The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Volume 4 (of 7)

1. Daguesseau 1 2. Cromwell 11 3. Lionardo da Vinci 21 4. Vauban 29 5. William III. 37 6. Goethe 46 7. Correggio[1] 57 8. Napoleon 67 9. Linnæus 77 10. Priestley[1] 85 11. Arios...

It is hard, in a brief and popular memoir, to assign reasons for the high reputation enjoyed by Daguesseau. His celebrity is rather traditional than historical; it can be apprec...

The remainder of the Long Parliament, although sneered at and hated, were the flower of the patriots, whose energy had begun and continued the contest, and well they supported t...

After the fall of Lodovico il Moro, in 1500, Lionardo returned to Florence, where he remained thirteen years, occasionally revisiting Milan. Among his first works done in Floren...

From the period of Vauban’s promotion to the dignity of Marshal of France, his active labours in the public service were necessarily much less numerous; much of his time being d...

The character of King William has been drawn with all the exaggeration of panegyric and obloquy by the opposing partisans in a cause, which is still the subject of controversy o...

This sentiment extended to politics. Long before the words “Conservative” and “Destructive” were applied to English parties, Goethe had made frequent use of them. It was the ten...

The peculiar softness for which Correggio is distinguished, is also to be traced to his feeling for the richness and union produced by shade; but he is by no means uniformly sof...

In December, 1804, the First Consul assumed the titles of Napoleon, Emperor of the French and King of Italy. The Pope assisted in the ceremony of his coronation at Notre Dame: b...

In 1738 Linnæus settled as a physician at Stockholm, where he met with so much opposition, that he almost resolved to quit his native country. But by perseverance he worked his...

Dr. Priestley’s residence at Leeds was near a brewery; and his first pneumatic experiments were made on the carbonic acid gas, or _fixed air_, largely generated during fermentat...

In October, 1532, Ariosto, after sixteen years passed, since its first publication, in the continual and almost daily revision of his great poem, published a third edition in fo...

The following year was fruitful in intrigues at home, and remarkable for the decline of the Duchess of Marlborough’s favour with Queen Anne: the military operations were barren...

It will be well, in the present Memoir, to touch but lightly upon the disputes which agitated the learned in France and Germany when the partial success of the Abbé de l’Epée be...

Such is the outline of Colbert’s ministerial life. He accomplished much; but the will of an opinionated master, and the jealousy of his ministerial colleagues, especially the ce...

The virtues which distinguish him from all others who have united the fame of statesman and captain, were two-fold, and they are as great as they are rare. He refused power whic...

Cean Bermudez remarks of the Tiñoso, that the figure of the Queen Santa Isabel (whom by the way he makes a Queen of Portugal in one of his works and a Queen of Hungary in anothe...

The best Spanish editions of Don Quixote are that of the Spanish Academy, in four vols. 4to., 1788; the edition by Don Juan Antonio Pellicer, with a good life of Cervantes, five...

The King of Prussia once more led an army into the field, when, on the death of the Elector of Bavaria, childless, in 1778, Joseph II. of Austria conceived the plan of re-annexi...

Failing in this attempt, Drake continued for some time on the coast, visiting Carthagena and other places, and making prize of various ships; and if we wonder at his hardihood i...

Charles, notwithstanding his victory at Pavia, did not invade France, but, as the price of freedom, he prescribed the harshest conditions to the captive king. At first they were...

At the age of twenty-one, he enlisted as a volunteer under the Prince of Orange. At Breda, the solution of a problem introduced him to Beekman. Here he wrote his ‘Treatise on Mu...

In a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, Spenser sets forth the general design of the ‘Faery Queene,’ and settles the scheme of the whole twelve books. But the following passage prove...

It is not for such minds as that of Grotius that “stone walls can make a prison.” During nearly two years of close imprisonment, with no society but that of his wife, who consta...