work for dwellers pent in great cities, pioneered by Gilbert
White, has been expanded with all the zest and charm that a novel
pursuit can endow by such writers as Richard Jefferies, an open-air and
nature mystic of extraordinary power at his best, Selous, Seton
Thompson, W.H. Hudson.
Poetry.
The age has not been particularly well attuned to the efforts of the
newer poets since Coventry Patmore in the _Angel in the House_ achieved
embroidery, often extremely beautiful, upon the Tennysonian pattern, and
since Edward FitzGerald, the first of all letter-writing commentators on
life and letters since Lamb, gave a new cult to the decadent century in
his version of the Persian centoist Omar Khayyam. The prizes which in
Moore's day were all for verse have now been transferred to the prose
novel and the play, and the poets themselves have played into the hands
of the Philistines by disdaining popularity in a fond preference for
virtuosity and obscurity. Most kinds of the older verse, however, have
been well represented, descriptive and elegiac poetry in particular by
Robert Bridges and William Watson; the music of the waters of the
western sea and its isles by W.B. Yeats, Synge, Moira O'Neill, "Fiona
Macleod" and an increasing group of Celtic bards; the highly wrought
verse of the 17th-century lyrists by Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson,
Ernest Dowson; the simplicity of a more popular strain by W.H. Davies,
of a brilliant rhetoric by John Davidson, and of a more intimate romance
by Sturge Moore and Walter de la Mare. Light verse has never, perhaps,
been represented more effectively since Praed and Calverley and Lewis
Carroll than by Austin Dobson, Locker Lampson, W.S. Gilbert and Owen
Seaman. The names of C.M. Doughty, Alfred Noyes, Herbert Trench and
Laurence Binyon were also becoming prominent at the opening of the 20th
century. For originality in form and substance the palm rests in all
probability with A.E. Housman, whose _Shropshire Lad_ opens new avenues
and issues, and with W.E. Henley, whose town and hospital poems had a
poignant as well as an ennobling strain. The work of Henry Newbolt, Mrs.
Meynell and Stephen Phillips showed a real poetic gift. Above all these,
however, in the esteem of many reign the verses of George Meredith and
of Thomas Hardy, whose _Dynasts_ was widely regarded by the best judges
as the most remarkable literary production of the new century.
Drama.
The new printed and acted drama dates almost entirely from the late
'eighties. Tom Robertson in the 'seventies printed nothing, and his
plays were at most a timid recognition of the claims of the drama to
represent reality and truth. The enormous superiority of the French
drama as represented by Augier, Dumas _fils_ and Sardou began to dawn
slowly upon the English consciousness. Then in the 'eighties came Ibsen,
whose daring in handling actuality was only equalled by his intrepid
stage-craft. Oscar Wilde and A.W. Pinero were the first to discover how
the spirit of these new discoveries might be adapted to the English
stage. Gilbert Murray, with his fascinating and tantalizing versions
from Euripides, gave a new flexibility to the expansion that was going
on in English dramatic ideas. Bernard Shaw and his disciples,
conspicuous among them Granville Barker, gave a new seasoning of wit to
the absolute novelties of subject, treatment and application with which
they transfixed the public which had so long abandoned thought upon
entering the theatre. This new adventure enjoyed a _succès de stupeur_,
the precise range of which can hardly be estimated, and the force of
which is clearly by no means spent.
20th-century changes.
English literature in the 20th century still preserves some of the old
arrangements and some of the consecrated phrases of patronage and
aristocracy; but the circumstances of its production were profoundly
changed during the 19th century. By 1895 English literature had become a
subject of regular instruction for a special degree at most of the
universities, both in England and America. This has begun to lead to
research embodied in investigations which show that what were regarded
as facts in connexion with the earlier literature can be regarded so no
longer. It has also brought comparative and historical treatment of a
closer kind and on a larger scale to bear upon the evolution of literary
types. On the other hand it has concentrated an excessive attention
perhaps upon the grammar and prosody and etymology of literature, it has
stereotyped the admiration of lifeless and obsolete forms, and has
substituted antiquarian notes and ready-made commentary for that live
enjoyment, which is essentially individual and which tends insensibly to
evaporate from all literature as soon as the circumstance of it changes.
It is prone, moreover, to force upon the immature mind a rapt admiration
for the mirror before ever it has scanned the face of the original. A
result due rather to the general educational agencies of the time is
that, while in the middle of the 19th century one man could be found to
write competently on a given subject, in 1910 there were fifty. Books
and apparatus for reading have multiplied in proportion. The fact of a
book having been done quite well in a certain way is no longer any bar
whatever to its being done again without hesitation in the same way.
This continual pouring of ink from one bottle into another is calculated
gradually to raise the standard of all subaltern writing and compiling,
and to leave fewer and fewer books securely rooted in a universal
recognition of their intrinsic excellence, power and idiosyncrasy or
personal charm. Even then, of what we consider first-rate in the 19th
century, for instance, but a very small residuum can possibly survive.
The one characteristic that seems likely to cling and to differentiate
this voluble century is its curious reticence, of which the 20th century
has already made uncommonly short work. The new playwrights have
untaught England a shyness which came in about the time of Southey,
Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott. That the best literature has survived
hitherto is at best a pious opinion. As the area of experience grows it
is more and more difficult to circumscribe or even to describe the
supreme best, and such attempts have always been responsible for base
superstition. It is clear that some limitation of the literary
stock-in-trade will become increasingly urgent as time goes on, and the
question may well occur as to whether we are insuring the right baggage.
The enormous apparatus of literature at the present time is suitable
only to a peculiar phasis and manner of existence. Some hold to the
innate and essential aristocracy of literature; others that it is bound
to develop on the popular and communistic side, for that at present,
like machinery and other deceptive benefits, it is a luxury almost
exclusively advantageous to the rich. But to predict the direction of
change in literature is even more futile than to predict the direction
of change in human history, for of all factors of history, literature,
if one of the most permanent, is also one of the least calculable.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--_The Age of Wordsworth_ and _The Age of
Tennyson_ in Bell's "Handbooks of English Literature" are of special
value for this period. Prof. Dowden's and Prof. Saintsbury's
19th-century studies fill in interstices; and of the "Periods of
European Literature," the _Romantic Revolt_ and _Romantic Triumph_ are
pertinent, as are the literary chapters in vols. x. and xi. of the
_Cambridge Modern History_. Of more specific books George Brandes's
_Literary Currents of the Nineteenth Century_, Stedman's _Victorian
Poets_, Holman Hunt's _Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood_, R.H. Hutton's
_Contemporary Thought_ (and companion volumes), Sir Leslie Stephen's
_The Utilitarians_, Buxton Forman's _Our Living Poets_, Dawson's
_Victorian Novelists_, Thureau-Dangin's _Renaissance des idées
catholiques en Angleterre_, A. Chevrillon's _Sydney Smith et la
renaissance des idées libérales en Angleterre_, A.W. Benn's _History
of English Thought in the Nineteenth Century_, the publishing
histories of Murray, Blackwood, Macvey Napier, Lockhart, &c., J.M.
Robertson's _Modern Humanists_, and the critical miscellanies of Lord
Morley, Frederic Harrison, W. Bagehot, A. Birrell, Andrew Lang and E.
Gosse, will be found, in their several degrees, illuminating. The
chief literary lives are those of Scott by Lockhart, Carlyle by
Froude, Macaulay by Trevelyan, Dickens by Forster and Charlotte Brontë
by Mrs Gaskell. (T. Se.)
FOOTNOTE:
[1] _Piers Plowman_ has been so long attributed as a whole to
Langland (q.v.), that in spite of modern analytical criticism it is
most conveniently discussed under that name.
ENGLISHRY (_Englescherie_), a legal name given, in the reign of William
the Conqueror, to the presentment of the fact that a person slain was an
Englishman. If an unknown man was found slain, he was presumed to be a
Norman, and the hundred was fined accordingly, unless it could be proved
that he was English. Englishry, if established, excused the hundred. Dr
W. Stubbs (_Constitutional History_, i. 196) says that possibly similar
measures were taken by King Canute. Englishry was abolished in 1340.
See _Select Cases from the Coroners' Rolls, 1265-1413_, ed. C. Gross,
Selden Society (London, 1896).
ENGRAVING, the process or result of the action implied by the verb "to
engrave" or mark by incision, the marks (whether for inscriptive,
pictorial or decorative purposes) being produced, not by simply staining
or discolouring the material (as with paint, pen or pencil), but by
cutting into or otherwise removing a portion of the substance. In the
case of pictures, the engraved surface is reproduced by printing; but
this is only one restricted sense of "engraving," since the term
includes seal-engraving (where a cast is taken), and also the chased
ornamentation of plate or gems, &c.
The word itself is derived from an O. Fr. _engraver_ (not to be confused
with the same modern French word used for the running of a boat's keel
into the beach, or for the sticking of a cart's wheels in the mud,--from
_grève_, Provençal _grava_, sands of the sea or river shore; cf. Eng.
"gravel"); it was at one time supposed that the Gr. _[Greek: graphein]_,
to write, was etymologically connected, but this view is not now
accepted, and (together with "grave," meaning either to engrave, or the
place where the dead are buried) the derivation is referred to a common
Teutonic form signifying "to dig" (O. Eng. _grafan_, Ger. _graben_). The
modern French _graver_, to engrave, is a later adoption. The idea of a
furrow, by digging or cutting, is thus historically associated with an
engraving, which may properly include the rudest marks cut into any
substance. In old English literature it included carving and sculpture,
from which it has become convenient to differentiate the terminology;
and the ancients who chiselled their writing on slabs of stone were
really "engraving." The word is not applicable, therefore, either
strictly to lithography (q.v.), nor to any of the photographic processes
(see PROCESS), except those in which the surface of the plate is
actually eaten into or lowered. In the latter case, too, it is
convenient to mark a distinction and to ignore the strict analogy. In
modern times the term is, therefore, practically restricted--outside the
spheres of gem-engraving and seal-engraving (see GEM), or the inscribing
or ornamenting of stone, plate, glass, &c.--to the art of making
original pictures (i.e. by the draughtsman himself, whether copies of
an original painting or not), either by incised lines on metal plates
(see LINE-ENGRAVING), or by the corrosion of the lines with acid (see
ETCHING), or by the roughening of a metal surface without actual lines
(see MEZZOTINT), or by cutting a wood surface away so as to leave lines
in relief (see WOOD-ENGRAVING); the result in each case may be called
generically an engraving, and in common parlance the term is applied,
though incorrectly, to the printed reproduction or "print."
Of these four varieties of engraving--line-engraving, etching, mezzotint
or wood-engraving--the woodcut is historically the earliest.
Line-engraving is now practically obsolete, while etching and mezzotint
have recently come more and more to the front. To the draughtsman the
difference in technical handling in each case has in most cases some
relation to his own artistic impulse, and to his own feeling for beauty.
A line engraver, as P.G. Hamerton said, will not see or think like an
etcher, nor an etcher like an engraver in mezzotint. Each kind, with its
own sub-varieties, has its peculiar effect and attraction. A real
knowledge of engraving can only be attained by a careful study and
comparison of the prints themselves, or of accurate facsimiles, so that
books are of little use except as guides to prints when the reader
happens to be unaware of their existence, or else for their explanation
of technical processes. The value of the prints varies not only
according to the artist, but also according to the fineness of the
impression, and the "state" (or stage) in the making of the plate, which
may be altered from time to time. "Proofs" may also be taken from the
plate, and even touched up by the artist, in various stages and various
degrees of fineness of impression.
The department of art-literature which classifies prints is called
_Iconography_, and the classifications adopted by iconographers are of
the most various kinds. For example, if a complete book were written on
Shakespearian iconography it would contain full information about all
prints illustrating the life and works of Shakespeare, and in the same
way there may be the iconography of a locality or of a single event.
The history of engraving is a part of iconography, and various
histories of the art exist in different languages. In England W.Y.
Ottley wrote an _Early History of Engraving_, published in two volumes
4to (1816), and began what was intended to be a series of notices on
engravers and their works. The facilities for the reproduction of
engravings by the photographic processes have of late years given an
impetus to iconography. One of the best modern writers on the subject
was Georges Duplessis, the keeper of prints in the national library of
France. He wrote a _History of Engraving in France_ (1888), and
published many notices of engravers to accompany the reproductions by
M. Amand Durand. He is also the author of a useful little manual
entitled _Les Merveilles de la gravure_ (1871). Jansen's work on the
origin of wood and plate engraving, and on the knowledge of prints of
the 15th and 16th centuries, was published at Paris in two volumes 8vo
in 1808. Among general works see Adam Bartsch, _Le Peintre-graveur_
(1803-1843); J.D. Passavant, _Le Peintre-graveur_ (1860-1864); P.G.
Hamerton, _Graphic Arts_ (1882); William Gilpin, _Essay on Prints_
(1781); J. Maberly, _The Print Collector_ (1844); W.H. Wiltshire,
_Introduction to the Study and Collection of Ancient Prints_ (1874);
F. Wedmore, _Fine Prints_ (1897). See also the lists of works given
under the separate headings for LINE-ENGRAVING, ETCHING, MEZZOTINT and
WOOD-ENGRAVING.
ENGROSSING, a term used in two legal senses: (1) the writing or copying
of a legal or other document in a fair large hand (_en gros_), and (2)
the buying up of goods wholesale in order to sell at a higher price so
as to establish a monopoly. The word "engross" has come into English
ultimately from the Late Lat. _grossus_, thick, stout, large, through
the A. Fr. _engrosser_, Med. Lat. _ingrossare_, to write in a large
hand, and the French phrase _en gros_, in gross, wholesale. Engrossing
and the kindred practices of forestalling and regrating were early
regarded as serious offences in restraint of trade, and were punishable
both at common law and by statute. They were of more particular
importance in relation to the distribution of corn supplies. The statute
of 1552 defines engrossing as "buying corn growing, or any other corn,
grain, butter, cheese, fish or other dead victual, with _intent to sell
the same again_." The law forbade all dealing in corn as an article of
ordinary merchandise, apart from questions of foreign import or export.
The theory was that when corn was plentiful in any district it should be
consumed at what it would bring, without much respect to whether the
next harvest might be equally abundant, or to what the immediate wants
of an adjoining province of the same country might be. The first statute
on the subject appears to have been passed in the reign of Henry III.,
though the general policy had prevailed before that time both in popular
prejudice and in the feudal custom. The statute of Edward VI. (1552) was
the most important, and in it the offences were elaborately defined; by
this statute any one who bought corn to sell it again was made liable to
two months' imprisonment with forfeit of the corn. A second offence was
punished by six months' imprisonment and forfeit of double the value of
the corn, and a third by the pillory and utter ruin. Severe as this
statute was, liberty was given by it to transport corn from one part of
the country under licence to men of approved probity, which implied that
there was to be some buying of corn to sell it again and elsewhere.
Practically "engrossing" came to be considered buying wholesale to sell
again wholesale. "Forestalling" was different, and the statutes were
directed against a class of dealers who went forward and bought or
contracted for corn and other provisions, and spread false rumours in
derogation of the public and open markets appointed by law, to which our
ancestors appear to have attached much importance, and probably in these
times not without reason. The statute of Edward VI. was modified by many
subsequent enactments, particularly by the statute of 1663, by which it
was declared that there could be no "engrossing" of corn when the price
did not exceed 48s. per quarter, and which Adam Smith recognized, though
it adhered to the variable and unsatisfactory element of price, as
having contributed more to the progress of agriculture than any previous
law in the statute book. In 1773 these injurious statutes were
abolished, but the penal character of "engrossing" and "forestalling"
had a root in the common law of England, as well as in the popular
prejudice, which kept the evil alive to a later period. As the public
enlightenment increased the judges were at no loss to give
interpretations of the common law consistent with public policy.
Subsequent to the act of 1773, for example, there was a case of
conviction and punishment for engrossing hops, _R._ v. _Waddington_,
1800, 1 East, 143, but though this was deemed a sound and proper
judgment at the time, yet it was soon afterwards overthrown in other
cases, on the ground that buying wholesale to sell wholesale was not in
"restraint of trade" as the former judges had assumed.
In 1800, one John Rusby was indicted for having bought ninety quarters
of oats at 41s. per quarter and selling thirty of them at 43s. the same
day. Lord Kenyon, the presiding judge, animadverted strongly against the
repealing act of 1773, and addressed the jury strongly against the
accused. Rusby was heavily fined, but, on appeal, the court was equally
divided as to whether engrossing, forestalling and regrating were still
offences at common law. In 1844, all the statutes, English, Irish and
Scottish, defining the offences, were repealed and with them the
supposed common law foundation. In the United States there have been
strong endeavours by the government to suppress trusts and combinations
for engrossing. (See also TRUSTS; MONOPOLY.)
AUTHORITIES.--D. Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_ (1805); J.S.
Girdler, _Observations on Forestalling, Regrating and Ingrossing_
(1800); W. Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_; W.J.
Ashley, _Economic History_; Sir J. Stephen, _History of Criminal Law_;
Murray, _New English Dictionary_.
ENGYON, an ancient town of the interior of Sicily, a Cretan colony,
according to legend, and famous for an ancient temple of the Matres
which aroused the greed of Verres. Its site is uncertain; some
topographers have identified it with Gangi, a town 20 m. S.S.E. of
Cefalu, but only on the ground of the similarity of the two names.
See C. Hülsen in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopädie_, v. 2568.
ENID, a city and the county-seat of Garfield county, Oklahoma, U.S.A.,
about 55 m. N.W. of Guthrie. Pop. (1900) 3444; (1907) 10,087 (355 of
negro descent); (1910) 13,799. Enid is served by the St Louis & San
Francisco, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé, and the Chicago, Rock Island
& Pacific railways, and by several branch lines, and is an important
railway centre. It is the seat of the Oklahoma Christian University
(1907; co-educational). Enid is situated in a flourishing agricultural
and stock-raising region, of which it is the commercial centre, and has
various manufactures, including lumber, brick, tile and flour. Natural
gas was discovered near the city in 1907. Enid was founded in 1893 and
was chartered as a city in the same year.
ENIGMA (Gr. [Greek: ainigma]), a riddle or puzzle, especially a form of
verse or prose composition in which the answer is concealed by means of
metaphors. Such were the famous riddle of the Sphinx and the riddling
answers of the ancient oracles. The composition of enigmas was a
favourite amusement in Greece and prizes were often given at banquets
for the best solution of them (Athen. x. 457). In France during the 17th
century enigma-making became fashionable. Boileau, Charles Rivière
Dufresny and J.J. Rousseau did not consider it beneath their literary
dignity. In 1646 the abbé Charles Cotier (1604-1682) published a
_Recueil des énigmes de ce temps_. The word is applied figuratively to
anything inexplicable or difficult of understanding.
ENKHUIZEN, a seaport of Holland in the province of North Holland, on the
Zuider Zee, and a railway terminus, 11½ m. N.E. by E. of Hoorn, with
which it is also connected by steam tramway. In conjunction with the
railway service there is a steamboat ferry to Stavoren in Friesland.
Pop. (1900) 6865. Enkhuizen, like its neighbour Hoorn, exhibits many
interesting examples of domestic architecture dating from the 16th and
17th centuries, when it was an important and flourishing city. The
façades of the houses are usually built in courses of brick and stone,
and adorned with carvings, sculptures and inscriptions. Some ruined
gateways belonging to the old city walls are still standing; among them
being the tower-gateway called the Dromedary (1540), which overlooks the
harbour. The tower contains several rooms, one of which was formerly
used as a prison. Among the churches mention must be made of the
Zuiderkerk, or South church, with a conspicuous tower (1450-1525); and
the Westerkerk, or West church, which possesses a beautifully carved
Renaissance screen and pulpit of the middle of the 16th century, and a
quaint wooden bell-house (1519) built for use before the completion of
the bell-tower. There are also a Roman Catholic church and a synagogue.
The picturesque town hall (1688) contains some finely decorated rooms
with paintings by Johan van Neck, a collection of local antiquities and
the archives. Other interesting buildings are the orphanage (1616),
containing some 17th and 18th century portraits and ancient leather
hangings; the weigh-house (1559), the upper story of which was once used
by the Surgeons' Gild, several of the window-panes (dating chiefly from
about 1640), being decorated with the arms of various members; the
former mint (1611); and the ancient assembly-house of the dike-reeves of
Holland and West Friesland. Enkhuizen possesses a considerable fishing
fleet and has some shipbuilding and rope-making, as well as market
traffic.
ENNEKING, JOHN JOSEPH (1841- ), American landscape painter, was born,
of German ancestry, in Minster, Ohio, on the 4th of October 1841. He was
educated at Mount St Mary's College, Cincinnati, served in the American
Civil War in 1861-1862, studied art in New York and Boston, and gave it
up because his eyes were weak, only to return to it after failing in the
manufacture of tinware. In 1873-1876 he studied in Munich under Schleich
and Leier, and in Paris under Daubigny and Bonnat; and in 1878-1879 he
studied in Paris again and sketched in Holland. Enneking is a
"plein-airist," and his favourite subject is the "November twilight" of
New England, and more generally the half lights of early spring, late
autumn, and winter dawn and evening.
ENNIS (Gaelic, _Innis_, an island; Irish, _Ennis_ and _Inish_), the
county town of Co. Clare, Ireland, in the east parliamentary division,
on the river Fergus, 25 m. W.N.W. from Limerick by the Great Southern &
Western railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 5093. It is the junction
for the West Clare line. Ennis has breweries, distilleries and extensive
flour-mills; and in the neighbourhood limestone is quarried. The
principal buildings are the Roman Catholic church, which is the
pro-cathedral of the diocese of Killaloe; the parish church formed out
of the ruins of the Franciscan Abbey, founded in 1240 by Donough Carbrac
O'Brien; a school on the foundation of Erasmus Smith, and various county
buildings. The abbey, though greatly mutilated, is full of interesting
details, and includes a lofty tower, a marble screen, a chapter-house, a
notable east window, several fine tombs and an altar of St Francis. On
the site of the old court-house a colossal statue in white limestone of
Daniel O'Connell was erected in 1865. The interesting ruins of Clare
Abbey, founded in 1194 by Donnell O'Brien, king of Munster, are half-way
between Ennis and the village of Clare Castle. O'Brien also founded
Killone Abbey, beautifully situated on the lough of the same name, 3 m.
S. of the town, possessing the unusual feature of a crypt and a holy
well. Five miles N.W. of Ennis is Dysert O'Dea, with interesting
ecclesiastical remains, a cross, a round tower and a castle. Ennis was
incorporated in 1612, and returned two members to the Irish parliament
until the Union, and thereafter one to the Imperial parliament until
1885.
ENNISCORTHY, a market town of Co. Wexford, Ireland, in the north
parliamentary division, on the side of a steep hill above the Slaney,
which here becomes navigable for barges of large size. Pop. of urban
district (1901) 5458. It is 77½ m. S. by W. from Dublin by the Dublin &
South-Eastern railway. There are breweries and flour-mills; tanning,
distilling and woollen manufactures are also prosecuted to some extent,
and the town is the centre of the agricultural trade for the district,
which is aided by the water communication with Wexford. There are
important fowl markets and horse-fairs. Enniscorthy was taken by
Cromwell in 1649, and in 1798 was stormed and burned by the rebels,
whose main forces encamped on an eminence called Vinegar Hill, which
overlooks the town from the east. The old castle of Enniscorthy, a
massive square pile with a round tower at each corner, is one of the
earliest military structures of the Anglo-Norman invaders, founded by
Raymond le Gros (1176). Ferns, the next station to Enniscorthy on the
railway towards Dublin, was the seat of a former bishopric, and the
modernized cathedral, and ruins of a church, an Augustinian monastery
founded by Dermod Mac-Morrough about 1160, and a castle of the Norman
period, are still to be seen. Enniscorthy was incorporated by James I.,
and sent two members to the Irish parliament until the Union.
ENNISKILLEN, WILLIAM WILLOUGHBY COLE, 3RD EARL OF (1807-1886), British
palaeontologist, was born on the 25th of January 1807, and educated at
Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford. As Lord Cole he early began to devote
his leisure to the study and collection of fossil fishes, with his
friend Sir Philip de M.G. Egerton, and he amassed a fine collection at
Florence Court, Enniskillen--including many specimens that were
described and figured by Agassiz and Egerton. This collection was
subsequently acquired by the British Museum. He died on the 21st of
November 1886, being succeeded by his son (b. 1845) as 4th earl.
The first of the Coles (an old Devonshire and Cornwall family) to settle
in Ireland was Sir William Cole (d. 1653), who was "undertaker" of the
northern plantation and received a grant of a large property in
Fermanagh in 1611, and became provost and later governor of Enniskillen.
In 1760 his descendant John Cole (d. 1767) was created Baron
Mountflorence, and the latter's son, William Willoughby Cole
(1736-1803), was in 1776 created Viscount Enniskillen and in 1789 earl.
The 1st earl's second son, Sir Galbraith Lowry Cole (1772-1842), was a
prominent general in the Peninsular War, and colonel of the 27th
Inniskillings, the Irish regiment with whose name the family was
associated.
ENNISKILLEN [INNISKILLING], a market town and the county town of county
Fermanagh, Ireland, in the north parliamentary division, picturesquely
situated on an island in the river connecting the upper and lower loughs
Erne, 116 m. N.W. from Dublin by the Great Northern railway. Pop. of
urban district (1901) 5412. The town occupies the whole island, and is
connected with two suburbs on the mainland on each side by two bridges.
It has a brewery, tanneries and a small manufactory of cutlery, and a
considerable trade in corn, pork and flax. In 1689 Enniskillen defeated
a superior force sent against it by James II. at the battle of Crom; and
part of the defenders of the town were subsequently formed into a
regiment of cavalry, which still retains the name of the Inniskilling
Dragoons. The town was incorporated by James I., and returned two
members to the Irish parliament until the Union; thereafter it returned
one to the Imperial parliament until 1885. There are wide communications
by water by the river and the upper and lower loughs Erne, and by the
Ulster canal to Belfast. The loughs contain trout, large pike and other
coarse fish. Two miles from Enniskillen in the lower lough is Devenish
Island, with its celebrated monastic remains. The abbey of St Mary here
was founded by St Molaise (Laserian) in the 6th century; here too are a
fine round tower 85 ft. high, remains of domestic buildings, a holed
stone and a tall well-preserved cross. The whole is carefully preserved
by the commissioners of public works under the Irish Church Act of 1869.
Steamers ply between Enniskillen and Belleek on the lower lake, and
between Enniskillen and Knockninny on the upper lake.
ENNIUS, QUINTUS (239-170 B.C.), ancient Latin poet, was born at Rudiae
in Calabria. Familiar with Greek as the language in common use among the
cultivated classes of his district, and with Oscan, the prevailing
dialect of lower Italy, he further acquired a knowledge of Latin; to use
his own expression (Gellius xvii. 17), he had three "hearts" (_corda_),
the Latin word being used to signify the seat of intelligence. He is
said (Servius on _Aen._ vii. 691) to have claimed descent from one of
the legendary kings of his native district, Messapus the eponymous hero
of Messapia, and this consciousness of ancient lineage is in accordance
with the high self-confident tone of his mind, with his sympathy with
the dominant genius of the Roman republic, and with his personal
relations to the members of her great families. Of his early years
nothing is directly known, and we first hear of him in middle life as
serving during the Second Punic War, with the rank of centurion, in
Sardinia, in the year 204, where he attracted the attention of Cato the
elder, and was taken by him to Rome in the same year. Here he taught
Greek and adapted Greek plays for a livelihood, and by his poetical
compositions gained the friendship of the greatest men in Rome. Amongst
these were the elder Scipio and Fulvius Nobilior, whom he accompanied on
his Aetolian campaign (189). Through the influence of Nobilior's son,
Ennius subsequently obtained the privilege of Roman citizenship (Cicero,
_Brutus_, 20. 79). He lived plainly and simply on the Aventine with the
poet Caecilius Statius. He died at the age of 70, immediately after
producing his tragedy _Thyestes_. In the last book of his epic poem, in
which he seems to have given various details of his personal history, he
mentions that he was in his 67th year at the date of its composition. He
compared himself, in contemplation of the close of the great work of his
life, to a gallant horse which, after having often won the prize at the
Olympic games, obtained his rest when weary with age. A similar feeling
of pride at the completion of a great career is expressed in the
memorial lines which he composed to be placed under his bust after
death,--"Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning;
for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men." From
the impression stamped on his remains, and from the testimony of his
countrymen, we think of him as a man of a robust, sagacious and cheerful
nature (Hor. _Epp._ ii. 1. 50; Cic. _De sen._ 5); of great industry and
versatility; combining imaginative enthusiasm and a vein of religious
mysticism with a sceptical indifference to popular beliefs and a scorn
of religious imposture; and tempering the grave seriousness of a Roman
with a genial capacity for enjoyment (Hor. _Epp._ i. 19. 7).
Till the appearance of Ennius, Roman literature, although it had
produced the epic poem of Naevius and some adaptations of Greek tragedy,
had been most successful in comedy. Naevius and Plautus were men of
thoroughly popular fibre. Naevius suffered for his attacks on members of
the aristocracy, and, although Plautus carefully avoids any direct
notice of public matters, yet the bias of his sympathies is indicated in
several passages of his extant plays. Ennius, on the other hand, was by
temperament in thorough sympathy with the dominant aristocratic element
in Roman life and institutions. Under his influence literature became
less suited to the popular taste, more especially addressed to a limited
and cultivated class, but at the same time more truly expressive of what
was greatest and most worthy to endure in the national sentiment and
traditions. He was a man of many-sided activity. He devoted attention to
questions of Latin orthography, and is said to have been the first to
introduce shorthand writing in Latin. He attempted comedy, but with so
little success that in the canon of Volcacius Sedigitus he is mentioned,
solely as a mark of respect "for his antiquity," tenth and last in the
list of comic poets. He may be regarded also as the inventor of Roman
satire, in its original sense of a "medley" or "miscellany," although it
was by Lucilius that the character of aggressive and censorious
criticism of men and manners was first imparted to that form of
literature. The word _satura_ was originally applied to a rude scenic
and musical performance, exhibited at Rome before the introduction of
the regular drama. The _saturae_ of Ennius were collections of writings
on various subjects, written in various metres and contained in four (or
six) books. Among these were included metrical versions of the physical
speculations of Epicharmus, of the gastronomic researches of
Archestratus of Gela (_Hedyphagetica_), and, probably, of the
rationalistic doctrines of Euhemerus. It may be noticed that all these
writers whose works were thus introduced to the Romans were Sicilian
Greeks. Original compositions were also contained in these _saturae_,
and among them the panegyric on Scipio, unless this was a drama. The
satire of Ennius seems to have resembled the more artistic satire of
Horace in its record of personal experiences, in the occasional
introduction of dialogue, in the use made of fables with a moral
application, and in the didactic office which it assumed.
But the chief distinction of Ennius was gained in tragic and narrative
poetry. He was the first to impart to the Roman adaptations of Greek
tragedy the masculine dignity, pathos and oratorical fervour which
continued to animate them in the hands of Pacuvius and Accius, and, when
set off by the acting of Aesopus, called forth vehement applause in the
age of Cicero. The titles of about twenty-five of his tragedies are
known to us, and a considerable number of fragments, varying in length
from a few words to about fifteen lines, have been preserved. These
tragedies were for the most part adaptations and, in some cases,
translations from Euripides. One or two were original dramas, of the
class called _praetextae_, i.e. dramas founded on Roman history or
legend; thus, the _Ambracia_ treated of the capture of that city by his
patron Nobilior, the _Sabinae_ of the rape of the Sabine women. The
heroes and heroines of the Trojan cycle, such as Achilles, Ajax,
Telamon, Cassandra, Andromache, were prominent figures in some of the
dramas adapted from the Greek. Several of the more important fragments
are found in Cicero, who expresses a great admiration for their manly
fortitude and dignified pathos. In these remains of the tragedies of
Ennius we can trace indications of strong sympathy with the nobler and
bolder elements of character, of vivid realization of impassioned
situations, and of sagacious observation of life. The frank bearing,
fortitude and self-sacrificing heroism of the best type of the soldierly
character find expression in the persons of Achilles, Telamon and
Eurypylus; and a dignified and passionate tenderness of feeling makes
itself heard in the lyrical utterances of Cassandra and Andromache. The
language is generally nervous and vigorous, occasionally vivified with
imaginative energy. But it flows less smoothly and easily than that of
the dialogue of Latin comedy. It shows the same tendency to aim at
effect by alliterations, assonances and plays on words. The rudeness of
early art is most apparent in the inequality of the metres in which both
the dialogue and the "recitative" are composed.
But the work which gained him his reputation as the Homer of Rome, and
which called forth the admiration of Cicero and Lucretius and frequent
imitation from Virgil, was the _Annales_, a long narrative poem in
eighteen books, containing the record of the national story from
mythical times to his own. Although the whole conception of the work
implies that confusion of the provinces of poetry and history which was
perpetuated by later writers, and especially by Lucan and Silius
Italicus, yet it was a true instinct of genius to discern in the idea of
the national destiny the only possible motive of a Roman epic. The
execution of the poem (to judge from the fragments, amounting to about
six hundred lines), although rough, unequal and often prosaic, seems to
have combined the realistic fidelity and freshness of feeling of a
contemporary chronicle with the vivifying and idealizing power of
genius. Ennius prided himself especially on being the first to form the
strong speech of Latium into the mould of the Homeric hexameter in place
of the old Saturnian metre. And although it took several generations of
poets to beat their music out to the perfection of the Virgilian
cadences, yet in the rude adaptation of Ennius the secret of what
ultimately became one of the grandest organs of literary expression was
first discovered and revealed. The inspiring idea of the poem was
accepted, purified of all alien material, and realized in artistic shape
by Virgil in his national epic. He deliberately imparted to that poem
the charm of antique associations by incorporating with it much of the
phraseology and sentiment of Ennius. The occasional references to Roman
history in Lucretius are evidently reminiscences of the _Annales_. He as
well as Cicero speaks of him with pride and affection as "Ennius
noster." Of the great Roman writers Horace had least sympathy with him;
yet he testifies to the high esteem in which he was held during the
Augustan age. Ovid expresses the grounds of that esteem when he
characterizes him as
"Ingenio maximus, arte rudis."
A sentence of Quintilian expresses the feeling of reverence for his
genius and character, mixed with distaste for his rude workmanship, with
which the Romans of the early empire regarded him: "Let us revere Ennius
as we revere the sacred groves, hallowed by antiquity, whose massive and
venerable oak trees are not so remarkable for beauty as for the
religious awe which they inspire" (_Inst. or._ x. 1. 88).
Editions of the fragments by L. Müller (1884), L. Valmaggi (1900, with
notes), J. Vahlen (1903); monographs by L. Müller (1884 and 1893), C.
Pascal, _Studi sugli scrittori Latini_ (1900); see also Mommsen,
_History of Rome_, bk. iii. ch. 14. On Virgil's indebtedness to Ennius
see V. Crivellari, _Quae praecipue hausit Vergilius ex Naevio et
Ennio_ (1889).
ENNODIUS, MAGNUS FELIX (A.D. 474-521), bishop of Pavia, Latin
rhetorician and poet. He was born at Arelate (Arles) and belonged to a
distinguished but impecunious family. Having lost his parents at an
early age, he was brought up by an aunt at Ticinum (Pavia); according to
some, at Mediolanum (Milan). After her death he was received into the
family of a pious and wealthy young lady, to whom he was betrothed. It
is not certain whether he actually married this lady; she seems to have
lost her money and retired to a convent, whereupon Ennodius entered the
Church, and was ordained deacon (about 493) by Epiphanius, bishop of
Pavia. From Pavia he went to Milan, where he continued to reside until
his elevation to the see of Pavia about 515. During his stay at Milan he
visited Rome and other places, where he gained a reputation as a teacher
of rhetoric. As bishop of Pavia he played a considerable part in
ecclesiastical affairs. On two occasions (in 515 and 517) he was sent to
Constantinople by Theodoric on an embassy to the emperor Anastasius, to
endeavour to bring about a reconciliation between the Eastern and
Western churches. He died on the 17th of July 521; his epitaph still
exists in the basilica of St Michael at Pavia (_Corpus Inscriptionum
Latinarum_, v. pt. ii. No. 6464).
Ennodius is one of the best representatives of the twofold (pagan and
Christian) tendency of 5th-century literature, and of the Gallo-Roman
clergy who upheld the cause of civilization and classical literature
against the inroads of barbarism. But his anxiety not to fall behind his
classical models--the chief of whom was Virgil--his striving after
elegance and grammatical correctness, and a desire to avoid the
commonplace have produced a turgid and affected style, which, aggravated
by rhetorical exaggerations and popular barbarisms, makes his works
difficult to understand. It has been remarked that his poetry is less
unintelligible than his prose.
The numerous writings of this versatile ecclesiastic may be divided
into (1) letters, (2) miscellanies, (3) discourses, (4) poems. The
letters on a variety of subjects, addressed to high church and state
officials, are valuable for the religious and political history of the
period. Of the miscellanies, the most important are: _The Panegyric of
Theodoric_, written to thank the Arian prince for his tolerance of
Catholicism and support of Pope Symmachus (probably delivered before
the king on the occasion of his entry into Ravenna or Milan); like all
similar works, it is full of flattery and exaggeration, but if used
with caution is a valuable authority; _The Life of St Epiphanius_,
bishop of Pavia, the best written and perhaps the most important of
all his writings, an interesting picture of the political activity and
influence of the church; _Eucharisticon de Vita Sua_, a sort of
"confessions," after the manner of St Augustine; the description of
the enfranchisement of a slave with religious formalities in the
presence of a bishop; _Paraenesis didascalica_, an educational guide,
in which the claims of grammar as a preparation for the study of
rhetoric, the mother of all the sciences, are strongly insisted on.
The discourses (_Dictiones_) are sacred, scholastic, controversial and
ethical. The discourse on the anniversary of Laurentius, bishop of
Milan, is the chief authority for the life of that prelate; the
scholastic discourses, rhetorical exercises for the schools, contain
eulogies of classical learning, distinguished professors and pupils;
the controversial deal with imaginary charges, the subjects being
chiefly borrowed from the _Controversiae_ of the elder Seneca; the
ethical harangues are put into the mouth of mythological personages
(e.g. the speech of Thetis over the body of Achilles). Amongst the
poems mention may be made of two _Itineraria_, descriptions of a
journey from Milan to Brigantium (Briançon) and of a trip on the Po;
an apology for the study of profane literature; an epithalamium, in
which Love is introduced as execrating Christianity; a dozen hymns,
after the manner of St Ambrose, probably intended for church use;
epigrams on various subjects, some being epigrams proper--inscriptions
for tombs, basilicas, baptisteries--others imitations of Martial,
satiric pieces and descriptions of scenery.
There are two excellent editions of Ennodius by G. Hartel (vol. vi. of
_Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum_, Vienna, 1882) and F.
Vogel (vol. vii. of _Monumenta Germaniae historica_, 1885, with
exhaustive prolegomena). On Ennodius generally consult M. Fertig,
_Ennodius und seine Zeit_ (1855-1860); A. Dubois, _La Latinité
d'Ennodius_ (1903); F. Magani, _Ennodio_ (Pavia, 1886); A. Ebert,
_Allgemeine Geschichte der Litt. des Mittelalters im Abendlande_, i.
(1889); M. Manitius, Geschichte der christlich-lateinischen Poesie
(1891); Teuffel, _Hist. of Roman Literature_, § 479 (Eng. tr., 1892).
French translation by the abbé S. Léglise (Paris, 1906 foll.).
ENNS, a town of Austria, in upper Austria, 11 m. by rail S.E. of Linz.
Pop. (1900) 4371. It is situated on the Enns near its confluence with
the Danube and possesses a 15th-century castle, an old Gothic church,
and a town hall erected in 1565. Three miles to the S.W. lies the
Augustinian monastery of St Florian, one of the oldest and largest
religious houses of Austria. Founded in the 7th century, it was occupied
by the Benedictines till the middle of the 11th century. It was
established on a firm basis in 1071, when it passed into the hands of
the Augustinians. The actual buildings, which are among the most
magnificent in Austria, were constructed between 1686 and 1745. Its
library, with over 70,000 volumes, contains valuable manuscripts and
also a fine collection of coins. Enns is one of the oldest towns in
Austria, and stands near the site of the Roman _Laureacum_. The nucleus
of the actual town was formed by a castle, called Anasiburg or Anesburg,
erected in 900 by the Bavarians as a post against the incursions of the
Hungarians. It soon attained commercial prosperity, and by a charter of
1212 was made a free town. In 1275 it passed into the hands of Rudolph
of Habsburg. An encounter between the French and the Austrian troops
took place here on the 5th of November 1805.
ENOCH ([Hebrew: hanockh, hanockh], Hanokh, Teaching or Dedication). (1)
In Gen. iv. 17, 18 (J), the eldest son of Cain, born while Cain was
building a city, which he named after Enoch; nothing is known of the
city. (2) In Gen. v. 24, &c. (P), _seventh_ in descent from Adam in the
line of Seth; he "walked with God," and after 365 years "was not for God
took him." [(1) and (2) are often regarded as both corruptions of the
_seventh_ primitive king Evedorachos (Enmeduranki in cuneiform
inscriptions), the two genealogies, Gen. iv. 16-24, v. 12-17, being
variant forms of the Babylonian list of primitive kings. Enmeduranki is
the favourite of the sun-god, cf. Enoch's 365 years.[1]] Heb. xi. 5 says
Enoch "was not found, because God _translated_ him." Later Jewish
legends represented him as receiving revelations on astronomy, &c., and
as the first author; apparently following the Babylonian account which
makes Enmeduranki receive instruction in all wisdom from the sun-god.[1]
Two apocryphal works written in the name of Enoch are extant, the _Book
of Enoch_, compiled from documents written 200-50 B.C., quoted as the
work of Enoch, Jude 14 and 15; and the _Book of the Secrets of Enoch_,
A.D. 1-50. Cf. 1 Chron. i. 3; Luke iii. 37; Wisdom iv. 7-14; Ecclus.
xliv. 16, xlix. 14. (3) Son, i.e. clan, of Midian, in Gen. xxv. 4; 1
Chron. i. 33. (4) Son, i.e. clan, of Reuben, E.V. _Hanoch_, _Henoch_, in
Gen. xlvi. 9; Exod. vi. 14; Num. xxvi. 5; 1 Chron. v. 3. There may have
been some historical connexion between these two clans with identical
names.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Eberhard Schrader, _Die Keilinschriften und das A.T._, 3rd ed.,
pp. 540 f.
ENOCH, BOOK OF. The _Book of Enoch_, or, as it is sometimes called, the
_Ethiopic Book of Enoch_, in contradistinction to the _Slavonic Book of
Enoch_ (see later), is perhaps the most important of all the apocryphal
or pseudapocryphal Biblical writings for the history of religious
thought. It is not the work of a single author, but rather a
conglomerate of literary fragments which once circulated under the names
of Enoch, Noah and possibly Methuselah. In the _Book of the Secrets of
Enoch_ we have additional portions of this literature. As the former
work is derived from a variety of Pharisaic writers in Palestine, so the
latter in its present form was written for the most part by Hellenistic
Jews in Egypt.
The _Book of Enoch_ was written in the second and first centuries B.C.
It was well known to many of the writers of the New Testament, and in
many instances influenced their thought and diction. Thus it is quoted
by name as a genuine production of Enoch in the Epistle of Jude, 14 sq.,
and it lies at the base of Matt. xix. 28 and John v. 22, 27, and many
other passages. It had also a vast indirect influence on the Palestinian
literature of the 1st century of our era. Like the Pentateuch, the
Psalms, the Megilloth, the Pirke Aboth, this work was divided into five
parts, with the critical discussion of which we shall deal below. With
the earlier Fathers and Apologists it had all the weight of a canonical
book, but towards the close of the 3rd and the beginning of the 4th
century it began to be discredited, and finally fell under the ban of
the Church. Almost the latest reference to it in the early church is
made by George Syncellus in his Chronography about A.D. 800. The book
was then lost sight of till 1773, when Bruce discovered the Ethiopic
version in Abyssinia.
_Original Language._--That the _Book of Enoch_ was written in Semitic is
now accepted on all hands, but scholars are divided as to whether the
Semitic language in question was Hebrew or Aramaic. Only one valuable
contribution on this question has been made, and that by Halévy in the
_Journal Asiatique_, Avril-Mai 1867, pp. 352-395. This scholar is of
opinion that the entire work was written in Hebrew. Since this
publication, however, fresh evidence bearing on the question has been
discovered in the Greek fragment (i.-xxxii.) found in Egypt. Since this
fragment contains three Aramaic words transliterated in the Greek, some
scholars, and among them Schürer, Lévi and N. Schmidt, have concluded
that not only are chapters i.-xxxvi. derived from an Aramaic original,
but also the remainder of the book. In support of the latter statement
no evidence has yet been offered by these or any other scholars, nor yet
has there been any attempt to meet the positive arguments of Halévy for
a Hebrew original of xxxvii.-civ., whose Hebrew reconstructions of the
text have been and must be adopted in many cases by every editor and
translator of the book. A prolonged study of the text, which has brought
to light a multitude of fresh passages the majority of which can be
explained by retranslation into Hebrew, has convinced the present
writer[1] that, whilst the evidence on the whole is in favour of an
Aramaic original of vi.-xxxvi., it is just as conclusive on behalf of
the Hebrew original of the greater part of the rest of the book.
_Versions--Greek, Latin and Ethiopic._--The Semitic original was
translated into Greek. It is not improbable that there were two distinct
Greek versions. Of the one, several fragments have been preserved in
Syncellus (A.D. 800), vi.-x. 14, viii. 4-ix. 4, xv. 8-xvi. 1; of the
other, i.-xxxii. in the Giza Greek fragment discovered in Egypt and
published by Bouriant (_Fragments grecs du livre d'Enoch_); in 1892, and
subsequently by Lods, Dillmann, Charles (_Book of Enoch_, 318 sqq.),
Swete, and finally by Radermacher and Charles (_Ethiopic Text_, 3-75).
In addition to these fragments there is that of lxxxix. 42-49 (see
Gildemeister in the _ZDMG_, 1855, pp. 621-624, and Charles, _Ethiopic
Text_, pp. 175-177). Of the Latin version only i. 9 survives, being
preserved in the Pseudo-Cyprian's _Ad Novatianum_, and cvi. 1-18
discovered by James in an 8th-century MS. of the British Museum (see
James, _Apoc. anecdota_, 146-150; Charles, _op. cit._ 219-222). This
version is made from the Greek.
The Ethiopic version, which alone preserves the entire text, is a very
faithful translation of the Greek. Twenty-eight MSS. of this version are
in the different libraries of Europe, of which fifteen are to be found
in England. This version was made from an ancestor of the Greek fragment
discovered at Giza. Some of the utterly unintelligible passages in this
fragment are literally reproduced in the Ethiopic. The same wrong order
of the text in vii.-viii. is common to both. In order to recover the
original text, it is from time to time necessary to retranslate the
Ethiopic into Greek, and the latter in turn into Aramaic or Hebrew. By
this means we are able to detect dittographies in the Greek and variants
in the original Semitic. The original was written to a large extent in
verse. The discovery of this fact is most helpful in the criticism of
the text. This version was first edited by Laurence in 1838 from one
MS., in 1851 by Dillmann from five, in 1902 by Flemming from fifteen
MSS., and in 1906 by the present writer from twenty-three.
_Translations and Commentaries._--Laurence, _The Book of Enoch_
(Oxford, 1821); Dillmann, _Das Buch Henoch_ (1853); Schodde, _The Book
of Enoch_ (1882); Charles, _The Book of Enoch_ (1893); Beer, "Das Buch
Henoch," in Kautzsch's _Apok. u. Pseud. des A.T._ (1900), ii. 217-310;
Flemming and Radermacher, _Das Buch Henoch_ (1901); Martin, _Le Livre
d'Henoch_ (1906). _Critical Inquiries._--The bibliography will be
found in Schürer, _Gesch. d. jüdischen Volkes_³, iii. 207-209, and a
short critical account of the most important of these in Charles, _op.
cit._ pp. 9-21.
_The different Elements in the Book, with their respective
Characteristics and Dates._--We have remarked above that the _Book of
Enoch_ is divided into five parts--i.-xxxvi., xxxvii.-lxxi.,
lxxii.-lxxxii., lxxxiii.-xc., xci-cviii. Some of these parts constituted
originally separate treatises. In the course of their reduction and
incorporation into a single work they suffered much mutilation and loss.
From an early date the compositeness of this work was recognized.
Scholars have varied greatly in their critical analyses of the work (see
Charles, _op. cit._ 6-21, 309-311). The analysis which gained most
acceptation was that of Dillmann (Herzog's _Realencyk._² xii. 350-352),
according to whom the present books consist of--(1) the groundwork, i.e.
i.-xxxvi., lxxii.-cv., written in the time of John Hyrcanus; (2)
xxxvii.-lxxi., xvii.-xix., before 64 B.C.; (3) the Noachic fragments,
vi. 3-8, viii. 1-3, ix. 7, x. 1, 11, xx., xxxix. 1, 2a, liv. 7-lv. 2,
lx., lxv.-lxix. 25, cvi.-cvii.; and (4) cviii., from a later hand. With
much of this analysis there is no reason to disagree. The similitudes
are undoubtedly of different authorship from the rest of the book, and
certain portions of the book are derived from the _Book of Noah_. On the
other hand, the so-called groundwork has no existence unless in the
minds of earlier critics and some of their belated followers in the
present. It springs from at least four hands, and may be roughly divided
into four parts, corresponding to the present actual divisions of the
book.
A new critical analysis of the book based on this view was given by
Charles (_op. cit._ pp. 24-33), and further developed by Clemen and
Beer. The analysis of the latter (see Herzog, _Realencyk._³ xiv. 240) is
very complex. The book, according to this scholar, is composed of the
following separate elements from the Enoch tradition:--(1) Ch. i.-v.;
(2) xii-xvi.; (3) xvii.-xix.; (4) xx.-xxxvi.; (5) xxxvii.-lxix. (from
diverse sources); (6) lxx.-lxxi.; (7) lxxii.-lxxxii.; (8)
lxxxiii.-lxxxiv.; (9) lxxxv.-xc.; (10) xciii., cxi. 12-17; (11) xci.
1-11, 18, 19, xcii., xciv.-cv.; (12) cviii., and from the Noah
tradition; (13) vi.-xi.; (14) xxxix. 1-2a, liv. 7-lv. 2, lx., lxv.-lxix.
25; (15) cvi.-cvii. Thus while Clemen finds eleven separate sources,
Beer finds fifteen. A fresh study from the hand of Appel (_Die
Composition des äthiopischen Henochbuchs_, 1906) seeks to reach a final
analysis of our book. But though it evinces considerable insight, it
cannot escape the charge of extravagance. The original book or
ground-work of Enoch consisted of i.-xvi., xx.-xxxvi. This work called
forth a host of imitators, and a number of their writings, together with
the groundwork, were edited as a Book of Methuselah, i.e. lxxii.-cv.
Then came the final redactor, who interpolated the groundwork and the
Methuselah sections, adding two others from his own pen. The Similitudes
he worked up from a series of later sources, and gave them the second
place in the final work authenticating them with the name of Noah. The
date of the publication of the entire work Appel assigns to the years
immediately following the death of Herod.
We shall now give an analysis of the book, with the dates of the
various sections where possible. Of these we shall deal with the
easiest first. _Chap. lxxii.-lxxxii._ constitutes a work in itself,
the writer of which had very different objects before him from the
writers of the rest of the book. His sole aim is to give the law of
the heavenly bodies. His work has suffered disarrangements and
interpolations at the hands of the editor of the whole work. Thus
lxxvi.-lxxvii., which are concerned with the winds, the quarters of
the heaven, and certain geographical matters, and lxxxi., which is
concerned wholly with ethical matters, are foreign to a work which
professes in its title (lxxii. 1) to deal only with the luminaries of
the heaven and their laws. Finally, lxxxii. should stand before
lxxix.; for the opening words of the latter suppose it to be already
read. The date of this section can be partially established, for it
was known to the author of Jubilees, and was therefore written before
the last third of the 2nd century B.C.
_Chaps. lxxxiii.-xc._--This section was written before 161 B.C., for
"the great horn," who is Judas the Maccabee, was still warring when
the author was writing. (Dillmann, Schürer and others take the great
horn to be John Hyrcanus, but this interpretation does violence to the
text.) These chapters recount three visions: the first two deal with
the first-world judgment; the third with the entire history of the
world till the final judgment. An eternal Messianic kingdom at the
close of the judgment is to be established under the Messiah, with its
centre in the New Jerusalem set up by God Himself.
_Chaps. xci.-civ._--In the preceding section the Maccabees were the
religious champions of the nation and the friends of the Hasidim. Here
they are leagued with the Sadducees, and are the declared foes of the
Pharisaic party. This section was written therefore after 134 B.C.,
when the breach between John Hyrcanus and the Pharisees took place and
before the savage massacres of the latter by Jannaeus (95 B.C.); for
it is not likely that in a book dealing with the sufferings of the
Pharisees such a reference would be omitted. These chapters indicate a
revolution in the religious hopes of the nation. An eternal Messianic
kingdom is no longer anticipated, but only a temporary one, at the
close of which the final judgment will ensue. The righteous dead rise
not to this kingdom but to spiritual blessedness in heaven itself--to
an immortality of the soul. This section also has suffered at the
hands of the final editor. Thus xci. 12-17, which describe the last
three weeks of the Ten-Weeks Apocalypse, should be read immediately
after xciii. 1-10, which recount the first seven weeks of the same
apocalypse. But, furthermore, the section obviously begins with xcii.
"Written by Enoch the scribe," &c. Then comes xci. 1-10 as a natural
sequel. The Ten-Weeks Apocalypse, xciii. 1-10, xci. 12-17, if it came
from the same hand, followed, and then xciv. The attempt (by Clemen
and Beer) to place the Ten-Weeks Apocalypse before 167, because it
makes no reference to the Maccabees, is not successful; for where the
history of mankind from Adam to the final judgment is despatched in
sixteen verses, such an omission need cause little embarrassment, and
still less if the author is the determined foe of the Maccabees, whom
he would probably have stigmatized as apostates, if he had mentioned
them at all, just as he similarly brands all the Sadducean priesthood
that preceded them to the time of the captivity. This Ten-Weeks
Apocalypse, therefore, we take to be the work of the writer of the
rest of xci.-civ.
_Chaps. i.-xxxvi._--This is the most difficult section of the book. It
is very composite. Chaps. vi.-xi. is apparently an independent
fragment of the Enoch Saga. It is itself compounded of the Semjaza and
Azazel myths, and in its present composite form is already presupposed
by lxxxviii.-lxxxix. 1; hence its present form is earlier than 166
B.C. It represents a primitive and very sensuous view of the eternal
Messianic kingdom on earth, seeing that the righteous beget 1000
children before they die. These chapters appear to be from the Book of
Noah; for they never refer to Enoch but to Noah only (x. 1). Moreover,
when the author of Jubilees is clearly drawing on the Book of Noah,
his subject-matter (vii. 21-25) agrees most closely with that of these
chapters in Enoch (see Charles' edition of Jubilees, pp. lxxi. sq.
264). xii.-xvi., on the other hand, belong to the Book of Enoch. These
represent for the most part what Enoch saw in a vision. Now whereas
vi.-xvi. deal with the fall of the angels, their destruction of
mankind, and the condemnation of the fallen angels, the subject-matter
now suddenly changes and xvii.-xxxvi. treat of Enoch's journeyings
through earth and heaven escorted by angels. Here undoubtedly we have
a series of doublets; for xvii.-xix. stand in this relation to
xx.-xxxvi., since both sections deal with the same subjects. Thus
xvii. 4 = xxiii.; xvii. 6 = xxii.; xviii. 1 = xxxiv.-xxxvi.; xviii.
6-9 = xxiv.-xxv., xxxii. 1-2; xviii. 11, xix. = xxi. 7-10; xviii.
12-16 = xxi. 1-6. They belong to the same cycle of tradition and
cannot be independent of each other. Chap. xx. appears to show that
xx.-xxxvi. is fragmentary, since only four of the seven angels
mentioned in xx. have anything to do in xxi.-xxxvi. Finally, i.-v.
seems to be of a different date and authorship from the rest.
_Chaps. xxxvii.-lxxi._--These constitute the well-known Similitudes.
They were written before 64 B.C., for Rome was not yet known to the
writer, and after 95 B.C., for the slaying of the righteous, of which
the writer complains, was not perpetrated by the Maccabean princes
before that date. This section consists of three
similitudes--xxxviii.-xliv., xlv.-lvii., lviii.-lxix. These are
introduced and concluded by xxxvii. and lxx. There are many
interpolations--lx., lxv.-lxix. 25 confessedly from the Book of Noah;
most probably also liv. 7-lv. 2. Whence others, such as xxxix. 1,
2a, xli. 3-8, xliii. sq., spring is doubtful. Chaps. 1, lvi. 5-lvii.
3a are likewise insertions.
In R.H. Charles's edition of Enoch, lxxi. was bracketed as an
interpolation. The writer now sees that it belongs to the text of the
Similitudes though it is dislocated from its original context. It
presents two visits of Enoch to heaven in lxxi. 1-4 and lxxi. 5-17.
The extraordinary statement in lxxi. 14, according to which Enoch is
addressed as "the Son of Man," is seen, as Appel points out, on
examination of the context to have arisen from the loss of a portion
of the text after verse 13, in which Enoch saw a heavenly being with
the Head of Days and asked the angel who accompanied him who this
being was. Then comes ver. 14, which, owing to the loss of this
passage, has assumed the form of an address to Enoch: "Thou art the
Son of Man," but which stood originally as the angel's reply to Enoch:
"This is the Son of Man," &c. Ver. 15, then, gives the message sent to
Enoch by the Son of Man. In the next verse the second person should be
changed into the third. Thus we recover the original text of this
difficult chapter. The Messianic doctrine and eschatology of this
section is unique. The Messiah is here for the first time described as
the pre-existent Son of Man (xlviii. 2), who sits on the throne of God
(xlv. 3; xlvii. 3), possesses universal dominion (lxii. 6), and is the
Judge of all mankind (lxix. 27). After the judgment there will be a
new heaven and a new earth, which will be the abode of the blessed.
THE BOOK OF THE SECRETS OR ENOCH, or _Slavonic Enoch_. This new fragment
of the Enochic literature has only recently come to light through five
MSS. discovered in Russia and Servia. Since about A.D. 500 it has been
lost sight of. It is cited without acknowledgment in the _Book of Adam
and Eve_, the _Apocalypses of Moses and Paul_, the _Sibylline Oracles_,
the _Ascension of Isaiah_, the _Epistle of Barnabas_, and referred to by
Origen and Irenaeus (see Charles, _The Book of the Secrets of Enoch_,
1895, pp. xvii-xxiv). For Charles's _editio princeps_ of this work, in
1895, Professor Morfill translated two of the best MSS., as well as
Sokolov's text, which is founded on these and other MSS. In 1896
Bonwetsch issued his _Das slavische Henochbuch_, in which a German
translation of the above two MSS. is given side by side, preceded by a
short introduction.
_Analysis._--Chaps. i.-ii. Introduction: life of Enoch: his dream, in
which he is told that he will be taken up to heaven: his admonitions
to his sons. iii.-xxxvi. What Enoch saw in heaven. iii.-vi. The first
heaven: the rulers of the stars: the great sea and the treasures of
snow, &c. vii. The second heaven: the fallen angels. viii.-x. The
third heaven: Paradise and place of punishment. xi.-xvii. The fourth
heaven: courses of the sun and moon: phoenixes. xviii. The fifth
heaven: the watchers mourning for their fallen brethren. xix. The
sixth heaven: seven bands of angels arrange and study the courses of
the stars, &c.: others set over the years, the fruits of the earth,
the souls of men. xx.-xxxvi. The seventh heaven. The Lord sitting on
His throne with the ten chief orders of angels. Enoch is clothed by
Michael in the raiment of God's glory and instructed in the secrets of
nature and of man, which he wrote down in 366 books. God reveals to
Enoch the history of the creation of the earth and the seven planets
and circles of the heaven and of man, the story of the fallen angels,
the duration of the world through 7000 years, and its millennium of
rest. xxxviii.-lxvi. Enoch returns to earth, admonishes his sons:
instructs them on what he had seen in the heavens, gives them his
books. Bids them not to swear at all nor to expect any intercession of
the departed saints for sinners. lvi.-lxiii. Methuselah asks Enoch's
blessing before he departs, and to all his sons and their families
Enoch gives fresh instruction. lxiv.-lxvi. Enoch addressed the
assembled people at Achuszan. lxvii.-lxviii. Enoch's translation.
Rejoicings of the people on behalf of the revelation given them
through Enoch.
_Language and Place of Writing._--A large part of this book was written
for the first time in Greek. This may be inferred from such statements
as (1) xxx. 13, "And I gave him a name (i.e. Adam) from the four
substances: the East, the West, the North and the South." Thus Adam's
name is here derived from the initial letters of the four quarters:
[Greek: anatolê, dusis, arktos, mesêmbria]. This derivation is
impossible in Semitic. This context is found elsewhere in the Sibyllines
iii. 24 sqq. and other Greek writings. (2) Again our author uses the
chronology of the Septuagint and in 1, 4 follows the Septuagint text of
Deuteronomy xxxii. 35 against the Hebrew. On the other hand, some
sections may wholly or in part go back to Hebrew originals. There is a
Hebrew Book of Enoch attributed to R. Ishmael ben Elisha who lived at
the close of the 1st century and the beginning of the 2nd century B.C.
This book is very closely related to the Book of the Secrets of Enoch,
or rather, to a large extent dependent upon it. Did Ishmael ben Elisha
use the Book of the Secrets of Enoch in its Greek form, or did he find
portions of it in Hebrew? At all events, extensive quotations from a
Book of Enoch are found in the rabbinical literature of the middle ages,
and the provenance of these has not yet been determined. See _Jewish
Encyc._ i. 676 seq.
But there is a stronger argument for a Hebrew original of certain
sections to be found in the fact that the Testaments of the XII.
Patriarchs appears to quote xxxiv. 2, 3 of our author in T. Napth. iv.
1, T. Benj. ix.
The book in its present form was written in Egypt. This may be inferred
(1) from the variety of speculations which it holds in common with Philo
and writings of a Hellenistic character that circulated mainly in Egypt.
(2) The Phoenixes are Chalkydries (ch. xii.)--monstrous serpents with
the heads of crocodiles--are natural products of the Egyptian
imagination. (3) The syncretistic character of the creation account
(xxv.-xxvi.) betrays Egyptian elements.
_Relation to Jewish and Christian Literature._--The existence of a
kindred literature in Neo-Hebrew has been already pointed out. We might
note besides that it is quoted in the Book of Adam and Eve, the
Apocalypse of Moses, the Apocalypse of Paul, the anonymous work _De
montibus Sina et Sion_, the Sibylline Oracles ii. 75, Origen, _De
princip._ i. 3, 2. The authors of the Ascension of Isaiah, the Apoc. of
Baruch and the Epistle of Barnabas were probably acquainted with it. In
the New Testament the similarity of matter and diction is sufficiently
strong to establish a close connexion, if not a literary dependence.
Thus with Matt. v. 9, "Blessed are the peacemakers," cf. lii. 11,
"Blessed is he who establishes peace": with Matt. v. 34, 35, 37, "Swear
not at all," cf. xlix. 1, "I will not swear by a single oath, neither by
heaven, nor by earth, nor by any other creature which God made--if there
is no truth in man, let them swear by a word yea, yea, or nay, nay."
_Date and Authorship._--The book was probably written between 30 B.C.
and A.D. 70. It was written after 30 B.C., for it makes use of Sirach,
the (Ethiopic) Book of Enoch and the Book of Wisdom. It was written
before A.D. 70; for the temple is still standing: see lix. 2.
The author was an orthodox Hellenistic Jew who lived in Egypt. He
believed in the value of sacrifices (xlii. 6; lix. 1, 2, &c), but is
careful to enforce enlightened views regarding them (xlv. 3, 4; lxi. 4,
5.) in the law, lii. 8, 9; in a blessed immortality, I. 2; lxv. 6, 8-10,
in which the righteous should be clothed in "the raiment of God's
glory," xxii. 8. In questions relating to cosmology, sin, death, &c, he
is an eclectic, and allows himself the most unrestricted freedom, and
readily incorporates Platonic (xxx. 16), Egyptian (xxv. 2) and Zend
(lviii. 4-6) elements into his system of thought.
_Anthropological Views._--All the souls of men were created before the
foundation of the world (xxiii. 5) and likewise their future abodes in
heaven or hell (xlix. 2, lviii. 5). Man's name was derived, as we have
already seen, from the four quarters of the world, and his body was
compounded from seven substances (xxx. 8). He was created originally
good: freewill was bestowed upon him with instruction in the two ways of
light and darkness, and then he was left to mould his own destiny (xxx.
15). But his preferences through the bias of the flesh took an evil
direction, and death followed as the wages of sin (xxx. 16).
LITERATURE.--Morfill and Charles, _The Book of the Secrets of Enoch_
(Oxford, 1896); Bonwetsch, "Das slavische Henochbuch," in the
_Abhandlungen der königlichen gelehrten Gesellschaft zu Göttingen_
(1896). See also Schürer _in loc._ and the Bible Dictionaries.
(R. H. C.)
FOOTNOTE:
[1] The evidence is given at length in R.H. Charles' _Ethiopic Text
of Enoch_, pp. xxvii-xxxiii.
ENOMOTO, BUYO, VISCOUNT (1839-1909), Japanese vice-admiral, was born in
Tokyo. He was the first officer sent by the Tokugawa government to study
naval science in Europe, and after going through a course of instruction
in Holland he returned in command of the frigate "Kaiyo Maru," built at
Amsterdam to order of the Yedo administration. The salient episode of
his career was an attempt to establish a republic at Hakodate. Finding
himself in command of a squadron which represented practically the whole
of Japan's naval forces, he refused to acquiesce in the deposition of
the Shogun, his liege lord, and, steaming off to Yezo (1867), proclaimed
a republic and fortified Hakodate. But he was soon compelled to
surrender. The newly organized government of the empire, however,
instead of inflicting the death penalty on him and his principal
followers, as would have been the inevitable sequel of such a drama in
previous times, punished them with imprisonment only, and four years
after the Hakodate episode, Enomoto received an important post in
Hokkaido, the very scene of his wild attempt. Subsequently (1874), as
his country's representative in St Petersburg, he concluded the treaty
by which Japan exchanged the southern half of Saghalien for the Kuriles.
He received the title of viscount in 1885, and afterwards held the
portfolios of communications, education and foreign affairs. He died at
Tokyo in 1909.
ENOS (anc. _Aenos_), a town of European Turkey, in the vilayet of
Adrianople; on the southern shore of the river Maritza, where its
estuary broadens to meet the Aegean Sea in the Gulf of Enos. Pop. (1905)
about 8000. Enos occupies a ridge of rock surrounded by broad marshes.
It is the seat of a Greek bishop, and the population is mainly Greek. It
long possessed a valuable export trade, owing to its position at the
mouth of the Maritza, the great natural waterway from Adrianople to the
sea. But its commerce has declined, owing to the unhealthiness of its
climate, to the accumulation of sandbanks in its harbour, which now only
admits small coasters and fishing-vessels, and to the rivalry of
Dédéagatch, a neighbouring seaport connected with Adrianople by rail.
ENRIQUEZ GOMEZ, ANTONIO (c. 1601-c. 1661), Spanish dramatist, poet and
novelist of Portuguese-Jewish origin, was known in the early part of his
career as Enrique Enriquez de Paz. Born at Segovia, he entered the army,
obtained a captaincy, was suspected of heresy, fled to France about
1636, assumed the name of Antonio Enriquez Gomez, and became majordomo
to Louis XIII., to whom he dedicated _Luis dado de Dios á Anna_ (Paris,
1645). Some twelve years later he removed to Amsterdam, avowed his
conversion to Judaism, and was burned in effigy at Seville on the 14th
of April 1660. He is supposed to have returned to France, and to have
died there in the following year. Three of his plays, _El Gran Cardenal
de España_, _don Gil de Albornoz_, and the two parts of _Fernan Mendez
Pinto_ were received with great applause at Madrid about 1629; in 1635
he contributed a sonnet to Montalban's collection of posthumous
panegyrics on Lope de Vega, to whose dramatic school Enriquez Gomez
belonged. The _Academias morales de las Musas_, consisting of four plays
(including _A lo que obliga el honor_, which recalls Calderon's _Médico
de su honra_), was published at Bordeaux in 1642; _La Torre de
Babilonia_, containing the two parts of _Fernan Mendez Pinto_, appeared
at Rouen in 1647; and in the preface to his poem, _El Samson Nazareno_
(Rouen, 1656), Enriquez Gomez gives the titles of sixteen other plays
issued, as he alleges, at Seville. There is no foundation for the theory
that he wrote the plays ascribed to Fernando de Zárate. His dramatic
works, though effective on the stage, are disfigured by extravagant
incidents and preciosity of diction. The latter defect is likewise
observable in the mingled prose and verse of _La Culpa del primer
peregrino_ (Rouen, 1644) and the dialogues entitled _Politica Angélica_
(Rouen, 1647). Enriquez Gomez is best represented by _El Siglo
Pitagórico y Vida de don Gregorio Guadaña_ (Rouen, 1644), a striking
picaresque novel in prose and verse which is still reprinted.
ENSCHEDE, a town in the province of Overysel, Holland, near the
Prussian frontier, and a junction station 5 m. by rail S.E. of Hengelo.
Pop. (1900) 23,141. It is important as the centre of the flourishing
cotton-spinning and weaving industries of the Twente district; while by
the railway via Gronau and Koesfeld to Dortmund it is in direct
communication with the Westphalian coalfields. Enschede possesses
several churches, an industrial trade school, and a large park intended
for the benefit of the working classes. About two-thirds of the town was
burnt down in 1862.
ENSENADA, CENON DE SOMODEVILLA, MARQUES DE LA (1702-1781), Spanish
statesman, was born at Alesanco near Logroño on the 2nd of June 1702.
When he had risen to high office it was said that his pedigree was
distinguished, but nothing is known of his parents--Francisco de
Somodevilla and his wife Francisca de Bengoechea,--nor is anything known
of his own life before he entered the civil administration of the
Spanish navy as a clerk in 1720. He served in administrative capacities
at the relief of Ceuta in that year and in the reoccupation of Oran in
1731. His ability was recognized by Don Jose Patiños, the chief minister
of King Philip V. Somodevilla was much employed during the various
expeditions undertaken by the Spanish government to put the king's sons
by his second marriage with Elizabeth Farnese, Charles and Philip, on
the thrones of Naples and Parma. In 1736 Charles, afterwards King
Charles III. of Spain, conferred on him the Neapolitan title of Marques
de la Ensenada. The name can be resolved into the three Spanish words
"en se nada," meaning "in himself nothing." The courtly flattery of the
time, and the envy of the nobles who disliked the rise of men of
Ensenada's class, seized upon this poor play on words; an _Ensenada_ is,
however, a roadstead or small bay. In 1742 he became secretary of state
and war to Philip, duke of Parma. In the following year (11th of April
1743), on the death of Patiños's successor Campillo, he was chosen by
Philip V. as minister of finance, war, the navy and the Indies (i.e. the
Colonies). Ensenada met the nomination with a becoming _nolo
episcopari_, professing that he was incapable of filling the four posts
at once. His reluctance was overborne by the king, and he became in fact
prime minister at the age of forty-one. During the remainder of the
king's reign, which lasted till the 11th of July 1746, and under his
successor Ferdinand VI. until 1754, Ensenada was the effective prime
minister. His administration is notable in Spanish history for the
vigour of his policy of internal reform. The reports on the finances and
general condition of the country, which he drew up for the new king on
his accession, and again after peace was made with England at
Aix-la-Chapelle on the 18th of October 1748, are very able and
clear-sighted. Under his direction the despotism of the Bourbon kings
became paternal. Public works were undertaken, shipping was encouraged,
trade was fostered, numbers of young Spaniards were sent abroad for
education. Many of them abused their opportunity, but on the whole the
prosperity of the country revived, and the way was cleared for the more
sweeping innovations of the following reign. Ensenada was a strong
partizan of a French alliance and of a policy hostile to England. Sir B.
Keene, the English minister, supported the Spanish court party opposed
to him, and succeeded in preventing him from adding the foreign office
to others which he held. Ensenada would probably have fallen sooner but
for the support he received from the Portuguese queen, Barbara. In 1754
he offended her by opposing an exchange of Spanish and Portuguese
colonial possessions in America which she favoured. On the 20th of July
of that year he was arrested by the king's order, and sent into mild
confinement at Granada, which he was afterwards allowed to exchange for
Puerto de Santa Maria. On the accession of Charles III. in 1759, he was
released from arrest and allowed to return to Madrid. The new king named
him as member of a commission appointed to reform the system of
taxation. Ensenada could not renounce the hope of again becoming
minister, and entered into intrigues which offended the king. On the
18th of April 1766 he was again exiled from court, and ordered to go to
Medina del Campo. He had no further share in public life, and died on
the 2nd of December 1781. Ensenada acquired wealth in office, but he was
never accused of corruption. Though, like most of his countrymen, he
suffered from the mania for grandeur, and was too fond of imposing
schemes out of all proportion with the resources of the state, he was
undoubtedly an able and patriotic man, whose administration was
beneficial to Spain.
For his administration see W. Coxe, _Memoirs of the Kings of Spain of
the House of Bourbon_ (London, 1815), but the only complete account of
Ensenada is by Don Antonio Rodriguez Villa, _Don Cenon de Somodevilla,
Marques de la Ensenada_ (Madrid, 1878). (D. H.)
ENSIGN (through the Fr. _enseigne_ from the Latin plural _insignia_), a
distinguishing token, emblem or badge such as symbols of office, or in
heraldry, the ornament or sign, such as the crown, coronet or mitre
borne above the charge or arms. The word is more particularly used of a
military or naval standard or banner. In the British navy, ensign has a
specific meaning, and is the name of a flag having a red, white or blue
ground, with the Union Jack in the upper corner next the staff. The
white ensign (which is sometimes further distinguished by having the St
George's Cross quartered upon it) is only used in the royal navy and the
royal yacht squadron, while the blue and red ensigns are the badges of
the naval reserve, some privileged companies, and the merchant service
respectively (see FLAG). Until 1871 the lowest grade of commissioned
officers in infantry regiments of the British army had the title of
ensign (now replaced by that of second lieutenant). It is the duty of
the officers of this rank to carry the colours of the regiment (see
COLOURS, MILITARY). In the 16th century ensign was corrupted into
"ancient," and was used in the two senses of a banner and the bearer of
the banner. In the United States navy, the title ensign superseded in
1862 that of _passed midshipman_. It designates an officer ranking with
second lieutenant in the army.
ENSILAGE, the process of preserving green food for cattle in an undried
condition in a silo (from Gr. [Greek: siros], Lat. _sirus_, a pit for
holding grain), i.e. a pit, an erection above ground, or stack, from
which air has been as far as possible excluded. The fodder which is the
result of the process is called silage. In various parts of Germany a
method of preserving green fodder precisely similar to that used in the
case of _Sauerkraut_ has prevailed for upwards of a century. Special
attention was first directed to the practice of ensilage by a French
agriculturist, Auguste Goffart of the district of Sologne, near Orleans,
who in 1877 published a work (_Manuel de la culture et de l'ensilage des
maïs et autres fourrages verts_) detailing the experiences of many years
in preserving green crops in silos. An English translation of Goffart's
book by J.B. Brown was published in New York in 1879, and, as various
experiments had been previously made in the United States in the way of
preserving green crops in pits, Goffart's experience attracted
considerable attention. The conditions of American dairy farming proved
eminently suitable for the ensiling of green maize fodder; and the
success of the method was soon indisputably demonstrated among the New
England farmers. The favourable results obtained in America led to much
discussion and to the introduction of the system in the United Kingdom,
where, with different conditions, success has been more qualified.
It has been abundantly proved that ensilage forms a wholesome and
nutritious food for cattle. It can be substituted for root crops with
advantage, because it is succulent and digestible; milk resulting from
it is good in quality and taste; it can be secured largely irrespective
of weather; it carries over grass from the period of great abundance and
waste to times when none would otherwise be available; and a larger
number of cattle can be supported on a given area by the use of ensilage
than is possible by the use of green crops.
Early silos were made of stone or concrete either above or below
ground, but it is recognized that air may be sufficiently excluded in a
tightly pressed stack, though in this case a few inches of the fodder
round the sides is generally useless owing to mildew. In America round
erections made of wood and 35 or 40 ft. in depth are most commonly used.
The crops suitable for ensilage are the ordinary grasses, clovers,
lucerne, vetches, oats, rye and maize, the latter being the most
important silage crop in America; various weeds may also be stored in
silos with good results, notably spurrey (_Spergula arvensis_), a most
troublesome plant in poor light soils. As a rule the crop should be mown
when in full flower, and deposited in the silo on the day of its
cutting. Maize is cut a few days before it is ripe and is shredded
before being elevated into the silo. Fair, dry weather is not essential;
but it is found that when moisture, natural and extraneous, exceeds 75%
of the whole, good results are not obtained. The material is spread in
uniform layers over the floor of the silo, and closely packed and
trodden down. If possible, not more than a foot or two should be added
daily, so as to allow the mass to settle down closely, and to heat
uniformly throughout. When the silo is filled or the stack built, a
layer of straw or some other dry porous substance may be spread over the
surface. In the silo the pressure of the material, when chaffed,
excludes air from all but the top layer; in the case of the stack extra
pressure is applied by means of planks or other weighty objects in order
to prevent excessive heating.
The closeness with which the fodder is packed determines the nature of
the resulting silage by regulating the chemical changes which occur in
the stack. When closely packed, the supply of oxygen is limited; and the
attendant acid fermentation brings about the decomposition of the
carbohydrates present into acetic, butyric and lactic acids. This
product is named "sour silage." If, on the other hand, the fodder be
unchaffed and loosely packed, or the silo be built gradually, oxidation
proceeds more rapidly and the temperature rises; if the mass be
compressed when the temperature is 140°-160° F., the action ceases and
"sweet silage" results. The nitrogenous ingredients of the fodder also
suffer change: in making sour silage as much as one-third of the
albuminoids may be converted into amino and ammonium compounds; while in
making "sweet silage" a less proportion is changed, but they become less
digestible. In extreme cases, sour silage acquires a most disagreeable
odour. On the other hand it keeps better than sweet silage when removed
from the silo.
ENSTATITE, a rock-forming mineral belonging to the group of orthorhombic
pyroxenes. It is a magnesium metasilicate, MgSiO3, often with a little
iron replacing the magnesium: as the iron increases in amount there is a
transition to bronzite (q.v.), and with still more iron to hypersthene
(q.v.). Bronzite and hypersthene were known long before enstatite, which
was first described by G.A. Kenngott in 1855, and named from [Greek:
enstatês], "an opponent," because the mineral is almost infusible before
the blowpipe: the material he described consisted of imperfect prismatic
crystals, previously thought to be scapolite, from the serpentine of
Mount Zdjar near Schönberg in Moravia. Crystals suitable for goniometric
measurement were later found in the meteorite which fell at Breitenbach
in the Erzgebirge, Bohemia. Large crystals, a foot in length and mostly
altered to steatite, were found in 1874 in the apatite veins traversing
mica-schist and hornblende-schist at the apatite mine of Kjörrestad,
near Brevig in southern Norway. Isolated crystals are of rare
occurrence, the mineral being usually found as an essential constituent
of igneous rocks; either as irregular masses in plutonic rocks (norite,
peridotite, pyroxenite, &c.) and the serpentines which have resulted by
their alteration, or as small idiormorphic crystals in volcanic rocks
(trachyte, andesite). It is also a common constituent of meteoric
stones, forming with olivine the bulk of the material: here it often
forms small spherical masses, or chondrules, with an internal radiated
structure.
Enstatite and the other orthorhombic pyroxenes are distinguished from
those of the monoclinic series by their optical characters, viz.
straight extinction, much weaker double refraction and stronger
pleochroism: they have prismatic cleavages (with an angle of 88° 16') as
well as planes of parting parallel to the planes of symmetry in the
prism-zone. Enstatite is white, greenish or brown in colour; its
hardness is 5½, and sp. gr. 3.2-3.3. (L. J. S.)
ENTABLATURE (Lat. _in_, and _tabula_, a tablet), the architectural term
for the superstructure carried by the columns in the classic orders
(q.v.). It usually consists of three members, the architrave (the
supporting member carried from column to column, pier or wall); the
frieze (the decorative member); and the cornice (the projecting and
protective member). Sometimes the frieze is omitted, as in the
entablature of the portico of the caryatides of the Erechtheum. There is
every reason to believe that the frieze did not exist in the archaic
temple of Diana at Ephesus; and it is not found in the Lycian tombs,
which are reproductions in the rock of timber structures based on early
Ionian work.
ENTADA, in botany, a woody climber belonging to the family _Leguminosae_
and common throughout the tropics. The best-known species is _Entada
scandens_, the sword-bean, so called from its large woody pod, 2 to 4
ft. in length and 3 to 4 in. broad, which contains large flat hard
polished chestnut-coloured seeds or "beans." The seeds are often made
into snuff-boxes or match-boxes, and a preparation from the kernel is
used as a drug by the natives in India. The seeds will float for a long
time in water, and are often thrown up on the north-western coasts of
Europe, having been carried by the Gulf-stream from the West Indies;
they retain their vitality, and under favourable conditions will
germinate. Linnaeus records the germination of a seed on the coast of
Norway.
ENTAIL (from Fr. _tailler_, to cut; the old derivation from _tales
haeredes_ is now abandoned), in law, a limited form of succession
(q.v.). In architecture, the term "entail" denotes an ornamental device
sunk in the ground of stone or brass, and subsequently filled in with
marble, mosaic or enamel.
ENTASIS (from Gr. [Greek: enteinein], to stretch a line or bend a bow),
in architecture, the increment given to the column (q.v.), to correct
the optical illusion which produces an apparent hollowness in an
extended straight line. It was referred to by Vitruvius (iii. 3), and
was first noticed in the columns of the Doric orders in Greek temples by
Allason in 1814, and afterwards measured and verified by Penrose. It
varies in different temples, and is not found in some: it is most
pronounced in the temple of Jupiter Olympius, most delicate in the
Erechtheum. The entasis is almost invariably introduced in the spires of
English churches.
ENTERITIS (Gr. [Greek: enteron], intestine), a general medical term for
inflammation of the bowels. According to the anatomical part specially
attacked, it is subdivided into duodenitis, jejunitis, ileitis,
typhlitis, appendicitis, colitis, proctitis. The chief symptom is
diarrhoea. The term "enteric fever" has recently come into use instead
of "typhoid" for the latter disease; but see TYPHOID FEVER.
ENTHUSIASM, a word originally meaning inspiration by a divine afflatus
or by the presence of a god. The Gr. [Greek: enthousiasmos], from which
the word is adapted, is formed from the verb [Greek: enthousiazein], to
be [Greek: entheos], possessed by a god [Greek: théos]. Applied by the
Greeks to manifestations of divine "possession," by Apollo, as in the
case of the Pythia, or by Dionysus, as in the case of the Bacchantes and
Maenads, it was also used in a transferred or figurative sense; thus
Socrates speaks of the inspiration of poets as a form of enthusiasm
(Plato, _Apol. Soc._ 22 C). Its uses, in a religious sense, are confined
to an exaggerated or wrongful belief in religious inspiration, or to
intense religious fervour or emotion. Thus a Syrian sect of the 4th
century was known as "the Enthusiasts"; they believed that by perpetual
prayer, ascetic practices and contemplation, man could become inspired
by the Holy Spirit, in spite of the ruling evil spirit, which the fall
had given to him. From their belief in the efficacy of prayer [Greek:
euchê], they were also known as Euchites. In ordinary usage,
"enthusiasm" has lost its peculiar religious significance, and means a
whole-hearted devotion to an ideal, cause, study or pursuit; sometimes,
in a depreciatory sense, it implies a devotion which is partisan and is
blind to difficulties and objections. (See further INSPIRATION, for a
comparison of the religious meanings of "enthusiasm," "ecstasy" and
"fanaticism.")
ENTHYMEME (Gr. [Greek: en, thymos]), in formal logic, the technical
name of a syllogistic argument which is incompletely stated. Any one of
the premises may be omitted, but in general it is that one which is most
obvious or most naturally present to the mind. In point of fact the full
formal statement of a syllogism is rare, especially in rhetorical
language, when the deliberate omission of one of the premises has a
dramatic effect. Thus the suppression of the conclusion may have the
effect of emphasizing the idea which necessarily follows from the
premises. Far commoner is the omission of one of the premises which is
either too clear to need statement or of a character which makes its
omission desirable. A famous instance quoted in the _Port Royal Logic_,
pt. iii. ch. xiv., is Medea's remark to Jason in Ovid's _Medea_,
"Servare potui, perdere an possim rogas?" where the major premise "Qui
servare, perdere possunt" is understood. This use of the word enthymeme
differs from Aristotle's original application of it to a syllogism based
on probabilities or signs ([Greek: ex eikotôn ê sêmeiôn]), i.e. on
propositions which are generally valid ([Greek: eikota]) or on
particular facts which may be held to justify a general principle or
another particular fact (_Anal. prior._ [beta] xxvii. 70 a 10).
See beside text-books on logic, Sir W. Hamilton's _Discussions_
(1547); Mansel's ed. of Aldrich, Appendix F; H.W.B. Joseph, _Introd.
to Logic_, chap. xvi.
ENTOMOLOGY (Gr. [Greek: entoma,] insects, and [Greek: logos], a
discourse), the science that treats of insects, i.e. of the animals
included in the class Hexapoda of the great phylum (or sub-phylum)
Arthropoda. The term, however, is somewhat elastic in its current use,
and students of centipedes and spiders are often reckoned among the
entomologists. As the number of species of insects is believed to exceed
that of all other animals taken together, it is no wonder that their
study should form a special division of zoology with a distinctive name.
Beetles (Scarabaei) are the subjects of some of the oldest sculptured
works of the Egyptians, and references to locusts, bees and ants are
familiar to all readers of the Hebrew scriptures. The interest of
insects to the eastern races was, however, economic, religious or moral.
The science of insects began with Aristotle, who included in a class
"Entoma" the true insects, the arachnids and the myriapods, the
Crustacea forming another class ("Malacostraca") of the "Anaema" or
"bloodless animals." For nearly 2000 years the few writers who dealt
with zoological subjects followed Aristotle's leading.
In the history of the science, various lines of progress have to be
traced. While some observers have studied in detail the structure and
life-history of a few selected types (insect anatomy and development),
others have made a more superficial examination of large series of
insects to classify them and determine their relationships (systematic
entomology), while others again have investigated the habits and
life-relations of insects (insect bionomics). During recent years the
study of fossil insects (palaeoëntomology) has attracted much attention.
The foundations of modern entomology were laid by a series of wonderful
memoirs on anatomy and development published in the 17th and 18th
centuries. Of these the most famous are M. Malpighi's treatise on the
silkworm (1669) and J. Swammerdam's _Biblia naturae_, issued in 1737,
fifty years after its author's death, and containing observations on the
structure and life-history of a series of insect types. Aristotle and
Harvey (_De generatione animalium_, 1651) had considered the insect larva
as a prematurely hatched embryo and the pupa as a second egg. Swammerdam,
however, showed the presence under the larval cuticle of the pupal
structures. His only unfortunate contribution to entomology--indeed to
zoology generally--was his theory of pre-formation, which taught the
presence within the egg of a perfectly formed but miniature adult. A year
before Malpighi's great work appeared, another Italian naturalist, F.
Redi, had disproved by experiment the spontaneous generation of maggots
from putrid flesh, and had shown that they can only develop from the eggs
of flies.
Meanwhile the English naturalist, John Ray, was studying the
classification of animals; he published, in 1705, his _Methodus
insectorum_, in which the nature of the metamorphosis received due
weight. Ray's "Insects" comprised the Arachnids, Crustacea, Myriapoda
and Annelida, in addition to the Hexapods. Ray was the first to
formulate that definite conception of the species which was adopted by
Linnaeus and emphasized by his binominal nomenclature. In 1735 appeared
the first edition of the _Systema naturae_ of Linnaeus, in which the
"Insecta" form a group equivalent to the Arthropoda of modern
zoologists, and are divided into seven orders, whose names--Coleoptera,
Diptera, Lepidoptera, &c., founded on the nature of the wings--have
become firmly established. The fascinating subjects of insect bionomics
and life-history were dealt with in the classical memoirs (1734-1742) of
the Frenchman R.A.F. de Réaumur, and (1752-1778) of the Swede C. de
Geer. The freshness, the air of leisure, the enthusiasm of discovery
that mark the work of these old writers have lessons for the modern
professional zoologist, who at times feels burdened with the accumulated
knowledge of a century and a half. From the end of the 18th century
until the present day, it is only possible to enumerate the outstanding
features in the progress of entomology. In the realm of classification,
the work of Linnaeus was continued in Denmark by J.C. Fabricius
(_Systema entomologica_, 1775), and extended in France by G.P.B. Lamarck
(_Animaux sans vertèbres_, 1801) and G. Cuvier (_Leçons d'anatomie
comparée_, 1800-1805), and in England by W.E. Leach (_Trans. Linn. Soc._
xi., 1815). These three authors definitely separated the Arachnida,
Crustacea and Myriapoda as classes distinct from the Insecta (see
HEXAPODA). The work of J.O. Westwood (_Modern Classification of
Insects_, 1839-1840) connects these older writers with their successors
of to-day.
In the anatomical field the work of Malpighi and Swammerdam was at first
continued most energetically by French students. P. Lyonnet had
published in 1760 his elaborate monograph on the goat-moth caterpillar,
and H.E. Strauss-Dürckheim in 1828 issued his great treatise on the
cockchafer. But the name of J.C.L. de Savigny, who (_Mém. sur les
animaux sans vertèbres_, 1816) established the homology of the jaws of
all insects whether biting or sucking, deserves especial honour. Many
anatomical and developmental details were carefully worked out by L.
Dufour (in a long series of memoirs from 1811 to 1860) in France, by G.
Newport ("Insecta" in _Encyc. Anat. and Physiol._, 1839) in England, and
by H. Burmeister (_Handbuch der Entomologie_, 1832) in Germany. Through
the 19th century, as knowledge increased, the work of investigation
became necessarily more and more specialized. Anatomists like F. Leydig,
F. Müller, B.T. Lowne and V. Graber turned their attention to the
detailed investigation of some one species or to special points in the
structure of some particular organs, using for the elucidation of their
subject the ever-improving microscopical methods of research.
Societies for the discussion and publication of papers on entomology
were naturally established as the number of students increased. The
Société Entomologique de France was founded in 1832, the Entomological
Society of London in 1834. Few branches of zoology have been more
valuable as a meeting-ground for professional and amateur naturalists
than entomology, and not seldom has the amateur--as in the case of
Westwood--developed into a professor. During the pre-Linnaean period,
the beauty of insects--especially the Lepidoptera--had attracted a
number of collectors; and these "Aurelians"--regarded as harmless
lunatics by most of their friends--were the forerunners of the
systematic students of later times. While the insect fauna of European
countries was investigated by local naturalists, the spread of
geographical exploration brought ever-increasing stores of exotic
material to the great museums, and specialization--either in the fauna
of a small district or in the world-wide study of an order or a group of
families--became constantly more marked in systematic work. As examples
may be instanced the studies of A.H. Haliday and H. Loew on the European
Diptera, of John Curtis on British insects, of H.T. Stainton and O.
Staudinger on the European Lepidoptera, of R. M'Lachlan on the European
and of H.A. Hagen on the North American Neuroptera, of D. Sharp on the
_Dyticidae_ and other families of Coleoptera of the whole world.
The embryology of insects is entirely a study of the last century. C.
Bonnet indeed observed in 1745 the virgin-reproduction of Aphids, but it
was not until 1842 that R.A. von Kölliker described the formation of the
blastoderm in the egg of the midge _Chironomus_. Later A. Weismann
(1863-1864) traced details of the growth of embryo and of pupa among the
Diptera, and A. Kovalevsky in 1871 first described the formation of the
germinal layers in insects. Most of the recent work on the embryology of
insects has been done in Germany or the United States, and among
numerous students V. Graber, K. Heider, W.M. Wheeler and R. Heymons may
be especially mentioned.
The work of de Réaumur and de Geer on the bionomics and life-history of
insects has been continued by numerous observers, among whom may be
especially mentioned in France J.H. Fabre and C. Janet, in England W.
Kirby and W. Spence, J. Lubbock (Lord Avebury) and L.C. Miall, and in
the United States C.V. Riley. The last-named may be considered the
founder of the strong company of entomological workers now labouring in
America. Though Riley was especially interested in the bearings of
insect life on agriculture and industry--economic entomology (q.v.)--he
and his followers have laid the science generally under a deep
obligation by their researches.
After the publication of C. Darwin's _Origin of Species_ (1859) a fresh
impetus was given to entomology as to all branches of zoology, and it
became generally recognized that insects form a group convenient and
hopeful for the elucidation of certain problems of animal evolution. The
writings of Darwin himself and of A.R. Wallace (both at one time active
entomological collectors) contain much evidence drawn from insects in
favour of descent with modification. The phylogeny of insects has since
been discussed by F. Brauer, A.S. Packard and many others; mimicry and
allied problems by H.W. Bates, F. Müller, E.B. Poulton and M.C. Piepers;
the bearing of insect habits on theories of selection and
use-inheritance by A. Weismann, G.W. and E. Peckham, G.H.T. Eimer and
Herbert Spencer; variation by W. Bateson and M. Standfuss.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--References to the works of the above authors, and to
many others, will be found under HEXAPODA and the special articles on
various insect orders. Valuable summaries of the labours of Malpighi,
Swammerdam and other early entomologists are given in L.C. Miall and
A. Denny's _Cockroach_ (London, 1886), and L. Henneguy's _Les
Insectes_ (Paris, 1904). (G. H. C.)
ENTOMOSTRACA. This zoological term, as now restricted, includes the
Branchiopoda, Ostracoda and Copepoda. The Ostracoda have the body
enclosed in a bivalve shell-covering, and normally unsegmented. The
Branchiopoda have a very variable number of body-segments, with or
without a shield, simple or bivalved, and some of the postoral
appendages normally branchial. The Copepoda have normally a segmented
body, not enclosed in a bivalved shell-covering, the segments not
exceeding eleven, the limbs not branchial.
Under the heading CRUSTACEA the Entomostraca have already been
distinguished not only from the Thyrostraca or Cirripedes, but also from
the Malacostraca, and an intermediate group of which the true position
is still disputed. The choice is open to maintain the last as an
independent subclass, and to follow Claus in calling it the Leptostraca,
or to introduce it among the Malacostraca as the Nebaliacea, or with
Packard and Sars to make it an entomostracan subdivision under the title
Phyllocarida. At present it comprises the single family _Nebaliidae_.
The bivalved carapace has a jointed rostrum, and covers only the front
part of the body, to which it is only attached quite in front, the
valve-like sides being under control of an adductor muscle. The eyes are
stalked and movable. The first antennae have a lamellar appendage at the
end of the peduncle, a decidedly non-entomostracan feature. The second
antennae, mandibles and two pairs of maxillae may also be claimed as of
malacostracan type. To these succeed eight pairs of foliaceous branchial
appendages on the front division of the body, followed on the hind
division by four pairs of powerful bifurcate swimming feet and two
rudimentary pairs, the number, though not the nature, of these
appendages being malacostracan. On the other hand, the two limbless
segments that precede the caudal furca are decidedly non-malacostracan.
The family was long limited to the single genus _Nebalia_ (Leach), and
the single species _N. bipes_ (O. Fabricius). Recently Sars has added a
Norwegian species, _N. typhlops_, not blind but weak-eyed. There are
also now two more genera, _Paranebalia_ (Claus, 1880), in which the
branchial feet are much longer than in _Nebalia_, and _Nebaliopsis_
(Sars, 1887), in which they are much shorter. All the species are
marine.
BRANCHIOPODA.--In this order, exclusion of the Phyllocarida will leave
three suborders of very unequal extent, the Phyllopoda, Cladocera,
Branchiura. The constituents of the last have often been classed as
Copepoda, and among the Branchiopods must be regarded as aberrant, since
the "branchial tail" implied in the name has no feet, and the actual
feet are by no means obviously branchial.
_Phyllopoda._--This "leaf-footed" suborder has the appendages which
follow the second maxillae variable in number, but all foliaceous and
branchial. The development begins with a free nauplius stage. In the
outward appearance of the adults there is great want of uniformity, one
set having their limbs sheltered by no carapace, another having a broad
shield over most of them, and a third having a bivalved shell-cover
within which the whole body can be enclosed. In accord with these
differences the sections may be named Gymnophylla, Notophylla,
Conchophylla. The equivalent terms applied by Sars are Anostraca,
Notostraca, Conchostraca, involving a termination already appropriated
to higher divisions of the Crustacean class, for which it ought to be
reserved.
1. Gymnophylla.--These singular crustaceans have long soft flexible
bodies, the eyes stalked and movable, the first antennae small and
filiform, the second lamellar in the female, in the male prehensile;
this last character gives rise to some very fanciful developments.
There are three families, two of which form companies rather severely
limited. Thus the _Polyartemiidae_, which compensate themselves for
their stumpy little tails by having nineteen instead of the normal
eleven pairs of branchial feet, consist exclusively of _Polyartemia
forcipata_ (Fischer, 1851). This species from the high north of Europe
and Asia carries green eggs, and above them a bright pattern in
ultramarine (Sars, 1896, 1897). The _Thamnocephalidae_ have likewise
but a single species, _Thamnocephalus platyurus_ (Packard, 1877),
which justifies its title "bushy-head of the broad tail" by a
singularity at each end. Forward from the head extends a long ramified
appendage described as the "frontal shrub," backward from the fourth
abdominal segment of the male spreads a fin-like expansion which is
unique. In the ravines of Kansas, pools supplied by torrential rains
give birth to these and many other phyllopods, and in turn "millions
of them perish by the drying up of the pools in July" (Packard). The
remaining family, the _Branchipodidae_, includes eight genera. In the
long familiar _Branchipus_, _Chirocephalus_ and _Streptocephalus_ the
males have frontal appendages, but these are wanting in the
"brine-shrimp" _Artemia_, and the same want helps to distinguish
_Branchinecta_ (Verrill, 1869) from the old genus _Branchipus_. Of
_Branchiopsyllus_ (Sars, 1897) the male is not yet known, but in his
genera of the same date, the Siberian _Artemiopsis_ and the South
African _Branchipodopsis_ (1898), there is no such appendage. Of the
last genus the type species _B. hodgsoni_ belongs to Cape Colony, but
the specimens described were born and bred and observed in Norway. For
the study of fresh-water Entomostraca large possibilities are now
opened to the naturalist. A parcel of dried mud, coming for example
from Palestine or Queensland, and after an indefinite interval of time
put into water in England or elsewhere, may yield him living forms,
both new and old, in the most agreeable variety. Some caution should
be used against confounding accidentally introduced indigenous species
with those reared from the imported eggs. Those, too, who send or
bring the foreign soil should exercise a little thought in the choice
of it, since dry earth that has never had any Entomostraca near it at
home will not become fertile in them by the mere fact of exportation.
2. Notophylla.--In this division the body is partly covered by a broad
shield, united in front with the head; the eyes are sessile, the first
antennae are small, the second rudimentary or wanting; of the numerous
feet, sometimes sixty-three pairs, exceeding the number of segments to
which they are attached, the first pair are more or less unlike the
rest, and in the female the eleventh have the epipod and exopod
(flabellum and sub-apical lobe of Lankester) modified to form an
ovisac. Development begins with a nauplius stage. Males are very rare.
The single family _Apodidae_ contains only two genera, _Apus_ and its
very near neighbour _Lepidurus_. _Apus australiensis_ (Spencer and
Hall, 1896) may rank as the largest of the Entomostraca, reaching in
the male, from front of shield to end of telson, a length of 70 mm.,
in the female of 64 mm. In a few days, or at most a fortnight, after a
rainfall numberless specimens of these sizes were found swimming
about, "and as not a single one was to be found in the water-pools
prior to the rain, these must have been developed from the egg."
Similarly, in Northern India _Apus himalayanus_ was "collected from a
stagnant pool in a jungle four days after a shower of rain had
fallen," following a drought of four months (Packard).
3. Conchophylla.--Though concealed within the bivalved shell-cover,
the mouth-parts are nearly as in the Gymnophylla, but the flexing of
the caudal part is in contrast, and the biramous second antennae
correspond with what is only a larval character in the other
phyllopods. In the male the first one or two pairs of feet are
modified into grasping organs. The small ova are crowded beneath the
dorsal part of the valves. The development usually begins with a
nauplius stage (Sars, 1896, 1900). There are four families: (a) The
_Limnadiidae_, with feet from 18 to 32 pairs, comprise four (or five)
genera. Of these _Limnadella_ (Girard, 1855) has a single eye. It
remains rather obscure, though the type species originally "was
discovered in great abundance in a roadside puddle subject to
desiccation." _Limnadia_ (Brongniart, 1820) is supposed to consist of
species exclusively parthenogenetic. But when asked to believe that
males never occur among these amazons, one cannot but remember how
hard it is to prove a negative. (b) The _Lynceidae_, with not more
than twelve pairs of feet. This family is limited to the species,
widely distributed, of the single genus _Lynceus_, established by O.F.
Müller in 1776 and 1781, and first restricted by Leach in 1816 in the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (art. "Annulosa," of that edition). Leach
there assigns to it the single species _L. brachyurus_ (Müller), and
as this is included in the genus _Limnetis_ (Lovén, 1846), that genus
must be a synonym of _Lynceus_ as restricted. (c) _Leptestheriidae_.
_Estheria_ (Rüppell, 1837) was instituted for the species
_dahalacensis_, which Sars includes in his genus _Leptestheria_
(1898); but _Estheria_ was already appropriated, and of its synonyms
_Cyzicus_ (Audouin, 1837) is lost for vagueness, while _Isaura_ (Joly,
1842) is also appropriated, so that _Leptestheria_ becomes the name of
the typical genus, and determines the name of the family. (d)
_Cyclestheriidae_. This family consists of the single species
_Cyclestheria hislopi_ (Baird), reported from India, Ceylon, Celebes,
Australia, East Africa and Brazil. Sars (1887) having had the
opportunity of raising it from dried Australian mud, found that,
unlike other phyllopods, but like the Cladocera, the parent keeps its
brood within the shell until their full development.
_Cladocera._--In this suborder the head is more or less distinct, the
rest of the body being in general laterally compressed and covered by a
bivalved test. The title "branching horns" alludes to the second
antennae, which are two-branched except in the females of _Holopedium_,
with each branch setiferous, composed of only two to four joints. The
mandibles are without palp. The pairs of feet are four to six. The eye
is single, and in addition to the eye there is often an "eye-spot,"
_Monospilus_ being unique in having the eye-spot alone and no eye, while
_Leydigiopsis_ (Sars, 1901) has an eye with an eye-spot equal to it or
larger. The heart has a pair of venous ostia, often blending into one,
and an anterior arterial aorta. Respiration is conducted by the general
surface, by the branchial lamina (external branch) of the feet, and the
vesicular appendage (when present) at the base of this branch. The
"abdomen," behind the limbs, is usually very short, occasionally very
long. The "postabdomen," marked off by the two postabdominal setae,
usually has teeth or spines, and ends in two denticulate or ciliate
claws, or it may be rudimentary, as in _Polyphemus_. Many species have a
special glandular organ at the back of the head, which _Sida
crystallina_ uses for attaching itself to various objects. The Leydigian
or nuchal organ is supposed to be auditory and to contain an otolith.
The female lays two kinds of eggs--"summer-eggs," which develop without
fertilization, and "winter-eggs" or resting eggs, which require to be
fertilized. The latter in the _Daphniidae_ are enclosed in a modified
part of the mother's shell, called the ephippium from its resemblance to
a saddle in shape and position. In other families a less elaborate case
has been observed, for which Scourfield has proposed the term
protoephippium. In _Leydigia_ he has recently found a structure almost
as complex as that of the _Daphniidae_. In some families the resting
eggs escape into the water without special covering. Only the embryos of
_Leptodora_ are known to hatch out in the nauplius stage. _Penilia_
(Dana, 1849) is perhaps the only exclusively marine genus. The great
majority of the Cladocera belong to fresh water, but their adaptability
is large, since _Moina rectirostris_ (O.F. Müller) can equally enjoy a
pond at Blackheath, and near Odessa live in water twice as salt as that
of the ocean. In point of size a Cladoceran of 5 mm. is spoken of as
colossal.
Dr Jules Richard in his revision (1895) retains the sections proposed
by Sars in 1865, Calyptomera and Gymnomera. The former, with the feet
for the most part concealed by the carapace, is subdivided into two
tribes, the Ctenopoda, or "comb-feet," in which the six pairs of
similar feet, all branchial and nonprehensile, are furnished with
setae arranged like the teeth of a comb, and the Anomopoda, or
"variety-feet," in which the front feet differ from the rest by being
more or less prehensile, without branchial laminae.
The Ctenopoda comprise two families: (a) the _Holopediidae_, with a
solitary species, _Holopedium gibberum_ (Zaddach), queerly clothed in
a large gelatinous involucre, and found in mountain tarns all over
Europe, in large lakes of N. America, and also in shallow ponds and
waters at sea-level; (b) the _Sididae_, with no such involucre, but
with seven genera, and rather more than twice as many species. Of
_Diaphanosoma modiglianii_ Richard says that at different points of
Lake Toba in Sumatra millions of specimens were obtained, among which
he had not met with a single male.
The Anomopoda are arranged in four families, all but one very
extensive. (a) _Daphniidae_. Of the seven genera, the cosmopolitan
_Daphnia_ contains about 100 species and varieties, of which Thomas
Scott (1899) observes that "scarcely any of the several characters
that have at one time or another been selected as affording a means
for discriminating between the different forms can be relied on as
satisfactory." Though this may dishearten the systematist, Scourfield
(1900) reminds us that "It was in a water-flea that Metschnikoff first
saw the leucocytes (or phagocytes) trying to get rid of disease germs
by swallowing them, and was so led to his epoch-making discovery of
the part played by these minute amoeboid corpuscles in the animal
body." For _Scapholeberis mucronata_ (O.F. Müller), Scourfield has
shown how it is adapted for movement back downwards in the water along
the underside of the surface film, which to many small crustaceans is
a dangerously disabling trap. (b) _Bosminidae_. To _Bosmina_ (Baird,
1845) Richard added _Bosminopsis_ in 1895. (c) _Macrotrichidae._ In
this family _Macrothrix_ (Baird, 1843) is the earliest genus, among
the latest being _Grimaldina_ (Richard, 1892) and _Jheringula_ (Sars,
1900). Dried mud and vegetable débris from S. Paulo in Brazil supplied
Sars with representatives of all the three in his Norwegian aquaria,
in some of which the little _Macrothrix elegans_ "multiplied to such
an extraordinary extent as at last to fill up the water with immense
shoals of individuals." "The appearance of male specimens was always
contemporary with the first ephippial formation in the females." For
_Streblocerus pygmaeus_, grown under the same conditions, Sars
observes: "This is perhaps the smallest of the Cladocera known, and is
hardly more than visible to the naked eye," the adult female scarcely
exceeding 0.25 mm. Yet in the next family _Alonella nana_ (Baird)
disputes the palm and claims to be the smallest of all known
Arthropoda. (d) _Chydoridae._ This family, so commonly called
_Lynceidae_, contains a large number of genera, among which one may
usually search in vain, and rightly so, for the genus _Lynceus_. The
key to the riddle is to be found in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ for
1816. There, as above explained, Leach began the subdivision of
Müller's too comprehensive genus, the result being that _Lynceus_
belongs to the Phyllopoda, and _Chydorus_ (Leach, 1816) properly gives
its name to the present family, in which the doubly convoluted
intestine is so remarkable. Of its many genera, _Leydigia_,
_Leydigiopsis_, _Monospilus_ have been already mentioned. _Dadaya
macrops_ (Sars, 1901), from South America and Ceylon, has a very large
eye and an eye-spot fully as large, but it is a very small creature,
odd in its behaviour, moving by jumps at the very surface of the
water. "To the naked eye it looked like a little black atom darting
about in a most wonderful manner."
[Illustration: FIG. 1.--_Dolops ranarum_ (Stuhlmann).]
The Gymnomera, with a carapace too small to cover the feet, which are
all prehensile, are divided also into two tribes, the Onychopoda, in
which the four pairs of feet have a toothed maxillary process at the
base, and the Haplopoda, in which there are six pairs of feet, without
such a process. To the _Polyphemidae_, the well-known family of the
former tribe, Sars in 1897 added two remarkable genera, _Cercopagis_,
meaning "tail with a sling," and _Apagis_, "without a sling," for
seven species from the Sea of Azov. The Haplopoda likewise have but a
single family, the _Leptodoridae_, and this has but the single genus
_Leptodora_ (Lilljeborg, 1861). Dr Richard (1895, 1896) gives a
Cladoceran bibliography of 601 references.
_Branchiura._--This term was introduced by Thorell in 1864 for the
_Argulidae_, a family which had been transferred to the Branchiopoda by
Zenker in 1854, though sometimes before and since united with the
parasitic Copepoda. Though the animals have an oral siphon, they do not
carry ovisacs like the siphonostomous copepods, but glue their eggs in
rows to extraneous objects. Their lateral, compound, feebly movable eyes
agree with those of the Phyllopoda. The family are described by Claus as
"intermittent parasites," because when gorged they leave their hosts,
fishes or frogs, and swim about in freedom for a considerable period.
The long-known _Argulus_ (O.F. Müller) has the second maxillae
transformed into suckers, but in _Dolops_ (Audouin, 1837) (fig. 1), the
name of which supersedes the more familiar _Gyropeltis_ (Heller, 1857),
these effect attachment by ending in strong hooks (Bouvier, 1897). A
third genus, _Chonopeltis_ (Thiele, 1900), has suckers, but has lost its
first antennae, at least in the female.
OSTRACODA.--The body, seldom in any way segmented, is wholly encased in
a bivalved shell, the caudal part strongly inflexed, and almost always
ending in a furca. The limbs, including antennae and mouth organs, never
exceed seven definite pairs. The first antennae never have more than
eight joints. The young usually pass through several stages of
development after leaving the egg, and this commonly after, even long
after, the egg has left the maternal shell. Parthenogenesis is frequent.
The four tribes instituted by Sars in 1865 were reduced to two by G.W.
Müller in 1894, the Myodocopa, which almost always have a heart, and the
Podocopa, which have none.
_Myodocopa._--These have the furcal branches broad, lamellar, with at
least three pairs of strong spines or ungues. Almost always the shell
has a rostral sinus. Müller divides the tribe into three families,
_Cypridinidae, Halocypridae_, and the heartless _Polycopidae_, which
constituted the tribe Cladocopa of Sars. From the first of these Brady
and Norman distinguish the Asteropidae (fig. 3), remarkable for seven
pairs of long branchial leaves which fold over the hinder extremity of
the animal, and the _Sarsiellidae_, still somewhat obscure, besides
adding the _Rutidermatidae_, knowledge of which is based on skilful
maceration of minute and long-dried specimens. The _Halocypridae_ are
destitute of compound lateral eyes, and have the sexual orifice
unsymmetrically placed.
_Podocopa._--In these the furcal branches are linear or rudimentary,
the shell is without rostral sinus, and, besides distinguishing
characters of the second antennae, they have always a branchial plate
well developed on the first maxillae, which is inconstant in the other
tribe. There are five families: (a) _Cyprididae_ (? including
_Cypridopsidae_ of Brady and Norman). In some of the genera
parthenogenetic propagation is carried to such an extent that of the
familiar _Cypris_ it is said, "until quite lately males in this genus
were unknown; and up to the present time no male has been found in the
British Islands" (Brady and Norman, 1896). On the other hand, the
ejaculatory duct with its verticillate sac in the male of _Cypris_ and
other genera is a feature scarcely less remarkable. (b) _Bairdiidae_,
which have the valves smooth, with the hinge untoothed. (c)
_Cytheridae_ (? including _Paradoxostomatidae_ of Brady and Norman),
in which the valves are usually sculptured, with toothed hinge. Of
this family the members are almost exclusively marine, but
_Limnicythere_ is found in fresh water, and _Xestoleberis bromeliarum_
(Fritz Müller) lives in the water that collects among the leaves of
Bromelias, plants allied to the pine-apples. (d) _Darwinulidae_,
including the single species _Darwinula stevensoni_, Brady and
Robertson, described as "perhaps the most characteristic Entomostracan
of the East Anglian Fen District." (e) _Cytherellidae_, which, unlike
the Ostracoda in general, have the hinder part of the body segmented,
at least ten segments being distinguishable in the female. They have
the valves broad at both ends, and were placed by Sars in a separate
tribe, called Platycopa.
The range in time of the Ostracoda is so extended that, in G.W.
Müller's opinion, their separation into the families now living may have
already taken place in the Cambrian period. Their range in space,
including carriage by birds, may be coextensive with the distribution of
water, but it is not known what height of temperature or how much
chemical adulteration of the water they can sustain, how far they can
penetrate underground, nor what are the limits of their activity between
the floor and the surface of aquatic expanses, fresh or saline. In
individual size they have never been important, and of living forms the
largest is one of recent discovery, _Crossophorus africanus_, a
Cypridinid about three-fifths of an inch (15.5 mm.) long; but a length
of one or two millimetres is more common, and it may descend to the
seventy-fifth of an inch. By multitude they have been, and still are,
extremely important.
Though the exterior is more uniform than in most groups of Crustacea,
the bivalved shell or carapace may be strongly calcified and diversely
sculptured (fig. 2), or membranaceous and polished, hairy or smooth,
oval or round or bean-shaped, or of some less simple pattern; the
valves may fit neatly, or one overlap the other, their hinge may have
teeth or be edentulous, and their front part may be excavated for the
protrusion of the antennae or have no such "rostral sinus." By various
modifications of their valves and appendages the creatures have become
adapted for swimming, creeping, burrowing, or climbing, some of them
combining two or more of these activities, for which their structure
seems at the first glance little adapted. Considering the imprisonment
of the ostracod body within the valves, it is more surprising that the
_Asteropidae_ and _Cypridinidae_ should have a pair of compound and
sometimes large eyes, in addition to the median organ at the base of
the "frontal tentacle," than that other members of the group should be
limited to that median organ of sight, or have no eyes at all. The
median eye when present may have or not have a lens, and its three
pigment-cups may be close together or wide apart and the middle one
rudimentary. As might be expected, in thickened and highly embossed
valves thin spaces occur over the visual organ. The frontal organ
varies in form and apparently in function, and is sometimes absent.
The first antennae, according to the family, may assist in walking,
swimming, burrowing, climbing, grasping, and besides they carry
sensory setae, and sometimes they have suckers on their setae (see
Brady and Norman on _Cypridina norvegica_). The second antennae are
usually the chief motor-organs for swimming, walking and climbing. The
mandibles are normally five-jointed, with remnants of an outer branch
on the second joint, the biting edge varying from strong development
to evanescence, the terminal joints or "palp" giving the organ a
leg-like appearance and function, which disappears in suctorial genera
such as _Paracytherois_. The variable first maxillae are seldom
pediform, their function being concerned chiefly with nutrition,
sensation and respiration. The variability in form and function of the
second maxillae is sufficiently shown by the fact that G.W. Müller,
our leading authority, adopts the confusing plan of calling them
second maxillae in the _Cypridinidae_ (including _Asteropidae_),
maxillipeds in the _Halocypridae_ and _Cyprididae_, and first legs in
the _Bairdiidae_, _Cytheridae_, _Polycopidae_ and _Cytherellidae_, so
that in his fine monograph he uses the term first leg in two quite
different senses. The first legs, meaning thereby the sixth pair of
appendages, are generally pediform and locomotive, but sometimes
unjointed, acting as a kind of brushes to cleanse the furca, while in
the _Polycopidae_ they are entirely wanting. The second legs are
sometimes wanting, sometimes pediform and locomotive, sometimes
strangely metamorphosed into the "vermiform organ," generally long,
many-jointed, and distally armed with retroverted spines, its function
being that of an extremely mobile cleansing foot, which can insert
itself among the eggs in the brood-space, between the branchial leaves
of _Asterope_ (fig. 3), and even range over the external surface of
the valves. The "brush-formed" organs of the Podocopa are medially
placed, and, in spite of their sometimes forward situation, Müller
believes among other possibilities that they and the penis in the
_Cypridinidae_ may be alike remnants of a third pair of legs, not
homologous with the penis of other Ostracoda (Podocopa included). The
furca is, as a rule, a powerful motor-organ, and has its laminae edged
with strong teeth (ungues) or setae or both. The young, though born
with valves, have at first a nauplian body, and pass through various
stages to maturity.
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--_Cythereis ornata_ (G.W. Müller). One
eye-space is shown above on the left.]
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--_Asterope arthuri_. Left valve removed.
M, End of adductor muscle.
OC, Eye.
AI, Second antenna.
MX. 1, First maxilla.
MX. 2, Second maxilla.
P. 1, First foot.
V. O, Vermiform organ.
BR, Seven branchial leaves.
F, Projecting ungues of the furca.]
Brady and Norman, in their _Monograph of the Ostracoda of the North
Atlantic and North-Western Europe_ (1889), give a bibliography of 125
titles, and in the second part (1896) they give 55 more. The lists are
not meant to be exhaustive, any more than G.W. Müller's literature
list of 125 titles in 1894. They do not refer to Latreille, 1802, with
whom the term Ostracoda originates.
COPEPODA.--The body is not encased in a bivalved shell; its articulated
segments are at most eleven, those behind the genital segment being
without trace of limbs, but the last almost always carrying a furca.
Sexes separate, fertilization by spermatophores. Ova in single or double
or rarely several packets, attached as ovisacs or egg-strings to the
genital openings, or enclosed in a dorsal marsupium, or deposited singly
or occasionally in bundles. The youngest larvae are typical nauplii. The
next, the copepodid or cyclopid, stage is characterized by a cylindrical
segmented body, with fore- and hind-body distinct, and by having at most
six cephalic limbs and two pairs of swimming feet.
The order thus defined (see Giesbrecht and Schmeil, _Das Tierreich_,
1898), with far over a thousand species (Hansen, 1900), embraces forms
of extreme diversity, although, when species are known in all their
phases and both sexes, they constantly tend to prove that there are no
sharply dividing lines between the free-living, the semi-parasitic, and
those which in adult life are wholly parasitic and then sometimes
grotesquely unlike the normal standard. Giesbrecht and Hansen have shown
that the mouth-organs consist of mandibles, first and second maxillae
and maxillipeds; and Claus himself relinquished his long-maintained
hypothesis that the last two pairs were the separated exopods and
endopods of a single pair of appendages. Thorell's classification (1859)
of Gnathostoma, Poecilostoma, Siphonostoma, based on the mouth-organs,
was long followed, though almost at the outset shown by Claus to depend
on the erroneous supposition that the Poecilostoma were devoid of
mandibles. Brady added a new section, Choniostomata, in 1894, and
another, Leptostomata, in 1900, each for a single species. Canu in 1892
proposed two groups, Monoporodelphya and Diporodelphya, the copulatory
openings of the female being paired in the latter, unpaired in the
former. It may be questioned whether this distinction, however important
in itself, would lead to a satisfactory grouping of families. In the
same year Giesbrecht proposed his division of the order into Gymnoplea
and Podoplea.
In appearance an ordinary Copepod is divided into fore- and hind-body,
of its eleven segments the composite first being the head, the next five
constituting the thorax, and the last five the abdomen. The coalescence
of segments, though frequent, does not after a little experience
materially confuse the counting. But there is this peculiarity, that the
middle segment is sometimes continuous with the broader fore-body,
sometimes with the narrower hind-body. In the former case the hind-body,
consisting only of the abdomen, forms a pleon or tail-part devoid of
feet, and the species so constructed are Gymnoplea, those of the naked
or footless pleon. In the latter case the middle segment almost always
carries with it to the hind-body a pair of rudimentary limbs, whence the
term Podoplea, meaning species that have a pleon with feet. It may be
objected that hereby the term pleon is used in two different senses,
first applying to the abdomen alone and then to the abdomen plus the
last thoracic segment. Even this verbal flaw would be obviated if
Giesbrecht could prove his tentative hypothesis, that the Gymnoplea may
have lost a pre-genital segment of the abdomen, and the Podoplea may
have lost the last segment of the thorax. The classification is worked
out as follows:--
1. _Gymnoplea._--First segment of hind-body footless, bearing the
orifices of the genital organs (in the male unsymmetrically placed);
last foot of the fore-body in the male a copulatory organ; neither, or
only one, of the first pair of antennae in the male geniculating;
cephalic limbs abundantly articulated and provided with many plumose
setae; heart generally present. Animals usually free-living, pelagic
(Giesbrecht and Schmeil).
This group, with 65 genera and four or five hundred species, is
divided by Giesbrecht into tribes: (a) Amphaskandria. In this tribe
the males have both antennae of the first pair as sensory organs.
There is but one family, the _Calanidae_, but this is a very large
one, with 26 genera and more than 100 species. Among them is the
cosmopolitan _Calanus finmarchicus_, the earliest described (by Bishop
Gunner in 1770) of all the marine free-swimming Copepoda. Among them
also is the peacock Calanid, _Calocalanus pavo_ (Dana), with its
highly ornamented antennae and gorgeous tail, the most beautiful
species of the whole order (fig. 4). (b) Heterarthrandria. Here the
males have one or the other of the first pair of antennae modified
into a grasping organ for holding the female. There are four families,
the _Diaptomidae_ with 27 genera, the _Pontellidae_ with 10, the
_Pseudocyclopidae_ and _Candaciidae_ each with one genus. The first of
these families is often called _Centropagidae_, but, as Sars has
pointed out, _Diaptomus_ (Westwood, 1836) is the oldest genus in it.
Of 177 species valid in the family Giesbrecht and Schmeil assign 67 to
_Diaptomus_. In regard to one of its species Dr Brady says: "In one
instance, at least (Talkin Tarn, Cumberland) I have seen the net come
up from a depth of 6 or 8 ft. below the surface with a dense mass
consisting almost entirely of _D. gracilis_." The length of this
net-filling species is about a twentieth of an inch.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--_Calocalanus pavo_ (Dana).]
2. _Podoplea._--The first segment of the hind-body almost always with
rudimentary pair of feet; orifices of the genital organs
(symmetrically placed in both sexes) in the following segment; neither
the last foot of the fore-body nor the rudimentary feet just mentioned
acting as a copulatory organ in the male; both or neither of the first
pair of antennae in the male geniculating; cephalic limbs less
abundantly articulated and with fewer plumose setae or none, but with
hooks and clasping setae. Heart almost always wanting. Free-living
(rarely pelagic) or parasitic (Giesbrecht and Schmeil).
This group is also divided by Giesbrecht into two tribes,
Ampharthrandria and Isokerandria. In 1892 he distinguished the former
as those in which the first antennae of the male have both members
modified for holding the female, and the genital openings of the
female have a ventral position, sometimes in close proximity,
sometimes strongly lateral; the latter as those in which the first
antennae of the male are similar to those of the female, the function
of holding her being transferred to the male maxillipeds, while the
genital openings of the female are dorsal, though at times strongly
lateral. In 1899, with a view to the many modifications exhibited by
parasitic and semi-parasitic species, the definitions, stripped of a
too hampering precision, took a different form: (a) Ampharthrandria.
"Swimming Podoplea with geniculating first antennae in the male sex,
and descendants of such; first antennae in female and male almost
always differently articulated." The families occupy fresh water as
well as the sea. Naturally "descendants" which have lost the
characteristic feature of the definition cannot be recognized without
some further assistance than the definition supplies. Of the families
comprised, the _Mormonillidae_ consist only of _Mormonilla_
(Giesbrecht), and are not mentioned by Giesbrecht in 1899 in the
grouping of this section. The _Thaumatoessidae_ include _Thaumatoessa_
(Kröyer), established earlier than its synonym _Thaumaleus_ (Kröyer),
or than _Monstrilla_ (Dana, 1849). The species are imperfectly known.
The defect of mouth-organs probably does not apply to the period of
youth, which some of them spend parasitically in the body-cavity of
worms (Giard, 1896). To the _Cyclopidae_ six genera are allotted by
Giesbrecht in 1900. _Cyclops_ (O.F. Müller, 1776), though greatly
restricted since Müller's time, still has several scores of species
abundantly peopling inland waters of every kind and situation, without
one that can be relied on as exclusively marine like the species of
_Oithona_ (Baird). The _Misophriidae_ are now limited to _Misophria_
(Boeck). The presence of a heart in this genus helps to make it a link
between the Podoplea and Gymnoplea, though in various other respects
it approaches the next family. The _Harpacticidae_ owe their name to
the genus _Arpacticus_ (Milne-Edwards, 1840). Brady in 1880 assigns to
this family 33 genera and 81 species. Canu (1892) distinguishes eight
sub-families, _Longipediinae_, _Peltidiinae_, _Tachidiinae_,
_Amymoninae_, _Harpacticinae_, _Idyinae_, _Canthocamptinae_ (for which
_Canthocampinae_ should be read), and _Nannopinae_, adding
_Stenheliinae_ (Brady) without distinctive characters for it. The
_Ascidicolidae_ have variable characters, showing a gradual adaptation
to parasitic life in Tunicates. Giesbrecht (1900) considers Canu quite
right in grouping together in this single family those parasites of
ascidians, simple and compound, which had been previously distributed
among families with the more or less significant names
_Notodelphyidae_, _Doropygidae_, _Buproridae_, _Schizoproctidae_,
_Kossmechtridae_, _Enterocolidae_, _Enteropsidae_. Further, he
includes in it his own _Enterognathus comatulae_, not from an
ascidian, but from the intestine of the beautiful starfish _Antedon
rosaceus_. The _Asterocheridae_, which have a good swimming capacity,
except in the case of _Cancerilla tubulata_ (Dalyell), lead a
semi-parasitic life on echinoderms, sponges, &c., imbibing their food.
Giesbrecht, displacing the older name _Ascomyzontidae_, assigns to
this family 21 genera in five subfamilies, and suggests that the
long-known but still puzzling _Nicothoë_ from the gills of the lobster
might be placed in an additional subfamily, or be made the
representative of a closely related family. The _Dichelestiidae_, on
account of their sometimes many-jointed first antennae, are referred
also to this tribe by Giesbrecht. (b) Isokerandria. "Swimming Podoplea
without genicullating first antennae in the male sex, and descendants
of such. First antennae of male and female almost always articulated
alike." To this tribe Giesbrecht assigns the families _Clausidiidae_,
_Corycaeidae_, _Oncaeidae_, _Lichomolgidae_, _Ergasilidae_,
_Bomolochidae_, _Clausiidae_, _Nereicolidae_. Here also must for the
time be placed the _Caligidae_, _Philichthyidae_ (_Philichthydae_ of
Vogt, Carus, Claus), _Lernaeidae_, _Chondracanthidae_,
_Sphaeronellidae_ (better known as _Choniostomatidae_, from H.J.
Hansen's remarkable study of the group), _Lernaeopodidae_,
_Herpyllobiidae_, _Entomolepidae_. For the distinguishing marks of all
these, the number of their genera and species, their habits and
transformations and dwellings, the reader must be referred to the
writings of specialists. Sars (1901) proposed seven
suborders--Calanoida, Harpacticoida, Cyclopoida, Notodelphoida,
Monstrilloida, Caligoida, Lernaeoida.
AUTHORITIES.--(The earlier memoirs of importance are cited in
Giesbrecht's _Monograph of Naples_, 1892); Canu, "Hersiliidae," _Bull.
Sci. France belgique_, ser. 3, vol. i. p. 402 (1888); and _Les
Copépodes du Boulonnais_ (1892); Cuenot, _Rev. biol. Nord France_,
vol. v. (1892); Giesbrecht, "Pelag. Copepoden." _F. u. fl. des Golfes
von Neapel_ (Mon. 19, 1892); Hansen, _Entomol. Med._ vol. iii. pt. 5
(1892); I.C. Thompson, "Copepoda of Liverpool Bay," _Trans. Liv. Biol.
Soc._ vol. vii. (1893); Schmeil, "Deutschlands Copepoden,"
_Bibliotheca zoologica_ (1892-1897); Brady, _Journ. R. Micr. Soc._ p.
168 (1894); T. Scott, "Entomostraca from the Gulf of Guinea," _Trans.
Linn. Soc. London_, vol. vi. pt. 1 (1894); Giesbrecht, _Mitteil. Zool.
Stat. Neapel_, vol. xi. p. 631; vol. xii. p. 217 (1895); T. and A.
Scott, _Trans. Linn. Soc. London_, ser. 2, vol. vi. p. 419 (1896);
Hansen "Choniostomatidae" (1897); Sars, _Proc. Mus. Zool. St
Petersburg_, "Caspian Entomostraca" (1897); Giesbrecht and Schmeil,
"Copepoda gymnoplea," _Das Tierreich_ (1898); Giesbrecht,
"Asterocheriden," _F. u. fl. Neapel_ (Mon. 25, 1899); Bassett-Smith,
"Copepoda on Fishes," _Proc. Zool. Soc. London_, p. 438 (1899); Brady,
_Trans. Zool. Soc. London_, vol. xv. pt. 2, p. 31 (1899); Sars, _Arch.
Naturv._ vol. xxi. No. 2 (1899); Giesbrecht, _Mitteil. Zool. Stat.
Neapel_, vol. xiv. p. 39 (1900); Scott, "Fish Parasites," _Scottish
Fishery Board_, 18th Ann. Rep. p. 144 (1900); Stebbing, _Willey's
Zool. Results_, pt. 5, p. 664 (1900); Embleton, _Journ. Linn. Soc.
London_, vol. xxviii. p. 211 (1901); Sars, _Crustacea of Norway_, vol.
iv. (1901). (T. R. R. S.)
ENTRAGUES, CATHERINE HENRIETTE DE BALZAC D' (1579-1633), marquise de
Verneuil, mistress of Henry IV., king of France, was the daughter of
Charles Balzac d'Entragues and of Marie Touchet, mistress of Charles IX.
Ambitious and intriguing, she succeeded in inducing Henry IV. to promise
to marry her after the death of Gabrielle d'Estrées, a promise which led
to bitter scenes at court when shortly afterwards Henry married Marie
de' Medici. She carried her spite so far as to be deeply compromised in
the conspiracy of Marshal Biron against the king in 1606, but escaped
with a slight punishment, and in 1608 Henry actually took her back into
favour again. She seems then to have been involved in the Spanish
intrigues which preceded the death of the king in 1610.
See H. de la Ferrière, _Henri IV. le roi, l'amoureux_ (Paris, 1890).
ENTRECASTEAUX, JOSEPH-ANTOINE BRUNI D' (1739-1793), French navigator,
was born at Aix in 1739. At the age of fifteen he entered the navy. In
the war of 1778 he commanded a frigate of thirty-two guns, and by his
clever seamanship was successful in convoying a fleet of merchant
vessels from Marseilles to the Levant, although they were attacked by
two pirate vessels, each of which was larger than his own ship. In 1785
he was appointed to the command of the French fleet in the East Indies,
and two years later he was named governor of the Mauritius and the Isle
of Bourbon. While in command of the East India fleet he made a voyage to
China, an achievement which, in 1791, led the French government to
select him to command an expedition which it was sending out to seek
some tidings of the unfortunate La Pérouse, of whom nothing had been
heard since February 1788. Rear-admiral d'Entrecasteaux's expedition
comprised the "Recherche" and "L'Esperance," with Captain Huon de
Kermadec as second in command. No tidings were obtained of the missing
navigator, but in the course of his search Entrecasteaux made important
geographical discoveries. He traced the outlines of the eastern coast of
New Caledonia, made extensive surveys round the Tasmanian coast, and
touched at several places on the south coast of New Holland. The two
ships entered Storm Bay, Tasmania, on the 21st of April 1792, and
remained there until the 16th of May, surveying and naming the
d'Entrecasteaux Channel, the entrances to the Huon and Derwent rivers,
Bruni Island, Recherche Bay, Port Esperance and various other
localities. Excepting the name of the river Derwent (originally called
Riviere du Nord by its French discoverers), these foregoing appellations
have been retained. Leaving Tasmania the expedition sailed northward for
the East Indies, and while coasting near the island of Java,
Entrecasteaux was attacked by scurvy and died on the 20th of July 1793.
ENTRE MINHO E DOURO (popularly called _Minho_), a former province of
Northern Portugal; bounded on the N. by Galicia in Spain, E. by
Traz-os-Montes, S. by Beira and W. by the Atlantic Ocean. Pop. (1900)
1,170,361; area 2790 sq. m. Though no longer officially recognized, the
old provincial name remains in common use. The coast-line of Entre Minho
e Douro is level and unbroken except by the estuaries of the main
rivers; inland, the elevation gradually increases towards the north and
east, where several mountain ranges mark the frontier. Of these, the
most important are the Serra da Peneda (4728 ft.), between the rivers
Minho and Limia; the Serra do Gerez (4357 ft.), on the Galician border;
the Serra da Cabreira (4021 ft.), immediately to the south; and the
Serra de Marão (4642 ft.), in the extreme south-east. As its name
implies, the province is bounded by two great rivers, the Douro (q.v.)
on the south, and the Minho (Spanish _Miño_) on the north; but a small
tract of land south of the Douro estuary is included also within the
provincial boundary. There are three other large rivers which, like the
Minho, flow west-south-west into the Atlantic. The Limia or Antela
(Spanish _Linia_) rises in Galicia, and reaches the sea at Vianna do
Castello; the Cavado springs from the southern foot hills of La Raya
Seca, on the northern frontier of Traz-os-Montes, and forms, at its
mouth, the small harbour of Espozende; and the Ave descends from its
sources in the Serra da Cabreira to Villa do Conde, where it enters the
Atlantic. A large right-hand tributary of the Douro, the Tamega, rises
in Galicia, and skirts the western slopes of the Serra de Marão.
The climate is mild, except among the mountains, and such plants as
heliotrope, fuchsias, palms, and aloes thrive in the open throughout the
year. Wheat and maize are grown on the plains, and other important
products are wine, fruit, olives and chestnuts. Fish abound along the
coast and in the main rivers; timber is obtained from the mountain
forests, and dairy-farming and the breeding of pigs and cattle are
carried on in all parts. As the province is occupied by a hardy and
industrious peasantry, and the density of population (419.5 per sq. m.)
is more than twice that of any other province on the Portuguese
mainland, the soil is very closely cultivated. The methods and
implements of the farmers are, however, most primitive, and at the
beginning of the 20th century it was not unusual to see a mule, or even
a woman, harnessed with the team of oxen to an old-fashioned wooden
plough. Small quantities of coal, iron, antimony, lead and gold are
mined; granite and slate are quarried; and there are mineral springs at
Monção (pop. 2283) on the Minho. The Oporto-Corunna railway traverses
the western districts and crosses the Spanish frontier at Tuy; its
branch lines give access to Braga, Guimarães and Povoa de Varzim; and
the Oporto-Salamanca railway passes up the Douro valley. The greater
part of the north and west can only be reached by road, and even the
chief highways are ill-kept. In these regions the principal means of
transport is the springless wooden cart, drawn by one or more of the
tawny and under-sized but powerful oxen, with immense horns and
elaborately carved yoke, which are characteristic of northern Portugal.
For administrative purposes the province is divided into three
districts: Vianna do Castello in the north, Braga in the centre, Oporto
in the south. The chief towns are separately described; they include
Oporto (167,955), one of the greatest wine-producing cities in the
world; Braga (24,202), the seat of an archbishop who is primate of
Portugal; the seaports of Povoa de Varzim (12,623) and Vianna do
Castello (9990); and Guimarães (9104), a place of considerable
historical interest.
ENTREPÔT (a French word, from the Lat. _interpositum_, that which is
placed between), a storehouse or magazine for the temporary storage of
goods, provisions, &c.; also a place where goods, which are not allowed
to pass into a country duty free, are stored under the superintendence
of the custom house authorities till they are re-exported. In a looser
sense, any town which has a considerable distributive trade is called an
_entrepôt_. The word is also used attributively to indicate the kind of
trade carried on in such towns.
ENTRE RIOS (Span. "between rivers"), a province of the eastern Argentine
Republic, forming the southern part of a region sometimes described as
the Argentine Mesopotamia, bounded N. by Corrientes, E. by Uruguay with
the Uruguay river as the boundary line, S. by Buenos Aires and W. by
Santa Fé, the Paraná river forming the boundary line with these two
provinces. Pop. (1895) 292,019; (1905, est.) 376,600. The province has
an area of 28,784 sq. m., consisting for the most part of an undulating,
well-watered and partly-wooded plain, terminating in a low, swampy
district of limited extent in the angle between the two great rivers.
The great forest of Monteil occupies an extensive region in the N.,
estimated at nearly one-fifth the area of the province. Its soil is
exceptionally fertile and its climate is mild and healthy. The province
is sometimes called the "garden of Argentina," which would probably be
sufficiently correct had its population devoted as much energy to
agriculture as they have to political conflict and civil war. Its
principal industry is that of stock-raising, exporting live cattle,
horses, hides, jerked beef, tinned and salted meats, beef extract,
mutton and wool. Its agricultural products are also important, including
wheat, Indian corn, barley and fruits. Lime, gypsum and firewood are
also profitable items in its export trade. The Paraná and Uruguay rivers
provide exceptional facilities for the shipment of produce and the Entre
Rios railways, consisting of a trunk line running E. and W. across the
province from Paraná to Concepción del Uruguay and several tributary
branches, afford ample transportation facilities to the ports. Another
railway line follows the Uruguay from Concordia northward into
Corrientes. Entre Rios has been one of the most turbulent of the
Argentine provinces, and has suffered severely from political disorder
and civil war. Comparative quiet reigned from 1842 to 1870 under the
autocratic rule of Gen. J.J. Urquiza. After his assassination in 1870
these partizan conflicts were renewed for two or three years, and then
the province settled down to a life of comparative peace, followed by an
extraordinary development in her pastoral and agricultural industries.
Among these is the slaughtering and packing of beef, the exportation of
which has reached large proportions. The capital is Paraná, though the
seat of government was originally located at Concepción del Uruguay, and
was again transferred to that town during Urquiza's domination.
Concepción del Uruguay, or Concepción (founded 1778), is a flourishing
town and port on the Uruguay, connected by railway with an extensive
producing region which gives it an important export trade, and is the
seat of a national college and normal school. Its population was
estimated at 9000 in 1905. Other large towns are Gualeguay and
Gualeguaychú.
ENVOY (Fr. _envoyé_, "sent"), a diplomatic agent of the second rank. The
word _envoyé_ comes first into general use in this connexion in the 17th
century, as a translation of the Lat. _ablegatus_ or _missus_ (see
DIPLOMACY). Hence the word envoy is commonly used of any one sent on a
mission of any sort.
ENZIO (c. 1220-1272), king of Sardinia, was a natural son of the
emperor Frederick II. His mother was probably a German, and his name,
Enzio, is a diminutive form of the German _Heinrich_. His father had a
great affection for him, and he was probably present at the battle of
Cortenuova in 1237. In 1238 he was married, in defiance of the wishes of
Pope Gregory IX., to Adelasia, widow of Ubaldo Visconti and heiress of
Torres and Gallura in Sardinia. Enzio took at once the title of king of
Torres and Gallura, and in 1243 that of king of Sardinia, but he only
spent a few months in the island, and his sovereignty existed in name
alone. In July 1239 he was appointed imperial vicegerent in Italy, and
sharing in his father's excommunication in the same year, took a
prominent part in the war which broke out between the emperor and the
pope. He commenced his campaign by subduing the march of Ancona, and in
May 1241 was in command of the forces which defeated the Genoese fleet
at Meloria, where he seized a large amount of booty and captured a
number of ecclesiastics who were proceeding to a council summoned by
Gregory to Rome. Later he fought in Lombardy. In 1248 he assisted
Frederick in his vain attempt to take Parma, but was wounded and taken
prisoner by the Bolognese at Fossalta on the 26th of May 1249. His
captivity was a severe blow to the Hohenstaufen cause in Italy, and was
soon followed by the death of the emperor. He seems to have been well
treated by the people of Bologna, where he remained a captive until his
death on the 14th of March 1272. He was apparently granted a magnificent
funeral, and was buried in the church of St Dominic at Bologna. During
his imprisonment Enzio is said to have been loved by Lucia da Viadagola,
a well-born lady of Bologna, who shared his captivity and attempted to
procure his release. Some doubt has, however, been cast upon this story,
and the same remark applies to another which tells how two friends had
almost succeeded in freeing him from prison concealed in a wine-cask,
when he was recognized by a lock of his golden hair. His marriage with
Adelasia had been declared void by the pope in 1243, and he left one
legitimate, and probably two illegitimate daughters. Enzio forms the
subject of a drama by E.B.S. Raupach and of an opera by A.F.B. Dulk.
See F.W. Grossman, _König Enzio_ (Göttingen, 1883); and H. Blasius,
_König Enzio_ (Breslau, 1884).
ENZYME (Gr. [Greek: enzymos], leavened, from [Greek: en], in, and
[Greek: zymê], leaven), a term, first suggested by Kühne, for an
unorganized ferment (see FERMENTATION), a group of substances, in the
constitution of plants and animals, which decompose certain carbon
compounds occurring in association with them. See also PLANTS:
_Physiology_; NUTRITION, &c.
EOCENE (Gr. [Greek: êôs], dawn, [Greek: kainos], recent), in geology,
the name suggested by Sir C. Lyell in 1833 for the lower subdivision of
the rocks of the Tertiary Era. The term was intended to convey the idea
that this was the period which saw the dawn of the recent or existing
forms of life, because it was estimated that among the fossils of this
period only 3½% of the species are still living. Since Lyell's time much
has been learned about the fauna and flora of the period, and many
palaeontologists doubt if any of the Eocene _species_ are still extant,
unless it be some of the lowest forms of life. Nevertheless the name is
a convenient one and is in general use. The Eocene as originally defined
was not long left intact, for E. Beyrich in 1854 proposed the term
"Oligocene" for the upper portion, and later, in 1874, K. Schimper
suggested "Paleocene" as a separate appellation for the lower portion.
The Oligocene division has been generally accepted as a distinct period,
but "Paleocene" is not so widely used.
In north-western Europe the close of the Cretaceous period was marked
by an extensive emergence of the land, accompanied, in many places, by
considerable erosion of the Mesozoic rocks; a prolonged interval elapsed
before a relative depression of the land set in and the first Eocene
deposits were formed. The early Eocene formations of the
London-Paris-Belgian basin were of fresh-water and brackish origin;
towards the middle of the period they had become marine, while later
they reverted to the original type. In southern and eastern Europe
changes of sea-level were less pronounced in character; here the late
Cretaceous seas were followed without much modification by those of the
Eocene period, so rich in foraminiferal life. In many other regions, the
great gap which separates the Tertiary from the Mesozoic rocks in the
neighbourhood of London and Paris does not exist, and the boundary line
is difficult to draw. Eocene strata succeed Cretaceous rocks without
serious unconformity in the Libyan area, parts of Denmark, S.E. Alps,
India, New Zealand and central N. America. The unconformity is marked in
England, parts of Egypt, on the Atlantic coastal plain and in the
eastern gulf region of N. America, as well as in the marine Eocene of
western Oregon. The clastic Flysch formation of the Carpathians and
northern Alps appears to be of Eocene age in the upper and Cretaceous in
the lower part. The Eocene sea covered at various times a strip of the
Atlantic coast from New Jersey southward and sent a great tongue or bay
up the Mississippi valley; similar epicontinental seas spread over parts
of the Pacific border, but the plains of the interior with the mountains
on the west were meanwhile being filled with terrestrial and lacustrine
deposits which attained an enormous development. This great extension of
non-marine formations in the Eocene of different countries has
introduced difficulties in the way of exact correlation; it is safer,
therefore, in the present state of knowledge, to make no attempt to find
in the Eocene strata of America and India, &c., the precise equivalent
of subdivisions that have been determined with more or less exactitude
in the London-Paris-Belgian area.
[Illustration: Distribution of Eocene Rocks.]
It is possible that in Eocene times there existed a greater continuity
of the northern land masses than obtains to-day. Europe at that time was
probably united with N. America through Iceland and Greenland; while on
the other side, America may have joined Asia by the way of Alaska. On
the other hand, the great central, mediterranean sea which stretched
across the Eurasian continents sent an arm northward somewhere just east
of the Ural mountains, and thus divided the northern land mass in that
region. S. America, Australia and perhaps Africa _may_ have been
connected more or less directly with the Antarctic continent.
Associated, no doubt, with the crustal movements which closed the
Cretaceous and inaugurated the Eocene period, there were local and
intermittent manifestations of volcanic activity throughout the period.
Diabases, gabbros, serpentines, soda-potash granites, &c., are found in
the Eocene of the central and northern Apennines. Tuffs occur in the
Veronese and Vicentin Alps--Ronca and Spelecco schists. Tuffs, basalts
and other igneous rocks appear also in Montana, Wyoming, California,
Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado; also in Central America, the
Antillean region and S. America.
It has been very generally assumed by geologists, mainly upon the
evidence of plant remains, that the Eocene period opened with a
temperate climate in northern latitudes; later, as indicated by the
London Clay, Alum Bay and Bournemouth beds, &c., the temperature appears
to have been at least subtropical. But it should be observed that the
frequent admixture of temperate forms with what are now tropical species
makes it difficult to speak with certainty as to the degree of warmth
experienced. The occurrence of lignites in the Eocene of the Paris
basin, Tirol and N. America is worthy of consideration in this
connexion. On the other hand, the coarse boulder beds in the lower
Flysch have been regarded as evidence of local glaciation; this would
not be inconsistent with a period of widespread geniality of climate, as
is indicated by the large size of the nummulites and the dispersion of
the marine Mollusca, but the evidence for glaciation is not yet
conclusive.
_Eocene Stratigraphy._--In Britain, with the exception of the Bovey
beds (q.v.) and the leaf-bearing beds of Antrim and Mull, Eocene rocks
are confined to the south-eastern portion of England. They lie in the
two well-marked synclinal basins of London and Hampshire which are
conterminous in the western area (Hampshire, Berkshire), but are
separated towards the east by the denuded anticline of the Weald. The
strata in these two basins have been grouped in the following manner:--
_London Basin._ _Hampshire Basin._
Upper Upper Bagshot Sands. Headon Hill and Barton Sands.
/ Middle Bagshot Beds and Bracklesham Beds and leaf
Middle < part of Lower Bagshot beds of Bournemouth and
\ Beds. Alum Bay.
/ Part of Lower Bagshot
| Beds, London Clay,
| Blackheath and Oldhaven London Clay and the equivalent
Lower < Beds, Woolwich and Bognor Beds, Woolwich
| Reading Beds, Thanet and Reading Beds.
\ Sands.
The Thanet sands have not been recognized in the Hampshire basin; they
are usually pale yellow and greenish sands with streaks of clay and at
the base; resting on an evenly denuded surface of chalk is a very
constant layer of green-coated, well-rounded chalk flint pebbles. It
is a marine formation, but fossils are scarce except in E. Kent, where
it attains its most complete development. The Woolwich and Reading
beds (see READING BEDS) contain both marine and estuarine fossils. In
western Kent, between the Woolwich beds and the London Clay are the
Oldhaven beds or Blackheath pebbles, 20 to 40 ft., made up almost
entirely of well-rounded flint pebbles set in sand; the fossils are
marine and estuarine. The London Clay, 500 ft. thick, is a marine
deposit consisting of blue or brown clay with sandy layers and
septarian nodules; its equivalent in the Hampshire area is sometimes
called the Bognor Clay, well exposed on the coast of Sussex. The
Bagshot, Bracklesham and Barton beds will be found briefly described
under those heads.
Crossing the English Channel, we find in northern France and Belgium a
series of deposits identified in their general characters with those
of England. The anticlinal ridge of the English Weald is prolonged
south-eastwards on to the continent, and separates the Belgian from
the French Eocene areas much as it separates the areas of London and
Hampshire; and it is clear that at the time of deposition all four
regions were intimately related and subject to similar variations of
marine and estuarine conditions. With a series of strata so variable
from point to point it is natural that many purely local phases should
have received distinctive names; in the Upper Eocene of the Paris
basin the more important formations are the highly fossiliferous
marine sands known as the "Sands of Beauchamp" and the local
fresh-water limestone, the "Calcaire de St Ouen." The Middle Eocene is
represented by the well-known "Calcaire grossier," about 90 ft. thick.
The beds in this series vary a good deal lithologically, some being
sandy, others marly or glauconitic; fossils are abundant. The Upper
Calcaire grossier or "Caillasses" is a fresh-water formation; the
middle division is marine; while the lower one is partly marine,
partly of fresh-water origin. The numerous quarries and mines for
building stone in the neighbourhood of Paris have made it possible to
acquire a very precise knowledge of this division, and many of the
beds have received trade names, such as "Rochette," "Roche," "Banc
franc," "Banc vert," "Cliquart," "Saint Nom;" the two last named are
dolomitic. Below these limestones are the nummulitic sands of Cuise
and Soissons. The Lower Eocene contains the lignitic plastic clay
(_argile plastique_) of Soissons and elsewhere; the limestones of
Rilly and Sézanne and the greenish glauconitic sands of Bracheux. The
relative position of the above formations with respect to those of
Belgium and England will be seen from the table of Eocene strata. The
Eocene deposits of southern Europe differ in a marked manner from
those of the Anglo-Parisian basin. The most important feature is the
great development of nummulitic limestone with thin marls and
nummulitic sandstones. The sea in which the nummulitic limestones were
formed occupied the site of an enlarged Mediterranean communicating
with similar waters right round the world, for these rocks are found
not only in southern Europe, including all the Alpine tracts, Greece
and Turkey and southern Russia, but they are well developed in
northern Africa, Asia Minor, Palestine, and they may be followed
through Persia, Baluchistan, India, into China, Tibet, Japan, Sumatra,
Borneo and the Philippines. The nummulitic limestones are frequently
hard and crystalline, especially where they have been subjected to
elevation and compression as in the Alpine region, 10,000 ft. above
the sea, or from 16,000, to 20,000 ft., in the central Asian plateau.
Besides being a widespread formation the nummulitic limestone is
locally several thousand feet thick.
While the foraminiferal limestones were being formed over most of
southern Europe, a series of clastic beds were in course of formation
in the Carpathians and the northern Alpine region, viz. the Flysch and
the Vienna sandstone. Some portions of this Alpine Eocene are coarsely
conglomeratic, and in places there are boulders of non-local rocks of
enormous dimensions included in the argillaceous or sandy matrix. The
occurrence of these large boulders together with the scarceness of
fossils has suggested a glacial origin for the formation; but the
evidence hitherto collected is not conclusive. C.W. von Gümbel has
classified the Eocene of the northern Alps (Bavaria, &c.) as follows:--
Upper Eocene, Flysch and Vienna sandstone, with younger nummulitic
beds and Häring group.
Middle " Kressenberg Beds, with older nummulitic beds.
Lower " Burberg Beds, Greensands with small nummulites.
The Häring group of northern Tirol contains lignite beds of some
importance. In the southern and S.E. Alps the following divisions are
recognized.
Upper Eocene, Macigno or Tassello--Vienna Sandstone, conglomerates,
marls and shales.
Middle " Nummulitic limestones, three subdivisions.
Lower " Liburnian stage (or Proteocene), foraminiferal
limestones with fresh-water intercalations at the top
and bottom, the _Cosina_ beds, fresh-water in the
middle of the series.
In the central and northern Apennines the Eocene strata have been
subdivided by Prof. F. Sacco into an upper Bartonian, a middle
Parisian and a lower Suessonian series. In the middle member are the
representatives of the Flysch and the Macigno. These Eocene strata are
upwards of 5500 ft. thick. In northern Africa the nummulitic
limestones and sandstones are widely spread; the lower portions
comprise the Libyan group and the shales of Esneh on the Nile
(Flandrien), the _Alveolina_ beds of Sokotra and others; the Mokattam
stage of Egypt is a representative of the later Eocene. Much of the N.
African Eocene contains phosphatic beds. In India strata of Eocene age
are extensively developed; in Sind the marine Ranikot beds, 1500 to
2000 ft., consisting of clays with gypsum and lignite, shales and
sandstones; these beds have, side by side with Eocene nummulites, a
few fossils of Cretaceous affinities. Above the Ranikot beds are the
massive nummulitic limestones and sandstones of the Kirthar group;
these are succeeded by the nummulitic limestones and shales at the
base of the Nari group. In the southern Himalayan region the
nummulitic phase of Eocene deposit is well developed, but there are
difficulties in fixing the line of demarcation between this and the
younger formations. The lower part of the Sirmur series of the Simla
district may belong to this period; it is subdivided into the Kasauli
group and the Dagshai group with the Subáthu group at the base.
Beneath the thick nummulitic Eocene limestone of the Salt Range are
shales and marls with a few coal seams. The marine Eocene rocks of N.
America are most extensively developed round the coast of the Gulf of
Mexico, whence they spread into the valley of the Mississippi and, as
a comparatively narrow strip, along the Atlantic coastal plain to New
Jersey.
The series in Alabama, which may be taken as typical of the Gulf coast
Eocene, is as follows:--
Upper Jacksonian, White limestone of Alabama (and Vicksburg?).
Middle Claibornian, Claiborne series.
Buhrstone series.
Lower, Chickasawan Sands and lignites.
Midwayan or Clayton formation, limestones.
The above succession is not fully represented in the Atlantic coast
states.
On the Pacific coast marine formations are found in California and
Oregon; such are the Tejon series with lignite and oil; the Escondido
series of S. California (7000 ft.), part of the Pascadero series of
the Santa Cruz Mountains; the Pulaski, Tyee, Arago and Coaledo
beds--with coals--in Oregon. In the Puget formation of Washington we
have a great series of sediments, largely of brackish water origin,
and in parts coal-bearing. The total thickness of this formation has
been estimated at 20,000 ft. (it may prove to be less than this), but
it is probable that only the lower portion is of Eocene age. The most
interesting of the N. American Eocene deposits are those of the Rocky
Mountains and the adjacent western plains, in Wyoming, Nevada,
Nebraska, Colorado, &c.; they are of terrestrial, lacustrine or
aeolian origin, and on this account and because they were not strictly
synchronous, there is considerable difficulty in placing them in their
true position in the time-scale. The main divisions or groups are
generally recognized as follows:--
Mammalian
Zonal Forms.
Upper [1] Uinta Group, 800 ft. (? = Jacksonian) _Diplacodon._
_Telmatotherium._
Middle[2] Bridger Group, 2000 ft. (? = Claibornian) _Uintatherium._
Lower [3] Wind River Group, 800 ft. _Bathyopsis._
[4] Wasatch Group, 2000 ft. (? = Chickasawan) _Coryphodon._
Basal [5] Torrejon Group, 300 ft. _Pantolambda._
[6] Puerco Group, 500 to 1000 ft. _Polymastodon._
[1] South of the Uinta Mts. in Utah.
[2] Fort Bridger Basin.
[3] Wind river in Wyoming.
[4] Wasatch Mts. in Utah.
[5] Torrejon in New Mexico.
[6] Puerco river, New Mexico.
The Fort Union beds of Canada and parts of Montana and N. Dakota are
probably the oldest Eocene strata of the Western Interior; they are
some 2000 ft. thick and possibly are equivalent to the Midwayan group.
But in these beds, as in those known as Arapahoe, Livingston, Denver,
Ohio and Ruby, which are now often classed as belonging to the upper
Laramie formation, it is safer to regard them as a transitional series
between the Mesozoic and Tertiary systems. There is, however, a marked
unconformity between the Eocene Telluride or San Miguel and Poison
Canyon formations of Colorado and the underlying Laramie rocks.
Many local aspects of Eocene rocks have received special names, but
too little is known about them to enable them to be correctly placed
in the Eocene series. Such are the Clarno formation (late Eocene) of
the John Day basin, Oregon, the Pinyon conglomerate of Yellowstone
Park, the Sphinx conglomerate of Montana, the Whitetail conglomerate
of Arizona, the Manti shales of Utah, the Mojave formation of S.
California and the Amyzon formation of Nevada.
Of the Eocene of other countries little is known in detail. Strata of
this age occur in Central and S. America (Patagonia-Megellanian
series--Brazil, Chile, Argentina), in S. Australia (and in the Great
Australian Bight), New Zealand, in Seymour Island near Graham Land in
the Antarctic Regions, Japan, Java, Borneo, New Guinea, Moluccas,
Philippines, New Caledonia, also in Greenland, Bear Island,
Spitzbergen and Siberia.
_Organic Life of the Eocene Period._--As it has been observed above, the
name Eocene was given to this period on the ground that in its fauna
only a small percentage of _living_ species were present; this estimation
was founded upon the assemblage of invertebrate remains in which, from
the commencement of this period until the present day, there has been
comparatively little change. The real biological interest of the period
centres around the higher vertebrate types. In the marine mollusca the
most noteworthy change is the entire absence of ammonoids, the group
which throughout the Mesozoic era had taken so prominent a place, but
disappeared completely with the close of the Cretaceous. Nautiloids were
more abundant than they are at present, but as a whole the Cephalopods
took a more subordinate part than they had done in previous periods. On
the other hand, Gasteropods and Pelecypods found in the numerous shallow
seas a very suitable environment and flourished exceedingly, and their
shells are often preserved in a state of great perfection and in
enormous numbers. Of the Gasteropod genera _Cerithium_ with its
estuarine and lagoonal forms _Potamides_, _Potamidopsis_, &c., is very
characteristic; _Rostellaria_, _Voluta_, _Fusus_, _Pleurotoma_, _Conus_,
_Typhis_, may also be cited. _Cardium_, _Venericardia_, _Crassatella_,
_Corbulomya_, _Cytherea_, _Lucina_, _Anomia_, _Ostrea_ are a few of the
many Pelecypod genera. Echinoderms were represented by abundant
sea-urchins, _Echinolampas_, _Linthia_, _Conoclypeus_, &c. Corals
flourished on the numerous reefs and approximated to modern forms
(_Trochosmilia_, _Dendrophyllia_). But by far the most abundant marine
organisms were the foraminifera which flourished in the warm seas in
countless myriads. Foremost among these are the _Nummulites_, which by
their extraordinary numerical development and great size, as well as by
their wide distribution, demand special recognition. Many other genera
of almost equal importance as rock builders, lived at the same time:
_Orthophragma_, _Operculina_, _Assilina_, _Orbitolites_, _Miliola_,
_Alveolina_. Crustacea were fairly abundant (_Xanthopsis_, _Portunus_),
and most of the orders and many families of modern insects were
represented.
When we turn to the higher forms of life, the reptiles and mammals,
we find a remarkable contrast between the fauna of the Eocene and those
periods which preceded and succeeded it. The great group of Saurian
reptiles, whose members had held dominion on land and sea during most of
the Mesozoic time, had completely disappeared by the beginning of the
Eocene; in their place placental mammals made their appearance and
rapidly became the dominant group. Among the early Eocene mammals no
trace can be found of the numerous and clearly-marked orders with which
we are familiar to-day; instead we find obscurely differentiated forms,
which cannot be fitted without violence into any of the modern orders.
The early placental mammals were generalized types (with certain
non-placental characters) with potentialities for rapid divergence and
development in the direction of the more specialized modern orders.
Thus, the Creodonta foreshadowed the Carnivora, the Condylarthra
presaged the herbivorous groups; but before the close of this period, so
favourable were the conditions of life to a rapid evolution of types,
that most of the great _orders_ had been clearly defined, though none of
the Eocene _genera_ are still extant. Among the early carnivores were
_Arctocyon_, _Palaeonictis_, _Amblyctonus_, _Hyaenodon_, _Cynodon_,
_Provivera_, _Patriofelis_. The primitive dog-like forms did not appear
until late in the period, in Europe; and true cats did not arrive until
later, though they were represented by _Eusmilus_ in the Upper Eocene of
France. The primitive ungulates (Condylarths) were generalized forms
with five effective toes, exemplified in _Phenacodus_. The gross
Amblypoda, with five-toed stumpy feet (_Coryphodon_), were prominent in
the early Eocene; particularly striking forms were the _Dinoceratidae_,
_Dinoceras_, with three pairs of horns or protuberances on its massive
skull and a pair of huge canine teeth projecting downwards; _Tinoceras_,
_Uintatherium_, _Loxophodon_, &c.; these elephantine creatures, whose
remains are so abundant in the Eocene deposits of western America, died
out before the close of the period. The divergence of the hoofed mammals
into the two prominent divisions, the odd-toed and even-toed, began in
this period, but the former did not get beyond the three-toed stage. The
least differentiated of the odd-toed group were the Lophiodonts: tapirs
were foreshadowed by _Systemodon_ and similar forms (_Palaeotherium_,
_Paloplotherium_); the peccary-like _Hyracotherium_ was a forerunner of
the horse, _Hyrochinus_ was a primitive rhinoceros. The evolution of the
horse through such forms as _Hyracotherium_, _Pachynolophus_,
_Eohippus_, &c., appears to have proceeded along parallel lines in
Eurasia and America, but the true horse did not arrive until later.
Ancestral deer were represented by _Dichobune_, _Amphitragulus_ and
others, while many small hog-like forms existed (_Diplopus_, _Eohyus_,
_Hyopotamus_, _Homacodon_). The primitive stock of the camel group
developed in N. America in late Eocene time and sent branches into S.
America and Eurasia. The edentates were very generalized forms at this
period (Ganodonta); the rodents (Tillodontia) attained a large size for
members of this group, e.g. _Tillotherium_. The Insectivores had Eocene
forerunners, and the Lemuroids--probable ancestors of the apes--were
forms of great interest, _Anaptomorphus_, _Microsyops_, _Heterohyus_,
_Microchaerus_, _Coenopithecus_; even the Cetaceans were well
represented by _Zeuglodon_ and others.
+--------------+-------------------------+----------------------+-------------------+---------------+------------------+------------------+
| | | | | Mediterranean | | |
| | | | | regions and | Flysch | |
| Stages. | Paris Basin. | England. | Belgian Basin. | Great Central | Phase. | North America. |
| | | | | sea. | | |
+--------------+-------------------------+----------------------+-------------------+---------------+------------------+------------------+
| Bartonien.[1]| Limestone of Saint-Ouen.| Barton beds. | | | | Unita Group and |
| | Sands of Mortefontaine. | | Sands of Lede. | | | Jacksonian. |
| | Sands of Beauchamp. | Upper Bagshot sands. | | | | |
| | Sands of Auvers. | | | | | |
+--------------+-------------------------+----------------------+-------------------+ | | |
| | | Bracklesham and | Laekenien. | | | Bridger Group |
| Lutétien. | Calcaire grossier. | Bournemouth beds. | Bruxellien. | | | and |
| | | Lower Bagshot sands. | Panisélien. | | Upper part of the| Claibornian. |
+--------------+-------------------------+----------------------+-------------------+ | Alpine Flysch | |
| Yprésien. | Nummulitic sands of | Alum Bay leaf beds. | Sands of Mons en | | and Vienna and | Wind River Group.|
| | Soissons and Sands of | | Pévèle. | Nummulitic | Carpathian | Wasatch Group |
| | Cuise and Aizy. | | Flanders Clay. | limestones, | sandstones. | and |
| | | | | sandstones | | |
+---+----------+ | +-------------------+ and shales. | | |
| | | | London Clay. | | | Macigno of the | |
| L | | | Oldhaven beds. | Upper Landénien | | Apennines and | |
| a | Sparna- | | | sands. | | Maritime Alps. | Chickasawan. |
| n | cien. | Plastic Clay and lignite| Woolwich and Reading | | | | |
| d | | beds. | beds. | Sands of | | | |
| é |----------+-------------------------+----------------------+ Ostricourt. | | | Torrejon Group |
| n | | Limestones of Rilly and | | | | | and |
| i | | Sézanne. | Thanet sands. | Landénien tuffeau.| | | Midwayan. |
| e |Thanetien.| Sands of Rilly and | | | | | |
| n | | Bracheux. | | Marls of Gelinden.| | | Puerco Group. |
| | | | | | | | |
+---+----------+-------------------------+----------------------+-------------------+---------------+------------------+------------------+
The non-placental mammals although abundant were taking a secondary
place; _Didelphys_, the primitive opossum, is noteworthy on account of
its wide geographical range.
Among the birds, the large flightless forms, _Eupterornis_, _Gastornis_,
were prominent, and many others were present, such as the ancestral
forms of our modern gulls, albatrosses, herons, buzzards, eagles, owls,
quails, plovers. Reptiles were poorly represented, with the exception of
crocodilians, tortoises, turtles and some large snakes.
The flora of the Eocene period, although full of interest, does not
convey the impression of newness that is afforded by the fauna of the
period. The reason for this difference is this: the newer flora had been
introduced and had developed to a considerable extent in the Cretaceous
period, and there is no sharp break between the flora of the earlier and
that of the later period; in both we find a mixed assemblage--what we
should now regard as tropical palms, growing side by side with
mild-temperate trees. Early Eocene plants in N. Europe, oaks, willows,
chestnuts (Castanea), laurels, indicate a more temperate climate than
existed in Middle Eocene when in the Isle of Wight, Hampshire and the
adjacent portions of the continent, palms, figs, cinnamon flourished
along with the cactus, magnolia, sequoia, cypress and ferns. The late
Eocene flora of Europe was very similar to its descendant in modern
Australasia.
See A. de Lapparent, _Traité de géologie_, vol. iii. (5th ed., 1906),
which contains a good general account of the period, with numerous
references to original papers. Also R.B. Newton, _Systematic List of
the Frederick E. Edwards Collection of British Oligocene and Eocene
Mollusca in the British Museum_ (_Natural History_) (1891), pp.
299-325; G.D. Harris, "A Revision of our Lower Eocenes," _Proc.
Geologists' Assoc._ x., 1887-1888; W.B. Clark, "Correlation Papers:
Eocene" (1891), _U.S. Geol. Survey Bull. No. 83._ For more recent
literature consult _Geological Literature added to the Geological
Society's Library_, published annually by the society. (J. A. H.)
FOOTNOTE:
[1]
Bartonien from Barton, England.
Lutétien " Lutetia = Paris.
Yprésien " Ypres, Flanders.
Landénien " Landen, Belgium.
Thanetien " The Isle of Thanet.
Sparnacien " Sparnacum = Épernay.
Laekenien " Laeken, Belgium.
Bruxellien " Brussels.
Panisélien " Mont Panisel, near Mons.
Other names that have been applied to subdivisions of the Eocene not
included in the table are Parisien and Suessonien (Soissons); Ludien
(Ludes in the Paris basin) and Priabonien (Priabona in the Vicentine
Alps); Heersien (Heer near Maastricht) and Wemmelien (Wemmel,
Belgium); very many more might be mentioned.
EON DE BEAUMONT, CHARLES GENEVIÈVE LOUISE AUGUSTE ANDRÉ TIMOTHÉE D'
(1728-1810), commonly known as the CHEVALIER D'EON, French political
adventurer, famous for the supposed mystery of his sex, was born near
Tonnerre in Burgundy, on the 7th of October 1728. He was the son of an
advocate of good position, and after a distinguished course of study at
the Collège Mazarin he became a doctor of law by special dispensation
before the usual age, and adopted his father's profession. He began
literary work as a contributor to Fréron's _Année littéraire_, and
attracted notice as a political writer by two works on financial and
administrative questions, which he published in his twenty-fifth year.
His reputation increased so rapidly that in 1755 he was, on the
recommendation of Louis François, prince of Conti, entrusted by Louis
XV. (who had originally started his "secret" foreign policy--i.e. by
undisclosed agents behind the backs of his ministers--in favour of the
prince of Conti's ambition to be king of Poland) with a secret mission
to the court of Russia. It was on this occasion that he is said for the
first time to have assumed the dress of a woman, with the connivance, it
is supposed, of the French court.[1] In this disguise he obtained the
appointment of reader to the empress Elizabeth, and won her over
entirely to the views of his royal master, with whom he maintained a
secret correspondence during the whole of his diplomatic career. After a
year's absence he returned to Paris to be immediately charged with a
second mission to St Petersburg, in which he figured in his true sex,
and as brother of the reader who had been at the Russian court the year
before. He played an important part in the negotiations between the
courts of Russia, Austria and France during the Seven Years' War. For
these diplomatic services he was rewarded with the decoration of the
grand cross of St Louis. In 1759 he served with the French army on the
Rhine as aide-de-camp to the marshal de Broglie, and was wounded during
the campaign. He had held for some years previously a commission in a
regiment of dragoons, and was distinguished for his skill in military
exercises, particularly in fencing. In 1762, on the return of the duc de
Nivernais, d'Eon, who had been secretary to his embassy, was appointed
his successor, first as resident agent and then as minister
plenipotentiary at the court of Great Britain. He had not been long in
this position when he lost the favour of his sovereign, chiefly,
according to his own account, through the adverse influence of Madame de
Pompadour, who was jealous of him as a secret correspondent of the king.
Superseded by count de Guerchy, d'Eon showed his irritation by denying
the genuineness of the letter of appointment, and by raising an action
against Guerchy for an attempt to poison him. Guerchy, on the other
hand, had previously commenced an action against d'Eon for libel,
founded on the publication by the latter of certain state documents of
which he had possession in his official capacity. Both parties succeeded
in so far as a true bill was found against Guerchy for the attempt to
murder, though by pleading his privilege as ambassador he escaped a
trial, and d'Eon was found guilty of the libel. Failing to come up for
judgment when called on, he was outlawed. For some years afterwards he
lived in obscurity, appearing in public chiefly at fencing matches.
During this period rumours as to the sex of d'Eon, originating probably
in the story of his first residence at St Petersburg as a female, began
to excite public interest. In 1774 he published at Amsterdam a book
called _Les Loisirs du Chevalier d'Eon_, which stimulated gossip. Bets
were frequently laid on the subject, and an action raised before Lord
Mansfield in 1777 for the recovery of one of these bets brought the
question to a judicial decision, by which d'Eon was declared a female. A
month after the trial he returned to France, having received permission
to do so as the result of negotiations in which Beaumarchais was
employed as agent. The conditions were that he was to deliver up certain
state documents in his possession, and to wear the dress of a female.
The reason for the latter of these stipulations has never been clearly
explained, but he complied with it to the close of his life. In 1784 he
received permission to visit London for the purpose of bringing back his
library and other property. He did not, however, return to France,
though after the Revolution he sent a letter, using the name of Madame
d'Eon, in which he offered to serve in the republican army. He continued
to dress as a lady, and took part in fencing matches with success,
though at last in 1796 he was badly hurt in one. He died in London on
the 22nd of May 1810. During the closing years of his life he is said to
have enjoyed a small pension from George III. A post-mortem examination
of the body conclusively established the fact that d'Eon was a man.
The best modern accounts are in the duc de Broglie's _Le Secret du
roi_ (1888); Captain J. Buchan Telfer's _Strange Career of the
Chevalier d'Eon_ (1888); Octave Homberg and Fernand Jousselin, _Le
Chevalier d'Eon_ (1904); and A. Lang's _Historical Mysteries_ (1904).
FOOTNOTE:
[1] But see Lang's _Historical Mysteries_, pp. 241-242, where this
traditional account is discussed and rejected.
EÖTVÖS, JÓZSEF, BARON (1813-1871), Hungarian writer and statesman, the
son of Baron Ignacz Eötvös and the baroness Lilian, was born at Buda on
the 13th of September 1813. After an excellent education he entered the
civil service as a vice-notary, and was early introduced to political
life by his father. He also spent many years in western Europe,
assimilating the new ideas both literary and political, and making the
acquaintance of the leaders of the Romantic school. On his return to
Hungary he wrote his first political work, _Prison Reform_; and at the
diet of 1839-1840 he made a great impression by his eloquence and
learning. One of his first speeches (published, with additional matter,
in 1841) warmly advocated Jewish emancipation. Subsequently, in the
columns of the _Pesti Hirlap_, Eötvös disseminated his progressive ideas
farther afield, his standpoint being that the necessary reforms could
only be carried out administratively by a responsible and purely
national government. The same sentiments pervade his novel _The Village
Notary_ (1844-1846), one of the classics of the Magyar literature, as
well as in the less notable romance _Hungary in 1514_, and the comedy
_Long live Equality!_ In 1842 he married Anna Rosty, but his happy
domestic life did not interfere with his public career. He was now
generally regarded as one of the leading writers and politicians of
Hungary, while the charm of his oratory was such that, whenever the
archduke palatine Joseph desired to have a full attendance in the House
of Magnates, he called upon Eötvös to address it. The February
revolution of 1848 was the complete triumph of Eötvös' ideas, and he
held the portfolio of public worship and instruction in the first
responsible Hungarian ministry. But his influence extended far beyond
his own department. Eötvös, Deák and Szechényi represented the pacific,
moderating influence in the council of ministers, but when the premier,
Batthyány, resigned, Eötvös, in despair, retired for a time to Munich.
Yet, though withdrawn from the tempests of the War of Independence, he
continued to serve his country with his pen. His _Influence of the
Ruling Ideas of the 19th Century on the State_ (Pest, 1851-1854, German
editions at Vienna and Leipzig the same year) profoundly influenced
literature and public opinion in Hungary. On his return home, in 1851,
he kept resolutely aloof from all political movements. In 1859 he
published _The Guarantees of the Power and Unity of Austria_ (Ger. ed.
Leipzig, same year), in which he tried to arrive at a compromise between
personal union and ministerial responsibility on the one hand and
centralization on the other. After the Italian war, however, such a
halting-place was regarded as inadequate by the majority of the nation.
In the diet of 1861 Eötvös was one of the most loyal followers of Deák,
and his speech in favour of the "Address" (see DEÁK, FRANCIS) made a
great impression at Vienna. The enforced calm which prevailed during the
next few years enabled him to devote himself once more to literature,
and, in 1866, he was elected president of the Hungarian academy. In the
diets of 1865 and 1867 he fought zealously by the side of Deák, with
whose policy he now completely associated himself. On the formation of
the Andrássy cabinet (Feb. 1867) he once more accepted the portfolio of
public worship and education, being the only one of the ministers of
1848 who thus returned to office. He had now, at last, the opportunity
of realizing the ideals of a lifetime. That very year the diet passed
his bill for the emancipation of the Jews; though his further efforts in
the direction of religious liberty were less successful, owing to the
opposition of the Catholics. But his greatest achievement was the
National Schools Act, the most complete system of education provided for
Hungary since the days of Maria Theresa. Good Catholic though he was (in
matters of religion he had been the friend and was the disciple of
Montalembert), Eötvös looked with disfavour on the dogma of papal
infallibility, promulgated in 1870, and when the bishop of Fehérvár
proclaimed it, Eötvös cited him to appear at the capital _ad audiendum
verbum regium_. He was a constant defender of the composition with
Austria (_Ausgleich_), and during the absence of Andrássy used to
preside over the council of ministers; but the labours of the last few
years were too much for his failing health, and he died at Pest on the
2nd of February 1871. On the 3rd of May 1879 a statue was erected to him
at Pest in the square which bears his name.
Eötvös occupied as prominent a place in Hungarian literature as in
Hungarian politics. His peculiarity, both as a politician and as a
statesman, lies in the fact that he was a true philosopher, a
philosopher at heart as well as in theory; and in his poems and novels
he clothed in artistic forms all the great ideas for which he contended
in social and political life. The best of his verses are to be found in
his ballads, but his poems are insignificant compared with his romances.
It was _The Carthusians_, written on the occasion of the floods at Pest
in 1838, that first took the public by storm. The Magyar novel was then
in its infancy, being chiefly represented by the historico-epics of
Jósiká. Eötvös first modernized it, giving prominence in his pages to
current social problems and political aspirations. The famous _Village
Notary_ came still nearer to actual life, while _Hungary in 1514_, in
which the terrible Dozsa _Jacquerie_ (see DOZSA) is so vividly
described, is especially interesting because it rightly attributes the
great national catastrophe of Mohács to the blind selfishness of the
Magyar nobility and the intense sufferings of the people. Yet, as
already stated, all these books are written with a moral purpose, and
their somewhat involved and difficult style is, nowadays at any rate, a
trial to those who are acquainted with the easy, brilliant and lively
novels of Jókai.
The best edition of Eötvös' collected works is that of 1891, in 17
vols. Comparatively few of his writings have been translated, but
there are a good English version (London, 1850) and numerous German
versions of _The Village Notary_, while _The Emancipation of the Jews_
has been translated into Italian and German (Pest, 1841-1842), and a
German translation of _Hungary in 1514_, under the title of _Der
Bauernkrieg in Ungarn_ was published at Pest in 1850.
See A. Bán, _Life and Art of Baron Joseph Eötvös_ (Hung.) (Budapest,
1902); Zoltan Ferenczi _Baron Joseph Eötvös_ (Hung.) (Budapest, 1903)
[this is the best biography]; and M. Berkovics, _Baron Joseph Eotvos
and the French Literature_ (Hung.) (Budapest, 1904). (R. N. B.)
EPAMINONDAS (c. 418-362), Theban general and statesman, born about 418
B.C. of a noble but impoverished family. For his education he was
chiefly indebted to Lysis of Tarentum, a Pythagorean exile who had found
refuge with his father Polymnis. He first comes into notice in the
attack upon Mantineia in 385, when he fought on the Spartan side and
saved the life of his future colleague Pelopidas. In his youth
Epaminondas took little part in public affairs; he held aloof from the
political assassinations which preceded the Theban insurrection of 379.
But in the following campaigns against Sparta he rendered good service
in organizing the Theban defence. In 371 he represented Thebes at the
congress in Sparta, and by his refusal to surrender the Boeotian cities
under Theban control prevented the conclusion of a general peace. In the
ensuing campaign he commanded the Boeotian army which met the
Peloponnesian levy at Leuctra, and by a brilliant victory on this site,
due mainly to his daring innovations in the tactics of the heavy
infantry, established at once the predominance of Thebes among the
land-powers of Greece and his own fame as the greatest and most original
of Greek generals. At the instigation of the Peloponnesian states which
armed against Sparta in consequence of this battle, Epaminondas in 370
led a large host into Laconia; though unable to capture Sparta he
ravaged its territory and dealt a lasting blow at Sparta's predominance
in Peloponnesus by liberating the Messenians and rebuilding their
capital at Messene. Accused on his return to Thebes of having exceeded
the term of his command, he made good his defence and was re-elected
boeotarch. In 369 he forced the Isthmus lines and secured Sicyon for
Thebes, but gained no considerable successes. In the following year he
served as a common soldier in Thessaly, and upon being reinstated in
command contrived the safe retreat of the Theban army from a difficult
position. Returning to Thessaly next year at the head of an army he
procured the liberation of Pelopidas from the tyrant Alexander of Pherae
without striking a blow. In his third expedition (366) to Peloponnesus,
Epaminondas again eluded the Isthmus garrison and won over the Achaeans
to the Theban alliance. Turning his attention to the growing maritime
power of Athens, Epaminondas next equipped a fleet of 100 triremes, and
during a cruise to the Propontis detached several states from the
Athenian confederacy. When subsequent complications threatened the
position of Thebes in Peloponnesus he again mustered a large army in
order to crush the newly formed Spartan league (362). After some
masterly operations between Sparta and Mantineia, by which he nearly
captured both these towns, he engaged in a decisive battle on the latter
site, and by his vigorous shock tactics gained a complete victory over
his opponents (see MANTINEIA). Epaminondas himself received a severe
wound during the combat, and died soon after the issue was decided.
His title to fame rests mainly on his brilliant qualities both as a
strategist and as a tactician; his influence on military art in Greece
was of the greatest. For the purity and uprightness of his character he
likewise stood in high repute; his culture and eloquence equalled the
highest Attic standard. In politics his chief achievement was the final
overthrow of Sparta's predominance in the Peloponnese; as a constructive
statesman he displayed no special talent, and the lofty pan-Hellenic
ambitions which are imputed to him at any rate never found a practical
expression.
Cornelius Nepos, _Vita Epaminondae_; Diodorus xv. 52-88; Xenophon,
_Hellenica_, vii.; L. Pomtow, _Das Leben des Epaminondas_ (Berlin,
1870); von Stein, _Geschichte der spartanischen und thebanischen
Hegemonie_ (Dorpat, 1884), pp. 123 sqq.; H. Swoboda in Pauly-Wissowa,
_Realencyclopädie_, v. pt. 2 (Stuttgart, 1905), pp. 2674-2707; also
ARMY: _History_, § 6. (M. O. B. C.)
EPARCH, an official, a governor of a province of Roman Greece, [Greek:
eparchos], whose title was equivalent to, or represented that of the
Roman _praefectus_. The area of his administration was called an eparchy
([Greek: eparchia]). The term survives as one of the administrative
units of modern Greece, the country being divided into nomarchies,
subdivided into eparchies, again subdivided into demarchies (see GREECE:
_Local Administration_). "Eparch" and "eparchy" are also used in the
Russian Orthodox Church for a bishop and his diocese respectively.
EPAULETTE (a French word, from _épaule_, a shoulder), properly a
shoulder-piece, and so applied to the shoulder-knot of ribbon to which a
scapulary was attached, worn by members of a religious order. The
military usage was probably derived from the metal plate (_épaulière_)
which protected the shoulder in the defensive armour of the 16th
century. It was first used merely as a shoulder knot to fasten the
baldric, and the application of it to mark distinctive grades of rank
was begun in France at the suggestion, it is said, of Charles Louis
Auguste Fouquet, duc de Belle-Isle, in 1759. In modern times it always
appears as a shoulder ornament for military and naval uniforms. At first
it consisted merely of a fringe hanging from the end of the
shoulder-strap or cord over the sleeve, but towards the end of the 18th
century it became a solid ornament, consisting of a flat shoulder-piece,
extended beyond the point of the shoulder into an oval plate, from the
edge of which hangs a thick fringe, in the case of officers of gold or
silver. The epaulette is worn in the British navy by officers above the
rank of sub-lieutenant; in the army it ceased to be worn about 1855. It
is worn by officers in the United States navy above the rank of ensign;
since 1872 it is only worn by general officers in the army. In most
other countries epaulettes are worn by officers, and in the French army
by the men also, with a fringe of worsted, various distinctions of shape
and colour being observed between ranks, corps and arms of the service.
The "scale" is similar to the epaulette, but has no fringe.
ÉPÉE, CHARLES-MICHEL, ABBÉ DE L' (1712-1789), celebrated for his
labours in behalf of the deaf and dumb, was born at Paris on the 25th of
November 1712, being the son of the king's architect. He studied for the
church, but having declined to sign a religious formula opposed to the
doctrines of the Jansenists, he was denied ordination by the bishop of
his diocese. He then devoted himself to the study of law; but about the
time of his admission to the bar of Paris, the bishop of Troyes granted
him ordination, and offered him a canonry in his cathedral. This bishop
died soon after, and the abbé, coming to Paris, was, on account of his
relations with Soanen, the famous Jansenist, deprived of his
ecclesiastical functions by the archbishop of Beaumont. About the same
time it happened that he heard of two deaf mutes whom a priest lately
dead had been endeavouring to instruct, and he offered to take his
place. The Spaniard Pereira was then in Paris, exhibiting the results he
had obtained in the education of deaf mutes; and it has been affirmed
that it was from him that Épée obtained his manual alphabet. The abbé,
however, affirmed that he knew nothing of Pereira's method; and whether
he did or not, there can be no doubt that he attained far greater
success than Pereira or any of his predecessors, and that the whole
system now followed in the instruction of deaf mutes virtually owes its
origin to his intelligence and devotion. In 1755 he founded, for this
beneficent purpose, a school which he supported at his own expense until
his death, and which afterwards was succeeded by the "Institution
Nationale des Sourds Muets à Paris," founded by the National Assembly in
1791. He died on the 23rd of December 1789. In 1838 a bronze monument
was erected over his grave in the church of Saint Roch. He published
various books on his method of instruction, but that published in 1784
virtually supersedes all others. It is entitled _La Véritable Manière
d'instruire les sourds et muets, confirmée par une longue expérience_.
He also began a _Dictionnaire général des signes_, which was completed
by his successor, the abbé Sicard.
ÉPÉE-DE-COMBAT, a weapon still used in France for duelling, and there
and elsewhere (blunted, of course) for exercise and amusement in fencing
(q.v.). It has a sharp-pointed blade, about 35 in. long, without any
cutting edge, and the guard, or shell, is bowl-shaped, having its
convexity towards the point. The _épée_ is the modern representative of
the small-sword, and both are distinguished from the older rapier,
mainly by being several inches shorter and much lighter in weight. The
small-sword (called thus in opposition to the heavy cavalry broadsword),
was worn by gentlemen in full dress throughout the 18th century, and it
still survives in the modern English court costume.
Fencing practice was originally carried on without the protection of any
mask for the face. Wire masks were not invented till near 1780 by a
famous fencing-master, La Boëssière the elder, and did not come into
general use until much later. Consequently, in order to avoid dangerous
accidents to the face, and especially the eyes, it was long the rigorous
etiquette of the fencing-room that the point should always be kept low.
In the 17th century a Scottish nobleman, who had procured the
assassination of a fencing-master in revenge for having had one of his
eyes destroyed by the latter at sword-play, pleaded on his trial for
murder that it was the custom to "spare the face."
Rowlandson's well-known drawing of a fencing bout, dated 1787, shows two
accomplished amateurs making a foil assault without masks, while in the
background a less practised one is having a wire mask tied on.
For greater safety the convention was very early arrived at that no hits
should count in a fencing-bout except those landing on the breast. Thus
sword-play soon became so unpractical as to lose much of its value as a
training for war or the duel. For, hits with "sharps" take effect
wherever they are made, and many an expert fencer of the old school has
been seriously wounded, or lost his life in a duel, through forgetting
that very simple fact.
Strangely enough, when masks began to be generally worn, and the
_fleuret_ (_anglice_, "foil," a cheap and light substitute for the real
épée) was invented, fencing practice became gradually even more
conventional than before. No one seems to have understood that with
masks all the conventions could be safely done away with, root and
branch, and sword-practice might assume all the semblance of reality.
Nevertheless it should be clearly recognized that the basis of modern
foil-fencing was laid with the épée or small-sword alone, in and before
the days of Angelo, of Danet, and the famous chevalier de St George, who
were among the first to adopt the fleuret also. All the illustrious
French professors who came after them, such as La Boëssière the younger,
Lafaugère, Jean Louis, Cordelois, Grisier, Bertrand and Robert, with
amateurs like the baron d'Ezpeléta, were foil-players pure and simple,
whose reputations were gained before the modern épée play had any
recognized status. It was reserved for Jacob, a Parisian fencing-master,
to establish in the last quarter of the 19th century a definite method
of the épée, which differed essentially from all its forerunners. He was
soon followed by Baudry, Spinnewyn, Laurent and Ayat. The methods of the
four first-named, not differing much _inter se_, are based on the
perception that in the real sword fight, where hits are effective on all
parts of the person, the "classical" bent-arm guard, with the foil
inclining upwards, is hopelessly bad. It offers a tempting mark in the
exposed sword-arm itself, while the point requires a movement to bring
it in line for the attack, which involves a fatal loss of time. The épée
is really in the nature of a short lance held in one hand, and for both
rapidity and precision of attack, as well as for the defence of the
sword-arm and the body behind it, a position of guard _with the arm
almost fully extended, and épée in line with the forearm_, is far the
safest. Against this guard the direct lunge at the body is impossible,
except at the risk of a mutual or double hit (_le coup des deux
veuves_). No safe attack at the face or body can be made without first
binding or beating, opposing or evading the adverse blade, and such an
attack usually involves an initial forward movement. Beats and binds of
the blade, with retreats of the body, or counter attacks with
opposition, replace the old foil-parries in most instances, except at
close quarters. And much of the offensive is reduced to thrusts at the
wrist or forearm, intended to disable without seriously wounding the
adversary. The direct lunge (_coup-droit_) at the body often succeeds in
tournaments, but usually at the cost of a counter hit, which, though
later in time, would be fatal with sharp weapons.
Ayat's method, as might be expected from a first-class foil-player, is
less simple. Indeed for years, too great simplicity marked the most
successful épée-play, because it usually gained its most conspicuous
victories over those who attempted a foil defence, and whose practice
gave them no safe strokes for an attack upon the extended blade. But by
degrees the épéists themselves discovered new ways of attacking with
comparative safety, and at the present day a complete épée-player is
master of a large variety of attractive as well as scientific movements,
both of attack and defence.
It was mainly by amateurs that this development was achieved. Perhaps
the most conspicuous representative of the new school is J.
Joseph-Renaud, a consummate swordsman, who has also been a champion
foil-player. Lucien Gaudin, Alibert and Edmond Wallace may be also
mentioned as among the most skilful amateurs, Albert Ayat and L. Bouché
as professors--all of Paris. Belgium, Italy and England have also
produced épéists quite of the first rank.
The épée lends itself to competition far better than the foil, and the
revival of the small-sword soon gave rise in France to "pools" and
"tournaments" in which there was the keenest rivalry between all comers.
In considering the épée from a British point of view, it may be
mentioned that it was first introduced publicly in London by C.
Newton-Robinson at an important assault-at-arms held in the Steinway
Hall on the 4th May 1900. Professor Spinnewyn was the principal
demonstrator, with his pupil, the late Willy Sulzbacher. The next day
was held at the Inns of Court R. V. School of Arms, Lincoln's Inn, the
first English open épée tournament for amateurs. It was won by W.
Sulzbacher, C. Newton-Robinson being second, and Paul Ettlinger, a
French resident in London, third. This was immediately followed by the
institution of the Épée Club of London, which, under the successive
residencies of a veteran swordsman, Sir Edward Jenkinson, and of Lord
Desborough, subsequently held annual open international tournaments. The
winners were: in 1901, Willy Sulzbacher; 1902, Robert Montgomerie; 1903,
the marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat; 1904, J.J. Renaud; 1905, R.
Montgomerie. In 1906 the Amateur Fencing Association for the first time
recognized the best-placed Englishman, Edgar Seligman (who was the
actual winner), as the English épée champion. In 1907 R. Montgomerie was
again the winner, in 1908 C.L. Daniell, in 1909 R. Montgomerie.
Among the most active of the English amateurs who were the earliest to
perceive the wonderful possibilities of épée-play, it is right to
mention Captain Hutton, Lord Desborough, Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon, Bart.,
Sir Charles Dilke, Bart., Lord Howard de Walden, Egerton Castle, A.S.
Cope, R.A., W.H.C. Staveley, C.F. Clay, Lord Morpeth, Evan James, Paul
King, J.B. Cunliffe, John Norbury, Jr., Theodore A. Cook, John
Jenkinson, R. Montgomerie, S. Martineau, E.B. Milnes, H.J. Law, R.
Merivale, the Marquis of Dufferin, Hugh Pollock, R.W. Doyne, A.G. Ross,
the Hon. Ivor Guest and Henry Balfour.
Among foreign amateurs who did most to promote the use of the épée in
England were Messrs P. Ettlinger, Anatole Paroissien, J. Joseph-Renaud,
W. Sulzbacher, René Lacroix, H.G. Berger and the Marquis de
Chasseloup-Laubat.
Épée practice became popular among Belgian and Dutch fencers about the
same time as in England, and this made it possible to set on foot
international team-contests for amateurs, which have done much to
promote good feeling and acquaintanceship among swordsmen of several
countries. In 1903 a series of international matches between teams of
six was inaugurated in Paris. Up to 1909 the French team uniformly won
the first place, with Belgium or England second.
English fencers who were members of these international teams were Lord
Desborough, Theodore A. Cook, Bowden, Cecil Haig, J. Norbury, Jr., R.
Montgomerie, John Jenkinson, F. Townsend, W.H.C. Staveley, S. Martineau,
C.L. Daniell, W. Godden, Captain Haig, M.D.V. Holt, Edgar Seligman, C.
Newton-Robinson, A.V. Buckland, P.M. Davson, E.M. Amphlett and L.V.
Fildes. In 1906 a British épée team of four, consisting of Lord
Desborough, Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon, Bart., Edgar Seligman and C.
Newton-Robinson, with Lord Howard de Walden and Theodore Cook as
reserves (the latter acting as captain of the team), went to Athens to
compete in the international match at the Olympic games. After defeating
the Germans rather easily, the team opposed and worsted the Belgians. It
thus found itself matched against the French in the final, the Greek
team having been beaten by the French and the Dutch eliminated by the
Belgians. After a very close fight the result was officially declared a
tie. This was the first occasion upon which an English fencing team had
encountered a French one of the first rank upon even terms. In fighting
off the tie, however, the French were awarded the first prize and the
Englishmen the second.
In the Olympic games of London, 1908, the Épée International Individual
Tournament was won by Alibert (France), but Montgomerie, Haig and Holt
(England) took the 4th, 5th, and 8th places in the final pool. The
result of the International Team competition was also very creditable to
the English representatives, Daniell, Haig, Holt, Montgomerie and
Amphlett, who by defeating the Dutch, Germans, Danes and Belgians took
second place to the French. Egerton Castle was captain of the English
team.
In open International Tournaments on the Continent, English épéists have
also been coming to the front. None had won such a competition up to
1909 outright, but the following had reached the final pool: C.
Newton-Robinson, Brussels, 1901 (10th), Étretat, 1904 (6th); E.
Seligman, Copenhagen, 1907 (2nd), and Paris, 1909 (12th); R.
Montgomerie, Paris, 1909 (5th); and E.M. Amphlett, Paris, 1909 (10th).
The method of ascertaining the victor in épée "tournaments" is by
dividing the competitors into "pools," usually of six or eight fencers.
Each of these fights an assault for first hit only, with every other
member of the same pool, and he who is least often hit, or not at all,
is returned the winner. If the competitors are numerous, fresh pools are
formed out of the first two, three or four in each pool of the
preliminary round, and so on, until a small number are left in for a
final pool, the winner of which is the victor of the tournament.
Épée fencing can be, and often is, conducted indoors, but one of its
attractions consists in its fitness for open-air practice in pleasant
gardens.
In the use of the épée the most essential points are (1) the position of
the sword-arm, which, whether fully extended or not, should always be so
placed as to ensure the protection of the wrist, forearm and elbow from
direct thrusts, by the intervention of the guard or shell; (2) readiness
of the legs for _instant_ advance or retreat; and (3) the way in which
the weapon is held, the best position (though hard to acquire and
maintain) being that adopted by J.J. Renaud with the fingers _over_ the
grip, so that a downward beat does not easily disarm.
The play of individuals is determined by their respective temperaments
and physical powers. But every fencer should be always ready to deliver
a well-aimed, swift, direct thrust at any exposed part of the
antagonist's arm, his mask or thigh. Very tall men, who are usually not
particularly quick on their legs, should not as a rule attack, otherwise
than by direct thrusts, when matched against shorter men. For if they
merely extend their sword-arm in response to a simple attack, their
longer reach will ward it off with a stop or counter-thrust. Short men
can only attack them safely by beating, binding, grazing, pressing or
evading the blade, and the taller fencers must be prepared with all the
well-known parries and counters to such offensive movements, as well as
with the stop-thrust to be made either with advancing opposition or with
a retreat. Fencers of small stature must be exceedingly quick on their
feet, unless they possess the art of parrying to perfection, and even
then, if slow to shift ground, they will continually be in danger. With
plenty of room, the quick mover can always choose the moment when he
will be within distance, for an attack which his slower opponent will be
always fearing and unable to prevent or anticipate.
It is desirable to put on record the modern form of the weapon. An
average épée weighs, complete, about a pound and a half, while a foil
weighs approximately one-third less. The épée blade is exactly like that
of the old small-sword after the abandonment of the "_colichemarde_"
form, in which the "_forte_" of the blade was greatly thickened. In
length from guard or shell to point it measures about 35 in., and in
width at the shell about 13/16ths of an inch. From this it gradually and
regularly tapers to the point. There is no cutting edge. The side of the
épée which is usually held uppermost is slightly concave, the other is
strengthened with a midrib, nearly equal in thickness and similar in
shape to either half of the true blade. The material is tempered steel.
There is a haft or tang about 8 in. long, which is pushed through a
circular guard or shell ("_coquille_") of convex form, the diameter of
which is normally 5 in. and the convexity 1¾ in. The shell is of steel
or aluminium, and if of the latter metal, sometimes fortified at the
centre with a disk of steel the size of a crown piece. The insertion of
the haft or tang through the shell may be either central or excentric to
the extent of about 1 in., for the better protection of the outside of
the forearm.
After passing through the shell, the haft of the blade is inserted in a
grip or handle ("_poignet_"), averaging 7 in. in length and of
quadrangular section, which is made of tough wood covered with leather,
india-rubber, wound cord or other strong material with a rough surface.
The grip is somewhat wider than its vertical thickness when held in the
usual way, and it diminishes gradually from shell to pommel for
convenience of holding. It should have a slight lateral curvature, so
that in executing circular movements the pommel is kept clear of the
wrist. The pommel, usually of steel, is roughly spherical or
eight-sided, and serves as a counterbalance. The end of the haft is
riveted through it, except in the case of "_épées démontables_," which
are the most convenient, as a blade may be changed by simply unscrewing
or unlocking the pommel.
An épée is well balanced and light in hand when, on poising the blade
across the forefinger, about 1 in. in advance of the shell, it is in
equilibrium.
For practice, the point is blunted to resemble the flat head of a nail,
and is made still more incapable of penetration by winding around it a
small ball of waxed thread, such as cobblers use. This is called the
"button." In competitions various forms of "_boutons marqueurs_," all of
which are unsatisfactory, are occasionally used. The "_pointe d'arrêt_,"
like a small tin-tack placed head downwards on the flattened point of
the épée, and fastened on by means of the waxed thread, is, on the
contrary, most useful, by fixing in the clothes, to show where and when
a good hit has been made. The point need only protrude about 1/16th of
an inch from the button. There are several kinds of pointes d'arrêt. The
best is called, after its inventor, the "Léon Sazie," and has three
blunt points of hardened steel each slightly excentric. The single point
is sometimes prevented by the thickness of the button from scoring a
good hit.
A mask of wire netting is used to protect the face, and a stout glove on
the sword hand. It is necessary to wear strong clothes and to pad the
jacket and trousers at the most exposed parts, in case the blade should
break unnoticed. A vulnerable spot, which ought to be specially padded,
is just under the sword-arm.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Among the older works on the history and practice of
the small-sword, or épée, are the following:--_The Scots
Fencing-Master, or Compleat Small-swordsman_, by W.H. Gent (Sir
William Hope, afterwards baronet) (Edinburgh, 1687), and several other
works by the same author, of later date, for which see _Schools and
Masters of Fence_, by Egerton Castle; _Nouveau traité de la perfection
sur le fait des armes_, by P.G.F. Girard (Paris, 1736); _L'École des
armes_, by M. Angelo (London, 1763); _L'Art des armes_, by M. Danet (2
vols., Paris, 1766-1767); _Nouveau traité de l'art des armes_, by
Nicolas Demeuse (Liège, 1778).
More modern are: _Traité de l'art des armes_, by la Böessière, Jr.
(Paris, 1818); _Les Armes et le duel_, by A. Grisier (2nd ed., Paris,
1847); _Les Secrets de l'épée_, by the baron de Bazancourt (Paris,
1862); _Schools and Masters of Fence_, by Egerton Castle (London,
1885); _Le Jeu de l'épée_, by J. Jacob and Émil André (Paris, 1887);
_L'Escrime pratique au XIX^e siècle_, by Ambroise Baudry (Paris);
L'Escrime a l'épée, by A. Spinnewyn and Paul Manonry (Paris, 1898);
_The Sword and the Centuries_, by Captain Hutton (London,1901); "The
Revival of the Small-sword," by C. Newton-Robinson, in the _Nineteenth
Century and After_ (London, January 1905); _Nouveau Traité de l'épée_,
by Dr Edom, privately published (Paris, 1908); and, most important of
all, _Méthode d'escrime à l'épée_, by J. Joseph-Renaud, privately
published (Paris, 1909). (C. E. N. R.)
EPERJES, a town of Hungary, capital of the county of Sáros, 190 m. N.E.
of Budapest by rail. Pop. (1900) 13,098. It is situated on the left bank
of the river Tarcza, an affluent of the Theiss, and has been almost
completely rebuilt since a great fire in 1887. Eperjes is one of the
oldest towns of Hungary, and is still partly surrounded by its old
walls. It is the seat of a Greek-Catholic bishop, and possesses a
beautiful cathedral built in the 18th century in late Gothic style. It
possesses manufactures of cloth, table-linen and earthenware, and has an
active trade in wine, linen, cattle and grain. About 2 m. to the south
is Sóvár with important salt-works.
In the same county, 28 m. by rail N. of Eperjes, is situated the old
town of _Bártfa_ (pop. 6098), which possesses a Gothic church from the
14th century, and an interesting town-hall, dating from the 15th
century, and containing very valuable archives. In its neighbourhood,
surrounded by pine forests, are the baths of Bártfa, with twelve mineral
springs--iodate, ferruginous and alkaline--used for bathing and
drinking.
About 6 m. N.W. of Eperjes is situated the village of Vörösvágás, which
contains the only opal mine in Europe. The opal was mined here 800 years
ago, and the largest piece hitherto found, weighing 2940 carats and
estimated to have a value of £175,000, is preserved in the Court Museum
at Vienna.
Eperjes was founded about the middle of the 12th century by a German
colony, and was elevated to the rank of a royal free town in 1347 by
Louis I. (the Great). It was afterwards fortified and received special
privileges. The Reformation found many early adherents here, and the
town played an important part during the religious wars of the 17th
century. It became famous by the so-called "butchery of Eperjes," a
tribunal instituted by the Austrian general Caraffa in 1687, which
condemned to death and confiscated the property of a great number of
citizens accused of Protestantism. During the 16th and the 17th
centuries its German educational establishments enjoyed a wide
reputation.
ÉPERNAY, a town of northern France, capital of an arrondissement in the
department of Marne, 88 m. E.N.E. of Paris on the main line of the
Eastern railway to Châlons-sur-Marne. Pop. (1906) 20,291. The town is
situated on the left bank of the Marne at the extremity of the pretty
valley of the Cubry, by which it is traversed. In the central and oldest
quarter the streets are narrow and irregular; the surrounding suburbs
are modern and more spacious, and that of La Folie, on the east,
contains many handsome villas belonging to rich wine merchants. The town
has also extended to the right bank of the Marne. One of its churches
preserves a portal and stained-glass windows of the 16th century, but
the other public buildings are modern. Épernay is best known as the
principal _entrepôt_ of the Champagne wines, which are bottled and kept
in extensive vaults in the chalk rock on which the town is built. The
manufacture of the apparatus and material used in the champagne industry
occupies many hands, and the Eastern Railway Company has important
workshops here. Brewing, and the manufacture of sugar and of hats and
caps, are also carried on. Épernay is the seat of a sub-prefect and has
tribunals of first instance and of commerce, and communal colleges for
girls and boys.
Épernay (_Sparnacum_) belonged to the archbishops of Reims from the 5th
to the 10th century, at which period it came into the possession of the
counts of Champagne. It suffered severely during the Hundred Years' War,
and was burned by Francis I. in 1544. It resisted Henry of Navarre in
1592, and Marshal Biron fell in the attack which preceded its capture.
In 1642 it was, along with Château-Thierry, erected into a duchy and
assigned to the duke of Bouillon.
ÉPERNON, a town of northern France in the department of Eure-et-Loir, at
the confluence of the Drouette and the Guesle, 17 m. N.E. of Chartres by
rail. Pop. (1906) 2370. It belonged originally to the counts of
Montfort, who, in the 11th century, built a castle here of which the
ruins are still left, and granted a charter to the town. In the 13th
century it became an independent lordship, which remained attached to
the crown of Navarre till, in the 16th century, it was sold by King
Henry (afterwards King Henry IV. of France) to Jean Louis de Nogaret,
for whom it was raised to the rank of a duchy in 1581. The new duke of
Épernon was one of the favourites of Henry III., who were called _les
Mignons_; the king showered favours upon him, giving him the posts of
colonel-general in the infantry and of admiral of France. Under the
reign of Henry IV. he made himself practically independent in his
government of Provence. He was instrumental in giving the regency to
Marie de' Medici in 1610, and as a result exercised a considerable
influence upon the government. During his governorship of Guienne in
1622 he had some scandalous scenes with the parlement and the archbishop
of Bordeaux. He died in 1642. His eldest son, Henri de Nogaret de la
Valette, duke of Candale, served under Richelieu, in the armies of
Guienne, of Picardy and of Italy. The second son of Jean Louis de
Nogaret, Bernard, who was born in 1592, and died in 1661, was, like his
father, duke of Épernon, colonel-general in the infantry and governor of
Guienne. After his death, the title of duke of Épernon was borne by the
families of Goth and of Pardaillan.
EPHEBEUM (from Gr. [Greek: ephêbos], a young man), in architecture, a
large hall in the ancient Palaestra furnished with seats (Vitruvius v.
11), the length of which should be a third larger than the width. It
served for the exercises of youths of from sixteen to eighteen years of
age.
EPHEBI (Gr. [Greek: epi], and [Greek: hêbê], i.e. "those who have
reached puberty"), a name specially given, in Athens and other Greek
towns, to a class of young men from eighteen to twenty years of age, who
formed a sort of college under state control. On the completion of his
seventeenth year the Athenian youth attained his civil majority, and,
provided he belonged to the first three property classes and passed the
scrutiny ([Greek: dokimasia]) as to age, civic descent and physical
capability, was enrolled on the register of his deme ([Greek:
lêxiarchikon grammateion]). He thereby at once became liable to the
military training and duties, which, at least in the earliest times,
were the main object of the Ephebia. In the time of Aristotle the names
of the enrolled ephebi were engraved on a bronze pillar (formerly on
wooden tablets) in front of the council-chamber. After admission to the
college, the ephebus took the oath of allegiance, recorded in Pollux and
Stobaeus (but not in Aristotle), in the temple of Aglaurus, and was sent
to Munychia or Acte to form one of the garrison. At the end of the first
year of training, the ephebi were reviewed, and, if their performance
was satisfactory, were provided by the state with a spear and a shield,
which, together with the _chlamys_ (cloak) and _petasus_ (broad-brimmed
hat), made up their equipment. In their second year they were
transferred to other garrisons in Attica, patrolled the frontiers, and
on occasion took an active part in war. During these two years they were
free from taxation, and were not allowed (except in certain cases) to
appear in the law courts as plaintiffs or defendants. The ephebi took
part in some of the most important Athenian festivals. Thus during the
Eleusinia they were told off to fetch the sacred objects from Eleusis
and to escort the image of Iacchus on the sacred way. They also
performed police duty at the meetings of the ecclesia.
After the end of the 4th century B.C. the institution underwent a
radical change. Enrolment ceased to be obligatory, lasted only for a
year, and the limit of age was dispensed with. Inscriptions attest a
continually decreasing number of ephebi, and with the admission of
foreigners the college lost its representative national character. This
was mainly due to the weakening of the military spirit and the progress
of intellectual culture. The military element was no longer
all-important, and the ephebia became a sort of university for
well-to-do young men of good family, whose social position has been
compared with that of the Athenian "knights" of earlier times. The
institution lasted till the end of the 3rd century A.D.
It is probable that the ephebia was in existence in the 5th century
B.C., and controlled by the Areopagus and strategus as its moral and
military supervisors. In the 4th century their place was taken by ten
_sophronistae_ (one for each tribe), who, as the name implies, took
special interest in the morals of those under them, their military
training being in the hands of experts, of whom the chief were the
_hoplomachus_, the _acontistes_, the _toxotes_ and the _aphetes_
(instructors respectively in the use of arms, javelin-throwing, archery
and the use of artillery engines). Later, the _sophronistae_ were
superseded by a single official called _cosmetes_, elected for a year by
the people, who appointed the instructors. When the ephebia instead of a
military college became a university, the military instructors were
replaced by philosophers, rhetoricians, grammarians and artists. In
Roman imperial times several new officials were introduced, one of
special importance being the director of the Diogeneion, where youths
under age were trained for the ephebia. At this period the college of
ephebi was a miniature city; its members called themselves "citizens,"
and it possessed an archon, strategus, herald and other officials, after
the model of ancient Athens.
There is an extensive class of inscriptions, ranging from the 3rd
century B.C. to the 3rd century A.D., containing decrees relating to
the ephebi, their officers and instructors, and lists of the same, and
a whole chapter (42) of the Aristotelian _Constitution of Athens_ is
devoted to the subject. The most important treatises on the subject
are: W. Dittenberger, _De ephebis Atticis_ (Göttingen, 1863); A.
Dumont, _Essai sur l'éphébie attique_ (1875-1876); L. Grasberger,
_Erziehung und Unterricht im klassichen Altertum_, iii. (Würzburg,
1881); J.P. Mahaffy, _Old Greek Education_ (1881); P. Girard,
_L'Éducation athénienne au V_^e _et IV_^e _siècle avant J.-C._ (2nd
ed., 1891), and article in Daremberg and Saglio's _Dictionnaire des
antiquités_ which contains further bibliographical references; G.
Gilbert, _The Constitutional Antiquities of Athens_ (Eng. tr., 1895);
G. Busolt, _Die griechischen Staats- und Rechtsaltertümer_ (1892); T.
Thalheim and J. Öhler in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopädie der
classischen Altertumswissenschaft_, v. pt. 2 (1905); W.W. Capes,
_University Life in Ancient Athens_ (1877).
EPHEMERIS (Greek for a "diary"), a table giving for stated times the
apparent position and other numerical particulars relating to a heavenly
body. The _Astronomical Ephemeris_, familiarly known as the "Nautical
Almanac," is a national annual publication containing ephemerides of the
principal or more conspicuous heavenly bodies, elements and other data
of eclipses, and other matter useful to the astronomer and navigator.
The governments of the United Kingdom, United States, France, Germany
and Spain publish such annals.
EPHESIANS, EPISTLE TO THE. This book of the New Testament, the most
general and least occasional and polemic of all the Pauline epistles, a
large section of which seems almost like the literary elaboration of a
theological topic, may best be described as a solemn oration, addressed
to absent hearers, and intended not primarily to clarify their minds but
to stir their emotions. It is thus a true letter, but in the grand
style, verging on the nature not of an essay but a poem. _Ephesians_ has
been called "the crown of St Paul's writings," and whether it be
measured by its theological or its literary interest and importance, it
can fairly dispute with _Romans_ the claim to be his greatest epistle.
In the public and private use of Christians some parts of _Ephesians_
have been among the most favourite of all New Testament passages. Like
its sister Epistle to the Colossians, it represents, whoever wrote it,
deep experience and bold use of reflection on the meaning of that
experience; if it be from the pen of the Apostle Paul, it reveals to us
a distinct and important phase of his thought.
To the nature of the epistle correspond well the facts of its title and
address. The title "To the Ephesians" is found in the Muratorian canon,
in Irenaeus, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria, as well as in all the
earliest MSS. and versions. Marcion, however (c. A.D. 150), used and
recommended copies with the title "To the Laodiceans." This would be
inexplicable if Eph. i. 1 had read in Marcion's copies, as it does in
most ancient authorities, "To the saints which are at Ephesus"; but in
fact the words [Greek: en Ephesô] of verse 1 were probably absent. They
were not contained in the text used by Origen (d. 253); Basil (d. 379)
says that "ancient copies" omitted the words; and they are actually
omitted by Codices B (Vaticanus, 4th century) and [Hebrew: alef]
(Sinaiticus, 4th century), together with Codex 67 (11th century). The
words "in Ephesus" were thus probably originally lacking in the address,
and were inserted from the suggestion of the title. Either the address
was general ("to the saints who are also faithful") or else a blank was
left. In the latter case the name may have been intended to be supplied
orally, in communicating the letter, or a different name may have been
written in each of the individual copies. Under any of these hypotheses
the address would indicate that we have a circular letter, written to a
group of churches, doubtless in Asia Minor. This would account for the
general character of the epistle, as well as for the entire and striking
absence of personal greetings and of concrete allusions to existing
circumstances among the readers. It appears to have drawn its title, "To
the Ephesians," from one of the churches for which it was intended,
perhaps the one from which a copy was secured when Paul's epistles were
collected, shortly before or after the year 100. That our epistle is the
one referred to in Col. iv. 16, which was to be had by the Colossians
from Laodicea, is not unlikely. Such an identification doubtless led
Marcion to alter the title in his copies.
The structure of _Ephesians_ is epistolary; it opens with the usual
salutation (i. 1-2) and closes with a brief personal note and formal
farewell (vi. 21-24). In the intervening body of the epistle the writer
also follows the regular form of a letter. In an ordinary Greek letter
(as the papyri show) we should find the salutation followed by an
expression of gratification over the correspondent's good health and of
prayer for its continuance. Paul habitually expanded and deepened this,
and, in this case, that paragraph is enormously enlarged, so that it may
be regarded as including chapters i.-iii., and as carrying the main
thought of the epistle. Chapters iv.-vi. merely make application of the
main ideas worked out in chapters i.-iii. Throughout the epistle we have
a singular combination of the seemingly desultory method of a letter,
turning aside at a word and straying wherever the mood of the moment
leads, with the firm, forward march of earnest and mature thought. In
this combination resides the doubtless unconscious but nevertheless real
literary art of the composition.
The fundamental theme of the epistle is _The Unity of Mankind in
Christ_, and hence the Unity and Divinity of the Church of Christ. God's
purpose from eternity was to unite mankind in Christ, and so to bring
human history to its goal, the New Man, the measure of the stature of
the fulness of Christ. Those who have believed in Christ are the present
representatives and result of this purpose; and a clear knowledge of the
purpose itself, the secret of the ages, has now been revealed to men.
This theme is not formally discussed, as in a theological treatise, but
is rather, as it were, celebrated in lofty eulogy and application.
First, in chapters i.-iii., under the mask of a conventional
congratulatory paragraph, the writer declares at length the privileges
which this great fact confers upon those who by faith receive the gift
of God, and he is thus able to touch on the various aspects of his
subject. Then, in chapters iv.-vi., he turns, with a characteristic and
impressive "therefore," to set forth the obligations which correspond to
the privileges he has just expounded. This author is indeed interested
to prosecute vigorous and substantial thinking, but the mainspring of
his interest is the conviction that such thought is significant for
inner and outer life.
The relationship, both literary and theological, between the epistle to
the _Ephesians_ and that to _the Colossians_ (q.v.) is very close. It is
to be seen in many of the prominent ideas of the two writings,
especially in the developed view of the central position of Christ in
the whole universe; in the conception of the Church as Christ's body, of
which He is the head; in the thought of the great Mystery, once secret,
now revealed. There is further resemblance in the formal moral code,
arranged by classes of persons, and having much the same contents in the
two epistles (Eph. v. 22-vi. 9; Col. iii. 18-iv. 1). In both, also,
Tychicus carries the letter, and in almost identical language the
readers are told that he will by word of mouth give fuller information
about the apostle's affairs (Eph. vi. 21-22; Col. iv. 7-8). Moreover, in
a great number of characteristic phrases and even whole verses the two
are alike. Compare, for instance, Eph. i. 7, Col. i. 14; Eph. i. 10,
Col. i. 20; Eph. i. 21, Col. i. 16; Eph. i. 22, 23, Col. i. 18, 19; Eph.
ii. 5, Col. ii. 13; Eph. ii. 11, Col. ii. 11; Eph: ii. 16, Col. i. 20;
Eph. iii. 2, 3, Col. i. 25, 26, and many other parallels. Only a
comparison in detail will give a true impression of the extraordinary
degree of resemblance. Yet the two epistles do not follow the same
course of thought, and their contents cannot be successfully exhibited
in a common synoptical abstract. Each has its independent occasion,
purpose, character and method; but they draw largely on a common store
of thought and use common means of expression.
The question of the authorship of _Ephesians_ is less important to the
student of the history of Christian thought than in the case of most of
the Pauline epistles, because of the generalness of tone and the lack of
specific allusion in the work. It purports to be by Paul, and was held
to be his by Marcion and in the Muratorian canon, and by Irenaeus,
Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria, all writing at the end of the 2nd
century. No doubt of the Pauline authorship was expressed in ancient
times; nor is there any lack of early use by writers who make no direct
quotation, to raise doubts as to the genuineness of the epistle. The
influence of its language is probably to be seen in Ignatius, Polycarp
and Hermas, less certainly in the epistle of Barnabas. Some resemblances
of expression in Clement of Rome and in Second Clement may have
significance. There is here abundant proof that the epistle was in
existence, and was highly valued and influential with leaders of
Christian thought, about the year 100, when persons who had known Paul
well were still living.
To the evidence given above may be added the use of _Ephesians_ in the
First Epistle of Peter. If the latter epistle could be finally
established as genuine, or its date fixed, it would give important
evidence with regard to _Ephesians_; but in the present state of
discussion we must confine ourselves to pointing out the fact. Some of
the more striking points of contact are the following: Eph. i. 3, 1
Peter i. 3; Eph. i. 20, 21, 1 Peter iii. 22; Eph. ii. 2, 3, iv. 17, 1
Peter iv. 3; Eph. ii. 21, 22, 1 Peter ii. 5; Eph. v. 22, 1 Peter iii. 1,
2; Eph. v. 25, 1 Peter iii. 7, 8; Eph. vi. 5, 1 Peter ii. 18, 19. A
similar relation exists between _Romans_ and _1 Peter_. In both cases
the dependence is clearly on the part of _1 Peter_; for ideas and
phrases that in _Ephesians_ and _Romans_ have their firm place in
closely wrought sequences, are found in _1 Peter_ with less profound
significance and transformed into smooth and pointed maxims and
apophthegmatic sentences.
Objections to the genuineness of _Ephesians_ have been urged since the
early part of the 19th century. The influence of Schleiermacher, whose
pupil Leonhard Usteri in his _Entwickelung der paulinischen
Lehrbegriffs_ (1824) expressed strong doubts as to _Ephesians_, carried
weight. He held that Tychicus was the author. De Wette first (1826)
doubted, then (1843) denied that the epistle was by Paul. The chief
attack came, however, from Baur (1845) and his colleagues of the
Tübingen school. Against the genuineness have appeared Ewald, Renan,
Hausrath, Hilgenfeld, Ritschl, Pfleiderer, Weizsäcker, Holtzmann, von
Soden, Schmiedel, von Dobschütz and many others. On the other hand, the
epistle has been defended by Bleek, Neander, Reuss, B. Weiss, Meyer,
Sabatier, Lightfoot, Hort, Sanday, Bacon, Jülicher, Harnack, Zahn and
many others. In recent years a tendency has been apparent among critics
to accept _Ephesians_ as a genuine work of Paul. This has followed the
somewhat stronger reaction in favour of _Colossians_.
Before speaking of the more fundamental grounds urged for the rejection
of _Ephesians_, we may look at various points of detail which are of
less significance.
(1) The style has unquestionably a slow and lumbering movement, in
marked contrast with the quick effectiveness of _Romans_ and
_Galatians_. The sentences are much longer and less vivacious, as any
one can see by a superficial examination. But nevertheless there are
parts of the earlier epistles where the same tendency appears (e.g. Rom.
iii. 23-26), and on the whole the style shows Paul's familiar traits.
(2) The vocabulary is said to be peculiar. But it can be shown to be no
more so than that of _Galatians_ (Zahn, _Einleitung_, i. pp. 365 ff.).
On the other hand, some words characteristic of Paul's use appear
(notably [Greek: dio], five times), and the most recent and careful
investigation of Paul's vocabulary (Nägeli, _Wortschatz der paulinischen
Briefe_, 1905) concludes that the evidence speaks for Pauline
authorship. (3) Certain phrases have aroused suspicion, for instance,
"the devil" (vi. 11, instead of Paul's usual term "Satan"); "his holy
apostles and prophets" (iii. 5, as smacking of later fulsomeness); "I
Paul" (iii. 1); "unto me, who am less than the least of all the saints"
(iii. 8, as exaggerated). But these cases, when properly understood and
calmly viewed, do not carry conviction against the epistle. (4) The
relation of _Ephesians_ to _Colossians_ would be a serious difficulty
only if _Colossians_ were held to be not by Paul. Those who hold to the
genuineness of _Colossians_ find it easier to explain the resemblances
as the product of the free working of the same mind, than as due to a
deliberate imitator. Holtzmann's elaborate and very ingenious theory
(1872) that _Colossians_ has been expanded, on the basis of a shorter
letter of Paul, by the same later hand which had previously written the
whole of _Ephesians_, has not met with favour from recent scholars.
But the more serious difficulties which to many minds still stand in the
way of the acceptance of the epistle have come from the developed phase
of Pauline theology which it shows, and from the general background and
atmosphere of the underlying system of thought, in which the absence of
the well-known earlier controversies is remarkable, while some things
suggest the thought of John and a later age. Among the most important
points in which the ideas and implications of _Ephesians_ suggest an
authorship and a period other than that of Paul are the following:
(a) The union of Gentiles and Jews in one body is already accomplished.
(b) The Christology is more advanced, uses Alexandrian terms, and
suggests the ideas of the Gospel of John. (c) The conception of the
Church as the body of Christ is new. (d) There is said to be a general
softening of Pauline thought in the direction of the Christianity of the
2nd century, while very many characteristic ideas of the earlier
epistles are absent.
With regard to the changed state of affairs in the Church, it must be
said that this can be a conclusive argument only to one who holds the
view of the Tübingen scholars, that the Apostolic Age was all of a piece
and was dominated solely by one controversy. The change in the situation
is surely not greater than can be imagined within the lifetime of Paul.
That the epistle implies as already existent a developed system of
Gnostic thought such as only came into being in the 2nd century is not
true, and such a date is excluded by the external evidence. As to the
other points, the question is, whether the admittedly new phase of
Paul's theological thought is so different from his earlier system as to
be incompatible with it. In answering this question different minds will
differ. But it must remain possible that contact with new scenes and
persons, and especially such controversial necessities as are
exemplified in _Colossians_, stimulated Paul to work out more fully,
under the influence of Alexandrian categories, lines of thought of which
the germs and origins must be admitted to have been present in earlier
epistles. It cannot be maintained that the ideas of _Ephesians_ directly
contradict either in formulation or in tendency the thought of the
earlier epistles. Moreover, if _Colossians_ be accepted as Pauline (and
among other strong reasons the unquestionable genuineness of the epistle
to Philemon renders it extremely difficult not to accept it), the chief
matters of this more advanced Christian thought are fully legitimated
for Paul.
On the other hand, the characteristics of the thought in _Ephesians_
give some strong evidence confirmatory of the epistle's own claim to be
by Paul. (a) The writer of Eph. ii. 11-22 was a Jew, not less proud of
his race than was the writer of Rom. ix.-xi. or of Phil. iii. 4 ff. (b)
The centre in all the theology of the epistle is the idea of redemption.
The use of Alexandrian categories is wholly governed by this interest.
(c) The epistle shows the same panoramic, pictorial, dramatic conception
of Christian truth which is everywhere characteristic of Paul. (d) The
most fundamental elements in the system of thought do not differ from
those of the earlier epistles.
The view which denies the Pauline authorship of _Ephesians_ has to
suppose the existence of a great literary artist and profound
theologian, able to write an epistle worthy of Paul at his best, who,
without betraying any recognizable motive, presented to the world in the
name of Paul an imitation of _Colossians_, incredibly laborious and yet
superior to the original in literary workmanship and power of thought,
and bearing every appearance of earnest sincerity. It must further be
supposed that the name and the very existence of this genius were
totally forgotten in Christian circles fifty years after he wrote. The
balance of evidence seems to lie on the side of the genuineness of the
Epistle.
If _Ephesians_ was written by Paul, it was during the period of his
imprisonment, either at Caesarea or at Rome (iii. 1, iv. 1, vi. 20). At
very nearly the same time he must have written _Colossians_ and
_Philemon_; all three were sent by Tychicus. There is no strong reason
for holding that the three were written from Caesarea. For Rome speaks
the greater probability of the metropolis as the place in which a
fugitive slave would try to hide himself, the impression given in
_Colossians_ of possible opportunity for active mission work (Col. iv.
3, 4; cf. Acts xxviii. 30, 31), the fact that _Philippians_, which in a
measure belongs to the same group, was pretty certainly written from
Rome. As to the Christians addressed, they are evidently converts from
heathenism (ii. 1, 11-13, 17 f., iii. 1, iv. 17); but they are not
merely Gentile Christians at large, for Tychicus carries the letter to
them, Paul has some knowledge of their special circumstances (i. 15),
and they are explicitly distinguished from "all the saints" (iii. 18,
vi. 18). We may most naturally think of them as the members of the
churches of Asia. The letter is very likely referred to in Col. iv. 16,
although this theory is not wholly free from difficulties.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--The best commentaries on _Ephesians_ are by C.J.
Ellicott (1855, 4th ed. 1868), H.A.W. Meyer (4th ed., 1867), (Eng.
trans. 1880), T.K. Abbott (1897), J.A. Robinson (1903, 2nd ed. 1904);
in German by H. von Soden (in _Hand-Commentar_) (1891, 2nd ed. 1893),
E. Haupt (in Meyer's _Kommentar_) (8th ed., 1902). J.B. Lightfoot's
commentary on _Colossians_ (1875, 3rd ed. 1879) is important for
_Ephesians_ also. On the English text see H.C.G. Moule (in Cambridge
Bible for Schools) (1887). R.W. Dale, _Epistle to the Ephesians; its
Doctrine and Ethics_ (1882), is a valuable series of expository
discourses.
Questions of genuineness, purpose, &c., are discussed in the New
Testament _Introductions_ of H. Holtzmann (1885, 3rd ed. 1892); B.
Weiss (1886, 3rd ed. 1897, Eng. trans. 1887); G. Salmon (1887, 8th ed.
1897); A. Jülicher (1894, 5th and 6th ed. 1906, Eng. trans. 1904); T.
Zahn (1897-1899, 2nd ed. 1900); and in the thorough investigations of
H. Holtzmann, _Kritik der Epheser- und Kolosserbriefe_ (1872), and
F.J.A. Hort, _Prolegomena to St Paul's Epistles to the Romans and the
Ephesians_ (1895). See also the works on the _Apostolic Age_ of C.
Weizsäcker (1886, 2nd ed. 1892, Eng. trans. 1894-1895); O. Pfleiderer
(_Das Urchristenthum_) (1887, 2nd ed. 1902, Eng. trans. 1906); and
A.C. McGiffert (1897).
On early attestation see A.H. Charteris, _Canonicity_ (1880) and the
_New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers_ (Oxford, 1905).
The theological ideas of Ephesians are also discussed in some of the
works on Paul's theology; see especially F.C. Baur, _Paulus_ (1845,
2nd ed. 1866-1867, Eng. trans. 1873-1874); O. Pfleiderer, _Der
Paulinismus_ (1873, 2nd ed. 1890, Eng. trans. 1877); and in the works
on New Testament theology by B. Weiss (1868, 7th ed. 1903, Eng. trans.
1882-1883); H. Holtzmann (1897), and G.B. Stevens (1899). See also
Somerville, _St Paul's Conception of Christ_ (1897).
For a guide to other literature see W. Lock, art. "Ephesians, Epistle
to," in Hastings's _Dictionary of the Bible_, the various works of
Holtzmann above referred to, and T.K. Abbott's _Commentary_, pp.
35-40. (J. H. Rs.)
EPHESUS, an ancient Ionian city on the west coast of Asia Minor. In
historic times it was situate on the lower slopes of the hills, Coressus
and Prion, which rise out of a fertile plain near the mouth of the river
Caÿster, while the temple and precinct of Artemis or Diana, to the fame
of which the town owed much of its celebrity, were in the plain itself,
E.N.E. at a distance of about a mile. But there is reason to think both
town and shrine had different sites in pre-Ionian times, and that both
lay farther south among the foot-hills of Mt. Solmissus. The situation
of the city was such as at all times to command a great commerce. Of the
three great river basins of Ionia and Lydia, those of the Hermus,
Caÿster and Maeander, it commanded the second, and had already access by
easy passes to the other two.
The earliest inhabitants assigned to Ephesus by Greek writers are the
"Amazons," with whom we hear of Leleges, Carians and Pelasgi. In the
11th century B.C., according to tradition (the date is probably too
early), Androclus, son of the Athenian king Codrus, landed on the spot
with his Ionians and a mixed body of colonists; and from his conquest
dates the history of the Greek Ephesus. The deity of the city was
Artemis; but we must guard against misconception when we use that name,
remembering that she bore close relation to the primitive Asiatic
goddess of nature, whose cult existed before the Ionian migration at the
neighbouring Ortygia, and that she always remained the virgin-mother of
all life and especially wild life, and an embodiment of the fertility
and productive power of the earth. The well-known monstrous
representation of her, as a figure with many breasts, swathed below the
waist in grave-clothes, was probably of late and alien origin. In early
Ionian times she seems to have been represented as a natural matronly
figure, sometimes accompanied by a child, and to have been a more
typically Hellenic goddess than she became in the Hellenistic and Roman
periods.
Twice in the period 700-500 B.C. the city owed its preservation to the
interference of the goddess; once when the swarms of the Cimmerians
overran Asia Minor in the 7th century and burnt the Artemision itself;
and once when Croesus besieged the town in the century succeeding, and
only retired after it had solemnly dedicated itself to Artemis, the sign
of such dedication being the stretching of a rope from city to
sanctuary. Croesus was eager in every way to propitiate the goddess, and
since about this time her temple was being restored on an enlarged
scale, he presented most of the columns required for the building as
well as some cows of gold. That is to say, these gifts were probably
paid for out of the proceeds of the sequestration of the property of a
rich Lydian merchant, Sadyattes, which Croesus presented to Ephesus
(Nic. Damasc. fr. 65). To counteract, perhaps, the growing Lydian
influence, Athens, the mother-city of Ephesus, despatched one of her
noblest citizens, Aristarchus, to restore law on the basis of the
Solonian constitution. The labours of Aristarchus seem to have borne
fruit. It was an Ephesian follower of his, Hermodorus, who aided the
Decemviri at Rome in their compilation of a system of law. And in the
same generation Heraclitus, probably a descendant of Codrus, quitted his
hereditary magistracy in order to devote himself to philosophy, in which
his name became almost as great as that of any Greek. Poetry had long
flourished at Ephesus. From very early times the Homeric poems found a
home and admirers there; and to Ephesus belong the earliest elegiac
poems of Greece, the war songs of Callinus, who flourished in the 7th
century B.C. and was the model of Tyrtaeus. The city seems to have been
more than once under tyrannical rule in the early Ionian period; and it
fell thereafter first to Croesus of Lydia, and then to Cyrus, the
Persian, and when the Ionian revolt against Persia broke out in the year
500 B.C. under the lead of Miletus, the city remained submissive to
Persian rule. When Xerxes returned from the march against Greece, he
honoured the temple of Artemis, although he sacked other Ionian shrines,
and even left his children behind at Ephesus for safety's sake. We hear
again of Persian respect for the temple in the time of Tissaphernes (411
B.C.). After the final Persian defeat at the Eurymedon (466 B.C.),
Ephesus for a time paid tribute to Athens, with the other cities of the
coast, and Lysander first and Agesilaus afterwards made it their
headquarters. To the latter fact we owe a contemporary description of it
by Xenophon. In the early part of the 4th century it fell again under
Persian influence, and was administered by an oligarchy.
Alexander was received by the Ephesians in 334, and established
democratic government. Soon after his death the city fell into the hands
of Lysimachus, who introduced fresh Greek colonists from Lebedus and
Colophon and, it is said, by means of an artificial inundation compelled
those who still dwelt in the plain by the temple to migrate to the city
on the hills, which he surrounded by a solid wall. He renamed the city
after his wife Arsinoë, but the old name was soon resumed. Ephesus was
very prosperous during the Hellenistic period, and is conspicuous both
then and later for the abundance of its coinage, which gives us a more
complete list of magistrates' names than we have for any other Ionian
city. The Roman coinage is remarkable for the great variety and
importance of its types. After the defeat of Antiochus the Great, king
of Syria, by the Romans, Ephesus was handed over by the conquerors to
Eumenes, king of Pergamum, whose successor, Attalus Philadelphus,
unintentionally worked the city irremediable harm. Thinking that the
shallowness of the harbour was due to the width of its mouth, he built a
mole part-way across the latter; the result, however, was that the
silting up of the harbour proceeded more rapidly than before. The third
Attalus of Pergamum bequeathed Ephesus with the rest of his possessions
to the Roman people, and it became for a while the chief city, and for
longer the first port, of the province of Asia, the richest in the
empire. Henceforth Ephesus remained subject to the Romans, save for a
short period, when, at the instigation of Mithradates Eupator of Pontus,
the cities of Asia Minor revolted and massacred their Roman residents.
The Ephesians even dragged out and slew those Romans who had fled to the
precinct of Artemis for protection, notwithstanding which sacrilege they
soon returned from their new to their former masters, and even had the
effrontery to state, in an inscription preserved to this day, that their
defection to Mithradates was a mere yielding to superior force. Sulla,
after his victory over Mithradates, brushed away their pretexts, and
inflicting a very heavy fine told them that the punishment fell far
short of their deserts. In the civil wars of the 1st century B.C. the
Ephesians twice supported the unsuccessful party, giving shelter to, or
being made use of by, first, Brutus and Cassius, and afterwards Antony,
for which partisanship or weakness they paid very heavily in fines.
All this time the city was gradually growing in wealth and in devotion
to the service of Artemis. The story of St Paul's doings there
illustrates this fact, and the sequel is very suggestive,--the burning,
namely, of books of sorcery of great value. Addiction to the practice of
occult arts had evidently become general in the now semi-orientalized
city. The Christian Church which Paul planted there was governed by
Timothy and John, and is famous in Christian tradition as a nurse of
saints and martyrs. According to local belief, Ephesus was also the last
home of the Virgin, who was lodged near the city by St John and there
died. But to judge from the Apocalyptic Letter to this Church (as shown
by Sir W.M. Ramsay), the latter showed a dangerous tendency to lightness
and reaction, and later events show that the pagan tradition of Artemis
continued very strong and perhaps never became quite extinct in the
Ephesian district. It was, indeed, long before the spread of
Christianity threatened the old local cult. The city was proud to be
termed _neocorus_ or servant of the goddess. Roman emperors vied with
wealthy natives in lavish gifts, one Vibius Salutaris among the latter
presenting a quantity of gold and silver images to be carried annually
in procession. Ephesus contested stoutly with Smyrna and Pergamum the
honour of being called the first city of Asia; each city appealed to
Rome, and we still possess rescripts in which the emperors endeavoured
to mitigate the bitterness of the rivalry. One privilege Ephesus
secured; the Roman governor of Asia always landed and first assumed
office there: and it was long the provincial centre of the official cult
of the emperor, and seat of the Asiarch. The Goths destroyed both city
and temple in the year A.D. 262, and although the city revived and the
cult of Artemis continued, neither ever recovered its former splendour.
A general council of the Christian Church was held there in 431 in the
great double church of St Mary, which is still to be seen. On this
occasion Nestorius was condemned, and the honour of the Virgin
established as _Theotokus_, amid great popular rejoicing, due,
doubtless, in some measure to the hold which the cult of the virgin
Artemis still had on the city. (On this council see below.) Thereafter
Ephesus seems to have been gradually deserted owing to its malaria; and
life transferred itself to another and higher site near the Artemision,
the name of which, Ayassoluk (written by early Arab geographers
_Ayathulukh_), is now known to be a corruption of the title of St John
_Theológos_, given to a great cathedral built on a rocky hill near the
present railway station, in the time of Justinian I. This church was
visited by Ibn Batuta in A.D. 1333; but few traces are now visible. The
ruins of the Artemision, after serving as a quarry to local builders,
were finally covered deep with mud by the river Caÿster, or one of its
left bank tributaries, the Selinus, and the true site remained
unsuspected until 1869.
_Excavations._--The first light thrown on the topography of Ephesus was
due to the excavations conducted by the architect, J.T. Wood, on behalf
of the trustees of the British Museum, during the years 1863-1874. He
first explored the Odeum and the Great Theatre situate in the city
itself, and in the latter place had the good fortune to find an
inscription which indicated to him in what direction to search for the
Artemision; for it stated that processions came to the city from the
temple by the Magnesian gate and returned by the Coressian. These two
gates were next identified, and following up that road which issued from
the Magnesian gate, Wood lighted first on a ruin which he believed to be
the tomb of Androclus, and afterwards on an angle of the peribolus wall
of the time of Augustus. After further tentative explorations, he struck
the actual pavement of the Artemision on the last day of 1869.
_The Artemision._--Wood removed the whole stratum of superficial
deposit, nearly 20 ft. deep, which overlay the huge area of the temple,
and exposed to view not only the scanty remains of the latest edifice,
built after 350 B.C., but the platform of an earlier temple, now known
to be that of the 6th century to which Croesus contributed. Below this
he did not find any remains. He discovered and sent to England parts of
several sculptured drums (_columnae caelatae_) of the latest temple, and
archaic sculptures from the drums and parapet of the earlier building.
He also made accurate measurements and a plan of the Hellenistic temple,
found many inscriptions and a few miscellaneous antiquities, and had
begun to explore the Precinct, when the great expense and other
considerations induced the trustees of the British Museum to suspend his
operations in 1874. Wood made two subsequent attempts to resume work,
but failed; and the site lay desolate till 1904, when the trustees,
wishing to have further information about the earlier strata and the
Precinct, sent D.G. Hogarth to re-examine the remains. As a result of
six months' work, Wood's "earliest temple" was re-cleared and planned,
remains of three earlier shrines were found beneath it, a rich deposit
of offerings, &c., belonging to the earliest shrine was discovered, and
tentative explorations were made in the Precinct. This deep digging,
however, which reached the sand of the original marsh, released much
ground water and resulted in the permanent flooding of the site.
[Illustration: Ground plan of the 6th Century ("Croesus") Temple at
Ephesus, conjecturally restored by A.E. Henderson.]
The history of the Artemision, as far as it can be inferred from the
remains, is as follows. (1) There was no temple on the plain previous to
the Ionian occupation, the primeval seat of the nature-goddess having
been in the southern hills, at Ortygia (near mod. _Arvalia_). Towards
the end of the 8th century B.C. a small shrine came into existence on
the plain. This was little more than a small platform of green schist
with a sacred tree and an altar, and perhaps later a wooden icon
(image), the whole enclosed in a _temenos_: but, as is proved by a great
treasure of objects in precious and other metals, ivory, bone, crystal,
paste, glass, terra-cotta and other materials, found in 1904-1905,
partly within the platform on which the cult-statue stood and partly
outside, in the lowest stratum of deposit, this early shrine was
presently enriched by Greeks with many and splendid offerings of
Hellenic workmanship. A large number of electron coins, found among
these offerings, and in style the earliest of their class known, combine
with other evidence to date the whole treasure to a period considerably
anterior to the reign of Croesus. This treasure is now divided between
the museums of Constantinople and London. (2) Within a short time,
perhaps after the Cimmerian sack (? 650 B.C.), this shrine was restored,
slightly enlarged, and raised in level, but not altered in character.
(3) About the close of the century, for some reason not known, but
possibly owing to collapse brought about by the marshy nature of the
site, this was replaced by a temple of regular Hellenic form. The latter
was built in relation to the earlier central statue-base but at a higher
level than either of its predecessors, doubtless for dryness' sake. Very
little but its foundations was spared by later builders, and there is
now no certain evidence of its architectural character; but it is very
probable that it was the early temple in which the Ionic order is said
to have been first used, after the colonists had made use of Doric in
their earlier constructions (e.g. in the _Panionion_); and that it was
the work of the Cnossian Chersiphron and his son, Metagenes, always
regarded afterwards as the first builders of a regular Artemision. Their
temple is said by Strabo to have been made bigger by another architect.
(4) The latter's work must have been the much larger temple, exposed by
Wood, and usually known as the Archaic or Croesus temple. This overlies
the remains of No. 3, at a level higher by about a metre, and the area
of its _cella_ alone contains the whole of the earlier shrines. Its
central point, however, was still the primitive statue-base, now
enlarged and heightened. About half its pavement, parts of the _cella_
walls and of three columns of the peristyle, and the foundations of
nearly all the platform, are still in position. The visible work was all
of very fine white marble, quarried about 7 m. N.E., near the modern Kos
Bunar. Fragments of relief-sculptures belonging to the parapet and
columns, and of fluted drums and capitals, cornices and other
architectural members have been recovered, showing that the workmanship
and Ionic style were of the highest excellence, and that the building
presented a variety of ornament, rare among Hellenic temples. The whole
ground-plan covered about 80,000 sq. ft. The height of the temple is
doubtful, the measurements of columns given us by later authority having
reference probably to its successor, the height of which was considered
abnormal and marvellous. Judged by the diameter of the drums, the
columns of the Croesus temple were not two-thirds of the height of those
of the Hellenistic temple. This fourth temple is, beyond question, that
to which Croesus contributed, and it was, therefore, in process of
building about 540 B.C. Our authorities seem to be referring to it when
they tell us that the Artemision was raised by common contribution of
the great cities of Asia, and took 120 years to complete. It was
dedicated with great ceremony, probably between 430 and 420 B.C., and
the famous Timotheus, son of Thersander, carried off the magnificent
prize for a lyric ode against all comers. Its original architects were,
probably, Paeonius of Ephesus, and Demetrius, a [Greek: hieros] of the
shrine itself: but it has been suggested that the latter may have been
rather the actual contracting builder than the architect. Of this temple
Herodotus speaks as existing in his day; and unless weight be given to
an isolated statement of Eusebius, that it was burned about 395 B.C., we
must assume that it survived until the night when one Herostratus,
desirous of acquiring eternal fame if only by a great crime, set it
alight. This is said to have happened in 356 B.C. on the October night
on which Alexander the Great came into the world, and, as Hegesias said,
the goddess herself was absent, assisting at the birth; but the
exactness of this portentous synchronism makes the date suspect. (5) It
was succeeded by what is called the Hellenistic temple, begun almost
immediately after the catastrophe, according to plans drawn by the
famous Dinocrates the architect of Alexandria. The platform was once
more raised to a higher level, some 7 ft. above that of the Archaic, by
means of huge foundation blocks bedded upon the earlier structures; and
this increase of elevation necessitated a slight expansion of the area
all round, and ten steps in place of three. The new columns were of
greater diameter than the old and over 60 ft. high; and from its great
height the whole structure was regarded as a marvel, and accounted one
of the wonders of the world. Since, however, other Greek temples had
colonnades hardly less high, and were of equal or greater area, it has
been suggested that the Ephesian temple had some distinct element of
grandiosity, no longer known to us--perhaps a lofty sculptured parapet
or some imposing form of _podium_. Bede, in his treatise _De sept. mir.
mundi_, describes a stupendous erection of several storeys; but his
other descriptions are so fantastic that no credence can be attached to
this. The fifth temple was once more of Ionic order, but the finish and
style of its details as attested by existing remains were inferior to
those of its predecessor. The great sculptured drums and pedestals, now
in the British Museum, belong to the lower part of certain of its
columns: but nothing of its frieze or pediments (if it had any) has been
recovered. Begun probably before 350 B.C., it was in building when
Alexander came to Ephesus in 334 and offered to bear the cost of its
completion. It was probably finished by the end of the century; for
Pliny the Elder states that its cypress-wood doors had been in existence
for 400 years up to his time. It stood intact, except for very partial
restorations, till A.D. 262 when it was sacked and burned by the Goths:
but it appears to have been to some extent restored afterwards, and its
cult no doubt survived till the Edict of Theodosius closed the pagan
temples. Its material was then quarried extensively for the construction
of the great cathedral of St John Theológos on the neighbouring hill
(Ayassoluk), and a large Byzantine building (a church?) came into
existence on the central part of its denuded site, but did not last
long. Before the Ottoman conquest its remains were already buried under
several feet of silt.
The organization of the temple hierarchy, and its customs and
privileges, retained throughout an Asiatic character. The priestesses of
the goddess were [Greek: parthenoi] (i.e. unwedded), and her priests
were compelled to celibacy. The chief among the latter, who bore the
Persian name of Megabyzus and the Greek title Neocorus, was doubtless a
power in the state as well as a dignitary of religion. His official
dress and spadonic appearance are probably revealed to us by a small
ivory statuette found by D.G. Hogarth in 1905. Besides these there was a
vast throng of dependents who lived by the temple and its
services--_theologi_, who may have expounded sacred legends, _hymnodi_,
who composed hymns in honour of the deity, and others, together with a
great crowd of _hieroi_ who performed more menial offices. The making of
shrines and images of the goddess occupied many hands. To support this
greedy mob, offerings flowed in in a constant stream from votaries and
from visitors, who contributed sometimes money, sometimes statues and
works of art. These latter so accumulated that the temple became a rich
museum, among the chief treasures of which were the figures of Amazons
sculptured in competition by Pheidias, Polyclitus, Cresilas and
Phradmon, and the painting by Apelles of Alexander holding a
thunderbolt. The temple was also richly endowed with lands, and
possessed the fishery of the Selinusian lakes, with other large
revenues. But perhaps the most important of all the privileges possessed
by the goddess and her priests was that of _asylum_. Fugitives from
justice or vengeance who reached her precincts were perfectly safe from
all pursuit and arrest. The boundaries of the space possessing such
virtue were from time to time enlarged. Mithradates extended them to a
bowshot from the temple in all directions, and Mark Antony imprudently
allowed them to take in part of the city, which part thus became free of
all law, and a haunt of thieves and villains. Augustus, while leaving
the right of asylum untouched, diminished the space to which the
privilege belonged, and built round it a wall, which still surrounds the
ruins of the temple at the distance of about a quarter of a mile,
bearing an inscription in Greek and Latin, which states that it was
erected in the proconsulship of Asinius Gallus, out of the revenues of
the temple. The right of asylum, however, had once more to be defended
by a deputation sent to the emperor Tiberius. Besides being a place of
worship, a museum and a sanctuary, the Ephesian temple was a great bank.
Nowhere in Asia could money be more safely bestowed, and both kings and
private persons placed their treasures under the guardianship of the
goddess.
_The City._--After Wood's superficial explorations, the city remained
desolate till 1894, when the Austrian Archaeological Institute obtained
a concession for excavation and began systematic work. This has
continued regularly ever since, but has been carried down no farther
than the imperial stratum. The main areas of operation have been: (1)
The _Great Theatre_. The stage buildings, orchestra and lower parts of
the _cavea_ have been cleared. In the process considerable additions
were made to Wood's find of sculptures in marble and bronze, and of
inscriptions, including missing parts of the Vibius Salutaris texts.
This theatre has a peculiar interest as the scene of the tumult aroused
by the mission of St Paul; but the existing remains represent a
reconstruction carried out after his time. (2) The _Hellenistic Agora_,
a huge square, surrounded by porticoes, lying S.W. of the theatre and
having fine public halls on the S. It has yielded to the Austrians fine
sculpture in marble and bronze and many inscriptions. (3) _The Roman
Agora_, with its large halls, lying N.W. of the theatre. Here were found
many inscriptions of Roman date and some statuary. (4) A street running
from the S.E. angle of the Hellenic Agora towards the Magnesian gate.
This was found to be lined with pedestals of honorific statues and to
have on the west side a remarkable building, stated in an inscription to
have been a library. The tomb of the founder, T. Julius Celsus, is hard
by, and some fine Roman reliefs, which once decorated it, have been sent
to Vienna. (5) A street running direct to the port from the theatre.
This is of great breadth, and had a Horologion half-way down and fine
porticoes and shops. It was known as the Arcadiane after having been
restored at a higher level than formerly by the emperor Arcadius (A.D.
395). It leaves on the right the great _Thermae_ of Constantine, of
which the Austrians have cleared out the south-east part. This huge pile
used to be taken for the Artemision by early visitors to Ephesus. Part
of the quays and buildings round the port were exposed, after measures
had been taken to drain the upper part of the marsh. (6) The Double
Church of the Virgin "Deipara" in the N.W. of the city, wherein the
council of 431 was held. Here interesting inscriptions and Byzantine
architectural remains were found. Besides these excavated monuments, the
Stadion; the _enceinte_ of fortifications erected by Lysimachus, which
runs from the tower called the "Prison of St Paul" and right along the
crests of the Bulbul (Prion) and Panajir hills; the round monument
miscalled the "Tomb of St Luke"; and the Opistholeprian gymnasium near
the Magnesian gate, are worthy of attention.
The work done by the Austrians enables a good idea to be obtained of the
appearance presented by a great Graeco-Roman city of Asia in the last
days of its prosperity. It may be realized better there than anywhere
how much architectural splendour was concentrated in the public
quarters. But the restriction of the clearance to the upper stratum of
deposit has prevented the acquisition of much further knowledge. Both
the Hellenistic and, still more, the original Ionian cities remain for
the most part unexplored. It should, however, be added that very
valuable topographical exploration has been carried out in the environs
of Ephesus by members of the Austrian expedition, and that the Ephesian
district is now mapped more satisfactorily than any other district of
ancient interest in Asia Minor.
The Turkish village of Ayassoluk (the modern representative of Ephesus),
more than a mile N.E. of the ancient city, has revived somewhat of
recent years owing to the development of its fig gardens by the Aidin
railway, which passes through the upper part of the plain. It is
noteworthy for a splendid ruined mosque built by the Seljuk, Isa Bey
II., of Aidin, in 1375, which contains magnificent columns: for a
castle, near which lie remains of the pendentives from the cupola of the
great cathedral of St John, now deeply buried in its own ruins: and for
an aqueduct, Turkish baths and mosque-tombs. There is a fair inn managed
by the Aidin Railway Company.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--E. Guhl, _Ephesiaca_ (1843); E. Curtius, _Ephesos_
(1874); C. Zimmermann, _Ephesos im ersten christlichen Jahrhundert_
(1874); J.T. Wood, _Discoveries at Ephesus_ (1877); E.L. Hicks, _Anc.
Greek Inscr. in the Brit. Museum_, iii. 2 (1890); B.V. Head, "Coinage
of Ephesus" (_Numism. Chron._, 1880); J. Menadier, _Qua condicione
Ephesii usi sint_, &c. (1880); Sir W.M. Ramsay, _Letters to the Seven
Churches_ (1904); O. Benndorf, R. Heberdey, &c., _Forschungen in
Ephesos_, vol. i. (1906) (Austrian Arch. Institute); D.G. Hogarth,
_Excavations at Ephesus: the Archaic Artemisia_ (2 vols., 1908), with
chapters by C.H. Smith, A. Hamilton Smith, B.V. Head, and A.E.
Henderson. (D. G. H.)
EPHESUS, COUNCIL OF. This Church council was convened in 431 for the
purpose of taking authoritative action concerning the doctrine of the
person of Christ. The councils of Nicaea and Constantinople had asserted
the full divinity and real humanity of Christ, without, however,
defining the manner of their union. The attempt to solve the apparent
incongruity of a perfect union of two complete and distinct natures in
one person produced first Apollinarianism, which substituted the divine
Logos for the human [Greek: nous] or [Greek: pneuma] of Jesus, thereby
detracting from the completeness of his humanity; and then Nestorianism,
which destroyed the unity of Christ's person by affirming that the
divine Logos dwelt in the man Jesus as in a temple, and that the union
of the two was in respect of dignity, and furthermore that, inasmuch as
the Logos could not have been born, to call Mary [Greek: theotokos],
"Godbearer," was absurd and blasphemous. The Alexandrians, led by Cyril,
stood for the doctrine of the perfect union of two complete natures in
one person, and made [Greek: theotokos] the shibboleth of orthodoxy. The
theological controversy was intensified by the rivalry of the two
patriarchates, Alexandria and Constantinople, for the primacy of the
East. As bishop of Constantinople Nestorius naturally looked to the
emperor for support, while Cyril turned to Rome. A Roman synod in 430
found Nestorius heretical and decreed his excommunication unless he
should recant. Shortly afterwards an Alexandrian synod condemned his
doctrines in twelve anathemas, which only provoked counter-anathemas.
The emperor now intervened and summoned a council, which met at Ephesus
on the 22nd of June 431. Nestorius was present with an armed escort, but
refused to attend the council on the ground that the patriarch of
Antioch (his friend) had not arrived. The council, nevertheless,
proceeded to declare him excommunicate and deposed. When the Roman
legates appeared they "examined and approved" the acts of the council,
whether as if thereby giving them validity, or as if concurring with the
council, is a question not easy to answer from the records. Cyril, the
president, apparently regarded the subscription of the legates as the
acknowledgment of "canonical agreement" with the synod.
The disturbances that followed the arrival of John, the patriarch of
Antioch, are sufficiently described in the article NESTORIUS.
The emperor finally interposed to terminate that scandalous strife,
banished Nestorius and dissolved the council. Ultimately he gave
decision in favour of the orthodox. The council was generally received
as ecumenical, even by the Antiochenes, and the differences between
Cyril and John were adjusted (433) by a "Union Creed," which, however,
did not prevent a recrudescence of theological controversy.
See Mansi iv. pp. 567-1482, v. pp. 1-1023; Hardouin i. pp. 1271-1722;
Hefele (2nd ed.) ii. pp. 141-247 (Eng. trans. iii. pp. 1-114);
Peltanus, _SS. Magni et Ecumen. Conc. Ephesini primi Acta omnia_ ...
(Ingolstadt, 1576); Wilhelm Kraetz, _Koptische Akten zum Ephes.
Konzil_ ... (Leipzig, 1904); also the articles NESTORIUS; CYRIL;
THEODORE OF MOPSUESTIA.
The so-called "Robber Synod" of Ephesus (_Latrocinium Ephesinum_) of
449, although wholly irregular and promptly repudiated by the church,
may, nevertheless, not improperly be treated here. The archimandrite
Eutyches (q.v.) having been deposed by his bishop, Flavianus of
Constantinople, on account of his heterodox doctrine of the person of
Christ, had appealed to Dioscurus, the successor of Cyril in the see of
Alexandria, who restored him and moved the emperor Theodosius II. to
summon a council, which should "utterly destroy Nestorianism." Rome
recognizing that she had more to fear from Alexandria, departed from her
traditional policy and sided with Constantinople. The council of 130
bishops, which convened on the 8th of August 449, was completely
dominated by Dioscurus. Eutyches was acquitted of heresy and reinstated,
Flavianus and other bishops deposed, the Roman legates insulted, and all
opposition was overborne by intimidation or actual violence. The death
of Flavianus, which soon followed, was attributed to injuries received
in this synod; but the proof of the charge leaves something to be
desired.
The emperor confirmed the synod, but the Eastern Church was divided
upon the question of accepting it, and Leo I. of Rome excommunicated
Dioscurus, refused to recognize the successor of Flavianus and demanded
a new and greater council. The death of Theodosius II. removed the main
support of Dioscurus, and cleared the way for the council of Chalcedon
(q.v.), which deposed the Alexandrian and condemned Eutychianism.
See Mansi vi. pp. 503 sqq., 606 sqq.; Hardouin ii. 71 sqq.; Hefele
(2nd ed.) ii. pp. 349 sqq. (Eng. trans. iii. pp. 221 sqq.); S.G.F.
Perry, _The Second Synod of Ephesus_ (Dartford, 1881); l'Abbé Martin,
_Actes du brigandage d'Éphèse_ (Amiens, 1874) and _Le Pseudo-synode
connu dans l'histoire sous le nom de brigandage d'Éphèse_ (Paris,
1875). (T. F. C.)
EPHOD, a Hebrew word (_ephod_) of uncertain meaning, retained by the
translators of the Old Testament. In the post-exilic priestly writings
(5th century B.C. and later) the ephod forms part of the gorgeous
ceremonial dress of the high-priest (see Ex. xxix. 5 sq. and especially
Ecclus. xlv. 7-13). It was a very richly decorated object of coloured
threads interwoven with gold, worn outside the luxurious mantle or robe;
it was kept in place by a girdle, and by shoulder-pieces (?), to which
were attached brooches of onyx (fastened to the robe) and golden rings
from which hung the "breastplate" (or rather pouch) containing the
sacred lots, Urim and Thummim. The somewhat involved description in Ex.
xxviii. 6 sqq., xxxix. 2 sqq. (see V. Ryssel's ed. of Dillmann's
commentary on Ex.-Lev.) leaves it uncertain whether it covered the back,
encircling the body like a kind of waistcoat, or only the front; at all
events it was not a garment in the ordinary sense, and its association
with the sacred lots indicates that the ephod was used for divination
(cf. Num. xxvii. 21), and had become the distinguishing feature of the
leading priestly line (cf. 1 Sam. ii. 28).[1] But from other passages it
seems that the ephod had been a familiar object whose use was by no
means so restricted. Like the teraphim (q.v.) it was part of the common
stock of Hebrew cult; it is borne (rather than worn) by persons acting
in a priestly character (Samuel at Shiloh, priests of Nob, David), it is
part of the worship of individuals (Gideon at Ophrah), and is found in a
private shrine with a lay attendant (Micah; Judg. xvii. 5; see, however,
vv. 10-13).[2] Nevertheless, while the prophetical teaching came to
regard the ephod as contrary to the true worship of Yahweh, the priestly
doctrine of the post-exilic age (when worship was withdrawn from the
community at large to the recognized priesthood of Jerusalem) has
retained it along with other remains of earlier usage, legalizing it, as
it were, by confining it exclusively to the Aaronites.
An intricate historical problem is involved at the outset in the
famous ephod, which the priest Abiathar brought in his hand when he
fled to David after the massacre of the priests of Nob. It is
evidently regarded as the one which had been in Nob (1 Sam. xxi. 9),
and the presence of the priests at Nob is no less clearly regarded as
the sequel of the fall of Shiloh. The ostensible intention is to
narrate the transference of the sacred objects to David (cf. 2 Sam. i.
10), and henceforth he regularly inquires of Yahweh in his movements
(1 Sam. xxiii. 9-12, xxx. 7 sq.; cf. xxiii. 2, 4; 2 Sam. ii. 1, v.
19-23). It is possible that the writer (or writers) desired to trace
the earlier history of the ephod through the line of Eli and Abiathar
to the time when the Zadokite priests gained the supremacy (see
LEVITES); but elsewhere Abiathar is said to have borne the ark (1
Kings ii. 26; cf. 2 Sam. vii. 6), and this fluctuation is noteworthy
by reason of the present confusion in the text of 1 Sam. xiv. 3, 18
(see commentaries).
On one view, the ark in Kirjath-jearim was in non-Israelite hands (1
Sam. vii. 1 sq.); on the other, Saul's position as king necessitates
the presumption that his sway extended over Judah and Israel,
including those cities which otherwise appear to have been in the
hands of aliens (1 Sam. xiv. 47 sq.; cf. xvii. 54, &c.). There are
some fundamental divergencies in the representations of the traditions
of both David and Saul (qq.v.), and there is indirect and independent
evidence which makes 1 Kings ii. 26 not entirely isolated. Here it
must suffice to remark that the ark, too, was also an object for
ascertaining the divine will (especially Judg. xx. 26-28; cf. 18, 23),
and it is far from certain that the later records of the ark (which
was too heavy to be borne by one), like those of the ephod, are valid
for earlier times.
For the form of the earlier ephod the classic passage is 2 Sam. vi. 14,
where David girt in (or with) a linen ephod dances before the ark at its
entry into Jerusalem and incurs the unqualified contempt of his wife
Michal, the daughter of Saul. Relying upon the known custom of
performing certain observances in a practically, or even entirely, nude
condition, it seems plausible to infer that the ephod was a scanty
wrapping, perhaps a loin-cloth, and this view has found weighty support.
On the other hand, the idea of contempt at the exposure of the person,
to whatever extent, may not have been so prominent, especially if the
custom were not unfamiliar, and it is possible that the sequel refers
more particularly to grosser practices attending outbursts of religious
enthusiasm.[3]
The favourite view that the ephod was also an image rests partly upon 1
Sam. xxi. 9, where Goliath's sword is wrapped in a cloth in the
sanctuary of Nob _behind the ephod_. But it is equally natural to
suppose that it hung on a nail in the wall, and apart from the omission
of the significant words in the original Septuagint, the possibility
that the text read "ark" cannot be wholly ignored (see above; also G.F.
Moore, _Ency. Bib._ col. 1307, n. 2). Again, in the story of Micah's
shrine and the removal of the sacred objects and the Levite priest by
the Danites, parallel narratives have been used: the graven and molten
images of Judg. xvii. 2-4 corresponding to the ephod and teraphim of
ver. 5. Throughout there is confusion in the use of these terms, and the
finale refers only to the graven image of Dan (xviii. 30 sq., see 1
Kings xii. 28 sq.). But the combination of ephod and teraphim (as in
Hos. iii. 4) is noteworthy, since the fact that the latter were images
(1 Sam. xix. 13; Gen. xxxi. 34) could be urged against the view that the
former were of a similar character. Finally, according to Judg. viii.
27, Gideon made an ephod of gold, about 70 lb. in weight, and "put" it
in Ophrah. It is regarded as a departure from the worship of Yahweh,
although the writer of ver. 33 (cf. also ver. 23) hardly shared this
feeling; it was probably something once harmlessly associated with the
cult of Yahweh (cf. CALF, GOLDEN), and the term "ephod" may be due to a
later hand under the influence of the prophetical teaching referred to
above. The present passage is the only one which appears to prove that
the ephod was an image, and several writers, including Lotz (_Realencyk.
f. prot. Theol._ vol. v., s.v.), T.C. Foote (pp. 13-18) and A.
Maecklenburg (_Zeit. f. wissens. Theol._, 1906, pp. 433 sqq.) find this
interpretation unnecessary.
Archaeological evidence for objects of divination (see, e.g., the
interesting details in Ohnefalsch-Richter, _Kypros, the Bible and
Homer_, i. 447 sq.), and parallels from the Oriental area, can be
readily cited in support of any of the explanations of the ephod which
have been offered, but naturally cannot prove the form which it actually
took in Palestine. Since images were clothed, it could be supposed that
the diviner put on the god's apparel (cf. _Ency. Bib._ col. 1141); but
they were also plated, and in either case the transference from a
covering to the object covered is intelligible. If the ephod was a
loin-cloth, its use as a receptacle and the known evolution of the
article find useful analogies (Foote, p. 43 sq., and _Ency. Bib._ col.
1734 [1]). Finally, if there is no decisive evidence for the view that
it was an image (Judg. viii. 27), or that as a wrapping it formed the
sole covering of the officiating agent (2 Sam. vi.), all that can safely
be said is that it was certainly used in divination and presumably did
not differ radically from the ephod of the post-exilic age.
See further, in addition to the monographs already cited, the articles
in Hastings's _Dict. Bible_ (by S.R. Driver), _Ency. Bib._ (by G.F.
Moore), and _Jew. Encyc._ (L. Ginsburg), and E. Sellin, in _Oriental.
Studien: Theodor Nöldeke_ (ed. Bezold, 1906), pp. 699 sqq.
(S. A. C.)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Cf. the phrase "ephod of prophecy" (_Testament of Levi_, viii.
2). The priestly apparatus of the post-exilic age retains several
traces of old mythological symbolism and earlier cult, the meaning of
which had not altogether been forgotten. With the dress one may
perhaps compare the apparel of the gods Marduk and Adad, for which
see A. Jeremias, _Das Alte Test. im Lichte des Alten Orients_, 2nd
ed., figs. 33, 46, and pp. 162, 449.
[2] The ordinary interpretation "_linen_ ephod" (1 Sam. ii. 18, xxii.
18; 2 Sam. vi. 14) is questioned by T.C. Foote in his useful
monograph, _Journ. Bibl. Lit._ xxi., 1902, pp. 3, 47. This writer
also aptly compares the infant Samuel with the child who drew the
lots at the temple of Fortuna at Praeneste (Cicero, _De divin._ ii.
41, 86), and with the modern practice of employing innocent
instruments of chance in lotteries (_op. cit._ pp. 22, 27).
[3] It is not stated that the linen ephod was David's sole covering,
and it is difficult to account for the text in the parallel passage 1
Chron. xv. 27 (where he is clothed with a robe); "girt," too, is
ambiguous, since the verb is even used of a sword. On the question of
nudity (cf. 1 Sam. xix. 24) see Robertson Smith, _Rel. Sem._² pp.
161, 450 sq.; _Ency. Bib._ s.vv. "girdle," "sackcloth"; and M.
Jastrow, _Journ. Am. Or. Soc._ xx. 144, xxi. 23. The significant
terms "uncover," "play" (2 Sam. vi. 20 sq.), have other meanings
intelligible to those acquainted with the excesses practised in
Oriental cults.
EPHOR (Gr. [Greek: ephoros]), the title of the highest magistrates of
the ancient Spartan state. It is uncertain when the office was created
and what was its original character. That it owed its institution to
Lycurgus (Herod. i. 65; cf. Xen. _Respub. Lacedaem._ viii. 3) is very
improbable, and we may either regard it as an immemorial Dorian
institution (with C.O. Müller, H. Gabriel, H.K. Stein, Ed. Meyer and
others), or accept the tradition that it was founded during the first
Messenian War, which necessitated a prolonged absence from Sparta on the
part of both kings (Plato, _Laws_, iii. 692 a; Aristotle, _Politics_, v.
9. 1 = p. 1313 a 26; Plut. _Cleomenes_, 10; so G. Dum, G. Gilbert,
A.H.J. Greenidge). There is no evidence for the theory that originally
the ephors were market inspectors; they seem rather to have had from the
outset judicial or police functions. Gradually they extended their
powers, aided by the jealousy between the royal houses, which made it
almost impossible for the two kings to co-operate heartily, and from the
5th to the 3rd century they exercised a growing despotism which Plato
justly calls a _tyrannis_ (_Laws_, 692). Cleomenes III. restored the
royal power by murdering four of the ephors and abolishing the office,
and though it was revived by Antigonus Doson after the battle of
Sellasia, and existed at least down to Hadrian's reign (_Sparta Museum
Catalogue_, Introd. p. 10), it never regained its former power.
In historical times the ephors were five in number, the first of them
giving his name to the year, like the eponymous archon at Athens. Where
opinions were divided the majority prevailed. The ephors were elected
annually, originally no doubt by the kings, later by the people; their
term of office began with the new moon after the autumnal equinox, and
they had an official residence ([Greek: ephoreion]) in the Agora. Every
full citizen was eligible and no property qualification was required.
The ephors summoned and presided over meetings of the Gerousia and
Apella, and formed the executive committee responsible for carrying out
decrees. In their dealings with the kings they represented the supremacy
of the people. There was a monthly exchange of oaths, the kings swearing
to rule according to the laws, the ephors undertaking on this condition
to maintain the royal authority (Xen. _Resp. Laced._ 15. 7). They alone
might remain seated in a king's presence, and had power to try and even
to imprison a king, who must appear before them at the third summons.
Two of them accompanied the army in the field, not interfering with the
king's conduct of the campaign, but prepared, if need be, to bring him
to trial on his return. The ephors, again, exercised a general
guardianship of law and custom and superintended the training of the
young. They shared the criminal jurisdiction of the Gerousia and decided
civil suits. The administration of taxation, the distribution of booty,
and the regulation of the calendar also devolved upon them. They could
actually put _perioeci_ to death without trial, if we may believe
Isocrates (xii. 181), and were responsible for protecting the state
against the helots, against whom they formally declared war on entering
office, so as to be able to kill any whom they regarded as dangerous
without violating religious scruples. Finally, the ephors were supreme
in questions of foreign policy. They enforced, when necessary, the alien
acts ([Greek: xenêlasia]), negotiated with foreign ambassadors,
instructed generals, sent out expeditions and were the guiding spirits
of the Spartan confederacy.
See the constitutional histories of G. Gilbert (Eng. trans.), pp. 16,
52-59; G. Busolt, p. 84 ff., V. Thumser, p. 241 ff., G.F. Schömann
(Eng. trans.), p. 236 ff., A.H.J. Greenidge, p. 102 ff.; Szanto's
article "Ephoroi" in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopädie_, v. 2860 ff.;
Ed. Meyer, _Forschungen zur alten Geschichte_, i. 244 ff.; C.O.
Müller, _Dorians_, bk. iii. ch. vii.; G. Grote, _History of Greece_,
pt. ii. ch. vi.; G. Busolt, _Griechische Geschichte_, i.² 555 ff.; B.
Niese, _Historische Zeitschrift_, lxii. 58 ff. Of the many monographs
dealing with this subject the following are specially useful: G. Dum,
_Entstehung und Entwicklung des spartan_. _Ephorats_ (Innsbruck,
1878); H.K. Stein, _Das spartan_. _Ephorat bis auf Cheilon_
(Paderborn, 1870); K. Kuchtner, _Entstehung und ursprüngliche
Bedeutung des spartan_. _Ephorats_ (Munich, 1897); C. Frick, _De
ephoris Spartanis_ (Göttingen, 1872); A. Schaefer, _De ephoris
Lacedaemoniis_ (Greifswald, 1863); E. von Stern, _Zur Entstehung und
ursprünglichen Bedeutung des Ephorats in Sparta_ (Berlin, 1894).
(M. N. T.)
EPHORUS (c. 400-330 B.C.), of Cyme in Aeolis, in Asia Minor, Greek
historian. Together with the historian Theopompus he was a pupil of
Isocrates, in whose school he attended two courses of rhetoric. But he
does not seem to have made much progress in the art, and it is said to
have been at the suggestion of Isocrates himself that he took up
literary composition and the study of history. The fruit of his labours
was his [Greek: Historiai] in 29 books, the first universal history,
beginning with the return of the Heraclidae to Peloponnesus, as the
first well-attested historical event. The whole work was edited by his
son Demophilus, who added a 30th book, containing a summary description
of the Social War and ending with the taking of Perinthus (340) by
Philip of Macedon (cf. Diod. Sic. xvi. 14 with xvi. 76). Each book was
complete in itself, and had a separate title and preface. It is clear
that Ephorus made critical use of the best authorities, and his work,
highly praised and much read, was freely drawn upon by Diodorus
Siculus[1] and other compilers. Strabo (viii. p. 332) attaches much
importance to his geographical investigations, and praises him for being
the first to separate the historical from the merely geographical
element. Polybius (xii. 25 g) while crediting him with a knowledge of
the conditions of naval warfare, ridicules his description of the
battles of Leuctra and Mantineia as showing ignorance of the nature of
land operations. He was further to be commended for drawing (though not
always) a sharp line of demarcation between the mythical and historical
(Strabo ix. p. 423); he even recognized that a profusion of detail,
though lending corroborative force to accounts of recent events, is
ground for suspicion in reports of far-distant history. His style was
high-flown and artificial, as was natural considering his early
training, and he frequently sacrificed truth to rhetoric effect; but,
according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, he and Theopompus were the only
historical writers whose language was accurate and finished. Other works
attributed to him were:--_A Treatise on Discoveries; Respecting Good and
Evil Things; On Remarkable Things in Various Countries_ (it is doubtful
whether these were separate works, or merely extracts from the
_Histories_); _A Treatise on my Country_, on the history and antiquities
of Cyme, and an essay _On Style_, his only rhetorical work, which is
occasionally mentioned by the rhetorician Theon. Nothing is known of his
life, except the statement in Plutarch that he declined to visit the
court of Alexander the Great.
Fragments in C.W. Müller, _Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum_, i., with
critical introduction on the life and writings of Ephorus; see J.A.
Klügmann, _De Ephoro historico_ (1860); C.A. Volquardsen,
_Untersuchungen über die Quellen der griechischen und sicilischen
Geschichten bei Diodor_. _xi.-xvi._ (1868); and specially J.B. Bury,
_Ancient Greek Historians_ (1909); E. Schwartz, in Pauly-Wissowa,
_Realencyc._ s.v.; and article GREECE: _History_: Ancient Authorities.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] It is now generally recognized, thanks to Volquardsen and others,
that Ephorus is the principal authority followed by Diodorus, except
in the chapters relating to Sicilian history.
EPHRAEM SYRUS (Ephraim the Syrian), a saint who lived in Mesopotamia
during the first three quarters of the 4th century A.D. He is perhaps
the most influential of all Syriac authors; and his fame as a poet,
commentator, preacher and defender of orthodoxy has spread throughout
all branches of the Christian Church. This reputation he owes partly to
the vast fertility of his pen--according to the historian Sozomen he was
credited with having written altogether 3,000,000 lines--partly to the
elegance of his style and a certain measure of poetic inspiration, more
perhaps to the strength and consistency of his personal character, and
his ardour in defence of the creed formulated at Nicaea.
An anonymous life of Ephraim was written not long after his death in
373. The biography has come down to us in two recensions. But in neither
form is it free from later interpolation; and its untrustworthiness is
shown by its conflicting with data supplied by his own works, as well as
by the manner in which it is overloaded with miraculous events. The
following is a probable outline of the main facts of Ephraim's life. He
was born in the reign of Constantine (perhaps in 306) at or near
Nisibis. His father was a pagan, the priest of an idol called Abnil or
Abizal.[1] During his boyhood Ephraim showed a repugnance towards
heathen worship, and was eventually driven by his father from the home.
He became a ward and disciple of the famous Jacob--the same who attended
the Council of Nicaea as bishop of Nisibis, and died in 338. At his
hands Ephraim seems to have received baptism at the age of 18 or of 28
(the two recensions differ on this point), and remained at Nisibis till
its surrender to the Persians by Jovian in 363. Probably in the course
of these years he was ordained a deacon, but from his humble estimate of
his own worth refused advancement to any higher degree in the church. He
seems to have played an important part in guiding the fortunes of the
city during the war begun by Shapur II. in 337, in the course of which
Nisibis was thrice unsuccessfully besieged by the Persians (in 338, 346
and 350). The statements of his biographer to this effect accord with
the impression we derive from his own poems (_Carmina Nisibena_, 1-21).
His intimate relations with Bishop Jacob were continued with the three
succeeding bishops--Babu (338-?349), Vologaeses (?349-361), and
Abraham--on all of whom he wrote encomia. The surrender of the city in
363 to the Persians resulted in a general exodus of the Christians, and
Ephraim left with the rest. After visiting Amid (Diarbekr) he proceeded
to Edessa, and there settled and spent the last ten years of his life.
He seems to have lived mainly as a hermit outside the city: his time was
devoted to study, writing, teaching and the refutation of heresies. It
is possible that during these years he paid a visit to Basil at
Caesarea. Near the end of his life he rendered great public service by
distributing provisions in the city during a famine. The best attested
date for his death is the 9th of June 373. It is clear that this
chronology leaves no room for the visit to Egypt, and the eight years
spent there in refuting Arianism, which are alleged by his biographer.
Perhaps, as has been surmised, there may be confusion with another
Ephraim. Nor can he have written the funeral panegyric on Basil who
survived him by three months. But with all necessary deductions the
biography is valuable as witnessing to the immense reputation for
sanctity and for theological acumen which Ephraim had gained in his
lifetime, or at least soon after he died. His biographer's statement as
to his habits and appearance is worth quoting, and is probably
true:--"From the time he became a monk to the end of his life his only
food was barley bread and sometimes pulse and vegetables: his drink was
water. And his flesh was dried upon his bones, like a potter's sherd.
His clothes were of many pieces patched together, the colour of dirt. In
stature he was little; his countenance was always sad, and he never
condescended to laughter. And he was bald and beardless."
The statement in his Life that Ephraim miraculously learned Coptic falls
to the ground with the narrative of his Egyptian visit: and the story of
his suddenly learning to speak Greek through the prayer of St Basil is
equally unworthy of credence. He probably wrote only in Syriac, though
he may have possessed some knowledge of Greek and possibly of Hebrew.
But many of his works must have been early translated into other
languages; and we possess in MSS. versions into Greek, Armenian, Coptic,
Arabic and Ethiopic. The Greek versions occupy three entire volumes of
the Roman folio edition, and the extant Armenian versions (mainly of
N.T. commentaries) were published at Venice in four volumes in 1836.
It was primarily as a sacred poet that Ephraim impressed himself on his
fellow-countrymen. With the exception of his commentaries on scripture,
nearly all his extant Syriac works are composed in metre. In many cases
the metrical structure is of the simplest, consisting only in the
arrangement of the discourse in lines of uniform length--usually
heptasyllabic (Ephraim's favourite metre) or pentasyllabic. A more
complicated arrangement is found in other poems, such as the _Carmina
Nisibena_: these are made up of strophes, each consisting of lines of
different lengths according to a settled scheme, with a recurring
refrain. T.J. Lamy has estimated that, in this class of poems, there are
as many as 66 different varieties of metres to be found in the works of
Ephraim. These strophic poems were set to music, and sung by alternating
choirs of girls. According to Ephraim's biographer, his main motive for
providing these hymns set to music was his desire to counteract the
baneful effects produced by the heretical hymns of Bardaisan and his son
Harmonius, which had enjoyed popularity and been sung among the
Edessenes for a century and a half.
The subject-matter of Ephraim's poems covers all departments of
theology. Thus the Roman edition contains (of metrical works) exegetical
discourses, hymns on the Nativity of Christ, 65 hymns against heretics,
85 on the Faith against sceptics, a discourse against the Jews, 85
funeral hymns, 4 on freewill, 76 exhortations to repentance, 12 hymns on
paradise, and 12 on miscellaneous subjects. The edition of Lamy has
added many other poems, largely connected with church festivals. It must
be confessed that, judged by Western standards, the poems of Ephraim are
prolix and wearisome in the extreme, and are distinguished by few
striking poetic beauties. And so far as they are made the vehicle of
reasoning, their efficiency is seriously hampered by their poetic form.
On the other hand, it is fair to remember that the taste of Ephraim's
countrymen in poetry was very different from ours. As Duval remarks:
"quant à la prolixité de saint Éphrem que nous trouvons parfois
fastidieuse, on ne peut la condamner sans tenir compte du goût des
Syriens qui aimaient les répétitions et les développements de la même
pensée, et voyaient des qualités là où nous trouvons des défauts"
(_Littér. syriaque_, p. 19). He is no worse in these respects than the
best of the Syriac writers who succeeded him. And he surpasses almost
all of them in the richness of his diction, and his skill in the use of
metaphors and illustrations.
Of Ephraim as a commentator on Scripture we have only imperfect means of
judging. His commentaries on the O.T. are at present accessible to us
only in the form they had assumed in the _Catena Patrum_ of Severus
(compiled in 861), and to some extent in quotations by later Syriac
commentators. His commentary on the Gospels is of great importance in
connexion with the textual history of the N.T., for the text on which he
composed it was that of the Diatessaron. The Syriac original is lost:
but the ancient Armenian version survives, and was published at Venice
in 1836 along with Ephraim's commentary on the Pauline epistles (also
only extant in Armenian) and some other works. A Latin version of the
Armenian Diatessaron commentary has been made by Aucher and Mösinger
(Venice, 1876). Using this version as a clue, J.R. Harris[2] has been
able to identify a number of Syriac quotations from or references to
this commentary in the works of Isho'dadh, Bar-Kepha (Severus),
Bar-salibi and Barhebraeus. Although, as Harris points out, it is
unlikely that the original text of the Diatessaron had come down
unchanged through the two centuries to Ephraim's day, the text on which
he comments was in the main unaffected by the revision which produced
the Peshitta. Side by side with this conclusion may be placed the result
of F.C. Burkitt's[3] careful examination of the quotations from the
Gospels in the other works of Ephraim; he shows conclusively that in all
the undoubtedly genuine works the quotations are from a pre-Peshitta
text.
As a theologian, Ephraim shows himself a stout defender of Nicaean
orthodoxy, with no leanings in the direction of either the Nestorian or
the Monophysite heresies which arose after his time. He regarded it as
his special task to combat the views of Marcion, of Bardaisan and of
Mani.
To the modern historian Ephraim's main contribution is in the material
supplied by the 72 hymns[4] known as _Carmina Nisibena_ and published by
G. Bickell in 1866. The first 20 poems were written at Nisibis between
350 and 363 during the Persian invasions; the remaining 52 at Edessa
between 363 and 373. The former tell us much of the incidents of the
frontier war, and particularly enable us to reconstruct in detail the
history of the third siege of Nisibis in 350.
Of the many editions of Ephraim's works a full list is given by Nestle
in _Realenk. f. protest. Theol. und Kirche_ (3rd ed.). For modern
students the most important are: (1) the great folio edition in 6
volumes (3 of works in Greek and 3 in Syriac), in which the text is
throughout accompanied by a Latin version (Rome, 1732-1746); on the
unsatisfactory character of this edition (which includes many works
that are not Ephraim's) and especially of the Latin version, see
Burkitt, _Ephraim's Quotations_, pp. 4 sqq.; (2) _Carmina Nisibena_,
edited with a Latin translation by G. Bickell (Leipzig, 1866); (3)
_Hymni et sermones_, edited with a Latin translation by T.J. Lamy (4
vols., Malines, 1882-1902). Many selected homilies have been edited or
translated by Overbeck, Zingerle and others (cf. Wright, _Short
History_, pp. 35 sqq.); a selection of the _Hymns_ was translated by
H. Burgess, _Select Metrical Hymns of Ephrem Syrus_ (1853). Of the two
recensions of Ephraim's biography, one was edited in part by J.S.
Assemani (B.O. i. 26 sqq.) and in full by S.E. Assemani in the Roman
edition (iii. pp. xxiii.-lxiii.); the other by Lamy (ii. 5-90) and
Bedjan (_Acta mart. et sanct._ iii. 621-665). The long poem on the
history of Joseph, twice edited by Bedjan (Paris, 1887 and 1891) and
by him attributed to Ephraim, is more probably the work of Balai.
(N. M.)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It is true that in the _Confession_ attributed to him and printed
among his Greek works in the first volume of the Roman edition he
speaks (p. 129) of his parents as having become martyrs for the
Christian faith. But this document is of very doubtful authenticity.
[2] _Fragments of the Commentary of Ephrem Syrus upon the
Diatessaron_ (London, 1895).
[3] "Ephraim's Quotations from the Gospel," in _Texts and Studies_,
vol. vii. (Cambridge, 1901).
[4] There were originally 77, but 5 have perished.
EPHRAIM, a tribe of Israel, called after the younger son of Joseph, who
in his benediction exalted Ephraim over the elder brother Manasseh (Gen.
xlviii.). These two divisions were often known as the "house of Joseph"
(Josh. xvii. 14 sqq.; Judg. i. 22; 2 Sam. xix. 20; 1 Kings xi. 28). The
relations between them are obscure; conflicts are referred to in Is. ix.
21,[1] and Ephraim's proud and ambitious character is indicated in its
demands as narrated in Josh. xvii. 14; Judg. viii. 1-3, xii. 1-6.
throughout, Ephraim played a distinctive and prominent part; it probably
excelled Manasseh in numerical strength, and the name became a synonym
for the northern kingdom of Israel. Originally the name may have been a
geographical term for the central portion of Palestine. Regarded as a
tribe, it lay to the north of Benjamin, which traditionally belongs to
it; but whether the young "brother" (see BENJAMIN) sprang from it, or
grew up separately, is uncertain. Northwards, Ephraim lost itself in
Manasseh, even if it did not actually include it (Judg. i. 27; 1 Chron.
vii. 29); the boundaries between them can hardly be recovered. Ephraim's
strength lay in the possession of famous sites: Shechem, with the tomb
of the tribal ancestor, also one of the capitals; Shiloh, at one period
the home of the ark; Timnath-Serah (or Heres), the burial-place of
Joshua; and Samaria, whose name was afterwards extended to the whole
district (see SAMARIA).
Shechem itself was visited by Abraham and Jacob, and the latter bought
from the sons of Hamor a burial-place (Gen. xxxiii. 19). The story of
Dinah may imply some early settlement of tribes in its vicinity (but see
SIMEON), and the reference in Gen. xlviii. 22 (see R.V. marg.) alludes
to its having been forcibly captured. But how this part of Palestine
came into the hands of the Israelites is not definitely related in the
story of the invasion (see JOSHUA).
A careful discussion of the Biblical data referring to Ephraim is given
by H.W. Hogg, _Ency. Bib._, s.v. On the characteristic narratives which
appear to have originated in Ephraim (viz. the Ephraimite or Elohist
source, E), see GENESIS and BIBLE: _Old Testament Criticism._ See
further ABIMELECH; GIDEON; MANASSEH; and JEWS: _History_.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Inter-tribal feuds during the period of the monarchy may underlie
the events mentioned in 1 Kings xvi. 9 sq., 21 sq.; 2 Kings xv. 10,
14.
EPHTHALITES, or WHITE HUNS. This many-named and enigmatical tribe was
of considerable importance in the history of India and Persia in the 5th
and 6th centuries, and was known to the Byzantine writers, who call them
[Greek: Ephthalitoi, Euthagitoi,] [Greek: Nephthalitoi] or [Greek:
Abdeloi]. The last of these is an independent attempt to render the
original name, which was probably something like Aptal or Haptal, but
the initial [Nu] of the third is believed to be a clerical error. They
were also called [Greek: Leukoi Ounnoi] or [Greek: Chounoi], White (that
is fair-skinned) Huns. In Arabic and Persian they are known as Haital
and in Armenian as Haithal, Idal or Hepthal. The Chinese name Yetha
seems an attempt to represent the same sound. In India they were called
Hunas. Ephthalite is the usual orthography, but Hephthalite is perhaps
more correct.
Our earliest information about the Ephthalites comes from the Chinese
chronicles, in which it is stated that they were originally a tribe of
the great Yue-Chi (q.v.), living to the north of the Great Wall, and in
subjection to the Jwen-Jwen, as were also the Turks at one time. Their
original name was Hoa or Hoa-tun; subsequently they styled themselves
Ye-tha-i-li-to after the name of their royal family, or more briefly
Ye-tha. Before the 5th century A.D. they began to move westwards, for
about 420 we find them in Transoxiana, and for the next 130 years they
were a menace to Persia, which they continually and successfully
invaded, though they never held it as a conquest. The Sassanid king,
Bahram V., fought several campaigns with them and succeeded in keeping
them at bay, but they defeated and killed Peroz (Firuz), A.D. 484. His
son Kavadh I. (Kobad), being driven out of Persia, took refuge with the
Ephthalites, and recovered his throne with the assistance of their khan,
whose daughter he had married, but subsequently he engaged in prolonged
hostilities with them. The Persians were not quit of the Ephthalites
until 557 when Chosroes Anushirwan destroyed their power with the
assistance of the Turks, who now make their first appearance in western
Asia.
The Huns who invaded India appear to have belonged to the same stock as
those who molested Persia. The headquarters of the horde were at Bamian
and at Balkh, and from these points they raided south-east and
south-west. Skandagupta repelled an invasion in 455, but the defeat of
the Persians in 484 probably stimulated their activity, and at the end
of the 5th century their chief Toromana penetrated to Malwa in central
India and succeeded in holding it for some time. His son Mihiragula (c.
510-540) made Sakala in the Punjab his Indian capital, but the cruelty
of his rule provoked the Indian princes to form a confederation and
revolt against him about 528. He was not, however, killed, but took
refuge in Kashmir, where after a few years he seized the throne and then
attacked the neighbouring kingdom of Gandhara, perpetrating terrible
massacres. About a year after this he died (c. 540), and shortly
afterwards the Ephthalites collapsed under the attacks of the Turks.
They do not appear to have moved on to another sphere, as these nomadic
tribes often did when defeated, and were probably gradually absorbed in
the surrounding populations. Their political power perhaps continued in
the Gurjara empire, which at one time extended to Bengal in the east and
the Nerbudda in the south, and continued in a diminished form until A.D.
1040. These Gurjaras appear to have entered India in connexion with the
Hunnish invasions.
Our knowledge of the Indian Hunas is chiefly derived from coins, from a
few inscriptions distributed from the Punjab to central India, and from
the account of the Chinese pilgrim Hsùan Tsang, who visited the country
just a century after the death of Mihiragula. The Greek monk Cosmas
Indicopleustes, who visited India about 530, describes the ruler of the
country, whom he calls Gollas, as a White Hun king, who exacted an
oppressive tribute with the help of a large army of cavalry and war
elephants. Gollas no doubt represents the last part of the name
Mihiragula or Mihirakula.
The accounts of the Ephthalites, especially those of the Indian Hunas,
dwell on their ferocity and cruelty. They are represented as delighting
in massacres and torture, and it is said that popular tradition in India
still retains the story that Mihiragula used to amuse himself by rolling
elephants down a precipice and watching their agonies. Their invasions
shook Indian society and institutions to the foundations, but, unlike
the earlier Kushans, they do not seem to have introduced new ideas into
India or have acted as other than a destructive force, although they may
perhaps have kept up some communication between India and Persia. The
first part of Mihiragula seems to be the name of the Persian deity
Mithra, but his patron deity was Siva, and he left behind him the
reputation of a ferocious persecutor of Buddhism. Many of his coins bear
the Nandi bull (Siva's emblem), and the king's name is preceded by the
title _sahi_ (shah), which had previously been used by the Kushan
dynasty. Toramana's coins are found plentifully in Kashmir, which,
therefore, probably formed part of the Huna dominions before
Mihiragula's time, so that when he fled there after his defeat he was
taking refuge, if not with his own subjects, at least with a kindred
clan.
Greek writers give a more flattering account of the Ephthalites, which
may perhaps be due to the fact that they were useful to the East Roman
empire as enemies of Persia and also not dangerously near. Procopius
says that they were far more civilized than the Huns of Attila, and the
Turkish ambassador who was received by Justin is said to have described
them as [Greek: astikoi], which may merely mean that they lived in the
cities which they conquered. The Chinese writers say that their customs
were like those of the Turks; that they had no cities, lived in felt
tents, were ignorant of writing and practised polyandry. Nothing
whatever is known of their language, but some scholars explain the names
Toramana and Jauvla as Turkish.
For the possible connexion between the Ephthalites and the European Huns
see HUNS. The Chinese statement that the Hoa or Ye-tha were a section of
the great Yue-Chi, and that their customs resembled those of the Turks
(Tu-Kiue), is probably correct, but does not amount to much, for the
relationship did not prevent them from fighting with the Yue-Chi and
Turks, and means little more than that they belonged to the warlike and
energetic section of central Asian nomads, which is in any case certain.
They appear to have been more ferocious and less assimilative than the
other conquering tribes. This may, however, be due to the fact that
their contact with civilization was so short; the Yue-Chi and Turks had
had some commerce with more advanced races before they played any part
in political history, but the Ephthalites appear as raw barbarians, and
were annihilated as a nation in little more than a hundred years. Like
the Yue-Chi they have probably contributed to form some of the physical
types of the Indian population, and it is noticeable that polyandry is a
recognized institution among many Himalayan tribes, and is also said to
be practised secretly by the Jats and other races of the plains.
Among original authorities may be consulted Procopius, Menander
Protector, Cosmas Indicopleustes (trans. McCrindle, Hakluyt Society,
1897), the Kashmir chronicle _Rajataranginî_ (trans. Stein, 1900, and
Yüan Chwang). See also A. Stein, _White Huns and Kindred Tribes_
(1905); O. Franke, _Beiträge aus chinesischen Quellen zur Kenntnis der
Türkvölker und Skythen_ (1904); Ujfalvy, _Mémoire sur les Huns Blancs_
(1898); Drouin, _Mémoire sur les Huns Ephthalites_ (1895); and various
articles by Vincent Smith, Specht, Drouin, and E.H. Parker in the
_Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, _Journal asiatique_, _Revue
numismatique_, _Asiatic Quarterly_, &c. (C. El.)
ÉPI, the French architectural term for a light finial, generally of
metal, but sometimes of terra-cotta, forming the termination of a spire
or the angle of a roof.
EPICENE (from the Gr. [Greek: epikoinos], common), a term in Greek and
Latin grammar denoting nouns which, possessing but one gender, are used
to describe animals of either sex. In English grammar there are no true
epicene nouns, but the term is sometimes used instead of _common
gender_. In figurative and literary language, epicene is an adjective
applied to persons having the characteristics of both sexes, and hence
is occasionally used as a synonym of "effeminate."
EPICHARMUS (c. 540-450 B.C.), Greek comic poet, was born in the island
of Cos. Early in life he went to Megara in Sicily, and after its
destruction by Gelo (484) removed to Syracuse, where he spent the rest
of his life at the court of Hiero, and died at the age of ninety or
(according to a statement in Lucian, _Macrobii_, 25) ninety-seven. A
brazen statue was set up in his honour by the inhabitants, for which
Theocritus composed an inscription (_Epigr._ 17). Epicharmus was the
chief representative of the Sicilian or Dorian comedy. Of his works 35
titles and a few fragments have survived. In the city of tyrants it
would have been dangerous to present comedies like those of the Athenian
stage, in which attacks were made upon the authorities. Accordingly, the
comedies of Epicharmus are of two kinds, neither of them calculated to
give offence to the ruler. They are either mythological travesties
(resembling the satyric drama of Athens) or character comedies. To the
first class belong the _Busiris_, in which Heracles is represented as a
voracious glutton; the _Marriage of Hebe_, remarkable for a lengthy list
of dainties. The second class dealt with different classes of the
population (the sailor, the prophet, the boor, the parasite). Some of
the plays seem to have bordered on the political, as _The Plunderings_,
describing the devastation of Sicily in the time of the poet. A short
fragment has been discovered (in the Rainer papyri) from the [Greek:
Odysseus automolos], which told how Odysseus got inside Troy in the
disguise of a beggar and obtained valuable information. Another feature
of his works was the large number of excellent sentiments expressed in a
brief proverbial form; the Pythagoreans claimed him as a member of their
school, who had forsaken the study of philosophy for the writing of
comedy. Plato (_Theaetetus_, 152 E) puts him at the head of the masters
of comedy, coupling his name with Homer and, according to a remark in
Diogenes Laërtius, Plato was indebted to Epicharmus for much of his
philosophy. Ennius called his didactic poem on natural philosophy
_Epicharmus_ after the comic poet. The metres employed by Epicharmus
were iambic trimeter, and especially trochaic and anapaestic tetrameter.
The plot of the plays was simple, the action lively and rapid; hence
they were classed among the _fabulae motoriae_ (stirring, bustling), as
indicated in the well-known line of Horace (_Epistles_, ii. 1. 58):
"Plautus ad exemplar Siculi properare Epicharmi."
Epicharmus is the subject of articles in Suidas and Diogenes Laërtius
(viii. 3). See A.O. Lorenz, _Leben und Schriften des Koers E._ (with
account of the Doric drama and fragments, 1864); J. Girard, _Études
sur la poésie grecque_ (1884); Kaibel in Pauly-Wissowa's
_Realencyclopädie_, according to whom Epicharmus was a Siceliot; for
the papyrus fragment, Blass in _Jahrbücher für Philologie_, cxxxix.,
1889.
EPIC POETRY, or EPOS (from the Gr. [Greek: epos], a story, and [Greek:
epikos], pertaining to a story), the names given to the most dignified
and elaborate forms of narrative poetry. The word _epopee_ is also, but
more rarely, employed to designate the same thing, [Greek: epopoios] in
Greek being a maker of epic poetry, and [Greek: epopoiia] what he makes.
It is to Greece, where the earliest literary monuments which we possess
are of an epical character, that we turn for a definition of these vast
heroic compositions, and we gather that their subject-matter was not
confined, as Voltaire and the critics of the 18th century supposed, to
"narratives in verse of warlike adventures." When we first discover the
epos, hexameter verse has already been selected for its vehicle. In this
form epic poems were composed not merely dealing with war and personal
romance, but carrying out a didactic purpose, or celebrating the
mysteries of religion. These three divisions, to which are severally
attached the more or less mythical names of Homer, Hesiod and Orpheus
seem to have marked the earliest literary movement of the Greeks. But,
even here, we must be warned that what we possess is not primitive;
there had been unwritten epics, probably in hexameters, long before the
composition of any now-surviving fragment. The saga of the Greek nation,
the catalogue of its arts and possessions, the rites and beliefs of its
priesthood, must have been circulated, by word of mouth, long before any
historical poet was born. We look upon Homer and Hesiod as records of
primitive thought, but Professor Gilbert Murray reminds us that "our
_Iliad, Odyssey_, _Erga_ and _Theogony_ are not the first, nor the
second, nor the twelfth of such embodiments." The early epic poets,
Lesches, Linus, Orpheus, Arctinus, Eugammon are the veriest shadows,
whose names often betray their symbolic and fabulous character. It is
now believed that there was a class of minstrels, the Rhapsodists or
Homeridae, whose business it was to recite poetry at feasts and other
solemn occasions. "The real bards of early Greece were all nameless and
impersonal." When our tradition begins to be preserved, we find
everything of a saga-character attributed to Homer, a blind man and an
inhabitant of Chios. This gradually crystallized until we find Aristotle
definitely treating Homer as a person, and attributing to him the
composition of three great poems, the _Iliad_, the _Odyssey_ and the
_Margites_, now lost (see HOMER). The first two of these have been
preserved and form for us the type of the ancient epic; when we speak of
epic poetry, we unconsciously measure it by the example of the _Iliad_
and the _Odyssey_. It is quite certain, however, that these poems had
not merely been preceded by a vast number of revisions of the mythical
history of the country, but were accompanied by innumerable poems of a
similar character, now entirely lost. That antiquity did not regard
these other epics as equal in beauty to the _Iliad_ seems to be certain;
but such poems as _Cypria_, _Iliou Persis_ (Sack of Ilion) and
_Aethiopis_ can hardly but have exhibited other sides of the epic
tradition. Did we possess them, it is almost certain that we could speak
with more assurance as to the scope of epic poetry in the days of oral
tradition, and could understand more clearly what sort of ballads in
hexameter it was which rhapsodes took round from court to court. In the
4th century B.C. it seems that people began to write down what was not
yet forgotten of all this oral poetry. Unfortunately, the earliest
critic who describes this process is Proclus, a Byzantine neo-Platonist,
who did not write until some 800 years later, when the whole tradition
had become hopelessly corrupted. When we pass from Homer and Hesiod,
about whose actual existence critics will be eternally divided, we reach
in the 7th century a poet, Peisander of Rhodes, who wrote an epic poem,
the _Heracleia_, of which fragments remain. Other epic writers, who
appear to be undoubtedly historic, are Antimachus of Colophon, who wrote
a _Thebais_; Panyasis, who, like Peisander, celebrated the feats of
Heracles; Choerilus of Samos; and Anyte, of whom we only know that she
was an epic poetess, and was called "The female Homer." In the 6th and
5th centuries B.C. there was a distinct school of philosophical epic,
and we distinguish the names of Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles as
the leaders of it.
From the dawn of Latin literature epic poetry seems to have been
cultivated in Italy. A Greek exile, named Livius Andronicus, translated
the _Odyssey_ into Latin during the first Punic War, but the earliest
original epic of Rome was the lost _Bellum Punicum_ of Naevius, a work
to which Virgil was indebted. A little later, Ennius composed, about 172
B.C., in 18 books, an historical epic of the _Annales_, dealing with the
whole chronicle of Rome. This was the foremost Latin poem, until the
appearance of the _Aeneid_; it was not imitated, remaining, for a
hundred years, as Mr Mackail has said, "not only the unique, but the
satisfying achievement in this kind of poetry." Virgil began the most
famous of Roman epics in the year 30 B.C., and when he died, nine years
later, he desired that the MS. of the _Aeneid_ should be burned, as it
required three years' work to complete it. Nevertheless, it seems to us,
and seemed to the ancient world, almost perfect, and a priceless
monument of art; it is written, like the great Greek poems on which it
is patently modelled, in hexameters. In the next generation, the
_Pharsalia_ of Lucan, of which Cato, as the type of the republican
spirit, is the hero, was the principal example of Latin epic. Statius,
under the Flavian emperors, wrote several epic poems, of which the
_Thebaid_ survives. In the 1st century A.D. Valerius Flaccus wrote the
_Argonautica_ in 8 books, and Silius Italicus the _Punic War_, in 17
books; these authors show a great decline in taste and merit, even in
comparison with Statius, and Silius Italicus, in particular, is as
purely imitative as the worst of the epic writers of modern Europe. At
the close of the 4th century the style revived with Claudian, who
produced five or six elaborate historical and mythological epics of
which the _Rape of Proserpine_ was probably the most remarkable; in his
interesting poetry we have a valuable link between the Silver Age in
Rome and the Italian Renaissance. With Claudian the history of epic
poetry among the ancients closes.
In medieval times there existed a large body of narrative poetry to
which the general title of Epic has usually been given. Three principal
schools are recognized, the French, the Teutonic and the Icelandic.
Teutonic epic poetry deals, as a rule, with legends founded on the
history of Germany in the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries, and in particular
with such heroes as Ermanaric, Attila and Theodoric. But there is also
an important group in it which deals with English themes, and among
these _Beowulf_, _Waldere_, _The Lay of Maldon_ and _Finnesburh_ are
pre-eminent. To this group is allied the purely German poem of
_Hildebrand_, attributed to c. 800. Among these _Beowulf_ is the only
one which exists in anything like complete form, and it is of all
examples of Teutonic epic the most important. With all its trivialities
and incongruities, which belong to a barbarous age, _Beowulf_ is yet a
solid and comprehensive example of native epic poetry. It is written,
like all old Teutonic work of the kind, in alliterative unrhymed rhythm.
In Iceland, a new heroic literature was invented in the middle ages, and
to this we owe the Sagas, which are, in fact, a reduction to prose of
the epics of the warlike history of the North. These Sagas took the
place of a group of archaic Icelandic epics, the series of which seems
to have closed with the noble poem of _Atlamál_, the principal surviving
specimen of epic poetry as it was cultivated in the primitive literature
of Iceland. The surviving epical fragments of Icelandic composition are
found thrown together in the _Codex Regius_, under the title of _The
Elder Edda_, a most precious MS. discovered in the 17th century. The
Icelandic epics seem to have been shorter and more episodical in
character than the lost Teutonic specimens; both kinds were written in
alliterative verse. It is not probable that either possessed the organic
unity and vitality of spirit which make the Sagas so delightful. The
French medieval epics (see CHANSONS DE GESTE) are late in comparison
with those of England, Germany and Iceland. They form a curious
transitional link between primitive and modern poetry; the literature of
civilized Europe may be said to begin with them. There is a great
increase of simplicity, a great broadening of the scene of action. The
Teutonic epics were obscure and intense, the French _chansons de geste_
are lucid and easy. The existing masterpiece of this kind, the
magnificent _Roland_, is doubtless the most interesting and pleasing of
all the epics of medieval Europe. Professor Ker's analysis of its merits
may be taken as typical of all that is best in the vast body of epic
which comes between the antique models, which were unknown to the
medieval poets, and the artificial epics of a later time which were
founded on vast ideal themes, in imitation of the ancients. "There is
something lyrical in _Roland_, but the poem is not governed by lyrical
principles; it requires the deliberation and the freedom of epic; it
must have room to move in before it can come up to the height of its
argument. The abruptness of its periods is not really an interruption of
its even flight; it is an abruptness of detail, like a broken sea with a
larger wave moving under it; it does not impair or disguise the grandeur
of the movement as a whole." Of the progress and decline of the chansons
de geste (q.v.) from the ideals of _Roland_ a fuller account is given
elsewhere. _To the Nibelungenlied_ (q.v.) also, detailed attention is
given in a separate article.
What may be called the artificial or secondary epics of modern Europe,
founded upon an imitation of the _Iliad_ and the _Aeneid_, are more
numerous than the ordinary reader supposes, although but few of them
have preserved much vitality. In Italy the _Chanson de Roland_ inspired
romantic epics by Luigi Pulci (1432-1487), whose _Morgante Maggiore_
appeared in 1481, and is a masterpiece of burlesque; by M.M. Boiardo
(1434-1494), whose _Orlando Innamorato_ was finished in 1486; by
Francesco Bello (1440?-1495), whose _Mambriano_ was published in 1497;
by Lodovico Ariosto (q.v.), whose _Orlando Furioso_, by far the greatest
of its class, was published in 1516, and by Luigi Dolce (1508-1568), as
well as by a great number of less illustrious poets. G.G. Trissino
(1478-1549) wrote a _Deliverance of Italy from the Goths_ in 1547, and
Bernardo Tasso (1493-1569) an _Amadigi_ in 1559; Berni remodelled the
epic of Boiardo in 1541, and Teofilo Folengo (1491-1544), ridiculed the
whole school in an _Orlandino_ of 1526. An extraordinary feat of
mock-heroic epic was _The Bucket_ (1622) of Alessandro Tassoni
(1565-1638). The most splendid of all the epics of Italy, however, was,
and remains, the _Jerusalem Delivered_ of Torquato Tasso (q.v.),
published originally in 1580, and afterwards rewritten as _The Conquest
of Jerusalem_, 1593. The fantastic _Adone_ (1623) of G.B. Marini
(1569-1625) and the long poems of Chiabrera, close the list of Italian
epics. Early Portuguese literature is rich in epic poetry. Luis Pereira
Brandão wrote an _Elegiada_ in 18 books, published in 1588; Jeronymo
Corte-Real (d. 1588) a _Shipwreck of Sepulveda_ and two other epics;
V.M. Quevedo, in 1601, an _Alphonso of Africa_, in 12 books; Sá de
Menezes (d. 1664) a _Conquest of Malacca_, 1634; but all these, and many
more, are obscured by the glory of Camoens (q.v.), whose magnificent
_Lusiads_ had been printed in 1572, and forms the summit of Portuguese
literature. In Spanish poetry, the _Poem of the Cid_ takes the first
place, as the great national epic of the middle ages; it is supposed to
have been written between 1135 and 1175. It was followed by the
_Rodrigo_, and the medieval school closes with the _Alphonso XI._ of
Rodrigo Yañez, probably written at the close of the 12th century. The
success of the Italian imitative epics of the 15th century led to some
imitation of their form in Spain. Juan de la Cueva (1550?-1606)
published a _Conquest of Bética_ in 1603; Cristóbal de Virues
(1550-1610) a _Monserrate_, in 1588; Luis Barahona de Soto continued
Ariosto in a _Tears of Angélica_; Gutiérrez wrote an _Austriada_ in
1584; but perhaps the finest modern epic in Spanish verse is the
_Araucana_ (1569-1590) of Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (1533-1595), "the
first literary work of merit," as Mr Fitzmaurice-Kelly remarks,
"composed in either American continent." In France, the epic never
flourished in modern times, and no real success attended the _Franciade_
of Ronsard, the _Alaric_ of Scudéry, the _Pucelle_ of Chapelain, the
_Divine Épopée_ of Soumet, or even the _Henriade_ of Voltaire. In
English literature _The Faery Queen_ of Spenser has the same claim as
the Italian poems mentioned above to bear the name of epic, and Milton,
who stands entirely apart, may be said, by his isolated _Paradise Lost_,
to take rank with Homer and Virgil, as one of the three types of the
mastery of epical composition.
See Bossu, _Traité du poeme épique_ (1675); Voltaire, _Sur la poésie
épique_; Fauviel, _L'Origine de l'épopée chevaleresque_ (1832); W.P.
Ker, _Epic and Romance_ (1897), and _Essays in Medieval Literature_
(1905); Gilbert Murray, _History of Ancient Greek Literature_ (1897);
W. von Christ, _Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur_ (1879); Gaston
Paris, _La Littérature française au moyen âge_ (1890); Léon Gautier,
_Les Épopées françaises_ (1865-1868). For works on the Greek epics see
also GREEK LITERATURE and CYCLE. (E. G.)
EPICTETUS (born c. A.D. 60), Greek philosopher, was probably a native
of Hierapolis in south-west Phrygia. The name Epictetus is merely the
Greek for "acquired" (from [Greek: epiktasthai]); his original name is
not known. As a boy he was a slave in the house of Epaphroditus, a
freedman and courtier of the emperor Nero. He managed, however, to
attend the lectures of the Stoic Musonius Rufus, and subsequently became
a freedman. He was lame and of weakly health. In 90 he was expelled with
the other philosophers by Domitian, who was irritated by the support and
encouragement which the opposition to his tyranny found amongst the
adherents of Stoicism. For the rest of his life he settled at Nicopolis,
in southern Epirus, not far from the scene of the battle of Actium.
There for several years he lived, and taught by close earnest personal
address and conversation. According to some authorities he lived into
the time of Hadrian; he himself mentions the coinage of the emperor
Trajan. His contemporaries and the next generation held his character
and teaching in high honour. According to Lucian, the earthenware lamp
which had belonged to the sage was bought by an antiquarian for 3000
drachmas. He was never married. He wrote nothing; but much of his
teaching was taken down with affectionate care by his pupil Flavius
Arrianus, the historian of Alexander the Great, and is preserved in two
treatises, of the larger of which, called the _Discourses of Epictetus_
([Greek: Epiktêtou Diatribai]), four books are still extant. The other
treatise is a shorter and more popular work, the _Encheiridion_
("Handbook"). It contains in an aphoristic form the main doctrines of
the longer work.
The philosophy of Epictetus is intensely practical, and exhibits a high
idealistic type of morality. He is an earnest, sometimes stern and
sometimes pathetic, preacher of righteousness, who despises the mere
graces of style and the subtleties of an abstruse logic. He has no
patience with mere antiquarian study of the Stoical writers. The problem
of how life is to be carried out well is the one question which throws
all other inquiries into the shade. True education lies in learning to
wish things to be as they actually are; it lies in learning to
distinguish what is our own from what does not belong to us. But there
is only one thing which is fully our own,--that is, our will or purpose.
God, acting as a good king and a true father, has given us a will which
cannot be restrained, compelled or thwarted. Nothing external, neither
death nor exile nor pain nor any such thing, can ever force us to act
against our will; if we are conquered, it is because we have willed to
be conquered. And thus, although we are not responsible for the ideas
that present themselves to our consciousness, we are absolutely and
without any modification responsible for the way in which we use them.
Nothing is ours besides our will. The divine law which bids us keep fast
what is our own forbids us to make any claim to what is not ours; and
while enjoining us to make use of whatever is given to us, it bids us
not long after what has not been given. "Two maxims," he says, "we must
ever bear in mind--that apart from the will there is nothing either good
or bad, and that we must not try to anticipate or direct events, but
merely accept them with intelligence." We must, in short, resign
ourselves to whatever fate and fortune bring to us, believing, as the
first article of our creed, that there is a god, whose thought directs
the universe, and that not merely in our acts, but even in our thoughts
and plans, we cannot escape his eye. In the world the true position of
man is that of member of a great system, which comprehends God and men.
Each human being is in the first instance a citizen of his own nation or
commonwealth; but he is also a member of the great city of gods and men,
whereof the city political is only a copy in miniature. All men are the
sons of God, and kindred in nature with the divinity. For man, though a
member in the system of the world, has also within him a principle which
can guide and understand the movement of all the members; he can enter
into the method of divine administration, and thus can learn--and it is
the acme of his learning--the will of God, which is the will of nature.
Man, said the Stoic, is a rational animal; and in virtue of that
rationality he is neither less nor worse than the gods, for the
magnitude of reason is estimated not by length nor by height but by its
judgments. Each man has within him a guardian spirit, a god within him,
who never sleeps; so that even in darkness and solitude we are never
alone, because God is within, our guardian spirit. The body which
accompanies us is not strictly speaking ours; it is a poor dead thing,
which belongs to the things outside us. But by reason we are the masters
of those ideas and appearances which present themselves from without; we
can combine them, and systematize, and can set up in ourselves an order
of ideas corresponding with the order of nature.
The natural instinct of animated life, to which man also is originally
subject, is self-preservation and self-interest. But men are so ordered
and constituted that the individual cannot secure his own interests
unless he contribute to the common welfare. We are bound up by the law
of nature with the whole fabric of the world. The aim of the philosopher
therefore is to reach the position of a mind which embraces the whole
world in its view,--to grow into the mind of God and to make the will of
nature our own. Such a sage agrees in his thought with God; he no longer
blames either God or man; he fails of nothing which he purposes and
falls in with no misfortune unprepared; he indulges in neither anger nor
envy nor jealousy; he is leaving manhood for godhead, and in his dead
body his thoughts are concerned about his fellowship with God.
The historical models to which Epictetus reverts are Diogenes and
Socrates. But he frequently describes an ideal character of a missionary
sage, the perfect Stoic--or, as he calls him, the Cynic. This missionary
has neither country nor home nor land nor slave; his bed is the ground;
he is without wife or child; his only mansion is the earth and sky and a
shabby cloak. He must suffer stripes, and must love those who beat him
as if he were a father or a brother. He must be perfectly unembarrassed
in the service of God, not bound by the common ties of life, nor
entangled by relationships, which if he transgresses he will lose the
character of a man of honour, while if he upholds them he will cease to
be the messenger, watchman and herald of the gods. The perfect man thus
described will not be angry with the wrong-doer; he will only pity his
erring brother; for anger in such a case would only betray that he too
thought the wrong-doer gained a substantial blessing by his wrongful
act, instead of being, as he is, utterly ruined.
The best editions of the works of Epictetus are by J. Schweighäuser (6
vols., Leipzig, 1799-1800) and H. Schenkl (Leipzig, 1894, 1898).
English translations by Elizabeth Carter (London, 1758); G. Long
(London, 1848, ed. 1877, 1892, 1897); T.W. Higginson (Boston, 1865,
new ed. 1890); of the _Encheiridion_ alone by H. Talbot (London,
1881); T.W.H. Rolleston (London, 1881). See A. Bonhöffer, _Epiktet und
die Stoa_ (Stuttgart, 1890) and _Die Ethik des Stoikers Epiktet_
(1894): E.M. Schranka, _Der Stoiker Epiktet und seine Philosophie_
(Frankfort, 1885); T. Zahn, _Der Stoiker Epiktet und sein Verhältnis
zum Christentum_ (2nd ed. Erlangen, 1895). See also STOICS and works
quoted. (W. W.; X.)
EPICURUS (342-270 B.C.), Greek philosopher, was born in Samos in the end
of 342 or the beginning of 341 B.C., seven years after the death of
Plato. His father Neocles, a native of Gargettos, a small village of
Attica, had settled in Samos, not later than 352, as one of the cleruchs
sent out after the victory of Timotheus in 366-365. At the age of
eighteen he went to Athens, where the Platonic school was flourishing
under the lead of Xenocrates. A year later, however, Antipater banished
some 12,000 of the poorer citizens, and Epicurus joined his father, who
was now living at Colophon. It seems possible that he had listened to
the lectures of Nausiphanes, a Democritean philosopher, and Pamphilus
the Platonist, but he was probably, like his father, merely an ordinary
teacher. Stimulated, however, by the perusal of some writings of
Democritus, he began to formulate a doctrine of his own; and at
Mitylene, Colophon and Lampsacus, he gradually gathered round him
several enthusiastic disciples. In 307 he returned to Athens, which had
just been restored to a nominal independence by Demetrius Poliorcetes,
and there he lived for the rest of his life. The scene of his teaching
was a garden which he bought for about £300 (80 _minae_). There he
passed his days as the loved and venerated head of a remarkable, and up
to that time unique, society of men and women. Amongst the number were
Metrodorus (d. 277), his brother Timocrates, and his wife Leontion
(formerly a hetaera), Polyaenus, Hermarchus, who succeeded Epicurus as
chief of the school, Leonteus and his wife Themista, and Idomeneus,
whose wife was a sister of Metrodorus. It is possible that the relations
between the sexes--in this prototype of Rabelais's Abbey of
Thélème--were not entirely what is termed Platonic. But there is on the
other hand scarcely a doubt that the tales of licentiousness circulated
by opponents are groundless. The stories of the Stoics, who sought to
refute the views of Epicurus by an appeal to his alleged antecedents and
habits, were no doubt in the main, as Diogenes Laertius says, the
stories of maniacs. The general charges, which they endeavoured to
substantiate by forged letters, need not count for much, and in many
cases they only exaggerated what, if true, was not so heinous as they
suggested. Against them trustworthy authorities testified to his general
and remarkable considerateness, pointing to the statues which the city
had raised in his honour, and to the numbers of his friends, who were
many enough to fill whole cities.
The mode of life in his community was plain. The general drink was
water and the food barley bread; half a pint of wine was held an ample
allowance. "Send me," says Epicurus to a correspondent, "send me some
Cythnian cheese, so that, should I choose, I may fare sumptuously."
There was no community of property, which, as Epicurus said, would imply
distrust of their own and others' good resolutions. The company was held
in unity by the charms of his personality, and by the free intercourse
which he inculcated and exemplified. Though he seems to have had a warm
affection for his countrymen, it was as human beings brought into
contact with him, and not as members of a political body, that he
preferred to regard them. He never entered public life. His kindliness
extended even to his slaves, one of whom, named Mouse, was a brother in
philosophy.
Epicurus died of stone in 270 B.C. He left his property, consisting of
the garden ([Greek: Kêpoi Epikourou]), a house in Melite (the south-west
quarter of Athens), and apparently some funds besides, to two trustees
on behalf of his society, and for the special interest of some youthful
members. The garden was set apart for the use of the school; the house
became the house of Hermarchus and his fellow-philosophers during his
lifetime. The surplus proceeds of the property were further to be
applied to maintain a yearly offering in commemoration of his departed
father, mother and brothers, to pay the expenses incurred in celebrating
his own birthday every year on the 7th of the month Gamelion, and for a
social gathering of the sect on the 20th of every month in honour of
himself and Metrodorus. Besides similar tributes in honour of his
brothers and Polyaenus, he directed the trustees to be guardians of the
son of Polyaenus and the son of Metrodorus; whilst the daughter of the
last mentioned was to be married by the guardians to some member of the
society who should be approved of by Hermarchus. His four slaves, three
men and one woman, were left their freedom. His books passed to
Hermarchus.
_Philosophy._--The Epicurean philosophy is traditionally divided into
the three branches of logic, physics and ethics. It is, however, only as
a basis of facts and principles for his theory of life that logical and
physical inquiries find a place at all. Epicurus himself had not
apparently shared in any large or liberal culture, and his influence was
certainly thrown on the side of those who depreciated purely scientific
pursuits as one-sided and misleading. "Steer clear of all culture" was
his advice to a young disciple. In this aversion to a purely or mainly
intellectual training may be traced a recoil from the systematic
metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, whose tendency was to subordinate
the practical man to the philosopher. Ethics had been based upon logic
and metaphysics. But experience showed that systematic knowledge of
truth is not synonymous with right action. Hence, in the second place,
Plato and Aristotle had assumed a perfect state with laws to guide the
individual aright. It was thus comparatively easy to show how the
individual could learn to apprehend and embody the moral law in his own
conduct. But experience had in the time of Epicurus shown the temporary
and artificial character of the civic form of social life. It was
necessary, therefore, for Epicurus to go back to nature to find a more
enduring and a wider foundation for ethical doctrine, to go back from
words to realities, to give up reasonings and get at feelings, to test
conceptions and arguments by a final reference to the only touchstone of
truth--to sensation. There, and there only, one seems to find a common
and a satisfactory ground, supposing always that all men's feelings give
the same answer. Logic must go, but so also must the state, as a
specially-privileged and eternal order of things, as anything more than
a contrivance serving certain purposes of general utility.
To the Epicureans the elaborate logic of the Stoics was a superfluity.
In place of logic we find canonic, the theory of the three tests of truth
and reality. (1) The only ultimate canon of reality is sensation;
whatever we feel, whatever we perceive by any sense, that we know on the
most certain evidence we can have to be real, and in proportion as our
feeling is clear, distinct and vivid, in that proportion are we sure of
the reality of its object. But in what that vividness ([Greek: enargeia])
consists is a question which Epicurus does not raise, and which he would
no doubt have deemed superfluous quibbling over a matter sufficiently
settled by common sense. (2) Besides our sensations, we learn truth and
reality by our preconceptions or ideas ([Greek: prolêpseis]). These are
the fainter images produced by repeated sensations, the "ideas" resulting
from previous "impressions"--sensations at second-hand as it were, which
are stored up in memory, and which a general name serves to recall. These
bear witness to reality, not because we feel anything now, but because we
felt it once; they are sensations registered in language, and again, if
need be, translatable into immediate sensations or groups of sensation.
(3) Lastly, reality is vouched for by the imaginative apprehensions of
the mind ([Greek: phantastikai epibolai]), immediate feelings of which
the mind is conscious as produced by some action of its own. This last
canon, however, was of dubious validity. Epicureanism generally was
content to affirm that whatever we effectively feel in consciousness is
real; in which sense they allow reality to the fancies of the insane, the
dreams of a sleeper, and those feelings by which we imagine the existence
of beings of perfect blessedness and endless life. Similarly, just
because fear, hope and remembrance add to the intensity of consciousness,
the Epicurean can hold that bodily pain and pleasure is a less durable
and important thing than pain and pleasure of mind. Whatever we feel to
affect us does affect us, and is therefore real. Error can arise only
because we mix up our opinions and suppositions with what we actually
feel. The Epicurean canon is a rejection of logic; it sticks fast to the
one point that "sensation is sensation," and there is no more to be made
of it. Sensation, it says, is unreasoning ([Greek: alogos]); it must be
accepted, and not criticized. Reasoning can come in only to put
sensations together, and to point out how they severally contribute to
human welfare; it does not make them, and cannot alter them.
_Physics._--In the Epicurean physics there are two parts--a general
metaphysic and psychology, and a special explanation of particular
phenomena of nature. The method of Epicurus is the argument of analogy.
It is an attempt to make the phenomena of nature intelligible to us by
regarding them as instances on a grand scale of that with which we are
already familiar on a small scale. This is what Epicurus calls
explaining what we do not see by what we do see.
In physics Epicurus founded upon Democritus, and his chief object was to
abolish the dualism between mind and matter which is so essential a
point in the systems of Plato and Aristotle. All that exists, says
Epicurus, is corporeal ([Greek: to pan esti sôma]); the intangible is
non-existent, or empty space. If a thing exists it must be felt, and to
be felt it must exert resistance. But not all things are intangible
which our senses are not subtle enough to detect. We must indeed accept
our feelings; but we must also believe much which is not directly
testified by sensation, if only it serves to explain phenomena and does
not contravene our sensations. The fundamental postulates of
Epicureanism are atoms and the void ([Greek: atoma kai kenon]). Space is
infinite, and there is an illimitable multitude of indestructible,
indivisible and absolutely compact atoms in perpetual motion in this
illimitable space. These atoms, differing only in size, figure and
weight, are perpetually moving with equal velocities, but at a rate far
surpassing our conceptions; as they move, they are for ever giving rise
to new worlds; and these worlds are perpetually tending towards
dissolution, and towards a fresh series of creations. This universe of
ours is only one section out of the innumerable worlds in infinite
space; other worlds may present systems very different from that of our
own. The soul of man is only a finer species of body, spread throughout
the whole aggregation which we term his bodily frame. Like a warm
breath, it pervades the human structure and works with it; nor could it
act as it does in perception unless it were corporeal. The various
processes of sense, notably vision, are explained on the principles of
materialism. From the surfaces of all objects there are continually
flowing thin filmy images exactly copying the solid body whence they
originate; and these images by direct impact on the organism produce (we
need not care to ask how) the phenomena of vision. Epicurus in this way
explains vision by substituting for the apparent action of a body at a
distance a direct contact of image and organ. But without following the
explanation into the details in which it revels, it may be enough to say
that the whole hypothesis is but an attempt to exclude the occult
conception of action at a distance, and substitute a familiar
phenomenon.
_The Gods._--This aspect of the Epicurean physics becomes clearer when
we look at his mode of rendering particular phenomena intelligible. His
purpose is to eliminate the common idea of divine interference. That
there are gods Epicurus never dreams of denying. But these gods have not
on their shoulders the burden of upholding and governing the world. They
are themselves the products of the order of nature--a higher species
than humanity, but not the rulers of man, neither the makers nor the
upholders of the world. Man should worship them, but his worship is the
reverence due to the ideals of perfect blessedness; it ought not to be
inspired either by hope or by fear. To prevent all reference of the more
potent phenomena of nature to divine action Epicurus rationalizes the
processes of the cosmos. He imagines all possible plans or hypotheses,
not actually contradicted by our experience of familiar events, which
will represent in an intelligible way the processes of astronomy and
meteorology. When two or more modes of accounting for a phenomena are
equally admissible as not directly contradicted by known phenomena, it
seems to Epicurus almost a return to the old mythological habit of mind
when a savant asserts that the real cause is one and only one.
"Thunder," he says, "may be explained in many other ways; only let us
have no myths of divine action. To assign only a single cause for these
phenomena, when the facts familiar to us suggest several, is insane, and
is just the absurd conduct to be expected from people who dabble in the
vanities of astronomy." We need not be too curious to inquire how these
celestial phenomena actually do come about; we can learn how they might
have been produced, and to go further is to trench on ground beyond the
limits of human knowledge.
Thus, if Epicurus objects to the doctrine of mythology, he objects no
less to the doctrine of an inevitable fate, a necessary order of things
unchangeable and supreme over the human will. The Stoic doctrine of
Fatalism seemed to Epicurus no less deadly a foe of man's true welfare
than popular superstition. Even in the movement of the atoms he
introduces a sudden change of direction, which is supposed to render
their aggregation easier, and to break the even law of destiny. So, in
the sphere of human action, Epicurus would allow of no absolutely
controlling necessity. In fact, it is only when we assume for man this
independence of the gods and of fatality that the Epicurean theory of
life becomes possible. It assumes that man can, like the gods, withdraw
himself out of reach of all external influences, and thus, as a sage,
"live like a god among men, seeing that the man is in no wise like a
mortal creature who lives in undying blessedness." And this present life
is the only one. With one consent Epicureanism preaches that the death
of the body is the end of everything for man, and hence the other world
has lost all its terrors as well as all its hopes.
The attitude of Epicurus in this whole matter is antagonistic to
science. The idea of a systematic enchainment of phenomena, in which
each is conditioned by every other, and none can be taken in isolation
and explained apart from the rest, was foreign to his mind. So little
was the scientific conception of the solar system familiar to Epicurus
that he could reproach the astronomers, because their account of an
eclipse represented things otherwise than as they appear to the senses,
and could declare that the sun and stars were just as large as they
seemed to us.
_Ethics._--The moral philosophy of Epicurus is a qualified hedonism,
the heir of the Cyrenaic doctrine that pleasure is the good thing in
life. Neither sect, it may be added, advocated sensuality pure and
unfeigned--the Epicurean least of all. By pleasure Epicurus meant both
more and less than the Cyrenaics. To the Cyrenaics pleasure was of
moments; to Epicurus it extended as a habit of mind through life. To the
Cyrenaics pleasure was something active and positive; to Epicurus it was
rather negative--tranquillity more than vigorous enjoyment. The test of
true pleasure, according to Epicurus, is the removal and absorption of
all that gives pain; it implies freedom from pain of body and from
trouble of mind. The happiness of the Epicurean was, it might almost
seem, a grave and solemn pleasure--a quiet unobtrusive ease of heart,
but not exuberance and excitement. The sage of Epicureanism is a
rational and reflective seeker for happiness, who balances the claims of
each pleasure against the evils that may possibly ensue, and treads the
path of enjoyment cautiously. Prudence is, therefore, the only real
guide to happiness; it is thus the chief excellence, and the foundation
of all the virtues. It is, in fact, says Epicurus--in language which
contrasts strongly with that of Aristotle on the same topic--"a more
precious power than philosophy." The reason or intellect is introduced
to balance possible pleasures and pains, and to construct a scheme in
which pleasures are the materials of a happy life. Feeling, which
Epicurus declared to be the means of determining what is good, is
subordinated to a reason which adjudicates between competing pleasures
with the view of securing tranquillity of mind and body. "We cannot live
pleasantly without living wisely and nobly and righteously." Virtue is
at least a means of happiness, though apart from that it is no good in
itself, any more than mere sensual enjoyments, which are good only
because they may sometimes serve to secure health of body and
tranquillity of mind. (See further ETHICS.)
_The Epicurean School._--Even in the lifetime of Epicurus we hear of the
vast numbers of his friends, not merely in Greece, but in Asia and
Egypt. The crowds of Epicureans were a standing enigma to the adherents
of less popular sects. Cicero pondered over the fact; Arcesilaus
explained the secession to the Epicurean camp, compared with the fact
that no Epicurean was ever known to have abandoned his school, by saying
that, though it was possible for a man to be turned into a eunuch, no
eunuch could ever become a man. But the phenomenon was not obscure. The
doctrine has many truths, and is attractive to many in virtue of its
simplicity and its immediate relation to life. The dogmas of Epicurus
became to his followers a creed embodying the truths on which salvation
depended; and they passed on from one generation to another with
scarcely a change or addition. The immediate disciples of Epicurus have
been already mentioned, with the exception of Colotes of Lampsacus, a
great favourite of Epicurus, who wrote a work arguing "that it was
impossible even to live according to the doctrines of the other
philosophers." In the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C. Apollodorus, nicknamed
[Greek: kêpotyrannos] ("Lord of the Garden"), and Zeno of Sidon (who
describes Socrates as "the Attic buffoon": Cic. _De nat. deor._ i, 21,
33, 34) taught at Athens. About 150 B.C. Epicureanism established itself
at Rome. Beginning with C. Amafinius or Amafanius (Cic. _Acad._ i. 2,
_Tusc._ iv. 3), we find the names of Phaedrus (who became scholarch at
Athens c. 70 B.C.) and Philodemus (originally of Gadara in Palestine) as
distinguished Epicureans in the time of Cicero. But the greatest of its
Roman names was Lucretius, whose _De rerum natura_ embodies the main
teaching of Epicurus with great exactness, and with a beauty which the
subject seemed scarcely to allow. Lucretius is a proof, if any were
needed, that Epicureanism is compatible with nobility of soul. In the
1st century of the Christian era, the nature of the time, with its
active political struggles, naturally called Stoicism more into the
foreground, yet Seneca, though nominally a Stoic, draws nearly all his
suavity and much of his paternal wisdom from the writings of Epicurus.
The position of Epicureanism as a recognized school in the 2nd century
is best seen in the fact that it was one of the four schools (the others
were the Stoic, Platonist, and Peripatetic) which were placed on a
footing of equal endowment when Marcus Aurelius founded chairs of
philosophy at Athens. The evidence of Diogenes proves that it still
subsisted as a school a century later, but its spirit lasted longer than
its formal organization as a school. A great deal of the best of the
Renaissance was founded on Epicureanism, and in more recent times a
great number of prominent thinkers have been Epicureans in a greater or
less degree. Among these may be mentioned Pierre Gassendi, who revived
and codified the doctrine in the 17th century; Molière, the comte de
Gramont, Rousseau, Fontenelle and Voltaire. All those whose ethical
theory is in any degree hedonistic are to some extent the intellectual
descendants of Epicurus (see HEDONISM).
_Works._--Epicurus was a voluminous writer ([Greek: polygraphôtatos],
Diog. Laërt. x. 26)--the author, it is said, of about 300 works. He had
a style and vocabulary of his own. His chief aim in writing was
plainness and intelligibility, but his want of order and logical
precision thwarted his purpose. He pretended to have read little, and to
be the original architect of his own system, and the claim was no doubt
on the whole true. But he had read Democritus, and, it is said,
Anaxagoras and Archelaus. His works, we learn, were full of repetition,
and critics speak of vulgarities of language and faults of style. None
the less his writings were committed to memory and remained the
text-books of Epicureanism to the last. His chief work was a treatise on
nature ([Greek: Peri physeôs]), in thirty-seven books, of which
fragments from about nine books have been found in the rolls discovered
at Herculaneum, along with considerable treatises by several of his
followers, and most notably Philodemus. An epitome of his doctrine is
contained in three letters preserved by Diogenes.
AUTHORITIES.--The chief ancient accounts of Epicurus are in the tenth
book of Diogenes Laërtius, in Lucretius, and in several treatises of
Cicero and Plutarch. Gassendi, in his _De vita, moribus, et doctrina
Epicuri_ (Lyons, 1647), and his _Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri_,
systematized the doctrine. The _Volumina Herculanensia_ (1st and 2nd
series) contain fragments of treatises by Epicurus and members of his
school. See also H. Usener, _Epicurea_ (Leipzig, 1887) and _Epicuri
recogniti specimen_ (Bonn, 1880); _Epicuri physica et meteorologica_
(ed. J.G. Schneider, Leipzig, 1813); Th. Gomperz in his _Herkulanische
Studien_, and in contributions to the Vienna Academy
(_Monatsberichte_), has tried to evolve from the fragments more
approximation to modern empiricism than they seem to contain. For
criticism see W. Wallace, _Epicureanism_ (London, 1880), and
_Epicurus; A Lecture_ (London, 1896); G. Trezza, _Epicuro e
l'Epicureismo_ (Florence, 1877; ed. Milan, 1885); E. Zeller,
_Philosophy of the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics_ (Eng. trans. O.J.
Reichel, 1870; ed. 1880); Sir James Mackintosh, _On the Progress of
Ethical Philosophy_ (4th ed.); J. Watson, _Hedonistic Theories_
(Glasgow, 1895); J. Kreibig, _Epicurus_ (Vienna, 1886); A.
Goedeckemeyer, _Epikurs Verhältnis zu Demokrit in der Naturphil._
(Strassburg, 1897); Paul von Gizycki, _Über das Leben und die
Moralphilos. des Epikur (Halle, 1879), and Einleitende Bemerkungen zu
einer Untersuchung über den Werth der Naturphilos. des Epikur_
(Berlin, 1884); P. Cassel, _Epikur der Philosoph_ (Berlin, 1892); M.
Guyau, _La Morale d'Épicure et ses rapports avec les doctrines
contemporaines_ (Paris, 1878; revised and enlarged, 1881); F. Picavet,
_De Epicuro novae religionis sectatore_ (Paris, 1889); H. Sidgwick,
_History of Ethics_ (5th ed., 1902). (W. W.; X.)
EPICYCLE (Gr. [Greek: epi], upon, and [Greek: kyklos], circle), in
ancient astronomy, a small circle the centre of which describes a larger
one. It was especially used to represent geometrically the periodic
apparent retrograde motion of the outer planets, Mars, Jupiter and
Saturn, which we now know to be due to the annual revolution of the
earth around the sun, but which in the Ptolemaic astronomy were taken to
be real.
EPICYCLOID, the curve traced out by a point on the circumference of a
circle rolling externally on another circle. If the moving circle rolls
internally on the fixed circle, a point on the circumference describes a
"hypocycloid" (from [Greek: hypo], under). The locus of any other
carried point is an "epitrochoid" when the circle rolls externally, and
a "hypotrochoid" when the circle rolls internally. The epicycloid was so
named by Ole Römer in 1674, who also demonstrated that cog-wheels having
epicycloidal teeth revolved with minimum friction (see MECHANICS:
_Applied_); this was also proved by Girard Desargues, Philippe de la
Hire and Charles Stephen Louis Camus. Epicycloids also received
attention at the hands of Edmund Halley, Sir Isaac Newton and others;
spherical epicycloids, in which the moving circle is inclined at a
constant angle to the plane of the fixed circle, were studied by the
Bernoullis, Pierre Louis M. de Maupertuis, François Nicole, Alexis
Claude Clairault and others.
In the annexed figure, there are shown various examples of the curves
named above, when the radii of the rolling and fixed circles are in
the ratio of 1 to 3. Since the circumference of a circle is
proportional to its radius, it follows that if the ratio of the radii
be commensurable, the curve will consist of a finite number of cusps,
and ultimately return into itself. In the particular case when the
radii are in the ratio of 1 to 3 the epicycloid (curve a) will
consist of three cusps external to the circle and placed at equal
distances along its circumference. Similarly, the corresponding
epitrochoids will exhibit three loops or nodes (curve b), or assume
the form shown in the curve c. It is interesting to compare the
forms of these curves with the three forms of the cycloid (q.v.). The
hypocycloid derived from the same circles is shown as curve d, and
is seen to consist of three cusps arranged internally to the fixed
circle; the corresponding hypotrochoid consists of a three-foil and is
shown in curve e. The epicycloid shown is termed the "three-cusped
epicycloid" or the "epicycloid of Cremona."
[Illustration]
The cartesian equation to the epicycloid assumes the form
_____
x = (a + b) cos[theta] - b cos(a + b / b)[theta],
_____
y = (a + b) sin[theta] - b sin(a + b / b)[theta],
when the centre of the fixed circle is the origin, and the axis of x
passes through the initial point of the curve (i.e. the original
position of the moving point on the fixed circle), a and b being the
radii of the fixed and rolling circles, and [theta] the angle through
which the line joining the centres of the two circles has passed. It
may be shown that if the distance of the carried point from the centre
of the rolling circle be mb, the equation to the epitrochoid is
_____
x = (a + b) cos[theta] - mb cos(a + b / b)[theta],
_____
y = (a + b) sin[theta] - mb sin(a + b / b)[theta].
The equations to the hypocycloid and its corresponding trochoidal
curves are derived from the two preceding equations by changing the
sign of b. Leonhard Euler (_Acta Petrop._ 1784) showed that the same
hypocycloid can be generated by circles having radii of ½(a ± b)
rolling on a circle of radius a; and also that the hypocycloid formed
when the radius of the rolling circle is greater than that of the
fixed circle is the same as the epicycloid formed by the rolling of a
circle whose radius is the difference of the original radii. These
propositions may be derived from the formulae given above, or proved
directly by purely geometrical methods.
The tangential polar equation to the epicycloid, as given above, is
______
p = (a + 2b) sin(a / a + 2b)[psi], while the intrinsic equation is
______
s = 4(b/a)(a + b) cos(a / a + 2b)[psi] and the pedal equation is
_____
r² = a² + (4b·a + b)p² / (a + 2b)². Therefore any epicycloid or
hypocycloid may be represented by the equations p = A sin B[psi] or p
= A cos B[psi], s = A sin B[psi] or s = A cos B[psi], or r² = A + Bp²,
the constants A and B being readily determined by the above
considerations.
If the radius of the rolling circle be one-half of the fixed circle,
the hypocycloid becomes a diameter of this circle; this may be
confirmed from the equation to the hypocycloid. If the ratio of the
radii be as 1 to 4, we obtain the four-cusped hypocycloid, which has
the simple cartesian equation x^(2/3) + y^(2/3) = a^(2/3). This curve
is the envelope of a line of constant length, which moves so that its
extremities are always on two fixed lines at right angles to each
other, i.e. of the line x/[alpha] + y/[beta] = 1, with the condition
[alpha]² + [beta]² = 1/a, a constant. The epicycloid when the radii of
the circles are equal is the cardioid (q.v.), and the corresponding
trochoidal curves are limaçons (q.v.). Epicycloids are also examples
of certain caustics (q.v.).
For the methods of determining the formulae and results stated above
see J. Edwards, _Differential Calculus_, and for geometrical
constructions see T.H. Eagles, _Plane Curves_.
EPIDAURUS, the name of two ancient cities of southern Greece.
1. A maritime city situated on the eastern coast of Argolis, sometimes
distinguished as [Greek: hê hiera Epidauros], or Epidaurus the Holy. It
stood on a small rocky peninsula with a natural harbour on the northern
side and an open but serviceable bay on the southern; and from this
position acquired the epithet of [Greek: distomos], or the two-mouthed.
Its narrow but fertile territory consisted of a plain shut in on all
sides except towards the sea by considerable elevations, among which the
most remarkable were Mount Arachnaeon and Titthion. The conterminous
states were Corinth, Argos, Troezen and Hermione. Its proximity to
Athens and the islands of the Saronic gulf, the commercial advantages of
its position, and the fame of its temple of Asclepius combined to make
Epidaurus a place of no small importance. Its origin was ascribed to a
Carian colony, whose memory was possibly preserved in Epicarus, the
earlier name of the city; it was afterwards occupied by Ionians, and
appears to have incorporated a body of Phlegyans from Thessaly. The
Ionians in turn succumbed to the Dorians of Argos, who, according to the
legend, were led by Deiphontes; and from that time the city continued to
preserve its Dorian character. It not only colonized the neighbouring
islands, and founded the city of Aegina, by which it was ultimately
outstripped in wealth and power, but also took part with the people of
Argos and Troezen in their settlements in the south of Asia Minor. The
monarchical government introduced by Deiphontes gave way to an
oligarchy, and the oligarchy degenerated into a despotism. When Procles
the tyrant was carried captive by Periander of Corinth, the oligarchy
was restored, and the people of Epidaurus continued ever afterwards
close allies of the Spartan power. The governing body consisted of 180
members, chosen from certain influential families, and the executive was
entrusted to a select committee of _artynae_ (from [Greek: artynein], to
manage). The rural population, who had no share in the affairs of the
city, were called [Greek: konipodes] ("dusty-feet"). Among the objects
of interest described by Pausanias as extant in Epidaurus are the image
of Athena Cissaea in the Acropolis, the temple of Dionysus and Artemis,
a shrine of Aphrodite, statues of Asclepius and his wife Epione, and a
temple of Hera. The site of the last is identified with the chapel of St
Nicolas; a few portions of the outer walls of the city can be traced;
and the name Epidaurus is still preserved by the little village of
Nea-Epidavros, or Pidhavro.
[Illustration: Map--Epidaurus Hieron of Asclepius.]
The _Hieron_ (sacred precinct) of Asclepius, which lies inland about 8
m. from the town of Epidaurus, has been thoroughly excavated by the
Greek Archaeological Society since the year 1881, under the direction of
M. Kavvadias. In addition to the sacred precinct, with its temples and
other buildings, the theatre and stadium have been cleared; and several
other extensive buildings, including baths, gymnasia, and a hospital for
invalids, have also been found. The sacred road from Epidaurus, which is
flanked by tombs, approaches the precinct through a gateway or
propylaea. The chief buildings are grouped together, and include temples
of Asclepius and Artemis, the Tholos, and the Abaton, or portico where
the patients slept. In addition to remains of architecture and
sculpture, some of them of high merit, there have been found many
inscriptions, throwing light on the cures attributed to the god. The
chief buildings outside the sacred precinct are the theatre and the
stadium.
The temple of Asclepius, which contained the gold and ivory statue by
Thrasymedes of Paros, had six columns at the ends and eleven at the
sides; it was raised on stages and approached by a ramp at the eastern
front. An inscription has been found recording the contracts for
building this temple; it dates from about 460 B.C. The sculptor
Timotheus--one of those who collaborated in the Mausoleum--is mentioned
as undertaking to make the acroteria that stood on the ends of the
pediments, and also models for the sculpture that filled one of them.
Some of this sculpture has been found; the acroteria are Nereids mounted
on sea-horses, and one pediment contained a battle of Greeks and
Amazons. The great altar lay to the south of the temple, and a little to
the east of it are what appear to be the remains of an earlier altar,
built into the corner of a large square edifice of Roman date, perhaps a
house of the priests. Just to the south of this are the foundations of a
small temple of Artemis. The Tholos lay to the south-west of the temple
of Asclepius; it must, when perfect, have been one of the most beautiful
buildings in Greece; the exquisite carving of its mouldings is only
equalled by that of the Erechtheum at Athens. It consisted of a circular
chamber, surrounded on the outside by a Doric colonnade, and on the
inside by a Corinthian one. The architect was Polyclitus, probably to be
identified with the younger sculptor of that name. In the inscription
recording the contracts for its building it is called the Thymele; and
this name may give the clue to its purpose; it was probably the
idealized architectural representative of a primitive pit of sacrifice,
such as may still be seen in the Asclepianum at Athens. The foundations
now visible present a very curious appearance, consisting of a series of
concentric walls. Those in the middle are thin, having only the pavement
of the cella to support, and are provided with doors and partitions that
make a sort of subterranean labyrinth. There is no evidence for the
statement sometimes made that there was a well or spring below the
Tholos. North of the Tholos is the long portico described in
inscriptions as the Abaton; it is on two different levels, and the lower
or western portion of it had two storeys, of which the upper one was on
a level with the ground in the eastern portion. Here the invalids used
to sleep when consulting the god, and the inscriptions found here record
not only the method of consulting the god, but the manner of his cures.
Some of the inscriptions are contemporary dedications; but those which
give us most information are long lists of cases, evidently compiled by
the priests from the dedications in the sanctuary, or from tradition.
There is no reason to doubt that most of the records have at least a
basis of fact, for the cases are in accord with well-attested phenomena
of a similar nature at the present day; but there are others, such as
the miraculous mending of a broken vase, which suggest either invention
or trickery.
In early times, though there is considerable variety in the cases
treated and the methods of cure, there are certain characteristics
common to the majority of the cases. The patient consulting the god
sleeps in the Abaton, sees certain visions, and, as a result, comes
forth cured the next morning. Sometimes there seem to be surgical cases,
like that of a man who had a spear-head extracted from his jaw, and
found it laid in his hands when he awoke in the morning, and there are
many examples resembling those known at the present day at Lourdes or
Tenos, where hysterical or other similar affections are cured by the
influence of imagination or sudden emotion. It is, however, difficult to
make any scientific use of the records, owing to the indiscriminate
manner in which genuine and apocryphal cases are mingled, and
circumstantial details are added. We learn the practice of later times
from some dedicated inscriptions. Apparently the old faith-healing had
lost its efficacy, and the priests substituted for it elaborate
prescriptions as to diet, baths and regimen which must have made
Epidaurus and its visitors resemble their counterparts in a modern spa.
At this time there were extensive buildings provided for the
accommodation of invalids, some of which have been discovered and
partially cleared; one was built by Antoninus Pius. They were in the
form of great courtyards surrounded by colonnades and chambers.
Between the precinct and the theatre was a large gymnasium, which was
in later times converted to other purposes, a small odeum being built
in the middle of it. In a valley just to the south-west of the
precinct is the stadium, of which the seats and goal are well
preserved. There is a gutter round the level space of the stadium,
with basins at intervals for the use of spectators or competitors, and
a post at every hundred feet of the course, thus dividing it into six
portions. The goal, which is well preserved at the upper end, is
similar to that at Olympia; it consists of a sill of stone sunk level
with the ground, with parallel grooves for the feet of the runners at
starting, and sockets to hold the posts that separated the spaces
assigned to the various competitors, and served as guides to them in
running. For these were substituted later a set of stone columns
resembling those in the proscenium of a theatre. There was doubtless a
similar sill at the lower end for the start of the stadium, this upper
one being intended for the start of the diaulos and longer races.
The theatre still deserves the praise given it by Pausanias as the
most beautiful in Greece. The auditorium is in remarkable
preservation, almost every seat being still _in situ_, except a few
where the supporting walls have given way on the wings. The whole plan
is drawn from three centres, the outer portion of the curves being
arcs of a larger circle than the one used for the central portion; the
complete circle of the orchestra is marked by a sill of white
limestone, and greatly enhances the effect of the whole. There are
benches with backs not only in the bottom row, but also above and
below the diazoma. The acoustic properties of the theatre are
extraordinarily good, a speaker in the orchestra being heard
throughout the auditorium without raising his voice. The stage
buildings are not preserved much above their foundations, and show
signs of later repairs; but their general character can be clearly
seen. They consist of a long rectangular building, with a proscenium
or column front which almost forms a tangent to the circle of the
orchestra; at the middle and at either end of this proscenium are
doors leading into the orchestra, those at the end set in projecting
wings; the top of the proscenium is approached by a ramp, of which the
lower part is still preserved, running parallel to the parodi, but
sloping up as they slope down. The proscenium was originally about 14
ft. high and 12 ft. broad; so corresponding approximately to the Greek
stage as described by Vitruvius. M. Kavvadias, who excavated the
theatre, believes that the proscenium is contemporary with the rest of
the theatre, which, like the Tholos, was built by Polyclitus (the
younger); but Professor W. Dörpfeld maintains that it is a later
addition. In any case, the theatre at Epidaurus ranks as the most
typical of Greek theatres, both from the simplicity of its plan and
the beauty of its proportions.
See Pausanias i. 29; _Expédition de la Morée_, ii.; Curtius,
_Peloponnesus_, ii.; _Transactions of Roy. Soc. of Lit._, 2nd series,
vol. ii.; Weclawski, _De rebus Epidauriorum_ (Posen, 1854).
The excavations at the Hieron have been recorded as they went on in
the [Greek: Praktika] of the Greek Archaeological Society, especially
for 1881-1884 and 1889, and also in the [Greek: Ephêmeris
Archaiologikê], especially for 1883 and 1885; see also Kavvadias, Les
_Fouilles d'Épidaure_ and [Greek: To Hieron tou Asklêpiou en Epidaurô
kai hê therapeia tôn asthenôn]; Defrasse and Lechat, _Épidaure_. A
museum was completed in 1910.
2. A city of Peloponnesus on the east coast of Laconia, distinguished by
the epithet of Limera (either "The Well-havened" or "The Hungry"). It
was founded by the people of Epidaurus the Holy, and its principal
temples were those of Asclepius and Aphrodite. It was abandoned during
the middle ages; its inhabitants took possession of the promontory of
Minoa, turned it into an island, and built and fortified thereon the
city of Monembasia, which became the most flourishing of all the towns
in the Morea, and gave its name to the well-known Malmsey or Malvasia
wine. The ruins of Epidaurus are to be seen at the place now called
Palaea Monemvasia.
A third Epidaurus was situated in Illyricum, on the site of the present
Ragusa Vecchia; but it is not mentioned till the time of the civil wars
of Pompey and Caesar, and has no special interest. (E. Gr.)
EPIDIORITE, in petrology, a typical member of a family of rocks
consisting essentially of hornblende and felspar, often with epidote,
garnet, sphene, biotite, or quartz, and having usually a foliated
structure. The term is to some extent synonymous with "amphibolite" and
"hornblende-schist." These rocks are metamorphic, and though having a
mineral constitution somewhat similar to that of diorite, they have been
produced really from rocks of more basic character, such as diabase,
dolerite and gabbro. They occur principally among the schists, slates
and gneisses of such districts as the Scottish Highlands, the north-west
of Ireland, Brittany, the Harz, the Alps, and the crystalline ranges of
eastern N. America. Their hornblende in microscopic section is usually
dark green, rarely brownish; their felspar may be clear and
recrystallized, but more frequently is converted into a turbid aggregate
of epidote, zoisite, quartz, sericite and albite. In the less complete
stages of alteration, ophitic structure may persist, and the original
augite of the rock may not have been entirely replaced by hornblende.
Pink or brownish garnets are common and may be an inch or two in
diameter. The iron oxides, originally ilmenite, are usually altered to
sphene. Biotite, if present, is brown; epidote is yellow or colourless;
rutile, apatite and quartz all occur with some frequency. The essential
minerals, hornblende and felspar, rarely show crystalline outlines, and
this is generally true also of the others. The rocks may be fine
grained, so that their constituents are hardly visible to the unaided
eye; or may show crystals of hornblende an inch in length. Their
prevalent colour is dark green and they weather with brown surfaces. In
many parts of the world epidiorites and the quartz veins which sometimes
occur in them have proved to be auriferous. As they are tough, hard
rocks, when fresh, they are well suited for use as road-mending stones.
(J. S. F.)
EPIDOSITE, in petrology, a typical member of a family of metamorphic
rocks composed mainly of epidote and quartz. In colour they are pale
yellow or greenish yellow, and they are hard and somewhat brittle. They
may occur in more than one way and are derived from several kinds of
rock. Some have been epidotic grits and sandstones; others are
limestones which have undergone contact-alteration; probably the
majority, however, are allied to epidiorite and amphibolite, and are
local modifications of rocks which were primarily basic intrusions or
lavas. The sedimentary epidosites occur with mica-schists, sheared grits
and granulitic gneisses; they often show, on minute examination, the
remains of clastic structures. The epidosites derived from limestones
may contain a great variety of minerals such as calcite, augite, garnet,
scapolite, &c., but their source may usually be inferred from their
close association with calc-silicate rocks in the field. The third group
of epidosites may form bands, veins, or irregular streaks and nodules in
masses of epidiorite and hornblende-schist. In microscopic section they
are often merely a granular mosaic of quartz and epidote with some iron
oxides and chlorite, but in other cases they retain much of the
structure of the original rock though there has been a complete
replacement of the former minerals by new ones. Epidosites when streaked
and variegated have been cut and polished as ornamental stones. They are
translucent and hard, and hence serve for brooch stones, and the simpler
kinds of jewelry. These rocks occasionally carry gold in visible yellow
specks. (J. S. F.)
EPIDOTE, a mineral species consisting of basic calcium, aluminium and
iron orthosilicate, Ca2(AlOH)(Al, Fe)2(SiO4)3, crystallizing in the
monoclinic system. Well-developed crystals are of frequent occurrence:
they are commonly prismatic in habit, the direction of elongation being
perpendicular to the single plane of symmetry. The faces lettered M, T
and r in the figure are often deeply striated in the same direction: M
is a direction of perfect cleavage, and T of imperfect cleavage:
crystals are often twinned on the face T. Many of the characters of the
mineral vary with the amount of iron present (Fe2O3, 5-17%), for
instance, the colour, the optical constants, and the specific gravity
(3.3-3.5). The hardness is 6½. The colour is green, grey, brown or
nearly black, but usually a characteristic shade of yellowish-green or
pistachio-green. The pleochroism is strong, the pleochroic colours being
usually green, yellow and brown. The names thallite (from [Greek:
thallos], "a young shoot") and pistacite (from [Greek: pistakia],
"pistachio nut") have reference to the colour. The name epidote is one
of R.J. Haüy's crystallographic names, and is derived from [Greek:
epidosis], "increase," because the base of the primitive prism has one
side longer than the other. Several other names (achmatite, bucklandite,
escherite, puschkinite, &c.) have been applied to this species.
Withamite is a carmine-red to straw-yellow, strongly pleochroic variety
from Glencoe in Scotland. Fouqueite and clinozoisite are white or pale
rose-red varieties containing very little iron, thus having the same
chemical composition as the orthorhombic mineral zoisite (q.v.).
[Illustration]
Epidote is an abundant rock-forming mineral, but one of secondary
origin. It occurs in crystalline limestones and schistose rocks of
metamorphic origin; and is also a product of weathering of various
minerals (felspars, micas, pyroxenes, amphiboles, garnets, &c.)
composing igneous rocks. A rock composed of quartz and epidote is known
as epidosite. Well-developed crystals are found at many localities, of
which the following may be specially mentioned: Knappenwand, near the
Gross-Venediger in the Untersulzbachthal in Salzburg, as magnificent,
dark green crystals of long prismatic habit in cavities in
epidote-schist, with asbestos, adularia, calcite, and apatite; the Ala
valley and Traversella in Piedmont; Arendal in Norway (arendalite); Le
Bourg d'Oisans in Dauphiné (oisanite and delphinite); Haddam in
Connecticut; Prince of Wales Island in Alaska, here as large, dark
green, tabular crystals with copper ores in metamorphosed limestone.
The perfectly transparent, dark green crystals from the Knappenwand and
from Brazil have occasionally been cut as gem-stones.
Belonging to the same isomorphous group with epidote are the species
piedmontite and allanite, which may be described as manganese and cerium
epidotes respectively.
Piedmontite has the composition Ca2(AlOH)(Fe, Mn)2(SiO4)3; it occurs as
small, reddish-black, monoclinic crystals in the manganese mines at San
Marcel, near Ivrea in Piedmont, and in crystalline schists at several
places in Japan. The purple colour of the Egyptian _porfido rosso
antico_ is due to the presence of this mineral.
Allanite has the same general formula R2"(R'"OH)R2'"(SiO4)3, where R"
represents calcium and ferrous iron, and R'" aluminium, ferric iron and
metals of the cerium group. In external appearance it differs widely
from epidote, being black or dark brown in colour, pitchy in lustre, and
opaque in the mass; further, there is little or no cleavage, and
well-developed crystals are rarely met with. The crystallographic and
optical characters are similar to those of epidote; the pleochroism is
strong with reddish-, yellowish-, and greenish-brown colours. Although
not a common mineral, allanite is of fairly wide distribution as a
primary accessory constituent of many crystalline rocks, e.g. gneiss,
granite, syenite, rhyolite, andesite, &c. It was first found in the
granite of east Greenland and described by Thomas Allan in 1808, after
whom the species was named. Allanite is a mineral readily altered by
hydration, becoming optically isotropic and amorphous: for this reason
several varieties have been distinguished, and many different names
applied. Orthite, from [Greek: orthos], "straight," was the name given
by J.J. Berzelius in 1818 to a hydrated form found as slender prismatic
crystals, sometimes a foot in length, at Finbo, near Falun in Sweden.
(L. J. S.)
EPIGONI ("descendants"), in Greek legend, the sons of the seven heroes
who fought against Thebes (see ADRASTUS). Ten years later, to avenge
their fathers, the Epigoni undertook a second expedition, which was
completely successful. Thebes was forced to surrender and razed to the
ground. In early times the war of the Epigoni was a favourite subject of
epic poetry. The term is also applied to the descendants of the
Diadochi, the successors of Alexander the Great.
EPIGONION (Gr. [Greek: epigoneion]), an ancient stringed instrument
mentioned in Athenaeus 183 C, probably a psaltery. The epigonion was
invented, or at least introduced into Greece, by Epigonus, a Greek
musician of Ambracia in Epirus, who was admitted to citizenship at
Sicyon as a recognition of his great musical ability and of his having
been the first to pluck the strings with his fingers, instead of using
the plectrum.[1] The instrument, which Epigonus named after himself, had
forty strings.[2] It was undoubtedly a kind of harp or psaltery, since
in an instrument of so many strings some must have been of different
lengths, for tension and thickness only could hardly have produced forty
different sounds, or even twenty, supposing that they were arranged in
pairs of unisons. Strings of varying lengths require a frame like that
of the harp, or of the Egyptian cithara which had one of the arms
supporting the cross bar or zugon shorter than the other,[3] or else
strings stretched over harp-shaped bridges on a sound-board in the case
of a psaltery. Juba II., king of Mauretania, who reigned from 30 B.C.,
said (ap. Athen. l.c.) that Epigonus brought the instrument from
Alexandria and played upon it with the fingers of both hands, not only
using it as an accompaniment to the voice, but introducing chromatic
passages, and a chorus of other stringed instruments, probably citharas,
to accompany the voice. Epigonus was also a skilled citharist and played
with his bare hands without plectrum.[4] Unfortunately we have no record
of when Epigonus lived. Vincenzo Galilei[5] has given us a description
of the epigonion accompanied by an illustration, representing his
conception of the ancient instrument, an upright psaltery with the
outline of the clavicytherium (but no keyboard). (K. S.)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Michael Praetorius, _Syntagma musicum_, tom. 1, c. 13, p. 380:
Salomon van Til, _Sing-Dicht und Spiel-Kunst_, p. 95.
[2] Pollux, _Onomasticon_, lib. iv. cap. 9, 59.
[3] For an illustration, see Kathleen Schlesinger, _Orchestral
Instruments_, part ii. "Precursors of the Violin Family," fig. 165,
p. 219.
[4] Athenaeus, iv. p. 183 d. and xiv. p. 638 a.
[5] _Dialogo della musica antica e moderna_, ed. 1602, p. 40.
EPIGRAM, properly speaking, anything that is inscribed. Nothing could be
more hopeless, however, than an attempt to discover or devise a
definition wide enough to include the vast multitude of little poems
which at one time or other have been honoured with the title of epigram,
and precise enough to exclude all others. Without taking account of its
evident misapplications, we find that the name has been given--first, in
strict accordance with its Greek etymology, to any actual inscription on
monument, statue or building; secondly, to verses never intended for
such a purpose, but assuming for artistic reasons the epigraphical form;
thirdly, to verses expressing with something of the terseness of an
inscription a striking or beautiful thought; and fourthly, by
unwarrantable restriction, to a little poem ending in a "point,"
especially of the satirical kind. The last of these has obtained
considerable popularity from the well-known lines--
"The qualities rare in a bee that we meet
In an epigram never should fail;
The body should always be little and sweet,
And a sting should be left in its tail"--
which represent the older Latin of some unknown writer--
"Omne epigramma sit instar apis: sit aculeus illi;
Sint sua mella; sit et corporis exigui."
Attempts not a few of a more elaborate kind have been made to state the
essential element of the epigram, and to classify existing specimens;
but, as every lover of epigrams must feel, most of them have been
attended with very partial success. Scaliger, in the third book of his
_Poetics_, gives a fivefold division, which displays a certain ingenuity
in the nomenclature but is very superficial: the first class takes its
name from _mel_, or honey, and consists of adulatory specimens; the
second from _fel_, or gall; the third from _acetum_, or vinegar; and the
fourth from _sal_, or salt; while the fifth is styled the condensed, or
multiplex. This classification is adopted by Nicolaus Mercerius in his
_De conscribendo epigrammate_ (Paris, 1653); but he supplemented it by
another of much more scientific value, based on the figures of the
ancient rhetoricians. Lessing, in the preface to his own epigrams, gives
an interesting treatment of the theory, his principal doctrine being
practically the same as that of several of his less eminent
predecessors, that there ought to be two parts more or less clearly
distinguished,--the first awakening the reader's attention in the same
way as an actual monument might do, and the other satisfying his
curiosity in some unexpected manner. An attempt was made by Herder to
increase the comprehensiveness and precision of the theory; but as he
himself confesses, his classification is rather vague--the expository,
the paradigmatic, the pictorial, the impassioned, the artfully turned,
the illusory, and the swift. After all, if the arrangement according to
authorship be rejected, the simplest and most satisfactory is according
to subjects. The epigram is one of the most catholic of literary forms,
and lends itself to the expression of almost any feeling or thought. It
may be an elegy, a satire, or a love-poem in miniature, an embodiment of
the wisdom of the ages, a bon-mot set off with a couple of rhymes.
"I cannot tell thee who lies buried here;
No man that knew him followed by his bier;
The winds and waves conveyed him to this shore,
Then ask the winds and waves to tell thee more."
ANONYMOUS.
"Wherefore should I vainly try
To teach thee what my love will be
In after years, when thou and I
Have both grown old in company,
If words are vain to tell thee how,
Mary, I do love thee now?"
ANONYMOUS.
"O Bruscus, cease our aching ears to vex,
With thy loud railing at the softer sex;
No accusation worse than this could be,
That once a woman did give birth to thee."
ACILIUS.
"Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason?
For if it prospers none dare call it treason."
HARRINGTON.
"Ward has no heart they say, but I deny it;
He has a heart, and gets his speeches by it."
ROGERS.
From its very brevity there is no small danger of the epigram passing
into childish triviality: the paltriest pun, a senseless anagram, is
considered stuff enough and to spare. For proof of this there is
unfortunately no need to look far; but perhaps the reader could not find
a better collection ready to his hand than the second twenty-five of the
_Epigrammatum centuriae_ of Samuel Erichius; by the time he reaches No.
11 of the 47th century, he will be quite ready to grant the
appropriateness of the identity maintained between the German _Seele_,
or soul, and the German _Esel_, or ass.
Of the epigram as cultivated by the Greeks an account is given in the
article ANTHOLOGY, discussing those wonderful collections which bid fair
to remain the richest of their kind. The delicacy and simplicity of so
much of what has been preserved is perhaps their most striking feature;
and one cannot but be surprised at the number of poets proved capable of
such work. In Latin literature, on the other hand, the epigrammatists
whose work has been preserved are comparatively few, and though several
of them, as Catullus and Martial, are men of high literary genius, too
much of what they have left behind is vitiated by brutality and
obscenity. On the subsequent history of the epigram, indeed, Martial has
exercised an influence as baneful as it is extensive, and he may fairly
be counted the far-off progenitor of a host of scurrilous verses. Nearly
all the learned Latinists of the 16th and 17th centuries may claim
admittance into the list of epigrammatists,--Bembo and Scaliger,
Buchanan and More, Stroza and Sannazaro. Melanchthon, who succeeded in
combining so much of Pagan culture with his Reformation Christianity,
has left us some graceful specimens, but his editor, Joannes Major
Joachimus, has so little idea of what an epigram is, that he includes in
his collection some translations from the Psalms. The Latin epigrams of
Étienne Pasquier were among the most admirable which the Renaissance
produced in France. John Owen, or, as he Latinized his name, Johannes
Audoenus, a Cambro-Briton, attained quite an unusual celebrity in this
department, and is regularly distinguished as Owen the Epigrammatist.
The tradition of the Latin epigram has been kept alive in England by
such men as Porson, Vincent Bourne and Walter Savage Landor. Happily
there is now little danger of any too personal epigrammatist suffering
the fate of Niccolo Franco, who paid the forfeit of his life for having
launched his venomous Latin against Pius V., though he may still incur
the milder penalty of having his name inserted in the _Index
Expurgatorius_, and find, like John Owen, that he consequently has lost
an inheritance.
In English literature proper there is no writer like Martial in Latin
or Logau in German, whose fame is entirely due to his epigrams; but
several even of those whose names can perish never have not disdained
this diminutive form. The designation epigram, however, is used by
earlier English writers with excessive laxity, and given or withheld
without apparent reason. The epigrams of Robert Crowley (1550) and of
Henry Parrot (1613) are worthless so far as form goes. John Weever's
collection (1599) is of interest mainly because of its allusion to
Shakespeare. Ben Jonson furnishes a number of noble examples in his
_Underwoods_; and one or two of Spenser's little poems and a great many
of Herrick's are properly classed as epigrams. Cowley, Waller, Dryden,
Prior, Parnell, Swift, Addison, Johnson, Goldsmith and Young have all
been at times successful in their epigrammatical attempts; but perhaps
none of them has proved himself so much "to the manner born" as Pope,
whose name indeed is almost identified with the epigrammatical spirit in
English literature. Few English modern poets have followed in his
footsteps, and though nearly all might plead guilty to an epigram or
two, there is no one who has a distinct reputation as an epigrammatist.
Such a reputation might certainly have been Landor's, had he not chosen
to write the best of his minor poems in Latin, and thus made his readers
nearly as select as his language.
The French are undoubtedly the most successful cultivators of the "salt"
and the "vinegar" epigram; and from the 16th century downwards many of
their principal authors have earned no small celebrity in this
department. The epigram was introduced into French literature by Mellin
de St Gelais and Clément Marot. It is enough to mention the names of
Boileau, J.B. Rousseau, Lebrun, Voltaire, Marmontel, Piron, Rulhière,
and M.J. Chénier. In spite of Rapin's dictum that a man ought to be
content if he succeeded in writing one really good epigram, those of
Lebrun alone number upwards of 600, and a very fair proportion of them
would doubtless pass muster even with Rapin himself. If Piron was never
anything better, "pas même académicien," he appears at any rate in
Grimm's phrase to have been "une machine à saillies, à épigrammes, et à
bons mots." Perhaps more than anywhere else the epigram has been
recognized in France as a regular weapon in literary and political
contests, and it might not be altogether a hopeless task to compile an
epigrammatical history from the Revolution to the present time.
While any fair collection of German epigrams will furnish examples that
for keenness of wit would be quite in place in a French anthology, the
Teutonic tendency to the moral and didactic has given rise to a class
but sparingly represented in French. The very name of _Sinngedichte_
bears witness to this peculiarity, which is exemplified equally by the
rude _priameln_ or _proeameln_, of the 13th and 14th centuries and the
polished lines of Goethe and Schiller. Logau published his _Deutsche
Sinngetichte Drey Tausend_ in 1654, and Wernicke no fewer than six
volumes of _Ueberschriften oder Epigrammata_ in 1697; Kästner's
_Sinngedichte_ appeared in 1782, and Haug and Weissen's _Epigrammatische
Anthologie_ in 1804. Kleist, Opitz, Gleim, Hagedorn, Klopstock and A.W.
Schlegel all possess some reputation as epigrammatists; Lessing is
_facile princeps_ in the satirical style; and Herder has the honour of
having enriched his language with much of what is best from Oriental and
classical sources.
It is often by no means easy to trace the history of even a single
epigram, and the investigator soon learns to be cautious of
congratulating himself on the attainment of a genuine original. The same
point, refurbished and fitted anew to its tiny shaft, has been shot
again and again by laughing cupids or fierce-eyed furies in many a
frolic and many a fray. During the period when the epigram was the
favourite form in Germany, Gervinus tells us how the works, not only of
the Greek and Roman writers, but of Neo-Latinists, Spaniards, Dutchmen,
Frenchmen, Englishmen and Poles were ransacked and plundered; and the
same process of pillage has gone on in a more or less modified degree in
other times and countries. Very noticeable often are the modifications
of tone and expression occasioned by national and individual
characteristics; the simplicity of the prototype may become common-place
in the imitation, the sublime be distorted into the grotesque, the
pathetic degenerate into the absurdly sentimental; or on the other hand,
an unpromising _motif_ may be happily developed into unexpected beauty.
A good illustration of the variety with which the same epigram may be
translated and travestied is afforded by a little volume published in
Edinburgh in 1808, under the title of _Lucubrations on the Epigram--_
[Greek: Ei men ên mathein a dei pathein,
kai mê pathein, kalon ên to mathein
ei de dei pathein a d' ên mathein,
ti dei mathein; chrê gar pathein.]
The two collections of epigrams most accessible to the English reader
are Booth's _Epigrams, Ancient and Modern_ (1863) and Dodd's _The
Epigrammatists_ (1870). In the appendix to the latter is a pretty full
bibliography, to which the following list may serve as a
supplement:--Thomas Corraeus, _De toto eo poëmatis genere quod
epigramma dicitur_ (Venice, 1569; Bologna, 1590); Cottunius, _De
conficiendo epigrammate_ (Bologna, 1632); Vincentius Gallus,
_Opusculum de epigrammate_ (Milan, 1641); Vavassor, _De epigrammate
liber_ (Paris, 1669); _Gedanke von deutschen Epigrammatibus_ (Leipzig,
1698); _Doctissimorum nostra aetate Italorum epigrammata; Flaminii
Moleae Naugerii, Cottae, Lampridii, Sadoleti, et aliorum, cura Jo.
Gagnaei_ (Paris, c. 1550); Brugière de Barante, _Recueil des plus
belles épigrammes des poètes français_ (2 vols., Paris, 1698); Chr.
Aug. Heumann, _Anthologia Latina: hoc est, epigrammata partim a
priscis partim junioribus a poëtis_ (Hanover, 1721); Fayolle,
_Acontologie ou dictionnaire d'épigrammes_ (Paris, 1817); Geijsbeck,
_Epigrammatische Anthologie_, Sauvage, _Les Guêpes gauloises: petit
encyclopédie des meilleurs épigrammes, &c., depuis Clément Marot
jusqu'aux poètes de nos jours_ (1859); _La Récréation et passe-temps
des tristes: recueil d'épigrammes et de petits contes en vers
réimprimé sur l'édition de Rouen_ 1595, &c. (Paris, 1863). A large
number of epigrams and much miscellaneous information in regard to
their origin, application and translation is scattered through _Notes
and Queries_.
See also an article in _The Quarterly Review_, No. 233.
EPIGRAPHY (Gr. [Greek: epi], on, and [Greek: graphein], to write), a
term used to denote (1) the study of inscriptions collectively, and (2)
the science connected with the classification and explanation of
inscriptions. It is sometimes employed, too, in a more contracted sense,
to denote the palaeography, in inscriptions. Generally, it is that part
of archaeology which has to do with inscriptions engraved on stone,
metal or other permanent material (not, however, coins, which come under
the heading NUMISMATICS).
See INSCRIPTIONS; PALAEOGRAPHY.
EPILEPSY (Gr. [Greek: epi], upon, and [Greek: lambanein], to seize), or
FALLING SICKNESS, a term applied generally to a nervous disorder,
characterized by a fit of sudden loss of consciousness, attended with
convulsions. There may, however, exist manifestations of epilepsy much
less marked than this, yet equally characteristic of the disease; while,
on the other hand, it is to be borne in mind that many other attacks of
a convulsive nature have the term "epileptic" or "epileptiform" applied
to them.
Epilepsy was well known in ancient times, and was regarded as a special
infliction of the gods, hence the names _morbus sacer_, _morbus divus_.
It was also termed _morbus Herculeus_, from Hercules having been
supposed to have been epileptic, and _morbus comitialis_, from the
circumstance that when any member of the forum was seized with an
epileptic fit the assembly was broken up. _Morbus caducus_, _morbus
lunaticus astralis_, _morbus demoniacus_, _morbus major_, were all terms
employed to designate epilepsy.
There are three well-marked varieties of the epileptic seizure; to these
the terms _le grand mal_, _le petit mal_ and _Jacksonian epilepsy_ are
usually applied. Any of these may exist alone, but the two former may be
found to exist in the same individual. The first of these, if not the
more common, is at least that which attracts the most attention, being
what is generally known as an _epileptic fit_.
Although in most instances such an attack comes on suddenly, it is in
many cases preceded by certain premonitory indications or warnings,
which may be present for a greater or less time previously. These are of
very varied character, and may be in the form of some temporary change
in the disposition, such as unusual depression or elevation of spirits,
or of some alteration in the look. Besides these general symptoms, there
are frequently peculiar sensations which immediately precede the onset
of the fit, and to such the name of _aura epileptica_ is applied. In its
strict sense this term refers to a feeling of a breath of air blowing
upon some part of the body, and passing upwards towards the head. This
sensation, however, is not a common one, and the term has now come to be
applied to any peculiar feeling which the patient experiences as a
precursor of the attack. The so-called _aura_ may be of mental
character, in the form of an agonizing feeling of momentary duration; of
sensorial character, in the form of pain in a limb or in some internal
organ, such as the stomach, or morbid feeling connected with the special
senses; or, further, of motorial character, in the form of contractions
or trembling in some of the muscles. When such sensations affect a limb,
the employment of firm compression by the hand or by a ligature
occasionally succeeds in warding off an attack. The aura may be so
distinct and of such duration as to enable the patient to lie down, or
seek a place of safety before the fit comes on.
The seizure is usually preceded by a loud scream or cry, which is not to
be ascribed, as was at one time supposed, to terror or pain, but is due
to the convulsive action of the muscles of the larynx, and the expulsion
of a column of air through the narrowed glottis. If the patient is
standing he immediately falls, and often sustains serious injury.
Unconsciousness is complete, and the muscles generally are in a state of
stiffness or tonic contraction, which will usually be found to affect
those of one side of the body in particular. The head is turned by a
series of jerks towards one or other shoulder, the breathing is for the
moment arrested, the countenance first pale then livid, the pupils
dilated and the pulse rapid. This, the first stage of the fit, generally
lasts for about half a minute, and is followed by the state of clonic
(i.e. tumultuous) spasm of the muscles, in which the whole body is
thrown into violent agitation, occasionally so great that bones may be
fractured or dislocated. The eyes roll wildly, the teeth are gnashed
together, and the tongue and cheeks are often severely bitten. The
breathing is noisy and laborious, and foam (often tinged with blood)
issues from the mouth, while the contents of the bowels and bladder are
ejected. The aspect of the patient in this condition is shocking to
witness, and the sight has been known to induce a similar attack in an
onlooker. This stage lasts for a period varying from a few seconds to
several minutes, when the convulsive movements gradually subside, and
relaxation of the muscles takes place, together with partial return of
consciousness, the patient looking confusedly about him and attempting
to speak. This, however, is soon followed by drowsiness and stupor,
which may continue for several hours, when he awakes either apparently
quite recovered or fatigued and depressed, and occasionally in a state
of excitement which sometimes assumes the form of mania.
Epileptic fits of this sort succeed each other with varying degrees of
frequency, and occasionally, though not frequently, with regular
periodicity. In some persons they only occur once in a lifetime, or once
in the course of many years, while in others they return every week or
two, or even are of daily occurrence, and occasionally there are
numerous attacks each day. According to Sir J.R. Reynolds, there are
four times as many epileptics who have their attacks more frequently
than once a month as there are of those whose attacks recur at longer
intervals. When the fit returns it is not uncommon for one seizure to be
followed by another within a few hours or days. Occasionally there
occurs a constant succession of attacks extending over many hours, and
with such rapidity that the patient appears as if he had never come out
of the one fit. The term _status epilepticus_ is applied to this
condition, which is sometimes followed with fatal results. In many
epileptics the fits occur during the night as well as during the day,
but in some instances they are entirely nocturnal, and it is well known
that in such cases the disease may long exist and yet remain
unrecognized either by the patient or the physician.
The second manifestation of epilepsy, to which the names _epilepsia
mitior_ or _le petit mal_ are given, differs from that above described
in the absence of the convulsive spasms. It is also termed by some
authors _epileptic vertigo_ (giddiness), and consists essentially in the
sudden arrest of volition and consciousness, which is of but short
duration, and may be accompanied with staggering or some alteration in
position or motion, or may simply exhibit itself in a look of absence or
confusion, and should the patient happen to be engaged in conversation,
by an abrupt termination of the act. In general it lasts but a few
seconds, and the individual resumes his occupation without perhaps being
aware of anything having been the matter. In some instances there is a
degree of spasmodic action in certain muscles which may cause the
patient to make some unexpected movement, such as turning half round, or
walking abruptly aside, or may show itself by some unusual expression of
countenance, such as squinting or grinning. There may be some amount of
_aura_ preceding such attacks, and also of faintness following them. The
_petit mal_ most commonly co-exists with the _grand mal_, but has no
necessary connexion with it, as each may exist alone. According to
Armand Trousseau, the _petit mal_ in general precedes the manifestation
of the _grand mal_, but sometimes the reverse is the case.
The third manifestation--_Jacksonian epilepsy_ or _partial epilepsy_--is
distinguished by the fact that consciousness is retained or lost late.
The patient is conscious throughout, and is able to watch the march of
the spasm. The attacks are usually the result of lesions in the motor
area of the brain, such being caused, in many instances, by depression
of the vault of the skull, due to trauma.
Epilepsy appears to exert no necessarily injurious effect upon the
general health, and even where it exists in an aggravated form is quite
consistent with a high degree of bodily vigour. It is very different,
however, with regard to its influence upon the mind; and the question of
the relation of epilepsy to insanity is one of great and increasing
importance. Allusion has already been made to the occasional occurrence
of maniacal excitement as one of the results of the epileptic seizure.
Such attacks, to which the name of _furor epilepticus_ is applied, are
generally accompanied with violent acts on the part of the patient,
rendering him dangerous, and demanding prompt measures of restraint.
These attacks are by no means limited to the more severe form of
epilepsy, but appear to be even more frequently associated with the
milder form--the epileptic vertigo--where they either replace altogether
or immediately follow the short period of absence characteristic of this
form of the disease. Numerous cases are on record of persons known to be
epileptic being suddenly seized, either after or without apparent
spasmodic attack, with some sudden impulse, in which they have used
dangerous violence to those beside them, irrespective altogether of
malevolent intention, as appears from their retaining no recollection
whatever, after the short period of excitement, of anything that had
occurred; and there is reason to believe that crimes of heinous
character, for which the perpetrators have suffered punishment, have
been committed in a state of mind such as that now described. The
subject is obviously one of the greatest medico-legal interest and
importance in regard to the question of criminal responsibility.
Apart, however, from such marked and comparatively rare instances of
what is termed epileptic insanity, the general mental condition of the
epileptic is in a large proportion of cases unfavourably affected by the
disease. There are doubtless examples (and their number according to
statistics is estimated at less than one-third) where, even among those
suffering from frequent and severe attacks, no departure from the normal
condition of mental integrity can be recognized. But in general there
exists some peculiarity, exhibiting itself either in the form of
defective memory, or diminishing intelligence, or what is perhaps as
frequent, in irregularities of temper, the patient being irritable or
perverse and eccentric. In not a few cases there is a steady mental
decline, which ends in dementia or idiocy. It is stated by some high
authorities that epileptic women suffer in regard to their mental
condition more than men. It also appears to be the case that the later
in life the disease shows itself the more likely is the mind to suffer.
Neither the frequency nor the severity of the seizures seem to have any
necessary influence in the matter; and the general opinion appears to be
that the milder form of the disease is that with which mental failure is
more apt to be associated. (For a consideration of the conditions of the
nervous system which result in epilepsy, see the article
NEUROPATHOLOGY.)
The influence of hereditary predisposition in epilepsy is very marked.
It is necessary, however, to bear in mind the point so forcibly insisted
on by Trousseau in relation to epilepsy, that hereditary transmission
may be either direct or indirect, that is to say, that what is epilepsy
in one generation may be some other form of neurosis in the next, and
conversely, nervous diseases being remarkable for their tendency to
transformation in their descent in families. Where epilepsy is
hereditary, it generally manifests itself at an unusually early period
of life. A singular fact, which also bears to some extent upon the
pathology of this disease, was brought to light by Dr Brown Séquard in
his experiments, namely, that the young of animals which had been
artifically rendered epileptic were liable to similar seizures. In
connexion with the hereditary transmission of epilepsy it must be
observed that all authorities concur in the opinion that this disease is
one among the baneful effects that often follow marriages of
consanguinity. Further, there is reason to believe that intemperance,
apart altogether from its direct effect in favouring the occurrence of
epilepsy, has an evil influence in the hereditary transmission of this
as of other nervous diseases. A want of symmetry in the formation of the
skull and defective cerebral development are not infrequently observed
where epilepsy is hereditarily transmitted.
Age is of importance in reference to the production of epilepsy. The
disease may come on at any period of life, but it appears from the
statistics of Reynolds and others, that it most frequently first
manifests itself between the ages of ten and twenty years, the period of
second dentition and puberty, and again at or about the age of forty.
Among other causes which are influential in the development of epilepsy
may be mentioned sudden fright, prolonged mental anxiety, over-work and
debauchery. Epileptic fits also occur in connexion with a depraved stage
of the general health, and with irritations in distant organs, as seen
in the fits occurring in dentition, in kidney disease, and as a result
of worms in the intestines. The symptoms traceable to these causes are
sometimes termed _sympathetic_ or _eccentric epilepsy_; these are but
rarely _epileptic_ in the strictest sense of the word, but rather
epileptiform.
Epilepsy is occasionally feigned for the purpose of extortion, but an
experienced medical practitioner will rarely be deceived; and when it is
stated that although many of the phenomena of an attack, particularly
the convulsive movements, can be readily simulated, yet that the
condition of the pupils, which are dilated during the fit, cannot be
feigned, and that the impostor seldom bites his tongue or injures
himself, deception is not likely to succeed even with non-medical
persons of intelligence.
The _medical treatment_ of epilepsy can only be briefly alluded to here.
During the fit little can be done beyond preventing as far as possible
the patient from injuring himself while unconsciousness continues. Tight
clothing should be loosened, and a cork or pad inserted between the
teeth. When the fit is of long continuance, the dashing of cold water on
the face and chest, or the inhalation of chloroform, or of nitrite of
amyl, may be useful; in general, however, the fit terminates
independently of any such measures. When the fit is over the patient
should be allowed to sleep, and have the head and shoulders well raised.
In the intervals of the attack, the general health of the patient is
one of the most important points to be attended to. The strictest
hygienic and dietetic rules should be observed, and all such causes as
have been referred to as favouring the development of the disease
should, as far as possible, be avoided. In the case of children, parents
must be made to realize that epilepsy is a chronic disease, and that
therefore the seizures must not be allowed to interfere unnecessarily
with the child's training. The patient must be treated as such only
during the attack; between times, though being carefully watched, must
be made to follow a child's normal pursuits, and no distinction must be
made from other children. The same applies to adults: it is far better
for them to have some definite occupation, preferably one that keeps
them in the open air. If such patients become irritable, then they
should be placed under supervision. As regards those who cannot be
looked after at home, colonies on a self-supporting basis have been
tried, and where the supervision has been intelligent the success has
been proved, a fairly high level of health and happiness being attained.
The various bromides are the only medical drugs that have produced any
beneficial results. They require to be given in large doses which are
carefully regulated for every individual patient, as the quantities
required vary enormously. Children take far larger doses in proportion
than adults. They are best given in a very diluted form, and after
meals, to diminish the chances of gastric disturbance. Belladonna seems
also to have some influence on the disease, and forms a useful addition;
arsenic should also be prescribed at times, both as a tonic, and for the
sake of the improvement it effects in those patients who develop a
tendency to _acne_, which is one of the troublesome results of bromism.
The administration of the bromides should be maintained until three
years after the cessation of the fits. The occurrence of gastric pain,
palpitations and loss of the palate reflex are indications to stop, or
to decrease the quantity of the drug. In very severe cases opium may be
required.
Surgical treatment for epilepsy is yet in its infancy, and it is too
early to judge of its results. This does not apply, however, to cases of
_Jacksonian epilepsy_, where a very large number have been operated on
with marked benefit. Here the lesion of the brain is, in a very large
percentage of the patients, caused by pressure from outside, from the
presence of a tumour or a depressed fracture; the removal of the one, or
the elevation of the other is the obvious procedure, and it is usually
followed by the complete disappearance of the seizures.
EPILOGUE. The appendix or supplement to a literary work, and in
particular to a drama in verse, is called an _epilogue_, from [Greek:
epilogos], the name given by the Greeks to the peroration of a speech.
As we read in Shakespeare's _Midsummer Night's Dream_, the epilogue was
generally treated as the apology for a play; it was a final appeal made
to encourage the good-nature of the audiences, and to deprecate attack.
The epilogue should form no part of the work to which it is attached,
but should be independent of it; it should be treated as a sort of
commentary. Sometimes it adds further information with regard to what
has been left imperfectly concluded in the work itself. For instance, in
the case of a play, the epilogue will occasionally tell us what became
of the characters after the action closed; but this is irregular and
unusual, and the epilogue is usually no more than a graceful way of
dismissing the audience. Among the ancients the form was not cultivated,
further than that the leader of the chorus or the last speaker advanced
and said "Vos valete, et plaudite, cives"--"Good-bye, citizens, and we
hope you are pleased." Sometimes this formula was reduced to the one
word, "Plaudite!" The epilogue as a literary species is almost entirely
confined to England, and it does not occur in the earliest English
plays. It is rare in Shakespeare, but Ben Jonson made it a particular
feature of his drama, and may almost be said to have invented the
tradition of its regular use. He employed the epilogue for two purposes,
either to assert the merit of the play or to deprecate censure of its
defects. In the former case, as in _Cynthia's Revels_ (1600), the actor
went off, and immediately came on again saying:--
"Gentles, be't known to you, since I went in
I am turned rhymer, and do thus begin:--
The author (jealous how your sense doth take
His travails) hath enjoined me to make
Some short and ceremonious epilogue,"--
and then explained to the audience what an extremely interesting play it
had been. In the second case, when the author was less confident, his
epilogue took a humbler form, as in the comedy of _Volpone_ (1605),
where the actor said:--
"The seasoning of a play is the applause.
Now, as the Fox be punished by the laws,
He yet doth hope, there is no suffering due
For any fact which he hath done 'gainst _you_.
If there be, censure him; here he doubtful stands:
If not, fare jovially and clap your hands."
Beaumont and Fletcher used the epilogue sparingly, but after their day
it came more and more into vogue, and the form was almost invariably
that which Ben Jonson had brought into fashion, namely, the short
complete piece in heroic couplets. The hey-day of the epilogue, however,
was the Restoration, and from 1660 to the decline of the drama in the
reign of Queen Anne scarcely a play, serious or comic, was produced on
the London stage without a prologue and an epilogue. These were almost
always in verse, even if the play itself was in the roughest prose, and
they were intended to impart a certain literary finish to the piece.
These Restoration epilogues were often very elaborate essays or satires,
and were by no means confined to the subject of the preceding play. They
dealt with fashions, or politics, or criticism. The prologues and
epilogues of Dryden are often brilliantly finished exercises in literary
polemic. It became the custom for playwrights to ask their friends to
write these poems for them, and the publishers would even come to a
prominent poet and ask him to supply one for a fee. It gives us an idea
of the seriousness with which the epilogue was treated that Dryden
originally published his valuable "Defence of the Epilogue; or An Essay
on the Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age" (1672) as a defence of the
epilogue which he had written for _The Conquest of Granada_. In France
the custom of reciting dramatic epilogues has never prevailed. French
criticism gives the name to such adieux to the public, at the close of a
non-dramatic work, as are reserved by La Fontaine for certain critical
points in the "Fables." (E. G.)
EPIMENIDES, poet and prophet of Crete, lived in the 6th century B.C.
Many fabulous stories are told of him, and even his existence is
doubted. While tending his father's sheep, he is said to have fallen
into a deep sleep in the Dictaean cave near Cnossus where he lived, from
which he did not awake for fifty-seven years (Diogenes Laërtius i.
109-115). When the Athenians were visited by a pestilence in consequence
of the murder of Cylon, he was invited by Solon (596) to purify the
city. The only reward he would accept was a branch of the sacred olive,
and a promise of perpetual friendship between Athens and Cnossus
(Plutarch, _Solon_, 12; Aristotle, _Ath. Pol._ 1). He died in Crete at
an advanced age; according to his countrymen, who afterwards honoured
him as a god, he lived nearly three hundred years. According to another
story, he was taken prisoner in a war between the Spartans and
Cnossians, and put to death by his captors, because he refused to
prophesy favourably for them. A collection of oracles, a theogony, an
epic poem on the Argonautic expedition, prose works on purifications and
sacrifices, and a cosmogony, were attributed to him. Epimenides must be
reckoned with Melampus and Onomacritus as one of the founders of
Orphism. He is supposed to be the Cretan prophet alluded to in the
epistle to Titus (i. 12).
See C. Schultess, _De Epimenide Cretensi_ (1877); O. Kern, _De Orphei,
Epimenidis ... Theogoniis_ (1888); G. Barone di Vincenzo, _E. di Creta
e le Credenze religiose de' suoi Tempi_ (1880); H. Demoulin,
_Épiménide de Crète_ (1901); H. Diels, _Die Fragmente der
Vorsokratiker_ (1903); O. Kern in Pauly-Wissowa's _Realencyclopädie_.
ÉPINAL, a town on the north-eastern frontier of France, capital of the
department of Vosges, 46 m. S.S.E. of Nancy on the Eastern railway
between that town and Belfort. Pop. (1906), town 21,296, commune
(including garrison) 29,058. The town proper--the Grande Ville--is
situated on the right bank of the Moselle, which at this point divides
into two arms forming an island whereon another quarter--the Petite
Ville--is built. The lesser of these two arms, which is canalized,
separates the island from the suburb of Hospice on its left bank. The
right bank of the Moselle is bordered for some distance by pleasant
promenades, and an extensive park surrounds the ruins of an old
stronghold which dominated the Grande Ville from an eminence on the
east. Apart from the church of St Goëry (or St Maurice) rebuilt in the
13th century but preserving a tower of the 12th century, the public
buildings of Épinal offer little of architectural interest. The old
hospital on the island-quarter contains a museum with interesting
collections of paintings, Gallo-Roman antiquities, sculpture, &c. Close
by stands the library, which possesses many valuable MSS.
The fortifications of Épinal are connected to the southward with
Belfort, Dijon and Besançon, by the fortified line of the Moselle, and
north of it lies the unfortified zone called the _Trouée d'Épinal_, a
gap designedly left open to the invaders between Épinal and Toul,
another great fortress which is itself connected by the Meuse _forts
d'arrêt_ with Verdun and the places of the north-east. Épinal therefore
is a fortress of the greatest possible importance to the defence of
France, and its works, all built since 1870, are formidable permanent
fortifications. The Moselle runs from S. to N. through the middle of the
girdle of forts; the fortifications of the right bank, beginning with
Fort de la Mouche, near the river 3 m. above Épinal, form a chain of
detached forts and batteries over 6 m. long from S. to N., and the
northernmost part of this line is immensely strengthened by numerous
advanced works between the villages of Dognéville and Longchamp. On the
left bank, a larger area of ground is included in the perimeter of
defence for the purposes of encampment, the most westerly of the forts,
Girancourt, being 7 m. distant from Épinal; from the lower Moselle to
Girancourt the works are grouped principally about Uxegney and Sarchey;
from Girancourt to the upper river and Fort de la Mouche a long ridge
extends in an arc, and on this south-western section the principal
defence is Fort Ticha and its annexes. The circle of forts, which has a
perimeter of nearly 30 m., was in 1895 reinforced by the construction of
sixteen new works, and the area of ground enclosed and otherwise
protected by the defences of Épinal is sufficiently extensive to
accommodate a large army.
Épinal is the seat of a prefect and of a court of assizes and has
tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a board of
trade-arbitrators, a chamber of commerce, training-colleges, a communal
college and industrial school, and exchange and a branch of the Bank of
France. The town, which is important as the centre of a cotton-spinning
region, carries on cotton-spinning, -weaving and -printing, brewing and
distilling, and the manufacture of machinery and iron goods, glucose,
embroidery, hats, wall-paper and tapioca. An industry peculiar to Épinal
is the production of cheap images, lithographs and engravings. There is
also trade in wine, grain, live-stock and starch products made in the
vicinity. Épinal is an important junction on the Eastern railway.
Épinal originated towards the end of the 10th century with the founding
of a monastery by Theodoric (Dietrich) I., bishop of Metz, whose
successors ruled the town till 1444, when its inhabitants placed
themselves under the protection of King Charles VII. In 1466 it was
transferred to the duchy of Lorraine, and in 1766 it was, along with
that duchy, incorporated with France. It was occupied by the Germans on
the 12th of October 1870 after a short fight, and until the 15th was the
headquarters of General von Werder.
EPINAOS (Gr. [Greek: epi], after, and [Greek: naos], a temple), in
architecture, the open vestibule behind the nave. The term is not found
in any classic author, but is a modern coinage, originating in Germany,
to differentiate the feature from "opisthodomus," which in the Parthenon
was an enclosed chamber.
ÉPINAY, LOUISE FLORENCE PÉTRONILLE TARDIEU D'ESCLAVELLES D'
(1726-1783), French writer, was born at Valenciennes on the 11th of
March 1726. She is well known on account of her _liaisons_ with Rousseau
and Baron von Grimm, and her acquaintanceship with Diderot, D'Alembert,
D'Holbach and other French men of letters. Her father, Tardieu
d'Esclavelles, a brigadier of infantry, was killed in battle when she
was nineteen; and she married her cousin Denis Joseph de La Live
d'Épinay, who was made a collector-general of taxes. The marriage was an
unhappy one; and Louise d'Épinay believed that the prodigality,
dissipation and infidelities of her husband justified her in obtaining a
formal separation in 1749. She settled in the château of La Chevrette in
the valley of Montmorency, and there received a number of distinguished
visitors. Conceiving a strong attachment for J.J. Rousseau, she
furnished for him in 1756 in the valley of Montmorency a cottage which
she named the "Hermitage," and in this retreat he found for a time the
quiet and natural rural pleasures he praised so highly. Rousseau, in his
_Confessions_, affirmed that the inclination was all on her side; but
as, after her visit to Geneva, Rousseau became her bitter enemy, little
weight can be given to his statements on this point. Her intimacy with
Grimm, which began in 1755, marks a turning-point in her life, for under
his influence she escaped from the somewhat compromising conditions of
her life at La Chevrette. In 1757-1759 she paid a long visit to Geneva,
where she was a constant guest of Voltaire. In Grimm's absence from
France (1775-1776), Madame d'Épinay continued, under the superintendence
of Diderot, the correspondence he had begun with various European
sovereigns. She spent most of her later life at La Briche, a small house
near La Chevrette, in the society of Grimm and of a small circle of men
of letters. She died on the 17th of April 1783. Her _Conversations
d'Émilie_ (1774), composed for the education of her grand-daughter,
Émilie de Belsunce, was crowned by the French Academy in 1783. The
_Mémoires et Correspondance de Mme d'Épinay, renfermant un grand nombre
de lettres inédites de Grimm, de Diderot, et de J.-J. Rousseau, ainsi
que des détails_, &c, was published at Paris (1818) from a MS. which she
had bequeathed to Grimm. The _Mémoires_ are written by herself in the
form of a sort of autobiographic romance. Madame d'Épinay figures in it
as Madame de Montbrillant, and René is generally recognized as Rousseau,
Volx as Grimm, Garnier as Diderot. All the letters and documents
published along with the _Mémoires_ are genuine. Many of Madame
d'Épinay's letters are contained in the _Correspondance de l'abbé
Galiani_ (1818). Two anonymous works, _Lettres à mon fils_ (Geneva,
1758) and _Mes moments heureux_ (Geneva, 1759), are also by Madame
d'Épinay.
See Rousseau's _Confessions_; Lucien Perey [Mlle Herpin] and Gaston
Maugras, _La Jeunesse de Mme d'Épinay, les dernières années de Mme
d'Épinay_ (1882-1883); Sainte-Beuve, _Causeries du lundi_, vol. ii.;
Edmond Scherer, _Études sur la littérature contemporaine_, vols. iii.
and vii. There are editions of the _Mémoires_ by L. Énault (1855) and
by P. Boiteau (1865); and an English translation, with introduction
and notes (1897), by J.H. Freese.
EPIPHANIUS, SAINT (c. 315-402), a celebrated Church Father, born in the
beginning of the 4th century at Bezanduca, a village of Palestine, near
Eleutheropolis. He is said to have been of Jewish extraction. In his
youth he resided in Egypt, where he began an ascetic course of life,
and, freeing himself from Gnostic influences, invoked episcopal
assistance against heretical thinkers, eighty of whom were driven from
the cities. On his return to Palestine he was ordained presbyter by the
bishop of Eleutheropolis, and became the president of a monastery which
he founded near his native place. The account of his intimacy with the
patriarch Hilarion is not trustworthy. In 367 he was nominated bishop of
Constantia, previously known as Salamis, the metropolis of Cyprus--an
office which he held till his death in 402. Zealous for the truth, but
passionate and bigoted, he devoted himself to two great labours, namely,
the spread of the recently established monasticism, and the confutation
of heresy, of which he regarded Origen and his followers as the chief
representatives. The first of the Origenists that he attacked was John,
bishop of Jerusalem, whom he denounced from his own pulpit at Jerusalem
(394) in terms so violent that the bishop sent his archdeacon to request
him to desist; and afterwards, instigated by Theophilus, bishop of
Alexandria, he proceeded so far as to summon a council of Cyprian
bishops to condemn the errors of Origen. In his closing years he came
into conflict with Chrysostom, the patriarch of Constantinople, who had
given temporary shelter to four Nitrian monks whom Theophilus had
expelled on the charge of Origenism. The monks gained the support of the
empress Eudoxia, and when she summoned Theophilus to Constantinople that
prelate forced the aged Epiphanius to go with him. He had some
controversy with Chrysostom but did not stay to see the result of
Theophilus's machinations, and died on his way home. The principal work
of Epiphanius is the _Panarion_, or treatise on heresies, of which he
also wrote an abridgment. It is a "medicine chest" of remedies for all
kinds of heretical belief, of which he names eighty varieties. His
accounts of the earlier errors (where he has preserved for us large
excerpts from the original Greek of Irenaeus) are more reliable than
those of contemporary heresies. In his desire to see the Church safely
moored he also wrote the _Ancoratus_, or discourse on the true faith.
His encyclopaedic learning shows itself in a treatise on Jewish weights
and measures, and another (incomplete) on ancient gems. These, with two
epistles to John of Jerusalem and Jerome, are his only genuine remains.
He wrote a large number of works which are lost. In allusion to his
knowledge of Hebrew, Syriac, Egyptian, Greek and Latin, Jerome styles
Epiphanius [Greek: Pentaglôssos] (Five-tongued); but if his knowledge of
languages was really so extensive, it is certain that he was utterly
destitute of critical and logical power. His early asceticism seems to
have imbued him with a love of the marvellous; and his religious zeal
served only to increase his credulity. His erudition is outweighed by
his prejudice, and his inability to recognize the responsibilities of
authorship makes it necessary to assign most value to those portions of
his works which he simply cites from earlier writers.
The primary sources for the life are the church histories of Socrates
and Sozomen, Palladius's _De vita Chrysostomi_ and Jerome's _De vir.
illust._ 114. Petau (Petavius) published an edition of the works in 2
vols. fol. at Paris in 1622; cf. Migne, _Patr. Graec._ 41-43. The
Panarion and other works were edited by F. Oehler (Berlin, 1859-1861).
For more recent work especially on the fragments see K. Bonwetsch's
art. in Herzog-Hauck's _Realencyk._ v. 417.
Other theologians of the same name were: (1) Epiphanius Scholasticus,
friend and helper of Cassiodorus; (2) Epiphanius, bishop of Ticinum
(Pavia), c. 438-496; (3) Epiphanius, bishop of Constantia and
Metropolitan of Cyprus (the Younger), c. A.D. 680, to whom some
critics have ascribed certain of the works supposed to have been
written by the greater Epiphanius; (4) Epiphanius, bishop of
Constantia in the 9th century, to whom a similar attribution has been
made.
EPIPHANY, FEAST OF. The word epiphany, in Greek, signifies an apparition
of a divine being. It was used as a singular or a plural, both in its
Greek and Latin forms, according as one epiphany was contemplated or
several united in a single commemoration. For in the East from an early
time were associated with the feast of the Baptism of Christ
commemorations of the physical birth, of the Star of the Magi, of the
miracles of Cana, and of the feeding of the five thousand. The
commemoration of the Baptism was also called by the Greek fathers of the
4th century the Theophany or Theophanies, and the Day of Lights, i.e. of
the Illumination of Jesus or of the Light which shone in the Jordan. In
the Teutonic west it has become the Festival of the three kings (i.e.
the Magi), or simply Twelfth day. Leo the Great called it the Feast of
the _Declaration_; Fulgentius, of the _Manifestation_; others, of the
_Apparition_ of Christ.
In the following article it is attempted to ascertain the date of
institution of the Epiphany feast, its origin, and its significance and
development.
Clement of Alexandria first mentions it. Writing c. 194 he states that
the Basilidians feasted the day of the Baptism, devoting the whole night
which preceded it to lections of the scriptures. They fixed it in the
15th year of Tiberius, on the 15th or 11th of the month Tobi, dates of
the Egyptian fixed calendar equivalent to January 10th and 6th. When
Clement wrote the great church had not adopted the feast, but toward
A.D. 300 it was widely in vogue. Thus the Acts of Philip the Martyr,
bishop of Heraclea in Thrace, A.D. 304, mention the "holy day of the
Epiphany." Note the singular. Origen seems not to have heard of it as a
feast of the Catholic church, but Hippolytus (died c. 235) recognized it
in a homily which may be genuine.
In the age of the Nicene Council, A.D. 325, the primate of Alexandria
was charged at every Epiphany Feast to announce to the churches in a
"Festal Letter" the date of the forthcoming Easter. Several such letters
written by Athanasius and others remain. In the churches so addressed
the feast of Jan. 6 must have been already current.
In Jerusalem, according to the Epistle of Macarius[1] to the Armenians,
c. 330, the feast was kept with zeal and splendour, and was with Easter
and Pentecost a favourite season for Baptism.
We have evidence of the 4th century from Spain that a long fast marked
the season of Advent, and prepared for the feast of Epiphany on the 6th
of January. The council of Saragossa c. 380 enacted that for 21 days,
from the 17th of December to the 6th of January, the Epiphany, the
faithful should not dance or make merry, but steadily frequent the
churches. The synod of Lerida in 524 went further and forbade marriages
during Advent. Our earliest Spanish lectionary, the _Liber comicus_ of
Toledo, edited by Don Morin (_Anecd. Maredsol._ vol. i.), provides
lections for five Sundays in Advent, and the gospel lections[2] chosen
regard the Baptism of Christ, not His Birth, of which the feast, like
that of the Annunciation, is mentioned, but not yet dated, December 25
being assigned to St Stephen. It is odd that for "the Apparition of the
Lord" the lection Matt. ii. 1-15 is assigned, although the lections for
Advent belong to a scheme which identified Epiphany with the Baptism.
This anomaly we account for below. The old editor of the Mozarabic
Liturgy, Fr. Antonio Lorenzano, notes in his preface § 28 that the
Spaniards anciently terminated the Advent season with the Epiphany
Feast. In Rome also the earliest fixed system of the ecclesiastical
year, which may go back to 300, makes Epiphany the _caput festorum_ or
chief of feasts. The Sundays of Advent lead up to it, and the first
Sundays of the year are "The Sunday within the octave of Epiphany," "the
first Sunday after," and so forth. December 25 is no critical date at
all. In Armenia as early as 450 a month of fasting prepared for the
Advent of the Lord at Epiphany, and the fast was interpreted as a
reiteration of John the Baptist's season of Repentance.
In Antioch as late as about 386 Epiphany and Easter were the two great
feasts, and the physical Birth of Christ was not yet feasted. On the eve
of Epiphany after nightfall the springs and rivers were blessed, and
water was drawn from them and stored for the whole year to be used in
lustrations and baptisms. Such water, says Chrysostom, to whose orations
we owe the information, kept pure and fresh for one, two and three
years, and like good wine actually improved the longer it was kept. Note
that Chrysostom speaks of the Feast of the _Epiphanies_, implying two,
one of the Baptism, the other of the Second Advent, when Christ will be
manifested afresh, and we with him in glory. This Second Epiphany
inspired, as we saw, the choice of Pauline lections in the _Liber
comicus_. But the salient event commemorated was the Baptism, and
Chrysostom almost insists on this as the exclusive significance of the
feast:--"It was not when he was born that he became manifest to all, but
when he was baptized." In his commentary on Ezekiel Jerome employs the
same language _absconditus est et non apparuit_, by way of protest
against an interpretation of the Feast as that of the Birth of Jesus in
Bethlehem, which was essayed as early as 375 by Epiphanius in Cyprus,
and was being enforced in Jerome's day by John, bishop of Jerusalem.
Epiphanius boldly removed the date of the Baptism to the 8th of
November. "January 6" (= Tobi 11), he writes, "is the day of Christ's
Birth, that is, of the Epiphanies." He uses the plural, because he adds
on January 6 the commemoration of the water miracle of Cana. Although in
375 he thus protested that January 6 was the day "of the Birth after the
Flesh," he became before the end of the century a convert, according to
John of Nice, to the new opinion that December 25 was the real day of
this Birth. That as early as about 385, January 6 was kept as the
physical birthday in Jerusalem, or rather in Bethlehem, we know from a
contemporary witness of it, the lady pilgrim of Gaul, whose
_peregrinatio_, recently discovered by Gamurrini, is confirmed by the
old Jerusalem Lectionary preserved in Armenian.[3] Ephraem the Syrian
father is attested already by Epiphanius (c. 375) to have celebrated the
physical birth on January 6. His genuine Syriac hymns confirm this, but
prove that the Baptism, the Star of the Magi, and the Marriage at Cana
were also commemorated on the same day. That the same union prevailed in
Rome up to the year 354 may be inferred from Ambrose. Philastrius (_De
haer._ ch. 140) notes that some abolished the Epiphany feast and
substituted a Birth feast. This was between 370 and 390.
In 385 Pope Siricius[4] calls January 6 _Natalicia_, "the Birthday of
Christ or of Apparition," and protests against the Spanish custom (at
Tarragona) of baptizing on that day--another proof that in Spain in the
4th century it commemorated the Baptism. In Gaul at Vienna in 360 Julian
the Apostate, out of deference to Christian feeling, went to church "on
the festival which they keep in January and call Epiphania." So
Ammianus; but Zonaras in his Greek account of the event calls it the day
of the Saviour's Birth.
Why the feast of the Baptism was called the feast or day of the
Saviour's Birth, and why fathers of that age when they call Christmas
the birthday constantly qualify and add the words "in the flesh," we are
able to divine from Pope Leo's (c. 447) 18th Epistle to the bishops of
Sicily. For here we learn that in Sicily they held that in His Baptism
the Saviour was reborn through the Holy Spirit. "The Lord," protests
Leo, "needed no remission of sins, no remedy of rebirth." The Sicilians
also baptized neophytes on January 6, "because baptism conveyed to Jesus
and to them one and the same grace." Not so, argues Leo, the Lord
sanctioned and hallowed the power of regeneration, not when He was
baptized, but "when the blood of redemption and the water of baptism
flowed forth from his side." Neophytes should therefore be baptized at
Easter and Pentecost alone, never at Epiphany.
Fortune has preserved to us among the _Spuria_ of several Latin fathers,
Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Maximus of Turin, various homilies for
Sundays of the Advent fast and for Epiphany. The Advent lections of
these homilists were much the same as those of the Spanish _Liber
comicus_; and they insist on Advent being kept as a strict fast, without
marriage celebrations. Their Epiphany lection is however Matt. iii.
1-17, which must therefore have once on a time been assigned in the
_Liber comicus_ also in harmony with its general scheme. The psalms used
on the day are, cxiii. (cxiv.) "When Israel went forth," xxviii. (xxix.)
"Give unto the Lord," and xxii. (xxiii.) "the Lord is my Shepherd." The
same lection of Matthew and also Ps. xxix. are noted for Epiphany in the
Greek oration for the day ascribed to Hippolytus, which is at least
earlier than 300, and also in special old Epiphany rites for the
Benediction of the waters found in Latin, Greek, Armenian, Coptic,
Syriac, &c. Now by these homilists as by Chrysostom,[5] the Baptism is
regarded as the occasion on which "the Saviour first _appeared_ after
the flesh in the world or on earth." These words were classical to the
homilists, who explain them as best they can. The baptism is also
declared to have been "the consecration of Christ," and "regeneration of
Christ and a strengthening of our faith," to have been "Christ's second
nativity." "This _second birth_ hath more renown than his first ... for
now the God of majesty is inscribed (as his father), but then (at his
first birth) Joseph the Carpenter was assumed to be his father ... he
hath more honour who cries aloud from Heaven (viz. God the Father), than
he who labours upon earth" (viz. Joseph).[6]
Similarly the old _ordo Romanus_ of the age of Pepin (given by
Montfaulcon in his preface to the Mozarabic missal in Migne, _Patr.
Latina_, 85, col. 46), under the rubric of the Vigil of the Theophany,
insists that "the _second birth_ of Christ (in Baptism) being
distinguished by so many mysteries (e.g. the miracle of Cana) is more
honoured than the first" (birth from Mary).
These homilies mostly belong to an age (? 300-400) when the commemoration
of the physical Birth had not yet found its own day (Dec. 25), and was
therefore added alongside of the Baptism on January 6. Thus the two
Births, the physical and the spiritual, of Jesus were celebrated on one
and the same day, and one homily contains the words: "Not yet is the feast
of his origin fully completed, and already we have to celebrate the solemn
commemoration of his Baptism. He has hardly been born humanwise, and
already he is being _reborn_ in sacramental wise. For to-day, though after
a lapse of many annual cycles, he was hallowed (or consecrated) in Jordan.
So the Lord arranged as to link rite with rite; I mean, in such wise as to
be brought forth through the Virgin and to be begotten through the mystery
(i.e. sacrament) in one and the same season." Another homily preserved in
a MS. of the 7th or 8th century and assigned to Maximus of Turin declares
that the Epiphany was known as the Birthday of Jesus, either because He
was then born of the Virgin or _reborn in baptism_. This also was the
classical defence made by Armenian fathers of their custom of keeping the
feast of the Birth and Baptism together on January 6. They argued from
Luke's gospel that the Annunciation took place on April 6, and therefore
the Birth on January 6. The Baptism was on Christ's thirtieth birthday,
and should therefore be also kept on January 6. Cosmas Indicopleustes (c.
550) relates that on the same grounds believers of Jerusalem joined the
feasts. All such reasoning was of course _après coup_. As late as the 9th
century the Armenians had at least three discrepant dates for the
Annunciation--January 5, January 9, April 6; and of these January 5 and 9
were older than April 6, which they perhaps borrowed from Epiphanius's
commentary on the Gospels. The old Latin homilist, above quoted, hits the
mark when he declares that the innate logic of things required the Baptism
(which must, he says, be any how called a natal or birth festival) to fall
on the same day as Christmas--_Ratio enim exigit_. Of the argument from
the 6th of April as the date of the Annunciation he knows nothing. The
12th century Armenian Patriarch Nerses, like this homilist, merely rests
his case against the Greeks, who incessantly reproached the Armenians for
ignoring their Christmas on December 25, on the inherent logic of things,
as follows:
"Just as he was born after the flesh from the holy virgin, so he was
_born_ through baptism and from the Jordan, by way of example unto us.
And since there are here _two births_, albeit differing one from the
other in mystic import and in point of time, therefore it was
appointed that we should feast them together, as the first, so also
the second birth."
The Epiphany feast had therefore in its own right acquired the name of
_natalis dies_ or birthday, as commemorating the spiritual rebirth of
Jesus in Jordan, before the _natalis in carne_, the Birthday _in the
flesh_, as Jerome and others call it, was associated with it. This idea
was condemned as Ebionite in the 3rd century, yet it influences
Christian writers long before and long afterwards. So Tertullian says:
"We little fishes (_pisciculi_), after the example of our great fish
([Greek: ichthyn]) Jesus Christ the Lord, are born (_gignimur_) in the
water, nor except by abiding in the water are we in a state of
salvation." And Hilary, like the Latin homilists cited above, writes of
Jesus that "he was _born again_ through baptism, and then became Son of
God," adding that the Father cried, when he had gone up out of the
water, "My Son art thou, I have this day begotten thee" (Luke iii. 22).
"But this," he adds, "was with the begetting of a man who is being
reborn; on that occasion too he himself was being reborn unto God to be
perfect son; as he was son of man, so in baptism, he was constituted son
of God as well." The idea frequently meets us in Hilary; it occurs in
the Epiphany hymn of the orthodox Greek church, and in the Epiphany
hymns and homilies of the Armenians.
A letter is preserved by John of Nice of a bishop of Jerusalem to the
bishop of Rome which attests a temporary union of both feasts on January
6 in the holy places. The faithful, it says, met before dawn at
Bethlehem to celebrate the Birth from the Virgin in the cave; but before
their hymns and lections were finished they had to hurry off to Jordan,
13 m. the other side of Jerusalem, to celebrate the Baptism, and by
consequence neither commemoration could be kept fully and reverently.
The writer therefore begs the pope to look in the archives of the Jews
brought to Rome after the destruction of Jerusalem, and to ascertain
from them the real date of Christ's birth. The pope looked in the works
of Josephus and found it to be December 25. The letter's genuineness has
been called in question; but revealing as it does the Church's ignorance
of the date of the Birth, the inconvenience and precariousness of its
association with the Baptism, the recency of its separate institution,
it could not have been invented. It is too tell-tale a document. Not the
least significant fact about it is that it views the Baptism as an
established feast which cannot be altered and set on another date. Not
it but the physical birth must be removed from January 6 to another
date. It has been shown above that perhaps as early as 380 the
difficulty was got over in Jerusalem by making the Epiphany wholly and
solely a commemoration of the miraculous birth, and suppressing the
commemoration of the Baptism. Therefore this letter must have been
written--or, if invented, then invented before that date. Chrysostom
seems to have known of it, for in his Epiphany homily preached at
Antioch, c. 392 (op. vol. ii. 354, ed. Montf.), he refers to the
archives at Rome as the source from which the date December 25 could be
confirmed, and declares that he had obtained it from those who dwell
there, and who observing it from the beginning and by old tradition, had
communicated it to the East. The question arises why the feast of the
Baptism was set on January 6 by the sect of Basilides? And why the great
church adopted the date? Now we know what sort of considerations
influenced this sect in fixing other feasts, so we have a clue. They
fixed the Birth of Jesus on Pachon 25 (= May 20), the day of the Niloa,
or feast of the descent of the Nile from heaven. We should thus expect
January 6 to be equally a Nile festival. And this from various sources
we know it was. On Tobi 11, says Epiphanius[7] (c. 370), every one draws
up water from the river and stores it up, not only in Egypt itself, but
in many other countries. In many places, he adds, springs and rivers
turn into wine on this day, e.g. at Cibyra in Caria and Gerasa in
Arabia. Aristides Rhetor (c. 160) also relates how in the winter, which
began with Tobi, the Nile water was at its purest. Its water, he says,
if drawn at the right time conquers time, for it does not go bad,
whether you keep it on the spot or export it. Galleys were waiting on a
certain night to take it on board and transport it to Italy and
elsewhere for libations and lustrations in the Temples of Isis. "Such
water," he adds, "remained fresh, long after other water supplies had
gone bad. The Egyptians filled their pitchers with this water, as others
did with wine; they stored it in their houses for three or four years or
more, and recommended it the more, the older it grew, just as the Greeks
did their wines."
Two centuries later Chrysostom, as we have seen, commends in identical
terms the water blessed and drawn from the rivers at the Baptismal
feast. It is therefore probable that the Basilidian feast was a
Christianized form of the blessing of the Nile, called by Chabas in his
Coptic calendar _Hydreusis_. Mas'udi the Arab historian of the 10th
century, in his _Prairies d'or_ (French trans. Paris, 1863, ii. 364),
enlarges on the splendours of this feast as he saw it still celebrated
in Egypt.
Epiphanius also (_Haer._ 51) relates a curious celebration held at
Alexandria of the Birth of the Aeon. On January 5 or 6 the votaries met
in the holy compound or Temple of the Maiden (Kore), and sang hymns to
the music of the flute till dawn, when they went down with torches into
a shrine under ground, and fetched up a wooden idol on a bier
representing Kore, seated and naked, with crosses marked on her brow,
her hands and her knees. Then with flute-playing, hymns and dances they
carried the image seven times round the central shrine, before restoring
it again to its dwelling-place below. He adds: "And the votaries say
that to-day at this hour _Kore_, that is, the Virgin, gave birth to the
Aeon."
Epiphanius says this was a heathen rite, but it rather resembles some
Basilidian or Gnostic commemoration of the spiritual birth of the Divine
life in Jesus of the Christhood, from the older creation the Ecclesia.
The earliest extant Greek text of the Epiphany rite is in a Euchologion
of about the year 795, now in the Vatican. The prayers recite that at
His baptism Christ hallowed the waters by His presence in Jordan,[8] and
ask that they may now be blessed by the Holy Spirit visiting them, by
its power and inworking, as the streams of Jordan were blessed. So they
will be able to purify soul and body of all who draw up and partake of
them. The hymn sung contains such clauses as these:
"To-day the grace of the Holy Spirit hallowing the waters appears
([Greek: epiphainetai], cf. Epiphany).... To-day the systems of waters
spread out their backs under the Lord's footsteps. To-day the unseen
is seen, that he may reveal himself to us. To-day the Increate is of
his own will ordained (lit. hath hands laid on him) by his own
creature. To-day the Unbending bends his neck to his own servant, in
order to free us from servitude. To-day we were liberated from
darkness and are illumined by light of divine knowledge. To-day for us
the Lord by means of rebirth (lit. palingenesy) of the Image reshapes
the Archetype."
This last clause is obscure. In the Armenian hymns the ideas of the
rebirth not only of believers, but of Jesus, and of the latter's
ordination by John, are very prominent.
The history of the Epiphany feast may be summed up thus:--
From the Jews the Church took over the feasts of Pascha and Pentecost;
and Sunday was a weekly commemoration of the Resurrection. It was
inevitable, however, that believers should before long desire to
commemorate the Baptism, with which the oldest form of evangelical
tradition began, and which was widely regarded as the occasion when the
divine life began in Jesus; when the Logos or Holy Spirit appeared and
rested on Him, conferring upon Him spiritual unction as the promised
Messiah; when, according to an old reading of Luke iii. 22, He was
begotten of God. Perhaps the Ebionite Christians of Palestine first
instituted the feast, and this, if a fact, must underlie the statement
of John of Nice, a late but well-informed writer (c. 950), that it was
fixed by the disciples of John the Baptist who were present at Jesus'
Baptism. The Egyptian gnostics anyhow had the feast and set it on
January 6, a day of the blessing of the Nile. It was a feast of
Adoptionist complexion, as one of its names, viz. the Birthday (Greek
[Greek: genethlia], Latin _Natalicia_ or _Natalis dies_), implies. This
explains why in east and west the feast of the physical Birth was for a
time associated with it; and to justify this association it was
suggested that Jesus was baptized just on His thirtieth birthday. In
Jerusalem and Syria it was perhaps the Ebionite or Adoptionist, we may
add also the Gnostic, associations of the Baptism that caused this
aspect of Epiphany to be relegated to the background, so that it became
wholly a feast of the miraculous birth. At the same time other
epiphanies of Christ were superadded, e.g. of Cana where Christ began
His miracles by turning water into wine and _manifested_ forth His
glory, and of the Star of the Magi. Hence it is often called the Feast
of _Epiphanies_ (in the plural). In the West the day is commonly called
the Feast of the three kings, and its early significance as a
commemoration of the Baptism and season of blessing the waters has been
obscured; the Eastern churches, however, of Greece, Russia, Georgia,
Armenia, Egypt, Syria have been more conservative. In the far East it is
still the season of seasons for baptisms, and in Armenia children born
long before are baptized at it. Long ago it was a baptismal feast in
Sicily, Spain, Italy (see Pope Gelasius to the Lucanian Bishops), Africa
and Ireland. In the Manx prayer-book of Bishop Phillips of the year 1610
Epiphany is called the "little Nativity" (_La nolicky bigge_), and the
Sunday which comes between December 25 and January 6 is "the Sunday
between _the two Nativities_," or _Jih dúni oedyr 'a Nolick_; Epiphany
itself is the "feast of the water vessel," _lail ymmyrt uyskey_, or "of
the well of water," _Chibbyrt uysky_.
AUTHORITIES.--Gregory Nazianz., Orat. xli.; Suicer, _Thesaurus_, s.v.
[Greek: epiphaneia]; Cotelerius _In constit. Apost._ (Antwerp, 1698),
lib. v. cap. 13; R. Bingham, _Antiquities_ (London, 1834), bk. xx.;
Ad. Jacoby, _Bericht über die Taufe Jesu_ (Strassburg, 1902); H.
Blumenbach, _Antiquitates Epiphaniorum_ (Leipzig, 1737); J.L. Schulze,
_De festo Sanctorum Luminum_, ed. J.E. Volbeding (Leipzig, 1841); and
K.A.H. Kellner, _Heortologie_ (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1906). (See also
the works enumerated under CHRISTMAS.) (F. C. C.)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] For its text see _The Key of Truth_, translated by F.C.
Conybeare, Oxford, and the article ARMENIAN CHURCH.
[2] These are Matt. iii. 1-11, xi. 2-15, xxi. 1-9; Mark i. 1-8; Luke
iii. 1-18. The Pauline lections regard the Epiphany of the Second
Advent, of the prophetic or Messianic kingdom.
[3] Translated in _Rituale Armenorum_ (Oxford, 1905).
[4] Epist. ad Himerium, c. 2.
[5] Hom. I. in Pentec. _op._ tom. ii. 458; "With us the Epiphanies is
the first festival. What is this festival's significance? This, that
God was seen upon earth and consorted with men." For this idea there
had soon to be substituted that of the manifestation of Christ to the
Gentiles.
[6] See the Paris edition of Augustine (1838), tom. v., Appendix,
_Sermons_ cxvi., cxxv., cxxxv., cxxxvi., cxxxvii.; cf. tom. vi.
_dial. quaestionum_, xlvi.; Maximus of Turin, Homily xxx.
[7] Perhaps Epiphanius is here, after his wont, transcribing an
earlier source.
[8] The same idea is frequent in Epiphany homilies of Chrysostom and
other 4th-century fathers.
EPIRUS, or EPEIRUS, an ancient district of Northern Greece extending
along the Ionian Sea from the Acroceraunian promontory on the N. to the
Ambracian gulf on the S. It was conterminous on the landward side with
Illyria, Macedonia and Thessaly, and thus corresponds to the southern
portion of Albania (q.v.). The name Epirus ([Greek: Êpeiros]) signified
"mainland," and was originally applied to the whole coast southward to
the Corinthian Gulf, in contradistinction to the neighbouring islands,
Corcyra, Leucas, &c. The country is all mountainous, especially towards
the east, where the great rivers of north-western Greece--Achelous,
Arachthus and Aous--rise in Mt Lacmon, the back-bone of the Pindus
chain. In ancient times Epirus did not produce corn sufficient for the
wants of its inhabitants; but it was celebrated, as it has been almost
to the present day, for its cattle and its horses. According to
Theopompus (4th cent. B.C.), the Epirots were divided into fourteen
independent tribes, of which the principal were the Chaones, the
Thesproti and the Molossi. The Chaones (perhaps akin to the Chones who
dwelt in the heel of Italy) inhabited the Acroceraunian shore, the
Molossians the inland districts round the lake of Pambotis (mod.
Jannina), and the Thesprotians the region to the north of the Ambracian
gulf. In spite of its distance from the chief centres of Greek thought
and action, and the barbarian repute of its inhabitants, Epirus was
believed to have exerted at an early period no small influence on
Greece, by means more especially of the oracle of Dodona. Aristotle even
placed in Epirus the original home of the Hellenes. But in historic
times its part in Greek history is mainly passive. The states of Greece
proper founded a number of colonies on its coast, which formed
stepping-stones towards the Adriatic and the West. Of these one of the
earliest and most flourishing was the Corinthian colony of Ambracia,
which gives its name to the neighbouring gulf. Elatria, Bucheta and
Pandosia, in Thesprotia, originated from Elis. Among the other towns in
the country the following were of some importance. In Chaonia: Palaeste
and Chimaera, fortified posts to which the dwellers in the open country
could retire in time of war; Onchesmus or Anchiasmus, opposite Corcyra
(Corfu), now represented by Santi Quarante; Phoenice, still so called,
the wealthiest of all the native cities of Epirus, and after the fall of
the Molossian kingdom the centre of an Epirotic League; Buthrotum, the
modern Butrinto; Phanote, important in the Roman campaigns in Epirus;
and Adrianopolis, founded by the emperor whose name it bore. In
Thesprotia: Cassope, the chief town of the most powerful of the
Thesprotian clans; and Ephyra, afterwards Cichyrus, identified by W.M.
Leake with the monastery of St John 3 or 4 m. from Phanari, and by C.
Bursian with Kastri at the northern end of the Acherusian Lake. In
Molossia: Passaron, where the kings were wont to take the oath of the
constitution and receive their people's allegiance; and Tecmon, Phylace
and Horreum, all of doubtful identification. The Byzantine town of Rogus
is probably the same as the modern Luro, the Greek Oropus.
_History._--The kings, or rather chieftains, of the Molossians, who
ultimately extended their power over all Epirus, claimed to be descended
from Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, who, according to legend, settled in the
country after the sack of Troy, and transmitted his kingdom to Molossus,
his son by Andromache. The early history of the dynasty is very obscure;
but Admetus, who lived in the 5th century B.C., is remembered for his
hospitable reception of the banished Themistocles, in spite of the fact
that the great Athenian had persuaded his countrymen to refuse the
alliance tardily offered by the Molossians when victory against the
Persians was already secured. Admetus was succeeded, about 429 B.C., by
his son or grandson, Tharymbas or Arymbas I., who being placed by a
decree of the people under the guardianship of Sabylinthus, chief of the
Atintanes, was educated at Athens, and at a later date introduced a
higher civilization among his subjects. Alcetas, the next king mentioned
in history, was restored to his throne by Dionysius of Syracuse about
385 B.C. His son Arymbas II. (who succeeded by the death of his brother
Neoptolemus) ruled with prudence and equity, and gave encouragement to
literature and the arts. To him Xenocrates of Chalcedon dedicated his
four books on the art of governing; and it is specially mentioned that
he bestowed great care on the education of his brother's children. One
of them, Troas, he married; Olympias, the other niece, was married to
Philip II. of Macedon and became the mother of Alexander the Great. On
the death of Arymbas, Alexander the brother of Olympias, was put on the
throne by Philip and married his daughter Cleopatra. Alexander assumed
the new title of king of Epirus, and raised the reputation of his
country abroad. Asked by the Tarentines for aid against the Samnites and
Lucanians, he made a descent at Paestum in 332 B.C., and reduced several
cities of the Lucani and Bruttii; but in a second attack he was
surrounded, defeated and slain near Pandosia in Bruttium.
Aeacides, the son of Arymbas II., succeeded Alexander. He espoused the
cause of Olympias against Cassander, but was dethroned by his own
soldiers, and had hardly regained his position when he fell in battle
(313 B.C.) against Philip, brother of Cassander. He had, by his wife
Phthia, a son, the celebrated Pyrrhus, and two daughters, Deidamia and
Troas, of whom the former married Demetrius Poliorcetes. His brother
Alcetas, who succeeded him, continued unsuccessfully the war with
Cassander; he was put to death by his rebellious subjects in 295 B.C.,
and was succeeded by Pyrrhus (q.v.), who for six years fought against
the Romans in south Italy and Sicily, and gave to Epirus a momentary
importance which it never again possessed.
Alexander, his son, who succeeded in 272 B.C., attempted to seize
Macedonia, and defeated Antigonus Gonatas, but was himself shortly
afterwards driven from his kingdom by Demetrius. He recovered it,
however, and spent the rest of his days in peace. Two other
insignificant reigns brought the family of Pyrrhus to its close, and
Epirus was thenceforward governed by a magistrate, elected annually in a
general assembly of the nation held at Passaron. Having imprudently
espoused the cause of Perseus (q.v.) in his ill-fated war against the
Romans, 168 B.C., it was exposed to the fury of the conquerors, who
destroyed, it is said, seventy towns, and carried into slavery 150,000
of the inhabitants. From this blow it never recovered. At the
dissolution of the Achaean League (q.v.), 146 B.C., it became part of
the province of Macedonia, receiving the name Epirus Vetus, to
distinguish it from Epirus Nova, which lay to the east.
On the division of the empire it fell to the East, and so remained
until the taking of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204, when Michel
Angelus Comnenus seized Aetolia and Epirus. On the death of Michel in
1216, these countries fell into the hands of his brother Theodore.
Thomas, the last of the direct line, was murdered in 1318 by his nephew
Thomas, lord of Zante and Cephalonia, and his dominions were
dismembered. Not long after, Epirus was overrun by the Samians and
Albanians, and the confusion which had been growing since the division
of the empire was worse confounded still. Charles II. Tocco, lord of
Cephalonia and Zante, obtained the recognition of his title of Despot of
Epirus from the emperor Manuel Comnenus in the beginning of the 15th
century; but his family was deprived of their possession in 1431 by
Murad (Amurath) II. In 1443, Scanderbeg, king of Albania, made himself
master of a considerable part of Epirus; but on his death it fell into
the power of the Venetians. From these it passed again to the Turks,
under whose dominion it still remains. For modern history see ALBANIA.
AUTHORITIES.--Nauze, "Rech. hist. sur les peuples qui s'établirent en
Épire," in _Mém. de l'Acad. des Inscr._ (1729); Pouqueville, _Voyage
en Morée, &c, en Albanie_ (Paris, 1805); Hobhouse, _A Journey through
Albania, &c._ (2 vols., London, 1813); Wolfe, "Observations on the
Gulf of Arta" in _Journ. Royal Geog. Soc._, 1834; W.M. Leake, Travels
in Northern Greece (London, 1835): Merleker, Darstellung des _Landes
und der Bewohner von Epeiros_ (Königsberg, 1841); J.H. Skene,
"Remarkable Localities on the Coast of Epirus," in _Journ. Roy. Geog.
Soc._, 1848; Bowen, _Mount Athos, Thessaly and Epirus_ (London, 1852);
von Hahn, _Albanesische Studien_ (Jena, 1854); Bursian, _Geog. von
Griechenland_ (vol. i., Leipzig, 1862); Schäfli, "Versuch einer
Klimatologie des Thales von Jannina," _Neue Denkschr. d. allgem.
schweizer. Ges. f. Naturw._ xix. (Zürich, 1862); Major R. Stuart, "On
Phys. Geogr. and Natural Resources of Epirus," in _Journ. R.G.S._,
1869; Guido Cora, in _Cosmos_; Dumont, "Souvenirs de l'Adriatique, de
l'Épire, &c." in _Rev. des deux mondes_ (Paris, 1872); de Gubernatis,
"L'Epiro," _Bull. Soc. Geogr. Ital._ viii. (Rome, 1872); Dozon,
"Excursion en Albanie," _Bull. Soc. Geogr._, 6th series; Karapanos,
_Dodone et ses ruines_ (Paris, 1878); von Heldreich, "Ein Beitrag zur
Flora von Epirus," _Verh. Bot. Vereins Brandenburg_ (Berlin, 1880);
Kiepert, "Zur Ethnographie von Epirus," _Ges. Erdk._ xvii. (Berlin,
1879); Zompolides, "Das Land und die Bewohner von Epirus," _Ausland_
(Berlin, 1880); A. Philippson, _Thessalien und Epirus_ (Berlin, 1897).
(J. L. M.)
EPISCOPACY (from Late Lat. _episcopatus_, the office of a bishop,
_episcopus_), the general term technically applied to that system of
church organization in which the chief ecclesiastical authority within a
defined district, or diocese, is vested in a bishop. As such it is
distinguished on the one hand from Presbyterianism, government by
elders, and Congregationalism, in which the individual church or
community of worshippers is autonomous, and on the other from Papalism.
The origin and development of episcopacy in the Christian Church, and
the functions and attributes of bishops in the various churches, are
dealt with elsewhere (see CHURCH HISTORY and BISHOP). Under the present
heading it is proposed only to discuss briefly the various types of
episcopacy actually existing, and the different principles that they
represent.
The deepest line of cleavage is naturally between the view that
episcopacy is a divinely ordained institution essential to the effective
existence of a church as a channel of grace, and the view that it is
merely a convenient form of church order, evolved as the result of a
variety of historical causes, and not necessary to the proper
constitution of a church. The first of these views is closely connected
with the doctrine of the Apostolical Succession. According to this,
Christ committed to his apostles certain powers of order and
jurisdiction in the Church, among others that of transmitting these
powers to others through "the laying on of hands"; and this power,
whatever obscurity may surround the practice of the primitive Church
(see APOSTLE, ad fin.) was very early confined to the order of bishops,
who by virtue of a special consecration became the successors of the
apostles in the function of handing on the powers and graces of the
ministry.[1] A valid episcopate, then, is one derived in an unbroken
series of "layings on of hands" by bishops from the time of the apostles
(see ORDER, HOLY). This is the Catholic view, common to all the ancient
Churches whether of the West or East, and it is one that necessarily
excludes from the union of Christendom all those Christian communities
which possess no such apostolically derived ministry.
Apart altogether, however, from the question of orders, episcopacy
represents a very special conception of the Christian Church. In the
fully developed episcopal system the bishop sums up in his own person
the collective powers of the Church in his diocese, not by delegation of
these powers from below, but by divinely bestowed authority from above.
"Ecclesia est in episcopo," wrote St Cyprian (Cyp. iv. _Ep._ 9); the
bishop, as the successor of the apostles, is the centre of unity in his
diocese, the unity of the Church as a whole is maintained by the
intercommunion of the bishops, who for this purpose represent their
dioceses. The bishops, individually and collectively, are thus the
essential ties of Catholic unity; they alone, as the depositories of the
apostolic traditions, establish the norm of Catholic orthodoxy in the
general councils of the Church. This high theory of episcopacy which, if
certain of the Ignatian letters be genuine, has a very early origin,
has, of course, fallen upon evil days. The power of the collective
episcopate to maintain Catholic unity was disproved long before it was
overshadowed by the centralized authority of Rome; before the
Reformation, its last efforts to assert its supremacy in the Western
Church, at the councils of Basel and Constance, had broken down; and the
religious revolution of the 16th century left it largely discredited and
exposed to a double attack, by the papal monarchy on the one hand and
the democratic Presbyterian model on the other. Within the Roman
Catholic Church the high doctrine of episcopacy continued to be
maintained by the Gallicans and Febronians (see GALLICANISM and
FEBRONIANISM) as against the claims of the Papacy, and for a while with
success; but a system which had failed to preserve the unity of the
Church even when the world was united under the Roman empire could not
be expected to do so in a world split up into a series of rival states,
of which many had already reorganized their churches on a national
basis. "Febronius," indeed, was in favour of a frank recognition of this
national basis of ecclesiastical organization, and saw in Episcopacy the
best means of reuniting the dissidents to the Catholic Church, which was
to consist, as it were, of a free federation of episcopal churches under
the presidency of the bishop of Rome. The idea had considerable success;
for it happened to march with the views of the secular princes. But
religious people could hardly be expected to see in the worldly
prince-bishops of the Empire, or the wealthy courtier-prelates of
France, the trustees of the apostolical tradition. The Revolution
intervened; and when, during the religious reaction that followed, men
sought for an ultimate authority, they found it in the papal monarch,
exalted now by ultramontane zeal into the sole depositary of the
apostolical tradition (see ULTRAMONTANISM). At the Vatican Council of
1870 episcopacy made its last stand against papalism, and was vanquished
(see VATICAN COUNCIL). The pope still addresses his fellow-bishops as
"venerable brothers"; but from the Roman Catholic Church the fraternal
union of coequal authorities, which is of the essence of episcopacy, has
vanished; and in its place is set the autocracy of one. The modern Roman
Catholic Church is episcopal, for it preserves the bishops, whose
_potestas ordinis_ not even the pope can exercise until he has been duly
consecrated; but the bishops as such are now but subordinate elements in
a system for which "Episcopacy" is certainly no longer an appropriate
term.
The word Episcopacy has, in fact, since the Reformation, been more
especially associated with those churches which, while ceasing to be in
communion with Rome, have preserved the episcopal model. Of these by far
the most important is the Church of England, which has preserved its
ecclesiastical organization essentially unchanged since its foundation
by St Augustine, and its daughter churches (see ENGLAND, CHURCH OF, and
ANGLICAN COMMUNION). The Church of England since the Reformation has
been the chief champion of the principle of Episcopacy against the papal
pretensions on the one hand and Presbyterianism and Congregationalism on
the other. As to the divine origin of Episcopacy and, consequently, of
its universal obligation in the Christian Church, Anglican opinion has
been, and still is, considerably divided.[2] The "High Church" view, now
predominant, is practically identical with that of the Gallicans and
Febronians, and is based on Catholic practice in those ages of the
Church to which, as well as to the Bible, the formularies of the Church
of England make appeal. So far as this view, however, is the outcome of
the general Catholic movement of the 19th century, it can hardly be
taken as typical of Anglican tradition in this matter. Certainly, in the
16th and 17th centuries, the Church of England, while rigorously
enforcing the episcopal model at home, and even endeavouring to extend
it to Presbyterian Scotland, did not regard foreign non-episcopal
Churches otherwise than as sister communions. The whole issue had, in
fact, become confused with the confusion of functions of the Church and
State. In the view of the Church of England the ultimate governance of
the Christian community, in things spiritual and temporal, was vested
not in the clergy but in the "Christian prince" as the vicegerent of
God.[3] It was the transference to the territorial sovereigns of modern
Europe of the theocratic character of the Christian heads of the Roman
world-empire; with the result that for the reformed Churches the unit of
church organization was no longer the diocese, or the group of dioceses,
but the Christian state. Thus in England the bishops, while retaining
their _potestas ordinis_ in virtue of their consecration as successors
of the apostles, came to be regarded not as representing their dioceses
in the state, but the state in their dioceses. Forced on their dioceses
by the royal _Congé d'élire_ (q.v.), and enthusiastic apostles of the
High Church doctrine of non-resistance, the bishops were looked upon as
no more than lieutenants of the crown;[4] and Episcopacy was ultimately
resisted by Presbyterians and Independents as an expression and
instrument of arbitrary government, "Prelacy" being confounded with
"Popery" in a common condemnation. With the constitutional changes of
the 18th and 19th centuries, however, a corresponding modification took
place in the character of the English episcopate; and a still further
change resulted from the multiplication of colonial and missionary sees
having no connexion with the state (see ANGLICAN COMMUNION). The
consciousness of being in the line of apostolic succession helped the
English clergy to revert to the principle _Ecclesia est in episcopo_,
and the great periodical conferences of Anglican bishops from all parts
of the world have something of the character, though they do not claim
the ecumenical authority, of the general councils of the early Church
(see LAMBETH CONFERENCES).
Of the reformed Churches of the continent of Europe only the Lutheran
Churches of Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland preserve the
episcopal system in anything of its historical sense; and of these only
the two last can lay claim to the possession of bishops in the unbroken
line of episcopal succession.[5] The superintendents (variously entitled
also arch-priests, deans, provosts, ephors) of the Evangelical
(Lutheran) Church, as established in the several states of Germany and
in Austria, are not bishops in any canonical sense, though their
jurisdictions are known as dioceses and they exercise many episcopal
functions. They have no special powers of order, being presbyters, and
their legal status is admittedly merely that of officials of the
territorial sovereign in his capacity as head of the territorial church
(see SUPERINTENDENT). The "bishops" of the Lutheran Church in
Transylvania are equivalent to the superintendents.
Episcopacy in a stricter sense is the system of the Moravian Brethren
(q.v.) and the Methodist Episcopal Church of America (see METHODISM). In
the case of the former, claim is laid to the unbroken episcopal
succession through the Waldenses, and the question of their eventual
intercommunion with the Anglican Church was accordingly mooted at the
Lambeth Conference of 1908. The bishops of the Methodist Episcopal
Church, on the other hand, derive their orders from Thomas Coke, a
presbyter of the Church of England, who in 1784 was ordained by John
Wesley, assisted by two other presbyters, "superintendent" of the
Methodist Society in America. Methodist episcopacy is therefore based on
the denial of any special _potestas ordinis_ in the degree of bishop,
and is fundamentally distinct from that of the Catholic Church--using
this term in its narrow sense as applied to the ancient churches of the
East and West.
In all of these ancient churches episcopacy is regarded as of divine
origin; and in those of them which reject the papal supremacy the
bishops are still regarded as the guardians of the tradition of
apostolic orthodoxy and the stewards of the gifts of the Holy Ghost to
men (see ORTHODOX EASTERN CHURCH; ARMENIAN CHURCH; COPTS: _Coptic
Church_, &c). In the West, Gallican and Febronian Episcopacy are
represented by two ecclesiastical bodies: the Jansenist Church under the
archbishop of Utrecht (see JANSENISM and UTRECHT), and the Old Catholics
(q.v.). Of these the latter, who separated from the Roman communion
after the promulgation of the dogma of papal infallibility, represent a
pure revolt of the system of Episcopacy against that of Papalism.
(W. A. P.)
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See Bishop C. Gore, _The Church and the Ministry_ (1887).
[2] Neither the Articles nor the authoritative Homilies of the Church
of England speak of episcopacy as essential to the constitution of a
church. The latter make "the three notes or marks" by which a true
church is known "pure and sound doctrine, the sacraments administered
according to Christ's holy institution, and the right use of
ecclesiastical discipline." These marks are perhaps ambiguous, but
they certainly do not depend on the possession of the Apostolic
Succession; for it is further stated that "the bishops of Rome and
their adherents are not the true Church of Christ" (Homily
"concerning the Holy Ghost," ed. Oxford, 1683, p. 292).
[3] "He and his holy apostles likewise, namely Peter and Paul, did
forbid unto all Ecclesiastical Ministers, dominion over the Church of
Christ" (_Homilies appointed to be read in Churches_, "The V. part of
the Sermon against Wilful Rebellion," ed. Oxford, 1683, p. 378).
Princes are "God's lieutenants, God's presidents, God's officers,
God's commissioners, God's judges ... God's vicegerents" ("The II.
part of the Sermon of Obedience," ib. p. 64).
[4] Juridically they were, of course, never this in the strict sense
in which the term could be used of the Lutheran superintendents (see
below). They were never mere royal officials, but peers of
parliament, holding their temporalities as baronies under the crown.
[5] During the crisis of the Reformation all the Swedish sees became
vacant but two, and the bishops of these two soon left the kingdom.
The episcopate, however, was preserved by Peter Magnusson, who, when
residing as warden of the Swedish hospital of St Bridget in Rome, had
been duly elected bishop of the see of Westeraes, and consecrated, c.
1524. No official record of his consecration can be discovered, but
there is no sufficient reason to doubt the fact; and it is certain
that during his lifetime he was acknowledged as a canonical bishop
both by Roman Catholics and by Protestants. In 1528 Magnusson
consecrated bishops to fill the vacant sees, and, assisted by one of
these, Magnus Sommar, bishop of Strengness, he afterwards consecrated
the Reformer, Lawrence Peterson, as archbishop of Upsala, Sept. 22,
1531. Some doubt has been raised as to the validity of the
consecration of Peterson's successor, also named Lawrence Peterson,
in 1575, from the insufficiency of the documentary evidence of the
consecration of his consecrator, Paul Justin, bishop of Åbo. The
integrity of the succession has, however, been accepted after
searching investigation by men of such learning as Grabe and Routh,
and has been formally recognized by the convention of the American
Episcopal Church. The succession to the daughter church of Finland,
now independent, stands or falls with that of Sweden.
EPISCOPIUS, SIMON (1583-1643), the Latin form of the name of Simon
Bischop, Dutch theologian, was born at Amsterdam on the 1st of January
1583. In 1600 he entered the university of Leiden, where he studied
theology under Jacobus Arminius, whose teaching he followed. In 1610,
the year in which the Arminians presented the famous Remonstrance to the
states of Holland, he became pastor at Bleyswick, a small village near
Rotterdam; in the following year he advocated the cause of the
Remonstrants (q.v.) at the Hague conference. In 1612 he succeeded
Francis Gomarus as professor of theology at Leiden, an appointment which
awakened the bitter enmity of the Calvinists, and, on account of the
influence lent by it to the spread of Arminian opinions, was doubtless
an ultimate cause of the meeting of the synod of Dort in 1618.
Episcopius was chosen as the spokesman of the thirteen representatives
of the Remonstrants before the synod; but he was refused a hearing, and
the Remonstrant doctrines were condemned without any explanation or
defence of them being permitted. At the end of the synod's sittings in
1619, Episcopius and the other twelve Arminian representatives were
deprived of their offices and expelled from the country (see DORT, SYNOD
OF). Episcopius retired to Antwerp and ultimately to France, where he
lived partly at Paris, partly at Rouen. He devoted most of his time to
writings in support of the Arminian cause; but the attempt of Luke
Wadding (1588-1657) to win him over to the Romish faith involved him
also in a controversy with that famous Jesuit. After the death (1625) of
Maurice, prince of Orange, the violence of the Arminian controversy
began to abate, and Episcopius was permitted in 1626 to return to his
own country. He was appointed preacher at the Remonstrant church in
Rotterdam and afterwards rector of the Remonstrant college in Amsterdam.
Here he died in 1643. Episcopius may be regarded as in great part the
theological founder of Arminianism, since he developed and systematized
the principles tentatively enunciated by Arminius. Besides opposing at
all points the peculiar doctrines of Calvinism, Episcopius protested
against the tendency of Calvinists to lay so much stress on abstract
dogma, and argued that Christianity was practical rather than
theoretical--not so much a system of intellectual belief as a moral
power--and that an orthodox faith did not necessarily imply the
knowledge of and assent to a system of doctrine which included the whole
range of Christian truth, but only the knowledge and acceptance of so
much of Christianity as was necessary to effect a real change on the
heart and life.
The principal works of Episcopius are his _Confessio s. declaratio
sententiae pastorum qui in foederato Belgio Remonstrantes vocantur
super praecipuis articulis religionis Christianae_ (1621), his
_Apologia pro confessione_ (1629), his _Verus theologus remonstrans_,
and his uncompleted work _Institutiones theologicae_. A life of
Episcopius was written by Philip Limborch, and one was also prefixed
by his successor, Étienne de Courcelles (Curcellaeus) (1586-1659), to
an edition of his collected works published in 2 vols. (1650-1665).
See also article in Herzog-Hauck, _Realencyklopädie_.
EPISODE, an incident occurring in the history of a nation, an
institution or an individual, especially with the significance of being
an interruption of an ordered course of events, an irrelevance. The word
is derived from a word ([Greek: epeisodos]) with a technical meaning in
the ancient Greek tragedy. It is defined by Aristotle (_Poetics_, 12) as
[Greek: meros holon tragôdias to metaxy holôn chorikôn melôn], all the
scenes, that is, which fall between the choric songs. [Greek: eisodos],
or entrance, is generally applied to the entrance of the chorus, but the
reference may be to that of the actors at the close of the choric songs.
In the early Greek tragedy the parts which were spoken by the actors
were considered of subsidiary importance to those sung by the chorus,
and it is from this aspect that the meaning of the word, as something
which breaks off the course of events, is derived (see A.E. Haigh, _The
Tragic Drama of the Greeks_, 1896, at p. 353).
EPISTAXIS (Gr. [Greek: epi], upon, and [Greek: stazein], to drop), the
medical term for bleeding from the nose, whether resulting from local
injury or some constitutional condition. In persistent cases of
nose-bleeding, various measures are adopted, such as holding the arms
over the head, the application of ice, or of such astringents as zinc or
alum, or plugging the nostrils.
EPISTEMOLOGY (Gr. [Greek: epistêmê], knowledge, and [Greek: logos],
theory, account; Germ. _Erkenntnistheorie_), in philosophy, a term
applied, probably first by J.F. Ferrier, to that department of thought
whose subject matter is the nature and origin of knowledge. It is thus
contrasted with metaphysics, which considers the nature of reality, and
with psychology, which deals with the objective part of cognition, and,
as Prof. James Ward said, "is essentially genetic in its method"
(_Mind_, April 1883, pp. 166-167). Epistemology is concerned rather with
the possibility of knowledge in the abstract (_sub specie aeternitatis_,
Ward, ibid.). In the evolution of thought epistemological inquiry
succeeded the speculations of the early thinkers, who concerned
themselves primarily with attempts to explain existence. The differences
of opinion which arose on this problem naturally led to the inquiry as
to whether any universally valid statement was possible. The Sophists
and the Sceptics, Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans
took up the question, and from the time of Locke and Kant it has been
prominent in modern philosophy. It is extremely difficult, if not
impossible, to draw a hard and fast line between epistemology and other
branches of philosophy. If, for example, philosophy is divided into the
theory of knowing and the theory of being, it is impossible entirely to
separate the latter (Ontology) from the analysis of knowledge
(Epistemology), so close is the connexion between the two. Again, the
relation between logic in its widest sense and the theory of knowledge
is extremely close. Some thinkers have identified the two, while others
regard Epistemology as a subdivision of logic; others demarcate their
relative spheres by confining logic to the science of the laws of
thought, i.e. to formal logic. An attempt has been made by some
philosophers to substitute "Gnosiology" (Gr. [Greek: gnôsis]) for
"Epistemology" as a special term for that part of Epistemology which is
confined to "systematic analysis of the conceptions employed by ordinary
and scientific thought in interpreting the world, and including an
investigation of the art of knowledge, or the nature of knowledge as
such." "Epistemology" would thus be reserved for the broad questions of
"the origin, nature and limits of knowledge" (Baldwin's _Dict. of
Philos._ i. pp. 333 and 414). The term Gnosiology has not, however, come
into general use. (See PHILOSOPHY.)
EPISTLE, in its primary sense any letter addressed to an absent person;
from the Greek word [Greek: epistolê], a thing sent on a particular
occasion. Strictly speaking, any such communication is an epistle, but
at the present day the term has become archaic, and is used only for
letters of an ancient time, or for elaborate literary productions which
take an epistolary form, that is to say, are, or affect to be, written
to a person at a distance.
1. _Epistles and Letters._--The student of literary history soon
discovers that a broad distinction exists between the letter and the
epistle. The letter is essentially a spontaneous, non-literary
production, ephemeral, intimate, personal and private, a substitute for
a spoken conversation. The epistle, on the other hand, rather takes the
place of a public speech, it is written with an audience in view, it is
a literary form, a distinctly artistic effort aiming at permanence; and
it bears much the same relation to a letter as a Platonic dialogue does
to a private talk between two friends. The posthumous value placed on a
great man's letters would naturally lead to the production of epistles,
which might be written to set forth the views of a person or a school,
either genuinely or as forgeries under some eminent name. Pseudonymous
epistles were especially numerous under the early Roman empire, and
mainly attached themselves to the names of Plato, Demosthenes, Aristotle
and Cicero.
Both letters and epistles have come down to us in considerable variety
and extent from the ancient world. Babylonia and Assyria, Egypt, Greece
and Rome alike contribute to our inheritance of letters. Those of
Aristotle are of questionable genuineness, but we can rely, at any rate
in part, on those of Isocrates and Epicurus. Some of the letters of
Cicero are rather epistles, since they were meant ultimately for the
general eye. The papyrus discoveries in Egypt have a peculiar interest,
for they are mainly the letters of people unknown to fame, and having no
thought of publicity. It is less to be wondered at that we have a large
collection of ancient epistles, especially in the realm of magic and
religion, for epistles were meant to live, were published in several
copies, and were not a difficult form of literary effort. The Tell
el-Amarna tablets found in Upper Egypt in 1887 are a series of
despatches in cuneiform script from Babylonian kings and Phoenician and
Palestinian governors to the Pharaohs (c. 1400 B.C.). The epistles of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Seneca and the Younger Pliny claim
mention at this point. In the later Roman period and into the middle
ages, formal epistles were almost a distinct branch of literature. The
ten books of Symmachus' _Epistolae_, so highly esteemed in the cultured
circles of the 4th century, may be contrasted with the less elegant but
more forceful epistles of Jerome.
The distinction between letters and epistles has particular interest
for the student of early Christian literature. G.A. Deissmann (_Bible
Studies_) assigns to the category of letters all the Pauline writings as
well as 2 and 3 John. The books bearing the names of James, Peter and
Jude, together with the Pastorals (though these may contain fragments of
genuine Pauline letters) and the Apocalypse, he regards as epistles. The
first epistle of John he calls less a letter or an epistle than a
religious tract. It is doubtful, however, whether we can thus reduce all
the letters of the New Testament to one or other of these categories;
and W.M. Ramsay (Hastings' _Dict. Bib._ Extra vol. p. 401) has pointed
out with some force that "in the new conditions a new category had been
developed--the general letter addressed to a whole class of persons or
to the entire Church of Christ." Such writings have affinities with both
the letter and the epistle, and they may further be compared with the
"edicts and rescripts by which Roman law grew, documents arising out of
special circumstances but treating them on general principles." Most of
the literature of the sub-apostolic age is epistolary, and we have a
particularly interesting form of epistle in the communications between
churches (as distinct from individuals) known as the _First Epistle of
Clement_ (Rome to Corinth), the _Martyrdom of Polycarp_ (Smyrna to
Philomelium), and the _Letters of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons_ (to
the congregations of Asia Minor and Phrygia) describing the Gallican
martyrdoms of A.D. 177. In the following centuries we have the valuable
epistles of Cyprian, of Gregory Nazianzen (to Cledonius on the
Apollinarian controversy), of Basil (to be classed rather as letters),
of Ambrose, Chrysostom, Augustine and Jerome. The encyclical letters of
the Roman Catholic Church are epistles, even more so than bulls, which
are usually more special in their destination. In the Renaissance one of
the most common forms of literary production was that modelled upon
Cicero's letters. From Petrarch to the _Epistolae obscurorum virorum_
there is a whole epistolary literature. The _Epistolae obscurorum
virorum_ have to some extent a counterpart in the Epistles of Martin
Marprelate. Later satires in an epistolary form are Pascal's _Provincial
Letters_, Swift's _Drapier Letters_, and the _Letters of Junius_. The
"open letter" of modern journalism is really an epistle. (A. J. G.)
2. _Epistles in Poetry._--A branch of poetry bears the name of the
Epistle, and is modelled on those pieces of Horace which are almost
essays (_sermones_) on moral or philosophical subjects, and are chiefly
distinguished from other poems by being addressed to particular patrons
or friends. The epistle of Horace to his agent (or _villicus_) is of a
more familiar order, and is at once a masterpiece and a model of what an
epistle should be. Examples of the work in this direction of Ovid,
Claudian, Ausonius and other late Latin poets have been preserved, but
it is particularly those of Horace which have given this character to
the epistles in verse which form so very characteristic a section of
French poetry. The graceful precision and dignified familiarity of the
epistle are particularly attractive to the temperament of France.
Clement Marot, in the 16th century, first made the epistle popular in
France, with his brief and spirited specimens. We pass the witty
epistles of Scarron and Voiture, to reach those of Boileau, whose
epistles, twelve in number, are the classic examples of this form of
verse in French literature; they were composed at different dates
between 1668 and 1695. In the 18th century Voltaire enjoyed a supremacy
in this graceful and sparkling species of writing; the _Épître à Uranie_
is perhaps the most famous of his verse-letters. Gresset, Bernis,
Sedaine, Dorat, Gentil-Bernard, all excelled in the epistle. The curious
"Épîtres" of J.P.G. Viennet (1777-1868) were not easy and mundane like
their predecessors, but violently polemical. Viennet, a hot defender of
lost causes, may be considered the latest of the epistolary poets of
France.
In England the verse-epistle was first prominently employed by Samuel
Daniel in his "Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius" (1599), and later
on, more legitimately, in his "Certain Epistles" (1601-1603). His
letter, in _terza rima_, to Lucy, Countess of Bristol, is one of the
finest examples of this form in English literature. It was Daniel's
deliberate intention to introduce the Epistle into English poetry,
"after the manner of Horace." He was supported by Ben Jonson, who has
some fine Horatian epistles in his _Forests_ (1616) and his
_Underwoods_. _Letters to Several Persons of Honour_ form an important
section in the poetry of John Donne. Habington's _Epistle to a Friend_
is one of his most finished pieces. Henry Vaughan (1622-1695) addressed
a fine epistle in verse to the French romance-writer Gombauld
(1570-1666). Such "letters" were not unfrequent down to the Restoration,
but they did not create a department of literature such as Daniel had
proposed. At the close of the 17th century Dryden greatly excelled in
this class of poetry, and his epistles to Congreve (1694) and to the
duchess of Ormond (1700) are among the most graceful and eloquent that
we possess. During the age of Anne various Augustan poets in whom the
lyrical faculty was slight, from Congreve and Richard Duke down to
Ambrose Philips and William Somerville, essayed the epistle with more or
less success, and it was employed by Gay for several exercises in his
elegant persiflage. Among the epistles of Gay, one rises to an eminence
of merit, that called "Mr Pope's welcome from Greece," written in 1720.
But the great writer of epistles in English is Pope himself, to whom the
glory of this kind of verse belongs. His "Eloisa to Abelard" (1717) is
carefully modelled on the form of Ovid's "Heroides," while in his _Moral
Essays_ he adopts the Horatian formula for the epistle. In either case
his success was brilliant and complete. The "Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot"
has not been surpassed, if it has been equalled, in Latin or French
poetry of the same class. But Pope excelled, not only in the voluptuous
and in the didactic epistle, but in that of compliment as well, and
there is no more graceful example of this in literature than is afforded
by the letter about the poems of Parnell addressed, in 1721, to Robert,
earl of Oxford. After the day of Pope the epistle again fell into
desuetude, or occasional use, in England. It revived in the charming
naïveté of Cowper's lyrical letters in octosyllabics to his friends,
such as William Bull and Lady Austin (1782). At the close of the century
Samuel Rogers endeavoured to resuscitate the neglected form in his
"Epistle to a Friend" (1798). The formality and conventional grace of
the epistle were elements with which the leaders of romantic revival
were out of sympathy, and it was not cultivated to any important degree
in the 19th century. It is, however, to be noted that Shelley's "Letter
to Maria Gisborne" (1820), Keats's "Epistle to Charles Clarke" (1816),
and Landor's "To Julius Hare" (1836), in spite of their romantic
colouring, are genuine Horatian epistles and of the pure Augustan type.
This type, in English literature, is commonly, though not at all
universally, cast in heroic verse. But Daniel employs _rime royal_ and
_terza rima_, while some modern epistles have been cast in short iambic
rhymed measures or in blank verse. It is sometimes not easy to
distinguish the epistle from the elegy and from the dedication. (E. G.)
For St Paul's Epistles see PAUL, for St Peter's see PETER, for
Apocryphal Epistles see APOCRYPHAL LITERATURE, for Plato's see PLATO,
&c.
EPISTYLE (Gr. [Greek: epi], upon, and [Greek: stylos], column), the
Greek architectural term for architrave, the lower member of the
entablature of the classic orders (q.v.).
EPISTYLIS (C.G. Ehrenberg), in zoology, a genus of peritrichous
Infusoria with a short oral disc and collar, and a rigid stalk, often
branching to form a colony.
EPITAPH (Gr. [Greek: epitaphios], sc. [Greek: logos], from [Greek: epi],
upon, and [Greek: taphos], a tomb), strictly, an inscription upon a
tomb, though by a natural extension of usage the name is applied to
anything written ostensibly for that purpose whether actually inscribed
upon a tomb or not. When the word was introduced into English in the
14th century it took the form _epitaphy_, as well as _epitaphe_, which
latter word is used both by Gower and Lydgate. Many of the best-known
epitaphs, both ancient and modern, are merely literary memorials, and
find no place on sepulchral monuments. Sometimes the intention of the
writer to have his production placed upon the grave of the person he has
commemorated may have been frustrated, sometimes it may never have
existed; what he has written is still entitled to be called an epitaph
if it be suitable for the purpose, whether the purpose has been carried
out or not. The most obvious external condition that suitability for
mural inscription imposes is one of rigid limitation as to length. An
epitaph cannot in the nature of things extend to the proportions that
may be required in an elegy.
The desire to perpetuate the memory of the dead being natural to man,
the practice of placing epitaphs upon their graves has been common among
all nations and in all ages. And the similarity, amounting sometimes
almost to identity, of thought and expression that often exists between
epitaphs written more than two thousand years ago and epitaphs written
only yesterday is as striking an evidence as literature affords of the
close kinship of human nature under the most varying conditions where
the same primary elemental feelings are stirred. The grief and hope of
the Roman mother as expressed in the touching lines--
"Lagge fili bene quiescas;
Mater tua rogat te,
Ut me ad te recipias:
Vale!"
find their echo in similar inscriptions in many a modern cemetery.
Probably the earliest epitaphial inscriptions that have come down to us
are those of the ancient Egyptians, written, as their mode of sepulture
necessitated, upon the sarcophagi and coffins. Those that have been
deciphered are all very much in the same form, commencing with a prayer
to a deity, generally Osiris or Anubis, on behalf of the deceased, whose
name, descent and office are usually specified. There is, however, no
attempt to delineate individual character, and the feelings of the
survivors are not expressed otherwise than in the fact of a prayer being
offered. Ancient Greek epitaphs, unlike the Egyptian, are of great
literary interest, deep and often tender in feeling, rich and varied in
expression, and generally epigrammatic in form. They are written usually
in elegiac verse, though many of the later epitaphs are in prose. Among
the gems of the Greek anthology familiar to English readers through
translations are the epitaphs upon those who had fallen in battle. There
are several ascribed to Simonides on the heroes of Thermopylae, of which
the most celebrated is the epigram--
"Go tell the Spartans, thou that passest by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie."
A hymn of Simonides on the same subject contains some lines of great
beauty in praise of those who were buried at Thermopylae, and these may
be regarded as forming a literary epitaph. In Sparta epitaphs were
inscribed only upon the graves of those who had been especially
distinguished in war; in Athens they were applied more indiscriminately.
They generally contained the name, the descent, the demise, and some
account of the life of the person commemorated. It must be remembered,
however, that many of the so-called Greek epitaphs are merely literary
memorials not intended for monumental inscription, and that in these
freer scope is naturally given to general reflections, while less
attention is paid to biographical details. Many of them, even some of
the monumental, do not contain any personal name, as in the one ascribed
to Plato--
"I am a shipwrecked sailor's tomb; a peasant's there doth stand:
Thus the same world of Hades lies beneath both sea and land."
Others again are so entirely of the nature of general reflections upon
death that they contain no indication of the particular case that called
them forth. It may be questioned, indeed, whether several of this
character quoted in ordinary collections are epitaphs at all, in the
sense of being intended for a particular occasion.
Roman epitaphs, in contrast to those of the Greeks, contained, as a
rule, nothing beyond a record of facts. The inscriptions on the urns, of
which numerous specimens are to be found in the British Museum, present
but little variation. The letters D.M. or D.M.S. (_Diis Manibus_ or
_Diis Manibus Sacrum_) are followed by the name of the person whose
ashes are enclosed, his age at death, and sometimes one or two other
particulars. The inscription closes with the name of the person who
caused the urn to be made, and his relationship to the deceased. It is a
curious illustration of the survival of traces of an old faith after it
has been formally discarded to find that the letters D.M. are not
uncommon on the Christian inscriptions in the catacombs. It has been
suggested that in this case they mean _Deo Maximo_ and not _Diis
Manibus_, but the explanation would be quite untenable, even if there
were not many other undeniable instances of the survival of pagan
superstitions in the thought and life of the early Christians. In these
very catacomb inscriptions there are many illustrations to be found,
apart from the use of the letters D.M., of the union of heathen with
Christian sentiment, (see Maitland's _Church in the Catacombs_). The
private burial-places for the ashes of the dead were usually by the side
of the various roads leading into Rome, the Via Appia, the Via Flaminia,
&c. The traveller to or from the city thus passed for miles an almost
uninterrupted succession of tombstones, whose inscriptions usually began
with the appropriate words _Siste Viator_ or _Aspice Viator_, the origin
doubtless of the "Stop Passenger," which still meets the eye in many
parish churchyards of Britain. Another phrase of very common occurrence
on ancient Roman tombstones, _Sit tibi terra levis_ ("Light lie the
earth upon thee"), has continued in frequent use, as conveying an
appropriate sentiment, down to modern times. A remarkable feature of
many of the Roman epitaphs was the terrible denunciation they often
pronounced upon those who violated the sepulchre. Such denunciations
were not uncommon in later times. A well-known instance is furnished in
the lines on Shakespeare's tomb at Stratford-on-Avon, said to have been
written by the poet himself--
"Good frend, for Jesus' sake forbeare
To digg the dust enclosed heare;
Bleste be y^e man y^t spares thes stones.
And curst be he y^t moves my bones."
The earliest existing British epitaphs belonged to the Roman period,
and are written in Latin after the Roman form. Specimens are to be seen
in various antiquarian museums throughout the country; some of the
inscriptions are given in Bruce's _Roman Wall_, and the seventh volume
of the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_ edited by Hübner, containing the
British inscriptions, is a valuable repertory for the earlier Roman
epitaphs in Britain. The earliest, of course, are commemorative of
soldiers, belonging to the legions of occupation, but the Roman form was
afterwards adopted for native Britons. Long after the Roman form was
discarded, the Latin language continued to be used, especially for
inscriptions of a more public character, as being from its supposed
permanence the most suitable medium of communication to distant ages. It
is only, in fact, within recent years that Latin has become unusual, and
the more natural practice has been adopted of writing the epitaphs of
distinguished men in the language of the country in which they lived.
While Latin was the chief if not the sole literary language, it was, as
a matter of course, almost exclusively used for epitaphial inscriptions.
The comparatively few English epitaphs that remain of the 11th and 12th
centuries are all in Latin. They are generally confined to a mere
statement of the name and rank of the deceased following the words "Hic
jacet." Two noteworthy exceptions to this general brevity are, however,
to be found in most of the collections. One is the epitaph to Gundrada,
daughter of the Conqueror (d. 1085), which still exists at Lewes, though
in an imperfect state, two of the lines having been lost; another is
that to William de Warren, earl of Surrey (d. 1089), believed to have
been inscribed in the abbey of St Pancras, near Lewes, founded by him.
Both are encomiastic, and describe the character and work of the
deceased with considerable fulness and beauty of expression. They are
written in leonine verse. In the 13th century French began to be used in
writing epitaphs, and most of the inscriptions to celebrated historical
personages between 1200 and 1400 are in that language. Mention may be
made of those to Robert, the 3rd earl of Oxford (d. 1221), as given in
Weever, to Henry III. (d. 1272) at Westminster Abbey, and to Edward the
Black Prince (d. 1376) at Canterbury. In most of the inscriptions of
this period the deceased addresses the reader in the first person,
describes his rank and position while alive, and, as in the case of the
Black Prince, contrasts it with his wasted and loathsome state in the
grave, and warns the reader to prepare for the same inevitable change.
The epitaph almost invariably closes with a request, sometimes very
urgently worded, for the prayers of the reader that the soul of the
deceased may pass to glory, and an invocation of blessing, general or
specific, upon all who comply. Epitaphs preserved much of the same
character after English began to be used towards the close of the 14th
century. The following, to a member of the Savile family at Thornhill,
is probably even earlier, though its precise date cannot be fixed:--
"Bonys emongg stonys lys ful
steyl gwylste the sawle wan-
deris were that God wylethe"--
that is, Bones among stones lie full still, whilst the soul wanders
whither God willeth. It may be noted here that the majority of the
inscriptions, Latin and English, from 1300 to the period of the
Reformation, that have been preserved, are upon brasses (see BRASSES,
MONUMENTAL). The very curious epitaph on St Bernard, probably written by
a monk of Clairvaux, has the peculiarity of being a dialogue in Latin
verse.
It was in the reign of Elizabeth that epitaphs in English began to
assume a distinct literary character and value, entitling them to rank
with those that had hitherto been composed in Latin. We learn from Nash
that at the close of the 16th century it had become a trade to supply
epitaphs in English verse. There is one on the dowager countess of
Pembroke (d. 1621), remarkable for its successful use of a somewhat
daring hyperbole. It was written by William Browne, author of
_Britannia's Pastorals_:--
"Underneath this sable hearse
Lies the subject of all verse;
Sydney's sister, Pembroke's mother;
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Fair and learn'd and good as she,
Time will throw his dart at thee.
Marble piles let no man raise
To her name for after days;
Some kind woman, born as she,
Reading this, like Niobe,
Shall turn marble, and become
Both her mourner and her tomb."
If there be something of the exaggeration of a conceit in the second
stanza, it needs scarcely to be pointed out that epitaphs, like every
other form of composition, necessarily reflect the literary
characteristics of the age in which they were written. The deprecation
of marble as unnecessary suggests one of the finest literary epitaphs in
the English language, that by Milton upon Shakespeare.
The epitaphs of Pope are still considered to possess very great literary
merit, though they were rated higher by Johnson and critics of his
period than they are now.
Dr Johnson, who thought so highly of Pope's epitaphs, was himself a
great authority on both the theory and practice of this species of
composition. His essay on epitaphs is one of the few existing monographs
on the subject, and his opinion as to the use of Latin had great
influence. The manner in which he met the delicately insinuated request
of a number of eminent men that English should be employed in the case
of Oliver Goldsmith was characteristic, and showed the strength of his
conviction on the subject. His arguments in favour of Latin were chiefly
drawn from its inherent fitness for epitaphial inscriptions and its
classical stability. The first of these has a very considerable force,
it being admitted on all hands that few languages are in themselves so
suitable for the purpose; the second is outweighed by considerations
that had considerable force in Dr Johnson's time, and have acquired more
since. Even to the learned Latin is no longer the language of daily
thought and life as it was at the period of the Reformation, and the
great body of those who may fairly claim to be called the well-educated
classes can only read it with difficulty, if at all. It seems,
therefore, little less than absurd, for the sake of a stability which is
itself in great part delusive, to write epitaphs in a language
unintelligible to the vast majority of those for whose information
presumably they are intended. Though a stickler for Latin, Dr Johnson
wrote some very beautiful English epitaphs, as, for example, the
following on Philips, a musician:--
"Philips, whose touch harmonious could remove
The pangs of guilty power or hapless love;
Rest here, distressed by poverty no more,
Here find that calm thou gav'st so oft before;
Sleep undisturbed within this peaceful shrine
Till angels wake thee with a note like thine!"
In classifying epitaphs various principles of division may be adopted.
Arranged according to nationality they indicate distinctions of race
less clearly perhaps than any other form of literature does,--and this
obviously because when under the influence of the deepest feeling men
think and speak very much in the same way whatever be their country. At
the same time the influence of nationality may to some extent be traced
in epitaphs. The characteristics of the French style, its grace,
clearness, wit and epigrammatic point, are all recognizable in French
epitaphs. In the 16th century those of Étienne Pasquier were universally
admired. Instances such as "La première au rendez-vous," inscribed on
the grave of a mother, Piron's epitaph, written for himself after his
rejection by the French Academy--
"Ci-gît Piron, qui ne fut rien,
Pas même académicien"--
and one by a relieved husband, to be seen at Père la Chaise--
"Ci-gît ma femme. Ah! qu'elle est bien
Pour son repos et pour le mien"--
might be multiplied indefinitely. One can hardly look through a
collection of English epitaphs without being struck with the fact that
these represent a greater variety of intellectual and emotional states
than those of any other nation, ranging through every style of thought
from the sublime to the commonplace, every mood of feeling from the most
delicate and touching to the coarse and even brutal. Few subordinate
illustrations of the complex nature of the English nationality are more
striking.
Epitaphs are sometimes classified according to their authorship and
sometimes according to their subject, but neither division is so
interesting as that which arranges them according to their
characteristic features. What has just been said of English epitaphs is,
of course, more true of epitaphs generally. They exemplify every variety
of sentiment and taste, from lofty pathos and dignified eulogy to coarse
buffoonery and the vilest scurrility. The extent to which the humorous
and even the low comic element prevails among them is a noteworthy
circumstance. It is curious that the most solemn of all subjects should
have been frequently treated, intentionally or unintentionally, in a
style so ludicrous that a collection of epitaphs is generally one of the
most amusing books that can be picked up. In this as in other cases,
too, it is to be observed that the unintended humour is generally of a
much more entertaining kind than that which has been deliberately
perpetrated.
See Weever, _Ancient Funerall Monuments_ (1631, 1661, Tooke's edit.,
1767); Philippe Labbe, _Thesaurus epitaphiorum_ (Paris, 1666);
_Theatrum funebre extructum a Dodone Richea seu Ottone Aicher_ (1675);
Hackett, _Select and Remarkable Epitaphs_ (1757); de Laplace,
_Épitaphes sérieuses, badines, satiriques et burlesques_ (3 vols.,
Paris, 1782); Pulleyn, _Churchyard Gleanings_ (c. 1830); L. Lewysohn,
_Sechzig Epitaphien von Grabsteinen d. israelit. Friedhofes zu Worms_
(1855); Pettigrew, _Chronicles of the Tombs_ (1857); S. Tissington,
_Epitaphs_ (1857); Robinson, _Epitaphs from Cemeteries in London,
Edinburgh, &c._ (1859); le Blant, _Inscriptions chrétiennes de la
Gaule antérieures au VIII^e siècle_ (1856, 1865); Blommaert, Galliard,
&c, _Inscriptions funéraires et monumentales de la prov. de Flandre
Orient_ (Ghent, 1857, 1860); _Inscriptions fun. et mon. de la prov.
d'Anvers_ (Antwerp, 1857-1860); Chwolson, _Achtzehn hebräische
Grabschriften aus der Krim_ (1859); J. Brown, _Epitaphs, &c, in
Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh_ (1867); H.J. Loaring, _Quaint,
Curious, and Elegant Epitaphs_ (1872); J.K. Kippax, _Churchyard
Literature, a Choice Collection of American Epitaphs_ (Chicago, 1876);
also the poet William Wordsworth's _Essay on Epitaphs_.
EPITHALAMIUM (Gr. [Greek: epi], at or upon, and [Greek: thalamos], a
nuptial chamber), originally among the Greeks a song in praise of bride
and bridegroom, which was sung by a number of boys and girls at the door
of the nuptial chamber. According to the scholiast on Theocritus, one
form, the [Greek: katakoimêtikon], was employed at night, and another,
the [Greek: diegertikon], to arouse the bride and bridegroom on the
following morning. In either case, as was natural, the main burden of
the song consisted of invocations of blessing and predictions of
happiness, interrupted from time to time by the ancient chorus of _Hymen
hymenaee_. Among the Romans a similar custom was in vogue, but the song
was sung by girls only, after the marriage guests had gone, and it
contained much more of what modern morality would condemn as obscene. In
the hands of the poets the epithalamium was developed into a special
literary form, and received considerable cultivation. Sappho, Anacreon,
Stesichorus and Pindar are all regarded as masters of the species, but
the finest example preserved in Greek literature is the 18th Idyll of
Theocritus, which celebrates the marriage of Menelaus and Helen. In
Latin, the epithalamium, imitated from Fescennine Greek models, was a
base form of literature, when Catullus redeemed it and gave it dignity
by modelling his _Marriage of Thetis and Peleus_ on a lost ode of
Sappho. In later times Statius, Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris and
Claudian are the authors of the best-known epithalamia in classical
Latin; and they have been imitated by Buchanan, Scaliger, Sannazaro, and
a whole host of modern Latin poets, with whom, indeed, the form was at
one time in great favour. The names of Ronsard, Malherbe and Scarron are
especially associated with the species in French literature, and Marini
and Metastasio in Italian. Perhaps no poem of this class has been more
universally admired than the _Epithalamium_ of Spenser (1595), though he
has found no unworthy rivals in Ben Jonson, Donne and Quarles. At the
close of _In Memoriam_ Tennyson has appended a poem, on the nuptials of
his sister, which is strictly an epithalamium.
EPITHELIAL, ENDOTHELIAL and GLANDULAR TISSUES,
Epithelium.
in anatomy. Every surface of the body which may come into contact with
foreign substances is covered with a protecting layer of cells closely
bound to one another to form continuous sheets. These are epithelial
cells (from [Greek: thêlê], a nipple). By the formation of outgrowths or
ingrowths from these surfaces further structures, consisting largely or
entirely of cells directly derived from the surface epithelium, may be
formed. In this way originate the central nervous system, the sensitive
surfaces of the special sense organs, the glands, and the hairs, nails,
&c. The epithelial cells possess typical microscopical characters which
enable them to be readily distinguished from all others. Thus the cell
outline is clearly marked, the nucleus large and spherical or
ellipsoidal. The protoplasm of the cell is usually large in amount and
often contains large numbers of granules.
Varieties.
The individual cells forming an epithelial membrane are classified
according to their shape. Thus we find _flattened_, or _squamous_,
_cubical_, _columnar_, _irregular_, _ciliated_ or _flagellated_ cells.
Many of the membranes formed by these cells are only one cell thick, as
for instance is the case for the major part of the alimentary canal. In
other instances the epithelial membrane may consist of a number of
layers of cells, as in the case of the epidermis of the skin.
Considering in the first place those membranes of which the cells are in
a single layer we may distinguish the following:--
1. _Columnar Epithelium_ (figs. 1 and 2).--This variety covers the main
part of the intestinal tract, i.e. from the end of the oesophagus to the
commencement of the rectum. It is also found lining the ducts of many
glands. In a highly typical form it is found covering the villi of the
small intestine (fig. 1). The external layer of the cell is commonly
modified to form a thin membrane showing a number of very fine radially
arranged lines, which are probably the expression of very minute tubular
perforations through the membrane.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.--Isolated Epithelial Cells from the Small
Intestine of the Frog.]
[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Columnar Epithelial Cells resting upon a
Basement Membrane.]
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Mosaic appearance of a Columnar Epithelial
Surface as seen from above.]
The close apposition of these cells to form a closed membrane is well
seen when a surface covered by them is examined from above (fig. 3). The
surfaces of the cells are then seen to form a mosaic, each cell area
having a polyhedral shape.
2. _Cubical Epithelium._--This differs from the former in that the cells
are less in height. It is found in many glands and ducts (e.g. the
kidney), in the middle ear, choroid plexuses of the brain, &c.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--Squamous Epithelial Cells from the Mucous
Membrane of the Mouth.]
[Illustration: FIG. 5.--Isolated ciliated Epithelial Cells from the
Trachea.]
3. _Squamous or Flattened Epithelium_ (fig. 4).--In this variety the
cell is flattened, very thin and irregular in outline. It occurs as the
covering epithelium of the alveoli of the lung, of the kidney glomerules
and capsule, &c. The surface epithelial cells of a stratified epithelium
are also of this type (fig. 4). Closely resembling these cells are those
known as endothelial (see later).
4. _Ciliated Epithelium_ (fig. 5).--The surface cells of many
epithelial membranes are often provided with a number of very fine
protoplasmic processes or _cilia_. Most commonly the cells are columnar,
but other shapes are also found. During life the cilia are always in
movement, and set up a current tending to drive fluid or other material
on the surface in one direction along the membrane or tube lined by such
epithelium. It is found lining the trachea, bronchi, parts of the nasal
cavities and the uterus, oviduct, vas deferens, epididymis, a portion of
the renal tubule, &c.
In the instance of some cells there may be but a single process from the
exposed surface of the cell, and then the process is usually of large
size and length. It is then known as a _flagellum_. Such cells are
common among the surface cells of many of the simple animal organisms.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.--A Stratified Epithelium from a Mucous Membrane.]
[Illustration: FIG. 7.--Stratified Epithelium from the Skin.
c, Columnar cells resting on the fibrous true skin.
p, The so-called prickle cells.
g, Stratum granulosum.
h, Horny cells.
s, Squamous horny cells.]
When the cells of an epithelial surface are arranged several layers
deep, we can again distinguish various types:--
1. _Stratified Epithelium_ (figs. 6 and 7).--This is found in the
epithelium of the skin and of many mucous membranes (mouth, oesophagus,
rectum, conjunctiva, vagina, &c.). Here the surface cells are very much
flattened (squamous epithelium), those of the middle layer are
polyhedral and those of the lowest layer are cubical or columnar. This
type of epithelium is found covering surfaces commonly exposed to
friction. The surface may be dry as in the skin, or moist, e.g. the
mouth. The surface cells are constantly being rubbed off, and are then
replaced by new cells growing up from below. Hence the deepest layer,
that nearest the blood supply, is a formative layer, and in successive
stages from this we can trace the gradual transformation of these
protoplasmic cells into scaly cells, which no longer show any sign of
being alive. In the moist mucous surfaces the number of cells forming
the epithelial layer is usually much smaller than in a dry stratified
epithelium.
2. _Stratified Ciliated Epithelium._--In this variety the superficial
cells are ciliated and columnar, between the bases of these are found
fusiform cells and the lowest cells are cubical or pyramidal. This
epithelium is found lining parts of the respiratory passages, the vas
deferens and the epididymis.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.--Transitional Epithelium from the Urinary
Bladder, showing the outlines of the cells only.]
3. _Transitional Epithelium_ (fig. 8).--This variety of epithelium is
found lining the bladder, and the appearance observed depends upon the
contracted or distended state of the bladder from which the preparation
was made. If the bladder was contracted the form seen in fig. 8 is
obtained. The epithelium is in three or more layers, the superficial one
being very characteristic. The cells are cubical and fit over the
rounded ends of the cells of the next layer. These are pear-shaped, the
points of the pear resting on the basement membrane. Between the bases
of these cells lie those of the lowermost layer. These are irregularly
columnar. If the bladder is distended before the preparation is made,
the cells are then found stretched out transversely. This is especially
the case with the surface cells, which may then become very flattened.
Considering epithelium from the point of view of function, it may be
classified as protective, absorptive or secretory. It may produce
special outgrowths for protective or ornamental purposes, such are
hairs, nails, horns, &c., and for such purposes it may manufacture
within itself chemical material best suited for that purpose, e.g.
keratin; here the whole cell becomes modified. In other instances may be
seen in the interior of the cells many chemical substances which
indicate the nature of their work, e.g. fat droplets, granules of
various kinds, protein, mucin, watery granules, glycogen, &c. In a
typical absorbing cell granules of material being absorbed may be seen.
A secreting cell of normal type forming specific substances stores these
in its interior until wanted, e.g. fat as in sebaceous and mammary
glands, ferment precursors (salivary, gastric glands, &c.), and various
excretory substances, as in the renal epithelium.
Initially the epithelium cell might have all these functions, but later
came specialization and therefore to most cells a specific work. Some of
that work does not require the cell to be at the surface, while for
other work this is indispensable, and hence when the surface becomes
limited those of the former category are removed from the surface to the
deeper parts. This is seen typically in secretory and excretory cells,
which usually lie below the surface on to which they pour their
secretions. If the secretion required at any one point is considerable,
then the secreting cells are numerous in proportion and a typical gland
is formed. The secretion is then conducted to the surface by a duct, and
this duct is also lined with epithelium.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.--A Compound Tubular Gland. One of the pyloric
glands of the stomach of the dog.]
Glands.
_Glandular Tissues._--Every gland is formed by an ingrowth from an
epithelial surface. This ingrowth may from the beginning possess a
tubular structure, but in other instances may start as a solid column of
cells which subsequently becomes tubulated. As growth proceeds, the
column of cells may divide or give off offshoots, in which case a
compound gland is formed. In many glands the number of branches is
limited, in others (salivary, pancreas) a very large structure is
finally formed by repeated growth and subdivision. As a rule the
branches do not unite with one another, but in one instance, the liver,
this does occur when a reticulated compound gland is produced. In
compound glands the more typical or secretory epithelium is found
forming the terminal portion of each branch, and the uniting portions
form ducts and are lined with a less modified type of epithelial cell.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.--A Tubulo-alveolar Gland. One of the mucous
salivary glands of the dog. On the left the alveoli are unfolded to show
their general arrangement. d, Small duct of gland subdividing into
branches; e, f and g, terminal tubular alveoli of gland.]
[Illustration: FIG. 11.--A Compound Alveolar Gland. One of the terminal
lobules of the pancreas, showing the spherical form of the alveoli.]
Glands are classified according to their shape. If the gland retains its
shape as a tube throughout it is termed a _tubular_ gland, simple
tubular if there is no division (large intestine), _compound_ tubular
(fig. 9) if branching occurs (pyloric glands of stomach). In the simple
tubular glands the gland may be coiled without losing its tubular form,
e.g. in sweat glands. In the second main variety of gland the secretory
portion is enlarged and the lumen variously increased in size. These are
termed _alveolar_ or _saccular_ glands. They are again subdivided into
simple or compound alveolar glands, as in the case of the tubular glands
(fig. 10). A further complication in the case of the alveolar glands may
occur in the form of still smaller saccular diverticuli growing out from
the main sacculi (fig. 11). These are termed _alveoli_.
The typical secretory cells of the glands are found lining the terminal
portions of the ramifications and extend upwards to varying degrees.
Thus in a typical acinous gland the cells are restricted to the final
alveoli. The remaining tubes are to be considered mainly as ducts. In
tubulo-alveolar glands the secreting epithelium lines the alveus as well
as the terminal tubule.
The gland cells are all placed upon a basement membrane. In many
instances this membrane is formed of very thin flattened cells, in other
instances it is apparently a homogeneous membrane, and according to some
observers is simply a modified part of the basal surface of the cell,
while according to others it is a definite structure distinct from the
epithelium.
In the secretory portion of the gland and in the smaller ducts the
epithelial layer is one cell thick only. In the larger ducts there are
two layers of cells, but even here the surface cell usually extends by a
thinned-out stalk down to the basement membrane.
The detailed characters of the epithelium of the different glands of the
body are given in separate articles (see ALIMENTARY CANAL, &c.). It will
be sufficient here to give the more general characters possessed by
these cells. They are cubical or conical cells with distinct oval nuclei
and granular protoplasm. Within the protoplasm is accumulated a large
number of spherical granules arranged in diverse manners in different
cells. The granules vary much in size in different glands, and in
chemical composition, but in all cases represent a store of material
ready to be discharged from the cell as its secretion. Hence the general
appearance of the cell is found to vary according to the previous degree
of activity of the cell. If it has been at rest for some time the cell
contains very many granules which swell it out and increase its size.
The nucleus is then largely hidden by the granules. In the opposite
condition, i.e. when the cell has been actively secreting, the
protoplasm is much clearer, the nucleus obvious and the cell shrunken in
size, all these changes being due to the extrusion of the granules.
Endothelium and mesothelium.
_Endothelium and Mesothelium._--Lining the blood vessels, lymph vessels
and lymph spaces are found flattened cells apposed to one another by
their edges to form an extremely thin membrane. These cells are
developed from the middle embryonic layer and are termed endothelium. A
very similar type of cells is also found, formed into a very thin
continuous sheet, lining the body-cavity, i.e. pleural pericardial, and
peritoneal cavities. These cells develop from that portion of the
mesoderm known as the mesothelium, and are therefore frequently termed
mesothelial, though by many they are also included as endothelial cells.
[Illustration: FIG. 12.--Mesothelial Cells forming the Peritoneal Serous
Membrane. Three stomata are seen surrounded by cubical cells. One of
these is closed. The light band marks the position of a lymphatic.
(After Klein.)]
A mesothelial cell is very flattened, thus resembling a squamous
epithelial cell. It possesses a protoplasm with faint granules and an
oval or round nucleus (fig. 12). The outline of the cell is irregularly
polyhedral, and the borders may be finely serrated. The cells are united
to one another by an intercellular cement substance which, however, is
very scanty in amount, but can be made apparent by staining with silver
nitrate when the appearance reproduced in the figure is seen. By being
thus united together, the cells form a continuous layer. This layer is
pierced by a number of small openings, known as stomata, which bring the
cavity into direct communication with lymph spaces or vessels lying
beneath the membrane. The stomata are surrounded by a special layer of
cubical and granular cells. Through these stomata fluids and other
materials present in the body-cavity can be removed into the lymph
spaces.
_Endothelial membranes_ (fig. 13) are quite similar in structure to
mesothelial. They are usually elongated cells of irregular outline and
serrated borders.
[Illustration: FIG. 13.--Endothelial Cells from the Interior of an
Artery.]
By means of endothelial or mesothelial membranes the surfaces of the
parts covered by them are rendered very smooth, so that movement over
the surface is greatly facilitated. Thus the abdominal organs can glide
easily over one another within the peritoneal cavity; the blood or lymph
experiences the least amount of friction; or again the friction is
reduced to a minimum between a tendon and its sheath or in the joint
cavities. The cells forming these membranes also possess further
physiological properties. Thus it is most probable that they play an
active part in the blood capillaries in transmitting substances from the
blood into the tissue spaces, or conversely in preventing the passage of
materials from blood to tissue space or from tissue space to blood.
Hence the fluid of the blood and that of the tissue space need not be of
the same chemical composition. (T. G. Br.)
EPITOME (Gr. [Greek: epitomê], from [Greek: epitemnein], to cut short),
an abridgment, abstract or summary giving the salient points of a book,
law case, &c., a short and concise account of any particular subject or
event. By transference _epitome_ is also used to express the
representation of a larger thing, concrete or abstract, reproduced in
miniature. Thus St Mark's was called by Ruskin the "epitome of Venice,"
as it embraces examples of all the periods of architecture from the 10th
to the 19th centuries.
EPOCH (Gr. [Greek: epochê], holding in suspense, a pause, from [Greek:
epechein], to hold up, to stop), a term for a stated period of time, and
so used of a date accepted as the starting-point of an era or of a new
period in chronology, such as the birth of Christ. It is hence
transferred to a period which marks a great change, whether in the
history of a country or a science, such as a great discovery or
invention. Thus an event may be spoken of as "epoch-making." The word is
also used, synonymously with "period," for any space of time marked by a
distinctive condition or by a particular series of events.
In astronomy the word is used for a moment from which time is measured,
or at which a definite position of a body or a definite relation of two
bodies occurs. For example, the position of a body moving in an orbit
cannot be determined unless its position at some given time is known.
The given time is then the epoch; but the term is often applied to the
mean longitude of the body at the given time.
EPODE, in verse, the third part in an ode, which followed the strophe
and the antistrophe, and completed the movement; it was called [Greek:
epôdos periodos] by the Greeks. At a certain moment the choirs, which
had chanted to right of the altar or stage and then to left of it,
combined and sang in unison, or permitted the coryphaeus to sing for
them all, standing in the centre. When, with the appearance of
Stesichorus and the evolution of choral lyric, a learned and artificial
kind of poetry began to be cultivated in Greece, a new form, the [Greek:
eidos epôdikon], or epode-song, came into existence. It consisted of a
verse of trimeter iambic, followed by a dimeter iambic, and it is
reported that, although the epode was carried to its highest perfection
by Stesichorus, an earlier poet, Archilochus, was really the inventor of
this form. The epode soon took a firm place in choral poetry, which it
lost when that branch of literature declined. But it extended beyond the
ode, and in the early dramatists we find numerous examples of monologues
and dialogues framed on the epodical system. In Latin poetry the epode
was cultivated, in conscious archaism, both as a part of the ode and as
an independent branch of poetry. Of the former class, the epithalamia of
Catullus, founded on an imitation of Pindar, present us with examples of
strophe, antistrophe and epode; and it has been observed that the
celebrated ode of Horace, beginning _Quem virum aut heroa lyra vel
acri_, possesses this triple character. But the word is now mainly
familiar from an experiment of Horace in the second class, for he
entitled his fifth book of odes _Epodon liber_ or the Book of Epodes. He
says in the course of these poems, that in composing them he was
introducing a new form, at least in Latin literature, and that he was
imitating the effect of the iambic distichs invented by Archilochus.
Accordingly we find the first ten of these epodes composed in alternate
verses of iambic trimeter and iambic dimeter, thus:--
"At o Deorum quicquid in coelo regit
Terras et humanum genus."
In the seven remaining epodes Horace has diversified the measures, while
retaining the general character of the distich. This group of poems
belongs in the main to the early youth of the poet, and displays a
truculence and a controversial heat which are absent from his more
mature writings. As he was imitating Archilochus in form, he believed
himself justified, no doubt, in repeating the sarcastic violence of his
fierce model. The curious thing is that these particular poems of
Horace, which are really short lyrical satires, have appropriated almost
exclusively the name of epodes, although they bear little enough
resemblance to the genuine epode of early Greek literature.
EPONA, a goddess of horses, asses and mules, worshipped by the Romans,
though of foreign, probably Gallic, origin. The majority of inscriptions
and images bearing her name have been found in Gaul, Germany and the
Danube countries; of the few that occur in Rome itself most were exhumed
on the site of the barracks of the _equites singulares_, a foreign
imperial body-guard mainly recruited from the Batavians. Her name does
not appear in Tertullian's list of the _indigetes di_, and Juvenal
contrasts her worship unfavourably with the old Roman Numa ritual. Her
cult does not appear to have been introduced before imperial times, when
she is often called Augusta and invoked on behalf of the emperor and the
imperial house. Her chief function, however, was to see that the beasts
of burden were duly fed, and to protect them against accidents and
malicious influence. In the countries in which the worship of Epona was
said to have had its origin it was a common belief that certain beings
were in the habit of casting a spell over stables during the night. The
Romans used to place the image of the goddess, crowned with flowers on
festive occasions, in a sort of shrine in the centre of the architrave
of the stable. In art she is generally represented seated, with her hand
on the head of the accompanying horse or animal.
See Tertullian, Apol. 16; Juvenal viii. 157; Prudentius, _Apoth._ 197;
Apuleius, _Metam._ iii. 27; articles in Daremberg and Saglio's _Dict,
des antiquités_ and Pauly-Wissowa's _Realencyclopädie_.
EPONYMOUS, that which gives a name to anything (Gr. [Greek: epônymos],
from [Greek: onoma], a name), a term especially applied to the mythical
or semi-mythical personages, heroes, deities, &c. from whom a country or
city took its name. Thus Pelops is the giver of the name to the
Peloponnese. At Athens the chief archon of the year was known as the
[Greek: archôn epônymos], as the year was known by his name. There was a
similar official in ancient Assyria. In ancient times, as in historical
and modern cases, a country or a city has been named after a real
personage, but in many cases the person has been invented to account for
the name.
EPPING, a market town in the Epping parliamentary division of Essex,
England, 17 m. N.N.E. from London by a branch of the Great Eastern
railway. Pop. of urban district (1901), 3789. The town lies high and
picturesquely, at the northern outskirts of Epping Forest. The modern
church of St John the Baptist replaces the old parish church of All
Saints in the village of Epping Upland 2 m. N.W. This is in part Norman.
There is considerable trade in butter, cheese and sausages.
Epping Forest forms part of the ancient Waltham Forest, which covered
the greater part of the county. All the "London Basin," within which the
Forest lies, was densely wooded. The Forest became one of the commonable
lands of Royal Chases or hunting-grounds. It was threatened with total
disafforestation, when under the Epping Forest Act of 1871 a board of
commissioners was appointed for the better management of the lands. The
corporation of the city of London then acquired the freehold interest of
waste land belonging to the lords of the manor, and finally secured
5559½ acres, magnificently timbered, to the use of the public for ever,
the tract being declared open by Queen Victoria in 1882. The Ancient
Court of Verderers was also revived, consisting of an hereditary lord
warden together with four verderers elected by freeholders of the
county. The present forest lies between the valleys of the Roding and
the Lea, and extends southward from Epping to the vicinity of Woodford
and Walthamstow, a distance of about 7 m. It is readily accessible from
the villages on its outskirts, such as Woodford, Chingford and Loughton,
which are served by branches of the Great Eastern railway. These are
centres of residential districts, and, especially on public holidays in
the summer, receive large numbers of visitors.
EPPS, the name of an English family, well known in commerce and
medicine. In the second half of the 18th century they had been settled
near Ashford, Kent, for some generations, claiming descent from an
equerry of Charles II., but were reduced in circumstances, when JOHN
EPPS rose to prosperity as a provision merchant in London, and restored
the family fortunes. He had four sons, of whom JOHN EPPS (1805-1869),
GEORGE NAPOLEON EPPS (1815-1874), and JAMES EPPS (1821-1907) were
notable men of their day, the two former as prominent doctors who were
ardent converts to homoeopathy, and James as a homoeopathic chemist and
the founder of the great cocoa business associated with his name. Among
Dr G.N. Epps's children were Dr Washington Epps, a well-known
homoeopathist, Lady Alma-Tadema, and Mrs Edmund Gosse.
ÉPRÉMESNIL (ÉSPRÉMESNIL or ÉPRÉMÉNIL), JEAN JACQUES DUVAL D'
(1745-1794), French magistrate and politician, was born in India on the
5th of December 1745 at Pondicherry, his father being a colleague of
Dupleix. Returning to France in 1750 he was educated in Paris for the
law, and became in 1775 _conseiller_ in the parlement of Paris, where he
soon distinguished himself by his zealous defence of its rights against
the royal prerogative. He showed bitter enmity to Marie Antoinette in
the matter of the diamond necklace, and on the 19th of November 1787 he
was the spokesman of the parlement in demanding the convocation of the
states-general. When the court retaliated by an edict depriving the
parlement of its functions, Éprémesnil bribed the printers to supply him
with a copy before its promulgation, and this he read to the assembled
parlement. A royal officer was sent to the palais de justice to arrest
Éprémesnil and his chief supporter Goislard de Montsabert, but the
parlement (5th of May 1788) declared that they were all Éprémesnils, and
the arrest was only effected on the next day on the voluntary surrender
of the two members. After four months' imprisonment on the island of Ste
Marguerite, Éprémesnil found himself a popular hero, and was returned to
the states-general as deputy of the nobility of the outlying districts
of Paris. But with the rapid advance towards revolution his views
changed; in his _Réflexions impartiales_ ... (January 1789) he defended
the monarchy, and he led the party among the nobility that refused to
meet with the third estate until summoned to do so by royal command. In
the Constituent Assembly he opposed every step towards the destruction
of the monarchy. After a narrow escape from the fury of the Parisian
populace in July 1792 he was imprisoned in the Abbaye, but was set at
liberty before the September massacres. In September 1793, however, he
was arrested at Le Havre, taken to Paris, and denounced to the
Convention as an agent of Pitt. He was brought to trial before the
revolutionary tribunal on the 21st of April 1794, and was guillotined
the next day.
D'Éprémesnil's speeches were collected in a small volume in 1823. See
also H. Carré, _Un Précurseur inconscient de la Révolution_ (Paris,
1897).
EPSOM, a market town in the Epsom parliamentary division of Surrey,
England, 14 m. S.W. by S. of London Bridge. Pop. of urban district
(1901), 10,915. It is served by the London & South-Western and the
London, Brighton & South Coast railways, and on the racecourse on the
neighbouring Downs there is a station (Tattenham Corner) of the
South-Eastern & Chatham railway. The principal building is the parish
church of St Martin, a good example of modern Gothic, the interior of
which contains some fine sculptures by Flaxman and Chantrey. Epsom (a
contraction of Ebbisham, still the name of the manor) first came into
notice when mineral springs were discovered there about 1618. For some
time after their discovery the town enjoyed a wonderful degree of
prosperity. After the Restoration it was often visited by Charles II.,
and when Queen Anne came to the throne, her husband, Prince George of
Denmark, made it his frequent resort. Epsom gradually lost its celebrity
as a spa, but the annual races held on its downs arrested the decay of
the town. Races appear to have been established here as early as James
I's residence at Nonsuch, but they did not assume a permanent character
until 1730. The principal races--the Derby and Oaks--are named after one
of the earls of Derby and his seat, the Oaks, which is in the
neighbourhood. The latter race was established in 1779, and the former
in the following year. The spring races are held on a Thursday and
Friday towards the close of April; and the great Epsom meeting takes
place on the Tuesday and three following days immediately before
Whitsuntide,--the Derby on the Wednesday, and the Oaks on the Friday
(see HORSE-RACING). The grand stand was erected in 1829, and
subsequently enlarged; and there are numerous training stables in the
vicinity. Close to the town are the extensive buildings of the Royal
Medical Benevolent College, commonly called Epsom College, founded in
1855. Scholars on the foundation must be the sons of medical men, but in
other respects the school is open. In the neighbourhood is the Durdans,
a seat of the earl of Rosebery.
EPSOM SALTS, heptohydrated magnesium sulphate, MgSO4·7H2O, the _magnesii
sulphas_ of pharmacy (Ger. _Bittersalz_). It occurs dissolved in sea
water and in most mineral waters, especially in those at Epsom (from
which place it takes its name), Seidlitz, Saidschutz and Pullna. It also
occurs in nature in fibrous excrescences, constituting the mineral
epsomite or hair-salt; and as compact masses (reichardite), as in the
Stassfurt mines. It is also found associated with limestone, as in the
Mammoth Caves, Kentucky, and with gypsum, as at Montmartre. Epsom salts
crystallizes in the orthorhombic system, being isomorphous with the
corresponding zinc and nickel sulphates, and also with magnesium
chromate. Occasionally monoclinic crystals are obtained by crystallizing
from a strong solution. It is used in the arts for weighting cotton
fabrics, as a top-dressing for clover hay in agriculture, and in dyeing.
In medicine it is frequently employed as a hydragogue purgative,
specially valuable in febrile diseases, in congestion of the portal
system, and in the obstinate constipation of painters' colic. In the
last case it is combined with potassium iodide, the two salts being
exceedingly effective in causing the elimination of lead from the
system. It is also very useful as a supplement to mercury, which needs a
saline aperient to complete its action. The salt should be given a few
hours after the mercury, e.g. in the early morning, the mercury having
been given at night. It possesses the advantage of exercising but little
irritant effect upon the bowels. Its nauseous bitter taste may to some
extent be concealed by acidifying the solution with dilute sulphuric
acid, and in some cases where full doses have failed the repeated
administration of small ones has proved effectual.
For the manufacture of Epsom salts and for other hydrated magnesium
sulphates see MAGNESIUM.
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