← Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Cincinnatus" to "Cleruchy" / Volume 6, Slice 4
Chapter 3
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Cincinnatus" to "Cleruchy" (part 3)
In England the clarinet has also passed through several progressive stages since its introduction about 1770, and first of all at the hands of Cornelius Ward. The principal improvements were due to Richard Carte, who took out a patent in 1858 for an improved Boehm clarinet which possessed some claim to the name, since Boehm’s principle of boring the holes at theoretically correct intervals and of venting the holes by means of open holes below was carried out. Carte made several modifications of his original patent, his chief endeavour being to so dispose the key-work as to reduce the difficulties in fingering. By the extension of the principle of the ring action, the work of the third and little fingers of the left hand was simplified and the fingering of certain difficult notes and shakes greatly facilitated. Messrs Rudall, Carte & Company have made further improvements in the clarinet, which are embodied in Klussmann’s patent (fig. 4); these consist in the introduction of the duplicate G♯ key, a note which has hitherto formed a serious obstacle to perfect execution. The duplicate key, operated by the third or second finger of the right hand, releases the fourth finger of the left hand. The old G♯ is still retained and may be used in the usual way if desired. The body of the instrument is now made in one joint, and the position of the G♯ hole is mathematically correct, whereby perfect intonation for C♯, G♯ and F♮ is secured. Other improvements were made in Paris by Messrs Evette & Schaeffer and by M. Paradis, a clarinet-player in the band of the Garde Républicaine, and very great improvements in boring and in key mechanism were effected by Albert of Brussels (see fig. 1).
The clarinet appears to have received appreciation in the Netherlands earlier than in its own native land. According to W. Altenburg (op. cit. p. 11), a MS. is preserved in the cathedral at Antwerp of a mass written by A.J. Faber in 1720, which is scored for a clarinet. Johann Mattheson, Kapellmeister at Hamburg, mentions clarinet music in 1713, although Handel, whose rival he was, does not appear to have known the instrument. Joh. Christ. Bach scored for the clarinet in 1763 in his opera Orione performed in London, and Rameau had already employed the instrument in 1751 in a theatre for his pastoral entitled Acante et Céphise. The clarinet was formally introduced into the orchestra in Vienna in 1767, Gluck having contented himself with the use of the chalumeau in Orfeo (1762) and in Alceste (1767). The clarinet had already been adopted in military bands in France in 1755, where it very speedily completely replaced the oboe. One of Napoleon Bonaparte’s bands is said to have had no less than twenty clarinets.
For further information on the clarinet at the beginning of the 19th century, consult the Methods by Ivan Müller and Xavier Lefébure, and Joseph Froehlich’s admirable work on the instruments of the orchestra; and Gottfried Weber’s articles in Ersch and Gruber’s Encyclopaedia. See also Basset Horn; Bass Clarinet and Pedal Clarinet.
(K. S.)
See Gottfried Weber’s objection to this derivation in “Über Clarinette und Basset-horn,” Caecilia (Mainz, 1829), vol. xi. pp. 36 and 37, note.
Nos. 3 and 4 are sometimes made in one, as for instance in Messrs Rudall, Carte & Company’s modification, the Klussmann patent.
Aristotle (de Audib. 802 b 18, and 804 a) and Porphyry (ed. Wallis, pp. 249 and 252) mention that if the performer presses the zeuge (mouthpiece) or the glottai (reeds) of the pipes, a sharper tone is produced.
Cf. V.C. Mahillon, Éléments d’acoustique musicale et instrumentale (Brussels, 1874), p. 161; and Fr. Zamminer, Die Musik und die musikalischen Instrumente in ihrer Beziehung zu den Gesetzen der Akustik ... (Giessen, 1855), pp. 297 and 298.
“The Aulos or Tibia,” Harvard Studies, iv. (Boston, 1893).
De Musica, 1138.
Op. cit. pp. 160 et seq.; and Wilhelm Altenburg, Die Klarinette (Heilbronn, 1904), p. 9, who refers to Mahillon.
See Macrobius, Comm. in somnium Scipionis, ii. 4. 5 “nec secus probamus in tibiis de quarum foraminibus vicinis inflantis ori sonus acutus emittitur, de longinquis autem et termino proximis, gravior: item acutior per patentiora foramina, gravior per angusta.”
See Victor Loret, L’Égypte au temps des Pharaons—la vie, le science, et l’art (Paris, 1889), illustration p. 139 and p. 143. The author gives no information about this fresco except that it is in the Musée Guimet. It is probably identical with the second of the mural paintings described on p. 190 of Petit guide illustré au Musée Guimet, par L. de Milloue.
See Victor Loret, “Les flûtes égyptiennes antiques,” Journal asiatique (Paris, 1889), , xiv. pp. 129, 130, 132.
See also A.A. Howard, “Study on the Aulos or Tibia,” Harvard Studies, vol. iv. (Boston, 1893); F.C. Gevaert, Musique de l’antiquité; Carl von Jan, article “Floete” in August Baumeister’s Denkmäler des klassischen Alterthums (Leipzig, 1884-1888), vol. i.; Dr Hugo Riemann, Handbuch der Musikgesch. vol. i. p. 90, &c. (Leipzig, 1904); all of whom have not come to the same conclusions.
Wilhelm Froehner, La Colonne trajane (Paris, 1872), t. ii. pl. 76.
“Aveuc aus ert vestus Guis
Ki leur cante et Kalemele,
En la muse au grant bourdon.”
J.A.U. Scheler’s Trouvères belges.
See Ernest Thoinan, Les Hotteterre et les Chédeville, célèbres facteurs de flûtes, hautbois, bassons et musettes (Paris, 1894), p. 15 et seq., and Méthode pour la musette, &c., par Hotteterre le Romain (Paris, 1737).
The whole series of 135 plates has been reproduced in Jahrb. d. Samml. des Alterh. Kaiserhauses (Vienna, 1883-1884).
Musica getutscht und auszgezogen (Basel, 1511).
Musica Instrumentalis Deudsch (Nuremberg, 1528 and 1545).
Syntagma Musicum (Wolfenbüttel, 1618). This work and those mentioned in the two previous notes have been reprinted by the Ges. f. Musikforschung in vols. xi., xx. and xiii. of Publikationen (Berlin).
See Descriptive Catalogue, by Capt. C.R. Day (London, 1891), pl. iv. A and p. 110, No. 221.
Wappenbuch, p. 111, “Musica.”
Paris, 1767, vol. v. “Planches,” pl. ix. 20, 21, 22.
Dr Theofilo Muffat, “Componimenti musicali per il cembalo,” in Denkmäler d. Tonkunst in Österreich, Bd. iii.
Historische Nachricht von den Nürnbergischen Mathematicis u. Künstlern, &c. (Nuremberg, 1730), p. 305.
Histoire de la musique aux Pays Bas avant le XIXe siècle.
For a facsimile of one of the Pompeii tibiae, see Capt. C.R. Day, op. cit. pl. iv. C. and p. 109.
Catalogue descriptif (Ghent, 1896), vol. ii. p. 211, No. 911, where an illustration is given. See also Capt. C.R. Day, op. cit. pl. iv. B and Errata where the description is printed.
For a description with illustration see V. Mahillon’s Catalogue descriptif (Ghent, 1896), vol. ii. p. 215, No. 916.
See Wilhelm Altenburg, op. cit. p. 6.
See V. Mahillon, Catal. descript. (1896), p. 213, No. 913.
H. Welcker von Gontershausen, Die musikalischen Tonwerk-zeuge (Frankfort-on-Main, 1855), p. 141.
Op. cit. p. 6.
See Capt. C.R. Day, op. cit. p. 106.
V. Mahillon, Catal. desc. (1880), p. 182, refers his statement to the Chevalier L. de Burbure.
Das neu-eröffnete Orchester (Hamburg, 1713).
Mahillon, Catal. desc. (1880), vol. i. p. 182.
See Chevalier Ludwig von Koechel, Die kaiserliche Hofmusik-kapelle zu Wien, 1543-1867 (Vienna, 1869).
In the Italian edition of 1769 the part is scored for clarinet.
CLARK, SIR ANDREW, Bart. (1826-1893), British physician, was born at Aberdeen on the 28th of October 1826. His father, who also was a medical man, died when he was only a few years old. After attending school in Aberdeen, he was sent by his guardians to Dundee and apprenticed to a druggist; then returning to Aberdeen he began his medical studies in the university of that city. Soon, however, he went to Edinburgh, where in the extra-academical school he had a student’s career of the most brilliant description, ultimately becoming assistant to J. Hughes Bennett in the pathological department of the Royal Infirmary, and assistant demonstrator of anatomy to Robert Knox. But symptoms of pulmonary phthisis brought his academic life to a close, and in the hope that the sea might benefit his health he joined the medical department of the navy in 1848. Next year he became pathologist to the Haslar hospital, where T.H. Huxley was one of his colleagues, and in 1853 he was the successful candidate for the newly-instituted post of curator to the museum of the London hospital. Here he intended to devote all his energies to pathology, but circumstances brought him into active medical practice. In 1854, the year in which he took his doctor’s degree at Aberdeen, the post of assistant-physician to the hospital became vacant and he was prevailed upon to apply for it. He was fond of telling how his phthisical tendencies gained him the appointment. “He is only a poor Scotch doctor,” it was said, “with but a few months to live; let him have it.” He had it, and two years before his death publicly declared that of those who were on the staff of the hospital at the time of his selection he was the only one remaining alive. In 1854 he became a member of the College of Physicians, and in 1858 a fellow, and then went in succession through all the offices of honour the college has to offer, ending in 1888 with the presidency, which he continued to hold till his death. From the time of his selection as assistant physician to the London hospital, his fame rapidly grew until he became a fashionable doctor with one of the largest practices in London, counting among his patients some of the most distinguished men of the day. The great number of persons who passed through his consulting-room every morning rendered it inevitable that to a large extent his advice should become stereotyped and his prescriptions often reduced to mere stock formulae, but in really serious cases he was not to be surpassed in the skill and carefulness of his diagnosis and in his attention to detail. In spite of the claims of his practice he found time to produce a good many books, all written in the precise and polished style on which he used to pride himself. Doubtless owing largely to personal reasons, lung diseases and especially fibroid phthisis formed his favourite theme, but he also discussed other subjects, such as renal inadequacy, anaemia, constipation, &c. He died in London on the 6th of November 1893, after a paralytic stroke which was probably the result of persistent overwork.
CLARK, FRANCIS EDWARD (1851- ), American clergyman, was born of New England ancestry at Aylmer, Province of Quebec, Canada, on the 12th of September 1851. He was the son of Charles C. Symmes, but took the name of an uncle, the Rev. E.W. Clark, by whom he was adopted after his father’s death in 1853. He graduated at Dartmouth College in 1873 and at Andover Theological Seminary in 1876, was ordained in the Congregational ministry, and was pastor of the Williston Congregational church at Portland, Maine, from 1876 to 1883, and of the Phillips Congregational church, South Boston, Mass., from 1883 to 1887. On the 2nd of February 1881 he founded at Portland the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor, which, beginning as a small society in a single New England church, developed into a great interdenominational organization, which in 1908 had 70,761 societies and more than 3,500,000 members scattered throughout the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, South Africa, India, Japan and China. After 1887 he devoted his time entirely to the extension of this work, and was president of the United Societies of Christian Endeavor and of the World’s Christian Endeavor Union, and editor of the Christian Endeavor World (originally The Golden Rule). Among his numerous publications are The Children and the Church (1882); Looking Out on Life (1883); Young People’s Prayer Meetings (1884); Some Christian Endeavor Saints (1889); World-Wide Endeavor (1895); A New Way Round an Old World (1900).
See his The Young People’s Christian Endeavor, where it began, &c. (Boston, 1895); Christian Endeavor Manual (Boston, 1903); and Christian Endeavor in All Lands: Record of Twenty-five Years of Progress (Philadelphia, 1907).
CLARK, GEORGE ROGERS (1752-1818), American frontier military leader, was born near Charlottesville, in Albemarle county, Virginia, on the 19th of November 1752. Early in life he became a land-surveyor; he took part in Lord Dunmore’s War (1774), and in 1775 went as a surveyor for the Ohio Company to Kentucky (then a district of Virginia), whither he removed early in 1776. His iron will, strong passions, audacious courage and magnificent physique soon made him a leader among his frontier neighbours, by whom in 1776 he was sent as a delegate to the Virginia legislature. In this capacity he was instrumental in bringing about the organization of Kentucky as a county of Virginia, and also obtained from Governor Patrick Henry a supply of powder for the Kentucky settlers. Convinced that the Indians were instigated and supported in their raids against the American settlers by British officers stationed in the forts north of the Ohio river, and that the conquest of those forts would put an end to the evil, he went on foot to Virginia late in 1777 and submitted to Governor Henry and his council a plan for offensive operations. On the 2nd of January 1778 he was commissioned lieutenant-colonel, received £1200 in depreciated currency, and was authorized to enlist troops; and by the end of May he was at the falls of the Ohio (the site of Louisville) with about 175 men. The expedition proceeded to Fort Kaskaskia, on the Mississippi, in what is now Illinois. This place and Cahokia, also on the Mississippi, near St Louis, were defended by small British garrisons, which depended upon the support of the French habitants. The French being willing to accept the authority of Virginia, both forts were easily taken. Clark gained the friendship of Father Pierre Gibault, the priest at Kaskaskia, and through his influence the French at Vincennes on the Wabash were induced (late in July) to change their allegiance. On the 17th of December Lieut.-Governor Henry Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, recovered Vincennes and went into winter quarters. Late in February 1779 he was surprised by Clark and compelled to give up Vincennes and its fort, Fort Sackville, and to surrender himself and his garrison of about 80 men, as prisoners of war. With the exception of Detroit and several other posts on the Canadian frontier the whole of the North-West was thus brought under American influence; many of the Indians, previously hostile, became friendly, and the United States was put in a position to demand the cession of the North-West in the treaty of 1783. For this valuable service, in which Clark had freely used his own private funds, he received practically no recompense either from Virginia or from the United States, and for many years before his death he lived in poverty. To him and his men, however, the Virginia legislature granted 150,000 acres of land in 1781, which was subsequently located in what are now Clark, Floyd and Scott counties, Indiana; Clark’s individual share was 8049 acres, but from this he realized little. Clark built Fort Jefferson on the Mississippi, 4 or 5 m. below the mouth of the Ohio, in 1780, destroyed the Indian towns Chillicothe and Piqua in the same year, and in November 1782 destroyed the Indian towns on the Miami river. With this last expedition his active military service virtually ended, and in July 1783 he was relieved of his command by Virginia. Thereafter he lived on part of the land granted to him by Virginia or in Louisville for the rest of his life. In 1793 he accepted from Citizen Genet a commission as “major-general in the armies of France, and commander-in-chief of the French Revolutionary Legion in the Mississippi Valley,” and tried to raise a force for an attack upon the Spanish possessions in the valley of the Mississippi. The scheme, however, was abandoned after Genet’s recall. Disappointed at what he regarded as his country’s ingratitude, and broken down by excessive drinking and paralysis, he lost his once powerful influence and lived in comparative isolation until his death, near Louisville, Kentucky, on the 13th of February 1818.
See W.H. English, Conquest of the Country north-west of the River Ohio, 1778-1783, and Life of George Rogers Clark (2 vols., Indianapolis and Kansas City, 1896), an accurate and detailed work, which represents an immense amount of research among both printed and manuscript sources. Clark’s own accounts of his expeditions, and other interesting documents, are given in the appendix to this work.
Clark, William (1770-1838), the well-known explorer, was the youngest brother of the foregoing. He was born in Caroline county, Virginia, on the 1st of August 1770. At the age of fourteen he removed with his parents to Kentucky, settling at the falls of the Ohio (Louisville). He entered the United States army as a lieutenant of infantry in March 1792, and served under General Anthony Wayne against the Indians in 1794. In July 1796 he resigned his commission on account of ill-health. In 1803-1806, with Meriwether Lewis (q.v.), he commanded the famous exploring expedition across the continent to the mouth of the Columbia river, and was commissioned second lieutenant in March 1804 and first lieutenant in January 1806. In February he again resigned from the army. He then served for a few years as brigadier-general of the Louisiana territorial militia, as Indian agent for “Upper Louisiana,” as territorial governor of Missouri in 1813-1820, and as superintendent of Indian affairs at St Louis from 1822 until his death there on the 1st of September 1838.
CLARK, SIR JAMES (1788-1870), English physician, was born at Cullen, Banffshire, and was educated at the grammar school of Fordyce and at the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. He served for six years as a surgeon in the army; then spent some time in travelling on the continent, in order to investigate the mineral waters and the climate of various health resorts; and for seven years he lived in Rome. In 1826 he began to practise in London. In 1835 he was appointed physician to the duchess of Kent, becoming physician in ordinary to Queen Victoria in 1837. In 1838 he was created a baronet. He published The Influence of Climate in Chronic Diseases, containing valuable meteorological tables (1829), and a Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption (1835).
CLARK, JOHN BATES (1847- ), American economist, was born at Providence, Rhode Island, on the 26th of January 1847. Educated at Brown University, Amherst College, Heidelberg and Zurich, he was appointed professor of political economy at Carleton College, Minnesota, in 1877. In 1881 he became professor of history and political science in Smith College, Massachusetts; in 1892 professor of political economy in Amherst College. He was appointed professor of political economy at Columbia University in 1895. Among his works are: The Philosophy of Wealth (1885); Wages (1889); Capital and its Earnings (1898); The Control of Trusts (1901); The Problem of Monopoly (1904); and Essentials of Economic Theory (1907).
CLARK, JOSIAH LATIMER (1822-1898), English engineer and electrician, was born on the 10th of March 1822 at Great Marlow, Bucks. His first interest was in chemical manufacturing, but in 1848 he became assistant engineer at the Menai Straits bridge under his elder brother Edwin (1814-1894), the inventor of the Clark hydraulic lift graving dock. Two years later, when his brother was appointed engineer to the Electric Telegraph Company, he again acted as his assistant, and subsequently succeeded him as chief engineer. In 1854 he took out a patent “for conveying letters or parcels between places by the pressure of air and vacuum,” and later was concerned in the construction of a large pneumatic despatch tube between the general post office and Euston station, London. About the same period he was engaged in experimental researches on the propagation of the electric current in submarine cables, on which he published a pamphlet in 1855, and in 1859 he was a member of the committee which was appointed by the government to consider the numerous failures of submarine cable enterprises. Latimer Clark paid much attention to the subject of electrical measurement, and besides designing various improvements in method and apparatus and inventing the Clark standard cell, he took a leading part in the movement for the systematization of electrical standards, which was inaugurated by the paper which he and Sir C.T. Bright read on the question before the British Association in 1861. With Bright also he devised improvements in the insulation of submarine cables. In the later part of his life he was a member of several firms engaged in laying submarine cables, in manufacturing electrical appliances, and in hydraulic engineering. He died in London on the 30th of October 1898. Besides professional papers, he published an Elementary Treatise on Electrical Measurement (1868), together with two books on astronomical subjects, and a memoir of Sir W.F. Cooke.
CLARK, THOMAS (1801-1867), Scottish chemist, was born at Ayr on the 31st of March 1801. In 1826 he was appointed lecturer on chemistry at the Glasgow mechanics’ institute, and in 1831 he took the degree of M.D. at the university of that city. Two years later he became professor of chemistry in Marischal College, Aberdeen, but was obliged to give up the duties of that position in 1844 through ill-health, though nominally he remained professor till 1860. His name is chiefly known in connexion with his process for softening hard waters, and his water tests, patented in 1841. The last twenty years before his death at Glasgow on the 27th of November 1867 were occupied with the study of the historical origin of the Gospels.
CLARK, WILLIAM GEORGE (1821-1878), English classical and Shakespearian scholar, was born at Barford Hall, Darlington, in March 1821. He was educated at Sedbergh and Shrewsbury schools and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected fellow after a brilliant university career. In 1857 he was appointed public orator. He travelled much during the long vacations, visiting Spain, Greece, Italy and Poland. His Peloponnesus (1858) was an important contribution to the knowledge of the country at that time. In 1853 Clark had taken orders, but left the Church in 1870 after the passing of the Clerical Disabilities Act, of which he was one of the promoters. He also resigned the public oratorship in the same year, and in consequence of illness left Cambridge in 1873. He died at York on the 6th of November 1878. He bequeathed a sum of money to his old college for the foundation of a lectureship in English literature. Although Clark was before all a classical scholar, he published little in that branch of learning. A contemplated edition of the works of Aristophanes, a task for which he was singularly fitted, was never published. He visited Italy in 1868 for the express purpose of examining the Ravenna and other MSS., and on his return began the notes to the Acharnians, but they were left in too incomplete a state to admit of publication in book form even after his death (see Journal of Philology, viii., 1879). He established the Cambridge Journal of Philology, and cooperated with B.H. Kennedy and James Riddell in the production of the well-known Sabrinae Corolla. The work by which he is best known is the Cambridge Shakespeare (1863-1866), containing a collation of early editions and selected emendations, edited by him at first with John Glover and afterwards with W. Aldis Wright. Gazpacho (1853)gives an account of his tour in Spain; his visits to Italy at the time of Garibaldi’s insurrection, and to Poland during the insurrection of 1863, are described in Vacation Tourists, ed. F. Galton, i. and iii.
H.A.J. Munro in Journal of Philology (viii. 1879) describes Clark as “the most accomplished and versatile man he ever met”; see also notices by W. Aldis Wright in Academy (Nov. 23, 1878); R. Burn in Athenaeum (Nov. 16, 1878); The Times (Nov. 8, 1878); Notes and Queries, 5th series, x. (1878), p. 400.
CLARKE, ADAM (1762?-1832), British Nonconformist divine, was born at Moybeg, Co. Londonderry, Ireland, in 1760 or 1762. After receiving a very limited education he was apprenticed to a linen manufacturer, but, finding the employment uncongenial, he resumed school-life at the institution founded by Wesley at Kingswood, near Bristol. In 1782 he entered on the duties of the ministry, being appointed by Wesley to the Bradford (Wiltshire) circuit. His popularity as a preacher was very great, and his influence in the denomination is indicated by the fact that he was three times (1806, 1814, 1822) chosen to be president of the conference. He served twice on the London circuit, the second period being extended considerably longer than the rule allowed, at the special request of the British and Foreign Bible Society, who had employed him in the preparation of their Arabic Bible. Though ardent in his pastoral work, he found time for diligent study of Hebrew and other Oriental languages, undertaken chiefly with the view of qualifying himself for the great work of his life, his Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (8 vols., 1810-1820). In 1802 he published a Bibliographical Dictionary in six volumes, to which he afterwards added a supplement. He was selected by the Records Commission to re-edit Rymer’s Foedera, a task which after ten years’ labour (1808-1818) he had to resign. He also wrote Memoirs of the Wesley Family (1823), and edited a large number of religious works. Honours were showered upon him (he was M.A., LL.D. of Aberdeen), and many distinguished men in church and state were his personal friends. He died in London on the 16th of August 1832.
His Miscellaneous Works were published in 13 vols. (1836), and a Life (3 vols.) by his son, J.B.B. Clarke, appeared in 1833.
CLARKE, SIR ANDREW (1824-1902), British soldier and administrator, son of Colonel Andrew Clarke, of Co. Donegal, Ireland, governor of West Australia, was born at Southsea, England, on the 27th of July 1824, and educated at King’s school, Canterbury. He entered the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and obtained his commission in the army in 1844 as second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. He was appointed to his father’s staff in West Australia, but was transferred to be A.D.C. and military secretary to the governor of Tasmania; and in 1847 he went to New Zealand to take part in the Maori War, and for some years served on Sir George Grey’s staff. He was then made surveyor-general in Victoria, took a prominent part in framing its new constitution, and held the office of minister of public lands during the first administration (1855-1857). He returned to England in 1857, and in 1863 was sent on a special mission to the West Coast of Africa. In 1864 he was appointed director of works for the navy, and held this post for nine years, being responsible for great improvements in the naval arsenals at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth, and for fortifications at Malta, Cork, Bermuda and elsewhere. In 1873 he was made K.C.M.G., and became governor of the Straits Settlements, where he did most valuable work in consolidating British rule and ameliorating the condition of the people. From 1875 to 1880 he was minister of public works in India; and on his return to England in 1881, holding then the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the army, he was first appointed commandant at Chatham and then inspector-general of fortifications (1882-1886). Having attained the rank of lieutenant-general and been created G.C.M.G., he retired from official life, and in 1886 and 1893 unsuccessfully stood for parliament as a supporter of Mr Gladstone. During his last years he was agent-general for Victoria. He died on the 29th of March 1902. Both as a technical and strategical engineer and as an Imperial administrator Sir Andrew Clarke was one of the ablest and most useful public servants of his time; and his contributions to periodical literature, as well as his official memoranda, contained valuable suggestions on the subjects of imperial defence and imperial consolidation which received too little consideration at a period when the home governments were not properly alive to their importance. He is entitled to remembrance as one of those who first inculcated, from a wide practical experience, the views of imperial administration and its responsibilities, which in his last years he saw accepted by the bulk of his countrymen.
CLARKE, CHARLES COWDEN (1787-1877), English author and Shakespearian scholar, was born at Enfield, Middlesex, on the 15th of December 1787. His father, John Clarke, was a schoolmaster, among whose pupils was John Keats. Charles Clarke taught Keats his letters, and encouraged his love of poetry. He knew Charles and Mary Lamb, and afterwards became acquainted with Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Coleridge and Hazlitt. Clarke became a music publisher in partnership with Alfred Novello, and married in 1828 his partner’s sister, Mary Victoria (1809-1898), the eldest daughter of Vincent Novello. In the year after her marriage Mrs Cowden Clarke began her valuable Shakespeare concordance, which was eventually issued in eighteen monthly parts (1844-1845), and in volume form in 1845 as The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare, being a Verbal Index to all the Passages in the Dramatic Works of the Poet. This work superseded the Copious Index to ... Shakespeare (1790) of Samuel Ayscough, and the Complete Verbal Index ... (1805-1807) of Francis Twiss. Charles Cowden Clarke published many useful books, and edited the text for John Nichol’s edition of the British poets; but his most important work consisted of lectures delivered between 1834 and 1856 on Shakespeare and other literary subjects. Some of the more notable series were published, among them being Shakespeare’s Characters, chiefly those subordinate (1863), and Molière’s Characters (1865). In 1859 he published a volume of original poems, Carmina Minima. For some years after their marriage the Cowden Clarkes lived with the Novellos in London. In 1849 Vincent Novello with his wife removed to Nice, where he was joined by the Clarkes in 1856. After his death they lived at Genoa at the “Villa Novello.” They collaborated in The Shakespeare Key, unlocking the Treasures of his Style ... (1879), and in an edition of Shakespeare for Messrs Cassell, which was issued in weekly parts, and completed in 1868. It was reissued in 1886 as Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare. Charles Clarke died on the 13th of March 1877 at Genoa, and his wife survived him until the 12th of January 1898. Among Mrs Cowden Clarke’s other works may be mentioned The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (3 vols., 1850-1852), and a translation of Berlioz’s Treatise upon Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration (1856).
See Recollections of Writers (1898), a joint work by the Clarkes containing letters and reminiscences of their many literary friends; and Mary Cowden Clarke’s autobiography, My Long Life (1896). A charming series of letters (1850-1861), addressed by her to an American admirer of her work, Robert Balmanno, was edited by Anne Upton Nettleton as Letters to an Enthusiast (Chicago, 1902).
CLARKE, EDWARD DANIEL (1769-1822), English mineralogist and traveller, was born at Willingdon, Sussex, on the 5th of June 1769, and educated first at Tonbridge. In 1786 he obtained the office of chapel clerk at Jesus College, Cambridge, but the loss of his father at this time involved him in difficulties. In 1790 he took his degree, and soon after became private tutor to Henry Tufton, nephew of the duke of Dorset. In 1792 he obtained an engagement to travel with Lord Berwick through Germany, Switzerland and Italy. After crossing the Alps, and visiting a few of the principal cities of Italy, including Rome, he went to Naples, where he remained nearly two years. Having returned to England in the summer of 1794, he became tutor in several distinguished families. In 1799 he set out with a Mr Cripps on a tour through the continent of Europe, beginning with Norway and Sweden, whence they proceeded through Russia and the Crimea to Constantinople, Rhodes, and afterwards to Egypt and Palestine. After the capitulation of Alexandria, Clarke was of considerable use in securing for England the statues, sarcophagi, maps, manuscripts, &c., which had been collected by the French savants. Greece was the country next visited. From Athens the travellers proceeded by land to Constantinople, and after a short stay in that city directed their course homewards through Rumelia, Austria, Germany and France. Clarke, who had now obtained considerable reputation, took up his residence at Cambridge. He received the degree of LL.D. shortly after his return in 1803, on account of the valuable donations, including a colossal statue of the Eleusinian Ceres, which he had made to the university. He was also presented to the college living of Harlton, near Cambridge, in 1805, to which, four years later, his father-in-law added that of Yeldham. Towards the end of 1808 Dr Clarke was appointed to the professorship of mineralogy in Cambridge, then first instituted. Nor was his perseverance as a traveller otherwise unrewarded. The MSS. which he had collected in the course of his travels were sold to the Bodleian library for £1000; and by the publication of his travels he realized altogether a clear profit of £6595. Besides lecturing on mineralogy and discharging his clerical duties, Dr Clarke eagerly prosecuted the study of chemistry, and made several discoveries, principally by means of the gas blow-pipe, which he had brought to a high degree of perfection. He was also appointed university librarian in 1817, and was one of the founders of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1819. He died in London on the 9th of March 1822. The following is a list of his principal works:—Testimony of Authors respecting the Colossal Statue of Ceres in the Public Library, Cambridge (8vo, 1801-1803); The Tomb of Alexander, a Dissertation on the Sarcophagus brought from Alexandria, and now in the British Museum (4to, 1805); A Methodical Distribution of the Mineral Kingdom (fol., Lewes, 1807); A Description of the Greek Marbles brought from the Shores of the Euxine, Archipelago and Mediterranean, and deposited in the University Library, Cambridge (8vo, 1809); Travels in various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa (4to, 1810-1819; 2nd ed., 1811-1823).
See Life and Remains, by Rev. W. Otter (1824).
CLARKE, SIR EDWARD GEORGE (1841- ), English lawyer and politician, son of J.G. Clarke of Moorgate Street, London, was born on the 15th of February 1841. In 1859 he became a writer in the India office, but resigned in the next year, and became a law reporter. He obtained a Tancred law scholarship in 1861, and was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1864. He joined the home circuit, became Q.C. in 1880, and a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn in 1882. In November 1877 he was successful in securing the acquittal of Chief-Inspector Clarke from the charge brought against certain Scotland Yard officials of conspiracy to defeat justice, and his reputation was assured by his defence of Patrick Staunton in the Penge murder case (1877), and of Mrs Bartlett against the charge of poisoning her husband (1886). Among other notable cases he was counsel for the plaintiff in the libel action brought by Sir William Gordon-Cumming (1890) against Mr and Mrs Lycett Green and others for slander, charging him with cheating in the game of baccarat (in this case the prince of Wales, afterwards Edward VII., gave evidence), and he appeared for Dr Jameson, Sir John Willoughby and others when they were tried (1896) under the Foreign Enlistment Act. He was knighted in 1886. He was returned as Conservative member for Southwark at a by-election early in 1880, but failed to retain his seat at the general election which followed a month or two later; he found a seat at Plymouth, however, which he retained until 1900. He was solicitor-general in the Conservative administration of 1886-1892, but declined office under the Unionist government of 1895 when the law officers of the crown were debarred from private practice. The most remarkable, perhaps, of his speeches in the House of Commons was his reply to Mr Gladstone on the second reading of the Home Rule Bill in 1893. In 1899 differences which arose between Sir Edward Clarke and his party on the subject of the government’s South African policy led to his resigning his seat. At the general election of 1906 he was returned at the head of the poll for the city of London, but he offended a large section of his constituents by a speech against tariff reform in the House of Commons on the 12th of March, and shortly afterwards he resigned his seat on grounds of health. He published a Treatise on the Law of Extradition (4th ed., 1903), and also three volumes of his political and forensic speeches.
CLARKE, JAMES FREEMAN (1810-1888), American preacher and author, was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the 4th of April 1810. He was prepared for college at the public Latin school of Boston, and graduated at Harvard College in 1829, and at the Harvard Divinity School in 1833. He was then ordained as minister of a Unitarian congregation at Louisville, Kentucky, which was then a slave state. Clarke soon threw himself heart and soul into the national movement for the abolition of slavery, though he was never what was then called in America a “radical abolitionist.” In 1839 he returned to Boston, where he and his friends established (1841) the “Church of the Disciples.” It brought together a body of men and women active and eager in applying the Christian religion to the social problems of the day, and he would have said that the feature which distinguished it from any other church was that they also were ministers of the highest religious life. Ordination could make no distinction between him and them. Of this church he was the minister from 1841 until 1850 and from 1854 until his death. He was also secretary of the Unitarian Association and, in 1867-1871 professor of natural religion and Christian doctrine at Harvard. From the beginning of his active life he wrote freely for the press. From 1836 until 1839 he was editor of the Western Messenger, a magazine intended to carry to readers in the Mississippi Valley simple statements of “liberal religion,” involving what were then the most radical appeals as to national duty, especially the abolition of slavery. The magazine is now of value to collectors because it contains the earliest printed poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was Clarke’s personal friend. Most of Clarke’s earlier published writings were addressed to the immediate need of establishing a larger theory of religion than that espoused by people who were still trying to be Calvinists, people who maintained what a good American phrase calls “hard-shelled churches.” But it would be wrong to call his work controversial. He was always declaring that the business of the Church is Eirenic and not Polemic. Such books as Orthodoxy: Its Truths and Errors (1866) have been read more largely by members of orthodox churches than by Unitarians. In the great moral questions of his time Clarke was a fearless and practical advocate of the broadest statement of human rights. Without caring much what company he served in, he could always be seen and heard, a leader of unflinching courage, in the front rank of the battle. He published but few verses, but at the bottom he was a poet. He was a diligent and accurate scholar, and among the books by which he is best known is one called Ten Great Religions (2 vols., 1871-1883). Few Americans have done more than Clarke to give breadth to the published discussion of the subjects of literature, ethics and religious philosophy. Among his later books are Every-Day Religion (1886) and Sermons on the Lord’s Prayer (1888). He died at Jamaica Plain, Mass., on the 8th of June 1888.
His Autobiography, Diary and Correspondence, edited by Edward Everett Hale, was published in Boston in 1891.
(E. E. H.)
CLARKE, JOHN SLEEPER (1833-1899), American actor, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on the 3rd of September 1833, and was educated for the law. He made his first appearance in Boston as Frank Hardy in Paul Pry in 1851. In 1859 he married Asia Booth, daughter of Junius Brutus Booth, and he was associated with his brother-in-law Edwin Booth in the management of the Winter Garden theatre in New York, the Walnut Street theatre in Philadelphia and the Boston theatre. In 1867 he went to London, where he made his first appearance at the St James’s as Major Wellington de Boots in Stirling Coynes’s Everybody’s Friend, rewritten for him and called The Widow’s Hunt. His success was so great that he remained in England for the rest of his life, except for four visits to America. Among his favourite parts were Toodles, which ran for 200 nights at the Strand, Dr Pangloss in The Heir-at-law, and Dr Ollapod in The Poor Gentleman. He managed several London theatres, including the Haymarket, where he preceded the Bancrofts. He retired in 1889, and died on the 24th of September 1899. His two sons also were actors.
CLARKE, MARCUS ANDREW HISLOP (1846-1881), Australian author, was born in London on the 24th of April 1846. He was the only son of William Hislop Clarke, a barrister of the Middle Temple who died in 1863. He emigrated forthwith to Australia, where his uncle, James Langton Clarke, was a county court judge. He was at first a clerk in the bank of Australasia, but showed no business ability, and soon proceeded to learn farming at a station on the Wimmera river, Victoria. He was already writing stories for the Australian Magazine, when in 1867 he joined the staff of the Melbourne Argus through the introduction of Dr Robert Lewins. He also became secretary (1872) to the trustees of the Melbourne public library and later (1876) assistant librarian. He founded in 1868 the Yorick Club, which soon numbered among its members the chief Australian men of letters. The most famous of his books is For the Term of his Natural Life (Melbourne, 1874), a powerful tale of an Australian penal settlement, which originally appeared in serial form in a Melbourne paper. He also wrote The Peripatetic Philosopher (1869), a series of amusing papers reprinted from The Austral-asian; Long Odds (London, 1870), a novel; and numerous comedies and pantomimes, the best of which was Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star (Theatre Royal, Melbourne; Christmas, 1873). He married an actress, Marian Dunn. In spite of his popular success Clarke was constantly involved in pecuniary difficulties, which are said to have hastened his death at Melbourne on the 2nd of August 1881.
See The Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume (Melbourne, 1884), containing selections from his writings with a biography and list of works, edited by Hamilton Mackinnon.
CLARKE, MARY ANNE (c. 1776-1852), mistress of Frederick duke of York, second son of George III., was born either in London or at Oxford. Her father, whose name was Thompson, seems to have been a tradesman in rather humble circumstances. She married before she was eighteen, but Mr Clarke, the proprietor of a stonemasonry business, became bankrupt, and she left him. After other liaisons, she became in 1803 the mistress of the duke of York, then commander-in-chief, maintaining a large and expensive establishment in a fashionable district. The duke’s promised allowance was not regularly paid, and to escape her financial difficulties Mrs Clarke trafficked in her protector’s position, receiving money from various promotion-seekers, military, civil and even clerical, in return for her promise to secure them the good services of the duke. Her procedure became a public scandal, and in 1809 Colonel Wardle, M.P., brought eight charges of abuse of military patronage against the duke in the House of Commons, and a committee of inquiry was appointed, before which Mrs Clarke herself gave evidence. The result of the inquiry clearly established the charges as far as she was concerned, and the duke of York was shown to have been aware of what was being done, but to have derived no pecuniary benefit himself. He resigned his appointment as commander-in-chief, and terminated his connexion with Mrs Clarke, who subsequently obtained from him a considerable sum in cash and a pension, as the price for withholding the publication of his numerous letters to her. Mrs Clarke died at Boulogne on the 21st of June 1852.
See Taylor, Authentic Memoirs of Mrs Clarke; Clarke (? pseud.), Life of Mrs M.A. Clarkek; Annual Register, vol. li.
CLARKE, SAMUEL (1675-1729), English philosopher and divine, son of Edward Clarke, an alderman, who for several years was parliamentary representative of the city of Norwich, was born on the 11th of October 1675, and educated at the free school of Norwich and at Caius College, Cambridge. The philosophy of Descartes was the reigning system at the university; Clarke, however, mastered the new system of Newton, and contributed greatly to its extension by publishing an excellent Latin version of the Traité de physique of Jacques Rohault (1620-1675) with valuable notes, which he finished before he was twenty-two years of age. The system of Rohault was founded entirely upon Cartesian principles, and was previously known only through the medium of a rude Latin version. Clarke’s translation (1697) continued to be used as a text-book in the university till supplanted by the treatises of Newton, which it had been designed to introduce. Four editions were issued, the last and best being that of 1718. It was translated into English in 1723 by his brother Dr John Clarke (1682-1757), dean of Sarum.
Clarke afterwards devoted himself to the study of Scripture in the original, and of the primitive Christian writers. Having taken holy orders, he became chaplain to John Moore (1646-1714), bishop of Norwich, who was ever afterwards his friend and patron. In 1699 he published two treatises,—one entitled Three Practical Essays on Baptism, Confirmation and Repentance, and the other, Some Reflections on that part of a book called Amyntor, or a Defence of Milton’s Life, which relates to the Writings of the Primitive Fathers, and, the Canon of the New Testament. In 1701 he published A Paraphrase upon the Gospel of St Matthew, which was followed, in 1702, by the Paraphrases upon the Gospels of St Mark and St Luke, and soon afterwards by a third volume upon St John. They were subsequently printed together in two volumes and have since passed through several editions. He intended to treat in the same manner the remaining books of the New Testament, but his design was unfulfilled.
Meanwhile he had been presented by Bishop Moore to the rectory of Drayton, near Norwich. As Boyle lecturer, he dealt in 1704 with the Being and Attributes of God, and in 1705 with the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion. These lectures, first printed separately, were afterwards published together under the title of A Discourse concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation, in opposition to Hobbes, Spinoza, the author of the Oracles of Reason, and other Deniers of Natural and Revealed Religion.
In 1706 he wrote a refutation of Dr Henry Dodwell’s views on the immortality of the soul, and this drew him into controversy with Anthony Collins. He also wrote at this time a translation of Newton’s Optics, for which the author presented him with £500. In the same year through the influence of Bishop Moore, he obtained the rectory of St Benet’s, Paul’s Wharf, London. Soon afterwards Queen Anne appointed him one of her chaplains in ordinary, and in 1709 presented him to the rectory of St James’s, Westminster. He then took the degree of doctor in divinity, defending as his thesis the two propositions: Nullum fidei Christianae dogma, in Sacris Scripturis traditum, est rectae rationi dissentaneum, and Sine actionum humanarum libertate nulla potest esse religio. During the same year, at the request of the author, he revised Whiston’s English translation of the Apostolical Constitutions.
In 1712 he published a carefully punctuated and annotated edition (folio 1712, octavo 1720) of Caesar’s Commentaries, with elegant engravings, dedicated to the duke of Marlborough. During the same year he published his celebrated treatise on The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity. It is divided into three parts. The first contains a collection and exegesis of all the texts in the New Testament relating to the doctrine of the Trinity; in the second the doctrine is set forth at large, and explained in particular and distinct propositions; and in the third the principal passages in the liturgy of the Church of England relating to the doctrine of the Trinity are considered. Whiston informs us that, some time before the publication of this book, a message was sent to him from Lord Godolphin “that the affairs of the public were with difficulty then kept in the hands of those that were for liberty; that it was therefore an unseasonable time for the publication of a book that would make a great noise and disturbance; and that therefore they desired him to forbear till a fitter opportunity should offer itself,”—a message that Clarke of course entirely disregarded. The ministers were right in their conjectures; and the work not only provoked a great number of replies, but occasioned a formal complaint from the Lower House of Convocation. Clarke, in reply, drew up an apologetic preface, and afterwards gave several explanations, which satisfied the Upper House; and, on his pledging himself that his future conduct would occasion no trouble, the matter dropped.
In 1715 and 1716 he had a discussion with Leibnitz relative to the principles of natural philosophy and religion, which was at length cut short by the death of his antagonist. A collection of the papers which passed between them was published in 1717 (cf. G. v. Leroy, Die philos. Probleme in dem Briefwechsel Leibniz und Clarke, Giessen, 1893). In 1719 he was presented by Nicholas 1st Baron Lechmere, to the mastership of Wigston’s hospital in Leicester. In 1724 he published seventeen sermons, eleven of which had not before been printed. In 1727, on the death of Sir Isaac Newton, he was offered by the court the place of master of the mint, worth on an average from £1200 to £1500 a year. This secular preferment, however, he absolutely refused. In 1728 was published “A Letter from Dr Clarke to Benjamin Hoadly, F.R.S., occasioned by the controversy relating to the Proportion of Velocity and Force in Bodies in Motion,” printed in the Philosophical Transactions. In 1729 he published the first twelve books of Homer’s Iliad. This edition, dedicated to William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, was highly praised by Bishop Hoadly. On Sunday, the 11th of May 1729, when going out to preach before the judges at Serjeants’ Inn, he was seized with a sudden illness, which caused his death on the Saturday following (May 17, 1729).
Soon after his death his brother Dr John Clarke, dean of Sarum, published, from his original manuscripts, An Exposition of the Church Catechism, and ten volumes of sermons. The Exposition is composed of the lectures which he read every Thursday morning, for some months in the year, at St James’s church. In the latter part of his life he revised them with great care, and left them completely prepared for the press. Three years after his death appeared also the last twelve books of the Iliad, published by his son Samuel Clarke, the first three of these books and part of the fourth having, as he states, been revised and annotated by his father.
In disposition Clarke was cheerful and even playful. An intimate friend relates that he once found him swimming upon a table. At another time Clarke on looking out at the window saw a grave blockhead approaching the house; upon which he cried out, “Boys, boys, be wise; here comes a fool.” Dr Warton, in his observations upon Pope’s line,
“Unthought-of frailties cheat us in the wise,”
says, “Who could imagine that Locke was fond of romances; that Newton once studied astrology; that Dr Clarke valued himself on his agility, and frequently amused himself in a private room of his house in leaping over the tables and chairs?”
Philosophy.—Clarke, though in no way an original thinker, was eminent in theology, mathematics, metaphysics and philology, but his chief strength lay in his logical power. The materialism of Hobbes, the pantheism of Spinoza, the empiricism of Locke, the determinism of Leibnitz, Collins’ necessitarianism, Dodwell’s denial of the natural immortality of the soul, rationalistic attacks on Christianity, and the morality of the sensationalists—all these he opposed with a thorough conviction of the truth of the principles which he advocated. His fame as theologian and philosopher rests to a large extent on his demonstration of the existence of God and his theory of the foundation of rectitude. The former is not a purely a priori argument, nor is it presented as such by its author. It starts from a fact and it often explicitly appeals to facts. The intelligence, for example, of the self-existence and original cause of all things is, he says, “not easily proved a priori,” but “demonstrably proved a posteriori from the variety and degrees of perfection in things, and the order of causes and effects, from the intelligence that created beings are confessedly endowed with, and from the beauty, order, and final purpose of things.” The propositions maintained in the argument are—“(1) That something has existed from eternity; (2) that there has existed from eternity some one immutable and independent being; (3) that that immutable and independent being, which has existed from eternity, without any external cause of its existence, must be self-existent, that is, necessarily existing; (4) what the substance or essence of that being is, which is self-existent or necessarily existing, we have no idea, neither is it at all possible for us to comprehend it; (5) that though the substance or essence of the self-existent being is itself absolutely incomprehensible to us, yet many of the essential attributes of his nature are strictly demonstrable as well as his existence, and, in the first place, that he must be of necessity eternal; (6) that the self-existent being must of necessity be infinite and omnipresent; (7) must be but one; (8) must be an intelligent being; (9) must be not a necessary agent, but a being endued with liberty and choice; (10) must of necessity have infinite power; (11) must be infinitely wise, and (12) must of necessity be a being of infinite goodness, justice, and truth, and all other moral perfections, such as become the supreme governor and judge of the world.”
In order to establish his sixth proposition, Clarke contends that time and space, eternity and immensity, are not substances, but attributes—the attributes of a self-existent being. Edmund Law, Dugald Stewart, Lord Brougham, and many other writers, have, in consequence, represented Clarke as arguing from the existence of time and space to the existence of Deity. This is a serious mistake. The existence of an immutable, independent, and necessary being is supposed to be proved before any reference is made to the nature of time and space. Clarke has been generally supposed to have derived the opinion that time and space are attributes of an infinite immaterial and spiritual being from the Scholium Generale, first published in the second edition of Newton’s Principia (1714). The truth is that his work on the Being and Attributes of God appeared nine years before that Scholium. The view propounded by Clarke may have been derived from the Midrash, the Kabbalah, Philo, Henry More, or Cudworth, but not from Newton. It is a view difficult to prove, and probably few will acknowledge that Clarke has conclusively proved it.
His ethical theory of “fitness” (see Ethics) is formulated on the analogy of mathematics. He held that in relation to the will things possess an objective fitness similar to the mutual consistency of things in the physical universe. This fitness God has given to actions, as he has given laws to Nature; and the fitness is as immutable as the laws. The theory has been unfairly criticized by Jouffroy, Amédée Jacques, Sir James Mackintosh, Thomas Brown and others. It is said, for example, that Clarke made virtue consist in conformity to the relations of things universally, although the whole tenor of his argument shows him to have had in view conformity to such relations only as belong to the sphere of moral agency. It is true that he might have emphasized the relation of moral fitness to the will, and in this respect J.F. Herbart (q.v.) improved on Clarke’s statement of the case. To say, however, that Clarke simply confused mathematics and morals by justifying the moral criterion on a mathematical basis is a mistake. He compared the two subjects for the sake of the analogy.
Though Clarke can thus be defended against this and similar criticism, his work as a whole can be regarded only as an attempt to present the doctrines of the Cartesian school in a form which would not shock the conscience of his time. His work contained a measure of rationalism sufficient to arouse the suspicion of orthodox theologians, without making any valuable addition to, or modification of, the underlying doctrine.
Authorities.—See W. Whiston’s Historical Memoirs, and the preface by Benjamin Hoadly to Clarke’s Works (4 vols., London, 1738-1742). See further on his general philosophical position J. Hunt’s Religious Thought in England, passim, but particularly in vol. ii. 447-457, and vol. iii. 20-29 and 109-115, &c.; Rob. Zimmermann in the Denkschriften d. k. Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Classe, Bd. xix. (Vienna, 1870); H. Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics (6th ed., 1901), p. 384; A. Bain’s Moral Science (1872), p. 562 foll., and Mental Science (1872), p. 416; Sir L. Stephen’s English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (3rd ed., 1902), c. iii.; J. E. le Rossignol, Ethical Philosophy of S. Clarke (Leipzig, 1892).
CLARKE, THOMAS SHIELDS (1860- ), American artist, was born in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, on the 25th of April 1860, and graduated at Princeton in 1882. He was a pupil of the Art Students’ League, New York, and of the École des Beaux Arts, Paris, under J.L. Gérôme; later he entered the atelier of Dagnan-Bouveret, and, becoming interested in sculpture, worked for a while under Henri M. Chapu. As a sculptor, he received a medal of honour in Madrid for his “The Cider Press,” now in the Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California, and he made four caryatides of “The Seasons” for the Appellate Court House, New York. He designed an “Alma Mater” for Princeton University, and a model is in the library. Among his paintings are his “Night Market in Morocco” (Philadelphia Art Club), for which he received a medal at the International Exposition in Berlin in 1891, and his “A Fool’s Fool,” exhibited at the Salon in 1887 and now in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia.
CLARKE, WILLIAM BRANWHITE (1798-1878), British geologist, was born at East Bergholt, in Suffolk, on the 2nd of June 1798. He received his early education at Dedham grammar school, and in 1817 entered Jesus College, Cambridge; he took his B.A. in 1821, was ordained and became M.A. in 1824. In 1821 he was appointed curate of Ramsholt in Suffolk, and he acted in his clerical capacity in other places until 1839. Having become interested in geology through the teachings of Sedgwick, he utilized his opportunities and gathered many interesting facts on the geology of East Anglia which were embodied in a paper “On the Geological Structure and Phenomena of Suffolk” (Trans. Geol. Soc. 1837). He also communicated a series of papers on the geology of S.E. Dorsetshire to the Magazine of Nat. Hist. (1837-1838). In 1839, after a severe illness, he left England for New South Wales, mainly with the object of benefiting by the sea voyage. He remained, however, in that country, and came to be regarded as the “Father of Australian Geology.” From the date of his arrival in New South Wales until 1870 he was in clerical charge first of the country from Paramatta to the Hawkesbury river, then of Campbelltown, and finally of Willoughby. He zealously devoted attention to the geology of the country, with results that have been of paramount importance. In 1841 he discovered gold, being the first explorer who had obtained it in situ in the country, finding it both in the detrital deposits and in the quartzites of the Blue Mountains, and he then declared his belief in its abundance. In 1849 he made the first actual discovery of tin in Australia and in 1859 he made known the occurrence of the diamond. He was also the first to indicate the presence of Silurian rocks, and to determine the age of the coal-bearing rocks in New South Wales. In 1869 he announced the discovery of remains of Dinornis in Queensland. He was a trustee of the Australian museum at Sydney, and an active member of the Royal Society of New South Wales. In 1860 he published Researches in the Southern Gold-fields of New South Wales. He was elected F.R.S. in 1876, and in the following year was awarded the Murchison medal by the Geological Society of London. His contributions to Australian scientific journals were numerous. He died near Sydney, on the 17th of June 1878.
CLARKSON, THOMAS (1760-1846), English anti-slavery agitator, was born on the 28th of March 1760, at Wisbeach, in Cambridgeshire, where his father was headmaster of the free grammar school. He was educated at St Paul’s school and at St John’s College, Cambridge. Having taken the first place among the middle bachelors as Latin essayist, he succeeded in 1785 in gaining a similar honour among the senior bachelors. The subject appointed by the vice-chancellor, Dr Peckhard, was one in which he was himself deeply interested—Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare? (Is it right to make men slaves against their will?). In preparing for this essay Clarkson consulted a number of works on African slavery, of which the chief was Benezet’s Historical Survey of New Guinea; and the atrocities of which he read affected him so deeply that he determined to devote all his energies to effect the abolition of the slave trade, and gave up his intention of entering the church.
His first measure was to publish, with additions, an English translation of his prize essay (June 1786). He then commenced to search in all quarters for information concerning slavery. He soon discovered that the cause had already been taken up to some extent by others, most of whom belonged to the Society of Friends, and among the chief of whom were William Dillwyn, Joseph Wood and Granville Sharp. With the aid of these gentlemen, a committee of twelve was formed in May 1787 to do all that was possible to effect the abolition of the slave trade. Meanwhile Clarkson had also gained the sympathy of Wilberforce, Whitbread, Sturge and several other men of influence. Travelling from port to port, he now commenced to collect a large mass of evidence; and much of it was embodied in his Summary View of the Slave Trade, and the Probable Consequences of its Abolition, which, with a number of other anti-slavery tracts, was published by the committee. Pitt, Grenville, Fox and Burke looked favourably on the movement; in May 1788 Pitt introduced a parliamentary discussion on the subject, and Sir W. Dolben brought forward a bill providing that the number of slaves carried in a vessel should be proportional to its tonnage. A number of Liverpool and Bristol merchants obtained permission from the House to be heard by council against the bill, but on the 18th of June it passed the Commons. Soon after Clarkson published an Essay on the Impolicy of the Slave Trade; and for two months he was continuously engaged in travelling that he might meet men who were personally acquainted with the facts of the trade. From their lips he collected a considerable amount of evidence; but only nine could be prevailed upon to promise to appear before the privy council. Meanwhile other witnesses had been obtained by Wilberforce and the committee, and on the 12th of May 1789 the former led a debate on the subject in the House of Commons, in which he was seconded by Burke and supported by Pitt and Fox.
It was now the beginning of the French Revolution, and in the hope that he might arouse the French to sweep away slavery with other abuses, Clarkson crossed to Paris, where he remained six months. He found Necker head of the government, and obtained from him some sympathy but little help. Mirabeau, however, with his assistance, prepared a speech against slavery, to be delivered before the National Assembly, and the Marquis de la Fayette entered enthusiastically into his views. During this visit Clarkson met a deputation of negroes from Santo Domingo, who had come to France to present a petition to the National Assembly, desiring to be placed on an equal footing with the whites; but the storm of the Revolution permitted no substantial success to be achieved. Soon after his return home he engaged in a search, the apparent hopelessness of which finely displays his unshrinking laboriousness and his passionate enthusiasm. He desired to find some one who had himself witnessed the capture of the negroes in Africa; and a friend having met by chance a man-of-war’s-man who had done so, Clarkson, though ignorant of the name and address of the sailor, set out in search of him, and actually discovered him. His last tour was undertaken in order to form anti-slavery committees in all the principal towns. At length, in the autumn of 1794, his health gave way, and he was obliged to cease active work. He now occupied his time in writing a History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which appeared in 1808. The bill for the abolition of the trade became law in 1807; but it was still necessary to secure the assent of the other powers to its principle. To obtain this was, under pressure of the public opinion created by Clarkson and his friends, one of the main objects of British diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna, and in February 1815 the trade was condemned by the powers. The question of concerting practical measures for its abolition was raised at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, but without result. On this occasion Clarkson personally presented an address to the emperor Alexander I., who communicated it to the sovereigns of Austria and Prussia. In 1823 the Anti-Slavery Society was formed, and Clarkson was one of its vice-presidents. He was for some time blind from cataract; but several years before his death on the 26th of September 1846, his sight was restored.
Besides the works already mentioned, he published the Portraiture of Quakerism (1806), Memoirs of William Penn (1813), Researches, Antediluvian, Patriarchal and Historical (1836), intended as a history of the interference of Providence for man’s spiritual good, and Strictures on several of the remarks concerning himself made in the Life of Wilberforce, in which his claim as originator of the anti-slavery movement is denied.
See the lives by Thomas Elmes (1876) and Thomas Taylor (1839).
CLARKSVILLE, a city and the county-seat of Montgomery county, Tennessee, U.S.A., situated in the N. part of the state, about 50 m. N.W. of Nashville, on the Cumberland river, at the mouth of the Red river. Pop. (1890) 7924; (1900) 9431, of whom 5094 were negroes; (1910 census) 8548. It is served by the Louisville & Nashville, and the Illinois Central railways, and by passenger and freight steamboat lines on the Cumberland river. The city hall, and the public library are among the principal public buildings, and the city is the seat of the Tennessee Odd Fellows’ home, and of the South-Western Presbyterian University, founded in 1875. Clarksville lies in the centre of the dark tobacco belt—commonly known as the “Black Patch”—and is an important tobacco market, with an annual trade in that staple of about $4,000,000, most of the product being exported to France, Italy, Austria and Spain. The city is situated in a region well adapted for the growing of wheat, Indian corn, and vegetables, and for the raising of live-stock; and Clarksville is a shipping point for the lumber—chiefly oak, poplar and birch—and the iron-ore of the surrounding country, a branch of the Louisville & Nashville railway extending into the iron district. The city’s principal manufactures are flour and grist mill products, chewing and smoking tobacco and snuff, furniture, lumber, iron, and pearl buttons. The value of the factory product in 1905 was $2,210,112, being 32% greater than in 1900. The municipality owns its water-works. Clarksville was first settled as early as 1780, was named in honour of General George Rogers Clark, and was chartered as a city in 1850.
CLASSICS. The term “classic” is derived from the Latin epithet classicus, found in a passage of Aulus Gellius (xix. 8. 15), where a “scriptor ‘classicus’” is contrasted with a “scriptor proletarius.” The metaphor is taken from the division of the Roman people into classes by Servius Tullius, those in the first class being called classici, all the rest infra classem, and those in the last proletarii. The epithet “classic” is accordingly applied (1) generally to an author of the first rank, and (2) more particularly to a Greek or Roman author of that character. Similarly, “the classics” is a synonym for the choicest products of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. It is to this sense of the word that the following article is devoted in two main divisions: (A) the general history of classical (i.e. Greek and Latin) scholarship, and (B) its place in higher education.
(A) General History of the Study of the Classics
We may consider this subject in four principal periods:—(i.) the Alexandrian, c. 300-1 B.C.; (ii.) the Roman, A.D. c. 1-530; (iii.) the Middle Ages, c. 530-1350; and (iv.) the Modern Age, c. 1350 to the present day.
(i.) The Alexandrian Age.—The study of the Greek classics begins with the school of Alexandria. Under the rule of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.), learning found a home in the Alexandrian Museum and in the great Alexandrian Library. The first four librarians were Zenodotus, Eratosthenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus. Zenodotus produced before 274 the first scientific edition of the Iliad and Odyssey, an edition in which spurious lines were marked, at the beginning, with a short horizontal dash called an obelus (—). He also drew up select lists of epic and lyric poets. Soon afterwards a classified catalogue of dramatists, epic and lyric poets, legislators, philosophers, historians, orators and rhetoricians, and miscellaneous writers, with a brief biography of each, was produced by the scholar and poet Callimachus (fl. 260). Among the pupils of Callimachus was Eratosthenes who, in 234, succeeded Zenodotus as librarian. Apart from his special interest in the history of the Old Attic comedy, he was a man of vast and varied learning; the founder of astronomical geography and of scientific chronology; and the first to assume the name of φιλόλογος. The greatest philologist of antiquity was, however, his successor, Aristophanes of Byzantium (195), who reduced accentuation and punctuation to a definite system, and used a variety of critical symbols in his recension of the Iliad and Odyssey. He also edited Hesiod and Pindar, Euripides and Aristophanes, besides composing brief introductions to the several plays, parts of which are still extant. Lastly, he established a scientific system of lexicography and drew up lists of the “best authors.” Two critical editions of the Iliad and Odyssey were produced by his successor, Aristarchus, who was librarian until 146 B.C. and was the founder of scientific scholarship. His distinguished pupil, Dionysius Thrax (born c. 166 B.C.), drew up a Greek grammar which continued in use for more than thirteen centuries. The most industrious of the successors of Aristarchus was Didymus (c. 65 B.C.-A.D. 10), who, in his work on the Homeric poems, aimed at restoring the lost recensions of Aristarchus. He also composed commentaries on the lyric and comic poets and on Thucydides and Demosthenes; part of his commentary on this last author was first published in 1904. He was a teacher in Alexandria (and perhaps also in Rome); and his death, about A.D. 10, marks the close of the Alexandrian age. He is the industrious compiler who gathered up the remnants of the learning of his predecessors and transmitted them to posterity. The poets of that age, including Callimachus and Theocritus, were subsequently expounded by Theon, who flourished under Tiberius, and has been well described as “the Didymus of the Alexandrian poets.”
The Alexandrian canon of the Greek classics, which probably had its origin in the lists drawn up by Callimachus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus, included the following authors:—
Epic poets (5): Homer, Hesiod, Peisander, Panyasis, Antimachus.
Iambic poets (3): Simonides of Amorgos, Archilochus, Hipponax.
Tragic poets (5): Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ion, Achaeus.
Comic poets, Old (7): Epicharmus, Cratinus, Eupolis, Aristophanes, Pherecrates, Crates, Plato. Middle (2): Antiphanes, Alexis. New (5): Menander, Philippides, Diphilus, Philemon, Apollodorus.
Elegiac poets (4): Callinus, Mimnermus, Philetas, Callimachus.
Lyric poets (9): Alcman, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Pindar, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides of Ceos.
Orators (10): Demosthenes, Lysias, Hypereides, Isocrates, Aeschines, Lycurgus, Isaeus, Antiphon, Ándocides, Deinarchus.
Historians (10): Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, Philistius, Theopompus, Ephorus, Anaximenes, Callisthenes, Hellanicus, Polybius.
The latest name in the above list is that of Polybius, who died about 123 B.C. Apollonius Rhodius, Aratus and Theocritus were subsequently added to the “epic” poets. Philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, were possibly classed in a separate “canon.”
While the scholars of Alexandria were mainly interested in the verbal criticism of the Greek poets, a wider variety of studies was the characteristic of the school of Pergamum, the literary rival of Alexandria. Pergamum was a home of learning for a large part of the 150 years of the Attalid dynasty, 283-133 B.C.
The grammar of the Stoics, gradually elaborated by Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, supplied a terminology which, in words such as “genitive,” “accusative” and “aorist,” has become a permanent part of the grammarian’s vocabulary; and the study of this grammar found its earliest home in Pergamum.
From about 168 B.C. the head of the Pergamene school was Crates of Mallus, who (like the Stoics) was an adherent of the principle of “anomaly” in grammar, and was thus opposed to Aristarchus of Alexandria, the champion of “analogy.” He also opposed Aristarchus, and supported the Stoics, by insisting on an allegorical interpretation of Homer. He is credited with having drawn up the classified lists of the best authors for the Pergamene library. His mission as an envoy to the Roman senate, “shortly after the death of Ennius” in 169 B.C., had a remarkable influence on literary studies in Rome. Meeting with an accident while he was wandering on the Palatine, and being detained in Rome, he passed part of his enforced leisure in giving lectures (possibly on Homer, his favourite author), and thus succeeded in arousing among the Romans a taste for the scholarly study of literature. The example set by Crates led to the production of a new edition of the epic poem of Naevius, and to the public recitation of the Annals of Ennius, and (two generations later) the Satires of Lucilius.
(ii.) The Roman Age.—(a) Latin Studies.—In the 1st century B.C. the foremost scholar in Rome was L. Aelius Stilo (c. 154-c. 74), who is described by Cicero as profoundly learned in Greek and Latin literature, and as an accomplished critic of Roman antiquities and of ancient authors. Of the plays then passing under the name of Plautus, he recognized twenty-five as genuine. His most famous pupil was Varro (116-27), the six surviving books of whose great work on the Latin language are mainly concerned with the great grammatical controversy on analogy and anomaly—a controversy which also engaged the attention of Cicero and Caesar, and of the elder Pliny and Quintilian. The twenty-one plays of Plautus accepted by Varro are doubtless the twenty now extant, together with the lost Vidularia. The influence of Varro’s last work on the nine disciplinae, or branches of study, long survived in the seven “liberal arts” recognized by St Augustine and Martianus Capella, and in the trivium and quadrivium of the middle ages.
Part of Varro’s treatise on Latin was dedicated to Cicero (106-43), who as an interpreter of Greek philosophy to his fellow-countrymen enlarged the vocabulary of Latin by his admirable renderings of Greek philosophical terms, and thus ultimately gave us such indispensable words as “species,” “quality” and “quantity.”
The earliest of Latin lexicons was produced about 10 B.C. by Verrius Flaccus in a work, De Verborum Significatu, which survived in the abridgment by Festus (2nd century A.D.) and in the further abridgment dedicated by Paulus Diaconus to Charles the Great.
Greek models were diligently studied by Virgil and Horace. Their own poems soon became the theme of criticism and of comment; and, by the time of Quintilian and Juvenal, they shared the fate (which Horace had feared) of becoming text-books for use in schools.
Recensions of Terence, Lucretius and Persius, as well as Horace and Virgil, were produced by Probus (d. A.D. 88), with critical symbols resembling those invented by the Alexandrian scholars. His contemporary Asconius is best known as the author of an extant historical commentary on five of the speeches of Cicero. In A.D. 88 Quintilian was placed at the head of the first state-supported school in Rome. His comprehensive work on the training of the future orator includes an outline of general education, which had an important influence on the humanistic schools of the Italian Renaissance. It also presents us with a critical survey of the Greek and Latin classics arranged under the heads of poets, historians, orators and philosophers (book x. chap. i.). The lives of Roman poets and scholars were among the many subjects that exercised the literary skill of Hadrian’s private secretary, Suetonius. One of his lost works is the principal source of the erudition of Isidore of Seville (d. A.D. 636), whose comprehensive encyclopaedia was a favourite text-book in the middle ages. About the time of the death of Suetonius (A.D. 160) a work entitled the Noctes Atticae was begun by Aulus Gellius. The author is an industrious student and a typical scholar, who frequents libraries and is interested in the MSS. of old Latin authors. Early in the 4th century the study of grammar was represented in northern Africa by the Numidian tiro, Nonius Marcellus (fl. 323), the author of an encyclopaedic work in three parts, lexicographical, grammatical and antiquarian, the main value of which lies in its quotations from early Latin literature. About the middle of the same century grammar had a far abler exponent at Rome in the person of Aelius Donatus, the preceptor of St Jerome, as well as the author of a text-book that remained in use throughout the middle ages. The general state of learning in this century is illustrated by Ausonius (c. 310-393), the grammarian and rhetorician of Bordeaux, the author of the Mosella, and the probable inspirer of the memorable decree of Gratian (376), providing for the appointment and the payment of teachers of rhetoric and of Greek and Latin literature in the principal cities of Gaul. His distinguished friend, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, the consul of A.D. 391, aroused in his own immediate circle an interest in Livy, the whole of whose history was still extant. Early in the 5th century other aristocratic Romans interested themselves in the textual criticism of Persius and Martial. Among the contemporaries of Symmachus, the devoted adherent of the old Roman religion, was St Jerome (d. 420), the most scholarly representative of Christianity in the 4th century, the student of Plautus and Terence, of Virgil and Cicero, the translator of the Chronology of Eusebius, and the author of the Latin version of the Bible now known as the Vulgate. St Augustine (d. 430) confesses to his early fondness for Virgil, and also tells us that he received his first serious impressions from the Hortensius of Cicero, an eloquent exhortation to the study of philosophy, of which only a few fragments survive. In his survey of the “liberal arts” St Augustine imitates (as we have seen) the Disciplinae of Varro, and in the greatest of his works, the De Civitate Dei (426), he has preserved large portions of the Antiquitates of Varro and the De Republica of Cicero. About the same date, and in the same province of northern Africa, Martianus Capella produced his allegorical work on the “liberal arts,” the principal, and, indeed, often the only, text-book of the medieval schools.
In the second half of the 5th century the foremost representative of Latin studies in Gaul was Apollinaris Sidonius (fl. 470), whose Letters were modelled on those of the younger Pliny, while his poems give proof of a wide though superficial acquaintance with classical literature. He laments the increasing decline in the classical purity of the Latin language.
An interest in Latin literature lived longest in Gaul, where schools of learning flourished as early as the 1st century at Autun, Lyons, Toulouse, Nîmes, Vienne, Narbonne and Marseilles; and, from the 3rd century onwards, at Trier, Poitiers, Besançon and Bordeaux.
About ten years after the death of Sidonius we find Asterius, the consul of 494, critically revising the text of Virgil in Rome. Boëthius, who early in life formed the ambitious plan of expounding and reconciling the opinions of Plato and Aristotle, continued in the year of his sole consulship (510) to instruct his fellow-countrymen in the wisdom of Greece. He is a link between the ancient world and the middle ages, having been the last of the learned Romans who understood the language and studied the literature of Greece, and the first to interpret to the middle ages the logical treatises of Aristotle. He thereby gave the signal for the age-long conflict between Nominalism and Realism, which exercised the keenest intellects among the Schoolmen, while the crowning work of his life, the Consolatio Philosophiae (524), was repeatedly expounded and imitated, and reproduced in renderings that were among the earliest literary products of the vernacular languages of modern Europe. His contemporary, Cassiodorus (c. 480-c. 575), after spending thirty years in the service of the Ostrogothic dynasty at Ravenna, passed the last thirty-three years of his long life on the shores of the Bay of Squillace, where he founded two monasteries and diligently trained their inmates to become careful copyists. In his latest work he made extracts for their benefit from the pages of Priscian (fl. 512), a transcript of whose great work on Latin grammar was completed at Constantinople by one of that grammarian’s pupils in 527, to be reproduced in a thousand MSS. in the middle ages. More than ten years before Cassiodorus founded his monasteries in the south of Italy, Benedict of Nursia (480-543) had rendered a more permanent service to the cause of scholarship by building, amid the ruins of the temple of Apollo on the crest of Monte Cassino, the earliest of those homes of learning that have lent an undying distinction to the Benedictine order. The learned labours of the Benedictines were no part of the original requirements of the rule of St Benedict; but before the founder’s death his favourite disciple had planted a monastery in France, and the name of that disciple is permanently associated with the learned labours of the Benedictines of the Congregation of St Maur (see Maurists).
(b) Greek Studies.—Meanwhile, the study of the Greek classics was ably represented at Rome in the Augustan age by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (fl. 30-8 B.C.), the intelligent critic of the ancient Attic orators, while the 1st century of our era is the probable date of the masterpiece of literary criticism known as the treatise On the Sublime by Longinus (q.v.).
The 2nd century is the age of the two great grammarians, Apollonius Dyscolus (the founder of scientific grammar and the creator of the study of Greek syntax) and his son Herodian, the larger part of whose principal work dealt with the subject of Greek accentuation. It is also the age of the lexicographers of Attic Greek, the most important of whom are Phrynichus, Pollux (fl. A.D. 180) and Harpocration.
In the 4th century Demosthenes was expounded and imitated by the widely influential teacher, Libanius of Antioch (c. 314-c. 393), the pagan preceptor of St Chrysostom. To the same century we may assign the grammarian Theodosius of Alexandria, who, instead of confining himself (like Dionysius Thrax) to the tenses of τύπτω in actual use, was the first to set forth all the imaginary aorists and futures of that verb, which have thence descended through the Byzantine age to the grammars of the Renaissance and of modern Europe.
In the 5th century we may place Hesychius of Alexandria, the compiler of the most extensive of our ancient Greek lexicons, and Proclus, the author of a chrestomathy, to the extracts from which (as preserved by Photius) we owe almost all our knowledge of the contents of the lost epics of early Greece. In the same century the study of Plato was represented by Synesius of Cyrene (c. 370-c. 413) and by the Neoplatonists of Alexandria and of Athens. The lower limit of the Roman age of classical studies may be conveniently placed in the year 529. In that year the monastery of Monte Cassino was founded in the West, while the school of Athens was closed in the East. The Roman age thus ends in the West with Boëthius, Cassiodorus and St Benedict, and in the East with Priscian and Justinian.
(iii.) The Middle Ages.—(a) In the East, commonly called the Byzantine Age, c. 530-1350. In this age, grammatical learning was represented by Choeroboscus, and lexicography by Photius (d. 891), the patriarch of Constantinople, who is also the author of a Bibliotheca reviewing and criticizing the contents of 280 MSS., and incidentally preserving important extracts from the lost Greek historians.
In the time of Photius the poets usually studied at school were Homer, Hesiod, Pindar; certain select plays of Aeschylus (Prometheus, Septem and Persae), Sophocles (Ajax, Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus), and Euripides (Hecuba, Orestes, Phoenissae, and, next to these, Alcestis, Andromache, Hippolytus, Medea, Rhesus, Troades,) also Aristophanes (beginning with the Plutus), Theocritus, Lycophron, and Dionysius Periegetes. The principal prose authors were Thucydides, parts of Plato and Demosthenes, with Aristotle, Plutarch’s Lives, and, above all, Lucian, who is often imitated in the Byzantine age.
One of the distinguished pupils of Photius, Arethas, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia (c. 907-932), devoted himself with remarkable energy to collecting and expounding the Greek classics. Among the important MSS. still extant that were copied at his expense are the Bodleian Euclid (888) and the Bodleian Plato (895). To the third quarter of the 10th century we may assign the Greek lexicon of Suïdas, a combination of a lexicon and an encyclopaedia, the best articles being those on the history of literature.
Meanwhile, during the “dark age” of secular learning at Constantinople (641-850), the light of Greek learning had spread eastwards to Syria and Arabia. At Bagdad, in the reign of Mamun (813-833), the son of Harun al-Rashid, philosophical works were translated by Syrian Christians from Greek into Syriac and from Syriac into Arabic. It was in his reign that Aristotle was first translated into Arabic, and, shortly afterwards, we have Syriac and Arabic renderings of commentators on Aristotle, and of portions of Plato, Hippocrates and Galen; while in the 10th century new translations of Aristotle and his commentators were produced by the Nestorian Christians.
The Arabic translations of Aristotle passed from the East to the West by being transmitted through the Arab dominions in northern Africa to Spain, which had been conquered by the Arabs in the 8th century. In the 12th century Toledo was the centre of the study of Aristotle in the West, and it was from Toledo that the knowledge of Aristotle spread to Paris and to other seats of learning in western Europe.
The 12th century in Constantinople is marked by the name of Tzetzes (c. 1110-c. 1180), the author of a mythological, literary and historical miscellany called the Chiliades, in the course of which he quotes more than four hundred authors. The prolegomena to his scholia on Aristophanes supply us with valuable information on the Alexandrian libraries. The most memorable name, however, among the scholars of this century is that of Eustathius, whose philological studies at Constantinople preceded his tenure of the archbishopric of Thessalonica (1175-1192). The opening pages of his commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey dwell with enthusiasm on the abiding influence of Homer on the literature of Greece.
While the Byzantine MSS. of the 11th century (such as the Laurentian MSS. of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and the Ravenna MS. of Aristophanes) maintain the sound traditions of the Alexandrian and Roman ages, those of the times of the Palaeologi give proof of a frequent tampering with the metres of the ancient poets in order to bring them into conformity with theories recently invented by Moschopulus and Triclinius. The scholars of these times are the natural precursors of the earliest representatives of the Revival of Learning in the West. Of these later Byzantines the first in order of date is the monk Planudes (d. 1330), who devoted his knowledge of Latin to producing excellent translations of Caesar’s Gallic War as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Heroides, and the classic work of Boëthius; he also compiled (in 1302) the only Greek anthology known to scholars before the recovery in 1607 of the earlier and fuller anthology of Cephalas (fl. 917).
The scholars of the Byzantine age cannot be compared with the great Alexandrians, but they served to maintain the continuity of tradition by which the Greek classics selected by the critics of Alexandria were transmitted to modern Europe.
(b) In the West (c. 530-c. 1350).—At the portal of the middle ages stands Gregory the Great (c. 540-604), who had little (if any) knowledge of Greek and had no sympathy with the secular side of the study of Latin. A decline in grammatical learning is exemplified in the three Latin historians of the 6th century, Jordanes, Gildas and Gregory of Tours (d. 594), who begins his history of the Franks by lamenting the decay of Latin literature in Gaul. The historian of Tours befriended the Latin poet, Venantius Fortunatus (d. c. 600), who is still remembered as the writer of the three well-known hymns beginning Salve festa dies, Vexilla regis prodeunt, and Pange lingua gloriosi proelium certaminis. The decadence of Latin early in the 7th century is exemplified by the fantastic grammarian Virgilius Maro, who also illustrates the transition from Latin to Provençal, and from quantitive to accentual forms of verse.
While Latin was declining in Gaul, even Greek was not unknown in Ireland, and the Irish passion for travel led to the spread of Greek learning in the west of Europe. The Irish monk Columban, shortly before his death in 615, founded in the neighbourhood of Pavia the monastery of Bobbio, to be the repository of many Latin MSS. which were ultimately dispersed among the libraries of Rome, Milan and Turin. About the same date his fellow-traveller, Gallus, founded above the Lake of Constance the monastery of St Gallen, where Latin MSS. were preserved until their recovery in the age of the Renaissance. During the next twenty-five years Isidore of Seville (d. 636) produced in his Origines an encyclopaedic work which gathered up for the middle ages much of the learning of the ancient world.
In Italy a decline in the knowledge of Greek in the 5th and 6th centuries led to an estrangement between the Greek and Latin Churches. The year 690 is regarded as the date of the temporary extinction of Greek in Italy, but, in the first quarters of the 8th and the 9th centuries, the iconoclastic decrees of the Byzantine emperors drove many of the Greek monks and their lay adherents to the south of Italy, and even to Rome itself.
In Ireland we find Greek characters used in the Book of Armagh (c. 807); and, in the same century, a Greek psalter was copied by an Irish monk of Liége, named Sedulius (fl. 850), who had a wide knowledge of Latin literature. In England, some sixty years after the death of Augustine, the Greek archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus (d. 690) founded a school for the study of Greek, and with the help of an African monk named Hadrian made many of the English monasteries schools of Greek and Latin learning, so that, in the time of Bede (d. 735), some of the scholars who still survived were “as familiar with Greek and Latin as with their mother-tongue.” Among those who had learned their Greek at Canterbury was Aldhelm (d. 709), “the first Englishman who cultivated classical learning with any success.” While Aldhelm is known as “the father of Anglo-Latin verse,” Latin prose was the literary medium used by Bede in his celebrated Ecclesiastical History of England (731). Nine years after the death of Bede (735), Boniface, “the apostle of Germany,” sanctioned the founding of Fulda (744), which soon rivalled St Gallen as a school of learning. Alcuin (d. 804), who was probably born in the year of Bede’s death, tells us of the wealth of Latin literature preserved in the library at York. Through the invitation of Charles the Great, he became associated with the revival of learning which marks the reign of that monarch, by presiding over the School of the Palace (782-790), and by exercising a healthy influence as abbot of St Martin’s at Tours (796-804). Among the friends of Alcuin and the advisers of Charles was Theodulfus, bishop of Orleans and abbot of Fleury (d. 821), who is memorable as an accomplished Latin poet, and as the initiator of free education. Einhard (d. 840), in his classic life of Charles the Great, models his style on that of Suetonius, and shows his familiarity with Caesar and Livy and Cicero, while Rabanus Maurus (d. 856), who long presided over Einhard’s school of Fulda, was the first to introduce Priscian into the schools of Germany. His pupil, Walafrid Strabo, the abbot of Reichenau (d. 849), had a genuine gift for Latin poetry, a gift agreeably exemplified in his poem on the plants in the monastic garden. In the same century an eager interest in the Latin classics is displayed by Servatus Lupus, who was educated at Fulda, and was abbot of Ferrières for the last twenty years of his life (d. 862). In his literary spirit he is a precursor of the humanists of the Renaissance. Under Charles the Bald (d. 877) there was a certain revival of interest in literature, when John the Scot (Erigena) became, for some thirty years (c. 845-875), the head of the Palace School. He was familiar with the Greek Fathers, and was chosen to execute a Latin rendering of the writings of “Dionysius the Areopagite,” the patron saint of France. In the preface the translator praises the king for prompting him not to rest satisfied with the literature of the West, but to have recourse to the “most pure and copious waters of the Greeks.” In the next generation Remi of Auxerre was the first to open a school in Paris (900). Virgil is the main authority quoted in Remi’s Commentary on Donatus, which remained in use until the Renaissance. During the two centuries after John the Scot, the study of Greek declined in France. In England the 9th century closes with Alfred, who, with the aid of the Welsh monk, Asser, produced a series of free translations from Latin texts, including Boëthius and Orosius and Bede, and the Cura Pastoralis of Gregory the Great.
In the 10th century learning flourished at Aachen under Bruno, brother of Otto I. and archbishop of Cologne (953-965), who had himself learned Greek from certain Eastern monks at the imperial court, and who called an Irish bishop from Trier to teach Greek at the imperial capital. He also encouraged the transcription of Latin MSS., which became models of style to Widukind of Corvey, the imitator of Sallust and Livy. In the same century the monastery of Gandersheim, south of Hanover, was the retreat of the learned nun Hroswitha, who celebrated the exploits of Otho in leonine hexameters, and composed in prose six moral and religious plays in imitation of Terence. One of the most prominent personages of the century was Gerbert of Aurillac, who, after teaching at Tours and Fleury, became abbot of Bobbio, archbishop of Reims, and ultimately pope under the name of Silvester II. (d. 1003). He frequently quotes from the speeches of Cicero, and it has been surmised that the survival of those speeches may have been due to the influence of Gerbert. The most original hellenist of this age is Luitprand, bishop of Cremona (d. 972), who acquired some knowledge of Greek during his repeated missions to Constantinople. About the same time in England Oswald of York, who had himself been educated at Fleury, invited Abbo (d. 1004) to instruct the monks of the abbey recently founded at Ramsey, near Huntingdon. At Ramsey he wrote for his pupils a scholarly work dealing with points of prosody and pronunciation, and exhibiting an accurate knowledge of Virgil and Horace. During the same half-century, Ælfric, the abbot of Eynsham (d. c. 1030), aided Bishop Æthelwold in making Winchester famous as a place of education. It was there that he began his Latin Grammar, his Glossary (the earliest Latin-English dictionary in existence), and his Colloquium, in which Latin is taught in a conversational manner.
In France, the most notable teacher in the first quarter of the 11th century was Fulbert, bishop of Chartres (d. 1029). In and after the middle of that century the Norman monastery of Bec flourished under the rule of Lanfranc and Anselm, both of whom had begun their career in northern Italy, and closed it at Canterbury. Meanwhile, in Germany, the styles of Sallust and Livy were being happily imitated in the Annals of Lambert of Hersfeld (d. 1077). In Italy, where the study of Latin literature seems never to have entirely died out, young nobles and students preparing for the priesthood were not infrequently learning Latin together, in private grammar schools under liberal clerics, such as Anselm of Bisate (fl. 1050), who describes himself as divided in his allegiance between the saints and the muses. Learning flourished at Monte Cassino under the rule of the Abbot Desiderius (afterwards Pope Victor III.). In this century that famous monastery had its classical chronicler in Leo Marsicanus, and its Latin poet in Alfanus, the future archbishop of Salerno.
The Schoolmen devoted most of their attention to Aristotle, and we may here briefly note the successive stages in their gradually increasing knowledge of his works. Until 1128 only the first two of the five parts of the Organon were known, and those solely in Latin translations from the original. After that date two more became known; the whole was familiar to John of Salisbury in 1159; while the Physics and Metaphysics came into notice about 1200. Plato was mainly represented by the Latin translation of the Timaeus. Abelard (d. 1142) was acquainted with no Greek works except in Latin translations, but he has left his mark on the history of European education. The wide popularity of his brilliant lectures in the “schools” of Paris made this city the resort of the many students who were ultimately organized as a “university” (c. 1170). John of Salisbury attended Abelard’s lectures in 1136, and, after spending two years in the study of logic in Paris, passed three more in the scholarly study of Latin literature at Chartres, where a sound and healthy tradition, originally due to Bernard of Chartres (fl. 1120), was still perpetuated by his pupils. In that school the study of “figures of speech” was treated as merely introductory to that of the classical texts. Stress was laid on the sense as well as the style of the author studied. Discussions on set subjects were held, select passages from the classics learned by heart, while written exercises in prose and verse were founded on the best ancient models. In the general scheme of education the authority followed was Quintilian. John of Salisbury (d. 1180), the ripest product of this school, is the most learned man of his time. His favourite author is Cicero, and in all the Latin literature accessible to him he is the best-read scholar of his age. Among Latin scholars of the next generation we have Giraldus Cambrensis (d. c. 1222), the author of topographical and historical writings on Ireland and Wales, and of other works teeming with quotations from the Latin classics. During the middle ages Latin prose never dies out. It is the normal language of literature. In England it is used by many chroniclers and historians, the best known of whom are William of Malmesbury (d. 1142) and Matthew Paris (d. 1259). In Italy Latin verse had been felicitously applied to historic themes by William of Apulia (fl. 1100) and other Latin poets (1088-1247). In the 12th century England claims at least seven Latin poets, one of these being her only Latin epic poet, Joseph of Exeter (d. 1210), whose poem on the Trojan war is still extant. The Latin versifier, John of Garlandia, an Englishman who lived mainly in France (fl. 1204-1252), produced several Latin vocabularies which were still in use in the boyhood of Erasmus. The Latin poets of French birth include Gautier and Alain de Lille (d. c. 1203), the former being the author of the Alexandreis, and the latter that of the Anti-Claudianus, a poem familiar to Chaucer.
During the hundred and thirty years that elapsed between the early translations of Aristotle executed at Toledo about 1150 and the death in 1281 of William of Moerbeke, the translator of the Rhetoric and the Politics, the knowledge of Aristotle had been greatly extended in Europe by means of translations, first from the Arabic, and, next, from the original Greek. Aristotle had been studied in England by Grosseteste (d. 1253), and expounded abroad by the great Dominican, Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), and his famous pupil, Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). Among the keenest critics of the Schoolmen and of the recent translations of Aristotle was Roger Bacon (d. 1294), whose Opus majus has been recognized as the Encyclopédie and the Organon of the 13th century. His knowledge of Greek, as shown in his Greek Grammar (first published in 1902), was clearly derived from the Greeks of his own day. The medieval dependence on the authority of Aristotle gradually diminished. This was partly due to the recovery of some of the lost works of ancient literature, and the transition from the middle ages to the revival of learning was attended by a general widening of the range of classical studies and by a renewed interest in Plato.
The classical learning of the middle ages was largely second-hand. It was often derived from glossaries, from books of elegant extracts, or from comprehensive encyclopaedias. Among the compilers of these last were Isidore and Hrabanus, William of Conches and Honorius of Autun, Bartholomaeus Anglicus (fl. 1250), Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264), and, lastly, Brunetto Latini (d. 1290), the earlier contemporary of Dante. For Aristotle, as interpreted by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, Dante has the highest regard. To the Latin translations of Aristotle and to his interpreters he refers in more than three hundred passages, while the number of his references to the Latin translation of the Timaeus of Plato is less than ten. His five great pagan poets are Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan; Statius he regards as a “Christian” converted by Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. His standard authors in Latin prose are Cicero, Livy, Pliny, Frontinus and Orosius. His knowledge of Greek was practically nil. Latin was the language of his political treatise, De Monarchia, and even that of his defence of the vulgar tongue, De Vulgari Eloquio. He is, in a limited sense, a precursor of the Renaissance, but he is far more truly to be regarded as the crowning representative of the spirit of the middle ages.
(iv.) The Modern Age.—(a) Our fourth period is ushered in by the age of the Revival of Learning in Italy (c. 1350-1527). Petrarch (1304-1374) has been well described as “the first of modern men.” In contrast with the Schoolmen of the middle ages, he has no partiality for Aristotle. He was interested in Greek, and, a full century before the fall of Constantinople, he was in possession of MSS. of Homer and Plato, though his knowledge of the language was limited to the barest rudiments. For that knowledge, scanty as it was, he was indebted to Leontius Pilatus, with whose aid Boccaccio (1313-1375) became “the first of modern men” to study Greek to some purpose during the three years that Leontius spent as his guest in Florence (1360-1363). It was also at Florence that Greek was taught in the next generation by Chrysoloras (in 1396-1400). Another generation passed, and the scholars of the East and West met at the council of Florence (1439). One of the envoys of the Greeks, Gemistus Pletho, then inspired Cosimo dei Medici with the thought of founding an academy for the study of Plato. The academy was founded, and, in the age of Lorenzo, Plato and Plotinus were translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499). The Apology and Crito, the Phaedo, Phaedrus and Gorgias of Plato, as well as speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines, with the Oeconomics, Ethics and Politics of Aristotle, had already been translated by Leonardo Bruni (d. 1444); the Rhetoric by Filelfo (1430), and Plato’s Republic by Decembrio (1439). A comprehensive scheme for translating the principal Greek prose authors into Latin was carried out at Rome by the founder of the manuscript collections of the Vatican, Nicholas V. (1447-1455), who had belonged to the literary circle of Cosimo at Florence. The translation of Aristotle was entrusted to three of the learned Greeks who had already arrived in Italy, Trapezuntius, Gaza and Bessarion, while other authors were undertaken by Italian scholars such as Guarino, Valla, Decembrio and Perotti. Among the scholars of Italian birth, probably the only one in this age who rivalled the Greeks as a public expositor of their own literature was Politian (1454-1494), who lectured on Homer and Aristotle in Florence, translated Herodian, and was specially interested in the Latin authors of the Silver Age and in the text of the Pandects of Justinian. It will be observed that the study of Greek had been resumed in Florence half a century before the fall of Constantinople, and that the principal writers of Greek prose had been translated into Latin before that event.
Meanwhile, the quest of MSS. of the Latin classics had been actively pursued. Petrarch had discovered Cicero’s Speech pro Archia at Liége (1333) and the Letters to Atticus and Quintus at Verona (1345). Boccaccio had discovered Martial and Ausonius, and had been the first of the humanists to be familiar with Varro and Tacitus, while Salutati had recovered Cicero’s letters Ad Familiares (1389). During the council of Constance, Poggio, the papal secretary, spent in the quest of MSS. the interval between May 1415 and November 1417, during which he was left at leisure by the vacancy in the apostolic see.
Thirteen of Cicero’s speeches were found by him at Cluny and Langres, and elsewhere in France or Germany; the commentary of Asconius, a complete Quintilian, and a large part of Valerius Flaccus were discovered at St Gallen. A second expedition to that monastery and to others in the neighbourhood led to the recovery of Lucretius, Manilius, Silius Italicus and Ammianus Marcellinus, while the Silvae of Statius were recovered shortly afterwards. A complete MS. of Cicero, De Oratore, Brutus and Orator, was found by Bishop Landriani at Lodi (1421). Cornelius Nepos was discovered by Traversari in Padua (1434). The Agricola, Germania and Dialogue of Tacitus reached Italy from Germany in 1455, and the early books of the Annals in 1508. Pliny’s Panegyric was discovered by Aurispa at Mainz (1433), and his correspondence with Trajan by Fra Giocondo in Paris about 1500.
Greek MSS. were brought from the East by Aurispa, who in 1423 returned with no less than two hundred and thirty-eight, including the celebrated Laurentian MS. of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Apollonius Rhodius. A smaller number was brought from Constantinople by Filelfo (1427), while Quintus Smyrnaeus was discovered in south Italy by Bessarion, who presented his own collection of MSS. to the republic of Venice and thus led to the foundation of the library of St Mark’s (1468). As the emissary of Lorenzo, Janus Lascaris paid two visits to the East, returning from his second visit in 1492 with two hundred MSS. from Mount Athos.
The Renaissance theory of a humanistic education is illustrated by several treatises still extant. In 1392 Vergerio addressed to a prince of Padua the first treatise which methodically maintains the claims of Latin as an essential part of a liberal education. Eight years later, he was learning Greek from Chrysoloras. Among the most distinguished pupils of the latter was Leonardo Bruni, who, about 1405, wrote “the earliest humanistic tract on education expressly addressed to a lady.” He here urges that the foundation of all true learning is a “sound and thorough knowledge of Latin,” and draws up a course of reading, in which history is represented by Livy, Sallust, Curtius, and Caesar; oratory by Cicero; and poetry by Virgil. The same year saw the birth of Maffeo Vegio, whose early reverence for the muse of Virgil and whose later devotion to the memory of Monica have left their mark on the educational treatise which he wrote a few years before his death in 1458. The authors he recommends include “Aesop” and Sallust, the tragedies of Seneca and the epic poets, especially Virgil, whom he interprets in an allegorical sense. He is in favour of an early simultaneous study of a wide variety of subjects, to be followed later by the special study of one or two. Eight years before the death of Vegio, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II.) had composed a brief treatise on education in the form of a letter to Ladislaus, the young king of Bohemia and Hungary. The Latin poets to be studied include Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and (with certain limitations) Horace, Juvenal and Persius, as well as Plautus, Terence and the tragedies of Seneca; the prose authors recommended are Cicero, Livy and Sallust. The first great school of the Renaissance was that established by Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua, where he resided for the last twenty-two years of his life (1424-1446). Among the Latin authors studied were Virgil and Lucan, with selections from Horace, Ovid and Juvenal, besides Cicero and Quintilian, Sallust and Curtius, Caesar and Livy. The Greek authors were Homer, Hesiod, Pindar and the dramatists, with Herodotus, Xenophon and Plato, Isocrates and Demosthenes, Plutarch and Arrian.
Meanwhile, Guarino had been devoting five years to the training of the eldest son of the marquis of Ferrara. At Ferrara he spent the last thirty years of his long life (1370-1460), producing text-books of Greek and Latin grammar, and translations from Strabo and Plutarch. His method may be gathered from his son’s treatise, De Ordine Docendi et Studendi. In that treatise the essential marks of an educated person are, not only ability to write Latin verse, but also, a point of “at least equal importance,” “familiarity with the language and literature of Greece.” “Without a knowledge of Greek, Latin scholarship itself is, in any real sense, impossible” (1459).
By the fall of Constantinople in 1453, “Italy (in the eloquent phrase of Carducci) became sole heir and guardian of the ancient civilization,” but its fall was in no way necessary for the revival of learning, which had begun a century before. Bessarion, Theodorus Gaza, Georgius Trepezuntius, Argyropulus, Chalcondyles, all had reached Italy before 1453. A few more Greeks fled to Italy after that date, and among these were Janus Lascaris, Musurus and Callierges. All three were of signal service in devoting their knowledge of Greek to perpetuating and popularizing the Greek classics with the aid of the newly-invented art of printing. That art had been introduced into Italy by the German printers, Sweynheym and Pannartz, who had worked under Fust at Mainz. At Subiaco and at Rome they had produced in 1465-1471 the earliest editions of Cicero, De Oratore and the Letters, and eight other Latin authors.
The printing of Greek began at Milan with the Greek grammar of Constantine Lascaris (1476). At Florence the earliest editions of Homer (1488) and Isocrates (1493) had been produced by Demetrius Chalcondyles, while Janus Lascaris was the first to edit the Greek anthology, Apollonius Rhodius, and parts of Euripides, Callimachus and Lucian (1494-1496). In 1494-1515 Aldus Manutius published at Venice no less than twenty-seven editiones principes of Greek authors and of Greek works of reference, the authors including Aristotle, Theophrastus, Theocritus, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Demosthenes (and the minor Attic orators), Pindar, Plato and Athenaeus. In producing Plato, Athenaeus and Aristophanes, the scholar-printer was largely aided by Musurus, who also edited the Aldine Pausanias (1516) and the Etymologicum printed in Venice by another Greek immigrant, Callierges (1499).
The Revival of Learning in Italy ends with the sack of Rome (1527). Before 1525 the study of Greek had begun to decline in Italy, but meanwhile an interest in that language had been transmitted to the lands beyond the Alps.
In the study of Latin the principal aim of the Italian humanists was the imitation of the style of their classical models. In the case of poetry, this imitative spirit is apparent in Petrarch’s Africa, and in the Latin poems of Politian, Pontano, Sannazaro, Vida and many others. Petrarch was not only the imitator of Virgil, who had been the leading name in Latin letters throughout the middle ages; it was the influence of Petrarch that gave a new prominence to Cicero. The imitation of Cicero was carried on with varying degrees of success by humanists such as Gasparino da Barzizza (d. 1431), who introduced a new style of epistolary Latin; by Paolo Cortesi, who discovered the importance of a rhythmical structure in the composition of Ciceronian prose (1490); and by the accomplished secretaries of Leo X., Bembo and Sadoleto. Both of these papal secretaries were mentioned in complimentary terms by Erasmus in his celebrated dialogue, the Ciceronianus (1528), in which no less than one hundred and six Ciceronian scholars of all nations are briefly and brilliantly reviewed, the slavish imitation of Cicero denounced, and the law laid down that “to speak with propriety we must adapt ourselves to the age in which we live—an age that differs entirely from that of Cicero.” One of the younger Ciceronians criticized by Erasmus was Longolius, who had died at Padua in 1522. The cause of the Ciceronians was defended by the elder Scaliger in 1531 and 1536, and by Étienne Dolet in 1535, and the controversy was continued by other scholars down to the year 1610. Meanwhile, in Italy, a strict type of Ciceronianism was represented by Paulus Manutius (d. 1574), and a freer and more original form of Latinity by Muretus (d. 1585).
Before touching on the salient points in the subsequent centuries, in connexion with the leading nations of Europe, we may briefly note the cosmopolitan position of Erasmus (1466-1536), who, although he was a native of the Netherlands, was far more closely connected with France, England, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, than with the land of his birth. He was still a school-boy at Deventer when his high promise was recognized by Rudolf Agricola, “the first (says Erasmus) who brought from Italy some breath of a better culture.” Late in 1499 Erasmus spent some two months at Oxford, where he met Colet; it was in London that he met More and Linacre and Grocyn, who had already ceased to lecture at Oxford. At Paris, in 1500, he was fully conscious that “without Greek the amplest knowledge of Latin was imperfect”; and, during his three years in Italy (1506-1509), he worked quietly at Greek in Bologna and attended the lectures of Musurus in Padua. In October 1511 he was teaching Greek to a little band of students in Cambridge; at Basel in 1516 he produced his edition of the Greek Testament, the first that was actually published; and during the next few years he was helping to organize the college lately founded at Louvain for the study of Greek and Hebrew, as well as Latin. Seven years at Basel were followed by five at Freiburg, and by two more at Basel, where he died. The names of all these places are suggestive of the wide range of his influence. By his published works, his Colloquies, his Adages and his Apophthegms, he was the educator of the nations of Europe. An educational aim is also apparent in his editions of Terence and of Seneca, while his Latin translations made his contemporaries more familiar with Greek poetry and prose, and his Paraphrase promoted a better understanding of the Greek Testament. He was not so much a scientific scholar as a keen and brilliant man of letters and a widely influential apostle of humanism.
In France the most effective of the early teachers of Greek was Janus Lascaris (1495-1503). Among his occasional pupils was Budaeus (d. 1540), who prompted Francis I. to found in 1530 the corporation of the Royal Readers in Greek, as well as Latin and Hebrew, afterwards famous under the name of the Collège de France. In the study of Greek one of the earliest links between Italy and Germany was Rudolf Agricola, who had learned Greek under Gaza at Ferrara. It was in Paris that his younger contemporary Reuchlin acquired part of that proficiency in Greek which attracted the notice of Argyropulus, whose admiration of Reuchlin is twice recorded by Melanchthon, who soon afterwards was pre-eminent as the “praeceptor” of Germany.
In the age of the revival the first Englishman who studied Greek was a Benedictine monk, William of Selling (d. 1494), who paid two visits to Italy. At Canterbury he inspired with his own love of learning his nephew, Linacre, who joined him on one of those visits, studied Greek at Florence under Politian and Chalcondyles, and apparently stayed in Italy from 1485 to 1499. His translation of a treatise of Galen was printed at Cambridge in 1521 by Siberch, who, in the same year and place, was the first to use Greek type in England. Greek had been first taught to some purpose at Oxford by Grocyn on his return from Italy in 1491. One of the younger scholars of the day was William Lilye, who picked up his Greek at Rhodes on his way to Palestine and became the first high-master of the school founded by Colet at St Paul’s (1510).
(b) That part of the Modern Period of classical studies which succeeds the age of the Revival in Italy may be subdivided into three periods distinguished by the names of the nations most prominent in each.
1. The first may be designated the French period. It begins with the foundation of the Royal Readers by Francis I. in 1530, and it may perhaps be regarded as extending to 1700. This period is marked by a many-sided erudition rather than by any special cult of the form of the classical languages. It is the period of the great polyhistors of France. It includes Budaeus and the elder Scaliger (who settled in France in 1529), with Turnebus and Lambinus, and the learned printers Robertus and Henricus Stephanus, while among its foremost names are those of the younger (and greater) Scaliger, Casaubon and Salmasius. Of these, Casaubon ended his days in England (1614); Scaliger, by leaving France for the Netherlands in 1593, for a time at least transferred the supremacy in scholarship from the land of his birth to that of his adoption. The last sixteen years of his life (1593-1609) were spent at Leiden, which was also for more than twenty years (1631-1653) the home of Salmasius, and for thirteen (1579-1592) that of Lipsius (d. 1606). In the 17th century the erudition of France is best represented by “Henricus Valesius,” Du Cange and Mabillon. In the same period Italy was represented by Muretus, who had left France in 1563, and by her own sons, Nizolius, Victorius, Robortelli and Sigonius, followed in the 17th century by R. Fabretti. The Netherlands, in the 16th, claim W. Canter as well as Lipsius, and, in the 17th, G.J. Vossius, Johannes Meursius, the elder and younger Heinsius, Hugo Grotius, J.F. Gronovius, J.G. Graevius and J. Perizonius. Scotland, in the 16th, is represented by George Buchanan; England by Sir John Cheke, Roger Ascham, and Sir Henry Savile, and, in the 17th, by Thomas Gataker, Thomas Stanley, Henry Dodwell, and Joshua Barnes; Germany by Janus Gruter, Ezechiel Spanheim and Chr. Cellarius, the first two of whom were also connected with other countries.
We have already seen that a strict imitation of Cicero was one of the characteristics of the Italian humanists. In and after the middle of the 16th century a correct and pure Latinity was promoted by the educational system of the Jesuits; but with the growth of the vernacular literatures Latin became more and more exclusively the language of the learned. Among the most conspicuous Latin writers of the 17th century are G.J. Vossius and the Heinsii, with Salmasius and his great adversary, Milton. Latin was also used in works on science and philosophy, such as Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687), and many of the works of Leibnitz (1646-1705). In botany the custom followed by John Ray (1627-1705) in his Historia Plantarum and in other works was continued in 1760 by Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae. The last important work in English theology written in Latin was George Bull’s Defensio Fidei Nicenae (1685). The use of Latin in diplomacy died out towards the end of the 17th century; but, long after that date negotiations with the German empire were conducted in Latin, and Latin was the language of the debates in the Hungarian diet down to 1825.
2. During the 18th century the classical scholarship of the Netherlands was under the healthy and stimulating influence of Bentley (1662-1742), who marks the beginning of the English and Dutch period, mainly represented in Holland by Bentley’s younger contemporary and correspondent, Tiberius Hemsterhuys (1685-1766), and the latter scholar’s great pupil David Ruhnken (1723-1798). It is the age of historical and literary, as well as verbal, criticism. Both of these were ably represented in the first half of the century by Bentley himself, while, in the twenty years between 1782 and 1803, the verbal criticism of the tragic poets of Athens was the peculiar province of Richard Porson (1759-1808), who was born in the same year as F.A. Wolf. Among other representatives of England were Jeremiah Markland and Jonathan Toup, Thomas Tyrwhitt and Thomas Twining, Samuel Parr and Sir William Jones; and of the Netherlands, the two Burmanns and L. Küster, Arnold Drakenborch and Wesseling, Lodewyk Valckenaer and Daniel Wyttenbach (1746-1829). Germany is represented by Fabricius and J.M. Gesner, J.A. Ernesti and J.J. Reiske, J.J. Winckelmann and Chr. G. Heyne; France by B. de Montfaucon and J.B.G.D. Villoison; Alsace by French subjects of German origin, R.F.P. Brunck and J. Schweighäuser; and Italy by E. Forcellini and Ed. Corsini.
3. The German period begins with F.A. Wolf (1759-1824), whose Prolegomena to Homer appeared in 1795. He is the founder of the systematic and encyclopaedic type of scholarship embodied in the comprehensive term Altertumswissenschaft, or “a scientific knowledge of the old classical world.” The tradition of Wolf was ably continued by August Böckh (d. 1867), one of the leaders of the historical and antiquarian school, brilliantly represented in the previous generation by B.G. Niebuhr (d. 1831).
In contrast with this school we have the critical and grammatical school of Gottfried Hermann (d. 1848). During this period, while Germany remains the most productive of the nations, scholarship has been more and more international and cosmopolitan in its character.
19th Century.—We must here be content with simply recording the names of a few of the more prominent representatives of the 19th century in some of the most obvious departments of classical learning. Among natives of Germany the leading scholars have been, in Greek, C.F.W. Jacobs, C.A. Lobeck, L. Dissen, I. Bekker, A. Meineke, C. Lehrs, W. Dindorf, T. Bergk, F.W. Schneidewin, H. Köchly, A. Nauck, H. Usener, G. Kaibel, F. Blass and W. Christ; in Latin, C. Lachmann, F. Ritschl, M. Haupt, C. Halm, M. Hertz, A. Fleckeisen, E. Bährens, L. Müller and O. Ribbeck. Grammar and kindred subjects have been represented by P. Buttmann, A. Matthiae, F.W. Thiersch, C.G. Zumpt, G. Bernhardy, C.W. Krüger, R. Kühner and H.L. Ahrens; and lexicography by F. Passow and C.E. Georges. Among editors of Thucydides we have had E.F. Poppo and J. Classen; among editors of Demosthenes or other orators, G.H. Schäfer, J.T. Vömel, G.E. Benseler, A. Westermann, G.F. Schömann, H. Sauppe, and C. Rehdantz (besides Blass, already mentioned). The Platonists include F. Schleiermacher, G.A.F. Ast, G. Stallbaum and the many-sided C.F. Hermann; the Aristotelians, C.A. Brandis, A. Trendelenburg, L. Spengel, H. Bonitz, C. Prantl, J. Bernays and F. Susemihl. The history of Greek philosophy was written by F. Ueberweg, and, more fully, by E. Zeller. Greek history was the domain of G. Droysen, Max Duncker, Ernst Curtius, Arnold Schäfer and Adolf Holm; Greek antiquities that of M.H. Meier and G.F. Schömann and of G. Gilbert; Greek epigraphy that of J. Franz, A. Kirchhoff, W. von Hartel, U. Köhler, G. Hirschfeld and W. Dittenberger; Roman history and constitutional antiquities that of Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), who was associated in Latin epigraphy with E. Hübner and W. Henzen. Classical art and archaeology were represented by F.G. Welcker, E. Gerhard, C.O. Müller, F. Wieseler, O. Jahn, C.L. Urlichs, H. Brunn, C.B. Stark, J. Overbeck, W. Helbig, O. Benndorf and A. Furtwängler; mythology (with cognate subjects) by G.F. Creuzer, P.W. Forchhammer, L. Preller, A. Kuhn, J.W. Mannhardt and E. Rohde; and comparative philology by F. Bopp, A.F. Pott, T. Benfey, W. Corssen, Georg Curtius, A. Schleicher and H. Steinthal. The history of classical philology in Germany was written by Conrad Bursian (1830-1883).
In France we have J.F. Boissonade, J.A. Letronne, L.M. Quicherat, M.P. Littré, B. Saint-Hilaire, J.V. Duruy, B.E. Miller, É. Egger, C.V. Daremberg, C. Thurot, L.E. Benoist, O. Riemann and C. Graux; (in archaeology) A.C. Quatremère de Quincy, P. le Bas, C.F.M. Texier, the duc de Luynes, the Lenormants (C. and F.), W.H. Waddington and O. Rayet; and (in comparative philology) Victor Henry. Greece was ably represented in France by A. Koraes. In Belgium we have P. Willems and the Baron De Witte (long resident in France); in Holland, C.G. Cobet; in Denmark, J.N. Madvig. Among the scholars of Great Britain and Ireland may be mentioned: P. Elmsley, S. Butler, T. Gaisford, P.P. Dobree, J.H. Monk, C.J. Blomfield, W. Veitch, T.H. Key, B.H. Kennedy, W. Ramsay, T.W. Peile, R. Shilleto, W.H. Thompson, J.W. Donaldson, Robert Scott, H.G. Liddell, C. Badham, G. Rawlinson, F.A. Paley, B. Jowett, T.S. Evans, E.M. Cope, H.A.J. Munro, W.G. Clark, Churchill Babington, H.A. Holden, J. Riddell, J. Conington, W.Y. Sellar, A. Grant, W.D. Geddes, D.B. Monro, H. Nettleship, A. Palmer, R.C. Jebb, A.S. Wilkins, W.G. Rutherford and James Adam; among historians and archaeologists, W.M. Leake, H. Fynes-Clinton, G. Grote and C. Thirlwall, T. Arnold, G. Long and Charles Merivale, Sir Henry Maine, Sir Charles Newton and A.S. Murray, Robert Burn and H.F. Pelham. Among comparative philologists Max Müller belonged to Germany by birth and to England by adoption, while, in the United States, his ablest counterpart was W.D. Whitney. B.L. Gildersleeve, W.W. Goodwin, Henry Drisler, J.B. Greenough and G.M. Lane were prominent American classical scholars.
The 19th century in Germany was marked by the organization of the great series of Greek and Latin inscriptions, and by the foundation of the Archaeological Institute in Rome (1829), which was at first international in its character. The Athenian Institute was founded in 1874. Schools at Athens and Rome were founded by France in 1846 and 1873, by the United States of America in 1882 and 1895, and by England in 1883 and 1901; and periodicals are published by the schools of all these four nations. An interest in Greek studies (and especially in art and archaeology) has been maintained in England by the Hellenic Society, founded in 1879, with its organ the Journal of Hellenic Studies. A further interest in Greek archaeology has been awakened in all civilized lands by the excavations of Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, Epidaurus, Sparta, Olympia, Dodona, Delphi, Delos and of important sites in Crete. The extensive discoveries of papyri in Egypt have greatly extended our knowledge of the administration of that country in the times of the Ptolemies, and have materially added to the existing remains of Greek literature. Scholars have been enabled to realize in their own experience some of the enthusiasm that attended the recovery of lost classics during the Revival of Learning. They have found themselves living in a new age of editiones principes, and have eagerly welcomed the first publication of Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens (1891), Herondas (1891) and Bacchylides (1897), as well as the Persae of Timotheus of Miletus (1903), with some of the Paeans of Pindar (1907) and large portions of the plays of Menander (1898-1899 and 1907). The first four of these were first edited by F.G. Kenyon, Timotheus by von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, Menander partly by J. Nicole and G. Lefebre and partly by B.P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt, who have also produced fragments of the Paeans of Pindar and many other classic texts (including a Greek continuation of Thucydides and a Latin epitome of part of Livy) in the successive volumes of the Oxyrhynchus papyri and other kindred publications.
Authorities.—For a full bibliography of the history of classical philology, see E. Hübner, Grundriss zu Vorlesungen über die Geschichte und Encyklopädie der klassischen Philologie (2nd ed., 1889); and for a brief outline, C.L. Urlichs in Iwan von Müller’s Handbuch, vol. i. (2nd ed., 1891). 33-145; S. Reinach, Manuel de philologie classique (2nd ed., 1883-1884; nouveau tirage 1907), 1-22; and A. Gudemann, Grundris (Leipzig, 1907), pp. 224 seq. For the Alexandrian period, F. Susemihl, Gesch. der griechischen Litteratur in der Alexandrinerzeit (2 vols., 1891-1892); cf. F.A. Eckstein, Nomenclator Philologorum (1871), and W. Pökel, Philologisches Schriftsteller-Lexikon (1882). For the period ending A.D. 400, see A. Gräfenhan, Gesch. der klass. Philologie (4 vols., 1843-1850); for the Byzantine period, C. Krumbacher in Iwan von Müller, vol. ix. (1) (2nd ed., 1897); for the Renaissance, G. Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des class. Altertums (3rd ed., 1894, with bibliography); L. Geiger, Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland (1882, with bibliography); J.A. Symonds, Revival of Learning (1877, &c.); R.C. Jebb, in Cambridge Modern History, i. (1902), 532-584; and J.E. Sandys, Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning (1905); also P. de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme (2nd ed., 1907). On the history of Greek scholarship in France, É. Egger, L’Histoire d’hellénisme en France (1869); Mark Pattison, Essays, i., and Life of Casaubon; in Germany, C. Bursian, Gesch. der class. Philologie in Deutschland (1883); in Holland, L. Müller, Gesch. der class. Philologie in den Niederlanden (1869); in Belgium, L.C. Roersch in E.P. van Bemmel’s Patria Belgica, vol. iii. (1875), 407-432; and in England, R.C. Jebb, “Erasmus” (1890) and “Bentley” (1882), and “Porson” (in Dict. Nat. Biog.). On the subject as a whole see J.E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship (with chronological tables, portraits and facsimiles), vol. i.; From the Sixth Century B.C. to the end of the Middle Ages (1903, 2nd ed., 1906); vols. ii. and iii., From the Revival of Learning to the Present Day (1908), including the history of scholarship in all the countries of Europe and in the United States of America. See also the separate biographical articles in this Encyclopaedia.
(B) The Study of the Classics in Secondary Education
After the Revival of Learning the study of the classics owed much to the influence and example of Vittorino da Feltre, Budacus, Erasmus and Melanchthon, who were among the leading representatives of that revival in Italy, France, England and Germany.
1. In England, the two great schools of Winchester (1382) and Eton (1440) had been founded during the life of Vittorino, but before the revival had reached Britain. The first school which came into being under the immediate influence of humanism was that founded at St Paul’s by Dean Colet (1510), the friend of Erasmus, whose treatise De pueris instituendis (1529) has its English counterpart in the Governor of Sir Thomas Elyot (1531). The highmaster of St Paul’s was to be “learned in good and clean Latin, and also in Greek, if such may be gotten.” The master and the second master of Shrewsbury (founded 1551) were to be “well able to make a Latin verse, and learned in the Greek tongue.” The influence of the revival extended to many other schools, such as Christ’s Hospital (1552), Westminster (1560), and Merchant Taylors’ (1561); Repton (1557), Rugby (1567) and Harrow (1571).
At the grammar school of Stratford-on-Avon, about 1571-1577, Shakespeare presumably studied Terence, Horace, Ovid and the Bucolics of Baptista Mantuanus (1502). In the early plays he quotes Ovid and Seneca. Similarly, in Titus Andronicus (iv. 2) he says, of Integer vitae: “’Tis a verse in Horace; I know it well: I read it in the grammar long ago.” In Henry VI. part ii. sc. 7, when Jack Cade charges Lord Say with having “most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school,” Lord Say replies that “ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.” In the Taming of the Shrew (I. i. 157) a line is quoted as from Terence (Andria, 74): “redime te captum quam queas minimo.” This is taken verbatim from Lilye’s contribution to the Brevis Institutio, originally composed by Colet, Erasmus and Lilye for St Paul’s School (1527), and ultimately adopted as the Eton Latin Grammar. The Westminster Greek Grammar of Grant (1575) was succeeded by that of Camden (1595), founded mainly on a Paduan text-book, and apparently adopted in 1596 by Sir Henry Savile at Eton, where it long remained in use as the Eton Greek Grammar, while at Westminster itself it was superseded by that of Busby (1663). The text-books to be used at Harrow in 1590 included Hesiod and some of the Greek orators and historians.
In one of the Paston Letters (i. 301), an Eton boy of 1468 quotes two Latin verses of his own composition. Nearly a century later, on New Year’s Day, 1560, forty-four boys of the school presented Latin verses to Queen Elizabeth. The queen’s former tutor, Roger Ascham, in his Scholemaster (1570), agrees with his Strassburg friend, J. Sturm, in making the imitation of the Latin classics the main aim of instruction. He is more original when he insists on the value of translation and retranslation for acquiring a mastery over Latin prose composition, and when he protests against compelling boys to converse in Latin too soon. Ascham’s influence is apparent in the Positions of Mulcaster, who in 1581 insists on instruction in English before admission to a grammar-school, while he is distinctly in advance of his age in urging the foundation of a special college for the training of teachers.
Cleland’s Institution of a Young Nobleman (1607) owes much to the Italian humanists. The author follows Ascham in protesting against compulsory Latin conversation, and only slightly modifies his predecessor’s method of teaching Latin prose. When Latin grammar has been mastered, he bids the teacher lead his pupil “into the sweet fountain and spring of all Arts and Science,” that is, Greek learning which is “as profitable for the understanding as the Latin tongue for speaking.” In the study of ancient history, “deeds and not words” are the prime interest. “In Plutarch pleasure is so mixed and confounded with profit; that I esteem the reading of him as a paradise for a curious spirit to walk in at all time.” Bacon in his Advancement of Learning (1605) notes it as “the first distemper of learning when men study words and not matter” (I. iv. 3); he also observes that the Jesuits “have much quickened and strengthened the state of learning” (I. vi. 15). He is on the side of reform in education; he waves the humanist aside with the words: vetustas cessit, ratio vicit. Milton, in his Tractate on Education (1644), advances further on Bacon’s lines, protesting against the length of time spent on instruction in language, denouncing merely verbal knowledge, and recommending the study of a large number of classical authors for the sake of their subject-matter, and with a view to their bearing on practical life. His ideal place of education is an institution combining a school and a university. Sir William Petty, the economist (1623-1687), urged the establishment of ergastula literaria for instruction of a purely practical kind. Locke, who had been educated at Winchester and had lectured on Greek at Oxford (1660), nevertheless almost completely eliminated Greek from the scheme which he unfolded in his Thoughts on Education (1693). With Locke, the moral and practical qualities of virtue and prudence are of the first consideration. Instruction, he declares, is but the least part of education; his aim is to train, not men of letters or men of science, but practical men armed for the battle of life. Latin was, above all, to be learned through use, with as little grammar as possible, but with the reading of easy Latin texts, and with no repetition, no composition. Greek he absolutely proscribes, reserving a knowledge of that language to the learned and the lettered, and to professional scholars.
Throughout the 18th century and the early part of the 19th, the old routine went on in England with little variety, and with no sign of expansion. The range of studies was widened, however, at Rugby in 1828-1842 by Thomas Arnold, whose interest in ancient history and geography, as a necessary part of classical learning, is attested by his edition of Thucydides; while his influence was still further extended when those who had been trained in his traditions became head masters of other schools.
During the rest of the century the leading landmarks are the three royal commissions known by the names of their chairmen: (1) Lord Clarendon’s on nine public schools, Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, St Paul’s and Merchant Taylors’ (1861-1864), resulting in the Public Schools Act of 1868; (2) Lord Taunton’s on 782 endowed schools (1864-1867), followed by the act of 1869; and (3) Mr Bryce’s on secondary education (1894-1895).
A certain discontent with the current traditions of classical training found expression in the Essays on a Liberal Education (1867). The author of the first essay, C.S. Parker, closed his review of the reforms instituted in Germany and France by adding that in England there had been but little change. The same volume included a critical examination of the “Theory of Classical Education” by Henry Sidgwick, and an attack on compulsory Greek and Latin verse composition by F.W. Farrar. The claims of verse composition have since been judiciously defended by the Hon. Edward Lyttelton (1897), while a temperate and effective restatement of the case for the classics may be found in Sir Richard Jebb’s Romanes Lecture on “Humanism in Education” (1899).
The question of the position of Greek in secondary education has from time to time attracted attention in connexion with the requirement of Greek in Responsions at Oxford, and in the Previous Examination at Cambridge.
In the Cambridge University Reporter for November 9, 1870, it was stated that, “in order to provide adequate encouragement for the study of Modern Languages and Natural Science,” the commissioners for endowed schools had determined on the establishment of modern schools of the first grade in which Greek would be excluded. The commissioners feared that, so long as Greek was a sine qua non at the universities, these schools would be cut off from direct connexion with the universities, while the universities would in some degree lose their control over a portion of the higher culture of the nation. On the 9th of March 1871 a syndicate recommended that, in the Previous Examination, French and German (taken together) should be allowed in place of Greek; on the 27th of April this recommendation (which only affected candidates for honours or for medical degrees) was rejected by 51 votes to 48.
All the other proposals and votes relating to Greek in the Previous Examination in 1870-1873, 1878-1880, and 1891-1892 are set forth in the Cambridge University Reporter for November 11, 1904, pp. 202-205. In November 1903 a syndicate was appointed to consider the studies and examinations of the university, their report of November 1904 on the Previous Examination was fully discussed, and the speeches published in the Reporter fcr December 17, 1904. In the course of the discussion Sir Richard Jebb drew attention to the statistics collected by the master of Emmanuel, Mr W. Chawner, showing that, out of 86 head masters belonging to the Head Masters’ Conference whose replies had been published, “about 56 held the opinion that the exemption from Greek for all candidates for a degree would endanger or altogether extinguish the study of Greek in the vast majority of schools, while about 21 head masters held a different opinion.” On the 3rd of March 1905 a proposal for accepting either French or German as an alternative for either Latin or Greek in the Previous Examination was rejected by 1559 to 1052 votes, and on the 26th of May 1906 proposals distinguishing between students in letters and students in science, and (inter alia) requiring the latter to take either French or German for either Latin or Greek in the Previous Examination, were rejected by 746 to 241.
Meanwhile, at Oxford a proposal practically making Greek optional with all undergraduates was rejected, in November 1902, by 189 votes to 166; a preliminary proposal permitting students of mathematics or natural science to offer one or more modern languages in lieu of Greek was passed by 164 to 162 in February 1904, but on the 29th of November the draft of a statute to this effect was thrown out by 200 to 164. In the course of the controversy three presidents of the Royal Society, Lord Kelvin, Lord Lister and Sir W. Huggins, expressed the opinion that the proposed exemption was not beneficial to science students.
Incidentally, the question of “compulsory Greek” has stimulated a desire for greater efficiency in classical teaching. In December 1903, a year before the most important of the public discussions at Cambridge, the Classical Association was founded in London. The aim of that association is “to promote the development, and maintain the well-being, of classical studies, and in particular (a) to impress upon public opinion the claim of such studies to an eminent place in the national scheme of education; (b) to improve the practice of classical teaching by free discussion of its scope and methods; (c) to encourage investigation and call attention to new discoveries; (d) to create opportunities of friendly intercourse and co-operation between all lovers of classical learning in this country.”
The question of the curriculum and the time-table in secondary education has occupied the attention of the Classical Association, the British Association and the Education Department of Scotland. The general effect of the recommendations already made would be to begin the study of foreign languages with French, and to postpone the study of Latin to the age of twelve and that of Greek to the age of thirteen. At the Head Masters’ Conference of December 1907 a proposal to lower the standard of Greek in the entrance scholarship examinations of public schools was lost by 10 votes to 16, and the “British Association report” was adopted with reservations in 1908. In the case of secondary schools in receipt of grants of public money (about 700 in England and 100 in Wales in 1907-1908), “the curriculum, and time-table must be approved by the Board of Education.” The Board has also a certain control over the curriculum of schools under the Endowed Schools Acts and the Charitable Trusts Acts, and also over that of schools voluntarily applying for inspection with a view to being recognized as efficient.
Further efficiency in classical education has been the aim of the movement in favour of the reform of Latin pronunciation. In 1871 this movement resulted in Munro and Palmer’s Syllabus of Latin Pronunciation. The reform was carried forward at University College, London, by Professor Key and by Professor Robinson Ellis in 1873, and was accepted at Shrewsbury, Marlborough, Liverpool College, Christ’s Hospital, Dulwich, and the City of London school. It was taken up anew by the Cambridge Philological Society in 1886, by the Modern Languages Association in 1901, by the Classical Association in 1904-1905, and the Philological Societies of Oxford and Cambridge in 1906. The reform was accepted by the various bodies of head masters and assistant masters in December 1906-January 1907, and the proposed scheme was formally approved by the Board of Education in February 1907.
See W.H. Woodward, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance (1906), chap. xiii.; Acland and Llewellin Smith, Studies in Secondary Education, with introduction by James Bryce (1892); Essays on a Liberal Education, ed. F.W. Farrar (1867); R.C. Jebb, “Humanism in Education,” Romanes Lecture of 1899, reprinted with other lectures on cognate subjects in Essays and Addresses (1907); Foster Watson, The Curriculum and Practice of the English Grammar Schools up to 1660 (1908); “Greek at Oxford,” by a Resident, in The Times (December 27, 1904); Cambridge University Reporter (November 11 and December 17, 1904); British Association Report on Curricula of Secondary Schools (with an independent paper by Professor Armstrong on “The Teaching of Classics”), (December 1907); W.H.D. Rouse in The Year’s Work in Classical Studies (1907 and 1908), chap. i.; J.P. Postgate, How to pronounce Latin (Appendix B, on “Recent Progress”), (1907). For further bibliographical details see pp. 875-890 of Dr Karl Breul’s “Grossbritannien” in Baumeister’s Handbuch, I. ii. 737-892 (Munich, 1897).
2. In France it was mainly with a view to promoting the study of Greek that the corporation of Royal Readers was founded by Francis I. in 1530 at the prompting of Budaeus. In the university of Paris, which was originally opposed to this innovation, the statutes of 1598 prescribed the study of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Theocritus, Plato, Demosthenes and Isocrates (as well as the principal Latin classics), and required the production of three exercises in Greek or Latin in each week.
From the middle of the 16th century the elements of Latin were generally learned from unattractive abridgments of the grammar of the Flemish scholar, van Pauteren or Despautère (d. 1520), which, in its original folio editions of 1537-1538, was an excellent work. The unhappy lot of those who were compelled to learn their Latin from the current abridgments was lamented by a Port-Royalist in a striking passage describing the gloomy forest of le pays de Despautère (Guyot, quoted in Sainte-Beuve’s Port-Royal, iii. 429). The first Latin grammar written in French was that of Père de Condren of the Oratoire (c. 1642), which was followed by the Port-Royal Méthode latine of Claude Lancelot (1644), and by the grammar composed by Bossuet for the dauphin, and also used by Fénelon for the instruction of the duc de Bourgogne. In the second half of the 17th century the rules of grammar and rhetoric were simplified, and the time withdrawn from the practice of composition (especially verse composition) transferred to the explanation and the study of authors.
Richelieu, in 1640, formed a scheme for a college in which Latin was to have a subordinate place, while room was to be found for the study of history and science, Greek, and French and modern languages. Bossuet, in educating the dauphin, added to the ordinary classical routine represented by the extensive series of the “Delphin Classics” the study of history and of science. A greater originality in the method of teaching the ancient languages was exemplified by Fénelon, whose views were partially reflected by the Abbé Fleury, who also desired the simplification of grammar, the diminution of composition, and even the suppression of Latin verse. Of the ordinary teaching of Greek in his day, Fleury wittily observed that most boys “learned just enough of that language to have a pretext for saying for the rest of their lives that Greek was a subject easily forgotten.”
In the 18th century Rollin, in his Traité des études (1726), agreed with the Port-Royalists in demanding that Latin grammars should be written in French, that the rules should be simplified and explained by a sufficient number of examples, and that a more important place should be assigned to translation than to composition. The supremacy of Latin was the subject of a long series of attacks in the same century. Even at the close of the previous century the brilliant achievements of French literature had prompted La Bruyère to declare in Des ouvrages de l’esprit (about 1680), “We have at last thrown off the yoke of Latinism”; and, in the same year, Jacques Spon claimed in his correspondence the right to use the French language in discussing points of archaeology.
Meanwhile, in 1563, notwithstanding the opposition of the university of Paris, the Jesuits had succeeded in founding the Collegium Claromontanum. After the accession of Henry IV. they were expelled from Paris and other important towns in 1594, and not allowed to return until 1609, when they found themselves confronted once more by their rival, the university of Paris. They opened the doors of their schools to the Greek and Latin classics, but they represented the ancient masterpieces dissevered from their original historic environment, as impersonal models of taste, as isolated standards of style. They did much, however, for the cultivation of original composition modelled on Cicero and Virgil. They have been charged with paying an exaggerated attention to form, and with neglecting the subject-matter of the classics. This neglect is attributed to their anxiety to avoid the “pagan” element in the ancient literature. Intensely conservative in their methods, they kept up the system of using Latin in their grammars (and in their oral instruction) long after it had been abandoned by others.
The use of French for these purposes was a characteristic of the “Little Schools” of the Jansenists of Port-Royal(1643-1660). The text-books prepared for them by Lancelot included not only the above-mentioned Latin grammar (1644) but also the Méthode grecque of 1655 and the Jardin des racines grecques (1657), which remained in use for two centuries and largely superseded the grammar of Clenardus (1636) and the Tirocinium of Père Labbe (1648). Greek began to decline in the university about 1650, at the very time when the Port-Royalists were aiming at its revival. During the brief existence of their schools their most celebrated pupils were Tillemont and Racine.
The Jesuits, on the other hand, claimed Corneille and Molière, as well as Descartes and Bossuet, Fontenelle, Montesquieu and Voltaire. Of their Latin poets the best-known were Denis Petau (d. 1652), René Rapin (d. 1687) and N.E. Sanadon (d. 1733). In 1762 the Jesuits were suppressed, and more than one hundred schools were thus deprived of their teachers. The university of Paris, which had prompted their suppression, and the parliament, which had carried it into effect, made every endeavour to replace them. The university took possession of the Collegium Claromontanum, then known as the Collège Louis-le-Grand, and transformed it into an école normale. Many of the Jesuit schools were transferred to the congregations of the Oratoire and the Benedictines, and to the secular clergy. On the eve of the Revolution, out of a grand total of 562 classical schools, 384 were in the hands of the clergy and 178 in those of the congregations.
The expulsion of the Jesuits gave a new impulse to the attacks directed against all schemes of education in which Latin held a prominent position. At the moment when the university of Paris was, by the absence of its rivals, placed in complete control of the education of France, she found herself driven to defend the principles of classical education against a crowd of assailants. All kinds of devices were suggested for expediting the acquisition of Latin; grammar was to be set aside; Latin was to be learned as a “living language”; much attention was to be devoted to acquiring an extensive vocabulary; and, “to save time,” composition was to be abolished. To facilitate the reading of Latin texts, the favourite method was the use of interlinear translations, originally proposed by Locke, first popularized in France by Dumarsais (1722), and in constant vogue down to the time of the Revolution.
Early in the 18th century Rollin pleaded for the “utility of Greek,” while he described that language as the heritage of the university of Paris. In 1753 Berthier feared that in thirty years no one would be able to read Greek. In 1768 Rolland declared that the university, which held Greek in high honour, nevertheless had reason to lament that her students learnt little of the language, and he traced this decline to the fact that attendance at lectures had ceased to be compulsory. Greek, however, was still recognized as part of the examination held for the appointment of schoolmasters.
During the 18th century, in Greek as well as in Latin, the general aim was to reach the goal as rapidly as possible, even at the risk of missing it altogether. On the eve of the Revolution, France was enjoying the study of the institutions of Greece in the attractive pages of the Voyage du jeune Anacharsis (1789), but the study of Greek was menaced even more than that of Latin. For fifty years before the Revolution there was a distinct dissatisfaction with the routine of the schools. To meet that dissatisfaction, the teachers had accepted new subjects of study, had improved their methods, and had simplified the learning of the dead languages. But even this was not enough. In the study of the classics, as in other spheres, it was revolution rather than evolution that was loudly demanded.
The Revolution was soon followed by the long-continued battle of the “Programmes.” Under the First Republic the schemes of Condorcet (April 1792) and J. Lakanal (February 1795) were superseded by that of P.C.F. Daunou (October 1795), which divided the pupils of the “central schools” into three groups, according to age, with corresponding subjects of study: (1) twelve to fourteen,—drawing, natural history, Greek and Latin, and a choice of modern languages; (2) fourteen to sixteen,—mathematics, physics, chemistry; (3) over sixteen,—general grammar, literature, history and constitutional law..
In July 1801, under the consulate, there were two courses, (1) nine to twelve,—elementary knowledge, including elements of Latin; (2) above twelve,—a higher course, with two alternatives, “humanistic” studies for the “civil,” and purely practical studies for the “military” section. The law of the 1st of May 1802 brought the lycées into existence, the subjects being, in Napoleon’s own phrase, “mainly Latin and mathematics.”
At the Restoration (1814) the military discipline of the lycées was replaced by the ecclesiastical discipline of the “Royal Colleges.” The reaction of 1815-1821 in favour of classics was followed by the more liberal programme of Vatimesnil (1829), including, for those who had no taste for a classical education, certain “special courses” (1830), which were the germ of the enseignement spécial and the enseignement moderne.
Under Louis Philippe (1830-1848), amid all varieties of administration there was a consistent desire to hold the balance fairly between all the conflicting subjects of study. After the revolution of 1848 the difficulties raised by the excessive number of subjects were solved by H.N.H. Fortoul’s expedient of “bifurcation,” the alternatives being letters and science. In 1863, under Napoleon III., Victor Duruy encouraged the study of history, and also did much for classical learning by founding the École des Hautes Études. In 1872, under the Third Republic, Jules Simon found time for hygiene, geography and modern languages by abolishing Latin verse composition and reducing the number of exercises in Latin prose, while he insisted on the importance of studying the inner meaning of the ancient classics. The same principles were carried out by Jules Ferry (1880) and Paul Bert (1881-1882). In the scheme of 1890 the Latin course of six years began with ten hours a week and ended with four; Greek was begun a year later with two hours, increasing to six and ending with four.
The commission of 1899, under the able chairmanship of M. Alexandre Ribot, published an important report, which was followed in 1902 by the scheme of M. Georges Leygues. The preamble includes a striking tribute to the advantages that France had derived from the study of the classics:—
“L’étude de l’antiquité grecque et latine a donné au génie français une mesure, une clarté et une élégance incomparables. C’est par elle que notre philosophie, nos lettres et nos arts ont brillé d’un si vif éclat; c’est par elle que notre influence morale s’est exercée en souveraine dans le monde. Les humanités doivent être protégées contre toute atteinte et fortifiées. Elles font partie du patrimoine national.
“L’esprit classique n’est pas ... incompatible avec l’esprit moderne. Il est de tous les temps, parce qu’il est le culte de la raison claire et libre, la recherche de la beauté harmonieuse et simple dans toutes les manifestations de la pensée.”
By the scheme introduced in these memorable terms the course of seven years is divided into two cycles, the first cycle (of four years) having two parallel courses: (1) without Greek or Latin, and (2) with Latin, and with optional Greek at the beginning of the third year. In the second cycle (of three years) those who have been learning both Greek and Latin, and those who have been learning neither, continue on the same lines as before; while those who have been learning Latin only may either (1) discontinue it in favour of modern languages and science, or (2) continue it with either. As an alternative to the second cycle, which normally ends in the examination for the baccalauréat, there is a shorter course, mainly founded on modern languages or applied science and ending in a public examination without the baccalauréat. The baccalauréat, however, has been condemned by the next minister, M. Briand, who prefers to crown the course with the award of a school diploma (1907).
See H. Lantoine, Histoire de l’enseignement secondaire en France au XVIIe siècle (1874); A. Sicard, Les Études classiques avant la Révolution (1887); Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, vols. i.-v. (1840-1859), especially iii. 383-588; O. Gréard, Education et instruction, 4 vols., especially “Enseignement secondaire,” vol. ii. pp. 1-90, with conspectus of programmes in the appendix (1889); A. Ribot, La Réforme de l’enseignement secondaire (1900); G. Leygues, Plan d’études, &c. (1902); H.H. Johnson, “Present State of Classical Studies in France,” in Classical Review (December 1907). See also the English Education Department’s Special Reports on Education in France (1899). The earlier literature is best represented in England by Matthew Arnold’s Schools and Universities in France (1868; new edition, 1892) and A French Eton (1864).
3. The history of education in Germany since 1500 falls into three periods: (a) the age of the Revival of Learning and the Reformation (1500-1650), (b) the age of French influence (1650-1800), and (c) the 19th century.
(a) During the first twenty years of the 16th century the reform of Latin instruction was carried out by setting aside the old medieval grammars, by introducing new manuals of classical literature, and by prescribing the study of classical authors and the imitation of classical models. In all these points the lead was first taken by south Germany, and by the towns along the Rhine down to the Netherlands. The old schools and universities were being quietly interpenetrated by the new spirit of humanism, when the sky was suddenly darkened by the clouds of religious conflict. In 1525-1535 there was a marked depression in the classical studies of Germany. Erasmus, writing to W. Pirckheimer in 1528, exclaims: “Wherever the spirit of Luther prevails, learning goes to the ground.” Such a fate was, however, averted by the intervention of Melanchthon (d. 1560), the praeceptor Germaniae, who was the embodiment of the spirit of the new Protestant type of education, with its union of evangelical doctrine and humanistic culture. Under his influence, new schools rapidly rose into being at Magdeburg, Eisleben and Nuremberg (1521-1526). During more than forty years of academic activity he not only provided manuals of Latin and Greek grammar and many other text-books that long remained in use, but he also formed for Germany a well-trained class of learned teachers, who extended his influence throughout the land. His principal ally as an educator and as a writer of text-books was Camerarius (d. 1574). Precepts of style, and models taken from the best Latin authors, were the means whereby a remarkable skill in the imitation of Cicero was attained at Strassburg during the forty-four years of the headmastership of Johannes von Sturm (d. 1589), who had himself been influenced by the De disciplinis of J.L. Vivès (1531), and in all his teaching aimed at the formation of a sapiens atque eloquens pietas. Latin continued to be the living language of learning and of literature, and a correct and elegant Latin style was regarded as the mark of an educated person. Greek was taught in all the great schools, but became more and more confined to the study of the Greek Testament. In 1550 it was proposed in Brunswick to banish all “profane” authors from the schools, and in 1589 a competent scholar was instructed to write a sacred epic on the kings of Israel as a substitute for the works of the “pagan” poets. In 1637, when the doubts of Scaliger and Heinsius as to the purity of the Greek of the New Testament prompted the rector of Hamburg to introduce the study of classical authors, any reflection on the style of the Greek Testament was bitterly resented.
The Society of Jesus was founded in 1540, and by 1600 most of the teachers in the Catholic schools and universities of Germany were Jesuits. The society was “dissolved” in 1773, but survived its dissolution. In accordance with the Ratio Studiorum of Aquaviva (1599), which long remained unaltered and was only partially revised by J. Roothaan (1832), the main subjects of instruction were the litterae humaniores diversarum linguarum. The chief place among these was naturally assigned to Latin, the language of the society and of the Roman Church. The Latin grammar in use was that of the Jesuit rector of the school at Lisbon, Alvarez (1572). As in the Protestant schools, the principal aim was the attainment of eloquentia. A comparatively subordinate place was assigned to Greek, especially as the importance attributed to the Vulgate weakened the motive for studying the original text. It was recognized, however, that Latin itself (as Vivès had said) was “in no small need of Greek,” and that, “unless Greek was learnt in boyhood, it would hardly ever be learnt at all.” The text-book used was the Institutiones linguae Graecae of the German Jesuit, Jacob Gretser, of Ingolstadt (c. 1590), and the reading in the highest class included portions of Demosthenes, Isocrates, Plato, Thucydides, Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil and Chrysostom. The Catholic and Protestant schools of the 16th century succeeded, as a rule, in giving a command over a correct Latin style and a taste for literary form and for culture. Latin was still the language of the law-courts and of a large part of general literature. Between Luther and Lessing there was no great writer of German prose.
(b) In the early part of the period 1650-1800, while Latin continued to hold the foremost place, it was ceasing to be Latin of the strictly classical type. Greek fell still further into the background; and Homer and Demosthenes gradually gave way to the Greek Testament. Between 1600 and 1775 there was a great gap in the production of new editions of the principal Greek classics. The spell was only partially broken by J.A. Ernesti’s Homer (1759 f.) and Chr. G. Heyne’s Pindar (1773 f.).
The peace of Westphalia (1648) marks a distinct epoch in the history of education in Germany. Thenceforth, education became more modern and more secular. The long wars of religion in Germany, as in France and England, were followed by a certain indifference as to disputed points of theology. But the modern and secular type of education that now supervened was opposed by the pietism of the second half of the 17th century, represented at the newly-founded university of Halle (1694) by A.H. Francke, the professor of Greek (d. 1727), whose influence was far greater than that of Chr. Cellarius (d. 1707), the founder of the first philological Seminar (1697). Francke’s contemporary, Chr. Thomasius (d. 1728), was never weary of attacking scholarship of the old humanistic type and everything that savoured of antiquarian pedantry, and it was mainly his influence that made German the language of university lectures and of scientific and learned literature. A modern education is also the aim of the general introduction to the nova methodus of Leibnitz, where the study of Greek is recommended solely for the sake of the Greek Testament (1666). Meanwhile, Ratichius (d. 1635) had in vain pretended to teach Hebrew, Greek and Latin in the space of six months (1612), but he had the merit of maintaining that the study of a language should begin with the study of an author. Comenius (d. 1671) had proposed to teach Latin by drilling his pupils in a thousand graduated phrases distributed over a hundred instructive chapters, while the Latin authors were banished because of their difficulty and their “paganism” (1631). One of the catchwords of the day was to insist on a knowledge of things instead of a knowledge of words, on “realism” instead of “verbalism.”
Under the influence of France the perfect courtier became the ideal in the German education of the upper classes of the 17th and 18th centuries. A large number of aristocratic schools (Ritter-Akademien) were founded, beginning with the Collegium Illustre of Tübingen (1589) and ending with the Hohe Karlschule of Stuttgart (1775). In these schools the subjects of study included mathematics and natural sciences, geography and history, and modern languages (especially French), with riding, fencing and dancing; Latin assumed a subordinate place, and classical composition in prose or verse was not considered a sufficiently courtly accomplishment. The youthful aristocracy were thus withdrawn from the old Latin schools of Germany, but the aristocratic schools vanished with the dawn of the 19th century, and the ordinary public schools were once more frequented by the young nobility.
(c) The Modern Period.—In the last third of the 18th century two important movements came into play, the “naturalism” of Rousseau and the “new humanism.” While Rousseau sought his ideal in a form of education and of culture that was in close accord with nature, the German apostles of the new humanism were convinced that they had found that ideal completely realized in the old Greek world. Hence the aim of education was to make young people thoroughly “Greek,” to fill them with the “Greek” spirit, with courage and keenness in the quest of truth, and with a devotion to all that was beautiful. The link between the naturalism of Rousseau and the new humanism is to be found in J.G. Herder, whose passion for all that is Greek inspires him with almost a hatred of Latin. The new humanism was a kind of revival of the Renaissance, which had been retarded by the Reformation in Germany and by the Counter-Reformation in Italy, or had at least been degraded to the dull classicism of the schools. The new humanism agreed with the Renaissance in its unreserved recognition of the old classical world as a perfect pattern of culture. But, while the Renaissance aimed at reproducing the Augustan age of Rome, the new humanism found its golden age in Athens. The Latin Renaissance in Italy aimed at recovering and verbally imitating the ancient literature; the Greek Renaissance in Germany sought inspiration from the creative originality of Greek literature with a view to producing an original literature in the German language. The movement had its effect on the schools by discouraging the old classical routine of verbal imitation, and giving a new prominence to Greek and to German. The new humanism found a home in Göttingen (1783) in the days of J.M. Gesner and C.G. Heyne. It was represented at Leipzig by Gesner’s successor, Ernesti (d. 1781); and at Halle by F.A. Wolf, who in 1783 was appointed professor of education by Zedlitz, the minister of Frederick the Great. In literature, its leading names were Winckelmann, Lessing and Voss, and Herder, Goethe and Schiller. The tide of the new movement had reached its height about 1800. Goethe and Schiller were convinced that the old Greek world was the highest revelation of humanity; and the universities and schools of Germany were reorganized in this spirit by F.A. Wolf and his illustrious pupil, Wilhelm von Humboldt. In 1809-1810 Humboldt was at the head of the educational section of the Prussian Home Office, and, in the brief interval of a year and a half, gave to the general system of education the direction which it followed (with slight exceptions) throughout the whole century. In 1810 the examen pro facultate docendi first made the profession of a schoolmaster independent of that of a minister of religion. The new scheme drawn up by J.W. Süvern recognized four principal co-ordinated branches of learning: Latin, Greek, German, mathematics. All four were studied throughout the school, Greek being begun in the fourth of the nine classes, that corresponding to the English “third form.” The old Latin school had only one main subject, the study of Latin style (combined with a modicum of Greek). The new gymnasium aimed at a wider education, in which literature was represented by Latin, Greek and German, by the side of mathematics and natural science, history and religion. The uniform employment of the term Gymnasium for the highest type of a Prussian school dates from 1812. The leaving examination (Abgangsprüfung), instituted in that year, required Greek translation at sight, with Greek prose composition, and ability to speak and to write Latin. In 1818-1840 the leading spirit on the board of education was Johannes Schulze, and a complete and comprehensive system of education continued to be the ideal kept in view. Such an education, however, was found in practice to involve a prolongation of the years spent at school and a correspondingly later start in life. It was also attacked on the ground that it led to “overwork.” This attack was partially met by the scheme of 1837. Schulze’s period of prominence in Berlin closely corresponded to that of Herbart at Königsberg (1809-1833) and Göttingen (1833-1841), who insisted that for boys of eight to twelve there was no better text-book than the Greek Odyssey, and this principle was brought into practice at Hanover by his distinguished pupil, Ahrens.
The Prussian policy of the next period, beginning with the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. in 1840, was to lay a new stress on religious teaching, and to obviate the risk of overwork resulting from the simultaneous study of all subjects by the encouragement of specialization in a few. Ludwig Wiese’s scheme of 1856 insisted on the retention of Latin verse as well as Latin prose, and showed less favour to natural science, but it awakened little enthusiasm, while the attempt to revive the old humanistic Gymnasium led to a demand for schools of a more modern type, which issued in the recognition of the Realgymnasium (1859).
In the age of Bismarck, school policy in Prussia had for its aim an increasing recognition of modern requirements. In 1875 Wiese was succeeded by Bonitz, the eminent Aristotelian scholar, who in 1849 had introduced mathematics and natural science into the schools of Austria, and had substituted the wide reading of classical authors for the prevalent practice of speaking and writing Latin. By his scheme of 1882 natural science recovered its former position in Prussia, and the hours assigned in each week to Latin were diminished from 86 to 77. But neither of the two great parties in the educational world was satisfied; and great expectations were aroused when the question of reform was taken up by the German emperor, William II., in 1890. The result of the conference of December 1890 was a compromise between the conservatism of a majority of its members and the forward policy of the emperor. The scheme of 1892 reduced the number of hours assigned to Latin from 77 to 62, and laid special stress on the German essay; but the modern training given by the Realgymnasium was still unrecognized as an avenue to a university education. A conference held in June 1900, in which the speakers included Mommsen and von Wilamowitz, Harnack and Diels, was followed by the “Kiel Decree” of the 26th of November. In that decree the emperor urged the equal recognition of the classical and the modern Gymnasium, and emphasized the importance of giving more time to Latin and to English in both. In the teaching of Greek, “useless details” were to be set aside, and special care devoted to the connexion between ancient and modern culture, while, in all subjects, attention was to be paid to the classic precept: multum, non multa.
By the scheme of 1901 the pupils of the Realgymnasium, the Oberrealschule and the Gymnasium were admitted to the university on equal terms in virtue of their leaving-certificates, but Greek and Latin were still required for students of classics or divinity.
For the Gymnasium the aim of the new scheme is, in Latin, “to supply boys with a sound basis of grammatical training, with a view to their understanding the more important classical writers of Rome, and being thus introduced to the intellectual life and culture of the ancient world”; and, in Greek, “to give them a sufficient knowledge of the language with a view to their obtaining an acquaintance with some of the Greek classical works which are distinguished both in matter and in style, and thus gaining an insight into the intellectual life and culture of Ancient Greece.” In consequence of these changes Greek is now studied by a smaller number of boys, but with better results, and a new lease of life has been won for the classical Gymnasium.
Lastly, by the side of the classical Gymnasium, we now have the “German Reform Schools” of two different types, that of Altona (dating from 1878) and that of Frankfort-on-the-Main (1892). The leading principle in both is the postponement of the time for learning Latin. Schools of the Frankfort type take French as their only foreign language in the first three years of the course, and aim at achieving in six years as much as has been achieved by the Gymnasia in nine; and it is maintained that, in six years, they succeed in mastering a larger amount of Latin literature than was attempted a generation ago, even in the best Gymnasia of the old style. It may be added that in all the German Gymnasia, whether reformed or not, more time is given to classics than in the corresponding schools in England.
See F. Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts vom Ausgang des Mittelalters bis auf die Gegenwart mit besonderer Rücksicht auf den klassischen Unterricht (2 vols., 2nd ed., 1896); Das Realgymnasium und die humanistische Bildung (1889); Die höheren Schulen und das Universitätsstudium im 20. Jahrhundert (1901); “Das moderne Bildungswesen” in Die Kulture der Gegenwart, vol. i. (1904); Das deutsche Bildungswesen in seiner geschichtlichen Entwickelung (1906) (with the literature there quoted, pp. 190-192), translated by Dr T. Lorenz, German Education, Past and Present (1908); T. Ziegler, Notwendigkeit ... des Realgymnasiums (Stuttgart, 1894); F.A. Eckstein, Lateinischer und griechischer Unterricht (1887); O. Kohl, “Griechischer Unterricht” (Langensalza, 1896) in W. Rein’s Handbuch; A. Baumeister’s Handbuch (1895), especially vol. i. 1 (History) and i. 2 (Educational Systems); P. Stötzner, Das öffentliche Unterrichtswesen Deutschlands in der Gegenwart (1901); F. Seiler, Geschichte des deutschen Unterrichtswesens (2 vols., 1906); Verhandlungen of June 1900 (2nd ed., 1902); Lehrpläne, &c. (1901); Die Reform des höheren Schulwesens, ed. W. Lexis (1902); A. Harnack’s Vortrag and W. Parow’s Erwiderung (1905); H. Müller, Das höhere Schulwesen Deutschlands am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1904); O. Steinbart, Durchführung des preussischen Schulreform in ganz Deutschland (Duisburg, 1904); J. Schipper, Alte Bildung und moderne Cultur (Vienna, 1901); Papers by M.E. Sadler: (1) “Problems in Prussian Secondary Education” (Special Reports of Education Dept., 1899); (2) “The Unrest in Secondary Education in Germany and Elsewhere” (Special Reports of Board of Education, vol. 9, 1902); J.L. Paton, The Teaching of Classics in Prussian Secondary Schools (on “German Reform Schools”) (1907, Wyman, London); J.E. Russell, German Higher Schools (New York, 1899); and (among earlier English publications) Matthew Arnold’s Higher Schools and Universities in Germany (1874, reprinted from Schools and Universities on the Continent, 1865).
(4) In the United States of America the highest degree of educational development has been subsequent to the Civil War. The study of Latin begins in the “high schools,” the average age of admission being fifteen and the normal course extending over four years. Among classical teachers an increasing number would prefer a longer course extending over six years for Latin, and at least three for Greek, and some of these would assign to the elementary school the first two of the proposed six years of Latin study. Others are content with the late learning of Latin and prefer that it should be preceded by a thorough study of modern languages (see Prof. B.I. Wheeler, in Baumeister’s Handbuch, 1897, ii. 2, pp. 584-586).
It was mainly owing to a pamphlet issued in 1871 by Prof. G.M. Lane, of Harvard, that a reformed pronunciation of Latin was adopted in all the colleges and schools of the United States. Some misgivings on this reform found expression in a work on the Teaching of Latin, published by Prof. C.E. Bennett of Cornell in 1901, a year in which it was estimated that this pronunciation was in use by more than 96% of the Latin pupils in the secondary schools.
Some important statistics as to the number studying Latin and Greek in the secondary schools were collected in 1900 by a committee of twelve educational experts representing all parts of the Union, with a view to a uniform course of instruction being pursued in all classical schools. They had the advantage of the co-operation of Dr W.T. Harris, the U.S. commissioner of education, and they were able to report that, in all the five groups into which they had divided the states, the number of pupils pursuing the study of Latin and Greek showed a remarkable advance, especially in the most progressive states of the middle west. The number learning Latin had increased from 100,144 in 1890 to 314,856 in 1899-1900, and those learning Greek from 12,869 to 24,869. Thus the number learning Latin at the later date was three times, and the number learning Greek twice, as many as those learning Latin or Greek ten years previously. But the total number in 1000 was 630,048; so that, notwithstanding this proof of progress, the number learning Greek in 1900 was only about one twenty-fifth of the total number, while the number learning Latin was as high as half.
The position of Greek as an “elective” or “optional” subject (notably at Harvard), an arrangement regarded with approval by some eminent educational authorities and with regret by others, probably has some effect on the high schools in the small number of those who learn Greek, and in their lower rate of increase, as compared with those who learn Latin. Some evidence as to the quality of the study of those languages in the schools is supplied by English commissioners in the Reports of the Mosely Commission. Thus Mr Papillon considered that, while the teaching of English literature was admirable, the average standard of Latin and Greek teaching and attainment in the upper classes was “below that of an English public school”; he felt, however, that the secondary schools of the United States had a “greater variety of the curriculum to suit the practical needs of life,” and that they existed, not “for the select few,” but “for the whole people” (pp. 250 f.).
For full information see the “Two volumes of Monographs prepared for the United States Educational Exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900,” edited by Dr N. Murray Butler; the Annual Reports of the U.S. commissioner of education (Washington); and the Reports of the Mosely Commission to the United States of America (London, 1904). Cf. statistics quoted in G.G. Ramsay’s “Address on Efficiency in Education” (Glasgow, 1902, 17-20), from the Transactions of the Amer. Philol. Association, xxx. (1899), pp. lxxvii-cxxii; also Bennett and Bristol, The Teaching of Latin and Greek in the Secondary School (New York, 1901).
(J. E. S.*)
The above derivation is in accordance with English usage. In the New English Dictionary the earliest example of the word “classical” is the phrase “classical and canonical,” found in the Europae Speculum of Sir Edwin Sandys (1599), and, as applied to a writer, it is explained as meaning “of the first rank or authority.” This exactly corresponds with the meaning of classicus in the above passage of Gellius. On the other hand, the French word classique (in Littré’s view) primarily means “used in class.”
See also the article Schools.
CLASSIFICATION (Lat. classis, a class, probably from the root cal-, cla-, as in Gr. καλέω, clamor), a logical process, common to all the special sciences and to knowledge in general, consisting in the collection under a common name of a number of objects which are alike in one or more respects. The process consists in observing the objects and abstracting from their various qualities that characteristic which they have in common. This characteristic constitutes the definition of the “class” to which they are regarded as belonging. It is this process by which we arrive first at “species” and then at “genus,” i.e. at all scientific generalization. Individual things, regarded as such, constitute a mere aggregate, unconnected with one another, and so far unexplained; scientific knowledge consists in systematic classification. Thus if we observe the heavenly bodies individually we can state merely that they have been observed to have certain motions through the sky, that they are luminous, and the like. If, however, we compare them one with another, we discover that, whereas all partake in the general movement of the heavens, some have a movement of their own. Thus we arrive at a system of classification according to motion, by which fixed stars are differentiated from planets. A further classification according to other criteria gives us stars of the first magnitude and stars of the second magnitude, and so forth. We thus arrive at a systematic understanding expressed in laws by the application of which accurate forecasts of celestial phenomena can be made. Classification in the strict logical sense consists in discovering the casual interrelation of natural objects; it thus differs from what is often called “artificial” classification, which is the preparation, e.g. of statistics for particular purposes, administrative and the like.
Of the systems of classification adopted in physical science, only one requires treatment here, namely, the classification of the sciences as a whole, a problem which has from the time of Aristotle attracted considerable attention. Its object is to delimit the spheres of influence of the positive sciences and show how they are mutually related. Of such attempts three are specially noteworthy, those of Francis Bacon, Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer.
Bacon’s classification is based on the subjective criterion of the various faculties which are specially concerned. He thus distinguished History (natural, civil, literary, ecclesiastical) as the province of memory, Philosophy (including Theology) as that of reason, and Poetry, Fables and the like, as that of imagination. This classification was made the basis of the Encyclopédie. Comte adopted an entirely different system based on an objective criterion. Having first enunciated the theory that all science passes through three stages, theological, metaphysical and positive, he neglects the two first, and divides the last according to the “things to be classified,” in view of their real affinity and natural connexions, into six, in order of decreasing generality and increasing complexity—mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, physiology and biology (including psychology), and sociology. This he conceives to be not only the logical, but also the historical, order of development, from the abstract and purely deductive to the concrete and inductive. Sociology is thus the highest, most complex, and most positive of the sciences. Herbert Spencer, condemning this division as both incomplete and theoretically unsound, adopted a three-fold division into (1) abstract science (including logic and mathematics) dealing with the universal forms under which all knowledge of phenomena is possible, (2) abstract-concrete science (including mechanics, chemistry, physics), dealing with the elements of phenomena themselves, i.e. laws of forces as deducible from the persistence of forces, and (3) concrete science (e.g. astronomy, biology, sociology), dealing with “phenomena themselves in their totalities,” the universal laws of the continuous redistribution of Matter and Motion, Evolution and Dissolution.
Beside the above three systems several others deserve brief mention. In Greece at the dawn of systematic thought the physical sciences were few in number; none the less philosophers were not agreed as to their true relation. The Platonic school adopted a triple classification, physics, ethics and dialectics; Aristotle’s system was more complicated, nor do we know precisely how he subdivided his three main classes, theoretical, practical and poetical (i.e. technical, having to do with ποίησις, creative). The second class covered ethics and politics, the latter of which was often regarded by Aristotle as including ethics; the third includes the useful and the imitative sciences; the first includes metaphysics and physics. As regards pure logic Aristotle sometimes seems to include it with metaphysics and physics, sometimes to regard it as ancillary to all the sciences.
Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) drew up an elaborate paradigm of the sciences, the first stage of which was a dichotomy into “Naturall Philosophy” (“consequences from the accidents of bodies naturall”) and “Politiques and Civill Philosophy” (“consequences from accidents of Politique bodies”). The former by successive subdivisions is reduced to eighteen special sciences; the latter is subdivided into the rights and duties of sovereign powers, and those of the subject.
Jeremy Bentham and A.M. Ampère both drew up elaborate systems based on the principle of dichotomy, and beginning from the distinction of mind and body. Bentham invented an artificial terminology which is rather curious than valuable. The science of the body was Somatology, that of the mind Pneumatology. The former include Posology (science of quantity, mathematics) and Poiology (science of quality); Posology includes Morphoscopic (geometry) and Alegomorphic(arithmetic). See further Bentham’s Chrestomathia and works quoted under Bentham, Jeremy.
Carl Wundt criticized most of these systems as taking too little account of the real facts, and preferred a classification based on the standpoint of the various sciences towards their subject-matter. His system may, therefore, be described as conceptional. It distinguishes philosophy, which deals with facts in their widest universal relations, from the special sciences, which consider facts in the light of a particular relation or set of relations.
All these systems have a certain value, and are interesting as throwing light on the views of those who invented them. It will be seen, however, that none can lay claim to unique validity. The fundamenta divisionis, though in themselves more or less logical, are quite arbitrarily chosen, generally as being germane to a preconceived philosophical or scientific theory.
CLASTIDIUM (mod. Casteggio), a village of the Anamares, in Gallia Cispadana, on the Via Postumia, 5 m. E. of Iria (mod. Voghera) and 31 m. W. of Placentia. Here in 222 B.C. M. Claudius Marcellus defeated the Gauls and won the spolia opima; in 218 Hannibal took it and its stores of corn by treachery. It never had an independent government, and not later than 190 B.C. was made part of the colony of Placentia (founded 219). In the Augustan division of Italy, however, Placentia belonged to the 8th region, Aemilia, whereas Iria certainly, and Clastidium possibly, belonged to the 9th, Liguria (see Th. Mommsen in Corp. Inscrip. Lat. vol. v. Berlin, 1877, p. 828). The remains visible at Clastidium are scanty; there is a fountain (the Fontana d’Annibale), and a Roman bridge, which seems to have been constructed of tiles, not of stone, was discovered in 1857, but destroyed.
See C. Giulietti, Casteggio, notizie storiche II. Avanzi di antichità (Voghera, 1893).
CLAUBERG, JOHANN (1622-1665), German philosopher, was born at Solingen, in Westphalia, on the 24th of February 1622. After travelling in France and England, he studied the Cartesian philosophy under John Raey at Leiden. He became (1649) professor of philosophy and theology at Herborn, but subsequently (1651), in consequence of the jealousy of his colleagues, accepted an invitation to a similar post at Duisburg, where he died on the 31st of January 1665. Clauberg was one of the earliest teachers of the new doctrines in Germany and an exact and methodical commentator on his master’s writings. His theory of the connexion between the soul and the body is in some respects analogous to that of Malebranche; but he is not therefore to be regarded as a true forerunner of Occasionalism, as he uses “Occasion” for the stimulus which directly produces a mental phenomenon, without postulating the intervention of God (H. Müller, J. Clauberg und seine Stellung im Cartesianismus). His view of the relation of God to his creatures is held to foreshadow the pantheism of Spinoza. All creatures exist only through the continuous creative energy of the Divine Being, and are no more independent of his will than are our thoughts independent of us,—or rather less, for there are thoughts which force themselves upon us whether we will or not. For metaphysics Clauberg suggested the names ontosophy or ontology, the latter being afterwards adopted by Wolff. He also devoted considerable attention to the German languages, and his researches in this direction attracted the favourable notice of Leibnitz. His chief works are: De conjunctione animae et corporis humani; Exercitationes centum de cognitione Dei et nostri; Logica vetus et nova; Initiatio philosophi, seu Dubitatio Cartesiana; a commentary on Descartes’ Meditations; and Ars etymologica Teutonum.
A collected edition of his philosophical works was published at Amsterdam (1691), with life by H.C. Hennin; see also E. Zeller, Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibnitz (1873).
CLAUDE, JEAN (1619-1687), French Protestant divine, was born at La Sauvetat-du-Dropt near Agen. After studying at Montauban, he entered the ministry in 1645. He was for eight years professor of theology in the Protestant college of Nîmes; but in 1661, having successfully opposed a scheme for re-uniting Catholics and Protestants, he was forbidden to preach in Lower Languedoc. In 1662 he obtained a post at Montauban similar to that which he had lost; but after four years he was removed from this also. He next became pastor at Charenton near Paris, where he engaged in controversies with Pierre Nicole (Réponse aux deux traités intitulés la perpétuité de la foi, 1665), Antoine Arnauld (Réponse au livre de M. Arnauld, 1670), and J.B. Bossuet (Réponse au livre de M. l’évêque de Meaux, 1683). On the revocation of the edict of Nantes he fled to Holland, and received a pension from William of Orange, who commissioned him to write an account of the persecuted Huguenots (Plaintes des protestants cruellement opprimés dans le royaume de France, 1686). The book was translated into English, but by order of James II, both the translation and the original were publicly burnt by the common hangman on the 5th of May 1686, as containing “expressions scandalous to His Majesty the king of France.” Other works by him were Réponse au livre de P. Nouet sur l’eucharistie (1668); Œuvres posthumes (Amsterdam, 1688), containing the Traité de la composition d’un sermon, translated into English in 1778.
See biographies by J.P. Nicéron and Abel Rotholf de la Devèze; E. Haag, La France protestante, vol. iv. (1884, new edition).
CLAUDE OF LORRAINE, or Claude Gelée (1600-1682), French landscape-painter, was born of very poor parents at the village of Chamagne in Lorraine. When it was discovered that he made no progress at school, he was apprenticed, it is commonly said, to a pastry-cook, but this is extremely dubious. At the age of twelve, being left an orphan, he went to live at Freiburg on the Rhine with an elder brother, Jean Gelée, a wood-carver of moderate merit, and under him he designed arabesques and foliage. He afterwards rambled to Rome to seek a livelihood; but from his clownishness and ignorance of the language, he failed to obtain permanent employment. He next went to Naples, to study landscape painting under Godfrey Waals, a painter of much repute. With him he remained two years; then he returned to Rome, and was domesticated until April 1625 with another landscape-painter, Augustin Tassi, who hired him to grind his colours and to do all the household drudgery.
His master, hoping to make Claude serviceable in some of his greatest works, advanced him in the rules of perspective and the elements of design. Under his tuition the mind of Claude began to expand, and he devoted himself to artistic study with great eagerness. He exerted his utmost industry to explore the true principles of painting by an incessant examination of nature; and for this purpose he made his studies in the open fields, where he very frequently remained from sunrise till sunset, watching the effect of the shifting light upon the landscape. He generally sketched whatever he thought beautiful or striking, marking every tinge of light with a similar colour; from these sketches he perfected his landscapes. Leaving Tassi, he made a tour in Italy, France and a part of Germany, including his native Lorraine, suffering numerous misadventures by the way. Karl Dervent, painter to the duke of Lorraine, kept him as assistant for a year; and he painted at Nancy the architectural subjects on the ceiling of the Carmelite church. He did not, however, relish this employment, and in 1627 returned to Rome. Here, painting two landscapes for Cardinal Bentivoglio, he earned the protection of Pope Urban VIII, and from about 1637 he rapidly rose into celebrity. Claude was acquainted not only with the facts, but also with the laws of nature; and the German painter Joachim von Sandrart relates that he used to explain, as they walked together through the fields, the causes of the different appearances of the same landscape at different hours of the day, from the reflections or refractions of light, or from the morning and evening dews or vapours, with all the precision of a natural philosopher. He elaborated his pictures with great care; and if any performance fell short of his ideal, he altered, erased and repainted it several times over.
His skies are aerial and full of lustre, and every object harmoniously illumined. His distances and colouring are delicate, and his tints have a sweetness and variety till then unexampled. He frequently gave an uncommon tenderness to his finished trees by glazing. His figures, however, are very indifferent; but he was so conscious of his deficiency in this respect, that he usually engaged other artists to paint them for him, among whom were Courtois and Filippo Lauri. Indeed, he was wont to say that he sold his landscapes and gave away his figures. In order to avoid a repetition of the same subject, and also to detect the very numerous spurious copies of his works, he made tinted outline drawings (in six paper books prepared for this purpose) of all those pictures which were transmitted to different countries; and on the back of each drawing he wrote the name of the purchaser. These books he named Libri di verità. This valuable work (now belonging to the duke of Devonshire) has been engraved and published, and has always been highly esteemed by students of the art of landscape. Claude, who had suffered much from gout, died in Rome at the age of eighty-two, on the 21st (or perhaps the 23rd) of November 1682, leaving his wealth, which was considerable, between his only surviving relatives, a nephew and an adopted daughter (? niece).
Many choice specimens of his genius may be seen in the National Gallery and in the Louvre; the landscapes in the Altieri and Colonna palaces in Rome are also of especial celebrity. A list has been printed showing no less than 92 examples in the various public galleries of Europe. He himself regarded a landscape which he painted in the Villa Madama, being a cento of various views with great abundance and variety of leafage, and a composition of Esther and Ahasuerus, as his finest works; the former he refused to sell, although Clement IX. offered to cover its surface with gold pieces. He etched a series of twenty-eight landscapes, fine impressions of which are greatly prized. Full of amenity, and deeply sensitive to the graces of nature, Claude was long deemed the prince of landscape painters, and he must always be accounted a prime leader in that form of art, and in his day a great enlarger and refiner of its province.
Claude was a man of amiable and simple character, very kind to his pupils, a patient and unwearied worker; in his own sphere of study, his mind was stored (as we have seen) with observation and knowledge, but he continued an unlettered man till his death. Famous and highly patronized though he was in all his later years, he seems to have been very little known to his brother artists, with the single exception of Sandrart. This painter is the chief direct authority for the facts of Claude’s life (Academia Artis Pictoriae, 1683); Baldinucci, who obtained information from some of Claude’s immediate survivors, relates various incidents to a different effect (Notizie dei professori del disegno).
See also Victor Cousin, Sur Claude Gelée (1853); M.F. Sweetser, Claude Lorrain (1878); Lady Dilke, Claude Lorrain (1884).
(W. M. R.)
CLAUDET, ANTOINE FRANÇOIS JEAN (1797-1867), French photographer, was born at Lyons on the 12th of August 1797. Having acquired a share in L.J.M. Daguerre’s invention, he was one of the first to practise daguerreotype portraiture in England, and he improved the sensitizing process by using chlorine in addition to iodine, thus gaining greater rapidity of action. In 1848 he produced the photographometer, an instrument designed to measure the intensity of photogenic rays; and in 1849 he brought out the focimeter, for securing a perfect focus in photographic portraiture. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1853, and in 1858 he produced the stereomonoscope, in reply to a challenge from Sir David Brewster. He died in London on the 27th of December 1867.
CLAUDIANUS, CLAUDIUS, Latin epic poet and panegyrist, flourished during the reign of Arcadius and Honorius. He was an Egyptian by birth, probably an Alexandrian, but it may be conjectured from his name and his mastery of Latin that he was of Roman extraction. His own authority has been assumed for the assertion that his first poetical compositions were in Greek, and that he had written nothing in Latin before A.D. 395; but this seems improbable, and the passage (Carm. Min. xli. 13) which is taken to prove it does not necessarily bear this meaning. In that year he appears to have come to Rome, and made his début as a Latin poet by a panegyric on the consulship of Olybrius and Probinus, the first brothers not belonging to the imperial family who had ever simultaneously filled the office of consul. This piece proved the precursor of the series of panegyrical poems which compose the bulk of his writings. In Birt’s edition a complete chronological list of Claudian’s poems is given, and also in J.B. Bury’s edition of Gibbon (iii. app. i. p. 485), where the dates given differ slightly from those in the present article.
In 396 appeared the encomium on the third consulship of the emperor Honorius, and the epic on the downfall of Rufinus, the unworthy minister of Arcadius at Constantinople. This revolution was principally effected by the contrivance of Stilicho, the great general and minister of Honorius. Claudian’s poem appears to have obtained his patronage, or rather perhaps that of his wife Serena, by whose interposition the poet was within a year or two enabled to contract a wealthy marriage in Africa (Epist. 2). Previously to this event he had produced (398) his panegyric on the fourth consulship of Honorius, his epithalamium on the marriage of Honorius to Stilicho’s daughter, Maria, and his poem on the Gildonic war, celebrating the repression of a revolt in Africa. To these succeeded his piece on the consulship of Manlius Theodorus (399), the unfinished or mutilated invective against the Byzantine prime minister Eutropius in the same year, the epics on Stilicho’s first consulship and on his repulse of Alaric (400 and 403), and the panegyric on the sixth consulship of Honorius (404). From this time all trace of Claudian is lost, and he is generally supposed to have perished with his patron Stilicho in 408. It may be conjectured that he must have died in 404, as he could hardly otherwise have omitted to celebrate the greatest of Stilicho’s achievements, the destruction of the barbarian host led by Radagaisus in the following year. On the other hand, he may have survived Stilicho, as in the dedication to the second book of his epic on the Rape of Proserpine (which Birt, however, assigns to 395-397), he speaks of his disuse of poetry in terms hardly reconcilable with the fertility which he displayed during his patron’s lifetime. From the manner in which Augustine alludes to him in his De civitate Dei, it may be inferred that he was no longer living at the date of the composition of that work, between 415 and 428.
Besides Claudian’s chief poems, his lively Fescennines on the emperor’s marriage, his panegyric on Serena, and the Gigantomachia, a fragment of an unfinished Greek epic, may also be mentioned. Several poems expressing Christian sentiments are undoubtedly spurious. Claudian’s paganism, however, neither prevented his celebrating Christian rulers and magistrates nor his enjoying the distinction of a court laureate. It is probable that he was nominally a Christian, like his patron Stilicho and Ausonius, although at heart attached to the old religion. The very decided statements of Orosius and Augustine as to his heathenism may be explained by the pagan style of Claudian’s political poems. We have his own authority for his having been honoured by a bronze statue in the forum, and Pomponius Laetus discovered in the 15th century an inscription (C.I.L. vi. 1710) on the pedestal, which, formerly considered spurious, is now generally regarded as genuine.
The position of Claudian—the last of the Roman poets—is unique in literature. It is sufficiently remarkable that, after nearly three centuries of torpor, the Latin muse should have experienced any revival in the age of Honorius, nothing less than amazing that this revival should have been the work of a foreigner, most surprising of all that a just and enduring celebrity should have been gained by official panegyrics on the generally uninteresting transactions of an inglorious epoch. The first of these particulars bespeaks Claudian’s taste, rising superior to the prevailing barbarism, the second his command of language, the third his rhetorical skill. As remarked by Gibbon, “he was endowed with the rare and precious talent of raising the meanest, of adorning the most barren, and of diversifying the most similar topics.” This gift is especially displayed in his poem on the downfall of Rufinus, where the punishment of a public malefactor is exalted to the dignity of an epical subject by the magnificence of diction and the ostentation of supernatural machinery. The noble exordium, in which the fate of Rufinus is propounded as the vindication of divine justice, places the subject at once on a dignified level; and the council of the infernal powers has afforded a hint to Tasso, and through him to Milton. The inevitable monotony of the panegyrics on Honorius is relieved by just and brilliant expatiation on the duties of a sovereign. In his celebration of Stilicho’s victories Claudian found a subject more worthy of his powers, and some passages, such as the description of the flight of Alaric, and of Stilicho’s arrival at Rome, and the felicitous parallel between his triumphs and those of Marius, rank among the brightest ornaments of Latin poetry. Claudian’s panegyric, however lavish and regardless of veracity, is in general far less offensive than usual in his age, a circumstance attributable partly to his more refined taste and partly to the genuine merit of his patron Stilicho. He is a valuable authority for the history of his times, and is rarely to be convicted of serious inaccuracy in his facts, whatever may be thought of the colouring he chooses to impart to them. He was animated by true patriotic feeling, in the shape of a reverence for Rome as the source and symbol of law, order and civilization. Outside the sphere of actual life he is less successful; his Rape of Proserpine, though the beauties of detail are as great as usual, betrays his deficiency in the creative power requisite for dealing with a purely ideal subject. This denotes the rhetorician rather than the poet, and in general it may be said that his especial gifts of vivid natural description, and of copious illustration, derived from extensive but not cumbrous erudition, are fully as appropriate to eloquence as to poetry. In the general cast of his mind and character of his writings, and especially, in his faculty for bestowing enduring interest upon occasional themes, we may fitly compare him with Dryden, remembering that while Dryden exulted in the energy of a vigorous and fast-developing language, Claudian was cramped by an artificial diction, confined to the literary class.
The editio princeps of Claudian was printed at Vicenza in 1482; the editions of J.M. Gesner (1759) and P. Burmann (1760) are still valuable for their notes. The first critical edition was that of L. Jeep (1876-1879), now superseded by the exhaustive work of T. Birt, with bibliography, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica (x., 1892; smaller ed. founded on this by J. Koch, Teubner series, 1893). There is a separate edition with commentary and verse translation of Il Ratto di Proserpina, by L. Garces de Diez (1889); the satire In Eutropium is discussed by T. Birt in Zwei politische Satiren des alten Rom (1888). There is a complete English verse translation of little merit by A. Hawkins (1817). See the articles by Ramsay in Smith’s Classical Dictionary and Vollmer in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, iii. 2 (1899); also J.H.E. Crees, Claudian as an Historian (1908), the “Cambridge Historical Essay” for 1906 (No. 17); T. Hodgkin, Claudian, the last of the Roman Poets (1875).
CLAUDIUS [Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus], Roman emperor A.D. 41-54, son of Drusus and Antonia, nephew of the emperor Tiberius, and grandson of Livia, the wife of Augustus, was born at Lugdunum (Lyons) on the 1st of August 10 B.C. During his boyhood he was treated with contempt, owing to his weak and timid character and his natural infirmities; the fact that he was regarded as little better than an imbecile saved him from death at the hands of Caligula. He chiefly devoted himself to literature, especially history, and until his accession he took no real part in public affairs, though Caligula honoured him with the dignity of consul. He was four times married: to Plautia Urgulanilla, whom he divorced because he suspected her of designs against his life; to Aelia Petina, also divorced; to the infamous Valeria Messallina (q.v.); and to his niece Agrippina.
In A.D. 41, on the murder of Caligula, Claudius was seized by the praetorians, and declared emperor. The senate, which had entertained the idea of restoring the republic, was obliged to acquiesce. One of Claudius’s first acts was to proclaim an amnesty for all except Cassius Chaerea, the assassin of his predecessor, and one or two others. After the discovery of a conspiracy against his life in 42, he fell completely under the influence of Messallina and his favourite freedmen Pallas and Narcissus, who must be held responsible for acts of cruelty which have brought undeserved odium upon the emperor. There is no doubt that Claudius was a liberal-minded man of kindly nature, anxious for the welfare of his people. Humane regulations were made in regard to freedmen, slaves, widows and orphans; the police system was admirably organized; commerce was put on a sound footing; the provinces were governed in a spirit of liberality; the rights of citizens and admission to the senate were extended to communities outside Italy. The speech of Claudius delivered (in the year 48) in the senate in support of the petition of the Aeduans that their senators should have the jus petendorum honorum (claim of admission to the senate and magistracies) at Rome has been partly preserved on the fragment of a bronze tablet found at Lyons in 1524; an imperial edict concerning the citizenship of the Anaunians (15th of March 46) was found in the southern Tirol in 1869 (C.I.L. v. 5050). Claudius was especially fond of building. He completed the great aqueduct (Aqua Claudia) begun by Caligula, drained the Lacus Fucinus, and built the harbour of Ostia. Nor were his military operations unsuccessful. Mauretania was made a Roman province; the conquest of Britain was begun; his distinguished general Domitius Corbulo (q.v.) gained considerable successes in Germany and the East. The intrigues of Narcissus caused Messallina to be put to death by order of Claudius, who took as his fourth wife his niece Agrippina, a woman as criminal as any of her predecessors. She prevailed upon him to set aside his own son Britannicus in favour of Nero, her son by a former marriage; and in 54, to make Nero’s position secure, she put the emperor to death by poison. The apotheosis of Claudius was the subject of a lampoon by Seneca called apokolokyntosis, the “pumpkinification” of Claudius.
Claudius was a prolific writer, chiefly on history, but his works are lost. He wrote (in Greek) a history of Carthage and a history of Etruria; (in Latin) a history of Rome from the death of Caesar, an autobiography, and an essay in defence of Cicero against the attacks of Asinius Gallus. He also introduced three new letters into the Latin alphabet: Ⅎ for the consonantal V, ⃝ for BS and PS, ˫ for the intermediate sound between I and U.
Authorities.—Ancient: the Annals of Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio Cassius. Modern: H. Lehmann, Claudius und seine Zeit, with introductory chapter on the ancient authorities (1858); Lucien Double, L’Empereur Claude (1876); A. Ziegler, Die politische Seite der Regierung des Kaisers Claudius (1885); H.F. Pelham in Quarterly Review (April 1905), where certain administrative and political changes introduced by Claudius, for which he was attacked by his contemporaries, are discussed and defended; Merivale, Hist. of the Romans under the Empire, chs. 49, 50; H. Schiller, Geschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit, i., pt. 1; H. Furneaux’s ed. of the Annals of Tacitus (introduction).
CLAUDIUS, the name of a famous Roman gens. The by-form Clodius, in its origin a mere orthographical variant, was regularly used for certain Claudii in late republican times, but otherwise the two forms were used indifferently. The gens contained a patrician and a plebeian family; the chief representatives of the former were the Pulchri, of the latter the Marcelli (see Marcellus). The following members of the gens deserve particular mention.
1. Appius Saminus Inregillensis, or Regillensis, Claudius, so called from Regillum (or Regilli) in Sabine territory, founder of the Claudian gens. His original name was Attus or Attius Clausus. About 504 B.C. he settled in Rome, where he and his followers formed a tribe. In 495 he was consul, and his cruel enforcement of the laws of debtor and creditor, in opposition to his milder colleague, P. Servilius Priscus, was one of the chief causes of the “secession” of the plebs to the Sacred Mount. On several occasions he displayed his hatred of the people, although it is stated that he subsequently played the part of mediator.
Suetonius, Tiberius, i.; Livy ii. 16-29; Dion. Halic. v. 40, vi. 23, 24.
2. Claudius, Appius, surnamed Crassus, a Roman patrician, consul in 471 and 451 B.C., and in the same and following year one of the decemvirs. At first he was conspicuous for his aristocratic pride and bitter hatred of the plebeians. Twice they refused to fight under him, and fled before their enemies. He retaliated by decimating the army. He was banished, but soon returned, and again became consul. In the same year (451) he was made one of the decemviri who had been appointed to draw up a code of written laws. When it was decided to elect decemvirs for another year, he who had formerly been looked upon as the champion of the aristocracy, suddenly came forward as the friend of the people, and was himself re-elected together with several plebeians. But no sooner was the new body in office, than it treated both patricians and plebeians with equal violence, and refused to resign at the end of the year. Matters were brought to a crisis by the affair of Virginia. Enamoured of the beautiful daughter of the plebeian centurion Virginius, Claudius attempted to seize her by an abuse of justice. One of his clients, Marcus Claudius, swore that she was the child of a slave belonging to him, and had been stolen by the childless wife of the centurion. Virginius was summoned from the army, and on the day of trial was present to expose the conspiracy. Nevertheless, judgment was given according to the evidence of Marcus, and Claudius commanded Virginia to be given up to him. In despair, her father seized a knife from a neighbouring stall and plunged it in her side. A general insurrection was the result; and the people seceded to the Sacred Mount. The decemvirs were finally compelled to resign and Appius Claudius died in prison, either by his own hand or by that of the executioner. For a discussion of the character of Appius Claudius, see Mommsen’s appendix to vol. i. of his History of Rome. He holds that Claudius was never the leader of the patrician party, but a patrician demagogue who ended by becoming a tyrant to patricians as well as plebeians. The decemvirate, one of the triumphs of the plebs, could hardly have been abolished by that body, but would naturally have been overthrown by the patricians. The revolution which ruined Claudius was a return to the rule of the patricians represented by the Horatii and Valerii.
Livy iii. 32-58; Dion. Halic. x. 59, xi. 3.
3. Claudius, Appius, surnamed Caecus, Roman patrician and author. In 312 B.C. he was elected censor without having passed through the office of consul. His censorship—which he retained for five years, in spite of the lex Aemilia which limited the tenure of that office to eighteen months—was remarkable for the actual or attempted achievement of several great constitutional changes. He filled vacancies in the senate with men of low birth, in some cases even the sons of freedmen (Diod. Sic. xx. 36; Livy ix. 30; Suetonius, Claudius, 24). His most important political innovation was the abolition of the old free birth, freehold basis of suffrage. He enrolled the freedmen and landless citizens both in the centuries and in the tribes, and, instead of assigning them to the four urban tribes, he distributed them through all the tribes and thus gave them practical control of the elections. In 304, however, Q. Fabius Rullianus limited the landless and poorer freedmen to the four urban tribes, thus annulling the effect of Claudius’s arrangement. Appius Claudius transferred the charge of the public worship of Hercules in the Forum Boarium from the Potitian gens to a number of public slaves. He further invaded the exclusive rights of the patricians by directing his secretary Gnaeus Flavius (whom, though a freedman, he made a senator) to publish the legis actiones (methods of legal practice) and the list of dies fasti (or days on which legal business could be transacted). Lastly, he gained enduring fame by the construction of a road and an aqueduct, which—a thing unheard of before—he called by his own name (Livy ix. 29; Frontinus, De Aquis, 115; Diod. Sic. xx. 36). In 307 he was elected consul for the first time. In 298 he was interrex; in 296, as consul, he led the army in Samnium, and although, with his colleague, he gained a victory over the Etruscans and Samnites, he does not seem to have specially distinguished himself as a soldier (Livy x. 19). Next year he was praetor, and he was once dictator. His character, like his namesake the decemvir’s is not easy to define. In spite of his political reforms, he opposed the admission of the plebeians to the consulship and priestly offices; and, although these reforms might appear to be democratic in character and calculated to give preponderance to the lowest class of the people, his probable aim was to strengthen the power of the magistrates (and lessen that of the senate) by founding it on the popular will, which would find its expression in the urban inhabitants and could be most easily influenced by the magistrate. He was already blind and too feeble to walk, when Cineas, the minister of Pyrrhus, visited him, but so vigorously did he oppose every concession that all the eloquence of Cineas was in vain, and the Romans forgot past misfortunes in the inspiration of Claudius’s patriotism (Livy x. 13; Justin xviii. 2; Plutarch, Pyrrhus, 19). The story of his blindness, however, may be merely a method of accounting for his cognomen. Tradition regarded it as the punishment of his transference of the cult of Hercules from the Potitii.
Appius Claudius Caecus is also remarkable as the first writer mentioned in Roman literature. His speech against peace with Pyrrhus was the first that was transmitted to writing, and thereby laid the foundation of prose composition. He was the author of a collection of aphorisms in verse mentioned by Cicero (of which a few fragments remain), and of a legal work entitled De Usurpationibus. It is very likely also that he was concerned in the drawing up of the Legis Actiones published by Flavius. The famous dictum “Every man is the architect of his own fortune” is attributed to him. He also interested himself in grammatical questions, distinguished the two sounds R and S in writing, and did away with the letter Z.
See Mommsen’s appendix to his Roman History (vol. i.); treatises by W. Siebert (1863) and F.D. Gerlach (1872), dealing especially with the censorship of Claudius.
4. Claudius, Publius, surnamed Pulcher, son of (3). He was the first of the gens who bore this surname. In 249 he was consul and appointed to the command of the fleet in the first Punic War. Instead of continuing the siege of Lilybaeum, he decided to attack the Carthaginians in the harbour of Drepanum, and was completely defeated. The disaster was commonly attributed to Claudius’s treatment of the sacred chickens, which refused to eat before the battle. “Let them drink then,” said the consul, and ordered them to be thrown into the sea. Having been recalled and ordered to appoint a dictator, he gave another instance of his high-handedness by nominating a subordinate official, M. Claudius Glicia, but the nomination was at once overruled. Claudius himself was accused of high treason and heavily fined. He must have died before 246, in which year his sister Claudia was fined for publicly expressing a wish that her brother Publius could rise from the grave to lose a second fleet and thereby diminish the number of the people. It is supposed that he committed suicide.
Livy, Epit., 19; Polybius i. 49; Cicero, De Divinatione, i. 16, ii. 8; Valerius Maximus i. 4, viii. I.
5. Claudius, Appius, surnamed Pulcher, Roman statesman and author. He served under his brother-in-law Lucullus in Asia (72 B.C.) and was commissioned to deliver the ultimatum to Tigranes, which gave him the choice of war with Rome or the surrender of Mithradates. In 57 he was praetor, in 56 propraetor in Sardinia, and in 54 consul with L. Domitius Ahenobarbus. Through the intervention of Pompey, he became reconciled to Cicero, who had been greatly offended because Claudius had indirectly opposed his return from exile. In this and certain other transactions Claudius seems to have acted from avaricious motives,—a result of his early poverty. In 53 he entered upon the governorship of Cilicia, in which capacity he seems to have been rapacious and tyrannical. During this period he carried on a correspondence with Cicero, whose letters to him form the third book of the Epistolae ad Familiares. Claudius resented the appointment of Cicero as his successor, avoided meeting him, and even issued orders after his arrival in the province. On his return to Rome Claudius was impeached by P. Cornelius Dolabella on the ground of having violated the sovereign rights of the people. This led him to make advances to Cicero, since it was necessary to obtain witnesses in his favour from his old province. He was acquitted, and a charge of bribery against him also proved unsuccessful. In 50 he was censor, and expelled many of the members of the senate, amongst them the historian Sallust on the ground of immorality. His connexion with Pompey brought upon him the enmity of Caesar, at whose march on Rome he fled from Italy. Having been appointed by Pompey to the command in Greece, in obedience to an ambiguous oracle he crossed over to Euboea, where he died about 48, before the battle of Pharsalus. Claudius was of a distinctly religious turn of mind, as is shown by the interest he took in sacred buildings (the temple at Eleusis, the sanctuary of Amphiaraus at Oropus). He wrote a work on augury, the first book of which he dedicated to Cicero. He was also extremely superstitious, and believed in invocations of the dead. Cicero had a high opinion of his intellectual powers, and considered him a great orator (see Orelli, Onomasticon Tullianum).
A full account of all the Claudii will be found in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, iii. 2 (1899).
CLAUDIUS, MARCUS AURELIUS, surnamed Gothicus, Roman emperor A.D. 268-270, belonged to an obscure Illyrian family. On account of his military ability he was placed in command of an army by Decius; and Valerian appointed him general on the Illyrian frontier, and ruler of the provinces of the lower Danube. During the reign of Gallienus, he was called to Italy in order to crush Aureolus; and on the death of the emperor (268) he was chosen as his successor, in accordance, it was said, with his express desire. Shortly after his accession he routed the Alamanni on the Lacus Benacus (some doubt is thrown upon this); in 269 a great victory over the Goths at Naïssus in Moesia gained him the title of Gothicus. In the following year he died of the plague at Sirmium, in his fifty-sixth year. He enjoyed great popularity, and appears to have been a man of ability and character.
His life was written by Trebellius Pollio, one of the Scriptores Historiae Augusiae; see also Zosimus i. 40-43, the histories of Th. Bernhardt and H. Schiller, and special dissertations by A. Duncker on the life of Claudius (1868) and the defeat of the Alamanni (Annalen des Vereins für nassauische Altertumskunde, 1879); Homo, De Claudio Gothico (1900); Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie, ii. 2458 ff. (Henze).
CLAUDIUS, MATTHIAS (1740-1815), German poet, otherwise known by the nom de plume of Asmus, was born on the 15th of August 1740 at Reinfeld, near Lübeck, and studied at Jena. He spent the greater part of his life in the little town of Wandsbeck, near Hamburg, where he earned his first literary reputation by editing from 1771 to 1775, a newspaper called the Wandsbecker Bote (Wandsbeck Messenger), in which he published a large number of prose essays and poems. They were written in pure and simple German, and appealed to the popular taste; in many there was a vein of extravagant humour or even burlesque, while others were full of quiet meditation and solemn sentiment. In his later days, perhaps through the influence of Klopstock, with whom he had formed an intimate acquaintance, Claudius became strongly pietistic, and the graver side of his nature showed itself. In 1814 he removed to Hamburg, to the house of his son-in-law, the publisher Friedrich Christoph Perthes, where he died on the 21st of January 1815.
Claudius’s collected works were published under the title of Asmus omnia sua secum portans, oder Sämtliche Werke des Wandsbecker Boten (8 vols., 1775-1812; 13th edition, by C. Redich, 2 vols., 1902). His biography has been written by Wilhelm Herbst (4th ed., 1878). See also M. Schneidereit, M. Claudius, seine Weltanschauung und Lebensweisheit (1898).
CLAUSEL (more correctly Clauzel), BERTRAND, Count (1772-1842), marshal of France, was born at Mirepoix (Ariège) on the 12th of December 1772, and served in the first campaign of the French Revolutionary Wars as one of the volunteers of 1791. In June 1795, having distinguished himself repeatedly in the war on the northern frontier (1792-1793) and the fighting in the eastern Pyrenees (1793-1794), Clausel was made a general of brigade. In this rank he served in Italy in 1798 and 1799, and in the disastrous campaign of the latter year he won great distinction at the battles of the Trebbia and of Novi. In 1802 he served in the expedition to S. Domingo. He became a general of division in December 1802, and after his return to France he was in almost continuous military employment there until in 1806 he was sent to the army of Naples. Soon after this Napoleon made him a grand officer of the Legion of Honour. In 1808-1809 he was with Marmont in Dalmatia, and at the close of 1809 he was appointed to a command in the army of Portugal under Masséna.
Clausel took part in the Peninsular campaigns of 1810 and 1811, including the Torres Vedras campaign, and under Marmont he did excellent service in re-establishing the discipline, efficiency and mobility of the army, which had suffered severely in the retreat from Torres Vedras. In the Salamanca campaign (1812) the result of Clausel’s work was shown in the marching powers of the French, and at the battle of Salamanca, Clausel, who had succeeded to the command on Marmont being wounded, and had himself received a severe wound, drew off his army with the greatest skill, the retreat on Burgos being conducted by him in such a way that the pursuers failed to make the slightest impression, and had themselves in the end to retire from the siege of Burgos (1812). Early in 1813 Clausel was made commander of the Army of the North in Spain, but he was unable to avert the great disaster of Vittoria. Under the supreme command of Soult he served through the rest of the Peninsular War with unvarying distinction. On the first restoration in 1814 he submitted unwillingly to the Bourbons, and when Napoleon returned to France, he hastened to join him. During the Hundred Days he was in command of an army defending the Pyrenean frontier. Even after Waterloo he long refused to recognize the restored government, and he escaped to America, being condemned to death in absence. He took the first opportunity of returning to aid the Liberals in France (1820), sat in the chamber of deputies from 1827 to 1830, and after the revolution of 1830 was at once given a military command. At the head of the army of Algiers, Clausel made a successful campaign, but he was soon recalled by the home government, which desired to avoid complications in Algeria. At the same time he was made a marshal of France (February 1831). For some four years thereafter he urged his Algerian policy upon the chamber of deputies, and finally in 1835 was reappointed commander-in-chief. But after several victories, including the taking of Mascara in 1835, the marshal met with a severe repulse at Constantine in 1836. A change of government in France was primarily responsible for the failure, but public opinion attributed it to Clausel, who was recalled in February 1837. He thereupon retired from active service, and, after vigorously defending his conduct before the deputies, he ceased to take part in public affairs. He lived in complete retirement up to his death at Secourrieu (Garonne) on the 21st of April 1842.
CLAUSEN, GEORGE (1852- ), English painter, was born in London, the son of a decorative artist. He attended the design classes at the South Kensington schools from 1867-1873 with great success. He then worked in the studio of Edwin Long, R.A., and subsequently in Paris under Bouguereau and Robert-Fleury. He became one of the foremost modern painters of landscape and of peasant life, influenced to a certain extent by the impressionists with whom he shared the view that light is the real subject of landscape art. His pictures excel in rendering the appearance of things under flecking outdoor sunlight, or in the shady shelter of a barn or stable. His “Girl at the Gate” was acquired for the nation by the Chantrey Trustees and is now at the National Gallery of British Art (Tate Gallery). He was elected associate of the Royal Academy in 1895, and as professor of painting gave a memorable series of lectures to the students of the schools,—published as Six Lectures on Painting (1904) and Aims and Ideals in Art (1906).
CLAUSEWITZ, KARL VON (1780-1831), Prussian general and military writer, was born at Burg, near Magdeburg, on the 1st of June 1780. His family, originally Polish, had settled in Germany at the end of the previous century. Entering the army in 1792, he first saw service in the Rhine campaigns of 1793-1794, receiving his commission at the siege of Mainz. On his return to garrison duty he set to work so zealously to remedy the defects in his education caused by his father’s poverty, that in 1801 he was admitted to the Berlin Academy for young officers, then directed by Scharnhorst. Scharnhorst, attracted by his pupil’s industry and force of character, paid special attention to his training, and profoundly influenced the development of his mind. In 1803, on Scharnhorst’s recommendation, Clausewitz was made “adjutant” (aide-de-camp) to Prince August, and he served in this capacity in the campaign of Jena (1806), being captured along with the prince by the French at Prenzlau. A prisoner in France and Switzerland for the next two years, he returned to Prussia in 1809; and for the next three years, as a departmental chief in the ministry of war, as a teacher in the military school, and as military instructor to the crown prince, he assisted Scharnhorst in the famous reorganization of the Prussian army. In 1810 he married the countess Marie von Brühl.
On the outbreak of the Russian war in 1812, Clausewitz, like many other Prussian officers, took service with his country’s nominal enemy. This step he justified in a memorial, published for the first time in the Leben Gneisenaus by Pertz (Berlin, 1869). At first adjutant to General Phull, who had himself been a Prussian officer, he served later under Pahlen at Witepsk and Smolensk, and from the final Russian position at Kaluga he was sent to the army of Wittgenstein. It was Clausewitz who negotiated the convention of Tauroggen, which separated the cause of Yorck’s Prussians from that of the French, and began the War of Liberation (see Yorck Von Wartenburg; also Blumenthal’s Die Konvention von Tauroggen, Berlin, 1901). As a Russian officer he superintended the formation of the Landwehr of east Prussia (see Stein, Baron Vom), and in the campaign of 1813 served as chief of staff to Count Wallmoden. He conducted the fight at Göhrde, and after the armistice, with Gneisenau’s permission, published an account of the campaign (Der Feldzug von 1813 bis zum Waffenstillstand, Leipzig, 1813). This work was long attributed to Gneisenau himself. After the peace of 1814 Clausewitz re-entered the Prussian service, and in the Waterloo campaign was present at Ligny and Wavre as General Thielmann’s chief of staff. This post he retained till 1818, when he was promoted major-general and appointed director of the Allgemeine Kriegsschule. Here he remained till in 1830 he was made chief of the 3rd Artillery Inspection at Breslau. Next year he became chief of staff to Field-marshal Gneisenau, who commanded an army of observation on the Polish frontier. After the dissolution of this army Clausewitz returned to his artillery duties; but on the 18th of November 1831 he died at Breslau of cholera, which had proved fatal to his chief also, and a little previously, to his old Russian commander Diebitsch on the other side of the frontier.
His collected works were edited and published by his widow, who was aided by some officers, personal friends of the general, in her task. Of the ten volumes of Hinterlassene Werke über Krieg und Kriegführung (Berlin, 1832-1837, later edition called Clausewitz’s Gesammte Werke, Berlin, 1874) the first three contain Clausewitz’s masterpiece, Vom Kriege, an exposition of the philosophy of war which is absolutely unrivalled. He produced no “system” of strategy, and his critics styled his work “negative” and asked “Qu’a-t-il fondé?” What he had “founded” was that modern strategy which, by its hold on the Prussian mind, carried the Prussian arms to victory in 1866 and 1870 over the “systematic” strategists Krismánic and Bazaine, and his philosophy of war became, not only in Germany but in many other countries, the essential basis of all serious study of the art of war. The English and French translations (Graham, On War, London, 1873; Neuens, La Guerre, Paris, 1849-1852; or Vatry, Théorie de la grande guerre, Paris, 1899), with the German original, place the work at the disposal of students of most nationalities. The remaining volumes deal with military history: vol. 4, the Italian campaign of 1796-97; vols. 5 and 6, the campaign of 1799 in Switzerland and Italy; vol. 7, the wars of 1812, 1813 to the armistice, and 1814; vol. 8, the Waterloo Campaign; vols. 9 and 10, papers on the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Luxemburg, Münnich, John Sobieski, Frederick the Great, Ferdinand of Brunswick, &c. He also wrote Über das Leben und den Charakter von Scharnhorst (printed in Ranke’s Historisch-politischer Zeitschrift, 1832). A manuscript on the catastrophe of 1806 long remained unpublished. It was used by v. Höpfner in his history of that war, and eventually published by the Great General Staff in 1888 (French translation, 1903). Letters from Clausewitz to his wife were published in Zeitschrift für preussische Landeskunde (1876). His name is borne by the 28th Field Artillery regiment of the German army.
See Schwartz, Leben des General von Clausewitz und der Frau Marie von Clausewitz (2 vols., Berlin, 1877); von Meerheimb, Karl von Clausewitz (Berlin, 1875), also Memoir in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie; Bernhardi, Leben des Generals von Clausewitz (10th Supplement, Militär. Wochenblatt, 1878).
CLAUSIUS, RUDOLF JULIUS EMMANUEL (1822-1888), German physicist, was born on the 2nd of January 1822 at Köslin, in Pomerania. After attending the Gymnasium at Stettin, he studied at Berlin University from 1840 to 1844. In 1848 he took his degree at Halle, and in 1850 was appointed professor of physics in the royal artillery and engineering school at Berlin. Late in the same year he delivered his inaugural lecture as Privatdocent in the university. In 1855 he became an ordinary professor at Zürich Polytechnic, accepting at the same time a professorship in the university of Zürich In 1867 he moved to Würzburg as professor of physics, and two years later was appointed to the same chair at Bonn, where he died on the 24th of August 1888. During the Franco-German War he was at the head of an ambulance corps composed of Bonn students, and received the Iron Cross for the services he rendered at Vionville and Gravelotte. The work of Clausius, who was a mathematical rather than an experimental physicist, was concerned with many of the most abstruse problems of molecular physics. By his restatement of Carnot’s principle he put the theory of heat on a truer and sounder basis, and he deserves the credit of having made thermodynamics a science; he enunciated the second law, in a paper contributed to the Berlin Academy in 1850, in the well-known form, “Heat cannot of itself pass from a colder to a hotter body.” His results he applied to an exhaustive development of the theory of the steam-engine, laying stress in particular on the conception of entropy. The kinetic theory of gases owes much to his labours, Clerk Maxwell calling him its principal founder. It was he who raised it, on the basis of the dynamical theory of heat, to the level of a theory, and he carried out many numerical determinations in connextion with it, e.g. of the mean free path of a molecule. To Clausius also was due an important advance in the theory of electrolysis, and he put forward the idea that molecules in electrolytes are continually interchanging atoms, the electric force not causing, but merely directing, the interchange. This view found little favour until 1887, when it was taken up by S.A. Arrhenius, who made it the basis of the theory of electrolytic dissociation. In addition to many scientific papers he wrote Die Potentialfunktion und das Potential, 1864, and Abhandlungen über die mechanische Wärmetheorie, 1864-1867.
CLAUSTHAL, or Klausthal, a town of Germany, in the Prussian Harz, lying on a bleak plateau, 1860 ft. above sea-level, 50. m. by rail W.S.W. of Halberstadt. Pop. (1905) 8565. Clausthal is the chief mining town of the Upper Harz Mountains, and practically forms one town with Zellerfeld, which is separated from it by a small stream, the Zellbach. The streets are broad, opportunity for improvement having been given by fires in 1844 and 1854; the houses are mostly of wood. There are an Evangelical and a Roman Catholic church, and a gymnasium. Clausthal has a famous mining college with a mineralogical museum, and a disused mint. Its chief mines are silver and lead, but it also smelts copper and a little gold. Four or five sanatoria are in the neighbourhood. The museum of the Upper Harz is at Zellerfeld.
Clausthal was founded about the middle of the 12th century in consequence probably of the erection of a Benedictine monastery (closed in 1431), remains of which still exist in Zellerfeld. At the beginning of the 16th century the dukes of Brunswick made a new settlement here, and under their directions the mining, which had been begun by the monks, was carried on more energetically. The first church was built at Clausthal in 1570. In 1864 the control of the mines passed into the hands of the state.
CLAVECIN, the French for clavisymbal or harpsichord (Ger. Clavicymbel or Dockenklavier), an abbreviation of the Flemish clavisinbal and Ital. clavicimbalo, a keyboard musical instrument in which the strings were plucked by means of a plectrum consisting of a quill mounted upon a jack.
See Pianoforte; Harpsichord.
CLAVICEMBALO, or Gravicembalo (from Lat. clavis, key, and cymbalum, cymbal; Eng. clavicymbal, clavisymbal; Flemish, clavisinbal; Span. clavisinbanos), a keyboard musical instrument with strings plucked by means of small quill or leather plectra. “Cymbal” (Gr. κύμβαλον, from κύμβη, a hollow vessel) was the old European term for the dulcimer, and hence its place in the formation of the word.
See Pianoforte; Spinet; Virginal.
CLAVICHORD, or Clarichord (Fr. manicorde; Ger. Clavichord; Ital. manicordo; Span. manicordio), a medieval stringed keyboard instrument, a forerunner of the pianoforte (q.v.), its strings being set in vibration by a blow from a brass tangent instead of a hammer as in the modern instrument. The clavichord, derived from the dulcimer by the addition of a keyboard, consisted of a rectangular case, with or without legs, often very elaborately ornamented with paintings and gilding. The earliest instruments were small and portable, being placed upon a table or stand. The strings, of finely drawn brass, steel or iron wire, were stretched almost parallel with the keyboard over the narrow belly or soundboard resting on the soundboard bridges, often three in number, and wound as in the piano round wrest or tuning pins set in a block at the right-hand side of the soundboard and attached at the other end to hitch pins. The bridges served to direct the course of the strings and to conduct the sound waves to the soundboard. The scaling, or division of the strings determining their vibrating length, was effected by the position of the tangents. These tangents, small wedge-shaped blades of brass, beaten out at the top, were inserted in the end of the arm of the keys. As the latter were depressed by the fingers the tangents rose to strike the strings and stop them at the proper length from the belly-bridge. Thus the string was set in vibration between the point of impact and the belly-bridge just as long as the key was pressed down. The key being released, the vibrations were instantly stopped by a list of cloth acting as damper and interwoven among the strings behind the line of the tangents.
There were two kinds of clavichords—the fretted or gebunden and the fret-free or bund-frei. The term “fretted” was applied to those clavichords which, instead of being provided with a string or set of strings in unison for each note, had one set of strings acting for three or four notes, the arms of the keys being twisted in order to bring the contact of the tangent into the acoustically correct position under the string. The “fret-free” were chromatically-scaled instruments. The first bund-frei clavichord is attributed to Daniel Faber of Crailsheim in Saxony about 1720. This important change in construction increased the size of the instrument, each pair of unison strings requiring a key and tangent of its own, and led to the introduction of the system of tuning by equal temperament upheld by J.S. Bach. Clavichords were made with pedals.
The tone of the clavichord, extremely sweet and delicate, was characterized by a tremulous hesitancy, which formed its great charm while rendering it suitable only for the private music room or study. Between 1883 and 1893 renewed attention was drawn to the instrument by A.J. Hipkins’s lectures and recitals on keyboard instruments in London, Oxford and Cambridge; and Arnold Dolmetsch reintroduced the art of making clavichords in 1894.
(K. S.)
The words clavicorde, clavicordo and clavicordio, respectively French, Italian and Spanish, were applied to a different type of instrument, the spinet (q.v.).
See Sebastian Virdung, Musica getutscht und auszgezogen (Basel, 1511) (facsimile reprint Berlin, 1882, edited by R. Eitner); J. Verschuere Reynvaan, Musijkaal Kunst-Woordenboek (Amsterdam, 1795) (a very scarce book, of which the British Museum does not possess a copy); Jacob Adlung, Musica Mechanica Organoedi (Berlin, 1768), vol. ii. pp. 158-9; A.J. Hipkins, The History of the Pianoforte (London, 1896), pp. 61 and 62.
CLAVICYTHERIUM, a name usually applied to an upright spinet (q.v.), the soundboard and strings of which were vertical instead of horizontal, being thus perpendicular to the keyboard; but it would seem that the clavicytherium proper is distinct from the upright spinet in that its strings are placed horizontally. In the early clavicytherium there was, as in the spinet, only one string (of gut) to each key, set in vibration by means of a small quill or leather plectrum mounted on a jack which acted as in the spinet and harpsichord (q.v.). The clavicytherium or keyed cythera or cetra, names which in the 14th and 15th centuries had been applied somewhat indiscriminately to instruments having strings stretched over a soundboard and plucked by fingers or plectrum, was probably of Italian or possibly of south German origin. Sebastian Virdung, writing early in the 16th century, describes the clavicytherium as a new invention, having gut strings, and gives an illustration of it. (See Pianoforte.) A certain amount of uncertainty exists as to its exact construction, due to the extreme rarity of unrestored specimens extant, and to the almost total absence of trustworthy practical information.
In a unique specimen with two keyboards dating from the 16th or 17th century, which is in the collection of Baron Alexandre Kraus, what appear to be vibrating strings stretched over a soundboard perpendicular to the keyboard are in reality the wires forming part of the mechanism of the action. The arrangement of this mechanism is the distinctive feature of the clavicytherium, for the wires, unlike the strings of the upright spinet, increase in length from left to right, so that the upright harp-shaped back has its higher side over the treble of the keyboard instead of over the bass. The vibrating strings of the clavicytherium in the Kraus Museum are stretched horizontally over two kinds of psalteries fixed one over the other. The first, serving for the lower register, is of the well-known trapezoid shape and lies over the keyboards; it has 30 wire strings in pairs of unisons corresponding to the 15 lowest keys. The second psaltery resembles the kanoun of the Arabs, and has 36 strings in courses of 3 unisons corresponding to the next 12 keys, and 88 very thin strings in courses of 4, completing the 49 keys; the compass thus has a range of four octaves from C to C. The quills of the jacks belonging to the two keyboards are of different length and thickness. The jacks, which work as in the spinet, are attached to the perpendicular wires, disposed in two parallel rows, one for each keyboard.
There is a very fine specimen of the so-called clavicytherium (upright spinet) in the Donaldson museum of the Royal College of Music, London, acquired from the Correr collection at Venice in 1885. The instrument is undated, but A.J. Hipkins placed it early in the 16th or even at the end of the 15th century. There is German writing on the inside of the back, referring to some agreement at Ulm. The case is of pine-wood, and the natural keys of box-wood. The jacks have the early steel springs, and in 1885 traces were found in the instrument of original brass plectra, all of which point to a very early date.
A learned Italian, Nicolo Vicentino, living in the 16th century, describes an archicembalo of his own invention, at which the performer had to stand, having four rows of keys designed to obtain a complete mesotonic pure third tuning. This was an attempt to reintroduce the ancient Greek musical system. This instrument was probably an upright harpsichord or clavicembalo.
For the history of the clavicytherium considered as a forerunner of the pianoforte see Pianoforte.
(K. S.)
Mersenne, Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636), p. 113, calls the clavicytherium “une nouvelle forme d’épinette dont on use en Italie,” and states that the action of the jacks and levers is parallel from back to front.
Musica getutscht und auszgezogen (Basel, 1511).
See “Une Pièce unique du Musée Kraus de Florence” in Annales de l’alliance scientifique universelle (Paris, 1907).
See illustration by William Gibb in A.J. Hipkins’s Musical Instruments, Historic, Rare and Unique (1888).
History of the Pianoforte, Novello’s Music Primers, No. 52 (1896), p. 75.
L’Antica Musica ridotta moderna prattica (Rome, 1555).
CLAVIE, BURNING THE, an ancient Scottish custom still observed at Burghead, a fishing village on the Moray Firth, near Forres. The “clavie” is a bonfire of casks split in two, lighted on the 12th of January, corresponding to the New Year of the old calendar. One of these casks is joined together again by a huge nail (Lat. clavus; hence the term). It is then filled with tar, lighted and carried flaming round the village and finally up to a headland upon which stands the ruins of a Roman altar, locally called “the Douro.” It here forms the nucleus of the bonfire, which is built up of split casks. When the burning tar-barrel falls in pieces, the people scramble to get a lighted piece with which to kindle the New Year’s fire on their cottage hearth. The charcoal of the clavie is collected and is put in pieces up the cottage chimneys, to keep spirits and witches from coming down.
CLAVIÈRE, ÉTIENNE (1735-1793), French financier and politician, was a native of Geneva. As one of the democratic leaders there he was obliged in 1782 to take refuge in England, upon the armed interference of France, Sardinia and Berne in favour of the aristocratic party. There he met other Swiss, among them Marat and Étienne Dumont, but their schemes for a new Geneva in Ireland—which the government favoured—were given up when Necker came to power in France, and Clavière, with most of his comrades, went to Paris. There in 1789 he and Dumont allied themselves with Mirabeau, secretly collaborating for him on the Courrier de Provence and also in preparing the speeches which Mirabeau delivered as his own. It was mainly by his use of Clavière that Mirabeau sustained his reputation as a financier. But Clavière also published some pamphlets under his own name, and through these and his friendship with J.P. Brissot, whom he had met in London, he became minister of finance in the Girondist ministry, from March to the 12th of June 1792. After the 10th of August he was again given charge of the finances in the provisional executive council, though with but indifferent success. He shared in the fall of the Girondists, was arrested on the 2nd of June 1793, but somehow was left in prison until the 8th of December, when, on receiving notice that he was to appear on the next day before the Revolutionary Tribunal, he committed suicide.
CLAVIJO, RUY GONZALEZ DE (d. 1412), Spanish traveller of the 15th century, whose narrative is the first important one of its kind contributed to Spanish literature, was a native of Madrid, and belonged to a family of some antiquity and position. On the return of the ambassadors Pelayo de Sotomayor and Hernan Sanchez de Palazuelos from the court of Timur, Henry III. of Castille determined to send another embassy to the new lord of Western Asia, and for this purpose he selected Clavijo, Gomez de Salazar (who died on the outward journey), and a master of theology named Fray Alonzo Paez de Santa Maria. They sailed from St Mary Port near Cadiz on the 22nd of May 1403, touched at the Balearic Isles, Gaeta and Rhodes, spent some time at Constantinople, sailed along the southern coast of the Black Sea to Trebizond, and proceeded inland by Erzerum, the Ararat region, Tabriz, Sultanieh, Teheran and Meshed, to Samarkand, where they were well received by the conqueror. Their return was at last accomplished, in part after Timur’s death, and with countless difficulties and dangers, and they landed in Spain on the 1st of March 1406. Clavijo proceeded at once to the court, at that time in Alcala de Henares, and served as chamberlain till the king’s death (in the spring of 1406-1407); he then returned to Madrid, and lived there in opulence till his own death on the 2nd of April 1412. He was buried in the chapel of the monastery of St Francis, which he had rebuilt at great expense.
There are two leading MSS. of Clavijo’s narrative—(a) London, British Museum, Additional MSS., 16,613 fols. I, n.-125, v.; (b) Madrid, National Library, 9218; and two old editions of the original Spanish—(1) by Gonçalo Argote de Molina (Seville, 1582), (2) by Antonio de Sancha (Madrid, 1782), both having the misleading titles, apparently invented by Molina, of Historia del gran Tamorlan, and Vida y hazañas del gran Tamorlan (the latter at the beginning of the text itself); a better sub-title is added, viz. Itinerario y enarracion del viage y relacion de la embaxada que Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo le hizo. Both editors, and especially Sancha, supply general explanatory dissertations. The Spanish text has also been published, with a Russian translation, in vol. xxviii. (pp. 1-455) of the Publications of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences (Section of Russian Language, &c.), edited by I.I. Sreznevski (1881). An English version, by Sir Clements Markham, was issued by the Hakluyt Society in 1859 (Narrative of the Embassy of R ... G ... de Clavijo to the Court of Timour). The identification of a great number of the places mentioned by Clavijo is a matter of considerable difficulty, and has given rise to some discussion (see Khanikof’s list in Geographical Magazine (1874), and Sreznevski’s Annotated Index in the Russian edition of 1881). A short account ot Clavijo’s life is given by Alvarez y Baena in the Hijos de Madrid, vol. ix. See also C.R. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, iii. 332-56.
CLAVIJO Y FAJARDO, JOSÉ (1730-1806), Spanish publicist, was born at Lanzarote (Canary Islands) in 1730. He settled in Madrid, became editor of El Pensador, and by his campaign against the public performance of autos sacramentales secured their prohibition in 1765. In 1770 he was appointed director of the royal theatres, a post which he resigned in order to take up the editorship of the Mercurio histórico y politico de Madrid: at the time of his death in 1806 he was secretary to the Cabinet of Natural History. He had in abundance the courage, perseverance and gift of pungent expression which form the equipment of the aggressive journalist, but his work would long since have been forgotten were it not that it put an end to a peculiarly national form of dramatic exposition, and that his love affair with one of Beaumarchais’ sisters suggested the theme of Goethe’s first publication, Clavigo.
CLAY, CASSIUS MARCELLUS (1810-1903), American politician, was born in Madison county, Kentucky, on the 19th of October 1810. He was the son of Green Clay (1757-1826), a Kentucky soldier of the war of 1812 and a relative of Henry Clay. He was educated at Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, and at Yale, where he graduated in 1832. Influenced to some extent by William Lloyd Garrison, he became an advocate of the abolition of slavery, and on his return to his native state, at the risk of social and political ostracism, he gave utterance to his belief. He studied law, but instead of practising devoted himself to a political career. In 1835, 1837 and 1840 he was elected as a Whig to the Kentucky legislature, where he advocated a system of gradual emancipation, and secured the establishment of a public school system, and a much-needed reform in the jury system. In 1841 he was defeated on account of his abolition views. In 1844 he delivered campaign speeches for Henry Clay throughout the North. In 1845 he established, at Lexington, Kentucky, an anti-slavery publication known as The True American, but in the same year his office and press were wrecked by a mob, and he removed the publication office to Cincinnati, Ohio. During this and the earlier period of his career his zeal and hot temper involved him in numerous personal encounters and several duels, in all of which he bore himself with a reckless bravery. In the Mexican War he served as a captain of a Kentucky company of militia, and was taken prisoner, while reconnoitring, during General Scott’s advance on the City of Mexico. He left the Whig party in 1850, and as an anti-slavery candidate for governor of Kentucky polled 5000 votes. In 1856 he joined the Republican party, and wielded considerable influence as a Southern representative in its councils. In 1860 he was a leading candidate for the vice-presidential nomination. In 1861 he was sent by President Lincoln as minister to Russia; in 1862 he returned to America to accept a commission as major-general of volunteers, but in March 1863 was reappointed to his former post at St Petersburg, where he remained until 1869. Disapproving of the Republican policy of reconstruction, he left the party, and in 1872 was one of the organizers of the Liberal-Republican revolt, and was largely instrumental in securing the nomination of Horace Greeley for the presidency. In the political campaigns of 1876 and 1880 he supported the Democratic candidate, but rejoined the Republican party in the campaign of 1884. He died at Whitehall, Kentucky, on the 22nd of July 1903.
See his autobiography, The Life, Memoirs, Writings, and Speeches of Cassius Marcellus Clay (Cincinnati, 1896); and The Writings of Cassius Marcellus Clay (edited with a “Memoir” by Horace Greeley. New York, 1848).
CLAY, CHARLES (1801-1893), English surgeon, was born at Bredbury, near Stockport, on the 27th of December 1801. He began his medical education as a pupil of Kinder Wood in Manchester (where he used to attend John Dalton’s lectures on chemistry), and in 1821 went to Edinburgh to continue his studies there. Qualifying in 1823, he began a general practice in Ashton-under-Lyne, but in 1839 removed to Manchester to practise as an operative and consulting surgeon. It was there that, in 1842, he first performed the operation of ovariotomy with which his name is associated. On this occasion it was perfectly successful, and when in 1865 he published an analysis of 111 cases he was able to show a mortality only slightly above 30%. Although his merits in this matter have sometimes been denied, his claim to the title “Father of Ovariotomy” is now generally conceded, and it is admittted that he deserves the credit not only of having shown how that operation could be made a success, but also of having played an important part in the advance of abdominal surgery for which the 19th century was conspicuous. In spite of the claims of a heavy practice, Clay found time for the pursuit of geology and archaeology. Among the books of which he was the author were a volume of Geological Sketches of Manchester (1839) and a History of the Currency of the Isle of Man (1849), and his collections included over a thousand editions of the Old and New Testaments and a remarkably complete series of the silver and copper coins of the United States. He died at Poulton-le-Fylde, near Preston, on the 19th of September 1893.
CLAY, FREDERIC (1838-1889), English musical composer, the son of James Clay, M.P., who was celebrated as a player of whist and a writer on that subject, was born in Paris on the 3rd of August 1838. He studied music under W.B. Molique in Paris and Moritz Hauptmann at Leipzig. With the exception of a few songs and two cantatas, The Knights of the Cross (1866) and Lalla Rookh (1877),—the latter of which contained his well-known song “I’ll sing thee songs of Araby,”—his compositions were all written for the stage. Clay’s first public appearance was made with an opera entitled Court and Cottage, the libretto of which was written by Tom Taylor. This was produced at Covent Garden in 1862, and was followed by Constance (1865), Ages Ago (1869), and Princess Toto (1875), to name only three of many works which have long since been forgotten. The last two, which were written to libretti by W.S. Gilbert, are among Clay’s most tuneful and most attractive works. He wrote part of the music for Babil and Bijou (1872) and The Black Crook (1873), both of which were produced at the Alhambra. He also furnished incidental music for a revival of Twelfth Night and for the production of James Albery’s Oriana. His last works, The Merry Duchess (1883) and The Golden Ring (1883), the latter written for the reopening of the Alhambra, which had been burned to the ground the year before, showed an advance upon his previous work, and rendered all the more regrettable the stroke of paralysis which crippled his physical and mental energies during the last few years of his life. He died at Great Marlow on the 24th of November 1889.
CLAY, HENRY (1777-1852), American statesman and orator, was born in Hanover county, Virginia, on the 12th of April 1777, and died in Washington on the 29th of June 1852. Few public characters in the United States have been the subject of more heated controversy. His enemies denounced him as a pretender, a selfish intriguer, and an abandoned profligate; his supporters placed him among the sages and sometimes even among the saints. He was an arranger of measures and leader of political forces, not an originator of ideas and systems. His public life covered nearly half a century, and his name and fame rest entirely upon his own merits. He achieved his success despite serious obstacles. He was tall, rawboned and awkward; his early instruction was scant; but he “read books,” talked well, and so, after his admission to the bar at Richmond, Virginia, in 1797, and his removal next year to Lexington, Kentucky, he quickly acquired a reputation and a lucrative income from his law practice.
Thereafter, until the end of life, and in a field where he met, as either friend or foe, John Quincy Adams, Gallatin, Madison, Monroe, Webster, Jackson, Calhoun, Randolph and Benton, his political activity was wellnigh ceaseless. At the age of twenty-two (1799), he was elected to a constitutional convention in Kentucky; at twenty-six, to the Kentucky legislature; at twenty-nine, while yet under the age limit of the United States constitution, he was appointed to an unexpired term (1806-1807) in the United States Senate, where, contrary to custom, he at once plunged into business, as though he had been there all his life. He again served in the Kentucky legislature (1808-1809), was chosen speaker of its lower house, and achieved distinction by preventing an intense and widespread anti-British feeling from excluding the common law from the Kentucky code. A year later he was elected to another unexpired term in the United States Senate, serving in 1810-1811. At thirty-four (1811) he was elected to the United States House of Representatives and chosen speaker on the first day of the session. One of the chief sources of his popularity was his activity in Congress in promoting the war with Great Britain in 1812, while as one of the peace commissioners he reluctantly signed the treaty of Ghent on the 24th of December 1814. During the fourteen years following his first election, he was re-elected five times to the House and to the speakership; retiring for one term (1821-1823) to resume his law practice and retrieve his fortunes. He thus served as speaker in 1811-1814, in 1815-1820 and in 1823-1825. Once he was unanimously elected by his constituents, and once nearly defeated for having at the previous session voted to increase congressional salaries. He was a warm friend of the Spanish-American revolutionists (1818) and of the Greek insurgents (1824). From 1825 to 1829 he served as secretary of state in President John Quincy Adams’s cabinet, and in 1831 he was elected to the United States Senate, where he served until 1842, and again from 1849 until his death.
From the beginning of his career he was in favour of internal improvements as a means of opening up the fertile but inaccessible West, and was opposed to the abuse of official patronage known as “the spoils system.” The most important of the national questions with which Clay was associated, however, were the various phases of slavery politics and protection to home industries. The most prominent characteristics of his public life were his predisposition to “compromises” and “pacifications” which generally failed of their object, and his passionate patriotic devotion to the Union.
His earliest championship of protection was a resolution introduced by him in the Kentucky legislature (1808) which favoured the wearing by its members of home-made clothes; and one in the United States Senate (April 1810), on behalf of home-grown and home-made supplies for the United States navy, but only to the point of making the nation independent of foreign supply. In 1816 he advocated the Dallas tariff, in which the duties ranged up to 35% on articles of home production, the supply of which could satisfy the home demand; the avowed purpose being to build up certain industries for safety in time of war. In 1824 he advocated high duties to relieve the prevailing distress, which he pictured in a brilliant and effective speech. Although the distress was caused by the reactionary effect of a disordered currency and the inflated prices of the war of 1812, he ascribed it to the country’s dependence on foreign supply and foreign markets. Great Britain, he said, was a shining example of the wisdom of a high tariff. No nation ever flourished without one. He closed his principal speech on the subject in the House of Representatives with a glowing appeal in behalf of what he called “The American System.” In spite of the opposition of Webster and other prominent statesmen, Clay succeeded in enacting a tariff which the people of the Southern states denounced as a “tariff of abominations.” As it overswelled the revenue, in 1832 he vigorously favoured reducing the tariff rates on all articles not competing with American products. His speech in behalf of the measure was for years a protection text-book; but the measure itself reduced the revenue so little and provoked such serious threats of nullification and secession in South Carolina, that, to prevent bloodshed and to forestall a free trade measure from the next Congress, Clay brought forward in 1833 a compromise gradually reducing the tariff rates to an average of 20%. To the Protectionists this was “like a crash of thunder in winter”; but it was received with such favour by the country generally, that its author was hailed as “The Great Pacificator,” as he had been thirteen years before at the time of the Missouri Compromise (see below). As, however, the discontent with the tariff in the South was only a symptom of the real trouble there—the sensitiveness of the slave-power,—Clay subsequently confessed his serious doubts of the policy of his interference.
He was only twenty-two, when, as an opponent of slavery, he vainly urged an emancipation clause for the new constitution of Kentucky, and he never ceased regretting that its failure put his state, in improvements and progress, behind its free neighbours. In 1820 he congratulated the new South American republics on having abolished slavery, but the same year the threats of the Southern states to destroy the Union led him to advocate the “Missouri Compromise,” which, while keeping slavery out of all the rest of the territory acquired by the “Louisiana Purchase” north of Missouri’s southern boundary line, permitted it in that state. Then, greeted with the title of “The Great Pacificator” as a reward for his success, he retired temporarily to private life, with a larger stock of popularity than he had ever had before. Although at various times he had helped to strengthen the law for the recovery of fugitive slaves, declining as secretary of state to aid Great Britain in the further suppression of the slave trade, and demanding the return of fugitives from Canada, yet he heartily supported the colonizing of the slaves in Africa, because slavery was the “deepest stain upon the character of the country,” opposition to which could not be repressed except by “blowing out the moral lights around,” and “eradicating from the human soul the light of reason and the law of liberty.” When the slave power became more aggressive, in and after the year 1831, Clay defended the right of petition for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and opposed Calhoun’s bill forbidding the use of the mails to “abolition” newspapers and documents. He was luke-warm toward recognizing the independence of Texas, lest it should aid the increase of slave territory, and generally favoured the freedom of speech and press as regards the question of slavery; yet his various concessions and compromises resulted, as he himself declared, in the abolitionists denouncing him as a slaveholder, and the slaveholders as an abolitionist. In 1839, only twelve months after opposing the pro-slavery demands, he prepared an elaborate speech, in order “to set himself right with the South,” which, before its delivery, received pro-slavery approval. While affirming that he was “no friend of slavery” he held abolition and the abolitionists responsible for the hatred, strife, disruption and carnage that menaced the nation. In response, Calhoun extended to him a most hearty welcome, and assigned him to a place on the bench of the penitents. Being a candidate for the presidency Clay had to take the insult without wincing. It was in reference to this speech that he made the oft-quoted remark that he “would rather be right than be president.” While a candidate for president in 1844, he opposed in the “Raleigh letter” the annexation of Texas on many grounds except that of its increasing the slave power, thus displeasing both the men of anti-slavery and those of pro-slavery sentiments. In 1847, after the conquest of Mexico, he made a speech against the annexation of that country or the acquiring of any foreign territory for the spread of slavery. Although in 1849 he again vainly proposed emancipation in Kentucky, he was unanimously elected to the United States Senate, where in 1850 he temporarily pacified both sections of the country by successfully offering, for the sake of the “peace, concord and harmony of these states,” a measure or series of measures that became known as the “Compromise of 1850.” It admitted California as a free state, organized Utah and New Mexico as Territories without reference to slavery, and enacted a more efficient fugitive slave law. In spite of great physical weakness he made several earnest speeches in behalf of these measures to save the Union.
Another conspicuous feature of Clay’s public career was his absorbing and rightful, but constantly ungratified, ambition to be president of the United States. His name in connexion therewith was mentioned comparatively early, and in 1824, with W.H. Crawford, Andrew Jackson, and John Quincy Adams, he was a candidate for that office. There being no choice by the people, and the House of Representatives having elected Adams, Clay was accused by Jackson and his friends of making a corrupt bargain whereby, in payment of his vote and influence for Adams, he was appointed secretary of state. This made Jackson Clay’s lifelong enemy, and ever after kept Clay busy explaining and denying the allegation. In 1832 Clay was unanimously nominated for the presidency by the National Republicans; Jackson, by the Democrats. The main issue was the policy of continuing the United States Bank, which in 1811 Clay had opposed, but in 1816 and always subsequently warmly favoured. A majority of the voters approved of Jackson’s fight against what Clay had once denounced as a dangerous and unconstitutional monopoly. Clay made the mistake of supposing that he could arouse popular enthusiasm for a moneyed corporation in its contest with the great military “hero of New Orleans.” In 1839 he was a candidate for the Whig nomination, but by a secret ballot his enemies defeated him in the party convention, held in December of that year, and nominated William Henry Harrison. The result threw Clay into paroxysms of rage, and he violently complained that his friends always used him as their candidate when he was sure to be defeated, and betrayed him when he or any one could have been elected. In 1844 he was nominated by the Whigs against James K. Polk, the Democratic candidate. By an audacious fraud that represented him as an enemy, and Polk as a friend of protection, Clay lost the vote of Pennsylvania; and he lost the vote of New York by his own letter abating the force of his previous opposition to the annexation of Texas. Even his enemies felt that his defeat by Polk was almost a national calamity. In 1848, Zachary Taylor, a Mexican War hero, and hardly even a convert to the Whig party, defeated Clay for the nomination, Kentucky herself deserting her “favourite son.”
Clay’s quick intelligence and sympathy, and his irreproachable conduct in youth, explain his precocious prominence in public affairs. In his persuasiveness as an orator and his charming personality lay the secret of his power. He had early trained himself in the art of speech-making, in the forest, the field and even the barn, with horse and ox for audience. By contemporaries his voice was declared to be the finest musical instrument that they ever heard. His eloquence was in turn majestic, fierce, playful, insinuating; his gesticulation natural, vivid, large, powerful. In public he was of magnificent bearing, possessing the true oratorical temperament, the nervous exaltation that makes the orator feel and appear a superior being, transfusing his thought, passion and will into the mind and heart of the listener; but his imagination frequently ran away with his understanding, while his imperious temper and ardent combativeness hurried him and his party into disadvantageous positions. The ease, too, with which he outshone men of vastly greater learning lured him from the task of intense and arduous study. His speeches were characterized by skill of statement, ingenious grouping of facts, fervent diction, and ardent patriotism; sometimes by biting sarcasm, but also by superficial research, half-knowledge and an unwillingness to reason a proposition to its logical results. In private, his never-failing courtesy, his agreeable manners and a noble and generous heart for all who needed protection against the powerful or the lawless, endeared him to hosts of friends. His popularity was as great and as inexhaustible among his neighbours as among his fellow-citizens generally. He pronounced upon himself a just judgment when he wrote: “If any one desires to know the leading and paramount object of my public life, the preservation of this Union will furnish him the key.”
See Calvin Colton, The Works of Henry Clay (6 vols., New York, 1857; new ed., 7 vols., New York, 1898), the first three volumes of which are an account of Clay’s “Life and Times”; Carl Schurz, Henry Clay (2 vols., Boston, 1887), in the “American Statesmen” series; and the life by T. Hart Clay (1910).
(C. S.)
CLAY (from O. Eng. claeg, a word common in various forms to Teutonic languages, cf. Ger. Klei), commonly defined as a fine-grained, almost impalpable substance, very soft, more or less coherent when dry, plastic and retentive of water when wet; it has an “earthy” odour when breathed upon or moistened, and consists essentially of hydrous aluminium silicate with various impurities. Of clay are formed a great number of rocks, which collectively are known as “clay-rocks” or “pelitic rocks” (from Gr. πηλός, clay), e.g. mudstone, shale, slate: these exhibit in greater or less perfection the properties above described according to their freedom from impurities. In nature, clays are rarely free from foreign ingredients, many of which can be detected with the unaided eye, while others may be observed by means of the microscope. The commonest impurities are:— (1) organic matter, humus, &c. (exemplified by clay-soils with an admixture of peat, oil shales, carbonaceous shales); (2) fossils (such as plants in the shales of the Lias and Coal Measures, shells in clays of all geological periods and in fresh water marls); (3) carbonate of lime (rarely altogether absent, but abundant in marls, cement-stones and argillaceous limestones); (4) sulphide of iron, as pyrite or marcasite (when finely diffused, giving the clay a dark grey-blue colour, which weathers to brown—e.g. London Clay; also as nodules and concretions, e.g. Gault); (5) oxides of iron (staining the clay bright red when ferric oxide, red ochre; yellow when hydrous, e.g. yellow ochre); (6) sand or detrital silica (forming loams, arenaceous clays, argillaceous sandstones, &c.). Less frequently present are the following:—rock salt (Triassic clays, and marls of Cheshire, &c.); gypsum (London Clay, Triassic clays); dolomite, phosphate of lime, vivianite (phosphate of iron), oxides of manganese, copper ores (e.g. Kupferschiefer), wavellite and amber. As the impurities increase in amount the clay rocks pass gradually into argillaceous sands and sandstones, argillaceous limestones and dolomites, shaly coals and clay ironstones.
Natural clays, even when most pure, show a considerable range of composition, and hence cannot be regarded as consisting of a single mineral; clay is a rock, and has that variability which characterizes all rocks. Of the essential properties of clay some are merely physical, and depend on the minute size of the particles. If any rock be taken (even a piece of pure quartz) and crushed to a very fine powder, it will show some of the peculiarities of clays; for example, it will be plastic, retentive of moisture, impermeable to water, and will shrink to some extent if the moist mass be kneaded, and then allowed to dry. It happens, however, that many rocks are not disintegrated to this extreme degree by natural processes, and weathering invariably accompanies disintegration. Quartz, for example, has little or no cleavage, and is not attacked by the atmosphere. It breaks up into fragments, which become rounded by attrition, but after they reach a certain minuteness are borne along by currents of water or air in a state of suspension, and are not further reduced in size. Hence sands are more coarse grained than clays. A great number of rock-forming minerals, however, possess a good cleavage, so that when bruised they split into thin fragments; many of these minerals decompose somewhat readily, yielding secondary minerals, which are comparatively soft and have a scaly character, with eminently perfect cleavages, which facilitate splitting into exceedingly thin plates. The principal substances of this description are kaolin, muscovite and chlorite. Kaolin and muscovite are formed principally after felspar (and the felspars are the commonest minerals of all crystalline rocks); also from nepheline, leucite, scapolite and a variety of other rock-forming minerals. Chlorite arises from biotite, augite and hornblende. Serpentine, which may be fibrous or scaly, is a secondary product of olivine and certain pyroxenes. Clays consist essentially of the above ingredients (although serpentine is not known to take part in them to any extent, it is closely allied to chlorite). At the same time other substances are produced as decomposition goes on. They are principally finely divided quartz, epidote, zoisite, rutile, limonite, calcite, pyrites, and very small particles of these are rarely absent from natural clays. These fine-grained materials are at first mixed with broken and more or less weathered rock fragments and coarser mineral particles in the soil and subsoil, but by the action of wind and rain they are swept away and deposited in distant situations. “Loess” is a fine calcareous clay, which has been wind-borne, and subsequently laid down on the margins of dry steppes and deserts. Most clays are water-borne, having been carried from the surface of the land by rain and transported by the brooks and rivers into lakes or the sea. In this state the fine particles are known as “mud.” They are deposited where the currents are checked and the water becomes very still. If temporarily laid down in other situations they are ultimately lifted again and removed. A little clay, stirred up with water in a glass vessel, takes hours to settle, and even after two or three days some remains in suspension; in fact, it has been suggested that in such cases the clay forms a sort of “colloidal solution” in the water. Traces of dissolved salts, such as common salt, gypsum or alum, greatly accelerate deposition. For these reasons the principal gathering places of fine pure clays are deep, still lakes, and the sea bottom at considerable distances from the shore. The coarser materials settle nearer the land, and the shallower portions of the sea floor are strewn with gravel and sand, except in occasional depressions and near the mouths of rivers where mud may gather. Farther out the great mud deposits begin, extending from 50 to 200 m. from the land, according to the amount of sediment brought in, and the rate at which the water deepens. A girdle of mud accumulations encircles all the continents. These sediments are fine and tenacious; their principal components, in addition to clay, being small grains of quartz, zircon, tourmaline, hornblende, felspar and iron compounds. Their typical colour is blackish-blue, owing to the abundance of sulphuretted hydrogen; when fresh they have a sulphurous odour, when weathered they are brown, as their iron is present as hydrous oxides (limonite, &c). These deposits are tenanted by numerous forms of marine life, and the sulphur they contain is derived from decomposing organic matter. Occasionally water-logged plant débris is mingled with the mud. In a few places a red colour prevails, the iron being mostly oxidized; elsewhere the muds are green owing to abundant glauconite. Traced landwards the muds become more sandy, while on their outer margins they grade into the abysmal deposits, such as the globigerina ooze (see Ocean and Oceanography). Near volcanoes they contain many volcanic minerals, and around coral islands they are often in large part calcareous.
Microscopic sections of some of the more coherent clays and shales may be prepared by saturating them with Canada balsam by long boiling, and slicing the resultant mass in the same manner as one of the harder rocks. They show that clay rocks contain abundant very small grains of quartz (about 0.01 to 0.05 mm. in diameter), with often felspar, tourmaline, zircon, epidote, rutile and more or less calcite. These may form more than one-third of an ordinary shale; the greater part, however, consists of still smaller scales of other minerals (0.01 mm. in diameter and less than this). Some of these are recognizable as pale yellowish and white mica; others seem to be chlorite, the remainder is perhaps kaolin, but, owing to the minute size of the flakes, they yield very indistinct reactions to polarized light. They are also often stained with iron oxide and organic substances, and in consequence their true nature is almost impossible to determine. It is certain, however, that the finer-grained rocks are richest in alumina, and in combined water; hence the inference is clear that kaolin or some other hydrous aluminium silicate is the dominating constituent. These results are confirmed by the mechanical analysis of clays. This process consists in finely pulverizing the soil or rock, and levigating it in vessels of water. A series of powders is obtained progressively finer according to the time required to settle to the bottom of the vessel. The clay is held to include those particles which have less than 0.005 mm. diameter, and contains a higher percentage of alumina than any of the other ingredients.
As might be inferred from the differences they exhibit in other respects, clay rocks vary greatly in their chemical composition. Some of them contain much iron (yellow, blue and red clays); others contain abundant calcium carbonate (calcareous clays and marls). Pure clays, however, may be found almost quite free from these substances. Their silica ranges from about 60 to 45%, varying in accordance with the amount of quartz and alkali-felspar present. It is almost always more than would be the case if the rock consisted of kaolin mixed with muscovite. Alumina is high in the finer clays (18 to 30%), and they are the most aluminous of all sediments, except bauxite. Magnesia is never absent, though its amount may be less than 1%; it is usually contained in minerals of the chlorite group, but partly also in dolomite. The alkalis are very interesting; often they form 5 or 10% of the whole rock; they indicate abundance of white micas or of undecomposed particles of felspar. Some clays, however, such as fireclays, contain very little potash or soda, while they are rich in alumina; and it is a fair inference that hydrated aluminous silicates, such as kaolin, are well represented in these rocks. There are, in fact, a few clays which contain about 45% of alumina, that is to say, more than in pure kaolin. It is probable that these are related to bauxite and certain kinds of laterite.
A few of the most important clay rocks, such as china-clay, brick-clay, red-clay and shale, may be briefly described here.