Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "English Language" to "Epsom Salts" Volume 9, Slice 6
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 Moliere 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 Moliere'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 litteraire 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 debut 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 naivetes 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 _eclosion_ 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 Abbe 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 Moliere, 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 Sevigne 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 _supreme_. 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 Jokai 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 siecle_, 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_; Merimee 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 scene_, 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 Bronte 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 _entrainement_ 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 Brontes, 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 Bronte.
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 Bronte (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 Brontes' 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 regime 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 _succes 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 idees catholiques en Angleterre_, A. Chevrillon's _Sydney Smith et la renaissance des idees liberales 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 Bronte 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 _greve_, Provencal _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. Hulsen in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopadie_, 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 Fe, 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 Riviere Dufresny and J.J. Rousseau did not consider it beneath their literary dignity. In 1646 the abbe Charles Cotier (1604-1682) published a _Recueil des enigmes 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, 11-1/2 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 facades 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 77-1/2 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. Muller (1884), L. Valmaggi (1900, with notes), J. Vahlen (1903); monographs by L. Muller (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 (Briancon) 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 Latinite 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_, S 479 (Eng. tr., 1892). French translation by the abbe S. Leglise (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 Halevy 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 Schurer, Levi 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 Halevy 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 Schurer, _Gesch. d. judischen 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 athiopischen 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, Schurer 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: anatole, dusis, arktos, mesembria]. 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 koniglichen gelehrten Gesellschaft zu Gottingen_ (1896). See also Schurer _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 Dedeagatch, 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 a 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 Espana_, _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 _Medico 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 Zarate. 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 Angelica_ (Rouen, 1647). Enriquez Gomez is best represented by _El Siglo Pitagorico y Vida de don Gregorio Guadana_ (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 Logrono 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 Patinos, 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 Patinos'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 mais 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 deg.-160 deg. 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: enstates], "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 Schonberg 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 Kjorrestad, 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 deg. 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 5-1/2, 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: theos]. 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: euche], 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 eikoton e semeion]), 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 (palaeoentomology) 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 Reaumur, 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 vertebres_, 1801) and G. Cuvier (_Lecons d'anatomie comparee_, 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-Durckheim in 1828 issued his great treatise on the cockchafer. But the name of J.C.L. de Savigny, who (_Mem. sur les animaux sans vertebres_, 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. Muller, 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 Societe 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 Kolliker 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 Reaumur 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. Muller, 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. Muller 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_ (Muller), and as this is included in the genus _Limnetis_ (Loven, 1846), that genus must be a synonym of _Lynceus_ as restricted. (c) _Leptestheriidae_. _Estheria_ (Ruppell, 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. Muller) 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. Muller), 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 debris 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 Muller'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."
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. Muller) 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. Muller 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. Muller 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 Muller) 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. Muller'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. Muller, 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, Muller 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.
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. Muller'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.
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_ (Kroyer), established earlier than its synonym _Thaumaleus_ (Kroyer), 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. Muller, 1776), though greatly restricted since Muller'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 _Nicothoe_ 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 Copepodes 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'Estrees, 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 Ferriere, _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 Perouse, 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 Marao (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 _Mino_) 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 Marao.
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 Moncao (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, Guimaraes 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 Guimaraes (9104), a place of considerable historical interest.
ENTREPOT (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 _entrepot_. 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 Fe, the Parana 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 Parana 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 Parana to Concepcion 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 Parana, though the seat of government was originally located at Concepcion del Uruguay, and was again transferred to that town during Urquiza's domination. Concepcion del Uruguay, or Concepcion (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 Gualeguaychu.
ENVOY (Fr. _envoye_, "sent"), a diplomatic agent of the second rank. The word _envoye_ 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, _Konig Enzio_ (Gottingen, 1883); and H. Blasius, _Konig Enzio_ (Breslau, 1884).
ENZYME (Gr. [Greek: enzymos], leavened, from [Greek: en], in, and [Greek: zyme], leaven), a term, first suggested by Kuhne, 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: eos], 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 3-1/2% 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.
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 Sezanne 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 Gumbel has classified the Eocene of the northern Alps (Bavaria, &c.) as follows:--
Upper Eocene, Flysch and Vienna sandstone, with younger nummulitic beds and Haring group.
Middle " Kressenberg Beds, with older nummulitic beds.
Lower " Burberg Beds, Greensands with small nummulites.
The Haring 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 Subathu 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 | | Lutetien. | Calcaire grossier. | Bournemouth beds. | Bruxellien. | | | and | | | | Lower Bagshot sands. | Paniselien. | | Upper part of the| Claibornian. | +--------------+-------------------------+----------------------+-------------------+ | Alpine Flysch | | | Ypresien. | Nummulitic sands of | Alum Bay leaf beds. | Sands of Mons en | | and Vienna and | Wind River Group.| | | Soissons and Sands of | | Pevele. | Nummulitic | Carpathian | Wasatch Group | | | Cuise and Aizy. | | Flanders Clay. | limestones, | sandstones. | and | | | | | | sandstones | | | +---+----------+ | +-------------------+ and shales. | | | | | | | London Clay. | | | Macigno of the | | | L | | | Oldhaven beds. | Upper Landenien | | Apennines and | | | a | Sparna- | | | sands. | | Maritime Alps. | Chickasawan. | | n | cien. | Plastic Clay and lignite| Woolwich and Reading | | | | | | d | | beds. | beds. | Sands of | | | | | e |----------+-------------------------+----------------------+ Ostricourt. | | | Torrejon Group | | n | | Limestones of Rilly and | | | | | and | | i | | Sezanne. | Thanet sands. | Landenien 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, _Traite de geologie_, 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. Lutetien " Lutetia = Paris. Ypresien " Ypres, Flanders. Landenien " Landen, Belgium. Thanetien " The Isle of Thanet. Sparnacien " Sparnacum = Epernay. Laekenien " Laeken, Belgium. Bruxellien " Brussels. Paniselien " 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 GENEVIEVE LOUISE AUGUSTE ANDRE TIMOTHEE 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 College 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 Freron's _Annee litteraire_, 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 Francois, 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.
EOTVOS, JOZSEF, BARON (1813-1871), Hungarian writer and statesman, the son of Baron Ignacz Eotvos 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_, Eotvos 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 Eotvos to address it. The February revolution of 1848 was the complete triumph of Eotvos' 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. Eotvos, Deak and Szechenyi represented the pacific, moderating influence in the council of ministers, but when the premier, Batthyany, resigned, Eotvos, 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 Eotvos was one of the most loyal followers of Deak, and his speech in favour of the "Address" (see DEAK, 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 Deak, with whose policy he now completely associated himself. On the formation of the Andrassy 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), Eotvos looked with disfavour on the dogma of papal infallibility, promulgated in 1870, and when the bishop of Fehervar proclaimed it, Eotvos 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 Andrassy 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.
Eotvos 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 Josika. Eotvos 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 Mohacs 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 Jokai.
The best edition of Eotvos' 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. Ban, _Life and Art of Baron Joseph Eotvos_ (Hung.) (Budapest, 1902); Zoltan Ferenczi _Baron Joseph Eotvos_ (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, _Realencyclopadie_, v. pt. 2 (Stuttgart, 1905), pp. 2674-2707; also ARMY: _History_, S 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 _epaule_, 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 (_epauliere_) 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.
EPEE, CHARLES-MICHEL, ABBE 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 abbe, 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 Epee obtained his manual alphabet. The abbe, 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 a 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 Veritable Maniere d'instruire les sourds et muets, confirmee par une longue experience_. He also began a _Dictionnaire general des signes_, which was completed by his successor, the abbe Sicard.
EPEE-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 _epee_ 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 Boessiere 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 epee) 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 epee 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 Boessiere the younger, Lafaugere, Jean Louis, Cordelois, Grisier, Bertrand and Robert, with amateurs like the baron d'Ezpeleta, were foil-players pure and simple, whose reputations were gained before the modern epee 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 epee, 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 epee 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 epee 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 epee-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 epeists themselves discovered new ways of attacking with comparative safety, and at the present day a complete epee-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. Bouche as professors--all of Paris. Belgium, Italy and England have also produced epeists quite of the first rank.
The epee 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 epee 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 epee 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 Epee 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 epee 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 epee-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 epee in England were Messrs P. Ettlinger, Anatole Paroissien, J. Joseph-Renaud, W. Sulzbacher, Rene Lacroix, H.G. Berger and the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat.
Epee 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 epee 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 Epee 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 epeists 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), Etretat, 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 epee "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.
Epee 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 epee 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 epee weighs, complete, about a pound and a half, while a foil weighs approximately one-third less. The epee 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 epee 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 1-3/4 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 "_epees demontables_," which are the most convenient, as a blade may be changed by simply unscrewing or unlocking the pommel.
An epee 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'arret_," like a small tin-tack placed head downwards on the flattened point of the epee, 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'arret. The best is called, after its inventor, the "Leon 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 epee, 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 traite de la perfection sur le fait des armes_, by P.G.F. Girard (Paris, 1736); _L'Ecole des armes_, by M. Angelo (London, 1763); _L'Art des armes_, by M. Danet (2 vols., Paris, 1766-1767); _Nouveau traite de l'art des armes_, by Nicolas Demeuse (Liege, 1778).
More modern are: _Traite de l'art des armes_, by la Boessiere, Jr. (Paris, 1818); _Les Armes et le duel_, by A. Grisier (2nd ed., Paris, 1847); _Les Secrets de l'epee_, by the baron de Bazancourt (Paris, 1862); _Schools and Masters of Fence_, by Egerton Castle (London, 1885); _Le Jeu de l'epee_, by J. Jacob and Emil Andre (Paris, 1887); _L'Escrime pratique au XIX^e siecle_, by Ambroise Baudry (Paris); L'Escrime a l'epee, 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 Traite de l'epee_, by Dr Edom, privately published (Paris, 1908); and, most important of all, _Methode d'escrime a l'epee_, by J. Joseph-Renaud, privately published (Paris, 1909). (C. E. N. R.)
EPERJES, a town of Hungary, capital of the county of Saros, 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 Sovar with important salt-works.
In the same county, 28 m. by rail N. of Eperjes, is situated the old town of _Bartfa_ (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 Bartfa, 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 Vorosvagas, 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 L175,000, 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.
EPERNAY, 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 Chalons-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. Epernay is best known as the principal _entrepot_ 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. Epernay is the seat of a sub-prefect and has tribunals of first instance and of commerce, and communal colleges for girls and boys.
Epernay (_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 Chateau-Thierry, erected into a duchy and assigned to the duke of Bouillon.
EPERNON, 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 Epernon 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 Epernon, colonel-general in the infantry and governor of Guienne. After his death, the title of duke of Epernon was borne by the families of Goth and of Pardaillan.
EPHEBEUM (from Gr. [Greek: ephebos], 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: hebe], 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: lexiarchikon 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_ (Gottingen, 1863); A. Dumont, _Essai sur l'ephebie attique_ (1875-1876); L. Grasberger, _Erziehung und Unterricht im klassichen Altertum_, iii. (Wurzburg, 1881); J.P. Mahaffy, _Old Greek Education_ (1881); P. Girard, _L'Education athenienne au V_^e _et IV_^e _siecle avant J.-C._ (2nd ed., 1891), and article in Daremberg and Saglio's _Dictionnaire des antiquites_ which contains further bibliographical references; G. Gilbert, _The Constitutional Antiquities of Athens_ (Eng. tr., 1895); G. Busolt, _Die griechischen Staats- und Rechtsaltertumer_ (1892); T. Thalheim and J. Ohler in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopadie 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 Epheso] 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 Tubingen school. Against the genuineness have appeared Ewald, Renan, Hausrath, Hilgenfeld, Ritschl, Pfleiderer, Weizsacker, Holtzmann, von Soden, Schmiedel, von Dobschutz and many others. On the other hand, the epistle has been defended by Bleek, Neander, Reuss, B. Weiss, Meyer, Sabatier, Lightfoot, Hort, Sanday, Bacon, Julicher, 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 (Nageli, _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 Tubingen 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. Julicher (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. Weizsacker (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 Cayster, 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, Cayster 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 Arsinoe, 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 _Theologos_, 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 Cayster, 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.
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 Theologos 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'Abbe Martin, _Actes du brigandage d'Ephese_ (Amiens, 1874) and _Le Pseudo-synode connu dans l'histoire sous le nom de brigandage d'Ephese_ (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 Noldeke_ (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. Muller, 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: xenelasia]), 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. Schomann (Eng. trans.), p. 236 ff., A.H.J. Greenidge, p. 102 ff.; Szanto's article "Ephoroi" in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopadie_, v. 2860 ff.; Ed. Meyer, _Forschungen zur alten Geschichte_, i. 244 ff.; C.O. Muller, _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 ursprungliche Bedeutung des spartan_. _Ephorats_ (Munich, 1897); C. Frick, _De ephoris Spartanis_ (Gottingen, 1872); A. Schaefer, _De ephoris Lacedaemoniis_ (Greifswald, 1863); E. von Stern, _Zur Entstehung und ursprunglichen 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. Muller, _Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum_, i., with critical introduction on the life and writings of Ephorus; see J.A. Klugmann, _De Ephoro historico_ (1860); C.A. Volquardsen, _Untersuchungen uber 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 a la prolixite de saint Ephrem que nous trouvons parfois fastidieuse, on ne peut la condamner sans tenir compte du gout des Syriens qui aimaient les repetitions et les developpements de la meme pensee, et voyaient des qualites la ou nous trouvons des defauts" (_Litter. 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 Mosinger (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 Hsuan 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 _Rajatarangini_ (trans. Stein, 1900, and Yuan Chwang). See also A. Stein, _White Huns and Kindred Tribes_ (1905); O. Franke, _Beitrage aus chinesischen Quellen zur Kenntnis der Turkvolker und Skythen_ (1904); Ujfalvy, _Memoire sur les Huns Blancs_ (1898); Drouin, _Memoire 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.)
EPI, 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 Laertius, 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 Laertius (viii. 3). See A.O. Lorenz, _Leben und Schriften des Koers E._ (with account of the Doric drama and fragments, 1864); J. Girard, _Etudes sur la poesie grecque_ (1884); Kaibel in Pauly-Wissowa's _Realencyclopadie_, according to whom Epicharmus was a Siceliot; for the papyrus fragment, Blass in _Jahrbucher fur 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 _Atlamal_, 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 Brandao 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; Sa 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 Yanez, 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 Betica_ in 1603; Cristobal de Virues (1550-1610) a _Monserrate_, in 1588; Luis Barahona de Soto continued Ariosto in a _Tears of Angelica_; Gutierrez wrote an _Austriada_ in 1584; but perhaps the finest modern epic in Spanish verse is the _Araucana_ (1569-1590) of Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga (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 Scudery, the _Pucelle_ of Chapelain, the _Divine Epopee_ 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, _Traite du poeme epique_ (1675); Voltaire, _Sur la poesie epique_; Fauviel, _L'Origine de l'epopee 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 Litterature francaise au moyen age_ (1890); Leon Gautier, _Les Epopees francaises_ (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: Epiktetou 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. Schweighauser (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. Bonhoffer, _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 Verhaltnis 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 L300 (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 Theleme--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: Kepoi 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: prolepseis]). 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 soma]); 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: kepotyrannos] ("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; Moliere, 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: polygraphotatos], Diog. Laert. 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 physeos]), 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 Laertius, 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 Verhaltnis zu Demokrit in der Naturphil._ (Strassburg, 1897); Paul von Gizycki, _Uber das Leben und die Moralphilos. des Epikur (Halle, 1879), and Einleitende Bemerkungen zu einer Untersuchung uber den Werth der Naturphilos. des Epikur_ (Berlin, 1884); P. Cassel, _Epikur der Philosoph_ (Berlin, 1892); M. Guyau, _La Morale d'Epicure 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 Romer 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, Francois 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."
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 1/2(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 _____ r^2 = a^2 + (4b.a + b)p^2 / (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 r^2 = A + Bp^2, 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 limacons (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: he 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.
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. Dorpfeld 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; _Expedition de la Moree_, 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: Ephemeris Archaiologike], especially for 1883 and 1885; see also Kavvadias, Les _Fouilles d'Epidaure_ and [Greek: To Hieron tou Asklepiou en Epidauro kai he therapeia ton asthenon]; Defrasse and Lechat, _Epidaure_. 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 6-1/2. 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. Hauy'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.).
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 Dauphine (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 Etienne 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 Clement Marot. It is enough to mention the names of Boileau, J.B. Rousseau, Lebrun, Voltaire, Marmontel, Piron, Rulhiere, and M.J. Chenier. 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 meme academicien," he appears at any rate in Grimm's phrase to have been "une machine a saillies, a epigrammes, et a 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; Kastner'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 en mathein a dei pathein, kai me pathein, kalon en to mathein ei de dei pathein a d' en mathein, ti dei mathein; chre 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 poematis 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); Brugiere de Barante, _Recueil des plus belles epigrammes des poetes francais_ (2 vols., Paris, 1698); Chr. Aug. Heumann, _Anthologia Latina: hoc est, epigrammata partim a priscis partim junioribus a poetis_ (Hanover, 1721); Fayolle, _Acontologie ou dictionnaire d'epigrammes_ (Paris, 1817); Geijsbeck, _Epigrammatische Anthologie_, Sauvage, _Les Guepes gauloises: petit encyclopedie des meilleurs epigrammes, &c., depuis Clement Marot jusqu'aux poetes de nos jours_ (1859); _La Recreation et passe-temps des tristes: recueil d'epigrammes et de petits contes en vers reimprime sur l'edition 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 Sequard 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 Laertius 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, _Epimenide de Crete_ (1901); H. Diels, _Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker_ (1903); O. Kern in Pauly-Wissowa's _Realencyclopadie_.
EPINAL, 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 Goery (or St Maurice) rebuilt in the 13th century but preserving a tower of the 12th century, the public buildings of Epinal 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 Epinal are connected to the southward with Belfort, Dijon and Besancon, by the fortified line of the Moselle, and north of it lies the unfortified zone called the _Trouee d'Epinal_, a gap designedly left open to the invaders between Epinal and Toul, another great fortress which is itself connected by the Meuse _forts d'arret_ with Verdun and the places of the north-east. Epinal 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 Epinal, 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 Dogneville 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 Epinal; 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 Epinal is sufficiently extensive to accommodate a large army.
Epinal 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 Epinal 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. Epinal is an important junction on the Eastern railway.
Epinal 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.
EPINAY, LOUISE FLORENCE PETRONILLE 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'Epinay, who was made a collector-general of taxes. The marriage was an unhappy one; and Louise d'Epinay believed that the prodigality, dissipation and infidelities of her husband justified her in obtaining a formal separation in 1749. She settled in the chateau 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'Epinay 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'Emilie_ (1774), composed for the education of her grand-daughter, Emilie de Belsunce, was crowned by the French Academy in 1783. The _Memoires et Correspondance de Mme d'Epinay, renfermant un grand nombre de lettres inedites de Grimm, de Diderot, et de J.-J. Rousseau, ainsi que des details_, &c, was published at Paris (1818) from a MS. which she had bequeathed to Grimm. The _Memoires_ are written by herself in the form of a sort of autobiographic romance. Madame d'Epinay figures in it as Madame de Montbrillant, and Rene is generally recognized as Rousseau, Volx as Grimm, Garnier as Diderot. All the letters and documents published along with the _Memoires_ are genuine. Many of Madame d'Epinay's letters are contained in the _Correspondance de l'abbe Galiani_ (1818). Two anonymous works, _Lettres a mon fils_ (Geneva, 1758) and _Mes moments heureux_ (Geneva, 1759), are also by Madame d'Epinay.
See Rousseau's _Confessions_; Lucien Perey [Mlle Herpin] and Gaston Maugras, _La Jeunesse de Mme d'Epinay, les dernieres annees de Mme d'Epinay_ (1882-1883); Sainte-Beuve, _Causeries du lundi_, vol. ii.; Edmond Scherer, _Etudes sur la litterature contemporaine_, vols. iii. and vii. There are editions of the _Memoires_ by L. Enault (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: Pentaglossos] (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,