Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Dübner, Johann Friedrich" to "Dyeing" / Volume 8, Slice 8 Papyras Classics

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Chapter 4

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Dübner, Johann Friedrich" to "Dyeing" (part 4)

The stir and revival of intellectual life that arrived with the Reformation found its first expression in the composition of Psalms. The earliest printed collection appeared at Antwerp in 1540, under the title of Souter-Liedekens, and was dedicated to a Dutch nobleman, Willem van Zuylen van Nieuvelt, by whose name it is usually known. This collection, however, was made before the Reformation in Holland really set in. For the Protestant congregations Jan Utenhove printed a volume of Psalms in London in 1566; Lucas de Heere (1534-1585), and immediately after him, with much greater success, Petrus Datheen (1531-1590), translated the hymns of Clément Marot. For printing this last volume, in 1567, Herman Schinkel of Delft was burned to death in 1568. Datheen was not a rhetorician, but a person of humble origin, who wrote in the vulgar tongue, and his hymns spread far and wide among the people. Until 1773 they were in constant use in the state church of Holland. But the great events of the period of reformation are not marked by psalms only in Dutch literature. Two collections of hymns and lyrical pieces, printed in 1562 and 1569, perpetuate the fervour and despair of the martyrs of the Mennonite Church. Similar utterances of the persecuted Protestants were published at Haarlem and Leeuwarden, at Ghent and at Bruges. Very different in tone were the battle-songs of liberty and triumph sung a generation later by the victorious Reformers, the “Geuzen” or “Gueux” (q.v.). The famous song-book of 1588, the Geusen Lieden Boecxken, was full of ardent and heroic sentiment, expressed often in marvellously brilliant phrases. In this collection appeared for the first time such classical snatches of Dutch song as the Ballad of Heiligerlee, the Ballad of Egmond and Horn, and the song of the Storm of Leiden. The political ballads, with their ridicule of the Spanish leaders, form a section of the Boecxken which has proved of inestimable value to historians. All these lyrics, however, whether of victory or of martyrdom, are still very rough in form and language.

The first writer who used the Dutch tongue with grace and precision of style was a woman and a professed opponent of Lutheranism and reformed thought. Modern Dutch literature practically begins with Anna Bijns (c. 1494-1575). Against the crowd of rhetoricians and psalm-makers of the early part of the 16th century she stands out in relief as the one poet of real genius. The language, oscillating before her time between French and German, formless, corrupt and invertebrate, took shape and comeliness, which none of the male pedants could give it, from the impassioned hands of a woman. Anna Bijns, who is believed to have been born at Antwerp in 1494, was a schoolmistress at that city in her middle life, and in old age she still “instructed youth in the Catholic religion.” She died on the 10th of April 1575. Hendrik Peppinck, a Franciscan, who edited her third volume of poems when she was an old woman in 1567, speaks of her as “a maiden small of descent, but great of understanding, and godly of life.” Her first known volume bears the date 1528, and displays her as already deeply versed in the mysteries of religion. We gather from all this that she was a lay nun, and she certainly occupied a position of great honour and influence at Antwerp. She was named “the Sappho of Brabant” and the “Princess of all Rhetoricians.” She bent the powerful weapon of her verse against the faith and character of Luther. In her volume of 1528 the Lutherans are scarcely mentioned; in that of 1538 every page is occupied with invectives against them; while the third volume of 1567 is the voice of one from whom her age has passed. All the poems of Anna Bijns which we possess are called refereinen or refrains. Her mastery over verse-form was extremely remarkable, and these refrains are really modified chants-royal. The writings of Anna Bijns offer many points of interest to the philologist. In her the period of Middle Dutch closes, and the modern Dutch begins. In a few grammatical peculiarities—such as the formation of the genitive by some verbs which now govern the accusative, and the use of ghe before the infinitive—her language still belongs to Middle Dutch; but these exceptions are rare, and she really initiated that modern speech which Filips van Marnix adopted and made classical in the next generation.

In Filips van Marnix, lord of St Aldegonde (1538-1598), a much greater personage came forward in the ranks of liberty and reform. He was born at Brussels in 1538, and began life as a disciple of Calvin and Beza in the schools of Geneva. It was as a defender of the Dutch iconoclasts that he first appeared in print, with his tract on The Images thrown down in Holland in August 1566. He soon became one of the leading spirits in the war of Dutch independence, the intimate friend of the prince of Orange, and the author of the glorious Wilhelmuslied. It was in the autumn of 1568 that Marnix composed this, the national hymn of Dutch liberty and Protestantism. In 1569 he completed a no less important and celebrated prose work, the Biencorf or Beehive of the Romish Church. In this satire he was inspired in a great measure by Rabelais, of whom he was an intelligent disciple. It is written in prose that may be said to mark an epoch in the language and literature of Holland. Overwhelmed with the press of public business, Marnix wrote little more until in 1580 he published his Psalms of David newly translated out of the Hebrew Tongue. He occupied the last years of his life in preparing a Dutch version of the Bible, translated direct from the original. At his death only Genesis was found completely revised; but in 1619 the synod of Dort placed the unfinished work in the hands of four divines, who completed it.

In Dirck Volckertsen Coornhert (1522-1590) Holland for the first time produced a writer at once eager to compose in his native tongue and to employ the weapons of humanism. Coornhert was a typical burgher of North Holland, equally interested in the progress of national emancipation and in the development of national literature. He was a native of Amsterdam, but he did not take part in the labours of the old chamber of the Eglantine, but quite early in life proceeded to Haarlem, and was notary, secretary and finally pensionary of the town. In 1566 he was imprisoned for his support of the Reformers, and in 1572 he became secretary to the states of Holland. He practised the art of etching, and spent all his spare time in the pursuit of classical learning. He was nearly forty years of age before he made any practical use of his attainments. In 1561 he printed his translation of the De officiis of Cicero, and in 1562 of the De beneficiis of Seneca. In these volumes he opposed with no less zeal than Marnix had done the bastard forms still employed in prose by the rhetoricians of Flanders and Brabant. During the next decade he occupied himself chiefly with plays and poems, conceived and expressed with far less freedom than his prose, and more in the approved conventional fashion of the rhetoricians; he collected his poems in 1575. The next ten years he occupied in polemical writing, from the evangelical point of view, against the Calvinists. In 1585 he translated Boethius, and then gave his full attention to his original masterpiece, the Zedekunst (1586), or Art of Ethics, a philosophical treatise in prose, in which he studied to adapt the Dutch tongue to the grace and simplicity of Montaigne’s French. His humanism unites the Bible, Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius in one grand system of ethics, and is expressed in a style remarkable for brightness and purity. He died at Gouda on the 29th of October 1590; his works, in three enormous folio volumes, were first collected in 1630.

Towards the end of the period of transition, Amsterdam became the centre of all literary enterprise in Holland. In 1585 two of the most important chambers of rhetoric in Flanders, the “White Lavender” and the “Fig Tree,” took flight from the south, and settled themselves in Amsterdam by the side of the “Eglantine.” The last-named institution had already observed the new tendency of the age, and was prepared to encourage intellectual reform of every kind, and its influence spread through Holland and Zealand. In Flanders, meanwhile, crushed under the yoke of Parma, literature and native thought absolutely expired. From this time forward, and until the emancipation of the southern provinces, the domain of our inquiry is confined to the district north of the Scheldt.

In the chamber of the Eglantine at Amsterdam two men took a very prominent place, more by their intelligence and modern spirit than by their original genius. Hendrick Laurenssen Spieghel (1549-1612) was a humanist of a type more advanced and less polemical than Coornhert. He wrote a charming poem in praise of dancing; but his chief contributions to literature were his Tweespraeck van de nederduytsche letterkunst, a philological exhortation, in the manner of Joachim du Bellay’s famous tract, urging the Dutch nation to purify and enrich its tongue at the fountains of antiquity, and a didactic epic, entitled Hertspieghel (1614), which has been greatly praised, but which is now much more antiquated in style and more difficult to enjoy than Coornhert’s prose of a similar tendency. That Spieghel was a Catholic prevented him perhaps from exercising as much public influence as he exercised privately among his younger friends. The same may be said of the man who, in 1614, first collected Spieghel’s writings, and published them in a volume with his own verses. Roemer Pieterssen Visscher (1547-1620) proceeded a step further than Spieghel in the cultivation of polite letters. He was deeply tinged with a spirit of classical learning that was much more genuine and nearer to the true antique than any that had previously been known in Holland. His own disciples called him the Dutch Martial, but he was at best little more than an amateur in poetry, although an amateur whose function it was to perceive and encourage the genius of professional writers. Roemer Visscher stands at the threshold of the new Renaissance literature, himself practising the faded arts of the rhetoricians, but pointing by his counsel and his conversation to the naturalism of the great period.

It was in the salon at Amsterdam which the beautiful daughters of Roemer Visscher formed around their father and themselves that the new school began to take form. The republic of the United Provinces, with Amsterdam at its head, had suddenly risen to the first rank among the nations of Europe, and it was under the influence of so much new emotion and brilliant ambition that the country no less suddenly asserted itself in a great school of painting and poetry. The intellect of the whole Low Countries was concentrated in Holland and Zealand, while the six great universities, Leiden, Groningen, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Harderwijk and Franeker, were enriched by a flock of learned exiles from Flanders and Brabant. It had occurred, however, to Roemer Visscher only that the path of literary honour lay, not along the utilitarian road cut out by Maerlant and Boendale, but in the study of beauty and antiquity. In this he was curiously aided by the school of ripe and enthusiastic scholars who began to flourish at Leiden, such as Drusius, Vossius and Hugo Grotius, who themselves wrote little in Dutch, but who chastened the style of the rising generation by insisting on a pure and liberal Latinity. Out of that generation arose the greatest names in the literature of Holland—Vondel, Hooft, Cats, Huygens—in whose hands the language, so long left barbarous and neglected, took at once its highest finish and melody. By the side of this serious and aesthetic growth there is to be noticed a quickening of the broad and farcical humour which had been characteristic of the Dutch nation from its commencement. For fifty years, and these the most glorious in the annals of Holland, these two streams of influence, one towards beauty and melody, the other towards lively comedy, ran side by side, often in the same channel, and producing a rich harvest of great works. It was in the house of the daughters of Roemer Visscher that the tragedies of Vondel and the comedies of Bredero, the farces of Coster and the odes of Huygens, alike found their first admirers and their best critics.

Of the famous daughters of Roemer, two cultivated literature with marked success. Anna (1584-1651) was the author of a descriptive and didactic poem, De Roemster van den Aemstel (The Glory of the Aemstel), and of various miscellaneous writings; Tesselschade (1594-1649) wrote some lyrics which still place her at the head of the female poets of Holland, and she translated the great poem of Tasso. They were women of universal accomplishment, graceful manners and singular beauty; and their company attracted to the house of Roemer Visscher all the most gifted youths of the time, several of whom were suitors, but in vain, for the hand of Anna or of Tesselschade.

Of this Amsterdam school, the first to emerge into public notice was Pieter Cornelissen Hooft (1581-1647). His Achilles and Polyxena (1598) displayed a precocious ease in the use of rhetorical artifices of style. In his pastoral drama of Granida (1605) he proved himself a pupil of Guarini. In tragedy he produced Baeto and Geraad van Velsen; in history he published in 1626 his Life of Henry the Great, while from 1628 to 1642 he was engaged upon his master-work, the History of Holland. Hooft desired to be a severe purist in style, and to a great extent he succeeded, but, like most of the writers of his age, he permitted himself too many Latinisms. In his poetry, especially in the lyrical and pastoral verse of his youth, he is full of Italian reminiscences both of style and matter; in his noble prose work he has set himself to be a disciple of Tacitus. Motley has spoken of Hooft as one of the greatest historians, not merely of Holland, but of Europe. His influence in purifying the language of his country, and in enlarging its sphere of experience, can hardly be overrated.

Very different from the long and prosperous career of Hooft was the brief, painful life of the greatest comic dramatist that Holland has produced. Gerbrand Adriaanssen Bredero (1585-1618), the son of an Amsterdam shoemaker, was born on the 16th of March 1585. He knew no Latin; he had no taste for humanism; he was a simple growth of the rich humour of the people. He entered the workshop of the painter Francisco Badens, but accomplished little in art. His life was embittered by a hopeless love for Tesselschade, to whom he dedicated his dramas, and whose beauty he celebrated in a whole cycle of love songs. His ideas on the subject of drama were at first a mere development of the medieval “Abelespelen.” The “Oude Kammer,” one of the chambers of rhetoric, furnished an opening for his dramatic powers. He commenced by dramatizing the romance of Roderick and Alphonsus, in 1611, and Griane in 1612, but in the latter year he struck out a new and more characteristic path in his Farce of the Cow. From this time until his death he continued to pour out comedies, farces and romantic dramas, in all of which he displayed a coarse, rough genius not unlike that of Ben Jonson, whose immediate contemporary he was. His last and best piece was Jerolimo, the Spanish Brabanter, a satire upon the exiles from the south who filled the halls of the Amsterdam chambers of rhetoric with their pompous speeches and preposterous Burgundian phraseology. The piece was based on a Dutch version (Delft, 1609) of an early Spanish picaresque romance, La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (Burgos, 1554). Bredero was closely allied in genius to the dramatists of the Shakespearian age, but he founded no school, and stands almost as a solitary figure in the literature of Holland. He died on the 23rd of August 1618. Theodore Rodenburg (d. 1644), ridiculed by Bredero for his pretentiousness, had a wider knowledge of contemporary foreign literature than the other dramatists. He adapted some of the dramas of Lope de Vega, which he had witnessed at Madrid, into Dutch, and in 1618 he adapted Cyril Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy.

The only individual at all clearly connected with Bredero in talent was Dr Samuel Coster, who was born at Amsterdam on the 16th of September 1579. He studied medicine at Leiden, and practised at Amsterdam. He is chiefly remembered for having been the first to take advantage of the growing dissension in the body of the old chamber of the Eglantine to form a new institution. In 1617 Coster founded what he called the “First Dutch Academy.” This was in fact a theatre, where, for the first time, dramas could be publicly acted under the patronage of no chamber of rhetoric. Coster himself had come before the world in 1612 with his farce of Teuwis the Boor, based on a folk-song in Jan Roulans’s Liedekens Boeckh, and he continued this order of composition in direct emulation of Bredero, but with less talent. In 1615 he began a series of “blood-and-thunder” tragedies with his horrible Itys, and he continued this coarse style of tragic writing for several years. He survived at least until after 1648 as a supreme authority in Amsterdam upon all dramatic matters.

The first work of the greatest of all Dutch writers, Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679), was Het Pascha (1612), a tragedy or tragi-comedy on the exodus of the children of Israel, written, like all his succeeding dramas, on the recognized Dutch plan, in alexandrines, in five acts, and with choral interludes between the acts. There is comparatively little promise in Het Pascha. It was much inferior dramatically to the plays just being produced by Bredero, and metrically to the clear and eloquent tragedies and pastorals of Hooft; but it secured the young poet a position inferior only to theirs. Yet for a number of years he made no attempt to emphasize the impression he had produced on the public, but contented himself during the years that are the most fertile in a poet’s life with translating and imitating portions of du Bartas’s popular epic. The short and brilliant life of Bredero, his immediate contemporary and greatest rival, burned itself out in a succession of dramatic victories, and it was not until two years after the death of that great poet that Vondel appeared before the public with a second tragedy, the Jerusalem laid Desolate. Five years later, in 1625, he published what seemed an innocent study from the antique, his tragedy of Palamedes, or Murdered Innocence. All Amsterdam discovered, with smothered delight, that under the name of the hero was thinly concealed the figure of Barneveldt, whose execution in 1618 had been a triumph of the hated Calvinists. Thus, at the age of forty-one, the obscure Vondel became in a week the most famous writer in Holland. For the next twelve years, and till the accession of Prince Frederick Henry, Vondel had to maintain a hand-to-hand combat with the “Saints of Dort.” This was the period of his most resolute and stinging satires; Cats took up the cudgels on behalf of the counter-Remonstrants, and there raged a war of pamphlets in verse. A purely fortuitous circumstance led to the next great triumph in Vondel’s slowly developing career. The Dutch Academy, founded in 1617 almost wholly as a dramatic gild, had become so inadequately provided with stage accommodation that in 1638, having coalesced with the two chambers of the “Eglantine” and the “White Lavender,” it ventured on the erection of a large public theatre, the first in Amsterdam. Vondel, as the greatest poet of the day, was invited to write a piece for the first night; on the 3rd of January 1638 the theatre was opened with the performance of a new tragedy out of early Dutch history, the famous Gysbreght van Aemstel. The next ten years were rich in dramatic work from Vondel’s hand; he supplied the theatre with heroic Scriptural pieces, of which the general reader will obtain the best idea if we point to the Athalie of Racine. In 1654, having already attained an age at which poetical production is usually discontinued by the most energetic of poets, he brought out the most exalted and sublime of all his works, the tragedy of Lucifer. Very late in life, through no fault of his own, financial ruin fell on the aged poet, and from 1658 to 1668—that is, from his seventieth to his eightieth year—this venerable and illustrious person, the main literary glory of Holland through her whole history, was forced to earn his bread as a common clerk in a bank, miserably paid, and accused of wasting his masters’ time by the writing of verses. The city released him at last from this wretched bondage by a pension, and the wonderful old man went on writing odes and tragedies almost to his ninetieth year. He died at last in 1679, of no disease, having outlived all his contemporaries and almost all his friends, but calm, sane and good-humoured to the last, serenely conscious of the legacy he left to a not too grateful country. Vondel is the typical example of Dutch intelligence and imagination at their highest development. Not merely is he to Holland all that Camoens is to Portugal and Mickiewicz to Poland, but he stands on a level with these men in the positive value of his writings.

Lyrical art was represented on its more spontaneous side by the songs and ballads of Jan Janssen Starter (b. 1594), an Englishman by birth, who was brought to Amsterdam in his thirteenth year. Very early in life he was made a member of the “Eglantine,” and he worked beside Bredero for two years; but in 1614 he wandered away to Leeuwarden, in Friesland, where he founded a literary gild, and brought out, in 1618, his plays Timbre de Cardone, Fenicie van Messine, the subject of which is identical with that of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, and Daraïda. But his great contribution to literature was his exquisite collection of lyrics, entitled the Friesche Lusthof, or Frisian Pleasance (1621). He returned to Amsterdam, but after 1625 we hear no more of him, and he is believed to have died as a soldier in Germany. The songs of Starter are in close relation to the lyrics of the English Elizabethans, and have the same exquisite simplicity and audacity of style.

While the genius of Holland clustered around the circle of Amsterdam, a school of scarcely less brilliance arose in Middelburg, the capital of Zealand. The ruling spirit of this school was the famous Jakob Cats (1577-1660). In this voluminous writer, to whom modern criticism almost denies the name of poet, the genuine Dutch habit of thought, the utilitarian and didactic spirit which we have already observed in Houwaert and in Boendale, reached its zenith of fluency and popularity. During early middle life he produced the most important of his writings, his pastoral of Galathea, and his didactic poems, the Maechdenplicht and the Sinne- en Minne-Beelden. In 1624 he removed from Middelburg to Dort, where he soon after published his tedious ethical work called Houwelick, or Marriage; and this was followed from time to time by one after another of his monotonous moral pieces. Cats is an exceedingly dull and prosaic writer, whose alexandrines roll smoothly on without any power of riveting the attention or delighting the fancy. Yet his popularity with the middle classes in Holland has always been immense, and his influence extremely hurtful to the growth of all branches of literary art. Among the disciples of Cats, Jakob Westerbaen (1599-1670) was the most successful. His works included translations from Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, Terence and Juvenal, besides original poems. The Jesuit Adriaen Poirters (1606-1675) closely followed Cats in his remarkable Masquer of the World. A poet of Amsterdam, Jan Hermansz Krul (1602-1644), preferred to follow the southern fashion, and wrote didactic pieces in the Catsian manner.

A poet of dignified imagination and versatile form was Sir Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687), the diplomatist. He threw in his lot with the great school of Amsterdam, and became the intimate friend and companion of Vondel, Hooft and the daughters of Roemer Visscher. His famous poem in praise of the Hague, Batava Tempe, appeared in 1622, and was, from a technical point of view, the most accomplished and elegant poem till that time produced in Holland. His collected poems, Otiorum libri sex, were printed in 1625. Oogentroost, or Eye Consolation, was the fantastic title of a remarkable poem dedicated in 1647 to his blind friend, Lucretia van Trello. He printed in 1654 a topographical piece describing his own mansion, Hofwijck. Huygens represents the direction in which it would have been desirable that Dutch literature, now completely founded by Hooft and Vondel, should forthwith proceed, while Cats represents the tame and mundane spirit which was actually adopted by the nation. Huygens had little of the sweetness of Hooft or of the sublimity of Vondel, but his genius was eminently bright and vivacious, and he was a consummate artist in metrical form. The Dutch language has never proved so light and supple in any hands as in his, and he attempted no class of writing, whether in prose or verse, that he did not adorn by his delicate taste and sound judgment. A blind admiration for John Donne, whose poems he translated, was the greatest fault of Huygens, who, in spite of his conceits, remains one of the most pleasing of Dutch writers. In addition to all this he comes down to us with the personal recommendation of having been “one of the most lovable men that ever lived.”

Three Dutchmen of the 17th century distinguished themselves very prominently in the movement of learning and philosophic thought, but the illustrious names of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) can scarcely be said to belong to Dutch literature. Balthasar Bekker (1634-1698), on the contrary, a Reformed preacher of Amsterdam, was a disciple of Descartes, who deserves to be remembered as the greatest philosophical writer who has used the Dutch language. His masterpiece, Betoverde Wereld, or the World Bewitched, appeared in 1691-1693. Bekker is popularly remembered most honourably by his determined attacks upon the system of a penal code for witchcraft.

From 1600 to 1650 was the blossoming time in Dutch literature. During this period the names of greatest genius were first made known to the public, and the vigour and grace of literary expression reached their highest development. It happened, however, that three men of particularly commanding talent survived to an extreme old age, and under the shadow of Vondel, Cats and Huygens there sprang up a new generation which sustained the great tradition until about 1680, when the final decline set in. Jan Vos (d. 1667) gained one illustrious success with his tragedy of Aaron and Titus in 1641, and lost still more in 1642 by his obscene farce of Oene. His second tragedy of Medea, in 1665, and his collected poems in 1662, supported his position as the foremost pupil of Vondel. Geeraerdt Brandt (1626-1685), the author of a History of the Reformation (4 vols., 1671-1704), deserves remembrance less as a tragic dramatist than as a consummate biographer, whose lives of Vondel and of De Ruyter are among the masterpieces of Dutch prose. Johan Antonides van der Goes (1647-1684) followed Vos as a skilful imitator of Vondel’s tragical manner. His Chinese tragedies, Trazil (1665) and Zungchin (1666), scarcely gave promise of the brilliant force and fancy of his Yslroom, a poem in praise of Amsterdam, 1671. He died suddenly, in early life, leaving unfinished an epic poem on the life of St. Paul. Reyer Anslo (1626-1669) marks the decline of taste and vigour; his once famous descriptive epic, The Plague at Naples, is singularly tame and rococo in style. Joachim Oudaen (1628-1692) wrote in his youth two promising tragedies, Johanna Gray (1648) and Konradyn (1649). The Amsterdam section of the school of Cats produced Jeremias de Decker (1609-1666), author of The Praise of Avarice, a satirical poem in imitation of Erasmus, and Joannes Vollenhove (1631-1708), voluminous writers of didactic verse. The engraver Jan Luiken (1649-1708) published in 1671 a very remarkable volume of poems. In lyrical poetry Starter had a single disciple, Daniel Jonctijs (1600-1652), who published a volume of love songs in 1639 under the affected and untranslatable title of Rooselijns oochjens ontleed. None of these poets, except in some slight degree Luiken, set before himself any more ambitious task than to repeat with skill the effects of his predecessors.

Meanwhile the romantic and voluminous romances of the French school of Scudéry and Honoré d’Urfé had invaded Holland and become fashionable. Johan van Heemskerk (1597-1656), a councillor of the Hague, set himself to reproduce this product in native form, and published in 1637 his Batavian Arcadia, the first original Dutch romance, in which a party of romantic youths journey from the Hague to Katwijk, and undergo all sorts of romantic adventures. This book was extremely popular, and was imitated by Hendrik Zoeteboom in his Zaanlandsche Arcadia (1658), and by Lambertus Bos in his Dordtsche Arcadia (1662). A far more spirited and original romance is the Mirandor (1675) of Nikolaes Heinsius the younger (b. 1655), a book which resembles Gil Blas, and precedes it.

The drama fell into Gallicized hands at the death of Vondel and his immediate disciples. Lodewijck Meijer translated Corneille, and brought out his plays on the stage at Amsterdam, where he was manager of the national theatre or Schouwburg after Jan Vos. In connexion with Andries Pels (d. 1681), author of the tragedy of Dido’s Death, Meijer constructed a dramatic club, entitled “Nil Volentibus Arduum,” the great object of which was to inflict the French taste upon the public. Pels furthermore came forward as the censor of letters and satirist of barbarism in Horace’s Art of Poetry expounded, in 1677, and in his Use and Misuse of the Stage, in 1681. Willem van Focquenbroch (1640-1679) was the most voluminous comic writer of this period. The close of the century saw the rise of two thoroughly Gallican dramatists, Jan van Paffenrode (d. 1673) and Pieter Bernagie (1656-1699), who may not unfairly be compared respectively to the Englishmen Farquhar and Shadwell. Thomas Asselijn (1630-1695) was a writer of more considerable talent and more homely instincts. He attempted to resist the dictatorship of Pels, and to follow the national tradition of Bredero. He is the creator of the characteristic Dutch type, the comic lover, Jan Klaaszen, whom he presented on the stage in a series of ridiculous situations. Abraham Alewijn (b. 1664), author of Jan Los (1721), possessed a coarse vein of dramatic humour; he lived in Java, and his plays were produced in Batavia. Finally Pieter Langendijk, the author of a farce borrowed from Don Quixote, claims notice among the dramatists of this period, although he lived from 1683 to 1756, and properly belongs to the next century. With him the tradition of native comedy expired.

The Augustan period of poetry in Holland was even more blank and dull than in the other countries of northern Europe. Of the name preserved in the history of literature there are but very few that call for repetition here. Arnold Hoogvliet (1687-1763) wrote a passable poem in honour of the town of Vlaardingen, and a terrible Biblical epic, in the manner of Blackmore, on the history of Abraham. Hubert Cornelissen Poot (1680-1733) showed an unusual love of nature and freshness of observation in his descriptive pieces. Sybrand Feitama (1694-1758), who translated Voltaire’s Henriade (1743), and wrote much dreary verse of the same class himself, is less worthy of notice than Dirk Smits (1702-1752), the mild and elegiac singer of Rotterdam. Tragic drama was more or less capably represented by Lucretia Wilhelmina van Merken (1722-1789), wife of the very dreary dramatist Nicholaas Simon van Winter (1718-1795).

In the midst of this complete dissolution of poetical style, a writer arose who revived an interest in literature, and gave to Dutch prose the classical grace of the 18th century. Justus van Effen (1684-1735) was born at Utrecht, fell into poverty early in life, and was thrown very much among the company of French émigrés, in connexion with whom he began literary life in 1713 by editing a French journal. Coming to London just when the Tatler and Spectator were in their first vogue, Van Effen studied Addison deeply, translated Swift and Defoe into French, and finally determined to transfer the beauties of English prose into his native language. It was not, however, until 1731, after having wasted the greater part of his life in writing French, that he began to publish his Hollandsche Spectator, which his death in 1735 soon brought to a close. Still, what he composed during the last four years of his life, in all its freshness, manliness and versatility, constitutes the most valuable legacy to Dutch literature that the middle of the 18th century left behind it.

The supremacy of the poetical clubs in every town produced a very weakening and Della-Cruscan effect upon literature, from which the first revolt was made by the famous brothers Van Haren, so honourably known as diplomatists in the history of the Netherlands. Willem van Haren (1710-1768) wrote verses from his earliest youth, while Onno Zwier van Haren (1713-1779), strangely enough, did not begin to do so until he had passed middle life. They were friends of Voltaire, and they were both ambitious of success in epic writing, as understood in France at that period. Willem published in 1741 his Gevallen van Friso, a historical epos, and a long series of odes and solemn lyrical pieces. Onno, in a somewhat lighter strain, wrote Piet and Agnietje, or Pandora’s Box, and a long series of tragedies in the manner of Voltaire. The baroness Juliana Cornelia de Lannoy (1738-1782) was a writer of considerable talent, also of the school of Voltaire; her poems were highly esteemed by Bilderdijk, and she has a neatness of touch and clearness of penetration that give vivacity to her studies of social life. Jakobus Bellamy (1757-1786) was the son of a Swiss baker at Flushing; his pompous odes (Gezangen myner Jeugd, 1782; Vaderlandsche Gezangen, 1782) struck the final note of the false taste and Gallic pedantry that had deformed Dutch literature now for a century, and were for a short time excessively admired.

The year 1777 has been mentioned as the turning-point in the history of letters in the Netherlands. It was in that year that Elizabeth (Betjen) Wolff (1738-1804), a widow lady in Amsterdam, persuaded her friend Agatha (Aagjen) Deken (1741-1804), a poor but extremely intelligent governess, to throw up her situation and live with her. For nearly thirty years these women continued together, writing in combination, and when the elder friend died on the 5th of November 1804, her companion survived her only nine days. Madam Wolff had appeared as a poetess so early as 1762, and again in 1769 and 1772, but her talent in verse was by no means very remarkable. But when the friends, in the third year of their association, published their Letters on Divers Subjects, it was plainly seen that in prose their talent was very remarkable indeed. Since the appearance of Heinsius’s Mirandor more than a century had passed without any fresh start in novel-writing being made in Holland. In 1782 the ladies Wolff and Deken, inspired partly by contemporary English writers, and partly by Goethe, published their first novel, Sara Burgerhar. In spite of the close and obvious following of Richardson, this was a masterly production, and it was enthusiastically received. Another novel, Willem Leevend, followed in 1785, and Cornelia Wildschut in 1792. The ladies were residing in France at the breaking out of the Revolution, and they escaped the guillotine with difficulty. After this they wrote no more, having secured for themselves by their three unrivalled romances a place among the foremost writers of their country.

The last years of the 18th century were marked in Holland by a general revival of intellectual force. The romantic movement in Germany made itself deeply felt in all branches of Dutch literature, and German lyricism took the place hitherto held by French classicism. Pieter Nieuwland (1764-1794) was a feeble forerunner of the revival, but his short life and indifferent powers gave him no chance of directing the transition that he saw to be inevitable. One volume of poems appeared in 1788, and a second, posthumously, in 1797.

The real precursor and creator of a new epoch in letters was the famous Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831) (q.v.). This remarkable man, whose force of character was even greater than his genius, impressed his personality on his generation so indelibly that to think of a Dutchman of the beginning of the 19th century is to think of Bilderdijk. In poetry his taste was strictly national and didactic; he began as a disciple of Cats, nor could he to the end of his life tolerate what he called “the puerilities of Shakespeare.” His early love-songs, collected in 1781 and 1785, gave little promise of talent, but in his epic of Elias in 1786, he showed himself superior to all the Dutch poets since Huygens in mastery of form. For twenty years he lived a busy, eventful life, writing great quantities of verse, and then commenced his most productive period with his didactic poem of The Disease of the Learned, in 1807; in 1808 he imitated Pope’s Essay on Man, and published the tragedy of Floris V., and in 1809 commenced the work which he designed to be his masterpiece, the epic of De Ondergang der eerste Wereld (The Destruction of the First World), which he never finished, and which appeared as a fragment in 1820. To the foreign student Bilderdijk is a singularly uninviting and unpleasing figure. He unites in himself all the unlovely and provincial features which deform the worst of his countrymen. He was violent, ignorant and dull; his view of art was confined to its declamatory and least beautiful side, and perhaps no writer of equal talent has shown so complete an absence of taste and tact. Ten Brink has summed up the character of Bilderdijk’s writings in an excellent passage:—“As an artist,” he says, “he can perhaps be best described in short as the cleverest versemaker of the 18th century. His admirable erudition, his power over language, more extended and more colossal than that of any of his predecessors, enabled him to write pithy and thoroughly original verses, although the general tone of his thought and expression never rose above the ceremonious, stagy and theatrical character of the 18th century.” But in spite of his outrageous faults, and partly because these faults were the exaggeration of a marked national failing, Bilderdijk long enjoyed an unbroken and unbounded popularity in Holland. Fortunately, however, a sounder spirit has arisen in criticism, and the prestige of Bilderdijk is no longer preserved so religiously.

Bilderdijk’s scorn for the dramas of Shakespeare was almost rivalled by that he felt for the new German poetry. Notwithstanding his opposition, however, the romantic fervour found its way into Holland, and first of all in the persons of Hieronymus van Alphen (1746-1803) and Pieter Leonard van de Kastiele (1748-1810), who amused themselves by composing funeral poems of the school of Gessner and Blair. Van Alphen at one time was extolled as a writer of verses for children, but neither in this nor in the elegiac line did he possess nearly so much talent as Rhijnvis Feith (1753-1824), burgomaster of Zwolle, the very type of a prosperous and sentimental Dutchman. In his Julia (1783), a prose romance, Feith proved himself as completely the disciple of Goethe in Werther as Wolff and Deken had been of Richardson in Sara Burgerhart. In Johannes Kinker (1764-1845) a comic poet arose who, at the instigation of Bilderdijk, dedicated himself to the ridicule of Feith’s sentimentalities. The same office was performed with more dignity and less vivacity by Baron W.E. van Perponcher (1741-1819), but Feith continued to hold the popular ear, and achieved an immense success with his poem The Grave in 1792. He then produced tragedies for a while, and in 1803 published Antiquity, a didactic epic. But his popularity waned before his death, and he was troubled by the mirth of such witty scoffers as Arend Fokke Simons (1755-1812), the disciple of Klopstock, and as P. de Wacker van Zon (1758-1818), who, in a series of very readable novels issued under the pseudonym of Bruno Daalberg, sharply ridiculed the sentimental and funereal school.

Under the Batavian republic a historian of great genius arose in the person of Johannes Henricus van der Palm (1763-1840), whose brilliant and patriotic Gedenkschrift van Nederlands Herstelling (1816) has somewhat obscured his great fame as a politician and an Orientalist. The work commenced by Van der Palm in prose was continued in verse by Cornelis Loots (1765-1834) and Jan Frederik Helmers (1767-1813). Loots, in his Batavians of the Time of Caesar (1805), read his countrymen a lesson in patriotism, which Helmers far exceeded in originality and force by his Dutch Nation in 1812. Neither of these poets, however, had sufficient art to render their pieces classical, or, indeed, enough to protect them during their lifetime from the sneers of Bilderdijk. Other political writers, whose lyrical energies were stimulated by the struggle with France, were Maurits Cornelis van Hall (1768-1858), Samuel Iperuszoon Wiselius (1769-1845) and Jan ten Brink (1771-1839), the second of whom immortalized himself and won the favour of Bilderdijk by ridiculing the pretensions of such frivolous tragedians as Shakespeare and Schiller.

The healthy and national spirit in which the ladies Wolff and Deken had written was adopted with great spirit by a novelist in the next generation, Adriaan Loosjes (1761-1818), a bookseller at Haarlem. His romantic stories of medieval life, especially his Charlotte van Bourbon, are curiously like shadows cast forward by the Waverley Novels, but he has little of Sir Walter Scott’s historical truth of vision. His production was incessant and his popularity great for many years, but he was conscious all through that he was at best but a disciple of the authoresses of Sara Burgerhart. Another disciple whose name should not be passed over is Maria Jacoba de Neufville (1775-1856), author of Little Duties, an excellent story somewhat in the manner of Mrs Opie.

A remarkable poet whose romantic genius strove to combine the power of Bilderdijk with the sweetness of Feith was Hendrik Tollens (1780-1856), whose verses have shown more vitality than those of most of his contemporaries. He struck out the admirable notion of celebrating the great deeds of Dutch history in a series of lyrical romances, many of which possess a lasting charm. Besides his folk-songs and popular ballads, he succeeded in a long descriptive poem, A Winter in Nova Zembla, 1819. He lacks the full accomplishment of a literary artist, but his inspiration was natural and abundant, and he thoroughly deserved the popularity with which his patriotic ballads were rewarded. Willem Messchert (1790-1844), a friend and follower of Tollens, pushed the domestic and familiar tone of the latter to a still further point, especially in his genre poem of the Golden Wedding, 1825. Both these writers were natives and residents of Rotterdam, which also claims the honour of being the birthplace of Adrianus Bogaers (1795-1870), the most considerable poetical figure of the time. Without the force and profusion of Bilderdijk, Bogaers has more truth to nature, more sweetness of imagination, and a more genuine gift of poetry than that clamorous writer, and is slowly taking a higher position in Dutch literature as Bilderdijk comes to take a lower one. Bogaers printed his famous poem Jochebed in 1835, but it had then been in existence more than thirteen years, so that it belongs to the second period of imaginative revival in Europe, and connects the name of its author with those of Byron and Heine. Still more beautiful was his Voyage of Heemskerk to Gibraltar (1836), in which he rose to the highest level of his genius. In 1846 he privately printed his Romances and Ballads. Bogaers had a great objection to publicity, and his reputation was long delayed by the secrecy with which he circulated his writings among a few intimate friends. A poet of considerable talent, whose powers were awakened by personal intercourse with Bogaers and Tollens, was Antoni Christiaan Winand Staring (1767-1840), who first at the age of fifty-three came before the world with a volume of Poems, but who continued to write till past his seventieth year. His amorous and humorous lyrics recall the best period of Dutch song, and are worthy to be named beside those of Starter and Vondel.

After 1830 Holland took a more prominent position in European thought than she could claim since the end of the 17th century. In scientific and religious literature her men of letters showed themselves cognizant of the newest shades of opinion, and freely ventilated their ideas. The language resisted the pressure of German from the outside, and from within broke through its long stagnation and enriched itself, as a medium for literary expression, with a multitude of fresh and colloquial forms. At the same time, no very great genius arose in Holland in any branch of literature. The vast labours of Jakobus van Lennep (1802-1868) consist of innumerable translations, historical novels and national romances, which have gained for him the title of the leader of the Dutch romantic school.

The novels of Sir Walter Scott had a great influence on Dutch literature, and the period was rich in historical novels. J. van der Hage (1806-1854), who wrote under the pseudonym of Jan Frederick Oltmans, was the author of the famous novels, Castle Loevenstein in 1570 (1834), and The Shepherd (1838), both dealing with the national history. Other popular works were the antique romance Charikles and Euphorion (1831) of Petrus van Limburg-Brouwer (1795-1847), author of a history of Greek mythology; the Mejuffrouw Lèclerc (1849), and the Portretten van Joost van den Vondel (1876) of the literary historian and critic J.A.A. Alberdingk Thijm (1820-1899); the Jan Faessen (1856) of Lodewijk Mulder (b. 1822); and the Lucretia d’Este of W.P. Walters (1827-1891). Johannes Kneppelhout (1814-1885) sketched university life at Leiden in two amusing volumes of Studententypen (1841) and Studentenleven (1844). Reinier Cornelis Bakhuizen van den Brink (1810-1865) was the chief critic of the romantic movement, and Everhard Johannes Potgieter (1808-1875) its mystical philosopher and esoteric lyrical poet. The genius and influence of Potgieter were very considerable, but they were exceeded by the gifts of Nicolaes Beets (q.v.), author of the famous Camera Obscura (1836), a masterpiece of humour and character. Johannes Pieter Hasebroek (1812-1896), who has been called the Dutch Charles Lamb, wrote in 1840 an admirable collection of essays entitled Truth and Dreams. Willem Hofdijk (1816-1888) wrote a collection of ballads, Kennemerland (1849-1852), and a series of epic and dramatic poems in the romantic style. Bernard ter Haar (1806-1881), an Amsterdam pastor and, in the last year of his life, a professor at Utrecht, made a reputation as a poet by his Johannes and Theagenes, a legend of apostolic times (1838). His poems were collected in 1866 and 1879. A poet of unusual power and promise was lost in the early death of Pieter Augustus de Genestet (1803-1861). His Eve of Saint Nicholas appeared in 1849, and was followed by two volumes of verse in 1851 and 1861, the second of which contains some poems that have attained great popularity. Among the poets should not be forgotten two writers of verse for children, Jan Pieter Heije (1809-1876) and J.J.A. Gouverneur (1809-1889). Criticism was represented by W.J.A. Jonckbloet (1817-1885), author of an excellent History of Dutch Literature (1868-1870), C. Busken Huet, and Jan ten Brink (1834-1901), author of a great number of valuable works on literary history, notably of a history of Dutch literature (1897), and a series of biographies of 19th century Dutch writers (new edition, 1902). His novels were collected in 13 volumes in 1885. With Isaak da Costa (q.v.), W.J. van Zeggelen (1811-1879), and J.J.L. Ten Kate (q.v.), the domestic tendency of Cats and Bilderdijk overpowered the influence of romanticism. The romantic drama found its best exponent in H.J. Schiminel (q.v.), who found a disciple in D.F. van Heyst (b. 1831), whose George van Lalaing was produced in 1873. Hugo Beijerman (ps. Glanor) produced a good play in his Uitgaan (1873), which was followed by other successes. Rosier Faessen (b. 1833) published his dramatic works in 1883.

The recent literature of Holland presents the interesting phenomenon of an aesthetic revolution, carefully and cleverly planned, crowned with unanticipated success, and dying away in a languor encouraged by the complete absence of organized resistance. It would perhaps be difficult to point to another European example so well defined of the vicissitudes which keep the history of literature varied and fresh. For the thirty or forty years preceding 1880 the course of belles-lettres in Holland was smooth and even sluggish. The Dutch writers had slipped into a conventionality of treatment and a strict limitation of form from which even the most striking talents among them could scarcely escape. In 1880 the most eminent authors of this early period were ready to pass away, and they appeared to be preparing no successors to take their place. The greatest humorist of Holland, Nicolaas Beets, had drawn his works together. The most interesting novelist, Mrs Gertrude Bosboom-Toussaint, had in her last psychological stories shown an unexpected sympathy with new ideas. M.G.L. van Loghem (b. 1849), known under the pseudonym of “Fiore delle Neve,” made a great success by his Een liefde in het Zuiden (1881), followed in 1882 by Liana, and in 1884 by Van eene Sultane. Among the novelists were Gerard Keller (b. 1829), author of From Home (1867); Johan Gram (b. 1833), of whose novels De Familie Schaffels (1870) is the best known; Hendrik de Veer (1829-1890), author of Frans Holster (1871); Justus van Maurik (b. 1846), who wrote plays and short sketches of Amsterdam life (Uit het Volk, 1879), and Arnold Buning (b. 1846), whose Marine Sketches (1880) won great popularity. The colonial novels of N. Marie C. Sloot, born in Java in 1853, are widely read in Holland and Belgium, and many of them have been translated into German. A number of them were collected (Schiedam, 1900-1902) as Romantische Werken. Adèle Opzoomer (b. 1856; pseud. A.C.S. Wallis) made her first success in 1877 with In Days of Strife. The two leading Dutch men of letters, however, besides Beets and Douwes Dekker, were critics, Conrad Busken-Huet (q.v.) and Carel Vosmaer (q.v.). In Huet the principles of the 1840-1880 period were summed up; he had been during all those years the fearless and trusty watch-dog of Dutch letters, as he understood them. He lived just long enough to become aware that a revolution was approaching, not to comprehend its character; but his accomplished fidelity to literary principle and his wide knowledge have been honoured even by the most bitter of the younger school. Vosmaer, although in certain directions more sympathetic than Huet, and himself an innovator, has not escaped so easily, because he has been charged with want of courage in accepting what he knew to be inevitable.

In November 1881 there died a youth named Jacques Perk (1860-1881), who had done no more than publish a few sonnets in the Spectator, a journal published by Vosmaer. He was no sooner dead, however, than his posthumous poems, and in particular a cycle of sonnets called Mathilde, were published (1882), and awakened extraordinary emotion. Perk had rejected all the formulas of rhetorical poetry, and had broken up the conventional rhythms. There had been heard no music like his in Holland for two hundred years. A group of young men, united in a sort of esoteric adoration of the memory of Perk, collected around his name. They joined to their band a man somewhat older than themselves, Marcellus Emants (born 1848), poet, novelist and dramatist, who had come forward in 1879 with a symbolical poem called Lilith, which had been stigmatized as audacious and meaningless; encouraged by the admiration of his juniors, Emants published in 1881 a treatise on Young Holland, in the form of a novel in which the first open attack was made on the old school. The next appearance was that of Willem Kloos (born 1857), who had been the editor and intimate friend of Perk, and who now undertook to lead the army of rebellion. His violent attacks on recognized authority in aesthetics began in 1882, and created a considerable scandal. For some time, however, the new poets and critics found a great difficulty in being heard, since all the channels of periodical literature were closed to them. But in 1883 Emants expressed his intellectual aspirations in his poem The Twilight of the Gods, and in 1884 the young school founded a review, De Nieuwe Gids, which was able to offer a direct challenge to De Gids, the ultra-respectable Dutch quarterly. In this year a new element was introduced: hitherto the influences of the young Dutch poetry had chiefly come from England; they were those of Shelley, Mrs Browning, the Rossettis. In 1884 Frans Netscher began to imitate with avidity the French naturalists. For some time, then, the new Dutch literature became a sort of mixture of Shelley and Zola, very violent, heady and bewildering. In 1885 the Persephone and other Poems of Albert Verwey (b. 1865) introduced a lyrical poet of real merit to Holland; Emants published his novel Goudakker’s Illusions. This was the great flowering moment of the new school. It was at this juncture that the principal recent writer of Holland, Louis Couperus (b. 1863), made his first definite appearance. Born in the Hague, the opening years of his boyhood were spent in Java, and he had preserved in all his nature a certain tropical magnificence. In 1884 a little volume of lyrics, and in 1886 the more important Orchids, showed in Couperus a poet whose sympathies were at first entirely with the new school. But he was destined to be a novelist, and his earliest story, Eline Vere (1889), already took him out of the ranks of his contemporaries. In 1890 he published Destiny (known as Footsteps of Fate in the English version), and in 1892 Ecstasy. This was followed in 1894 by Majesty, in 1896 by World-wide Peace, in 1898 by Metamorphosis, a delicate study of character, in 1899 by Fidessa, in 1901 by Quiet Force, and in 1902 by the first volume of a tetralogy called The Books of Small Souls. Of all these later books, some of which have been translated into English, by Couperus, it is perhaps Ecstasy in which the peculiar quality of his work is seen at present to the greatest advantage. This is an extreme sensitiveness to psychological phenomena, expressed in terms of singular delicacy and beauty. The talent of Couperus is like a rich but simple tropical flower laden with colour and odour. He separated himself, as he developed, from the more fanatical members of the group, and addressed himself to the wider public. Another writer, of a totally different class, resembling Couperus only in his defiance of the ruling system of aesthetics, is the prominent Ultramontane politician and bishop, E.J.A.M. Schaepmann (born 1844), whose poem of Aja Sofia originally appeared in 1886. Recent novelists of some polemical vigour are H. Borel and van Hulzen. A very delightful talent was revealed by Frederick van Eeden in Little Johnny (1887), a prose fairy-tale; in Ellen (1891), a cycle of mysterious and musical elegies; and in From the Cold Pools of Death (1901), a very melancholy novel. Another poet of less refinement of spirit, but even greater sumptuousness of form, appeared in Helène Swarth-Lapidoth (born 1859), whose Pictures and Voices belongs to 1887. In that year also, in which Dutch literature reached its height of fecundity, was published the powerful and scandalous naturalistic novel, A Love, by L. van Deyssel (K.J.L. Alberdingk Thijm) who had hitherto been known chiefly as a most uncompromising critic. After 1887 the condition of modern Dutch literature remained comparatively stationary, and within the last decade of the 19th century was definitely declining. In 1889, it is true, a new poet Herman Gorter, made his appearance with a volume of strange verses called May, eccentric both in prosody and in treatment. He held his own without any marked advance towards lucidity or variety. Since the recognition of Gorter, however, no really remarkable talent has made itself prominent in Dutch poetry, unless we except P.C. Boutens, whose Verses in 1898 were received with great respect. Willem Kloos, still the acute and somewhat turbulent leader of the school, collected his poems in 1894 and his critical essays in 1896. L. van Deyssel, though an effective reviewer, continued to lack the erudition which years should have brought to him. Gorter remained tenebrous, Helène Swarth-Lapidoth still gorgeous; the others, with the exception of Couperus, showed symptoms of sinking into silence. The entire school, now that the struggle for recognition is over, and its members are accepted as little classics and the tyrants of taste, rests on its triumphs and seems to limit itself to a repetition of its old experiments. The leading dramatist of the close of the century was Hermann Heijermans (b. 1864), a Jew of strong realistic and socialistic tendencies, and the author of innumerable gloomy plays. His Ghetto (1898) and Ora et Labora (1901) particularly display his peculiar talent. Other notable products of drama are those of de Koo, whose Tobias Bolderman (1900) and Vier Ton (1901) are effective comedies. Dutch literature presented features of remarkable interest between 1882 and 1888, but since that time the general heightening of the average of merit, the abandonment of the old dry conventions, and a recognition of the artistic value of words and forms, are more evident to a foreign observer than any very important single expression of the national genius in literary art. An exception should be made in favour of the powerful peasant-stories of Steijn Streuvels (Frank Lateur), a young baker by trade, whose Summer Land (1901) was a most promising production.

Authorities.—Dr W.J.A. Jonckbloet, Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letterkunde (4th ed., 1889-1892); Dr J. ten Brink, Kleine Geschiedenis der Nederlandschen Letteren (Haarlem, 1877); and the same author’s Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letterkunde (1897), with elaborate illustrations, facsimiles of MSS. and title pages, &c.; Dr J. van Vloten, Schets van de Geschiedenis der Nederlandschen Letteren (1879); L. Schneider, Geschichte der niederländischen Literatur (Leipzig, 1887); G. Kalff, Literatuur en tooneel te Amsterdam in de zeventiende Eeuw (Haarlem, 1895).

Interesting observations on the development of the new school in Dutch literature will be found in Willem Kloos, Veertien Jaar Literatuur-Geschiedenis (2 vols., 1880-1896), and in L. van Deyssel, Verzamelde Opstelen (4 vols., 1890-1897), and in the series of monographs and bibliographies by Prof. J. ten Brink, Geschiedenis der Noord-Nederlandsche Letteren in de XIXe Eeuw (Rotterdam, new ed. 1902, &c.).

(E. G.)


Edited by J.F. Willems (Brussels, 1836).

Edited by C.P. Serrure and Ph. Blommaert (Ghent, 1852-1854).

Edited by Dr E. Verwijs (Leiden, 1868).

Edited by L.P.C. v. den Bergh (Leiden, 1846-1847).

Edited by P. Leendertz (Leiden, 1845-1847).

Edited by Dr Jul. Zacher in Haupt’s Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum, vol. ii. (Leipzig, 1842).

See Schotel, Geschiedenis der Rederijkers in Nederland (1862-1864), Amsterdam.

For Houwaert, see a study by K.F. Stallaert in the Nederlandsch Museum (1885).

Ed. Dr W.L. van Helten (1875).

For Coornhert see also J. ten Brink, D.V. Coornhert en zijne wellevenkunst (Amsterdam, 1860).

The best edition is by P. Vlaming (Amsterdam, 1723).

On Visscher and his daughters see N. Beets, Al de gedichten van Anna Roemers Visscher (1881), and E. Gosse, Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe (1879).

See J. ten Brink, G.A. Brederoo (Utrecht, 1859; 3rd ed. 1887-1888); also J.H.W. Unger, Brederoo, eine Bibliographie (1884). His works were edited (3 vols., 1885-1890) by J. ten Brink and others.

See R.A. Kollewijn’s edition of Samuel Coster’s Werken (1883).

See Dr W. Bisschop, Justus van Effen ... (Utrecht, 1859).

See Dr J. van Vloten, Leven enwerken van Willem en Onno van Haren (1874), and Busken-Huet, De van Harens (1875).

See Dr J. van Vloten, Elisabeth Wolff ... (1880).


DUTCH WARS, a convenient general title for a series of European wars between 1652 and 1678, which centred chiefly upon the political and commercial relations of the Netherlands with England and France. By Englishmen the term “Dutch Wars” is usually applied to the two purely naval wars of 1652-53 and 1663-67 and to the Anglo-Dutch or naval part of the war that began in 1672. But the last of these was part of a much wider struggle by land, known to Continental historians as the Dutch War of 1672-78, and the second part of this article deals with their struggle on the various frontiers of France, which was illustrated by the genius of Turenne and Condé.

I. Naval Operations

First Dutch War (1652-53).—Though political causes were at work, the main incentive to hostility between the peoples was commercial rivalry. It was therefore natural that their first encounters should have taken place between fleets engaged in convoying trade, or in endeavouring to intercept the trade of their enemy. Blows were exchanged before war was formally declared. On the 12th of May 1652 an English officer, Captain Young, stopped a Dutch convoy near the Start in order to enforce the salute to the English flag, which England then demanded from all who used the seas round her coast. The demand was resisted, and was only yielded to after a sharp conflict. Though the Dutch were still endeavouring to negotiate a peace with the Council of State which governed in the British Isles after the execution Of King Charles I., they made ready for war. In May forty sail of their war-ships appeared off Dover under command of Martin Harpertzoon Tromp—then the best known of their admirals. There were then 8 British ships in Dover under Rear-Admiral Nicholas Bourne, and 15 near Rye under Robert Blake, a member of parliament, and soldier who had gained a great reputation in the Civil War. Blake came into the Straits of Dover with his ships, and on the 19th of May a sharp collision took place between him and Tromp. Bourne joined his countryman after the action began. The encounter, which the Dutch attributed to the English, and the English to the Dutch, made war inevitable, even if the relations of the two powers had allowed of the maintenance of peace. The first operations on both sides took the form of attacks on trade. Sir George Ayscue, who had lately returned from the West Indies, whither he had been sent to subdue the Royalist party in Barbados, had a sharp encounter with a Dutch convoy while on his way up Channel to the Downs, and had captured several prizes. The Council of State, being mainly anxious to destroy the Dutch trade and fisheries, began by reinforcing Blake, and sending him north to scatter the Dutch herring fleet. He had with him 60 vessels. Ayscue remained in the Downs with 16. Soon after Blake had gone, Tromp appeared in the Downs with a stronger force and threatened an attack on Ayscue. Want of wind prevented the operation. Tromp was also most intent on collecting the home-coming Dutch convoys, and seeing them safe into port. He therefore also sailed north to meet the Baltic trade. No meeting, however, took place between him and Blake, while bad weather scattered the Dutch. Their herring fishery was ruined for the year, and the outcry against Tromp was loud. He was notoriously no friend to the Loevenstein party then prevalent in Holland, and was displaced, his place being taken by Cornelius de Witt and Michiel Adriaanzoon de Ruyter. De Ruyter was sent into the Channel to convoy the outward-bound convoys, and meet the home-coming trade. On the 16th of August he had an encounter off Plymouth with Ayscue, whom he worsted, and then cruised at the Land’s End. The failure of Ayscue, who was not employed again in this war, induced the Council of State to send Blake, who had now returned from the north, into the Channel. He was not, however, more successful. His fleet was allowed to become scattered, and the Dutchman brought his convoy back safe after a partial action with Penn, Blake’s subordinate, on the 16th of August.

So far the operations had been confined to commerce destroying, or to the protection of trade by convoy. The next moves were more purely warlike. In the 27th of September the Dutch appeared in force off the mouth of the Thames, and Blake, whose fleet was collected in the Downs, stood to sea. On the 28th of September the first real battle of the war was fought off the Kentish Knock, a shoal opposite the coast of Essex. The English fleet standing to the north passed to west of the Dutch, and then turned. In the close engagement which followed, the Dutch were defeated. They did not fight well, and their failure was attributed in part to the discontent of their seamen with the removal of Tromp, and the unpopularity of de Witt. The states-general found it necessary to replace Tromp, who was at once sent to sea, again with the charge of seeing the outward-bound trade down Channel, and waiting for the homeward-bound. Blake had not remained on the coast of Holland, for the Council of State was still almost as intent as the Dutch on convoying trade or molesting the enemy’s. It brought its fleet back, and then divided the ships, sending some to the north with Penn, and keeping the others, 40 in all, with Blake in the Downs. Thus when Tromp appeared “at the back of the Goodwins” with a fleet of 80 war-ships and a crowd of merchant vessels on the 29th of November, Blake was not in a position to engage him with any assured prospect of success. But he made the attempt, and a hot engagement took place off Dungeness on the 30th. Two English vessels were taken, and the loss would have been greater if some of the English captains had not shown themselves backward. Many of the ships were merchant vessels pressed or hired, and commanded by their own skippers, who displayed little military spirit. Blake, who offered to resign, complained of the conduct of many of them, and some were punished. The Council of State saw the necessity for making a strong effort against Tromp, who ranged the Channel unopposed. Penn was recalled from the north, Richard Deane and George Monk were united with Blake as “admirals and generals at sea,” and a competent force was collected by the middle of February. The legend (for it is nothing more) that Tromp hoisted a broom at his mainmast-head to announce his intention to sweep the English off the sea, refers to this period.

On the 18th of February 1653 the Dutch admiral, who had now collected the homeward-bound convoys, was off Plymouth on his way back to Holland, and was attacked by the English fleet. The encounter, which lasted from the 18th to the 20th of February and ranged from Plymouth to Calais, is commonly named the “Three Days’ Battle” and was described by Clarendon as “stupendous.” The Dutch admiral brought his charge of merchant ships up Channel between him and the French shore. His war-ships were arranged in what was called a half-moon, and was in fact an obtuse angle with his flagship, the “Brederode,” at the apex. During the 18th and 19th, the attacks of the English though fierce were partial, and met with no great success. Tromp had to complain of the conduct of several of his captains. On the 20th his line was broken and some 60 of his merchant ships were captured. He anchored in some confusion in Calais roads. Yet by taking advantage of the dark, and the turn of the tide, he succeeded in carrying the great majority of his merchant ships home. The English fleet had suffered severely, Blake himself was seriously wounded, and his colleague Deane was also hurt. Blake’s wound disabled him greatly through the remainder of the war.

The Three Days’ Battle was followed by a pause in the war. On the English side much damage had to be repaired. The administration of the navy, called upon as it was to deal with a war of unprecedented magnitude, was overtaxed by the obligation to refit ships, raise crews, and provide for the numerous sick or wounded. The close approach of the great political crisis in which Cromwell expelled the Long Parliament and established the Protectorate (17th of April 1653), may have had some influence. The fleet adhered to the new government on the 22nd of April. On the Dutch side much damage had to be repaired, and their complicated administration, by five independent admiralty boards, rendered rapid work impossible. They had also begun to realize that the quality of their ships was inferior. Reflection had further shown them that to hamper their fleets by imposing the direct protection of a great flock of merchant ships on them was not even an effectual way to protect commerce. When, therefore, Tromp was next sent to sea, it was with an unhampered fleet of war-ships, and for the purpose of bringing the English fleet to battle.

In spite of their heavy losses and their awkward administration, the Dutch were at sea before the end of May, and were close to the mouth of the Thames. The English fleet was not all ready. Part was in the river fitting out under Blake, who had not fully recovered from his wound. The bulk of it was, however, ready for service, and Blake’s colleagues, Monk and Deane, attacked Tromp on the 2nd of June. Changes of wind made the battle somewhat confused. At first the English were to windward and they bore down with Rear-Admiral John Lawson in command of the van. Tromp, conscious that his ships were weaker in build, at first drew away, firing at the spars of the English ships in order to cripple them. A shift of the wind having given him the weather-gage, he concentrated a vigorous attack on Lawson. But the wind changed again and transferred the weather-gage to the English. Monk and Deane brought on a general action, in which the Dutch were outmatched, and forced to retreat to their own coast. Deane was slain by a cannon-shot by the side of his colleague Monk, who threw his cloak over the mangled body. Blake, informed by the sound of the cannon, which was audible on the Thames, that an action was in progress, hurried to sea and joined Monk in the pursuit of the Dutch on the 3rd of June. Tromp was driven into port and told the states-general that they must build better ships if they wished to beat the English at sea. Blake was forced by his still unhealed wound to go ashore, and the sole command was left to Monk, who remained cruising on the coast of Holland. The states-general now sought for peace, but Cromwell’s demands were excessive, and could not be accepted without a surrender of the independence of Holland. A last effort was therefore made to regain the command of the sea. A great fleet was fitted out, partly at Flushing, partly in the Texel. Between the 26th and the 30th of July Tromp, by a series of skilful manœuvres, united the divided Dutch squadrons in the face of Monk’s fleet, and on the 30th he stood out to sea with the wind in his favour, and gave battle. More than a hundred vessels were engaged on either side. The Dutch admiral manœuvred to keep, and Monk to gain, the weather-gage. The fleets passed on opposite tacks, and the Dutch tried to destroy their enemy with fire-ships without success. At last the weatherly qualities of the ships enabled Monk to break through the Dutch line, cutting some of their ships off from the others. The vessels thus cut off fled to the Maas, and Tromp with the others retired to the Texel. He was shot dead by a musket bullet in the retreat. The loss of life had been heavy on both sides. Six captains of Monk’s fleet were slain. The Dutch now sought peace, and Cromwell offered better terms. During the fighting in the North Sea the Mediterranean trade of England had suffered severely. A squadron of trading ships and a few war vessels were blocked in Italian ports till some of them were taken and others forced to flee in March 1653 off Leghorn. The battle of the 31st of July was the last serious operation of the war, though peace was not formally made till some months later.

Second Dutch War (1663-67).—Although the formal declaration of war was not made by the government of King Charles II. till March 1665, the operations of the second Dutch War began in October 1663. The king and his brother the duke of York (James II.), who were largely interested in the slave-trading Guinea Company, were eager to remove the Dutch ports from the slave coast. They knew that war with the Republic, which had recovered very rapidly from the disasters of the war of 1652-53, would be popular with the trading classes in England. They relied also on the known reluctance of the Dutch government to go to war. In October 1663, therefore, a squadron was sent out under command of Sir Robert Holmes to attack the Dutch in Gambia and America. Their posts on the African coast were captured and New Amsterdam (now New York) taken. The states-general under the skilful management of the Grand Pensionary, John de Witt, retaliated by sending de Ruyter from the Mediterranean, where he was cruising against the Barbary pirates, to follow Holmes. De Ruyter re-established the Dutch posts in Gambia, and, though he failed to retake New Amsterdam, did much injury to English trade before he returned to Holland. It may be pointed out that all colonial settlements belonged at that time exclusively to England, and the war was made entirely by her, and in her interest, Scotland and Ireland having no share. Numbers of Scotch sailors and of English deserters served in the Dutch fleet in this war—the bad administration of the navy and the constant ill-treatment of the crews having caused bitter discontent. Other attacks were made on Dutch trade during 1664, but the great operations of war did not begin till May 1665. In that month the duke of York was on the east coast of England with a fleet of 80 to 90 sail, composed, according to the custom of the time, of vessels of all sizes. A Dutch fleet of corresponding strength was sent to sea, under command of Baron Opdam van Wassenaer. In this war we do not find that the movements of fleets were subordinated to the work of providing convoy. They were sent to sea for the much more intelligent purpose of seeking out the enemy and driving him off. It was understood that the trade of the victor would be secure.

The first battle took place from 30 to 40 m. S.E. of Lowestoft, on the 3rd of June 1665. By the bad conduct of some of the captains in the centre of the Dutch line, the English, who fought with much spirit, were able to win a considerable victory. Opdam’s flagship was blown up and he perished. But the pursuit of the English fleet was feeble, and the retreat of the Dutch was ably covered by Cornelius van Tromp, son of Martin Tromp. Much scandal was caused by the mysterious circumstances in which an order to shorten sail was given in the English flagship, and doubts were expressed of the courage of the duke of York. He withdrew, or was withdrawn, from the active command at sea, and was replaced by the earl of Sandwich. On the Dutch side vigorous measures were taken to enforce good discipline. Four of the captains who had misbehaved on the 3rd of June were shot for cowardice, and others were dismissed. De Ruyter was named commander-in-chief, and John de Witt, or later his brother Cornelius, accompanied the admiral as delegate of the states-general to support his authority. The earl of Sandwich did nothing becoming a capable commander. Under his command the fleet made no attempt to blockade the Dutch coast, but was turned from its proper work to engage in a prize-hunting plot with the king of Denmark. The object was to plunder a Dutch convoy which had taken refuge at Bergen in Norway, then united to Denmark. The mutual interest of the associates led to the failure of the plot. Sir Thomas Teddeman, who was sent by Sandwich to attack the Dutch at Bergen, was suspected by the Danish governor of intending to play false, was fired on by the batteries, and was beaten off. De Ruyter covered the return of the trade to Holland. Sandwich, who had taken some prizes, unlawfully seized part of their cargoes for the benefit of himself and the other flag officers. A loud outcry was raised in the fleet and the country. Sandwich was displaced, and his command was transferred to Monk, with whom was associated the king’s cousin, Prince Rupert. The war had so far been unsuccessful for England. The victory of the 3rd of June was barren. Great injury was inflicted on English trade by Dutch cruisers, while the wasteful administration of his officers reduced the king’s treasury to much embarrassment. Winter suspended the movements of the fleets.

The year 1666 (called the annus mirabilis, for it included the plague and the fire of London) was marked by fierce fighting and changes of fortune. The French, who had signed a treaty with Holland in 1662, were reluctantly induced to intervene in the war as the enemies of England. By May a Dutch fleet of some eighty sail was at sea, preparing to watch the English, and unite with the French. Monk and Rupert were fitting out a fleet of nearly the same strength in the Thames. Under the influence of their fear of a French naval force King Charles’s ministers committed a great blunder. They detached Prince Rupert into the Channel with 20 ships, leaving Monk with only 57 to face the Dutch. The English commander put to sea, and found the enemy anchored on the coast of Flanders, in three divisions. He boldly attacked the van, hoping to cripple it before it could be helped by the centre and rear. This daring and well-judged move brought on the Four Days’ Battle of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th of June (O.S.). On the 1st the Dutch van, under Cornelius van Tromp, bore the brunt of the English attack. The fighting was very fierce. One English admiral, Sir William Berkeley, was slain, and another, Sir John Harman, was in great danger. Monk drew off at night without doing all the harm he had wished to the Dutch. During the 2nd of June the fleets engaged again, and on this day the self-will of Van Tromp, who commanded the rear in the battle, and the misconduct of some of the ships in the van, prevented De Ruyter from making full use of his numbers. Yet Monk was clearly overtaxed, and on the 3rd he prepared to retreat to the Thames. During this movement the “Prince” (100) carrying the flag of Admiral Sir Robert Ayscue, ran on the Galloper Sand, and was lost. In the evening Prince Rupert returned, and by hugging the coast of Kent to the south of the fleets, was able to rejoin his colleague. Monk and Rupert renewed the battle on the 4th. It was fought with extreme fury, and terminated in the retreat of the English to the Thames with a loss of 20 ships and 6000 men.

The Dutch remained masters of the approach to the Thames till the 21st of July. They menaced the coast of Essex, and could easily have covered an invasion of England by a French army if Louis XIV. had been disposed to send one. Danger stimulated the English government to active exertions, and by the 21st of July Monk and Rupert were enabled by a happy combination of wind and tide to set to sea through the passage called the Swin. A storm which scattered both fleets delayed their meeting till the 25th of July. On that and the two succeeding days the Dutch were again defeated and driven into port. The English fleet then burnt the Dutch East India Company’s dockyard at Terschelting, inflicting great loss. But the fruits of the victory were less than they would have been if it had been properly followed up. The British fleet withdrew to its own coast and within a month De Ruyter was at sea again, hoping to effect a junction with a French squadron. The French failed to keep tryst, and De Ruyter was watched by Rupert, who was now in sole command, Monk having been recalled to London to take command amid the confusion caused by the fire and the plague. Nor did the failure of King Charles’s government to press the war with vigour end here. Embarrassed by want of money, on bad terms with his parliament, and secretly intent on schemes incompatible with a policy which could earn the approval of his subjects, the king preferred to spend what money he could command on raising troops, and neglected his fleet. Peace negotiations were begun with the Dutch, and the line-of-battle ships were put out of commission. A light squadron was, however, kept at sea to injure the Dutch trade, and as no armistice was arranged the Republic was free to continue warlike operations. The Dutch, being well aware of the disarmed condition of the English coast, sent out a powerful fleet again under the command of De Ruyter in June. It entered the Thames, forced the entrance of the Medway, and burnt both the dockyard at Chatham and a number of the finest ships in the navy which were lying in the river. A terrible panic prevailed in London, where an attack was expected. The Dutch were content with the injury they had done at Chatham, and dropped down the river. De Ruyter remained cruising in the Channel till the peace of Breda was signed in July. During the last months of the war Sir John Harman had fought a successful campaign in the West Indies against the French on whom he inflicted a severe defeat at Martinique on the 24th of June. By the terms of the peace England retained possession of New York, but the war, though it contained some passages glorious to her arms, was very disastrous to her commerce.

Third Dutch War (1672-74).—This war differed very materially in its inception and conduct from the first and second. They had been popular in England, and even the second gave Englishmen not a little to be proud of. The third was undertaken by the king in pursuit of a policy arranged between him and his cousin Louis XIV. Their avowed object was a partition of Holland, but there was a secret understanding that King Charles II. was to establish Roman Catholicism, and to make himself despotic in England, with the help of the French king. This hidden purpose was suspected, and the war became intensely unpopular with the English parliament and nation. Parliament would grant the king no supplies, and he could find the means of fitting out a fleet only by defrauding his creditors. The English fleets were, therefore, comparatively small, were ill-provided and had to co-operate with French squadrons which in the then raw state of King Louis’ young navy, proved inefficient allies.

In this as in former wars, attacks on Dutch commerce preceded a formal declaration of hostilities. On the 13th of March 1672 Sir Robert Holmes fell upon a Dutch convoy under the command of Van Ness in the Channel. In the penury of the dockyards Holmes could not be provided with the force he was promised, and the enterprise was but partially successful. It was characteristic of the morality of his time and the spirit of the English navy as it had been shaped by the corrupt government of Charles II., that the officers concerned quarrelled violently and accused one another of fraud. A fleet of 60 sail was with difficulty got together under the duke of York, who now went to sea for the second time. The duke was joined in May, and at Portsmouth, by 40 French ships under the comte d’Estrées, a soldier and noble who had been made an admiral late in life. The allies entered the North Sea but did not take the offensive against the Dutch. The English were ill supplied, and were compelled to anchor at Southwold Bay on the coast of Suffolk in order to obtain water and provisions. The Dutch, who had to contend with an overwhelming French invasion on shore, nevertheless fitted out a fleet of 70 to 80 sail of the line and the command was given to De Ruyter. On the 28th of May 1672 he fell upon the allies in a N.W. wind. D’Estrées, who was stationed with his squadron at the south end of the line, went to sea on the port tack, heading to the S.E. The English, who constituted the centre and rear, stood out on the starboard tack. Thus the allies were at once divided into two widely separated bodies, and the Dutch admiral was able to concentrate nearly his whole force on the centre division, which suffered severely. The flagship of the duke of York, the “Prince” (100), was so shattered that he was compelled to leave her, and go to the “St Michael.” The “Royal James” (100), the flagship of his second in command, the earl of Sandwich, after being much shattered by the Dutch artillery, was set alight by a fire-ship, and destroyed with enormous loss of life. The earl himself perished. His body was picked up three days afterwards, so disfigured that it was only recognized by the star on his coat. The ships at the head of the English line at last tacked to the support of the centre, and at evening De Ruyter drew off. A foolish attempt was made to claim his retreat as a victory, but the allies were too severely damaged to attempt an attack on the Dutch during the rest of the year. The Republic was so hard pressed by the French invasion that it had to land the gunpowder from its ships for the service of its army.

In 1673 the allies made an effort to invade Holland from the sea coast. Prince Rupert replaced the duke of York, who as a Roman Catholic was driven from office by the newly passed Test Act. He was supplied with 54 ships and was joined early in the year by d’Estrées with 27. Soldiers were embarked, and in May the allied fleet stood over to the Dutch coast. The distress of the Republic prevented it from equipping more than 55 ships, but the patriotism of the race was roused to white heat, and in De Ruyter they possessed an admiral of consummate skill and heroic character. He took up an anchorage at Schooneveld and stood on his guard. On the 28th of May Rupert and d’Estrées, believing that De Ruyter was too much afraid of their superior numbers to venture to sea, sent in a squadron of light vessels and fire-ships to attack him, but he took the offensive at once, scattering the light squadron, and falling with energy on the rest of the fleet, which, not being in expectation of a vigorous assault, was taken at a disadvantage. On this occasion the English placed the French in the centre, in order to avoid such a separation as had taken place in the battle at Southwold Bay. But the disposition made no difference in the result. De Ruyter concentrated on the van and centre of the allies, and in spite of his great inferiority of numbers was able to be superior at the point of attack. The allies were compelled to retreat, and De Ruyter, satisfied with having averted the invasion of his country, anchored at West-Kappel.

Seven days later, on the 4th of June, a second encounter took place. The French were now placed in the rear of the line as it engaged. The Dutch admiral, who had the advantage of the wind, fell on the English in the van and centre. His inferiority in numbers did not allow him to push his attack quite home, but he inflicted so much injury that the allies were forced to return to the Thames to refit. At the end of July the allies again appeared off the coast of Holland, bringing four thousand soldiers in the war-ships and two thousand in transports. De Ruyter’s fleet had been raised to 70 vessels, but the allies had also been reinforced and were 90 strong. On the 11th of August the Dutch admiral kept in the shallow waters of the coast looking for a favourable opportunity to attack. On the 11th of August the wind, which had been westerly, turned to the S.E., giving him the weather gage. The French division was leading, and De Ruyter fell furiously upon the English in the centre and rear. The French were kept in play by a small squadron under Bankert, while De Ruyter drove Prince Rupert in the centre out of the line, and in the rear Cornelius van Tromp fought a desperate duel with the English rear division commanded by Sir E. Spragge. The two admirals engaged in a species of personal conflict, and each was compelled to shift his flag to another vessel. While Sir E. Spragge, whose second flagship was shattered by the Dutch fire, was on his way to a third, his boat was sunk by a cannon shot and he was drowned.

The defeat of the allies was undeniable, and a violent quarrel broke out between them. Want of money, and the increasing violence of popular opposition to the French alliance, compelled the king to withdraw from the war. Peace was made in the following spring.

In this war, which presented no features of a creditable kind, the loss to English commerce from Dutch cruisers was so great that it was found necessary to suspend the clause of the navigation act which forbade the purchase of foreign-built vessels.

As England withdrew from her alliance with Louis XIV., the other powers of Europe, frightened by the growth of the aggressive French power, began to come forward to the support of Holland. The coalition then formed continued the struggle till 1678. But the war was conducted mainly on the land. The French king, who knew that his fleet was not as yet capable of meeting the Dutch single-handed, was content to withdraw his ships from the North Sea and the ocean. The Dutch, who had to pay subventions to their German allies, and to support a large army, could spare little for their fleet. For some time they willingly confined themselves to efforts to protect their commerce from French privateers. In 1674 a revolt of the people of Sicily against their Spanish rulers gave the French king an opportunity of seizing the island. Spain, unable to defend its possessions single-handed, appealed to the Dutch for naval help. In September 1675 De Ruyter was sent into the Mediterranean with 18 sail of the line and four fire-ships. The force was inadequate, but it was all that Holland could spare. The Dutch admiral, who was hampered rather than helped by his Spanish allies, did his best to make good his weakness by skilful management. He cruised off Messina to intercept the supplies which were being brought to the French garrison by a fleet of 20 sail under the command of Abraham Duquesne. Conscious that he must spare his small force as much as possible, he abstained from such vigorous attacks as he had made in 1672 and 1673. When Duquesne appeared on the 7th of January 1676 near the Lipari Islands, De Ruyter allowed them to get the weather-gage, and on the 8th of January waited passively for their attack. The French, with more recklessness than was usual with them in later times, bore down on their enemy courageously but in some disorder. Their leading ships were severely mauled, and their whole force so crippled that they could make no pursuit of the Dutch when they drew off, their injured ships being towed by the Spanish galleys, in the late afternoon. Duquesne was able to reach Messina and join the French ships at anchor there. De Ruyter made his way to Palermo, which was in the hands of the Spaniards. One of his vessels sank on the way and he was reduced to 17. It is true that his allies provided him with 10 ships of their own, but the Spanish navy had sunk to abject inefficiency. Their commander, the marquis of Bayona, arrogantly insisted on occupying the centre of the line with his worthless squadron instead of allowing his ships to be scattered among the Dutch for support. When on the 22nd of April the allies, 27 strong, met the fleet of Duquesne, 29 ships, off Agosta, they attacked from windward. De Ruyter, who led the van, was mortally wounded. The Spaniards in the centre behaved very ill, and no victory was gained. The serious fighting was, in fact, confined to the vans of the two fleets. After the battle the allies retired to Syracuse, where De Ruyter died, and where their ships were mostly destroyed by the French a month later. Reinforcements sent out from Holland were stopped in the Straits of Gibraltar and blockaded in Cadiz. The French remained masters of the Mediterranean. In the meantime, however, angry disputes had arisen between France and England. King Louis XIV. enforced his belligerent rights at sea with as much disregard of neutral interests as was shown by England in later times. His naval officers insisted on making prize of all Dutch-built vessels found under the English flag. In 1678 war seemed imminent between France and England. King Louis then withdrew his soldiers from Sicily, and made the peace of Nijmwegen.

Authorities.—For the English side, see Naval History of England, by Thomas Lediard (London, 1735); Memorials of Sir W. Penn, by Grenville Penn (London, 1833); The First Dutch War, 1652-1654, edited by S.R. Gardiner for the Navy Record Society (1899). For the Dutch side: Het Leven un Bedryf van den Heere Michiel de Ruiter, by Gerard Brandt (Amsterdam, 1687); Geschiedenis van den Nederlandsche Zeewegen, by J.C. de Jongke (Haarlem, 1858); Annales des Provinces-Unies, by J. Basnages de Beauval (The Hague, 1726). For the French side; Abraham du Quesne et la marine de son temps, by A. Jal (Paris, 1873). For the small Spanish share; Armada Española, by Captain Cesareo Fernandez Duro (Madrid, 1895-1901). For critical studies of these wars the reader may be referred to Naval Warfare, by Rear-admiral P.H. Colomb (London, 1899), and The Influence of Sea Power upon History, by Captain A.T. Mahan.

(D. H.)

II. Operations on Land

The contemporary military history of Europe included, first, the war between France and Spain, 1654-59, usually called the Spanish Fronde, of which the most notable incident was the great battle of the Dunes fought on the 14th of June 1658 between the French and English under Turenne and the Spaniards under Condé, in which a contingent of Cromwell’s soldiers bore a conspicuous part. About the same time a war was fought in northern Europe (1655-60), celebrated chiefly for the three days’ battle of Warsaw (28th, 29th, 30th July 1656), and the successful invasion of Denmark by the Swedes, carried out from island to island over the frozen sea (February 1658), and culminating in a long siege of Copenhagen (1658-59). Between the second and third wars of England and the United Provinces came the short War of Devolution (1667-68)—a war of sieges in the Low Countries in which the French were commanded chiefly by Turenne. In 1668 the French under Condé made a rapid conquest of Franche-Comté. This was, however, given up at the peace. The war of 1672-78, the first of the three great wars of Louis XIV., was fought on a grander scale.

Invasion of Holland, 1672.—The diplomacy of Louis had, before the outbreak of war, deprived Holland of her allies—England (treaty of Dover, 1670), Sweden (treaty of Stockholm, 1672) and the emperor, and when he declared war on the United Provinces in March 1672, it seemed that the Dutch could offer little resistance. The French army under Louis in person started from Charleroi and marched down the Meuse unopposed. The powerful Dutch fortress of Maastricht was masked, and the French then moved towards Düsseldorf. In the electorate of Cologne they were in friendly country, and the main army soon moved down the Rhine from Düsseldorf, the corps of Turenne on the left bank, that of Condé on the right. At the same time a corps under Marshal Luxemburg, composed of Louis’ German allies (Cologne and Münster) moved from Westphalia towards Over-Yssel and Groningen. The Rhine fortresses offered but little resistance to the advance of Turenne and Condé. William of Orange with a weak field army tried to defend the Yssel-Rhine line, but the French rapidly forced the passage of the Rhine at Tollhuis (June 12th) and passed into the Betuwe (between the Leck and the Waal). Condé now advised a cavalry raid on Amsterdam, but Louis, acting on the suggestion of the war minister Louvois, preferred to reduce Nijmwegen, Gorinchem and other places, before entering Utrecht province. Condé’s plan was, however, partially carried out by Count Rochefort, who with 1800 troopers captured successively Amersfoort and Naarden. His further progress was checked at Muyden, which the Dutch garrisoned in the nick of time, and he returned to the main army, taking Utrecht en route. Louis now moved on Amsterdam, brushing aside the feeble opposition which was offered, and it seemed that the French must achieve their object in one short campaign. But the Dutch people were roused. The month before, the citizens of Utrecht had refused to raze their suburban villas, and defence of the fortifications had consequently been impossible. Now, the dykes were cut and the sluices opened, and Amsterdam was covered by a wide inundation, against which the invader was powerless. At the same time the men of Zealand repulsed a French raid from Ath on Ardenburg, and this infraction of the neutrality of the Spanish Netherlands served but to raise up another enemy for Louis. Luxemburg too, at first successful, was repulsed before Groningen. A revolution placed William of Orange at the head of the government. The alliance of Brandenburg and the Mainz electorate had already been secured, and Spain, justly fearing for the safety of her Flemish possessions, soon joined them. The emperor followed, and Louis was now opposed, not by one state, but by a formidable coalition.

War against the Coalition.—In the autumn the war spread to the Rhine. No attempt could be made on Amsterdam until the ice should cover the floods. Turenne was therefore despatched to Westphalia and Condé to Alsace, while a corps of observation was formed on the Meuse to watch the Spanish Netherlands. But the coalition had not yet developed its full strength, and Turenne’s skill checked the advance of the Imperialists under Montecucculi and of the Brandenburgers under the Great Elector. A war of manœuvre on the middle Rhine ended in favour of the French, and the allies then turned against the territories of Cologne and Münster, while William, disappointed in his hopes of joining forces with his friends, made a bold, but in the end unsuccessful, raid on Charleroi (September-December 1672). The allies in Germany were now not merely checked but driven from point to point by Turenne, who on this occasion displayed a degree of energy rare in the military history of the period. The troops of Cologne and Münster formed part of his army, other friends of Louis were preparing to take the field, and after a severe winter campaign, the elector, defeated in combat and manœuvre, was forced back to the Weser, and being but weakly supported by the Imperialists, found himself compelled to make a separate peace (June 6th, 1673). Turenne then turned his attention to the Imperialists who were assembling in Bohemia, and made ready to meet them at Wetzlar. Meanwhile the other French armies were fully employed. Corps of observation were formed in Roussillon and Lorraine. Condé in Holland was to renew his efforts against the Amsterdam defences; during the winter the demands of the war on the Rhine had reduced the French forces in the provinces to the size of a mere army of occupation. Louis’ own army, originally collected for the relief of Charleroi in December, advanced on Maastricht, and after a brief siege, in which Vauban directed the besiegers, captured this most important fortress (June 29th, 1673). But this was the last success of the French armies in the campaign. Condé made no headway against Amsterdam, and William retook Naarden (September 14th). Louis, after the capture of Maastricht led his army southwards into Lorraine and overran the electorate of Trier. But nothing of importance was gained, and Turenne’s summer campaign was wholly unsuccessful.

Capture of Bonn.—From Wetzlar he moved to Aschaffenburg, Louis at the same time keeping back, for the intended conquest of Franche-Comté, many soldiers who would have been more usefully employed in Germany. Soon the Imperialists advanced in earnest, greatly superior in numbers. Marching via Eger and Nuremberg (September 3rd) on the Main, Montecucculi drew Turenne to the valley of the Tauber; then, having persuaded the bishop of Würzburg to surrender the bridge of that place, he passed to the right bank of the Main before Turenne could intervene. The Imperialists soon arrived at Frankfort, and the French position was turned. Montecucculi thus achieved one of the greatest objects of the 17th century strategist, the wearing down of the enemy in repeated and useless marches. The French retreat to the Rhine was painful and costly, and Montecucculi then passed that river at Mainz and made for Trier. Turenne followed, unable to do more than conform to his opponent’s movements, and took post to defend Trier and Alsace. Thereupon Montecucculi turned northward to meet William of Orange, who evaded Condé’s weak army and marched rapidly via Venló (22nd October) on Coblenz. The elector of Trier, who had not forgotten the depredations of Louis’ army in the spring, followed the example of the bishop of Würzburg and gave a free passage at Coblenz. William and Montecucculi joined forces in the electorate and promptly besieged Bonn. This fortress fell on the 12th of November, and the troops of the coalition gained possession of an unbroken line from Amsterdam to the Breisgau, while Louis’ German allies (Cologne and Münster), now isolated, had to make peace at once. William wintered in Holland, Montecucculi in Cologne and Jülich, and the Spaniards, who had served with William, in their own provinces of the Meuse. A century after the outbreak of the War of Independence the Dutch and the Spaniards are thus found making war as allies, a striking proof of the fact that all questions but those of dynastic interests had been effectually settled by the peace of Westphalia. Louis’ allies were leaving him one by one. The German princes and the empire itself rallied to the emperor, Denmark joined the coalition (January 1674), the Great Elector re-entered the war, and soon afterwards England made peace.

1674.—In 1674 therefore Louis reluctantly evacuated those of the United Provinces occupied by his army. He had derived a considerable revenue from the enemy’s country, and he had moreover quartered his troops without expense. The resources of the French government were almost intact for the coming campaign; the corps of observation in Roussillon was continued, and its commander, Marshal Schomberg, made a successful campaign against the Spaniards, and the war was carried even into Sicily. Condé, in the Spanish Low Countries, opposed with inferior forces the united army of Spaniards, Dutch and Austrians under William, and held the Meuse from Grave to Charleroi on the Sambre. The war in this quarter was memorable for Condé’s last, and William’s first, battle, the desperate and indecisive engagement of Seneffe (August 11th), in which the two armies lost one-seventh of their strength in killed alone. The French, however, in the course of the year lost a few fortresses on the Meuse, including Grave and Huy. The king’s part in the campaign was, as usual, a war of sieges; an army under his personal command overran Franche-Comté in six weeks, and Louis, aided by the genius of Vauban, reduced Besançon in nine days. Turenne’s Rhine campaign began with an invasion of Germany, undertaken to prevent interference with Louis in Franche-Comté. Bournonville, the imperial commander who now replaced Montecucculi, lay in the Cologne and Trier electorates. An army of South Germans in the Breisgau, after an unsuccessful attempt to invade Alsace, moved northward to the Neckar valley with the intention of uniting with Bournonville, who was moving up the Rhine to meet them. Turenne determined to attack the southern army under the duke of Lorraine and Count Caprara before the junction could be effected. He crossed the Rhine at Philipsburg early in June, and on the 16th fell upon the inferior forces of Caprara in their entrenched position of Sinsheim. The result of the battle was a complete victory for the French, who followed up their success by driving a portion of Bournonville’s army (on which the duke of Lorraine had rallied his forces) from the Neckar (action of Ladenburg near Heidelberg, July 7th). Turenne then laid waste the Palatinate, in order that it should no longer support an army, and fell back over the Rhine, ignoring the reproaches of the elector palatine, who vainly challenged him to a duel. This devastation has usually been considered as a grave stain on the character of the commander who ordered it, but Turenne’s conception of duty did not differ in this respect from that of Cromwell, Marlborough, Wellington and the generals of the American Civil War. It was held to be necessary and expedient, and it was accordingly carried out. Bournonville’s army near Frankfort was still to be dealt with, and the Great Elector and his Brandenburgers were rapidly approaching the Main valley. After a slight attempt to invade Lorraine, which Turenne easily stopped, the Imperialists suddenly recrossed the Rhine and marched rapidly into the neighbourhood of the Strassburg bridge.

Turenne’s Winter Campaign in Alsace.—The magistrates of this city were not less amenable than had been the bishop of Würzburg in 1673. Bournonville obtained a free passage, and Turenne was too late to oppose him. The French general, however, determined to fight, as he had done at Sinsheim, to prevent the junction of the two hostile armies. The Great Elector was still in the Neckar valley when the battle of Enzheim (8 m. from Strassburg) was fought on the 4th of October. This time it was indecisive, and Bournonville’s superior forces, soon augmented by the arrival of the elector, spread into Alsace. Turenne steadily retired to his camp of Dettweiler, unable for the moment to do more, and the Germans took up winter quarters in all the towns from Belfort to Strassburg (October-November 1674). But Turenne was preparing for another winter campaign, the most brilliant in the great commander’s career.

First he placed the fortresses of middle Alsace in a state of defence, to deceive the enemy. Then he withdrew the whole of the field army quietly into Lorraine. Picking up on his way such reinforcements as were available, he marched southward with all speed behind the Vosges, and in the last stages of the movement he even split up his forces into many small bodies, that the enemy’s spies might be misled. After a severe march through hilly country and in the midst of snowstorms, the French reunited near Belfort, and without a moment’s delay poured into Alsace from the south. The scattered Imperialists were driven towards Strassburg, every corps which tried to resist being cut off. Bournonville stood to fight at Mülhausen with such forces as he could collect (29th December 1674) but Turenne’s men carried all before them. The advance continued to Colmar, where the elector, who was now in command of the Germans, stood on the defensive with forces equal to Turenne’s own. The battle of Türkheim (5th of January 1675) nevertheless resulted in another and this time a decisive victory for the French; a few days after the battle Turenne could report that there was not a soldier of the enemy left in Alsace. His army now went into winter quarters about Strassburg, and drew supplies from the German bank of the Rhine and even from the Neckar valley (January 1675).

1675.—This opening of the campaign promised well, and Louis as usual took the field as early as possible. In the course of the spring (May-June) the king’s army recaptured some of the lost fortresses of the Meuse and took in addition Liège and Limburg. The expeditionary corps in Sicily also gained some successes in this campaign, and Schomberg invaded Catalonia. On the Rhine was fought the last campaign of Turenne and Montecucculi. The elector having withdrawn his forces to Brandenburg (see Sweden: History), Montecucculi resumed command, and between Philipsburg and Strassburg the two great commanders manœuvred for an advantage, each seeking to cover his own country and to live upon that of the enemy. At last Turenne prevailed and had the Imperialists at a disadvantage on the Sasbach, where, in opening the action, he was killed by a cannon-shot (July 27th). The sequel showed how dependent was even the best organized army of the time upon the personality of its commander.

All the advantages won were hastily surrendered, and Montecucculi, sharply following up the retreat of the French, drove them over the Rhine and almost to the Vosges. At the same time the duke of Lorraine defeated Marshal Créqui (August 11th) at Conzer Brücke on the Moselle, and recaptured Trier (September 6th), which, as a set-off against Bonn, Turenne had taken in the autumn of 1673. The situation was more than alarming for the French, but Condé was destined to achieve a last success—for once a success of careful strategy and prudent manœuvre. Luxemburg was left in charge in Flanders, and the prince took command of the remnant of Turenne’s old army and of the fugitives of Créqui’s. Montecucculi’s skill failed completely to shake his position, and in the end the prince compelled him to retire over the Rhine. Condé and Montecucculi retired from their commands at the close of the year, Turenne was dead, and a younger generation of commanders henceforward carried on the war.

1676.—In 1676 the naval successes of France in the Mediterranean enabled the corps under Marshal Vivonne in Sicily to make considerable progress, and he won an important victory at Messina on the 25th of March. Vivonne was made viceroy of Sicily. Louis himself, with his marshals and Vauban, conducted the campaign in the north. The town of Condé fell on the 26th of April, and the king then manœuvred against the prince of Orange in the neighbourhood of Valenciennes. An attempt made by the latter in the summer to besiege Maastricht was frustrated by Marshal Schomberg with a detachment of the king’s army (August). Rochefort meanwhile covered the Meuse country and Luxemburg. Créqui, who had now returned from captivity (he had been taken after the battle of Conzer Brücke) opposed the Imperialists in Lorraine, but he was unable to prevent the fall of Philipsburg, which occurred on the 17th of September. The French now laid waste the land between the Meuse and Moselle for the same reason which brought about the devastation of the Palatinate in 1674, and the year closed with a war of manœuvre on the upper Rhine between the Imperialists under the duke of Lorraine and the French under Luxemburg.

1677.—The chief event of the campaign of 1677 in the Netherlands was the siege of Valenciennes, which fortress was invested by Louis in the first weeks of the campaigning season. Five marshals of France served under the king in this enterprise, but their advice was of less value than that of Vauban, whose plans the king followed implicitly, even so far as to order an assault de vive force against the unanimous opinion of the marshals. This succeeded beyond Vauban’s own expectation; the picked troops entrusted with the attack of an outwork forced their way into the town itself (March 17th). The success was followed by the siege of St Omer and the defeat of William’s relieving army by the duke of Orleans (battle of Mont Cassel, April 11th, 1677). The summer campaign was a contest of skill between Luxemburg and William, which resulted in favour of the French. The prince of Orange failed in an attempt to take Charleroi, and Marshal D’Humières captured St Ghislain.

In Germany the credit of the French successes was due to Créqui, who was no longer the defeated general of Conzer Brücke, but the most successful of Turenne’s pupils. He began by driving back the duke of Lorraine to the Rhine. Another attempt by the Lorraine family to reconquer their duchy was thus foiled, and at the same time a second imperial army under the duke of Saxe-Eisenach, which had crossed the Rhine by Philipsburg, was shut up in an island of the Rhine and forced to make terms with the French. A large reinforcement sent by the duke of Lorraine to the assistance of Saxe-Eisenach was completely defeated by Créqui in the battle of Kochersberg near Strassburg (October 7th) and the marshal followed up his successes by the capture of Freiburg on the 14th of November. During the year there was a brisk war in the West Indies, and also in Catalonia, where the French maintained the ground won by Schomberg in the previous campaign.

1678.—In 1678 Louis took the field in February. The skilful manœuvres of the French, whether due to Louis’ own generalship or that of his advisers, resulted in the speedy capture of Ghent and Ypres (March), and the retention of the prizes in the usual war of posts which followed. The last battle of the war was fought at St Denis (outside Mons) between William and Luxemburg on the 14th of August, three days after the peace of Nijmwegen had been concluded. William sustained another defeat, but the battle was one of the most fiercely contested of the whole war. On the Rhine, Créqui began by winning the battle of Rheinfelden (July 6th), after which he inflicted upon the Imperialists another defeat at Gengenbach (July 23rd) and took Kehl. In the short campaign of 1679, before France and the empire had concluded peace, he was equally successful.

In Spain the French army under Marshal de Navailles had also made steady progress, and thus the last campaign was wholly in favour of the French. The peace of Nijmwegen gave Louis many of the Netherlands frontier fortresses, and little else. He was threatened by the intervention of England on the side of the coalition, and would have made peace earlier but for his reluctance to abandon his ally Sweden. The French army had, however, well established its reputation. Vauban was unique amongst the officers of his time, and Créqui and Luxemburg were not unworthy successors of Turenne and Condé. The two marshals added to their reputation in the “Reunion War” of 1680-84. Créqui died in 1684 at the age of sixty-one, Luxemburg’s greatest triumph was won ten years later (see Grand Alliance, War of the). Vauban retired from active service as a marshal twenty-five years after the peace of Nijmwegen. But the interest of the war does not reside wholly in the personalities of the leaders. There were great commanders before Turenne and Condé. It is as the début of a new method of military organization and training—the first real test of the standing army as created by Louvois—that the Dutch War of 1672-79 is above all instructive.

(C. F. A.)


Marshal Luxemburg, who was left in command of the army in Holland during the winter of 1672-73, had indeed made a bold attempt to capture Leiden and the Hague by marching a corps from Utrecht across the frozen inundations. But a sudden thaw imperilled his force and he had to make a painful retreat along the dykes to Utrecht. Holland was again inundated in 1673.


DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY, THE (De Westindische Compagnie), a company founded by letters-patent from the Netherlands states-general dated the 3rd of June 1621. The purpose for which the company was formed was to regulate and protect the contraband trade already carried on by the Dutch in the American and African possessions of Spain and Portugal, and to establish colonies on both continents and their islands. By the terms of the charter the company was to be composed of five boards or branches, established in Amsterdam, Zealand, the Meuse (Rotterdam), the North Department (Friesland and Hoorn), and Groningen. Each was to be represented on the general governing board according to the importance of the capital contributed by it. Thus Amsterdam, which contributed four-ninths of the capital, had eight directors on the board. Zealand, which subscribed two-ninths, had four. Rotterdam was represented by two directors, though it only contributed one-ninth. The northern district and Groningen, which each contributed one-ninth, appointed one director each. Another director was appointed by the states-general. In 1629 a ninth representative was given to Amsterdam, and the strength of the whole board was fixed at nineteen.

The company was granted the monopoly of the trade with America and Africa and between them, from the Arctic regions to the Straits of Magellan, and from the Tropic of Cancer to the Cape of Good Hope. The policy the company proposed to follow was to use its monopoly on the coast of Africa in order to secure the cheap and regular supply of negro slaves for the possessions it hoped to acquire in America. The trade was thrown open by the voluntary action of the company in 1638. The general board was endowed with ample power to negotiate treaties, and make war and peace with native princes; to appoint its officials, generals and governors; and to legislate in its possessions subject to the laws of the Netherlands. The states-general undertook to secure the trading rights of the company, and to support it by a subvention of one million guilders (about £100,000). In case of war the states-general undertook to contribute sixteen vessels of 300 tons and upwards for the defence of the company, which, however, was to bear the expense of maintaining them. In return for these aids the states-general claimed a share in the profits, stipulated that the company must maintain sixteen large vessels (300 tons and upwards) and fourteen “yachts” (small craft of 50 to 100 tons or so); required that all the company’s officials should take an oath of allegiance to themselves as well as to the board of directors; and that all despatches should be sent in duplicate to themselves and to the board.

The history of the Dutch West India Company is one of less prosperity than that of the Dutch East India Company. In early days the trade was not sufficient to meet the heavy expense of the armaments raised against Spain and Portugal. A compensation was found in the plunder of Spanish and Portuguese galleons and carracks. In 1628 the company’s admiral Piet Heijn captured a vast booty in the Spanish treasure-ships. But this source of profit was dried up by the success of the company’s cruisers, which destroyed their enemy’s trade. Profit had to be sought in the development of the colonies established on the continent of America. In this field the successes of the company were counterbalanced by not a few failures. The company was never able to secure the control of the supply of slaves from Africa. Its settlement of New Netherland was lost to England. In the West Indies it gained a valuable footing among the islands. It occupied St Eustatius in 1634, Curaçao with Bonaire and Aruba in 1634 and 1635, Saba in 1640 and St Martin in 1648. But its greatest conquests and its greatest losses were alike met on the continent of South America. After a first unsuccessful occupation in 1623 of Bahia, which was immediately retaken by a combined Spanish and Portuguese armament, the company obtained a firm footing in Pernambuco. The story of the wars which arose out of this invasion belongs to the history of Brazil. The company had been largely guided in its policy of assailing the Portuguese possessions by the advice of the Jews, who were numerous in Brazil, and who found means to communicate with their fellows in religion, the refugees in Amsterdam. The most prosperous period of the company was during the tolerant and liberal administration of Count John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen (1636-1644).

The monopolist tendency of all Dutch colonization, the religious hostility of the Roman Catholic Portuguese, and the support given by France and England to Portugal after her revolt from Spain, combined at last to make the position of the company in Brazil untenable. It resigned all claim on the country by the treaty of 1661. But though deprived of its establishment in Brazil, the company found a compensation in Surinam and Essequibo (Dutch Guiana), where there was no Spanish or Portuguese population to resist it, and where the resources of the country offered great profits. The advantages of the settlement in Guiana were not, however, reaped by the company founded in 1621. In 1674 it had become so embarrassed that it was dissolved, and reconstructed in 1675. The newly formed company continued to exploit the Dutch possessions in America till 1794, when they were all swept into the general reorganization consequent on the French invasion of Holland. The West India Company founded after the Napoleonic epoch in 1828 was only meant to develop trade, and was not successful.

Authorities.—P.M. Nitscher, Les Hollandais au Brésil (the Hague, 1853), the work of a Dutch author writing in French. See also Southey, History of Brazil (London, 1810), and E.B. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland (New York, 1846-1848).


DUTENS, LOUIS (1730-1812), French writer, was born at Tours, of Protestant parents, on the 15th of January 1730. He went to London, where his uncle was a jeweller, and there obtained a situation as tutor in a private family. In this position he learnt Greek and mathematics, and studied oriental languages, also Italian and Spanish. He took orders, and was appointed chaplain and secretary to the English minister at the court of Turin in October 1758. In 1760-1762 he was chargé d’affaires at Turin. Lord Bute, before retiring from office in 1763, procured him a pension. He again went to Turin as chargé d’affaires; and during this second mission he collected and published a complete edition of the works of Leibnitz (Geneva, 6 vols., 1768) and wrote his Recherches sur l’origine des découvertes attribuées aux modernes (1766). On his return to England the duke of Northumberland procured him the living of Elsdon, in Northumberland, and made him tutor to his son. In 1775 he became a member of the French Academy of Inscriptions and a fellow of the Royal Society. Dutens was for a third time chargé d’affaires at Turin. He was in Paris in 1783, and returned to London the following year. He died in London on the 23rd of May 1812.

The principal works of Dutens were his Recherches sur l’origine des découvertes attribuées aux modernes (1766, 2 vols.); Appel au bon sens (London, 1777, 8vo), directed in defence of Christianity against the French philosophers, and published anonymously; Explication de quelques médailles de peuples, de rois et de villes grecques et phéniciennes (London, 1773); Explication de quelques médailles du cabinet de Duane (1774); Troisième dissertation sur quelques médailles grecques et phéniciennes (1776); Logique, ou l’art de raisonner (1773); Des pierres précieuses et des pierres fines, avec les moyens de les connaître et de les évaluer (Paris, 1776); Itinéraire des routes les plus fréquentées, ou journal d’un voyage aux principales villes d’Europe (Paris, 1775), frequently republished; Considérations théologiques sur les moyens de réunir toutes les églises chrétiennes (1798); Œuvres mêlées, containing his most important works published up to the date (London, 1797, 4 vols.); L’Ami des étrangers qui voyagent en Angleterre (1789, 8vo); Histoire de ce qui s’est passé pour le rétablissement d’une régence en Angleterre (1789); Recherches sur le tems le plus reculé de l’usage des voûtes chez les anciens (1795); Mémoires d’un voyageur qui se repose (Paris, 1786, 3 vols.). The first two volumes of the last-named work contain the life of the author, written in a romantic style; the third bears the title of Dutensiana, and is filled with remarks, anecdotes and bons mots. (See memoir of Dutens in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1812.)


DUTROCHET, RENÉ JOACHIM HENRI (1776-1847), French physiologist, was born at Château de Néon (Indre) on the 14th of November 1776, and died at Paris on the 4th of February 1847. In 1799 he entered the military marine at Rochefort, but soon left it to join the Vendean army. In 1802 he began the study of medicine at Paris; and he was subsequently appointed chief physician to the hospital at Burgos. After an attack of typhus he returned in 1809 to France, where he devoted himself to the study of the natural sciences. His scientific publications were numerous, and covered a wide field, but his most noteworthy work was embryological. His “Recherches sur l’accroissement et la reproduction des végétaux,” published in the Mémoires du muséum d’histoire naturelle for 1821, procured him in that year the French Academy’s prize for experimental physiology. In 1837 appeared his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire anatomique et physiologique des végétaux et des animaux, a collection of all his more important biological papers.


DUTT, MICHAEL MADHU SUDAN (1824-1873), the greatest native poet of India in the 19th century, was born at Sagandari, in the district of Jessore in Bengal, on the 25th of January 1824. His father was a pleader in Calcutta, and young Madhu Sudan received his education in the Hindu college of Calcutta, and was the foremost among the distinguished young students of his day, many of whom lived to make their mark in the literature and social progress of their country. Madhu Sudan left the college in 1842, and in the following year ran away to avoid a marriage into which his father wished to force him, and embraced the Christian religion. Continuing his studies now in the Bishop’s college, Madhu Sudan learnt Greek and Latin and some modern European languages, and in 1848 went to Madras. There he wrote English verses, and married the daughter of a European indigo-planter, but was soon separated from her. He then united himself with an English lady, the daughter of an educational officer; and she remained true to him through life amidst all his misfortunes, and was the mother of the children he left. With her Madhu Sudan returned to Calcutta in 1856, and soon discovered that the true way for winning literary distinction was by writing in his own language, not by composing verses in English. His three classical dramas—Sarmishtha, Padmavati, and Krishna Kumari—appeared between 1858 and 1861, and were recognized as works of merit. But his great ambition was to introduce blank verse into Bengali. His knowledge of Sanskrit poetry, his appreciation of the Greek and Latin epics, and his admiration of Dante and of Milton, impelled him to break through the fetters of the Bengali rhyme, and to attempt a spirited and elevated style in blank verse. His first poem in blank verse, the Tilottama, was only a partial success; but his great epic which followed in 1861, the Meghanad-Badha, took the Indian world by surprise, and at once established his reputation as the greatest poet of his age and country. He took his story from the old Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, but the beauty of the poem is all his own, and he imparted to it the pathos and sweetness of Eastern ideas combined with the vigour and loftiness of Western thought. In 1862 Madhu Sudan left for Europe. He lived in England for some years, and was called to the bar; and in 1867 returned to his country to practise as a barrister in Calcutta. But the poet was unfitted for a lawyer’s vocation; his liabilities increased, his health failed, his powers declined. He still wrote much, but nothing of enduring merit. His brilliant but erratic life ended in a Calcutta hospital on the 29th of June 1873.


DUTY (from “due,” that which is owing, O. Fr. deu, dû, past participle of devoir; Lat. debere, debitum; cf. “debt”), a term loosely applied to any action or course of action which is regarded as morally incumbent, apart from personal likes and dislikes or any external compulsion. Such action must be viewed in relation to a principle, which may be abstract in the highest sense (e.g. obedience to the dictates of conscience) or based on local and personal relations. That a father and his children have mutual duties implies that there are moral laws regulating their relationship; that it is the duty of a servant to obey his master within certain limits is part of a definite contract, whereby he becomes a servant engaging to do certain things for a specified wage. Thus it is held that it is not the duty of a servant to infringe a moral law even though his master should command it. For the nature of duty in the abstract, and the various criteria on which it has been based, see Ethics.

From the root idea of obligation to serve or give something in return, involved in the conception of duty, have sprung various derivative uses of the word; thus it is used of the services performed by a minister of a church, by a soldier, or by any employee or servant. A special application is to a tax, a payment due to the revenue of a state, levied by force of law. Properly a “duty” differs from a “tax” in being levied on specific commodities, transactions, estates, &c., and not on individuals; thus it is right to talk of import-duties, excise-duties, death-or succession-duties, &c., but of income-tax as being levied on a person in proportion to his income.


DU VAIR, GUILLAUME (1556-1621), French author and lawyer, was born in Paris on the 7th of March 1556. Du Vair was in orders, and, though during the greater part of his life he exercised only legal functions, he was from 1617 till his death bishop of Lisieux. His reputation, however, is that of a lawyer, a statesman and a man of letters. He became in 1584 counsellor of the parlement of Paris, and as deputy for Paris to the Estates of the League he pronounced his most famous politico-legal discourse, an argument nominally for the Salic law, but in reality directed against the alienation of the crown of France to the Spanish infanta, which was advocated by the extreme Leaguers. Henry IV. acknowledged his services by entrusting him with a special commission as magistrate at Marseilles, and made him master of requests. In 1595 appeared his treatise De l’éloquence française et des raisons pour quoi elle est demeurée si basse, in which he criticizes the orators of his day, adding by way of example some translations of the speeches of ancient orators, which reproduce the spirit rather than the actual words of the originals. He was sent to England in 1596 with the marshal de Bouillon to negotiate a league against Spain; in 1599 he became first president of the parlement of Province (Aix); and in 1603 was appointed to the see of Marseilles, which he soon resigned in order to resume the presidency. In 1616 he received the highest promotion open to a French lawyer and became keeper of the seals. He died at Tonneins (Lot-et-Garonne) on the 3rd of August 1621. Both as speaker and writer he holds a very high rank, and his character was equal to his abilities. Like other political lawyers of the time, Du Vair busied himself not a little in the study of philosophy. The most celebrated of his treatises are La Philosophie morale des Stoïques, translated into English (1664) by Charles Cotton; De la constance et consolation ès calamités publiques, which was composed during the siege of Paris in 1589, and applied the Stoic doctrine to present misfortunes; and La Sainte Philosophie, in which religion and philosophy are intimately connected. Pierre Charron drew freely on these and other works of Du Vair. F. de Brunetière points out the analogy of Du Vair’s position with that afterwards developed by Pascal, and sees in him the ancestor of the Jansenists. Du Vair had a great indirect influence on the development of style in French, for in the south of France he made the acquaintance of Malherbe, who conceived a great admiration for Du Vair’s writings. The reformer of French poetry learned much from the treatise De l’éloquence française, to which the counsels of his friend were no doubt added.

Du Vair’s works were published in folio at Paris in 1641. See Nicéron, Mémoires, vol. 43; and monographs by C.A. Sapey (1847 and 1858).


Translated into English by Andrew Comt in 1622 as A Buckler against Adversitie.


DUVAL, ALEXANDRE VINCENT PINEUX (1767-1842), French dramatist, was born at Rennes on the 6th of April 1767. He was in turn sailor, architect, actor, theatrical manager and dramatist. He is the characteristic dramatist of the Empire, but the least ambitious of his dramas have best stood the test of time. Les Projets de ménage (1790), Les Tuteurs vengés (1794) and Les Héritiers (1796) have been revived on the modern French stage. Others among his plays, which number more than sixty, are Le Menuisier de Livonie (1805), La Manie des grandeurs (1817) and Le Faux Bonhomme (1821). In 1812 he was elected to the Academy. He died on the 1st of September 1842.


DUVAL, CLAUDE (1643-1670), a famous highwayman, was born at Domfront, Normandy, in 1643. Having entered domestic service in Paris, he came to England at the time of the Restoration in attendance on the duke of Richmond, and soon became a highwayman notorious for the daring of his robberies no less than for his gallantry to ladies. Large rewards were offered for his capture, and he was at one time compelled to seek refuge in France. In the end he was captured in London, and hanged at Tyburn on the 21st of January 1670. His body was buried in the centre aisle of Covent Garden church, under a stone with the following epitaph:—

“Here lies Du Vall: Reader if male thou art,

Look to thy purse: if female to thy heart.”

A full account of his adventures, ascribed to William Pope, was reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany, and Samuel Butler published a satirical ode To the Happy Memory of the Most Renowned Du Val.


DUVENECK, FRANK (1848- ), American figure and portrait painter, was born at Covington, Kentucky, on the 9th of October 1848. He was a pupil of Diez in the Royal Academy of Munich, and a prominent member of the group of Americans who in the ’seventies overturned the traditions of the Hudson River School and started a new art movement. His work shown in Boston and elsewhere about 1875 attracted great attention, and many pupils flocked to him in Germany and Italy, where he made long visits. After returning from Italy to America, he gave some attention to sculpture, and modelled a fine monument to his wife, now in the English cemetery in Florence.


DU VERGIER DE HAURANNE, JEAN (1581-1643), abbot of St Cyran, father of the Jansenist revival in France, was born of wealthy parents at Bayonne in 1581, and studied theology at the Flemish university of Louvain. After taking holy orders he settled in Paris, where he became known as a mine of miscellaneous erudition. In 1609 he distinguished himself by his Question royale, an elaborate answer to a problem casually thrown out by King Henry IV. as to the exact circumstances under which a subject ought to give his life for his sovereign. His learning was presently diverted into a more profitable channel. The Louvain of his time was the scene of many conflicts between the Jesuit party, which stood for scholasticism and Church-authority, and the followers of Michael Baius (q.v.), who upheld the mysticism of St Augustine. Into this controversy Du Vergier was presently dragged by his friendship with Cornelius Jansen, a young champion of the Augustinian party, who had come to Paris to study Greek. The two divines went off together to Du Vergier’s home at Bayonne, where he became a canon of the cathedral, and Jansen a tutor in the bishop’s seminary. Here they remained some years, intently studying the fathers. Eventually, however, Jansen went back to Louvain, while Du Vergier became confidential secretary to the bishop of Poitiers, and was presently made sinecure abbot of St Cyran. Thereafter he was generally called M. de St Cyran. At Poitiers he was brought into contact with Richelieu—as yet unknown to political fame, and simply the zealous young bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Luçon. Western Touraine being the headquarters of French Protestantism, the two prelates turned St Cyran’s learning against the Huguenots. He began to dream of reforming Catholicism on Augustinian lines, and thus defeating the Protestants by their own weapons. They appealed to primitive antiquity; he answered that his Church understood antiquity better than theirs. They appealed to the spirit of St Paul; he answered that Augustine had saved that spirit from etherealizing away, by coupling it with a high sacramental theory of the Church. They flung practical abuses in the teeth of Rome; he entered on a bold campaign to bring those abuses to an end. Before long, his reforming zeal involved him in many quarrels—so much so that he left Poitiers and settled down in Paris. Here he became widely known as a director of consciences, forming a particular friendship with the influential Arnauld family. But his general projects of reform were by no means allowed to sleep, though here he worked hand in hand with his old friend Jansen. Both traced the evils of their time to the Jesuits and Schoolmen. Their dialectic had corrupted theology; their hand-to-mouth utilitarianism had played havoc with traditional church-institutions. Accordingly, Jansen set to work to remedy one evil by writing a big book on St Augustine, the great master of theological method. St Cyran dealt with the other evil in an equally bulky treatise, the Petrus Aurelius (1633). This indicts the Jesuits for every sort and kind of misdemeanour. It deals much with what Pascal will presently call their dévotion aisée; but still more with crimes of a technical sort, especially their defiance of episcopal authority. Thereby the book gained for its author’s projects of reform a great deal of Gallican support. On the other hand, it gave much annoyance to Richelieu, now the all-powerful and extremely Erastian prime minister. After failing more than once to stop St Cyran’s mouth with a bishopric, he had him arrested as a disturber of ecclesiastical peace (14th of March 1638). He remained shut up in the castle of Vincennes until Richelieu’s death (December 1642). Then he was at once set free; but the long imprisonment had told heavily on his health, and he died of a stroke of apoplexy in October 1643.

St Cyran’s character has been always something of a puzzle. Many excellent contemporary judges were profoundly impressed; others, as one of them said, went away bewildered by this strange abbé, who never argued a question out, but leapt from one point to another in broken, incoherent phrases. Grace of expression he had none; perhaps no man of equal spiritual insight ever found it so hard to make his meaning clear, whether on paper or by word of mouth. On the other hand, Jansenism, considered as a practical religious revival, is altogether his work. He dragged the Augustinian mysticism out of the Louvain classrooms, and made it a vital spiritual force in France. Without him there would have been no Pascal—no Provincial Letters, and no Pensées.

There is an excellent life of St Cyran by his secretary, Claude Lancelot, published at Cologne in two volumes, 1738. A selection of his Lettres chrestiennes was edited by his disciple, Robert Arnauld d’Andilly (Paris, 1645). An entirely different collection of Lettres spirituelles was printed at Cologne in 1744.

(St C.)


DUVEYRIER, HENRI (1840-1892), French explorer of the Sahara, was born in Paris on the 28th of February 1840. His youth was spent partly in London, where he met Heinrich Barth, then preparing the narrative of his travels in the western Sudan. At the age of nineteen Duveyrier, who had already learnt Arabic, began a journey in the northern parts of the Sahara which lasted nearly three years. On returning to France he received, in 1863, the gold medal of the Paris Geographical Society, and in 1864 published Exploration du Sahara: les Touareg du nord. In the war of 1870 he was taken prisoner by the Germans. Subsequently he made several other journeys in the Sahara, adding considerably to the knowledge of the regions immediately south of the Atlas, from the eastern confines of Morocco to Tunisia. He also examined the Algerian and Tunisian shats and explored the interior of western Tripoli. Duveyrier devoted special attention to the customs and speech of the Tuareg, with whom he lived for months at a time, and to the organization of the Senussi. In 1881 he published La Tunisie, and in 1884 La Confrérie musselmane de Sidi Mohammed Ben Alî-Es-Senôusi et son domaine géographique. He died at Sevres on the 25th of April 1892.


DUX (Czech Duchcov), a town of Bohemia, Austria, 86 m. N.N.W. of Prague by rail. Pop. (1900) 11,921, three-fourths German. It is situated in the centre of an extensive and well-worked lignite deposit and manufactures glass, porcelain and earthenware. In Dux is a castle belonging to Count Waldstein, a kinsman of Wallenstein, which contains a picture gallery with two portraits of Wallenstein by Van Dyck, and a museum with a collection of arms and armour and several relics of the great general.


DUXBURY, a township of Plymouth county, Massachusetts, on Massachusetts Bay, 36 m. S.S.E. of Boston. Pop. (1890) 1908; (1905, state census) 2028. Area, 25.5 sq. m. Duxbury is served by the Old Colony system of the New York, New Haven & Hartford railway. In the township are the villages of Duxbury, South Duxbury, West Duxbury, North Duxbury, Island Creek and Millbrook. The soil is sandy, the surface of the country well wooded and broken by a number of ponds and creeks. Duxbury is a summer resort, with a large hotel at Standish Shore. Duxbury has a public library, and is the seat of the Powder Point school for boys, and Partridge Academy, founded in 1828 by a bequest of $10,000 from George Partridge of Duxbury, and incorporated in 1830. On Captain’s Hill is the Standish Monument (begun in 1872), a circular tower, on an octagonal base, of rough Hallowell granite, surmounted by a statue of Miles Standish, 124 ft. from the ground. The Standish house, built in 1666 by Miles’s son, Alexander, is still in existence. In South Duxbury is an old burying ground, in which the oldest marked grave is that of Jonathan Alden (d. 1697), son of John Alden. For many years there were important cod and mackerel fisheries here and Duxbury clams were famous; there were large shipyards in Duxbury in the 18th century and in the first half of the 19th. At present cranberries are the only product of importance. The first settlement was made here in 1631 by Miles Standish (to whom Captain’s Hill was granted), William Brewster, John Alden, and a few others. In 1632 a church was organized and the present name was adopted from Duxbury Hall, Lancashire, the old seat of the Standish family; the Indian name had been Mattakeeset. The township was incorporated in 1637; it originally included Bridgewater and parts of Pembroke and Kingston.

See Justin Winsor, History of Duxbury (Boston, 1849); and Laurence Bradford, Historic Duxbury in Plymouth County (Boston, 1900).


DVINA, the name of two rivers of European Russia.

1. The Northern Dvina, or Dvina Syevernaya, belongs to the basin of the White Sea, and is formed by the junction of the Sukhona and the Yug, which, rising, the former in the south-west and the latter in the south-east of the government of Vologda, meet in the neighbourhood of Velikiy-Ustyug, at a height of 300 ft. above the sea, in 61° 20′ N. and 46° 20′ E. The conjoint stream then flows N.W. to the Gulf of Archangel, which it reaches 50 m. below the city of Archangel. From its mouth to the confluence of the co-tributary streams the distance is about 470 m., and to the source of the Sukhona 780 m. The drainage area is estimated at 141,000 sq. m. Except at the rapids the current of the Dvina is comparatively slow, as the average fall per mile is only 9 in. Till its union with the Vychegda, a river which exceeds it in volume, it flows for the most part in a single, well-defined and permanent channel; but below that point it often splits into several branches, and not infrequently alters its course. In the neighbourhood of Archangel it divides into three distinct arms, which form a regular delta; but of these that of Berezov alone is navigable for sea-going vessels, and even it is impeded by a bar at the mouth, with not more than 14½ or 15½ ft. of water at full tide. Just above the point where the delta begins the river is joined by a large tributary, the Pinega, from the right. Above the confluence of the Vychegda the breadth is about 1750 ft.; below that point it widens out to 3500 ft.; and near Archangel it attains more than three times that measure. The channel is free from ice for about 174 days in the year. By means of the Duke Alexander of Württemberg Canal, the river is connected with the Neva and the Volga.

2. The Southern Dvina, or Dvina Zapadnaya, in German Düna and in Lettish Daugava, belongs to the Baltic basin, and takes its rise in a small lake about 800 ft. above the level of the sea, in the government of Tver, not far from the sources of the Volga and the Dnieper. After dividing Tver in part from Pskov in part, it skirts the east and south of the government of Vitebsk, separates part of the latter from Vilna, and then divides Vitebsk and Livonia from Courland, and disembogues in the southern end of the Gulf of Riga. Its length is 640 m. and it drains an area of 32,960 sq. m. From Dvinsk (Dünaburg) to Riga, a distance of 135 m., there is altogether a fall of 295 ft., of which 105 ft. are in the 40 m. from Jakobstadt to Friedrichstadt. In the lower part of its course the river attains an ordinary depth of 30 ft. and an average breadth of 1400 ft.; but during the spring flood it sometimes rises 14 ft. above its usual level, and its waters spread out to a mile in width. Near the mouth the river is usually free from ice for 245 days in the year, and in the government of Vitebsk for 229. It is navigable from the confluence of the Mezha (i.e. from Vitebsk) downwards, but the number of rapids and shallows greatly diminishes its value. Navigation can also be carried on by the following tributaries: the Usvyat, Mezha, Kasplya, Ulla, Disna and Bolder-aa. This river was formerly called the Khezin or Turunt, and at the present day it has the name of Polot among the White Russians. Salmon and lampreys abound in its waters.

(P. A. K.; J. T. Be.)


DVINSK, the official name since 1893 of Dünaburg, a town and fortress of western Russia, in the government of Vitebsk, 162 m. by rail N.W. of the city of Vitebsk, on the right bank of the Dvina (Düna), in 55° 53′ N. and 26° 23′ E., and at the intersection of two main railway lines—Riga-Smolensk and Vilna-St Petersburg. It is the chief strategic position for the defence of the Dvina. It consists of four portions—the main town, or fortress, the old suburb, the new suburb, and on the left bank of the river the village of Griva. Among the industrial establishments are tanneries and breweries, saw-mills, flour-mills, brick and tile works and limekilns. The town is an important commercial centre, especially for flax, hemp, tallow and timber. The population increased from 25,764 in 1860 to 72,231 in 1900, consisting chiefly of Jews (about 30,000), Lithuanians and Letts.

Dünaburg was originally founded in 1278 by the Livonian Knights of the Sword, about 12 m. farther down the river than its present site, at a spot still known as the Old Castle or Stariy Zamok. In 1559 it was mortgaged by the grand-master of the Knights to Sigismund Augustus, king of Poland. Although captured in 1576 by Ivan the Terrible of Russia, it was again restored to Poland; and in 1582 Stephen Bathori, king of Poland, transferred the fortress to its present site. In the 17th century it was held alternately by the Swedes and the Russians. It was finally incorporated with Russia in 1772 on the first division of Poland. In July 1812 the tête-de-pont was vainly stormed by the French under Oudinot, but a few weeks afterwards the town was captured by them under Macdonald.


DVOŘÁK, ANTON (1841-1904), Bohemian musical composer, born at Nelahozeves (otherwise Mühlhausen) in Bohemia on the 8th of September 1841, was the son of Frantisek Dvořák, a small publican and village butcher. At the door of his father’s inn Dvořák first appeared as a practical musician, taking his place among the fiddlers who scraped out their “furiants” and other wild dances for the benefit of the holiday-making local beaux and belles. At the village school he learnt from Josef Spitz both to sing and to play the violin, with so much effect that soon he was able to assist in the parish church services. At twelve years old he was sent by his father to Zlonic, near Schlan, to an uncle, with whom he lived while passing through the higher-grade classes at school. Here, too, he was fortunate enough to find a valuable friend in A. Liehmann, organist and chief musician of the little town, a competent musician, who instructed the boy in elementary theory, organ and pianoforte playing. The theory studies, however, could not long be continued, since Liehmann soon acknowledged in his own dialect that the boy was extraordinarily full of promise (“Aus Tonda, dem Sappermentsbuben ’mal ’was werden könnte”), at the same time realizing that he could not do much to assist. But Dvořák soon left Zlonic for Böhmisch-Kamnitz, where he learnt German and advanced his musical studies under Hancke. A year later he was summoned to return to Zlonic to assist his father, who had set up in business there. But his craving for a musical career was not to be checked, and after considerable trouble with his father consent was obtained to his settling in Prague in order to devote himself entirely to music.

In October 1857 Dvořák entered the organ-school of the Gesellschaft der Kirchenmusik, where he worked for three years. The small financial aid his father was at first able to lend soon ceased, and after being in Prague but a few months Dvořák found himself practically thrown on his own resources. By playing the viola in a private orchestra and in various inns of the town he succeeded in obtaining a precarious livelihood. On the opening in 1862 of the Bohemian Interimstheater, Dvořák, with part of this band, formed the nucleus of the theatrical orchestra, and remained connected with it for eleven years, when he became organist of the church of St Adalbert. At this time his small stipend was augmented slightly by the fees of a few pupils, though the privations suffered by him and his wife (for he had recently married) must have been great. But in spite of financial worry and of the amount of time he had to devote to his professional duties and private pupils, Dvořák found leisure not only for his own studies of the classics, but also to compose. His work, like his daily life, was beset with difficulties, for he had not the means to provide himself with sufficient music-paper, much less to hire a pianoforte; and it is possible that several of his important early works would never have been written had it not been for the generosity of Karel Bendl, the composer, who helped him in many ways.

Dvořák himself said afterwards that he retained no recollection of much that he then composed. In and about 1864 two symphonies, a host of songs, some chamber-music, and an entire opera, Alfred, lay unheard in his desk. The libretto of this opera was made up from materials found in an old almanack. Most of these works were burnt long ago. In 1873 he made his first bid for popularity by his patriotic hymn Die Erben des weissen Berges (published many years later as Op. 30). Its reception was enthusiastic, and Dvořák’s subsequent works were eagerly awaited and warmly received on production. In 1874 his opera König und Köhler resulted in a fiasco at Prague, owing to its mixture of styles. Nothing daunted, Dvořák recomposed the whole work in three months. In 1875, on the recommendation of Brahms and Hanslick, he obtained a stipend from the Kultus-Ministerium at Vienna, which freed him from care and enabled him to indulge in composition to his heart’s content. Following on this success came a commission in 1877 for a series of Slavic dances, which took the public by storm. Immediately compositions, old and new, began to pour from the publisher. English sympathy was entirely won by the Stabat Mater in 1883, and increased by the symphonies in D, D mi., and F, G, and E mi. (The American), and the cantata The Spectre’s Bride, based on K.J. Erben’s elaboration of the Bohemian version of the saga treated in Burger’s Leonore. The favourable effect produced by these works was somewhat chilled by the oratorio St Ludmila, a comparatively feeble work written “to suit English taste” for the Leeds Festival of 1886. The three overtures Opp. 91, 92, 93, failed to hold their place, but the pseudo-American symphony has become one of Dvořák’s most popular works, and much of his chamber-music, of which there is abundance, seems quite permanent in its place in concert programmes. In 1892, after having frequently visited England, Dvořák became head of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York. There he remained till 1895, when he returned to Prague, where he died on the 1st of May 1904.

Dvořák’s music is characteristically national, though less purely so than that of Smetana. But in spite of his industry and dramatic talent not one of his operas has been really successful. A master of the orchestra and a composer of real individuality, he earned and deserved his place among the elect, not only by his great gifts, but by his abnormal energy in their development.

See W.H. Hadow, Studies in Modern Music (second series, 1908).


DWARAKA, Dwarka, or Jigat, a town of British India, in Baroda state, near the extremity of the peninsula of Kathiawar, Bombay. Pop. (1901) 7535. As the birthplace and residence of Krishna, it is the most sacred spot in this part of India, and its principal temple is visited annually by many thousand pilgrims. The approach from the sea is by a fine flight of stone steps, and the great spire rises to a height of 150 ft.


DWARF (A.S. dweorg, D. dwerg, Icel. dvergr), the term generally used to describe an extraordinarily under-sized individual of a race of normal stature (for dwarf-races see Pygmy.) In Scandinavian mythology the word connoted smallness and deformity, and was used of the elfins and goblins who were supposed to live on the mountains or in the bowels of the earth, and to be kings of metals and mines. The later use of the word certainly does not imply deformity, for many of the dwarfs of history have been singularly graceful and well formed. Dwarfishness is, however, often accompanied by disproportion of the limbs.

From the earliest historic times dwarfs attracted attention, and there was much competition on the part of kings and the wealthy to obtain the little folk as attendants. It is certain that members of the tiny Akka race of Equatorial Africa figured at the courts of the Pharaohs of the early dynasties and were much valued. Philetas of Cos, poet and grammarian (circa 330 B.C.), tutor of Ptolemy Philadelphus, was alleged to be so tiny that he had to wear leaden shoes lest he should be blown away. The Romans practised artificial dwarfing, and the Latin nanus or pumilo were terms alternatively used to describe the natural and unnatural dwarf. Julia, the niece of Augustus, had a dwarf named Coropas 2 ft. 4 in. high, and a freed-maid Andromeda who measured the same.

Various recipes for dwarfing children have been from time to time in vogue. The most effective, according to report, was to anoint the backbone with the grease of moles, bats and dormice. The stunting of the growth of stable-boys who aspire to jockey’s honours is in no sense true dwarfing.

In later days there have been many dwarf-favourites at European courts. British tradition has its earliest dwarf mentioned in the old ballad which begins “In Arthur’s court Tom Thumb did live”; and on this evidence the prototype of the modern Tom Thumb is alleged to have lived at the court of King Edgar. Of authentic English dwarfs the first appears to be John Jarvis (2 ft. high), who was page to Queen Mary I. Her brother Edward VI. had his dwarf Xit. But the first English dwarf of whom there is anything like an authentic history is Jeffery Hudson (1619-1682). He was the son of a butcher at Oakham, Rutlandshire, who kept and baited bulls for George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham. Neither of Jeffery’s parents was under-sized, yet at nine years he measured scarcely 18 in., though he was gracefully proportioned. At a dinner given by the duke to Charles I. and his queen he was brought in to table in a pie out of which he stepped, and was at once adopted by Henrietta Maria. The little fellow followed the fortunes of the court in the Civil War, and is said to have been a captain of horse, earning the nickname of “strenuous Jeffery” for his activity. He fought two duels—one with a turkey-cock, a battle recorded by Davenant, and a second with Mr Crofts, who came to the meeting with a squirt, but who in the more serious encounter which ensued was shot dead by little Hudson, who fired from horseback, the saddle putting him on a level with his antagonist. Twice was Jeffery made prisoner—once by the Dunkirkers as he was returning from France, whither he had been on homely business for the queen; the second time was when he fell into the hands of Turkish pirates. His sufferings during this latter captivity made him, he declared, grow, and in his thirtieth year, having been of the same height since he was nine, he steadily increased until he was 3 ft. 9 in. At the Restoration he returned to England, where he lived on a pension granted him by the duke of Buckingham. He was later accused of participation in the “Popish Plot,” and was imprisoned in the Gate House. He was released and shortly after died in the sixty-third year of his age.

Contemporary with Hudson were the two other dwarfs of Henrietta Maria, Richard Gibson and his wife Anne. They were married by the queen’s wish; and the two together measured only 2 in. over 7 ft. They had nine children, five of whom, who lived, were of ordinary stature. Edmund Waller celebrated the nuptials, Evelyn designated the husband as the “compendium of a man,” and Lely painted them hand in hand. Gibson was miniature painter to Charles I., and drawing-master to the daughters of James II., Queens Mary and Anne, when they were children. This Cumberland pygmy, who began his career as a page, first in a “gentle,” next in the royal family, died in 1690, in his seventy-fifth year, and is buried in St Paul’s, Covent Garden. The last court dwarf in England was Coppernin, a lively little imp in the service of the princess (Augusta) of Wales, the mother of George III. The last dwarf retainer in a gentleman’s family was the one kept by Mr Beckford, the author of Vathek and builder of Fonthill. He was rather too big to be flung from one guest to another, as used to be the custom at dinners in earlier days when a dwarf was a “necessity” for every noble family.

Of European court dwarfs the most famous were those of Philip IV. of Spain, the hunchbacks whose features have been immortalized by Velazquez. Stanislas, king of Poland, owned Nicholas Ferry (Bébé), who measured 2 ft. 9 in. He was one of three dwarf children of peasant parents in the Vosges. He died in his 23rd year (1764). But Bébé was not so remarkable as Richebourg, who died in Paris in 1858, at the age of 90. He was only 23 in. high. He began life as a servant in the Orleans family. In later years he was their pensioner. He is said to have been put to strange use in the Revolution—passing in and out of Paris as an infant in a nurse’s arms, but with despatches, dangerous to carry, in the little man’s baby-wrappings!

Of dwarfs exhibited in England, the most celebrated was the Pole, Borulwaski (1739-1837). At six he measured 17 in., and he finally in his thirtieth year reached 39 in. He had a sister shorter than himself by the head and shoulders. Borulwaski was a handsome man, a wit, and something of a scholar. He travelled over all Europe; and he—born in the reign of George II.—died in his well-earned retirement near Durham, in the reign of Victoria. Borulwaski lies buried at Durham by the side of the Falstaffian Stephen Kemble. The companionship reminds one of that of the dwarf skeleton of Jonathan Wild by the side of that of the Irish Giant, at the Royal College of Surgeons, London.

In the year in which Borulwaski died, Charles Stratton, better known as “General Tom Thumb,” was born. When twenty-five he was 31 in. high. In 1844 he appeared in England, where he had an extraordinary success. One result of his season at the Egyptian Hall, London, was to kill Haydon the painter. The latter presented his great work “The Banishment of Aristides” for exhibition in the same building. The public rushed to see the dwarf. He took £600 the first week, while Haydon’s masterpiece drew but £7, 13s. The result was that the artist committed suicide in despair. After extensive travel in both hemispheres, Stratton again visited England in 1857, but the dwarf man, despite many personal and intellectual qualities, was less attractive than the dwarf boy. In the year 1863 the “General” married the very minute American lady, Lavinia Warren (born in 1842). He died on the 15th of July 1883.

Other modern dwarfs include Signor Hervio Nano, who played at the Olympic Theatre, London, in 1843; three Highlanders named MacKinlay, children of a Scots shepherd, the shortest of whom was 45 in.; a Spaniard, Don Francisco Hidalgo (29 in.); a Dutchman, Jan Hannema (28 in.); and Mary Jane Youngman (Australia), who at fifteen was 35 in. high. She was called the “dwarf-giantess” because she was 3 ft. 6 in. round the shoulders, 4 ft. 3 in. round the waist, and 2 ft. round the leg. Much interest was aroused by the so-called Aztec dwarfs who were exhibited in London in 1853. In 1867 the pair were married, the ceremony being publicly performed, and the bride’s robes are said to have cost no less than £2000. The wedding-breakfast was held at Willis’s Rooms. From time to time other dwarfs have been exhibited, among whom the most remarkable has been Che-mah, a Chinese, 42 years old and 25 in. high, who appeared in London in 1880. George Prout (1774-1851), who was less than 3 ft. high, was a well-known character in London in the early Victorian period, as a messenger at the Houses of Parliament.

See E.J. Wood, Giants and Dwarfs (1860).


DWARS, a tract of country in north-east India. It consists of two divisions, the Western Dwars and the Eastern Dwars, both of which belonged to Bhutan prior to the Bhutan War of 1864-65, as a result of which they passed into possession of the British, when the Eastern Dwars were assigned to Assam and the Western to Bengal. Since 1905 both divisions have been in the province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. The five Eastern Dwars, entitled respectively Bijni, Sidli, Chirang, Ripu and Guma, are situated in the Goalpara district of Eastern Bengal and Assam, forming a strip of flat country lying beneath the Bhutan mountains. It is an unhealthy country for natives as well as Europeans, and is but slightly developed. The Western Dwars form a region lying at the foot of the Himalayas in the north-east of the Jalpaiguri district of Eastern Bengal and Assam, which comprises nine parganas, namely, Bhalka, Bhatibari, Baxa, Chakao-Kshattriya, Madari, Lakshmipur, Maraghat, Mainaguri and Chengmari. The Western Dwars are an important centre of the tea-planting industry.


DWIGHT, JOHN (d. 1703), the first distinguished English potter. One can only surmise as to his parentage, and the date of his birth has been variously given from 1637 to 1640. Apparently he was educated at Oxford, and in 1661 was appointed registrar and scribe to the diocese of Chester, and the same year he proceeded to the degree of B.C.L. of Christ Church, Oxford. He resided at Chester for some time and acted as secretary to four successive bishops. One of these, Bishop Hall, also held the rectory of Wigan, Lancashire, and Dwight seems to have resided in that town, for three of his children were baptized there between 1667 and 1671. In 1671, while he still apparently resided in Wigan, he was granted his first patent for “the mistery of transparent earthenware, commonly known by the names of porcelain or china, and of stoneware, vulgarly called Cologne ware.” It is not believed that much, if any, work was executed at Wigan, and he probably removed to Fulham in 1672 or 1673, as his name first appears on the rate books of Fulham, where he was rated for a house in Bear Street, in 1674. He died in 1703, and his business was carried on by his descendants for some time, but with gradually diminishing success. It has been claimed that Dwight made the first porcelain in England, but there is no proof of this, though magnificent specimens of stoneware from his hands are in existence. The British Museum contains a number of the best of Dwight’s pieces, of which the finest is the bust of Prince Rupert. Other specimens are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and they are sufficient to establish Dwight’s fame as a potter of the first rank. (See Ceramics.)


DWIGHT, JOHN SULLIVAN (1813-1893), American writer on music, was born at Boston and educated at Harvard. He became a Unitarian minister, but abandoned this career and joined the Brook Farm settlement as a teacher of music and other subjects. In 1848 he settled as a musical critic at Boston, being best known as founder and editor of the Journal of Music (1852-1881), the most important musical periodical that has been published in America. He died on the 5th of September 1893.

G.W. Cooke edited his letters (1898) and also wrote a memoir (1899).


DWIGHT, THEODORE WILLIAM (1822-1892), American jurist and educationalist, cousin of Theodore Dwight Woolsey and of Timothy Dwight, was born on the 18th of July 1822 in Catskill, New York. His father, Benjamin Woolsey Dwight (1780-1850), an abolitionist and reformer, removed to Clinton, New York, in 1831. The son graduated at Hamilton College in 1840, studied physics under S.F.B. Morse and John William Draper, taught classics in Utica Academy in 1840-1841, and studied law for one year at Yale. He was tutor at Hamilton in 1841-1846, at the same time teaching law privately; was made Maynard professor of law, history, civil polity, and political economy in 1846; received recognition of his law school in 1853, and in 1858 accepted an invitation to Columbia to teach law upon his own condition that he should found a law school. He himself was this school for many years and did not retire from it until 1891, about a year before his death, at Clinton, New York, on the 28th of June 1892. A man of broad culture, he was best known as the founder of a famous school of law and a famous method of legal teaching, which was broadly educational and which called for class-room recitation on the text-book studied and opposed mere “taking notes” on lectures. His questioning was illustrative and its method Socratic. He was a non-resident professor of law at Cornell (1869-1871) and at Amherst (1870-1872). Dwight was an able jurist, frequently acted as referee in difficult questions, in 1874-1875 was a judge of the New York commission of appeals, appointed to clear the docket of the court of appeals, and in 1886 was counsel for the five Andover professors charged with heresy. He was a prominent figure in political and social (notably prison) reforms; published in 1867 a Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada, the result of his labours on a New York state prison commission with Enoch Cobb Wines (1806-1879); favoured indeterminate sentences; drew up the bill for the establishment of the Elmira Reformatory; and organized the State Charities Aid Association. He edited Sir Henry Maine’s Ancient Law (1864); was associate editor of the American Law Register and legal editor of Johnson’s Cyclopaedia; and published Charitable Uses: Argument in the Rose Will Case (1863).


DWIGHT, TIMOTHY (1752-1817), American divine, writer, and educationalist, was born at Northampton, Massachusetts, on the 14th of May 1752. His father, Timothy Dwight, a graduate of Yale College (1744), was a merchant, and his mother was the third daughter of Jonathan Edwards. He was remarkably precocious, and is said to have learned the alphabet at a single lesson, and to have been able to read the Bible before he was four years old. In 1769 he graduated at Yale College, and then for two years taught in a grammar school at New Haven. He was a tutor in Yale College from 1771 to 1777; and then, having been licensed to preach, was a chaplain for a year in a regiment of troops engaged in the War of Independence, inspiring the troops both by his sermons and by several stirring war songs, the most famous of which is “Columbia.” From 1778 until 1783 he lived at Northampton, studying, farming, preaching, and dabbling in politics. From 1783 until 1795 he was pastor of the Congregational church at Greenfield Hill, Connecticut, where he opened an academy which at once acquired a high reputation and attracted pupils from all parts of the Union. From 1795 until his death at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 11th of January 1817, he was president of Yale College, and by his judicious management, by his remarkable ability as a teacher—he taught a variety of subjects, including theology, metaphysics, logic, literature and oratory,—and by his force of character and magnetic personality, won great popularity and influence, and restored that institution to the high place from which it had fallen before his appointment. President Dwight was also well known as an author. In verse he wrote an ambitious epic in eleven books, The Conquest of Canaan, finished in 1774, but not published until 1785; a somewhat ponderous and solemn satire, The Triumph of Infidelity (1788), directed against Hume, Voltaire and others; Greenfield Hill (1794), the suggestion for which seems to have been derived from John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill; and a number of minor poems and hymns, the best known of which is that beginning “I love thy kingdom, Lord.” Many of his sermons were published posthumously under the titles Theology Explained and Defended (5 vols., 1818-1819), to which a memoir of the author by his two sons, W.T. and Sereno E. Dwight, is prefixed, and Sermons by Timothy Dwight (2 vols., 1828), which had a large circulation both in the United States and in England. Probably his most important work, however, is his Travels in New England and New York (4 vols., 1821-1822), which contains much material of value concerning social and economic New England and New York during the period 1796-1817.

See W.B. Sprague’s “Life of Timothy Dwight” in vol. iv. (second series) of Jared Sparks’s Library of American Biography, and especially an excellent chapter in Moses Coit Tyler’s Three Men of Letters (New York, 1895).

His fifth son, Sereno Edwards Dwight (1786-1850), born in Greenfield Hill, Connecticut, graduated at Yale in 1803, was a tutor there in 1806-1810, and successfully practised law in New Haven in 1810-1816. Licensed to preach in 1816, he was the chaplain of the United States Senate for one year, was pastor of the Park Street church, Boston, in 1817-1826, and in 1833-1835 was president of Hamilton College, Clinton, New York. His career was wrecked by accidental mercury poisoning, which interfered with his work in Boston and at Hamilton College, and made his life after 1839 solitary and comparatively uninfluential. His publications include Life and Works of Jonathan Edwards (10 vols., 1830); The Hebrew Wife (1836), an argument against marriage with a deceased wife’s sister; and Select Discourses (1851); to which was prefixed a biographical sketch by his brother William Dwight (1795-1865), who was also successively a lawyer and a Congregational preacher.

President Dwight’s grandson, Timothy Dwight (1828- ), a famous preacher and educationalist, was born at Norwich, Connecticut, on the 16th of November 1828. He graduated at Yale in 1849, continued his studies there and at Bonn and Berlin, was professor of sacred literature and New Testament Greek in the Yale Divinity School from 1858 to 1886, was licensed to preach in 1861, and from 1886 to 1899 was president of Yale, which during his administration greatly prospered and became in name and in fact a university. Dr Dwight was also a member in 1876-1885 of the American committee for the revision of the English Bible, was an editor from 1866 to 1874 of the New Englander, which later became the Yale Review, and besides editing and annotating several volumes of the English translation of H.A.W. Meyer’s Kritisch-exegetischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, and writing many magazine articles, published a collection of sermons entitled Thoughts of and for the Inner Life (1899).


DYAKS, or Dayaks, the name given to the wild tribes found in Borneo by the Malays on their first settlement there. Whether they are the aborigines of the island or the successors of a Negrito people whom they expelled is uncertain. If the latter, they are descendants of an early pre-Malayan immigration. In any case, though regarded by the Malays as aliens, the Dyaks are of the same stock as the Malays. For themselves they have no general name; but, broken as they are into numerous tribes, they are distinguished by separate tribal names, many of which seem to be merely those of the rivers on which their settlements are situated. Sir Harry Keppel, who attempted to form a classification of the Dyaks according to their ethnographical affinity, divides them into five principal branches. The first of these, which he calls the north-western, includes the natives of Sadong, Sarawak, Sambas, Landak, Tayan, Melionow and Sangow. They all speak the same language, and are remarkable for their dependence on the Malay princes. The second branch, which is called emphatically the Malayan from its greater retention of Malay characteristics, occupies the north coast in Banting, Batang-Lupar, Rejang and part of the valley of the Kapuas. To the third or Parian branch belong the Dyaks of the rivers Kuti and Passir, who are said to speak a language like that of Macassar. The fourth consists of the Beyadjoes, who are settled in the valley of the Banjermassin; and the fifth and lowest comprises the Manketans and Punans, who are still nomadic and ignorant of agriculture.

Physically the Dyaks differ little from the Malays except in their slimmer figure, lighter colour, more prominent nose and higher forehead. In disposition they are as cheerful as the Malay is morose. The typical Dyak is rather slightly built, but is active and capable of enduring great fatigue. His features are distinctly marked and often well formed. The forehead is generally high, and the eyes are dark; the cheek-bones are broad; the hair is black, and the colour of the skin a pure reddish brown, frequently, in the female, approaching the Chinese complexion. The beard is generally scanty, and in many tribes the men pull out all the hair of the face. Both sexes file, dye, and sometimes bore holes in the teeth and insert gold buttons. In dress there is considerable variety, great alterations having resulted from foreign influence. The original and still prevailing style is simple, consisting of a waistcloth, generally of blue cotton, for the men, and a tight-fitting petticoat for the women, who acquire a peculiar mincing gait from its interference with their walking. The favourite ornaments of both sexes are brass rings for the legs and arms, hoops of rattan decorated in various ways, necklaces of white and black beads, and crescent-shaped ear-rings of a large size. The lobes of the ears are distended sometimes nearly to the shoulders by disks of metal and bits of stick. Tattooing is practised by most of the tribes, and the skulls of infants are artificially deformed. The men usually go bare-headed, or wear a bright-coloured kerchief. The custom of betel-chewing being most universal, the betel-pouch is always worn at the side. The weapons in use are a curved sword and a long spear. The bow is unknown, but its place among some tribes is partly supplied by the blowpipe, in the boring of which they show great skill. When going to war the Dyak wears a strong padded jacket, which proves no bad defence. A curious custom among some tribes is the imprisonment of young girls for two or three years before puberty, during which time they are not allowed to see even their mothers.

The Dyak is decidedly intelligent, has a good memory and keen powers of observation, is unsuspicious and hospitable, and honest and truthful to a striking degree. The various tribes differ greatly in religious ceremonies and beliefs. They have no temples, priests or regular worship; but the father of each family performs rites. A supreme god, Sang-Sang, seems generally acknowledged, but subordinate deities are supposed to watch over special departments of the world and human affairs. Sacrifices both of animals and fruits—and in some cases even of human beings—are offered to appease or invoke the gods; divination of various kinds is resorted to for the purpose of deciding the course to be pursued in any emergency; and criminals are subjected to the ordeal by poison or otherwise. Offerings are made to the dead, and there is a very strong belief in the existence of evil spirits, and all kinds of calamities and diseases are ascribed to their malignity. Thus almost the whole medical system of the Dyaks consists in the application of appropriate charms or the offerings of conciliatory sacrifices. Many of those natives who have had much intercourse with the Malays have adopted a kind of mongrel Mahommedanism, with a mixture of Hindu elements. The transmigration of souls seems to be believed in by some tribes; and some have a system of successive heavens rising one above the other very much in the style of the Hindu cosmogony. In the treatment of their dead much variety prevails; they are sometimes buried, sometimes burned, and sometimes elevated on a lofty framework. The Dyaks have no exact calculation of the year, and simply name the months first month, second month, and so on. They calculate the time of day by the height of the sun, and if asked how far distant a place is can only reply by showing how high the sun would be when you reached it if you set out in the morning.

In agriculture, navigation, and manufactures they have made some progress. In a few districts a slight sort of plough is used, but the usual instrument of tillage is a kind of cleaver. Two crops, one of rice and the other of maize or vegetables, are taken, and then the ground is allowed to lie fallow for eight or ten years. The inland Dyaks collect the forest products, rattan, gutta-percha, beeswax and edible birds’ nests, and exchange them for clothing or ornaments, especially brass wire or brass guns in which consists the wealth of every chief. They spin and weave their own cotton, and dye the cloth with indigo of their own growing. Their iron and steel instruments are excellent, the latter far surpassing European wares in strength and fineness of edge. Their houses are neatly built of bamboos, and raised on piles a considerable height from the ground; but perhaps their most remarkable constructive effort is the erection of suspension bridges and paths over rivers and along the front of precipices, in which they display a boldness and ingenuity that surprise the European traveller. In the centre of most villages is the communal house where the unmarried men live, which serves as a general assembly hall. Some have a circuit of no less than 1000 ft. One on the banks of the Lundi was 600 ft. long and housed 400 persons.

The Dyaks have always been notorious for head-hunting, a custom which has now been largely suppressed. It is essentially a religious practice, the Dyak seeking a consecration for every important event of his life by the acquisition of one or more skulls. A child is believed ill-fated to whose mother the father has not at its birth presented skulls. The young man is not admitted to full tribal rights, nor can he woo a bride with any hope of success, until he has a skull or more to adorn his hut; a chief’s authority would not be acknowledged without such trophies of his prowess. The strictest rules govern head-hunting; a period of fasting and confession, of isolation in a taboo hut, precedes the expedition, for which the Dyak clothes himself in the skins of wild beasts and puts on an animal mask. The Dyak curiously enough prefers the head of a fellow-tribesman, and the hunt is usually one of ambush rather than of open combat. Among some tribes it was not sufficient to kill the victim. He was tortured first, his body sprinkled with his own blood, and even his flesh eaten under the eyes of priests and priestesses who presided over the rites. Skulls, especially those of enemies, were held in great veneration. At meals the choicest morsels were offered them: they were supplied with betel and tobacco: fulsome compliments and prayers for success in battle addressed to them. Head-hunting at one time threatened the very existence of the race; but in spite of their reformation in this respect the Dyaks are not on the increase, a fact for which A.R. Wallace accounts by the hard life the women lead and their consequent slight fecundity.

The Dyaks speak a variety of dialects, most of which are still very slightly known. The tribes on the coast have adopted a great number of pure Malay words into common use, and it is often hard to ascertain their own proper synonyms. The American missionaries have investigated the dialects of the west coast (Landak, &c.), and their Rhenish brethren have devoted their attention to those of the south, into one of which (that of Pulu Petak) a complete translation of the Bible has been made. Mr Hardeland, the translator, has also published a Dyak-German dictionary.


DYCE, ALEXANDER (1798-1869), English dramatic editor and literary historian, was born in Edinburgh on the 30th of June 1798. After receiving his early education at the high school of his native city, he became a student at Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1819. He took holy orders, and became a curate at Lantegloss, in Cornwall, and subsequently at Nayland, in Suffolk; in 1827 he settled in London. His first books were Select Translations from Quintus Smyrnaeus (1821), an edition of Collins (1827), and Specimens of British Poetesses (1825). He issued annotated editions of George Peele, Robert Greene, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher, with lives of the authors and much illustrative matter. He completed, in 1833, an edition of James Shirley left unfinished by William Gifford, and contributed biographies of Shakespeare, Pope, Akenside and Beattie to Pickering’s Aldine Poets. He also edited (1836-1838) Richard Bentley’s works, and Specimens of British Sonnets (1833). His carefully revised edition of John Skelton, which appeared in 1843, did much to revive interest in that trenchant satirist. In 1857 his edition of Shakespeare was published by Moxon; and the second edition, a great improvement on the old one, was issued by Chapman & Hall in 1866. He also published Remarks on Collier’s and Knight’s Editions of Shakespeare (1844); A Few Notes on Shakespeare (1853); and Strictures on Collier’s new Edition of Shakespeare (1859), a contribution to the Collier controversy (see Collier, John Payne), which ended a long friendship between the two scholars. He was intimately connected with several literary societies, and undertook the publication of Kempe’s Nine Days’ Wonder for the Camden Society; and the old plays of Timon and Sir Thomas More were published by him for the Shakespeare Society. He was associated with Halliwell-Phillips, John Payne Collier and Thomas Wright as one of the founders of the Percy Society, for publishing old English poetry. Dyce also issued Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers (1856). He died on the 15th of May 1869. He had collected a valuable library, containing amongst other treasures many rare Elizabethan books, and this collection he bequeathed to the South Kensington Museum. He displayed untiring industry, abundant learning, and admirable critical acumen in his editions of the old English poets. His wide reading in Elizabethan literature enabled him to explain much that was formerly obscure in Shakespeare; while his sound judgment was a check to extravagance in emendation. While preserving all that was valuable in former editions, Dyce added much fresh matter. His Glossary, a large volume of 500 pages, was the most exhaustive that had appeared.


DYCE, WILLIAM (1806-1864), British painter, was born in Aberdeen, where his father, a fellow of the Royal Society, was a physician of some repute. He attended Marischal College, took the degree of M.A. at sixteen years of age, and was destined for one of the learned professions. Showing a turn for design instead, he studied in the school of the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, then as a probationer (not a full student) in the Royal Academy of London, and thence, in 1825, he proceeded to Rome, where he spent nine months. He returned to Aberdeen in 1826, and painted several pictures; one of these, “Bacchus nursed by the Nymphs of Nysa,” was exhibited in 1827. In the autumn of that year he went back to Italy, showing from the first a strong sympathy with the earlier masters of the Florentine and allied schools. A “Virgin and Child” which he painted in Rome in 1828 was much noticed by Overbeck and other foreign artists. In 1829 Dyce settled in Edinburgh, taking at once a good rank in his profession, and showing considerable versatility in subject-matter. Portrait-painting for some years occupied much of his time; and he was particularly prized for likenesses of ladies and children. In February 1837 he was appointed master of the school of design of the Board of Manufactures, Edinburgh. In the same year he published a pamphlet on the management of schools of this description, which led to his transfer from Edinburgh, after eighteen months’ service there, to London, as superintendent and secretary of the then recently established school of design at Somerset House. Dyce was sent by the Board of Trade to the continent to examine the organization of foreign schools; and a report which he eventually printed, 1840, led to a remodelling of the London establishment. In 1842 he was made a member of the council and inspector of provincial schools, a post which he resigned in 1844. In this latter year, being appointed professor of fine art in King’s College, London, he delivered a remarkable lecture, The Theory of the Fine Arts. In 1835 he had been elected an associate of the Royal Scottish Academy; this honour he relinquished upon settling in London, and he was then made an honorary R.S.A. In 1844 he became an associate, in 1848 a full member, of the London Royal Academy; he also was elected a member of the Academy of Arts in Philadelphia. He was active in the deliberations of the Royal Academy, and it is said that his tongue was the dread of the urbane President, Sir Charles Eastlake, for Dyce was keen in speech as in visage; it was on his proposal that the class of retired Academicians was established. In January 1850 Dyce married Jane, daughter of Mr James Brand, of Bedford Hill, Surrey. He died at Streatham on the 14th of February 1864, leaving two sons and two daughters.

Dyce was one of the most learned and accomplished of British painters—one of the highest in aim, and most consistently self-respecting in workmanship. His finest productions, the frescoes in the robing-room in the Houses of Parliament, did honour to the country and time which produced them. Generally, however, there is in Dyce’s work more of earnestness, right conception, and grave, sensitive, but rather restricted powers of realization, than of authentic greatness. He has elevation, draughtsmanship, expression, and on occasion fine colour; along with all these, a certain leaning on precedent, and castigated semi-conventionalized type of form and treatment, which bespeak rather the scholarly than the originating mind in art. The following are among his principal or most interesting works (oil pictures, unless otherwise stated). 1829: “The Daughters of Jethro defended by Moses”; “Puck.” 1830: “The Golden Age”; “The Infant Hercules strangling the Serpents” (now in the National Gallery, Edinburgh); “Christ crowned with Thorns.” 1835: “A Dead Christ” (large lunette altarpiece). 1836: “The Descent of Venus,” from Ben Jonson’s Triumph of Love; “The Judgment of Solomon,” prize cartoon in tempera for tapestry (National Gallery, Edinburgh). 1837: “Francesca da Rimini” (National Gallery, Edinburgh). 1838, and again 1846: “The Madonna and Child.” 1839: “Dunstan separating Edwy and Elgiva.” 1844: “Joash shooting the Arrow of Deliverance” (the finest perhaps of the oil-paintings). 1850: “The Meeting of Jacob and Rachel.” 1851: “King Lear and the Fool in the Storm.” 1855: “Christabel.” 1857: “Titian’s first essay in Colouring.” 1859: “The Good Shepherd.” 1860: “St John bringing Home his Adopted Mother”; “Pegwell Bay” (a coast scene of remarkably minute detail, showing the painter’s partial adhesion to the “pre-Raphaelite” movement). 1861: “George Herbert at Bemerton.” Dyce executed some excellent cartoons for stained glass:—that for the choristers’ window, Ely Cathedral, and that for a vast window at Alnwick in memory of a duke of Northumberland; the design of “Paul rejected by the Jews,” now at South Kensington, belongs to the latter. In fresco-painting his first work appears to have been the “Consecration of Archbishop Parker,” painted in Lambeth palace. In one of the Westminster Hall competitions for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament, he displayed two heads from this composition; and it is related that the great German fresco-painter Cornelius, who had come over to England to give advice, with a prospect of himself taking the chief direction of the pictorial scheme, told the prince consort frankly that the English ought not to be asking for him, when they had such a painter of their own as Mr Dyce. The cartoon by Dyce of the “Baptism of Ethelbert” was approved and commissioned for the House of Lords, and is the first of the works done there, 1846, in fresco. In 1848 he began his great frescoes in the Robing-room—subjects from the legend of King Arthur, exhibiting chivalric virtue. The whole room was to have been finished in eight years; but ill-health and other vexations trammelled the artist, and the series remains uncompleted. The largest picture figures “Hospitality, the admission of Sir Tristram into the fellowship of the Round Table.” Then follow—“Religion,” the Vision of Sir Galahad and his Companions; “Generosity,” Arthur unhorsed, and spared by the Victor; “Courtesy,” Sir Tristram harping to la Belle Yseult; “Mercy,” Sir Gawaine’s Vow. The frescoes of sacred subjects in All Saints’ church, Margaret Street, London; of “Comus,” in the summer-house of Buckingham Palace; and of “Neptune and Britannia,” at Osborne House, are also by this painter.

Dyce was an elegant scholar in more ways than one. In 1828 he obtained the Blackwell prize at Aberdeen for an essay on animal magnetism. In 1843-1844 he published an edition of the Book of Common Prayer, with a dissertation on Gregorian music, and its adaptation to English words. He founded the Motett Society, for revival of ancient church-music, was a fine organist, and composed a “non nobis” which has appropriately been sung at Royal Academy banquets. His last considerable writing relating to his own art was published in 1853, The National Gallery: its Formation and Management.

See Redgrave’s Dictionary of Artists (1878), and Dictionary of National Biography.

(W. M. R.)


DYEING (O. Eng. deágian, deáh; Mid. Eng. deyen), the art of colouring textile and other materials in such a manner that the colours will not be readily removed by those influences to which they are likely to be submitted—e.g. washing, rubbing, light, &c. The materials usually dyed are those made from the textile fibres, silk, wool, cotton, &c., and intended for clothing or decoration; but in addition to these may be mentioned straw, fur, leather, paper, &c.

The art of dyeing dates from prehistoric times, and its practice probably began with the first dawn of civilization. Although we cannot trace the successive stages of its development from the beginning, we may suppose they were somewhat similar to those witnessed among certain uncivilized tribes to-day—e.g. the Maoris of New Zealand. At first the dyes were probably mere fugitive stains obtained by means of the juices of fruits, and the decoctions of flowers, leaves, barks and roots; but in course of time methods were discovered, with the aid of certain kinds of earth and mud containing alumina or iron, whereby the stains could be rendered permanent, and then it was that the true art of dyeing began. There is no doubt that dyeing was, in the early period of its history, a home industry practised by the women of the household, along with the sister arts of spinning and weaving, for the purpose of embellishing the materials manufactured for clothing.

Historical evidence shows that already at a remote period a high state of civilization existed in Persia, India, and China, and the belief is well founded that the arts of dyeing and printing have been practised in these countries during a long succession of ages. In early times the products and manufactures of India were highly prized throughout Southern Asia, and in due course they were introduced by Arabian merchants to Phoenicia and Egypt, with which countries commercial intercourse, by way of the Persian and Arabian Gulfs, seems to have existed from time immemorial. Eventually the Egyptians themselves began to practise the arts of dyeing and printing, utilizing no doubt both the knowledge and the materials derived from India. Pliny the historian has left us a brief record of the methods employed in Egypt during the first century, as well as of the Tyrian purple dye celebrated already 1000 B.C., while the chemical examination of mummy cloths by Thomson and Schunck testifies to the use by the Egyptian dyers of indigo and madder. The Phoenician and Alexandrian merchants imported drugs and dyestuffs into Greece, but we know little or nothing of the methods of dyeing pursued by the Greeks and Romans, and such knowledge as they possessed seems to have been almost entirely lost during the stormy period of barbarism reigning in Europe during the 5th and succeeding centuries. In Italy, however, some remnants of the art fortunately survived these troublous times, and the importation of Oriental products by the Venetian merchants about the beginning of the 13 th century helped to revive the industry. From this time rapid progress was made, and the dyers formed important guilds in Florence, Venice and other cities. It was about this time, too, that a Florentine named Rucellai rediscovered the method of making the purple dye orchil from certain lichens of Asia Minor. In 1429 there was published at Venice, under the title of Mariegola dell’ arte de tentori, the first European book on dyeing, which contained a collection of the various processes in use at the time. From Italy a knowledge of dyeing gradually extended to Germany, France and Flanders, and it was from the latter country that the English king Edward III. procured dyers for England, a Dyers’ Company being incorporated in 1472 in the city of London.

A new impetus was given to the industry of dyeing by the discovery of America in 1492, as well as by the opening up of the way to the East Indies round the Cape of Good Hope in 1498. A number of new dyestuffs were now introduced, and the dyewood trade was transferred from Italy to Spain and Portugal, for the East Indian products now came direct to Europe round the Cape instead of by the old trade routes through Persia and Asia Minor. Eastern art-fabrics were introduced in increasing quantity, and with them came also information as to the methods of their production. In Europe itself the cultivation of dye-plants gradually received more and more attention, and both woad and madder began to be cultivated, about 1507, in France, Germany and Holland. Under the influence of Spain the Dutch largely developed their industries and made considerable progress in dyeing. The Spaniards, on their first arrival in Mexico (1518), noticed the employment of the red dyestuff cochineal by the natives, and at once imported it to Europe, where an increasing demand for the new colouring matter gradually developed in the course of the century. A further impetus was given to the trade by the Dutch chemist Drebbel’s accidental discovery, in 1630, of the method of dyeing a brilliant scarlet on wool by means of cochineal and tin solutions. The secret was soon communicated to other dyers, and the new scarlet was dyed as a speciality at the Gobelin dyeworks in Paris, and some time later (1643) at a dyeworks in Bow, near London.

In 1662 the newly established Royal Society in London took a useful step in advancing the art of dyeing, and in order to inform and assist practical dyers, caused the publication of the first original account, in the English language, of the methods employed in dyeing, entitled “An apparatus to the history of the common practices of Dyeing.” Ten years later the French Minister Colbert sought to improve as well as control the operations of dyeing, by publishing a code of instructions for the use of the woollen dyers and manufacturers in France. From this time, too, a succession of eminent chemists were appointed by the French government to devote some of their attention to the study of the industrial arts, including dyeing, with a view to their progress and improvement. Dufay, Hellot, Macquer, Berthollet, Roard and Chevreul (1700-1825) all rendered excellent service to the art, by investigating the chemical principles of dyeing, by publishing accounts of the various processes in vogue, by examining the nature and properties of the dyestuffs employed, and by explaining the cause of the several phenomena connected with dyeing. With the advent of the 18th century, certain old prejudices against the use of foreign dyewoods gradually disappeared, and very rapid progress was made owing to the birth of the modern chemistry and the discovery of several useful chemical products and processes—e.g. Prussian Blue (1710), Saxony Blue or Indigo Extract (1740), sulphuric acid (1774), murexide (1776), picric acid (1788), carbonate of soda (1793), bleaching powder (1798). Experiments on the practical side of bleaching and dyeing were made during this period, in England by Thomas Henry, Home and Bancroft, and in France by Dambourney, Gonfreville and others, each of whom has left interesting records of his work.

Down to the middle of the 19th century natural dyestuffs alone, with but few exceptions, were at the command of the dyer. But already in the year 1834 the German chemist Runge noticed that one of the products obtained by distilling coal-tar, namely, aniline, gave a bright blue coloration under the influence of bleaching powder. No useful colouring matter, however, was obtained from this product, and it was reserved for the English chemist Sir W.H. Perkin to prepare the first aniline dye, namely, the purple colouring matter Mauve (1856). The discovery of other brilliant aniline dyestuffs followed in rapid succession, and the dyer was in the course of a few years furnished with Magenta, Aniline Blue, Hofmann’s Violet, Iodine Green, Bismarck Brown, Aniline Black, &c. Investigation has shown that the products of the distillation of coal-tar are very numerous, and some of them are found to be specially suitable for the preparation of colouring matters. Such, for example, are benzene, naphthalene and anthracene, from each of which distinct series of colouring matters are derived. In 1869 the German chemists Graebe and Liebermann succeeded in preparing Alizarin, the colouring matter of the madder-root, from the coal-tar product anthracene, a discovery which is of the greatest historical interest, since it is the first instance of the artificial production of a vegetable dyestuff. Another notable discovery is that of artificial Indigo by Baeyer in 1878. Since 1856, indeed, an ever-increasing number of chemists has been busily engaged in pursuing scientific investigations with the view of preparing new colouring matters from coal-tar products, and of these a few typical colours, with the dates of their discovery, may be mentioned: Cachou de Laval (1873); Eosin (1874); Alizarin Blue (1877); Xylidine Scarlet (1878); Biebrich Scarlet (1879); Congo Red (1884); Primuline Red (1887); Rhodamine (1887); Paranitraniline Red (1889); Alizarin Bordeaux (1890); Alizarin Green (1895). At the present time it may truly be said that the dyer is furnished with quite an embarrassing number of coal-tar dyestuffs which are capable of producing every variety of colour possessing the most diverse properties. Many of the colours produced are fugitive, but a considerable number are permanent and withstand various influences, so that the general result for some years has been the gradual displacement of the older natural dyestuffs by the newer coal-tar colours.

During this period of discovery on the part of the chemist, the mechanical engineer has been actively engaged in devising machines suitable for carrying out, with a minimum of manual labour, all the various operations connected with dyeing. This introduction of improved machinery into the dyeing trade has resulted in the production of better work, it has effected considerable economy, and may be regarded as an important feature in modern dyeing.

The art of dyeing is a branch of applied chemistry in which the dyer is continually making use of chemical and physical principles in order to bring about a permanent union between the material to be dyed and the colouring matter applied. If cotton or wool is boiled in water containing finely powdered charcoal, or other insoluble coloured powder, the material is not dyed, but merely soiled or stained. This staining is entirely due to the entanglement of the coloured powder by the rough surface of the fibre, and a vigorous washing and rubbing suffices to remove all but mere traces of the colour. True dyeing can only result when the colouring matter is presented to the fibre in a soluble condition, and is then, by some means or other, rendered insoluble while it is absorbed by, or is in direct contact with, the fibre. There must always be some marked physical or chemical affinity existing between fibre and colouring matter, and this depends upon the physical and chemical properties of both. It is well known that the typical fibres, wool, silk and cotton, behave very differently towards the solution of any given colouring matter, and that the method of dyeing employed varies with each fibre. As a general rule wool has the greatest attraction for colouring matters, and dyes most readily; cotton has the least attraction, while silk occupies in this respect an intermediate position. These differences may be to some extent due to differences of physical structure in the fibres, but they are mainly due to their different chemical composition.

On the other hand, a given fibre, e.g. cotton, behaves quite differently in dyeing towards various colouring matters. Some of these are not at all attracted by it, and are incapable of being used as dyestuffs for cotton. For others cotton exhibits a marked attraction, so that it is readily dyed by mere steeping in a hot solution of the colouring matter. Again, for other colouring matters cotton has little or no attraction, and cannot be dyed with them until it has been previously impregnated or prepared with a metallic salt, tannic acid or some other agent which is capable of combining with the colouring matter and precipitating it as an insoluble coloured compound within or upon the fibre. Such differences of behaviour are to be ascribed to differences in the chemical constitution or atomic arrangement of the various colouring matters.

In the case of the coal-tar colours we are, for the most part, well acquainted with their chemical constitution, and in accordance with this knowledge the chemist has arranged them in the following groups:—(1) Nitro Colours. (2) Azo Colours, including Amido-azo, Oxy-azo, Tetrazo and Polyazo Colours. (3) Hydrazone Colours. (4) Oxy-quinone Colours, including Quinone-oxime Colours. (5) Diphenylmethane and Triphenylmethane Colours, including Rosaniline, Rosolic acid and Phthaleïne Colours. (6) Quinoneimide Colours, including Indamine, Indophenol, Thiazime, Thiazone, Oxazime, Oxazone, Azine, Induline, Quinoxaline and Fluorindine Colours. (7) Aniline Black. (8) Quinoline and Acridine Colours. (9) Thiazol Colours. (10) Oxy-ketone, Xanthone, Flavone and Cumarine Colours. (11) Indigo. (12) Colours of unknown constitution.

This arrangement of the colouring matters in natural chemical groups is well suited for the requirements of the chemist, but another classification is that based on the mode of their application in dyeing. This is much simpler than the previous one, and being better adapted for the practical purposes of the dyer, as well as for explaining the various methods of dyeing, it is preferred for this article. According to this arrangement colouring matters are classified under the following groups:—(1) Acid Colours. (2) Basic Colours. (3) Direct Colours. (4) Developed Colours. (5) Mordant Colours. (6) Miscellaneous Colours. (7) Mineral Colours. It is well to state that there is no sharp line of division between some of these groups, for many colours are applicable by more than one method, and might quite well be placed in two, or even three, of the above groups. This may be due either to the kind of fibre to which the colouring matter is to be applied, or to certain details in the chemical constitution of the latter which give it a twofold character.

Acid Colours.—These dyestuffs are so called because they dye the animal fibres wool and silk in an acid bath; they do not dye cotton. From a chemical point of view the colouring matters themselves are of an acid character, this being due to the presence in the molecule of nitro (NO2) or sulphonic acid (HSO3) groups. According to their origin and constitution they may be distinguished as nitro compounds, sulphonated azo compounds and sulphonated basic colours. The acid colours are usually sold in the form of their alkali salts, as variously coloured powders soluble in water. For the alkali salts in neutral or alkaline solution wool and silk have little or no affinity, but dyeing rapidly occurs if the solution is acidified with sulphuric acid whereby the colour-acid is liberated. This addition of acid, however, is necessary not only to set free the colour-acid of the dyestuff, but also to alter partially the chemical composition of the fibre, and thus render it capable of uniting more readily with the free colour-acid. It has been shown, namely, that if wool is boiled with dilute sulphuric acid, and then thoroughly washed with boiling-water till free from acid, it acquires the property of being dyed with acid colours even in neutral solution. By this treatment a portion of the wool substance is converted into so-called lanuginic acid, which has a strong attraction for the colour-acid of the dyestuff, with which it forms an insoluble coloured compound. For dyeing wool, the general rule is to charge the dyebath with the amount of dyestuff necessary to give the required colour, say from ½ to 2 or 6 % on the weight of wool employed, along with 10% sodium sulphate (Glauber’s salt) and 4% sulphuric acid (1.84 sp. gr.). The woollen material is then introduced and continually handled or moved about in the solution, while the temperature of the latter is gradually raised to the boiling point in the course of ¾ to 1 hour; after boiling for ¼ to ½ hour longer, the operation is complete, and the material is washed and dried.

In practice, modifications of this normal process may be introduced, in order to ensure the dyeing of an even colour, i.e. free from such irregularities as cloudiness, streaks, &c., which may be due to the quality of the material or to the special properties of the acid colour employed. Materials of a firm, close texture, also the existence of a strong affinity between fibre and colouring matter, do not generally lend themselves to the dyeing of even colours, or to a satisfactory penetration of the material. Some acid colours dye even colours without any difficulty; others, however, do not. The addition of sodium sulphate to the dyebath exerts a restraining action; the dyeing therefore proceeds more slowly and regularly, and a more equal distribution and better absorption of the colouring matter takes place. Other devices to obtain even colours are: the use of old dye-liquors, a diminished amount of acid, the employment of weaker acids, e.g. acetic or formic acid or ammonium acetate, and the entering of the material at a low temperature.

In the application of so-called Alkali Blue the process of dyeing in an acid bath is impossible, owing to the insolubility of the colour-acid in an acid solution. Wool and silk, however, possess an affinity for the alkali salt of the colouring matter in neutral or alkaline solution, hence these fibres are dyed with the addition of about 5% borax; the material acquires only a pale colour, that of the alkali salt, in this dyebath, but by passing the washed material into a cold or tepid dilute solution of sulphuric acid a full bright blue colour is developed, due to the liberation of the colour-acid within the fibre. In the case of other acid colours, e.g. Chromotrope, Chrome Brown, Chromogen, Alizarin Yellow, &c., the dyeing in an acid bath is followed by a treatment with a boiling solution of bichromate of potash, alum, or chromium fluoride, whereby the colouring matter on the fibre is changed into insoluble oxidation products or colour-lakes. This operation of developing or fixing the colour is effected either in the same bath at the end of the dyeing operation, or in a separate bath. See also Artificial Mordant Colours.

When dyeing with certain acid colours, e.g. Eosine, Phloxine and other allied bright pink colouring matters derived from resorcin, the use of sulphuric acid as an assistant must be avoided, since the colours would thereby be rendered paler and duller, and only acetic acid must be employed.

The properties of the dyes obtained with the acid colours are extremely varied. Many are fugitive to light; on the other hand, many are satisfactorily fast, some even being very fast in this respect. As a rule, they do not withstand the operations of milling and scouring very well, hence acid colours are generally unsuitable for tweed yarns or for loose wool. They are largely employed, however, in dyeing other varieties of woollen yarn, silk yarn, union fabrics, dress materials, leather, &c. Previous to the discovery of the coal-tar colours very few acid colours were known, the most important one being Indigo Extract. Prussian Blue as applied to wool may also be regarded as belonging to this class, also the purple dyestuff known as Orchil or Cudbear.

The following list includes some of the more important acid colours now in use, arranged according to the colour they yield in dyeing:—

Red.—Wool scarlet, brilliant scarlet, erythrine, croceïn scarlet, brilliant croceïn, violamine G, scarlet 3R, crystal scarlet, new coccine, chromotrope 2R, azo acid magenta, Victoria scarlet, xylidine scarlet, Palatine scarlet, Biebrich scarlet, pyrotine, orchil red, Bordeaux B, milling red, azo carmine, acid magenta, fast acid violet A 2R, naphthylamine red, fast red, claret red, eosine, erythrosine, rose Bengale, phloxine, cyanosine, cloth red, lanafuchsine, rosinduline, erio carmine.

Orange.—Diphenylamine orange, methyl orange, naphthol orange, croceïn orange, brilliant orange, orange G, orange N, mandarin G R.

Yellow.—Picric acid, naphthol yellow S, fast yellow, brilliant yellow S, azoflavine, metanil yellow, resorcine yellow, tartrazine, quinoline yellow, milling yellow, azo yellow, Victoria yellow, brilliant yellow S, citronine, Indian yellow.

Green.—Acid green, guinea green, fast green, patent green, cyanol green, erio green, brilliant acid green 6 G.

Blue.—Alkali blue, soluble blue, opal blue, methyl blue, Höchst new blue, patent blue, ketone blue, cyanine, thiocarmine, fast blue, induline, violamine 3 B, azo acid blue, wool blue, indigo extract, erio glaucine, erio cyanine, erio blue, lanacyl blue, sulphon-azurine, sulphon-cyanine.

Violet.—Acid violet, red violet, regina violet, formyl violet, violamine B, fast violet, azo acid violet, erio violet, lanacyl violet.

Brown.—Fast brown, naphthylamine brown, acid brown, resorcine brown, azo brown, chrome brown, chromogene.

Black.—Naphthol black, azo black, wool black, naphthylamine black, jet black, anthracite black, Victoria black, azo acid black, brilliant black, union black, brilliant black B.

Basic Colours.—These colouring matters are the salts of organic colour-bases, their name being derived from the fact that their dyeing power resides entirely in the basic part of the salt. In the free state the bases are colourless and insoluble, but in combination with acids they form salts which are coloured and for the most part soluble in water. They are usually sold in the form of powder or crystals, the latter exhibiting frequently a beautiful metallic lustre. Wool and silk are dyed in a neutral bath, i.e. without any addition, the material not requiring any previous preparation. During the dyeing operation the animal fibres appear to play the part of an acid, for they decompose the colouring matter and unite with the colour-base to form an insoluble coloured salt or lake, while the acid of the colouring matter is liberated and remains in solution. Although, as a rule, a neutral dyebath is employed in dyeing wool, a slight addition (2%) of soap is sometimes made in order to give a brighter colour, while in other cases, e.g. with Victoria Blue, the dyebath must of necessity be made distinctly acid with acetic or sulphuric acid. Silk is usually dyed in a bath containing “boiled-off liquor” (i.e. the spent soap-liquor from the operation of scouring) neutralized or slightly acidified with acetic or tartaric acid. For a full colour use 2 or 3% colouring matter, enter the wool at a low temperature, heat gradually to near the boiling point in the course of ¾ hour, and continue dyeing for ¼ hour. Owing to the slight solubility of many basic colours, it is important to take the precaution of filtering the colour solution into the dyebath through a flannel filter, also to neutralize the alkalinity of calcareous water with a little acetic acid, to prevent decomposition of the colouring matter and precipitation of the colour-base.

Unlike the animal fibres, cotton has little or no affinity for the basic colours; hence the cotton dyer makes use of the fact that cotton has a natural attraction for tannic acid, and that the latter forms insoluble lakes with the bases of basic colours. Previous to dyeing, the cotton is prepared with tannic acid by steeping in a cold solution of the latter for several hours; cotton pieces are run at full width through a solution containing 2 to 6 oz. per gallon of tannic acid, and after being evenly squeezed are dried on steam cylinders. The cotton is then worked in a solution of tartar emetic or stannic chloride, so that the tannic acid absorbed by the fibre may be fixed upon it as insoluble tannate of antimony or tin. Although the tannic acid is thus united with metallic oxide, it still has the power of attracting the base of the colouring matter, and there is fixed upon the fibre an insoluble colour-lake, namely, a tannate of antimony and colour-base, which constitutes the dye. In this process the tannic acid is called the mordant, the tartar emetic acts as the fixing-agent for the tannic acid, and the cotton as finally prepared for dyeing is said to be mordanted. The proportions employed, reckoned on the weight of cotton, may vary from 2 to 10% tannic acid, or the equivalent in a decoction of sumach, myrabolans, or other tannin matter, and ½ to 3% tartar emetic. After mordanting and fixing of the mordant, the cotton is well washed and dyed in the cold or at 60° C. for ½ to 1 hour with the necessary colouring matter. Applied in this manner, basic colours are moderately fast to soap, but generally not to the action of light.

Linen is dyed in the same manner as cotton. Jute is dyed without any previous preparation, since it behaves like a tannin-mordanted fibre, attracting the basic colours direct.

The basic colours, to which class most of the earlier coal-tar colours belonged, are remarkable for their great colouring power, and in most cases for the brilliancy of the colours they yield. With the exception of certain dark colours, they are fugitive to light. It is interesting to note that only one vegetable colouring matter is at present recognized as belonging to this class, namely, the yellow dyestuff barberry bark and root (Berberis vulgaris) which contains the alkaloid berberine.

The following is a list of the more important basic colours derived from coal-tar:—

Red.—Magenta, safranine, rhodamine, pyronine red, rhoduline red, rosazeïn, induline scarlet.

Orange.—Chrysoïdine, phosphine, acridine orange, tannin orange.

Yellow.—Auramine, benzoflavine, thioflavine T, acridine yellow, homophosphine, rhoduline yellow.

Green.—Malachite green, emerald green, imperial green, China green, brilliant green, Victoria green, diamond green, methylene green, azine green.

Blue.—Methylene blue, new methylene blue, toluidine blue, thionine blue, indamine blue, Victoria blue, night blue, Nile blue, turquoise blue, marine blue, indoine blue, metamine blue, Capri blue, indazine, metaphenylene blue, paraphenylene blue, toluylene blue, indigene, indol blue, diphene blue, setopaline, setocyanine, setoglaucine, Helvetia blue.

Violet.—Methyl violet, crystal violet, ethyl purple, methylene violet, mauve, paraphenylene violet, rhoduline violet, methylene heliotrope.

Brown.—Bismarck brown.

Black.—Diazine black.

Grey.—Methylene grey, nigrisine, new grey.

Direct Colours.—The characteristic feature of the dyestuffs belonging to this class is that they dye cotton “direct”—i.e. without the aid of mordants. Two distinct series of colouring matters of this group may be distinguished—namely, Direct Cotton Colours and Sulphide Colours.

(a) Direct Cotton Colours.—The colours of this class are frequently called the Substantive Cotton Colours, Benzo Colours, Diamine Colours, Congo Colours. Considered from the chemical point of view, they are mostly alkali salts of sulphonated tetrazo colours obtained by diazotizing certain diamido compounds, e.g. benzidine, diamido-stilbene, &c., and uniting the products thus obtained with various amines or phenols. The first colouring matter of this class was the so-called Congo red, discovered in 1884, and since that time a very great number have been introduced which yield almost every variety of colour. The method of dyeing cotton consists in merely boiling the material in a solution of the dyestuff, when the cotton absorbs and retains the colouring matter by reason of a special natural affinity. The concentration of the dyebath is of the greatest importance, since the amount of colour taken up by the fibre is in an inverse ratio to the amount of dye liquor present in the bath. The addition of 1 to 3 oz. sodium sulphate and 1⁄12 to 1⁄3 oz. carbonate of soda per gallon gives deeper colours, since it diminishes the solubility of the colouring matter in the water and increases the affinity of the cotton for the colouring matter. An excess of sodium sulphate is to be avoided, otherwise precipitation of the colouring matter and imperfect dyeing result. With many dyestuffs it is preferable to use 1⁄6 to 1⁄3 oz. soap instead of soda. On cotton the dyed colours are usually not very fast to light, and some are sensitive to alkali or to acid, but their most serious defect is that they are not fast to washing, the colour tending to run and stain neighbouring fibres. Their fastness to light and washing is, however, greatly improved by a short (½ hour) after-treatment with a boiling solution of copper sulphate (3%), with or without the addition of bichromate of potash (1%). Wool and silk are dyed with the direct colours either neutral or with the addition of a little acetic acid to the dyebath. On these fibres the dyed colours are usually faster than on cotton to washing, milling and light; some are very fast even to light—e.g. Diamine fast red, chrysophenine, Hessian yellow, &c. Many of the Direct Colours are very useful for dyeing plain shades on union fabrics composed of wool and cotton, silk and cotton, or wool and silk. Owing to the facility of their application, they are also very suitable for use as household dyes, especially for cotton goods.

A few vegetable dyestuffs belong to this class, notably Turmeric, saffron, annatto and safflower, but they all yield colours which are fugitive to light, and they are now of little importance. Turmeric is the underground stem or tuber of Curcuma tinctoria, a plant growing abundantly in the East Indies. It dyes cotton, wool and silk in a bath acidified with acetic acid or alum, yielding a bright yellow colour which is turned brown by alkalis. Saffron consists of the stigmata of the flower of Crocus sativus, which is grown in Austria, France and Spain. It dyes a bright orange-yellow colour. Annatto is the pulpy mass surrounding the seeds of Bixa orellana, a plant which grows in South America—e.g. Brazil, Cayenne, &c. It dyes cotton and silk in an alkaline or soap bath an orange colour, which is turned red by acids. Safflower consists of the dried florets of Carthamus tinctorius, which is grown in the East Indies, Egypt and southern Europe. Cotton is dyed a brilliant pink colour by working it in a cold alkaline (sodium carbonate) extract of the colouring matter, while gradually acidifying the solution with citric acid (lime-juice).

The Direct Colours which are derived from coal-tar products are very numerous indeed; they are largely employed, and occupy a very important position among dyestuffs. The following list includes the principal coal-tar colours of this group:—

Red.—Congo red, brilliant Congo, benzopurpurine, brilliant purpurine, deltapurpurine, diamine scarlet, diamine fast red, rosazurine, salmon red, erica, Titan pink, St Denis red, Columbia red, naphthylene red, Congo rubine, acetopurpurine, dianol red, thiamine crimson, geranine, brilliant geranine, Columbia fast scarlet, benzo fast scarlet, thiamine red, diamine rose, Dongola red, rosophenine.

Orange.—Congo orange, benzo orange, toluylene orange, mikado orange, brilliant orange, Columbia orange, diamine orange, pyramine orange, benzo fast orange.

Yellow.—Chrysamine, cresotin yellow, diamine yellow, carbazol yellow, chrysophenine, Hessian yellow, curcumine yellow, thiazol yellow, thioflavine S, oriol, mimosa yellow, Columbia yellow, cotton yellow, chloramine yellow, direct yellow, diamine fast yellow, diamine gold, sun yellow, stilbene yellow, chlorophenine, oxyphenine.

Green.—Benzo olive, Columbia green, benzo green, diamine green, direct green, diphenyl green, oxamine green, eboli green.

Blue.—Azo blue, benzoazurine, brilliant azurine, sulphon-azurine, diamine blue, benzo indigo blue, benzo black blue, Chicago blue, Columbia blue, Erie blue, Zambezi blue, benzo cyanine, Congo blue, diamine sky blue, brilliant benzo blue, benzo chrome black blue, oxamine blue, diphenyl blue, diamineral blue, diaminogene, benzo fast blue, diazo indigo blue, brilliant chlorazol blue.

Violet.—Hessian purple, Congo Corinth, heliotrope, Congo violet, diamine violet, Hessian violet, azo violet, benzo violet, violet black, diamine Bordeaux, chlorantine lilac, diphenyl violet, triazol violet, Columbia violet.

Brown.—Benzo brown, Congo brown, toluylene brown, diamine brown, cotton brown, Hessian brown, terra-cotta, mikado brown, catechu brown, wool brown, Columbia brown, Zambezi brown, benzo chrome brown, direct fast brown, direct bronze brown, chloramine brown, triazol brown, toluylene brown, dianol brown, Crumpsall direct fast brown.

Black.—Diamine black, Columbia black, Nyanza black, Tabora black, Zambezi black, chromanil black, benzo black, benzo fast black, direct blue black, Pluto black, oxydiamine black, diamine jet black, polyphenyl black, union black, triazol black, Titan black, cotton black, oxamine black.

Grey.—Benzo grey, benzo black, azo mauve, diaminogene, neutral grey.

(b) Sulphide Colours.—These dyestuffs are only suitable for dyeing the vegetable fibres, since they must be applied in a strongly alkaline bath. The dyestuff Cachou de Laval, discovered in 1873, was the first member of this group, and was obtained by melting a mixture of sodium sulphide and various organic substances—e.g. bran, sawdust, &c. In recent years numerous other dyestuffs have been added to the list, namely, grey, blue, green, brown, and especially black colours, by submitting certain definite amido compounds of the aromatic series to a similar treatment with sodium sulphide or sodium thiosulphate, and subsequent oxidation. The mode of dyeing with these colours is based on the fact that they are soluble in an alkaline reducing agent, and if the cotton is worked in the solution, subsequent oxidation develops the colour, which is fixed upon the fibre in an insoluble condition. The material is boiled for about one hour in a solution of the colour (10 to 15%), with the addition of sodium carbonate (1 to 10%), common salt (10 to 20%), and sodium sulphide (5 to 30%); it is then washed in water, and may be developed by heating in a bath containing 2 to 5% of bichromate of soda, and 3 to 6% acetic acid. A final washing with water containing a little soda to remove acidity is advisable. The sulphide colours are remarkable for their fastness to light, alkalis, acids and washing, but unless proper care is exercised the cotton is apt to be tendered on being stored for some time.

The following list includes some of the most important of the colours of this class:—

Yellow.—Immedial yellow, pyrogene yellow, sulphur yellow, thion yellow, thiogene yellow.

Orange.—Eclipse phosphine, immedial orange, pyrogene orange, thion orange, thiogene orange.

Green.—Pyrogene green, Italian green, eclipse green, pyrol green, immedial green, katigene green, thionol green.

Blue.—Immedial blue, immedial sky blue, eclipse blue, katigene indigo, pyrogene blue, sulphur blue, thion blue, thiogene blue.

Violet.—Katigene violet, thiogene heliotrope, thiogene purple.

Brown.—Pyrogene brown, pyrogene yellow, Cachou de Laval, thiocatechine, katigene black brown, eclipse brown, immedial brown, katigene brown, dianol brown.

Grey and Black.—Pyrogene grey, Vidal black, immedial black, katigene black, anthraquinone black, St Denis black, amidazol black, cross dye black, eclipse black, carbide black, thiogene black, sulphaniline black, sulfogene black, pyrogene black, dianol black, sulphur black, thion black, kryogene black.

This class of colours is continually increasing in number, and for certain purposes in cotton dyeing the group has acquired great importance.

Developed Colours.—This group includes certain azo colours which are developed or produced upon the fibre itself (usually cotton) by the successive application of their constituent elements. It may be conveniently divided into the following sub-groups:—Insoluble Azo Colours, Developed Direct Colours, Benzo Nitrol Colours.

(a) The Insoluble Azo Colours are produced as insoluble coloured precipitates by adding a solution of a diazo compound to an alkaline solution of a phenol, or to an acid solution of an amido compound. The necessary diazo compound is prepared by allowing a solution containing nitrous acid to act upon a solution of a primary aromatic amine. It is usually desirable to keep the solutions cool with ice, owing to the very unstable nature of the diazo compounds produced. The colour obtained varies according to the particular diazo compound, as well as the amine or phenol employed, β-naphthol being the most useful among the latter. The same coloured precipitates are produced upon the cotton fibre if the material is first impregnated with an alkaline solution of the phenol, then dried and passed into a cold solution of the diazo solution. The most important of these colours is para-nitraniline red, which is dyed in enormous quantities on cotton pieces. The pieces are first “prepared” by running them on a padding machine through a solution made up of 30 grms. β-naphthol, 20 grms, caustic soda, 50 grms. Turkey red oil, and 5 grms. tartar emetic in 1000 grms. (1 litre) water. They are then dried on the drying-machine, and are passed, after being allowed to cool, into the diazo solution, which is prepared as follows: 15 grms. para-nitraniline are dissolved in 53 c.c. hydrochloric acid (34° Tw.) and a sufficiency of water. To the cold solution a solution of 10½ grms. sodium nitrite is added while stirring. The whole is then made up to 1200 c.c., and just before use 60 grms. sodium acetate are added. The colour is developed almost immediately, but it is well to allow the cotton to remain in contact with the solution for a few minutes. The dyed cotton is squeezed, washed, soaped slightly, and finally rinsed in water and dried. A brilliant red is then obtained which is fast to soap but not to light. If the para-nitraniline used in the foregoing process is replaced by meta-nitraniline, a yellowish-orange colour is obtained; with α-naphthylamine, a claret-red; with amido-azo-toluene, a brownish red; with benzidine, a dark chocolate; with dianisidine, a dark blue; and so on. The dyed colours are fast to washing and are much used in practice, particularly the para-nitraniline red, which serves as a substitute for Turkey-red, although it is not so fast to light as the latter.

(b) Developed Direct Colours.—The primuline colours were the first representatives of this class and are derived from the yellow dyestuff known as primuline, which dyes cotton in the same manner as the direct colours. The primuline yellow thus obtained is fugitive to light and of little practical value, but since the colouring matter is an amido base it can be diazotized in the fibre and then developed in solutions of phenols or amines, whereby azo dyes of various hues may be obtained, according to the developer employed; thus, β-naphthol develops a bright red colour, resorcin develops an orange, phenol a yellow, naphthylamine a brown, &c. The dyeing of the primuline yellow is effected by boiling the cotton for one hour in a solution of primuline (5%) and common salt (10 to 20%). The diazotizing operation consists in passing the dyed and rinsed cotton for 5 to 10 minutes into a cold solution of nitrous acid—i.e. a solution of ¾ oz. sodium nitrite per gallon of water, slightly acidified with sulphuric acid. The diazotized material should not be exposed to light, but at once washed in cold water and passed into the developer. The developing process consists in working the diazotized material for 5 to 10 minutes in a cold solution of the necessary phenol, and finally washing with water. The only developer of any practical importance is a solution of β-naphthol in caustic soda, which produces primuline red. The primuline colours are best adapted for cotton dyeing, and the colours obtained are fast to washing and to moderate soaping, but they are not very fast to light.

If cotton is dyed with other direct colours containing free amido groups, the colour can be diazotized on the dyed fibre exactly in the same manner as in the case of primuline-dyed cotton, and then developed by passing into the solution of an amine or phenol, or by treating it with a warm solution of sodium carbonate. In this manner a new azo dye is produced upon the fibre, which differs from the original one not only in colour, but also by being faster to washing and other influences. A treatment with copper sulphate solution after development is frequently beneficial in rendering the colour faster to light. Some Direct Colours, indeed, are of little value, owing, for example, to their sensibility to acids, until they have been diazotized and developed, the usual developers being β-naphthol, resorcinol, phenol and phenylene-diamine.

The following Direct Colours, after being applied to cotton, may be submitted to the above treatment, the colours produced being chiefly blue, brown and black:—

Blue.—Diazurine, diazo blue, diamine blue, diaminogene.

Red.—Rosanthiene.

Brown.—Diazo brown, diamine cutch, diamine brown, cotton brown.

Grey and Black.—Senzo blue, diazo blue black, diazo black, diamine black, diazo brilliant black.

(c) Benzo Nitrol Colours.—These are certain Direct Colours, dyed on cotton in the ordinary manner, which are then developed by passing into a diazo solution—e.g. diazotized para-nitraniline, &c. The dyed colour here plays the part of a phenol or amine, and reacts with the diazo compound to produce a new colour. The process is similar to the production of the Insoluble Azo Colours, the β-naphthol which is there applied to the fibre being here replaced by a Direct Colour. The colour of the latter is rendered much deeper by the process, and also faster to washing and to the action of acids. The dyestuffs recommended for application in the manner described are: Benzo nitrol brown, toluylene brown, direct fast brown, Pluto black, direct blue black.

”Topping” Direct Colours.—The direct colours possess the remarkable property of precipitating the basic colours from aqueous solution. Use is frequently made of this property for “topping” cotton dyed with direct colours either with a view to obtain compound shades or to brighten the colour. Thus by dyeing cotton first yellow in chrysamine and then dyeing it again in a cold bath of methylene blue a brilliant shade of green results. If, on the other hand, a direct blue is topped with methylene blue, its brilliancy may be enhanced.

Mordant Colours.—The colouring matters of this class include some of the most important dyestuffs employed, since they furnish many colours remarkable for their fastness to light, washing and other influences. Employed by themselves, Mordant Colours are usually of little or no value as dyestuffs, because, with few exceptions, either they are not attracted by the fibre, particularly in the case of cotton, or they only yield a more or less fugitive stain. Their importance and value as dyestuffs are due to the fact that they act like weak acids and have the property of combining with metallic oxides to form insoluble coloured compounds termed “lakes,” which vary in colour according to the metallic oxide or salt employed. The most stable lakes are those in which the colouring matter is combined with two metallic oxides, a sesquioxide and a monoxide—e.g. alumina and lime. In applying colouring matters of this class the object of the dyer is to precipitate and fix these coloured lakes upon and within the fibre, for which purpose two operations are necessary, namely, mordanting and dyeing.

The mordanting operation aims at fixing upon the fibre the necessary metallic oxide or insoluble basic salt, which is called the mordant, although the term is also applied to the original metallic salt employed. In the subsequent dyeing operation the mordanted material is boiled with a solution of the colouring matter, during which the metallic oxide attracts and chemically combines with the colouring matter, producing the coloured lake in situ on the fibre, which thus becomes dyed. The mode of applying the mordants varies according to the nature of the fibre and the metallic salt employed, the chief mordants at present in use being salts of chromium, aluminium, tin, copper and iron. The method of mordanting wool depends upon its property of decomposing metallic salts, and fixing upon itself an insoluble metallic compound, when boiled in their solutions. This decomposition is facilitated by the heating and by the dilution of the solution, but it is chiefly due to the action of the fibre itself. The exact nature of the substance fixed upon the fibre has not in all cases been determined; probably it is a compound of the metallic oxide with the wool-substance itself, which has the character of an amido-acid. The mordant most largely employed for wool is bichromate of potash, since, besides being simply applied, and leaving the wool with a soft feel, it yields with the various mordant-dyestuffs a large variety of fast colours. The wool is boiled for 1 to 1½ hours in a solution containing 2 to 3% bichromate of potash on the weight of the wool employed. During this operation the wool at first attracts chromic acid, which is gradually reduced to chromium chromate, so that the mordanted fibre has finally a pale olive-yellow tint. In the dyebath, under the influence of a portion of the dyestuff, further complete reduction to chromic hydrate occurs before it combines with the colouring matter. Not unfrequently certain so-called “assistants” are employed in small amount along with the bichromate of potash—e.g. sulphuric acid, cream of tartar, tartaric acid, lactic acid, &c. The use of the organic acids here mentioned ensures the complete reduction of the chromic acid on the wool to chromic hydrate already in the mordant bath, and the pale greenish mordanted wool is better adapted for dyeing with colours which are susceptible to oxidation—e.g. alizarin blue. For special purposes chromium fluoride, chrome alum, &c., are employed. Alum or aluminium sulphate (8%), along with acid potassium tartrate (cream of tartar) (7%), is used for brighter colours—e.g. reds, yellows, &c. The object of the tartar is to retard the mordanting process and ensure the penetration of the wool by the mordant, by preventing superficial precipitation through the action of ammonia liberated from the wool; it ensures the ultimate production of clear, bright, full colours. For still brighter colours, notably yellow and red, stannous chloride was at one time largely employed, now it is used less frequently; and the same may be said of copper and ferrous sulphate, which were used for dark colours. Silk may be often mordanted in the same manner as wool, but as a rule it is treated like cotton. The silk is steeped for several hours in cold neutral or basic solutions of chromium chloride, alum, ferric sulphate, &c., then rinsed in water slightly, and passed into a cold dilute solution of silicate of soda, in order to fix the mordants on the fibre as insoluble silicates. Cotton does not, like wool and silk, possess the property of decomposing metallic salts, hence the methods of mordanting this fibre are more complex, and vary according to the metallic salts and colouring matters employed, as well as the particular effects to be obtained. One method is to impregnate the cotton with a solution of so-called “sulphated oil” or “Turkey-red oil”; the oil-prepared material is then dried and passed into a cold solution of some metallic salt—e.g. aluminium acetate, basic chromium chloride, &c. The mordant is thus fixed on the fibre as a metallic oleate, and after a passage through water containing a little chalk or silicate of soda to remove acidity, and a final rinsing, the cotton is ready for dyeing. Another method of mordanting cotton is to fix the metallic salt on the fibre as a tannate instead of an oleate. This is effected by first steeping the cotton in a cold solution of tannic acid or in a cold decoction of some tannin matter, e.g. sumach, in which operation the cotton attracts a considerable amount of tannic acid; after squeezing, the material is steeped for an hour or more in a solution of the metallic salt, and finally washed. The mordants employed in this case are various—e.g. basic aluminium or ferric sulphate, basic chromium chloride, stannic chloride (cotton spirits), &c. There are other methods of mordanting cotton besides those mentioned, but the main object in all cases is to fix an insoluble metallic compound on the fibre. It is interesting to note that whether the metallic oxide is united with the substance of the fibre, as in the case of wool and silk, or precipitated as a tannate, oleate, silicate, &c., as in the case of cotton or silk, it still has the power of combining with the colouring matter in the dyebath to form the coloured “lake” or dye on the material.

The dyeing operation consists in working the mordanted material in a solution of the necessary colouring matter, the dyebath being gradually raised to the boiling point. With many colouring matters, e.g. with alizarin, it is necessary to add a small percentage of calcium acetate to the dyebath, and also acetic acid if wool is being dyed. In wool-dyeing, also, the mordanting operation may follow that of dyeing instead of preceding it, in which case the boiling of the wool with dyestuff is termed “stuffing,” and the subsequent developing of the colour by applying the mordant is termed “saddening,” because this method has in the past been usually carried out with iron and copper mordants, which give dull or sad colours. The method of “stuffing and saddening” may, however, be carried out with other mordants, even for the production of bright colours, and it is now frequently employed with certain alizarin dyestuffs for the production of pale shades which require to be very even and regular in colour. There is still another method of applying Mordant Colours in wool-dyeing, in which the dyestuff and the mordant are applied simultaneously from the beginning; it is known as the "single-bath method." It is only successful, however, in the case of certain colouring matters and mordants, to some of which reference will be made in the following paragraphs.

The Natural Mordant Colours.—It is interesting to note that nearly all the natural or vegetable dyestuffs employed belong to the class of Mordant Colours, the most important of these being included in the following list:—Madder, Cochineal, Peachwood, Sapanwood, Limawood, Camwood, Barwood, Sanderswood, Old Fustic, Young Fustic, Quercitron Bark, Persian Berries, Weld, Logwood.

Madder consists of the dried ground roots of Rubia tinctorum, a plant of Indian origin. Formerly cultivated largely in France and Holland, it was long one of the most important dyestuffs employed, chiefly in the production of Turkey-red and in calico-printing, also in wool-dyeing. With the different mordants it yields very distinct colours, all fast to light and soap, namely, red with aluminium, orange with tin, reddish brown with chromium, purple and black with iron. Madder contains two closely allied colouring matters, namely, alizarin and purpurin. The former, which is by far the more important, is now prepared artificially from the coal-tar product anthracene, and has almost entirely superseded madder.

Cochineal is the dried scale-insect Coccus cacti, which lives on certain of the cactus plants of Mexico and elsewhere. The rearing of cochineal was once a large and important industry, and although still pursued, it has seriously declined, in consequence of the discovery of the azo scarlets derived from coal-tar. The colouring matter of cochineal, carminic acid, is believed by chemists to be a derivative of naphthalene, but its artificial production has not yet been accomplished. Cochineal dyes a purple colour with chromium mordant, crimson with aluminium, scarlet with tin, and grey or slate with iron. Its chief employment is for the purpose of dyeing crimson, and more especially scarlet, on wool. Crimson is dyed by mordanting the wool with alum and tartar and dyeing in a separate bath with ground cochineal. Scarlet on wool is obtained by the single-bath method, namely, by dyeing the wool with a mixture of stannous chloride (or nitrate of tin), oxalic acid, and cochineal. It is usual to add also a small amount of the yellow dyestuff flavine in order to obtain a yellower shade of scarlet. The cochineal colours are very fast to light, but somewhat susceptible to the action of alkalis.

Peachwood, Sapanwood and Limawood are usually referred to as the "soluble red-woods," because of the solubility in water of the colouring principle they contain. They consist of the ground wood of various species of Caesalpinia found in Central America, the East Indies and Peru. They all yield more or less similar colours with the different mordants—claret-brown with chromium, red with aluminium, bright red with tin, dark slate with iron. Owing to the fugitive character of all the colours to light, these dyewoods are now comparatively little employed in dyeing.

Camwood, Barwood and Sanderswood represent the so-called "insoluble red-woods," their colouring principles being sparingly soluble even in boiling water. They are obtained from certain species of Pterocarpus and Baphia, large trees growing in the interior of West Africa. Their general dyeing properties are similar, a claret-brown being obtained with chromium mordant, a brownish red with aluminium, a brighter red with tin, and purplish brown with iron. Their chief employment is in wool-dyeing, for the production of various shades of brown, being best applied by the "stuffing and saddening" method above described; but since the colours are fugitive to light, they are now very largely replaced by alizarin. A brown on wool is obtained by first boiling for one to two hours in a decoction of the ground wood (50%), and then boiling in a separate bath in solution of bichromate of potash (2%) for half an hour. These dye-woods are also employed by the indigo-dyer, in order to give a brownish ground colour to the wool previous to dyeing in the indigo vat, and thus obtain a deeper, fuller blue. The colouring matters contained in these dyewoods have not been exhaustively examined.

Fustic is a yellow dyestuff, and consists of the wood of the dyer's mulberry tree, Morus tinctoria, which grows in Cuba, Jamaica, &c. It is still an important and largely used dyestuff, being cheap, and the colours obtained from it being satisfactorily fast to light and other influences. With chromium mordant it yields an olive-yellow or "old-gold" shade; with aluminium, yellow; with tin, a brighter yellow; with iron, an olive-green. It is chiefly employed in wooldyeing along with other dyestuffs, and furnishes the yellow in compound shades. Two colouring principles exist in Old Fustic, namely, morin and maclurin, the former being the most important, and generally regarded as the true colouring matter.

Quercitron Bark consists of the inner bark of an oak-tree, Quercus tinctoria, which grows in the North American States. It dyes somewhat like Old Fustic, but gives with aluminium and tin mordants brighter yellows, for which colours it is chiefly used. The colouring principle of Quercitron Bark is called quercitrin, which by the action of boiling mineral acid solutions is decomposed, with the production of the true colouring matter termed quercetin.

So-called Flavine is a commercial preparation of Quercitron Bark consisting of quercitrin or of quercetin; it is much used by wool-dyers for the production of bright yellow and orange colours. Wool is dyed in single bath by boiling with a mixture of Flavine (8%), stannous chloride (4%) and oxalic acid (2%). Flavine is used in small quantity along with cochineal for dyeing scarlet on wool.

Persian Berries are the dried unripe fruit of various species of Rhamnus growing in the Levant. The general dyeing properties are similar to those of Quercitron Bark, the orange colour given with tin mordant being particularly brilliant. The high price of this dyestuff causes its employment to be somewhat limited. The colouring matter of Persian Berries is called xanthorhamnin, which by the action of fermentation and acids yields the true dyestuff rhamnetin.

Weld is the dried plant Reseda luteola, a species of wild mignonette, formerly largely cultivated in Europe. Its dyeing properties resemble those of Quercitron Bark, but the yellows with aluminium and tin mordants are much brighter and purer, and also faster to light. It is still used to a limited extent for dyeing a bright yellow on woollen cloth and braid for the decoration of military uniforms. Quite recently the colouring matter of Weld, namely, luteolin, has been prepared artificially, but the process is too expensive to be of practical use.

Logwood is the heart-wood of Haematoxylon campechianum, a tree growing in Central America. It is the most important natural dyewood at present employed, being largely used for dyeing dark blues and black on silk, wool and cotton. With chromium and aluminium mordants logwood dyes a dark blue, and even black; with tin, a dark purple; and with iron, black. The colours are only moderately fast to light. On wool the mordant is bichromate of potash; on cotton and silk an iron mordant is employed. Before use by the dyer the logwood is ground and aged or oxidized, by allowing moistened heaps of the ground wood to ferment slightly, and by frequently turning it over to expose it freely to the air. By this means the colouring principle haematoxylin which logwood contains is changed into the true colouring matter haemateïn. The constitution of this colouring matter has been recently discovered; it is very closely allied to the brazilin of peachwood, sapanwood and limawood, and is also a member of the γ-pyrone group of colouring matters.

The importance of the above-mentioned natural dyestuffs is gradually diminishing in favour of mordant dyestuffs and others derived from coal-tar. Fustic and logwood are perhaps the most largely used, and may continue to be employed for many years, no satisfactory artificial substitutes having hitherto come into the market.

The Artificial Mordant Colours are well represented by alizarin, the colouring matter of the madder root, which was the first natural dyestuff prepared artificially from the coal-tar product anthracene (1868). For this reason many of these colours are frequently referred to as the Alizarin Colours. At the present time, however, there are numerous Mordant Colours which are prepared from other initial materials than anthracene; they are not chemically related to alizarin, and for these the term Alizarin Colours is therefore inappropriate. The property, which Mordant Colours possess in common, of combining with metals and producing lakes, which readily adhere to the fibre, depends upon their chemical constitution, more particularly upon the general and relative position in the molecule of certain side atomic groups. In alizarin there are, for example, two characteristic hydroxyl groups (OH) occupying a special (ortho) position in the molecule, i.e. they are next to each other, and also next to one of the socalled ketone groups (C : O). In other Mordant Colours there are carboxyl (COOH) as well as hydroxyl groups, which are all-important in this respect. In addition to this, the general dyeing property is influenced by the constitution of the molecule itself, and by the presence of other side-groups, e.g. NH2, HSO3, &c., which modify the colour as to solubility or hue. Hence it is that the members of this group, while possessing the mordant-dyeing property in common, differ materially in other points. Some, like alizarin, are not in themselves to be regarded as colouring matters, but rather as colouring principles, because they only yield useful dyes in combination with metallic oxides. According to their constitution, these may yield one or many colours with the various metallic oxides employed, and they are used for cotton as well as for wool and silk. Other Mordant Colours, e.g. many of the Direct Colours and others, are capable of dyeing either the vegetable or animal fibres without the aid of a mordant; they are fully developed colouring matters in themselves, and possess the mordantdyeing property as an additional feature, in consequence of the details of their chemical constitution, to which reference has been made in the foregoing paragraphs. As a rule these yield, at most, various shades of one colour with the different oxides, and are only suitable for the animal fibres, particularly wool.

In the following list, the most important artificial Mordant Colours are arranged according to the colour they give in conjunction with the aluminium mordant, unless otherwise indicated. Some of those named here dye the animal fibres, even without mordants; some are Direct Colours possessing mordant-dyeing properties, others are sulphonic acid derivatives of Alizarin Colours, suitable for wool but not for cotton.

Red.—Alizarin, anthrapurpurin, flavopurpurin, purpurin, alizarin Bordeaux, alizarin garnet R, alizarin maroon, alizarin S, cloth red, diamine fast red, anthracene red, chrome red, chrome Bordeaux, salicine red, erio chrome red, emin red, milling red.

Orange and Yellow.—Alizarin orange, alizarin orange G, alizarin yellow paste, alizarin yellow A, alizarin yellow C, anthracene yellow, galloflavin, alizarin yellow GG, alizarin yellow R, diamond flavin G, chrome yellow D, Crumpsall yellow, fast yellow, diamond yellow, benzo orange R, cloth orange, carbazol yellow, chrysamine, milling orange.

Green.—Coeruleïn, coeruleïn S, alizarin green S, fast green (Fe), naphthol green (Fe), Dioxin (Fe), Gambine (Fe), azo green, gallanil green, alizarin green G and B, acid alizarin green, alizarin cyanine green, alizarin viridine, diamond green, chrome green, Domingo green.

Blue.—Alizarin blue, alizarin blue S, alizarin cyanine, anthracene blue, brilliant alizarin blue, alizarin indigo blue S, gallanilic indigo, acid alizarin blue, brilliant alizarin cyanine, alizarin grisole, alizarin sky blue, alizarin saphirole, gallanilide blue, delphine blue, gallamine blue, celestine blue, chrome blue, gallazine A, phenocyanine, coreïne.

Purple and Violet.—Galleïn, alizarin heliotrope, anthraquinone violet, chrome prime, gallocyanine, chrome violet, anthracene chrome violet.

Brown.—Anthracene brown, chromogen, cloth brown, diamond brown, alizarin brown, fast brown, alizarin acid brown, chrome brown, palatine chrome brown, erio chrome brown.

Black.—Alizarin black, diamond black, alizarin blue black, alizarin cyanine black, alizarin fast grey, chromotrope, chrome black, erio chrome black, anthracite black, acid alizarin black, anthracene chrome black.

A brief description of the application of a few of the more important of the above colouring matters will suffice.

Alizarin, Anthrapurpurin and Flavopurpurin give somewhat similar shades with the different mordants, namely, brown with chromium, red with aluminium, orange with tin, and purple with iron.

In wool-dyeing they are applied along with other Mordant Colours on chromium mordant for the production of a large variety of compound shades, browns, drabs, greys, &c., the presence of acetic acid in the dyebath being advantageous. When alum and tartar mordant is employed, for the production of reds, it is necessary to add a small amount (4%) of calcium acetate to the dyebath, in order to neutralize the strong acidity of the mordanted wool, and to furnish the calcium of the colour-lake fixed upon the fibre, which is regarded as an aluminium-calcium compound of the colouring matter.

In cotton-dyeing the above colouring matters are chiefly used for the production of so-called Turkey-red, a colour remarkable for its brilliancy and its fastness to light and soap. These properties are due to the preparation of the cotton with oil, in addition to the ordinary mordanting and dyeing, whereby there is fixed on the fibre a permanent and stable lake, in which aluminium and calcium are combined with alizarin and some form of fatty oxy-acid. In the older processes employed, the preparation of the cotton with oil was effected by passing the material several times through emulsions of olive oil and potassium carbonate solution; at a later date, and even now in the case of cloth, the cotton is first impregnated with hot oil (Steiner's process), then passed through solutions of alkali carbonate. After the preparation with oil or oil-emulsions, the cotton is "stoved," i.e. heated for several hours in special chambers or stoves to a temperature of about 70° C., during which operation the oil is decomposed and oxidized and becomes indelibly attached to the fibre. The oil-prepared cotton is steeped in cold solutions of basic aluminium sulphate or acetate, washed, dyed with alizarin, and finally boiled for several hours with soap solution under pressure in order to brighten the colour. In the more recent and much more expeditious "sulphated-oil process," castor oil is employed instead of olive oil, and before use it is submitted to a treatment with sulphuric acid, the sulphated oil thus obtained being finally more or less neutralized with alkali. The cotton is impregnated with this sulphated-oil solution, dried, mordanted with aluminium acetate, dyed, dried, steamed and soaped. The operation of steaming plays an important part in brightening and fixing the colour-lake on the fibre. In these and all other Turkey-red processes, the oil, probably in the form of a fatty oxy-acid, acts as a fixing agent for the aluminium and enters into the composition of the red lake, imparting to it both brilliancy and permanency.

Alizarin S is a sulphonic acid derivative of alizarin, and since it is much more soluble, it readily yields level colours. Silk is dyed in a similar manner to wool, the fibre being mordanted by the ordinary methods and then dyed in a separate bath.

Diamine Fast Red is applied to cotton as a Direct Colour, with the addition of soda or soap to the dyebath. By treating the dyed colour with a solution of fluoride of chromium, its fastness to washing is materially increased. Wool is dyed in a similar manner, sodium sulphate being added to the dyebath, and the dyed colour treated with fluoride of chromium or bichromate of potash. On wool, the colour is so extremely fast to light and to milling that it may well serve as a substitute for alizarin.

Alizarin Orange is employed in the same manner as alizarin. In wool-dyeing it is usually applied on chromium mordant for browns and a variety of compound shades in combination with other Alizarin Colours and dyewood extracts, less frequently on aluminium mordant.

Galloflavin is used in wool and silk dyeing on chromium mordant as a substitute for fustic and other yellow dyewoods, to furnish the yellow part of compound shades.

The alizarin yellows, R and GG, anthracene yellow, diamond flavine, chrome yellow, diamond yellow, carbazol yellow, chrysamine, &c., are Direct Colours with mordant-dyeing properties. They also serve as substitutes for fustic in wool or silk dyeing, and are dyed either on a chromium mordant, or first in an acid bath and afterwards saddened with bichromate of potash.

Coeruleïn is employed in dyeing wool, silk or cotton with aluminium or chromium mordants, either as a self-colour or for compound shades. With aluminium mordant the colour is a moderately bright green, more particularly on silk; with chromium mordant, an olive-green. Coeruleïn S is the more soluble bisulphite compound of the ordinary coeruleïn. It is applied in the same manner, care being taken, however, to dye for some time (one hour) at a temperature not exceeding 60° C. until the bath is nearly exhausted, and then only raising the temperature to the boiling point. Without this precaution coeruleïn S is decomposed, and the ordinary insoluble coeruleïn is precipitated. The colours obtained are very fast to light.

Fast Green, Dioxine and Gambine are chiefly of use in calico-printing and in wool-dyeing. With iron mordant they yield olive-greens, which on wool are extremely fast to light. Cotton is impregnated with ferrous acetate, dried, aged and fixed with silicate of soda, then dyed in a neutral bath. Wool is mordanted with ferrous sulphate and tartar (3% of each) and dyed in a neutral bath.

Acid Alizarin Green, Alizarin Cyanine Green and Diamond Green all dye wool direct in a bath acidified with acetic or sulphuric acid, and the dyed colour may be afterwards fixed or saddened with bichromate of potash, or they may be dyed on chromium-mordanted wool. The first method is very useful for pale shades, since the colours are very level or regular.

Alizarin Blue is a dark blue dyestuff which, owing to the fastness of the colours it yields, has for many years been regarded as a worthy substitute for indigo in wool-dyeing. It is applied in the same manner as alizarin, the chromium mordant being alone employed. Alizarin blue S is the soluble sodium bisulphite compound of alizarin blue; it corresponds, therefore, to the above-mentioned coeruleïn S, and in its application the same precautions as to the temperature of the dyebath are necessary. The fastness of the dyed colours to light, milling and acid satisfy the highest requirements.

Alizarin Cyanine, Anthracene Blue and Brilliant Alizarin Blue were discovered later than the above-mentioned alizarin blues, and, owing to their greater solubility and other advantages, they have largely replaced them as substitutes for indigo. They are dyed on chromium-mordanted wool, silk or cotton, and yield dark purplish or greenish blues, according to the particular brand employed. The fastness of the dyed colours to light, and general durability, are very satisfactory, but in fastness to milling and acids they are to some extent inferior to alizarin blue.

Celestine Blue and Chrome Blue dye purplish blue and bright blue respectively, and are dyed in the ordinary way upon a chromium mordant. The colours they yield are inferior to the Alizarin Colours in fastness to light, but on account of their clear shades they are often used for brightening other colours.

Brilliant Alizarin Cyanine, Alizarin Viridine and Alizarin Saphirole are true Alizarin Colours, and possess the same fastness to light as other colours of this class. Unlike most of the Alizarin Colours, they are capable of dyeing wool satisfactorily without the aid of a metallic mordant—namely, with the addition of sulphuric acid to the dyebath, in the same manner as the Acid Colours. If necessary, the dyed colours may be treated with bichromate of potash. The colours thus produced are very fast to light and very level, hence these dyestuffs are valuable in the production of the most delicate compound shades, such as drabs, slates, greys, &c., which are desired to be fast to light. Alizarin saphirole dyes clear blue, the colour produced being much more brilliant even than those of brilliant alizarin cyanine.

Galleïn, Gallocyanine, and especially Chrome Violet, dye somewhat bright purple shades, and are hence frequently employed for brightening other colours, but they are only moderately fast to light. They are applied in the usual manner on a chromium mordant.

Anthracene Brown is largely employed in the production of compound shades. It dyes a dark, somewhat reddish, brown on chromium mordant, the colour being very even and extremely fast to light.

Alizarin Black is dyed on chromium mordant in the same manner as alizarin, and is used as a self-colour or in combination with other Alizarin Colours.

Diamond Black is very useful for dyeing good blacks on wool, fast to light and acids. The wool is first dyed with the addition of acetic and finally sulphuric acid. When the dyebath is exhausted, bichromate of potash (2%) is added, and boiling is continued for half an hour longer.

The erio chrome colours (black, brown, red, &c.) are applied in wool dyeing like diamond black.

Chromotrope, of which there are several brands, is an Acid Colour which is applied to wool in an acid bath in the usual manner. The red or purple colours thus obtained are saddened in the same bath with bichromate of potash and changed into black, the colouring matter being oxidized and simultaneously combined with chromium.

Miscellaneous Colours.—Under this head there may be arranged a few dyestuffs which, although capable of inclusion under one or other of the foregoing groups, it is more convenient to treat of separately. Indigo, Aniline Black and Catechu, for example, might be placed in the class of Developed Colours, since they are all developed on the fibre, and indeed by the same method, namely, by oxidation.

Indigo is one of our most important blue dyestuffs, which has been employed from the earliest times. Indigo, being insoluble in water, would be of no use in dyeing if it were not capable of being rendered soluble. This is effected in two ways, corresponding to which there are two methods of dyeing with indigo. One method consists in dissolving the indigo in very strong sulphuric acid, whereby it is converted into indigotin-disulphonic acid (Indigo Extract), which is readily soluble in water. This substance belongs to the group of Acid Colours; hence it is applied to the animal fibres, wool and silk, by boiling in a solution of the colouring matter slightly acidified with sulphuric acid. The second and most important method is based on the fact that under the influence of reducing agents (i.e. substances capable of yielding nascent hydrogen) indigo blue is changed into indigo white, which is soluble in alkali, the solution thus obtained being called a "vat." If textile materials are steeped in a clear yellow solution of the reduced indigo and then exposed to air, the indigo white absorbed by the fibre is oxidized and reconverted into indigo blue within and upon the fibre, which thus becomes dyed blue; this is the so-called "indigo-vat" method of dyeing. Comparing the two methods, the "indigo-extract" method is only applicable to the animal fibres, and although it gives brighter colours, they are fugitive to light and are decolourized by washing with alkaline solutions; the "vat method" is applicable to all fibres, and gives somewhat dull blues, which are very fast to light, washing, &c.

Cotton is dyed by means of the "lime and copperas vat," the "zinc powder vat," or the "hydrosulphite vat." In the first-mentioned vat the ingredients are quicklime, ferrous sulphate and finely ground indigo; the lime decomposes the ferrous sulphate and precipitates ferrous hydrate; this quickly reduces the indigo to indigo white, which dissolves in the excess of lime present. The ingredients of the zinc powder vat are zinc powder, lime and indigo; in the presence of the lime and indigo the zinc takes up oxygen from the water, liberating the hydrogen necessary to reduce the indigo, as in the previous vat. The constituents of the hydrosulphite vat are hydrosulphite of soda, lime and indigo. The requisite hydrosulphite of soda is prepared by allowing zinc powder (13 ℔) to act upon a cold concentrated solution of bisulphite of soda (17 gallons of sp. gr. 1.225), taking care to avoid, as much as possible, access of air and any heating of the mixture, to prevent decomposition. The solution thus obtained is thoroughly neutralized by the addition of lime; and after settling, the clear liquor is used for the vat, along with indigo and lime. Here again the hydrosulphite takes up oxygen from the water and liberates the necessary hydrogen. It is found convenient to prepare, in the first instance, a very concentrated standard of reduced indigo, and to add as much of this to the dye-vat as may be required, along with lime and a little hyposulphite of soda. The advantages of this vat are that it is easily prepared and that there is very little sediment; moreover, it can be employed in dyeing wool, as well as cotton, and it is now very generally in use. The vat usually employed for dyeing wool is the so-called "woad vat," which differs from the foregoing in that the hydrogen necessary to reduce the indigo and bring it into solution is furnished, not by the action of chemical agents, but by means of fermentation. The ingredients of the woad vat are indigo, woad, bran, madder and lime. The woad here employed is prepared by grinding the leaves of the woad plant (Isatis tinctoria) to a paste, which is allowed to ferment and then partially dried. It serves as the ferment to excite lactic and butyric fermentation with the aid of the bran and madder, the necessary hydrogen being thus evolved. Excessive fermentation is avoided by making timely additions of lime; sluggish fermentation is accelerated by additions of bran and slightly raising the temperature. When the reduction and complete solution of the indigo is effected, the vat is allowed to settle, and the woollen material is immersed and moved about in the clear liquor for half an hour to two hours, according to the shade required, then squeezed and exposed to the air in order to develop the blue colour on the fibre.

Thioindigo red is an artificial colouring matter belonging to the indigo series and comes into the market in the form of a paste. It is used in dyeing in exactly the same way as indigo, yielding shades which range from a somewhat dull pink to a full claret shade of red. The colours obtained are remarkable for their fastness.

Indanthrene. This colouring matter, which is also sold as a paste, is an anthracene derivative, being formed by the action of caustic potash on β-amidoanthraquinone. It is reduced by hydrosulphite of soda yielding a blue vat, in which cotton and other vegetable fibres are dyed in the same way as in the indigo vat. Since a fair amount of caustic soda is necessary for the setting of the vat, the dyestuff is not suitable for animal fibres. Indanthrene yields on cotton reddish shades of blue which are extremely fast to all external influences; in fact the colour is so fast that when once fixed on cotton it cannot be removed again from the fibre by any known means.

Other vat colours belonging to this series, which are similarly applied, are flavanthrene (yellow), viridanthrene (green), fuscanthrene (grey-brown), violanthrene (dull violet) and melanthrene (grey to black). The algol colours resemble the indanthrene colours in their properties and application.

Aniline Black differs from other dyes in that it is not sold as a ready-made dyestuff, but is produced in situ upon the fibre by the oxidation of aniline. It is chiefly used for cotton, also for silk and cotton-silk union fabrics, but seldom or not at all for wool. Properly applied, this colour is one of the most permanent to light and other influences with which we are acquainted. One method of dyeing cotton is to work the material for about two hours in a cold solution containing aniline (10 parts), hydrochloric acid (20 parts), bichromate of potash (20 parts), sulphuric acid (20 parts), and ferrous sulphate (10 parts). The ferrous sulphate here employed is oxidized by the chromic acid to a ferric salt, which serves as a carrier of oxygen to the aniline. This method of dyeing is easily carried out, and it gives a good black; but since much of the colouring matter is precipitated on the fibre superficially as well as in the bath itself, the colour has the defect of rubbing off. Another method is to impregnate the cotton with a solution containing aniline hydrochloride (35 parts), neutralized with addition of a little aniline oil, sodium chlorate (10 parts), ammonium chloride (10 parts). Another mixture is 1.8 part aniline salt, 12 parts potassium ferrocyanide, 200 parts water, 3.5 parts potassium chlorate dissolved in water. After squeezing, the material is passed through a special oxidation chamber, the air of which is heated to about 50° C. and also supplied with moisture. This oxidizing or ageing is continuous, the material passing into the chamber at one end in a colourless condition, and after about 20 minutes passing out again with the black fully developed, a final treatment with hot chromic acid solution and soaping being necessary to complete the process. In this method, employing the first-mentioned solution, chlorate of copper is formed, and this being a very unstable compound, readily decomposes, and the aniline is oxidized by the liberated chlor-oxygen compounds. The presence in the mixture of a metallic salt is very important in aiding the development of the black, and for this purpose salts of vanadium, cerium and copper have proved to be specially useful. The chemistry of aniline black is still incomplete, but it would appear that there are several oxidation products of aniline. The first product is so-called emeraldine, a dark green substance of the nature of a salt, which by treatment with alkali yields a dark blue base called azurine. The further oxidation of emeraldine yields nigraniline, also a dark green salt, but the free base of which has a violet black colour. The latter becomes greenish under the influence of acids, especially sulphuric acid, and this explains the defect known as "greening" which is developed in ordinary aniline blacks during exposure to air. By a supplementary oxidation with chromic acid such a black is rendered ungreenable, the nigraniline being probably changed into the more stable chromate of nigraniline.

Catechu is a valuable brown dyestuff, obtained from various species of Acacia, Areca and Uncaria growing in India. The wood, leaves and fruit of these plants are extracted with boiling water; the decoction is then evaporated to dryness or to a pasty consistency. Catechu is largely used by the cotton dyer for the production of brown, drab and similar colours. It is seldom employed for wool. Cotton is usually dyed by boiling it for about one hour in a decoction of catechu (100%) containing copper sulphate (5%). After squeezing, the material is boiled for about fifteen minutes in a solution of bichromate of potash (¼ oz. per gal.), then washed and dried. By repeating the operations two or three times deeper shades are obtained. During the boiling with catechu the cotton attracts the active principles catechin and catechu-tannic acid, but it thus acquires only a pale brown colour; in the bichromate of potash, however, these are oxidized to form insoluble japonic acid, which permeates the fibre, and a deep brown colour is thus developed. Catechu browns are fast to a variety of influences, e.g. washing, alkalis, acids, &c., but less so to light. Catechu has been recently much employed, in conjunction with copper sulphate, for dyeing the so-called khaki-brown on woollen material for military clothing. On silk, catechu is much used for weighting purposes in dyeing black.

Mineral Colours.—Those include Chrome Yellow, Iron Buff, Prussian Blue and Manganese Brown.

Chrome Yellow is only useful in cotton-dyeing as a self-colour, or for conversion into chrome orange, or, in conjunction with indigo, for the production of fast green colours. The cotton is first impregnated with a solution of lead acetate or nitrate, squeezed, and then passed through a solution of sodium sulphate or lime water to fix the lead on the fibre as sulphate or oxide of lead. The material is then passed through a solution of bichromate of potash. The colour is changed to a rich orange by a short, rapid passage through boiling milk of lime, and at once washing with water, a basic chromate of lead being thus produced. The colour is fast to light, but has the defect of being blackened by sulphuretted hydrogen.

Iron Buff is produced by impregnating the cotton with a solution of ferrous sulphate, squeezing, passing into sodium hydrate or carbonate solution, and finally exposing to air, or passing through a dilute solution of bleaching powder. The colour obtained, which is virtually oxide of iron, or iron-rust, is fast to light and washing, but is readily removed by acids.

Prussian Blue is applicable to wool, cotton and silk, but since the introduction of coal-tar blues its employment has been very much restricted. The colour is obtained on cotton by first dyeing an iron buff, according to the method just described, and then passing the dyed cotton into an acidified solution of potassium ferrocyanide, when the blue is at once developed. A similar method is employed for silk. Wool is dyed by heating it in a solution containing potassium ferricyanide and sulphuric acid. The colour is developed gradually as the temperature rises; it may be rendered brighter by the addition of stannous chloride. On wool and silk Prussian blue is very fast to light, but alkalis turn it brown (ferric oxide).

Manganese brown or bronze is applied in wool, silk and cotton dyeing. The animal fibres are readily dyed by boiling with a solution of potassium permanganate, which, being at first absorbed by the fibre, is readily reduced to insoluble brown manganic hydrate. Since caustic potash is generated from the permanganate and is liable to act detrimentally on the fibre, it is advisable to add some magnesium sulphate to the permanganate bath in order to counteract this effect. Imitation furs are dyed in this manner on wool-plush, the tips or other parts of the fibres being bleached by the application of sulphurous acid. Cotton is dyed by first impregnating it with a solution of manganous chloride, then dyeing and passing into a hot solution of caustic soda. There is thus precipitated on the fibre manganous hydrate, which by a short passage into a cold dilute solution of bleaching powder is oxidized and converted into the brown manganic hydrate. This manganese bronze or brown colour is very susceptible to, and readily bleached by, reducing agents; hence when exposed to the action of an atmosphere in which gas is freely burnt, the colour is liable to be discharged, especially where the fabric is most exposed. In other respects manganese bronze is a very fast colour.

Dyeing on a large Scale.—It is not possible to give here more than a bare outline of the methods which are used on the large scale for dyeing textile fibres, yarns and fabrics. In principle, dyeing is effected by allowing an aqueous solution of the dye-stuff, with or without additions (alkalis, acids, salts, &c.), to act, usually at an elevated temperature, on the material to be dyed. During the process it is necessary, in order to ensure the uniform distribution of the dyestuff in the material, that the latter should either be moved more or less continuously in the dye liquor or that the dye liquor should be circulated through the material. The former mode of operation is in general use for hank, warp and piece dyeing, but for textile fibres in the loose condition or in the form of "slubbing," "sliver" or "cops" (see Spinning) the latter method has, in consequence of the introduction of improved machinery, come more and more into vogue within recent years.

Loose Material.—Cotton and wool are frequently dyed in the loose state, i.e. before being subjected to any mechanical treatment. The simplest method of effecting this is to treat the material in open vessels (boilers) which can be heated either by means of steam or direct fire. Since, however, a certain amount of felting or matting of the fibres cannot be avoided, it is frequently found to be more advantageous to effect these treatments in specially constructed apparatus in which the dye liquors are circulated through the material.

Yarn.—Yarn may be dyed either in the hank, in the warp or in the cop, i.e. in the form in which the yarn leaves the spinning frame. The dyeing in the hank is carried out in rectangular dye-vats constructed of wood or stone like that shown in fig. 1, in which the hanks are suspended from smooth wooden poles or rods resting on the sides, and are thus immersed almost entirely in the dye liquor. The heating of the vat is effected either by means of live steam, i.e. by blowing steam into the dye solution from a perforated pipe which runs along the bottom of the vat, or by means of a steam coil similarly situated. In order to expose the hanks as uniformly as possible to the action of the dye liquor, they are turned by hand at regular intervals until the operation is finished. Washing off is effected in the same or in a similar vessel, after which excess of water is removed by wringing by hand, through squeezing rollers or, what is generally preferred, in a hydro-extractor (centrifugal machine). The drying of the dyed and washed yarn is generally effected by suspending it on poles in steam-heated drying chambers. Yarn in the warp is dyed in vats or "boxes" like that shown in fig. 2, through which it is caused to pass continuously. The warps to be dyed pass slowly up and down over the loose rollers in the first box B, then through squeezing rollers S into the next, and the same thing occurs in the second (also third and fourth in a four-box machine) box A, whence they are delivered through a second pair of squeezing rollers S1 into the wagon W. The boxes may contain the same or different liquors, according to the nature of the dyestuff employed. Washing is done in the same machine, while drying is effected on a cylinder drying machine like that shown in figs. 8 and 9 of Bleaching. Latterly, machines have been introduced for dyeing warps on the beam, the dye liquor being caused to circulate through the material, and the system appears to be meeting with considerable success. Large quantities of yarn, especially cotton, are now dyed in the cop. When the dyed yarn is to be used as weft the main advantage of this method is at once apparent, inasmuch as the labour, time and waste of material incurred by reeling into hanks and then winding back into the compact form so as to fit into the shuttle are avoided. On the other hand the number of fast dyestuffs suitable for cop dyeing is very limited. In the original cop-dyeing machine constructed by Graemiger a thin tapering perforated metallic tube is inserted in the hollow of each cop. The cops are then attached to a perforated disk (which constitutes the lid of a chamber or box) by inserting the protruding ends of the tubes into the perforations. The chamber is now immersed in the dye-bath and the hot liquor is drawn through the cops by means of a centrifugal pump and returned continuously to the dye-bath. This principle, which is known as the skewer or spindle system, is the one on which most modern cop-dyeing machines are based. In the so-called "compact" system of cop dyeing the cops are packed as closely as possible in a box, the top and bottom (or the two opposite sides) of which are perforated, the interstices between the cops being filled up with loose cotton, ground cork or sand. The dye liquor is then drawn by suction or forced by pressure through the box, thus permeating and dyeing the cops.

Pieces.—Plain shades are usually dyed in the piece, this being the most economical and at the same time the most expeditious means of obtaining the desired effect. The dyeing of piece goods may be effected by running them through the dye liquor either at full breadth or in rope form. The machine in most common use for the first method is the Lancashire "jigger," which is simple in principle and is shown in section in fig. 3. It consists essentially of a dye-vessel constructed of wood or cast iron and containing loose guide rollers, r and r, at the top and bottom. By coupling up the roller B with the driving gear the pieces which are batched on A are drawn through the dye liquor and rolled on to B. A band brake (not shown in the figure) applied to the axis of A gives the pieces the required amount of tension in passing through the dye-bath. As soon as the whole of the pieces have passed through in this way from A to B, the machine is reversed, and roller A draws them back again through the bath in a similar way on to roller A. This alternating process goes on until the dyeing is finished, when the goods are washed off, squeezed and dried. The jigger is especially useful in cotton piece dyeing, one great advantage being that it is suited for what is known as a "short bath," i.e. a bath containing a minimum amount of dye liquor, this being of great importance in the application of dyestuffs which do not exhaust well, like the direct colours and the sulphide colours. The padding machine is similar in principle to the jigger, the pieces running over loose guide rollers through the mordant or dye solution contained in a trough of suitable shape and size, but on leaving the machine they pass through a pair of squeezing rollers which uniformly express the excess of liquor and cause it to be returned to the bath. The padding machine is used more for preparing (mordanting, &c.) than for dyeing.

For the dyeing of pieces in rope form a so-called "dye-beck" is used, which is a machine of larger dimensions than the jigger. Across the dye-bath is attached a winch W (see fig. 4), by means of which the pieces, sewn together at the ends so as to form an endless band, are caused to circulate through the machine, being drawn up on the front side of the machine and allowed to drop back into the dye liquor on the other. This form of machine is particularly suited for the mordanting and dyeing of heavy goods. Washing off may be done in the same machine.

The drying of piece goods is done on steam-heated cylinders like those used for the drying of bleached goods (see Bleaching).

The operations which precede dyeing vary according to the material to be dyed and the effects which it is desired to produce. Loose wool, woollen and worsted yarn and piece goods of the same material are almost invariably scoured (see Bleaching) before dyeing in order to remove the oily or greasy impurities which would otherwise interfere with the penetration of the dye solution. Silk is subjected to the process of discharging or boiling off (see Bleaching) in order to remove the silk gum or sericine. Cotton which is to be dyed in dark shades does not require any preparatory treatment, but for light or very bright shades it is bleached before dyeing. Wool and silk are seldom bleached before dyeing. Cotton, wool and union (cotton warp and worsted weft) fabrics are frequently singed (see Bleaching) before dyeing. Worsted yarn, especially two-fold yarn, is very liable to curl and become entangled when scoured, and in order to avoid this it is necessary to stretch and "set" it. To this end it is stretched tight on a specially constructed frame, placed in boiling water, and then cooled. Similarly, union fabrics are liable to "cockle" when wetted, and although this defect may be put right in finishing, spots of water or raindrops will give an uneven appearance of a permanent character to the goods. To avoid this, the pieces are subjected previous to dyeing to the so-called "crabbing" process, in which they are drawn under great tension through boiling water and wound on to perforated hollow cylinders. Steam is then blown through the goods and they are allowed to cool.