← Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Logarithm" to "Lord Advocate" / Volume 16, Slice 8
Chapter 4
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Logarithm" to "Lord Advocate" (part 4)
In those days of public conviviality, and for many years afterwards, the taverns of London held a very important place. The Boar’s Head in Great Eastcheap was an inn of Shakespeare’s own day, and the characters he introduces into his plays are really his own contemporaries. The “Mermaid” is sometimes described as in Bread Street, and at other times in Friday Street and also in Cheapside. We are thus able to fix its exact position; for a little to the west of Bow church is Bread Street, then came a block of houses, and the next thoroughfare was Friday Street. It was in this block that the “Mermaid” was situated, and there appear to have been entrances from each street. What makes this fact still more certain is the circumstance that a haberdasher in Cheapside living “’twixt Wood Street and Milk Street,” two streets on the north side opposite Bread and Friday Streets, described himself as “over against the Mermaid tavern in Cheapside.” The Windmill tavern occupies a prominent position in the action of Every Man in his Humour. The Windmill stood at the corner of the Old Jewry towards Lothbury, and the Mitre close by the Mermaid in Bread Street. The Mitre in Fleet Street, so intimately associated with Dr Johnson, also existed at this time. It is mentioned in a comedy entitled Ram Alley (1611) and Lilly the astrologer frequented it in 1640. At the Mermaid Ben Jonson had such companions as Shakespeare, Raleigh, Beaumont, Fletcher, Carew, Donne, Cotton and Selden, but at the Devil in Fleet Street, where he started the Apollo Club, he was omnipotent. Herrick, in his well-known Ode to Ben, mentions several of the inns of the day.
Under James I. the theatre, which established itself so firmly in the latter years of Elizabeth, had still further increased its influence, and to the entertainments given at the many playhouses may be added the masques so expensively produced at court and by the lawyers at the inns of court. In 1613 The Masque of Flowers was presented by the members of Gray’s Inn in the Old Banqueting House in honour of the marriage of the infamous Carr, earl of Somerset, and the equally infamous Lady Frances, daughter of the earl of Suffolk. The entertainment was prepared by Sir Francis Bacon at a cost of about £2000.
It was during the reign of Charles I. that the first great exodus of the wealthy and fashionable was made to the West End. The great square or piazza of Covent Garden was formed from the designs of Inigo Jones about 1632. The neighbouring streets were built shortly afterwards, and the names of Henrietta, Charles, James, King and York Streets were given after members of the royal family. Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was built about 1629, and named in honour of Henrietta Maria. Lincoln’s Inn Fields had been planned some years before. With the Restoration the separation of fashionable from city life became complete.
When the Civil War broke out London took the side of the parliament, and an extensive system of fortification was at once projected to protect the town against the threatened attack of the royal army. A strong earthen rampart, flanked with bastions and redoubts, surrounded the City, its liberties, Westminster and Southwark, making an immense enclosure.
London had been ravaged by plague on many former occasions, but the pestilence that began in December 1664 lives in history as “the Plague of London.” On the 7th of June 1665 Samuel Pepys for the first time saw two or three houses marked with the red cross and the words “Lord, have mercy upon us,” on the doors. The deaths daily increased, and business was stopped. Grass grew in the area of the Royal Exchange, at Whitehall, and in the principal streets of the city. On the 4th of September 1665 Pepys writes an interesting letter to Lady Carteret from Woolwich: “I have stayed in the city till above 7400 died in one week, and of them about 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day or night but tolling of bells.” The plague was scarcely stayed before the whole city was in flames, a calamity of the first magnitude, but one which in the end caused much good, as the seeds of disease were destroyed, and London has never since been visited by such an epidemic. On the 2nd of September 1666 the fire broke out at one o’clock in the morning at a house in Pudding Lane. A violent east wind fomented the flames, which raged during the whole of Monday and great part of Tuesday. On Tuesday night the wind fell somewhat, and on Wednesday the fire slackened. On Thursday it was extinguished, but on the evening of that day the flames again burst forth at the Temple. Some houses were at once blown up by gunpowder, and thus the fire was finally mastered. Many interesting details of the fire are given in Pepys’s Diary. The river swarmed with vessels filled with persons carrying away such of their goods as they were able to save. Some fled to the hills of Hampstead and Highgate, but Moorfields was the chief resort of the houseless Londoner. Soon paved streets and two-storey houses were seen in that swampy place. The people bore their troubles heroically, and Henry Oldenburg, writing to the Hon. Robert Boyle on September 10, says: “The citizens, instead of complaining, discoursed almost of nothing but of a survey for rebuilding the city with bricks and large streets.” Within a few days of the fire three several plans were presented to the king for the rebuilding of the city, by Christopher Wren, John Evelyn and Robert Hooke. Wren proposed to build main thoroughfares north and south, and east and west, to insulate all the churches in conspicuous positions, to form the most public places into large piazzas, to unite the halls of the twelve chief companies into one regular square annexed to Guildhall and to make a fine quay on the bank of the river from Blackfriars to the Tower. His streets were to be of three magnitudes—90 ft., 60 ft. and 30 ft. wide respectively. Evelyn’s plan differed from Wren’s chiefly in proposing a street from the church of St Dunstan’s in the East to the cathedral, and in having no quay or terrace along the river. In spite of the best advice, however, the jealousies of the citizens prevented any systematic design from being carried out, and in consequence the old lines were in almost every case retained. But though the plans of Wren and Hooke were not adopted, it was to these two fellows of the Royal Society that the labour of rebuilding London was committed. Wren’s great work was the erection of the cathedral of St Paul’s, and the many churches ranged round it as satellites. Hooke’s task was the humbler one of arranging as city surveyor for the building of the houses. He laid out the ground of the several proprietors in the rebuilding of the city, and had no rest early or late from persons soliciting him to set out their ground for them at once. The first great impetus of change in the configuration of London was given by the great fire, and Evelyn records and regrets that the town in his time had grown almost as large again as it was within his own memory. Although for several centuries attempts had been made in favour of building houses with brick or stone, yet the carpenters continued to be the chief house-builders. As late as the year 1650 the Carpenters’ Company drew up a memorial in which they “gave their reasons that tymber buildings were more commodious for this citie than brick buildings were.” The Act of Parliament “for rebuilding the city of London” passed after the great fire, gave the coup de grâce to the carpenters as house-builders. After setting forth that “building with brick was not only more comely and durable, but also more safe against future perils of fire,” it was enacted “that all the outsides of all buildings in and about the city should be made of brick or stone, except doorcases and window-frames, and other parts of the first story to the front between the piers,” for which substantial oaken timber might be used “for conveniency of shops.” In the winter of 1683-1684 a fair was held for some time upon the Thames. The frost, which began about seven weeks before Christmas and continued for six weeks after, was the greatest on record; the ice was 11 in. thick.
The revocation of the edict of Nantes in October 1685, and the consequent migration of a large number of industrious French Protestants, caused a considerable growth in the east end of London. The silk manufactories at Spitalfields were then established.
During the short reign of James II. the fortunes of the city were at their lowest, and nowhere was the arrival of the prince of Orange more welcomed.
William III. cared little for London, the smoke of which gave him asthma, and when a great part of Whitehall was burnt in 1691 he purchased Nottingham House and made it into Kensington Palace. Kensington was then an insignificant village, but the arrival of the court soon caused it to grow in importance.
Although the spiritual wants of the city were amply provided for by the churches built by Wren, the large districts outside the city and its liberties had been greatly neglected. The act passed in the reign of Queen Anne for building fifty new churches (1710) for a time supplied the wants of large districts.
7. Eighteenth Century.—London had hitherto grown up by the side of the Thames. In the 18th century other parts of the town were more largely built upon. The inhabitants used coaches and chairs more than boats, and the banks of the river were neglected. London could no longer be seen as a whole, and became a mere collection of houses. In spite of this the 18th century produced some of the most devoted of Londoners—men who considered a day lived out of London as one lost out of their lives. Of this class Dr Johnson and Hogarth are striking examples. The exhibitions of vice and cruelty that were constantly to be seen in the capital have been reproduced by Hogarth, and had they not been set down by so truthful an observer it would have been almost impossible to believe that such enormities could have been committed in the streets of a great city. A few days after his accession George I. addressed the representatives of the city in these words: “I have lately been made sensible of what consequence the city of London is, and therefore shall be sure to take all their privileges and interests into my particular protection.” On the following lord mayor’s day the king witnessed the show in Cheapside and attended the banquet at Guildhall. Queen Anne and the first three Georges were all accommodated, on the occasions of their visits to the city to see the show, at the same house opposite Bow church. In the time of Queen Anne and George I. David Barclay (the son of the famous apologist for the Quakers) was an apprentice in the house, but he subsequently became master, and had the honour of receiving George II. and George III. as his guests. There was a large balcony extending along the front of the house which was fitted with a canopy and hangings of crimson damask silk. The building, then numbered 108 Cheapside, was pulled down in 1861.
Early in the 18th century there was a considerable extension of building operations in the West End. Still, however, the north of London remained unbuilt upon. In 1756 and for some years subsequently the land behind Montague House (now the British Museum) was occupied as a farm, and when in that year a proposal was made to plan out a new road the tenant and the duke of Bedford strongly opposed it. In 1772 all beyond Portland Chapel in Great Portland Street was country. Bedford House in Bloomsbury Square had its full view of Hampstead and Highgate from the back, and Queen’s Square was built open to the north in order that the inhabitants might obtain the same prospect.
In 1737 the Fleet ditch between Holborn Bridge and Fleet Bridge was covered over, and Stocks Market was removed from the site of the Mansion House to the present Farringdon Street, and called Fleet market. On October 25, 1739, the first stone of the Mansion House was laid. Previously the first magistrates lived in several different houses. A frost almost as severe as the memorable one of 1683-1684 occurred in the winter of 1739-1740, and the Thames was again the scene of a busy fair. In 1758 the houses on London Bridge were cleared away, and in 1760-1762 several of the city gates were taken down and sold. Moorgate is said to have fetched £166, Aldersgate £91, Aldgate £177, Cripplegate £90, and Ludgate £148. The statue of Queen Elizabeth which stood on the west side of Ludgate was purchased by Alderman Gosling and set up against the east end of St Dunstan’s church in Fleet Street, where it still remains.
8. Nineteenth Century.—In 1806 London saw the public funerals of three of England’s greatest men. On the 8th February the body of Nelson was borne with great pomp from the Admiralty to St Paul’s Cathedral, where it was interred in the presence of the prince of Wales and the royal dukes. Pitt was buried on the 22nd of February, and Fox on the 10th of October, both in Westminster Abbey.
The first exhibition of Winsor’s system of lighting the streets with gas took place on the king’s birthday (June 4) 1807, and was made in a row of lamps in front of the colonnade before Carlton House. Finsbury Square was the first public place in which gas lighting was actually adopted, and Grosvenor Square the last. In the winter of 1813-1814 the Thames was again frozen over. The frost began on the evening of December 27, 1813, with a thick fog. After it had lasted for a month, a thaw of four days, from the 26th to the 29th of January, took place, but this thaw was succeeded by a renewal of the frost, so severe that the river soon became one immovable sheet of ice. There was a street of tents called the City Road, which was daily thronged with visitors. In 1838 the second Royal Exchange was destroyed by fire; and on October 28, 1844, the Queen opened the new Royal Exchange, built by Mr (afterwards Sir William) Tite. The Great Exhibition of 1851 brought a larger number of visitors to London than had ever been in it before at one time. The great and continuous increase in the buildings and the enlargement of London on all sides dates from this period.
London within the walls has been almost entirely rebuilt, although in the neighbourhood of the Tower there are still many old houses which have only been refronted. From the upper rooms of the houses may be seen a large number of old tiled roofs.
Unlike many capitals of Europe which have shifted their centres the city of London in spite of all changes and the continued enlargement of the capital remains the centre and headquarters of the business of the country. The Bank of England, the Royal Exchange and the Mansion House are on the site of Ancient London.
In 1863 on the occasion of the marriage of King Edward VII. (when prince of Wales) the streets of London were illuminated as they had never been before. Among other events which made the streets gay and centred in processions to St Paul’s may be specially mentioned the Thanksgiving Day on the 27th of February 1872 for the recovery of the prince of Wales after his dangerous illness; and the rejoicings at the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887, and the Diamond Jubilee in 1897.
The first great emigration of the London merchants westward was about the middle of the 18th century, but only those who had already secured large fortunes ventured so far as Hatton Garden. At the beginning of the 19th century it had become common for the tradesmen of the city to live away from their businesses, but it was only about the middle of the 19th century that it became at all usual for those in the West End to do the same.
During the first half of the 19th century the position of the City Corporation had somewhat fallen in public esteem, and some of the most influential men in the city were unconnected with it, but a considerable change took place in the latter half of the century. Violent attacks were made upon the Livery Companies, but of late years, largely owing to the public spirit of the companies in devoting large sums of money towards the improvement of the several industries in connexion with which they were founded, and the establishment of the City and Guilds of London Technical Institute, a complete change has taken place as to the public estimation in which they are held.
Growth and Population
Much has been written upon the population of medieval London, but little certainty has resulted therefrom. We know the size of London at different periods and are able to guess to some extent as to the number of its inhabitants, but most of the figures which have come down to us are mere guesses. The results of the poll-tax have often been considered as trustworthy substitutes for population returns, but Professor Oman has shown that little trust can be placed in these results. As an instance he states that the commissioners of the poll-tax reported that there were only two-thirds as many contributaries in 1381 as in 1377. The adult population of the realm had ostensibly fallen from 1,355,201 to 896,481. These figures were monstrous and incredible.
The Bills of Mortality of the 16th and 17th centuries are of more value, and they have been considered and revised by such able statisticians as John Graunt and Sir William Petty. It was not, however, before the 19th century that accurate figures were obtainable. The circuit of the walls of London which were left by the Romans was never afterwards enlarged, and the population did not overflow into the suburbs to any extent until the Tudor period. Population was practically stationary for centuries owing to pestilences and the large proportion of deaths among infants. We have no materials to judge of the number of inhabitants before the Norman Conquest, but we can guess that there were many open spaces within the walls that were afterwards filled up. It is scarcely worth while to guess as to the numbers in Saxon London, but it is possible that in the early period there were about 10,000 inhabitants, growing later to about 20,000. During the latter part of the Saxon period the numbers of the population of the country began to decay; this decay, however, was arrested by the Norman Conquest. The population increased during ten peaceful years of Henry III., and increased slowly until the death of Edward II., and then it began to fall off, and continued to decrease during the period of the Wars of the Roses and of the Barons until the accession of the first Tudor monarch. The same causes that operated to bring about these changes in the whole kingdom were of course also at work in the case of the City of London.
One of the earliest statements as to the population of London occurs in a letter of about the year 1199 written to Pope Innocent III. by Peter of Blois, then archdeacon of London, and therefore a man of some authority on the subject. He states that the City contained 120 parish churches and 40,000 inhabitants. These numbers have been very generally accepted as fairly correct, and Dr Creighton comes to the conclusion after careful consideration that the population of London from the reign of Richard I. to that of Henry VII. varied within a limit of about forty to fifty thousand inhabitants.
Dr Creighton points out that the number given by certain chroniclers of the deaths from the early pestilences in London are incredible; such for instance as the statement that forty or fifty thousand bodies were buried in Charterhouse churchyard at the time of the Black Death in 1348-1349. These numbers have been taken as a basis for calculation of population, and one statistician reasoned that if 50,000 were buried in one churchyard 100,000 should represent the whole mortality of London. If this were allowed the population at this time must have been at least 200,000, an impossible amount.
Although the mortality caused by the different plagues had a great effect upon the population of the country at large the city soon recovered the losses by reason of the numbers who came to London from outside in hopes of obtaining work. Although there were fluctuations in the numbers at different periods there is evidence to show that on the average the amount of forty to fifty thousand fixed by Dr Creighton for the years between 1189 and 1509 is fairly correct. The medieval period closed with the accession of the Tudor dynasty, and from that time the population of London continued to increase, in spite of attempts by the government to prevent it. One of the first periods of increase was after the dissolution of the religious houses; another period of increase was after the Restoration.
A proclamation was issued in 1580 prohibiting the erection within 3 m. of the city gates of any new houses or tenements “where no former house hath been known to have been.” In a subsequent proclamation Queen Elizabeth commanded that only one family should live in one house, that empty houses erected within seven years were not to be let and that unfinished buildings on new foundations were to be pulled down. In spite of these restrictions London continued to grow. James I. and Charles I. were filled with the same fear of the increasing growth of London. In 1630 a similar proclamation to that of 1580 was published. During the greater part of the 18th century there was a serious check to the increase of population, but at the end of the century a considerable increase occurred, and in the middle of the 19th century the enormous annual increase became particularly marked. To return to the 16th century when the Bills of Mortality came into existence. Mention is made of these bills as early as 1517, but the earliest series now known dates from 1532. Dr Creighton had access to the manuscript returns of burials and christenings for five years from 1578 to 1582 preserved in the library at Hatfield House. The history of the Bills of Mortality which in the early years were intermittent in their publication is of much interest, and Dr Creighton has stated it with great clearness. The Company of Parish Clerks is named in an ordinance of 1581 (of which there is a copy in the Record Office) as the body responsible for the bills, and their duties were then said to be “according to the Order in that behalf heretofore provided.” John Bell, clerk to the company, who wrote an essay during the great plague of 1665, had no records in his office of an earlier date than 1593, and he was not aware that his company had been engaged in registering births and deaths before that year. The fire of 1666 destroyed all the documents of the Parish Clerks Company, and in its hall in Silver Street only printed tables from about the year 1700 are to be found. There is a set of Annual Bills from 1658 (with the exception of the years 1756 to 1764) in the library of the British Museum.
These bills were not analysed and general results obtained from them until 1662, when Captain John Graunt first published his valuable Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality. Sir William Petty followed with his important inquiries upon the population (Essay on Political Arithmetic, 1683).
It is not worth while to refer to all the wild guesses that were made by various writers, but Dr Creighton shows the absurdity of one of these calculations made in 1554 by Soranzo, the Venetian ambassador for the information of the doge and senators of Venice. He estimates the population to have been 180,000 persons, which Dr Creighton affirms to be nearly three times the number that we obtain by a moderate calculation from the bills of mortality in 1532 and 1535.
Following on his calculations from 1509, when the population may be supposed to have been about 50,000, Dr Creighton carries on his numbers to the Restoration in the following table:—
1532-1535 62,400 1605 224,275
1563 93,276 1622 272,207
1580 123,034 1634 339,824
1593-1595 152,478 1661 460,000
The numbers for 1661 are those arrived at by Graunt, and they are just about half the population given authoritatively in the first census 1801 (864,845). It therefore took 140 years to double the numbers, while in 1841 the numbers of 1801 were more than doubled.
These numbers were arrived at with much care and may be considered as fairly accurate although some other calculations conflict with a few of the figures. The first attempt at a census was in August 1631 when the lord mayor returned the number of mouths in the city of London and Liberties at 130,268, which is only about half the number given above. This is accounted for by the larger area contained in the bills of mortality compared with that containing only the city and its liberties. Howell’s suggestion that the population of London in 1631 was a million and a half need only be mentioned as a specimen of the wildest of guesses.
Petty’s numbers for 1682 are 670,000 and those of Gregory King for 1696, 530,000. The latter are corroborated by those of 1700, which are given as 550,000. Maitland gives the numbers in 1737 as 725,903. with regard to the relative size of great cities Petty affirms that before the Restoration the people of Paris were more in number than those of London and Dublin, whereas in 1687 the people of London were more than those of Paris and Rome or of Paris and Rouen.
It is not necessary to give any further numbers for the population of the 18th century, as that has been already stated to have been almost stationary. This is proved by Gregory King’s figures for 1696 (530,000) when compared with those of the first census for 1801 (864,035). A corroboration is also to be found in the report of the first census for 1801, where a calculation is made of the probable population of the years 1700 and 1750. These are given respectively as 674,350 and 676,250. These figures include (1) the City of London within and (2) without the walls, (3) the City and Liberties of Westminster, (4) the outparishes within the bills of mortality and (5) the parishes not within the bills of mortality. No. 5 is given as 9150 in 1700, and 22,350 in 1750. It is curious to find that already in the 18th century a considerable reduction in the numbers of the city of London is supposed to have taken place, as is seen in the following figures:—
1700. 1750.
City of London within the walls 139,300 87,000
City of London without the walls 69,000 57,300
As the increase in Westminster is not great (130,000 in 1700 and 152,000 in 1750) and there is little difference in the totals it will be seen that the amount is chiefly made up by the increase in the parishes without the bills of mortality. The extraordinary growth of London did not come into existence until about the middle of the 19th century (see § IV. above).
Government
We know little of the government of London during the Saxon period, and it is only incidentally that we learn how the Londoner had become possessed of special privileges which he continued to claim with success through many centuries. One of the chief of these was the claim to a separate voice in the election of the king. The citizens did not dispute the right of election by the kingdom but they held that that election did not necessarily include the choice of London.
An instance of this is seen in the election of Edmund Ironside, although the Witan outside London had elected Canute. The remarkable instance of this after the Conquest was the election of Stephen, but William the Conqueror did not feel secure until he had the sanction of the Londoners to his kingship, and his attitude towards London when he hovered about the neighbourhood of the city for a time shows that he was anxious to obtain this sanction freely rather than by compulsion. His hopes and expectations were fulfilled when the gates of London were opened to receive him, as already related. Athelstan’s acceptance of the London-made law for the whole kingdom, as pointed out by Mr Gomme, is another instance of the independence of the Londoner. When William the Conqueror granted the first charter to London he addressed the bishop and the portreeve—the bishop as the ecclesiastical governor and the portreeve as the representative of the civil power.
The word “port” in the title “portreeve” does not indicate the Port of London as might naturally be supposed, for Stubbs has pointed out that it is porta not portus, and “although used for the city generally, seems to refer to it specially in its character of a Mart or City of Merchants.” The Saxon title of reeve was continued during the Norman period and the shire-reeve or sheriff has continued to our own time. There were originally several distinct reeves, all apparently officers appointed by the king. Some writers have supposed that a succession of portreeves continued in London, but J. H. Round holds that this title disappeared after the Conqueror’s charter. Henry I. granted to the city by charter the right of appointing its own sheriffs; this was a great privilege, which, however, was recalled in the reigns of Henry II. and Richard I., to be restored by John in 1199.
J. H. Round holds that the office of Justiciar was created by Henry I.’s charter, and as he was the chief authority in the city this somewhat takes off from the value of the privilege of appointing sheriffs.
In the 12th century there was a great municipal movement over Europe. Londoners were well informed as to what was going on abroad, and although the rulers were always willing to wait for an opportunity of enlarging their liberties, they remained ready to take advantage of such circumstances as might occur. Their great opportunity occurred while Richard I. was engaged abroad as a crusader.
In 1889 a medal was struck to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the mayoralty which according to popular tradition was founded in 1189. With respect to this tradition Round writes (Commune of London, p. 223): “The assumption that the mayoralty of London dates from the accession of Richard I. is an absolute perversion of history,” and he adds that “there is record evidence which completely confirms the remarkable words of Richard of Devizes, who declares that on no terms whatever would King Richard or his father have ever assented to the establishment of the Communa in London.”
In October 1191 the conflict between John the king’s brother and Longchamp the king’s representative became acute. The latter bitterly offended the Londoners, who, finding that they could turn the scales to either side, named the Commune as the price of their support of John. A small party of the citizens under Henry of Cornhill remained faithful to the chancellor Longchamp, but at a meeting held at St Paul’s on the 8th of October, the barons welcomed the archbishop of Rouen as chief justiciar (he having produced the king’s sign manual appointing a new commission), and they saluted John as regent. Stubbs, in his introduction to the Chronicle of Roger de Hoveden, writes: “This done, oaths were largely taken: John, the Justiciar and the Barons swore to maintain the Communa of London; the oath of fealty to Richard was then sworn, John taking it first, then the two archbishops, the bishops, the barons, and last the burghers with the express understanding that should the king die without issue they would receive John as his successor.” Referring to this important event Mr Round writes: “The excited citizens, who had poured out overnight, with lanterns and torches, to welcome John to the capital, streamed together on the morning of the eventful 8th of October at the well-known sound of the great bell swinging out from its campanile in St Paul’s Churchyard. There they heard John take the oath to the ‘Commune’ like a French king or lord; and then London for the first time had a municipality of her own.”
Little is known as to what the Commune then established really was. Round’s remarkable discovery among the manuscripts of the British Museum of the Oath of the Commune proves for the first time that London in 1193 possessed a fully developed “Commune” of the continental pattern. A striking point in this municipal revolution is that the new privileges extended to the city of London were entirely copied from those of continental cities, and Mr Round shows that there is conclusive proof of the assertion that the Commune of London derived its origin from that of Rouen. This MS. gives us information which was unknown before, but upsets the received opinions as to the early governing position of the aldermen. From this we learn that the government of the city was in the hands of a mayor and twelve échevins (skivini); both these names being French, seem for a time to have excluded the Saxon aldermen.
Twelve years later (1205-1206) we learn from another document, preserved in the same volume as the oath, that alii probi homines were associated with the mayor and échevins to form a body of twenty-four (that is, twelve skivini and an equal number of councillors). Round holds that the Court of Skivini and alii probi homines, of which at present we know nothing further than what is contained in the terms of the oaths, was the germ of the Common Council. We must not suppose that when the city of London obtained the privilege of appointing a mayor, and a citizen could boast in 1194 that “come what may the Londoners shall have no king but their mayor,” that the king did not occasionally exert his power in suspending the liberties of the city. There were really constant disagreements, and sometimes the king degraded the mayor and appointed a custos or warden in his place. Several instances of this are recorded in the 13th and 14th centuries. It is very important to bear in mind that the mayors of London besides holding a very onerous position were mostly men of great distinction. They often held rank outside the city, and naturally took their place among the rulers of the country. They were mostly representatives of the landed interests as well as merchant princes.
There is no definite information as to when the mayor first received the title of lord. A claim has been set up for Thomas Legge, mayor for the second time in 1354, that he was the first lord mayor, but there is positively no authority whatever for this claim, although it is boldly stated that he was created lord mayor by Edward III. in this year. Apparently the title was occasionally used, and the use gradually grew into a prescriptive right. There is no evidence of any grant, but after 1540 the title had become general.
No record has been found of the date when the aldermen became the official advisers of the mayor. The various wards were each presided over by an alderman from an early period, but we cannot fix the time when they were united as a court of aldermen. Stubbs writes: “The governing body of London in the 13th century was composed of the mayor, twenty-five aldermen of the wards and two sheriffs.”
As we do not find any further evidence than the oath of the Commune alluded to of the existence of “échevins” in London, it is possible that aldermen were elected on the mayor’s council under this title. This, however, is not the opinion of Mr Round, who, as before stated, is inclined to believe that the body of échevins became in course of time the Court of Common Council. The aldermen are not mentioned as the colleagues of the mayor until the very end of the 13th century, except in the case of Fitz-Ailwin’s Assize of 1189, and this, of course, related specially to the duties of aldermen as heads of the wards of the city.
In March 1298-1299 letters were sent from “the Mayor and Commune of the City of London” to the municipalities of Bruges, Caen and Cambray. Although the official form of “The Mayor and Commune” was continued until the end of the 13th century, and it was not until early in the 14th century that the form “Mayor, Aldermen and Common Council” came into existence, there is sufficient evidence to show that the aldermen and common council before that time were acting with the mayor as governors of the city. In 1377 it was ordered that aldermen could be elected annually, but in 1384 the rule was modified so as to allow an alderman to be re-elected for his ward at the expiration of his year of office without any interval.
In 1394 the Ordinance respecting annual elections was repealed by the king (Richard II.). Distinct rank was accorded to aldermen, and in the Liber Albus we are told that “it is a matter of experience that ever since the year of our Lord 1350, at the sepulture of aldermen, the ancient custom of interment with baronial honours was observed.” When the poll-tax of 1379 was imposed the mayor was assessed as an earl and the aldermen as barons.
The government of the city by reeves dates back to a very early period, and these reeves were appointed by the king. The prefix of the various kinds of reeves made but little difference in the duties of the office, although the area of these duties might be different. There was slight difference between the office of sheriff and that of portreeve, which latter does not appear to have survived the Conquest.
After the establishment of the Commune and the appointment of a mayor the sheriffs naturally lost much of their importance, and they became what they are styled in Liber Albus “the Eyes of the Mayor.” When Middlesex was in farm to London the two sheriffs were equally sheriffs of London and Middlesex. There is only one instance in the city records of a sheriff of Middlesex being mentioned as distinct from the sheriffs, and this was in 1283 when Anketin de Betteville and Walter le Blond are described as sheriffs of London, and Gerin as sheriff of Middlesex. By the Local Government Act of 1888 the citizens of London were deprived of all right of jurisdiction over the county of Middlesex, which had been expressly granted by various charters.
In 1383 it was ordained and agreed “that no person shall from henceforth be mayor in the said city if he have not first been sheriff of the said city, to the end that he may be tried in governance and bounty before he attains such estate of the mayoralty.”
The two courts—that of aldermen and that of the common council—were probably formed about the same time, but it is remarkable that we have no definite information on the subject. The number of members of the common council varied greatly at different times, but the right to determine the number was indirectly granted by the charter of Edward III. (1341) which enables the city to amend customs and usages which have become hard.
There have also been many changes in the mode of election. The common council were chosen by the wards until 1351, when the appointments were made by certain companies. In 1376 an ordinance was made by the mayor and aldermen, with the assent of the whole commons, to the effect that the companies should select men with whom they were content, and none other should come to the elections of mayors and sheriffs; that the greater companies should not elect more than six, the lesser four and the least two. Forty-seven companies nominated 156 members. In 1383 the right of election reverted to the wards, but was obtained again by the livery companies in 1467.
The Common Hall was the successor of the folkmote, the meetings of which were originally held in the open air at the east end of St Paul’s and afterwards in the Guildhall. These general assemblies of the citizens are described in the old city records as immensa communitas or immensa multitudo civium. The elections in Common Hall were by the whole body of citizens until Edward I.’s reign, citizens were then specially summoned to Common Hall by the mayor. In Edward IV.’s reign the elections of mayor, sheriffs and other officers and members of parliament were transferred to liverymen. Various alterations were subsequently made and now the qualification of electors at the election of the corporate offices of lord mayor, sheriffs, chamberlain and minor offices in Common Hall is that of being a liveryman of a livery company and an enrolled freeman of London. The election of aldermen and common councilmen takes place in the wardmotes.
The recorder, the chief official, is appointed for life. He was formerly appointed by the city, but since the Local Government Act of 1888 he is nominated by the city and approved by the lord chancellor. The common sergeant was formerly appointed by the city, but since 1888 by the lord chancellor. The town clerk is appointed by the city and re-elected annually.
The chamberlain or comptroller of the king’s chamber is appointed by the livery. He was originally a king’s officer and the office was probably instituted soon after the Conquest. The remembrancer is appointed by the common council.
The common hunt, an office abolished in 1807, was filled by John Courtenay in 1417. The sword-bearer is noticed in the Liber Albus (1419) and the first record of an appointment is dated 1426.
Few fundamental alterations have been made in the constitution of the city, but in the reign of Charles II. the most arbitrary proceedings were taken against its liberties. The king and his brother had long entertained designs against the city, and for the purpose of crushing them two pretexts were set up—(1) that a new rate of market tolls had been levied by virtue of an act of common council, and (2) that a petition to the king, in which it was alleged that by the prorogation of parliament public justice had been interrupted, had been printed by order of the Court of Common Council. Charles directed a writ quo warranto against the corporation of London in 1683, and the Court of King’s Bench declared its charter forfeited. Soon afterwards all the obnoxious aldermen were displaced and others appointed in their room by royal commission. When James II. found himself in danger from the landing of the Prince of Orange he sent for the lord mayor and aldermen and informed them of his determination to restore the city charter and privileges, but he had no time to do anything before his flight. The Convention which was summoned to meet on the 22nd of January 1689 was converted by a formal act into a true parliament (February 23). One of the first motions put to the House was that a special Committee should be appointed to consider the violations of the liberties and franchises of all the corporations of the kingdom “and particularly of the City of London.” The motion was lost but the House resolved to bring in a bill for repealing the Corporation Act, and ten years later (March 5) the Grand Committee of Grievances reported to the House its opinion (1) that the rights of the City of London in the election of sheriffs in the year 1682 were invaded and that such invasion was illegal and a grievance, and (2) that the judgment given upon the Quo Warranto against the city was illegal and a grievance. The committee’s opinion on these two points (among others) was endorsed by the House and on the 16th of March it ordered a Bill to be brought in to restore all corporations to the state and condition they were in on the 29th of May 1660, and to confirm the liberties and franchises which at that time they respectively held and enjoyed.
When the Act for the reform of Municipal Corporations was passed in 1835 London was specially excepted from its provisions. When the Metropolitan Board of Works was formed by the Metropolis Management Act of 1855 the city was affected to a certain extent, but by the Local Government Act of 1888 which founded the London County Council the right of appointing a sheriff for Middlesex was taken away from the city of London.
When the county of Middlesex was dissociated from the city of London one portion was joined to the administrative county of London, and the other to the county of Middlesex.
The lord mayor of London has certain very remarkable privileges which have been religiously guarded and must be of great antiquity. It is only necessary to mention these here, but each of the privileges requires an exhaustive examination as to its origin. They all prove the remarkable position of Old London, and mark it off from all other cities of modern Europe. Shortly stated the privileges are four:
1. The closing of Temple Bar to the sovereign.
2. The mayor’s position in the city, where he is second only to the king.
3. His summons to the Privy Council on the accession of a new sovereign.
4. His position of butler at the coronation banquets.
The last may be considered in abeyance as there has not been any coronation banquet since that of George IV. In the case of the coronation of King Edward VII. the claim was excluded from the consideration of the Court of Claims under the royal proclamation. The terms of the judgment on a further claim are as follows: “The Court considers and adjudges that the lord mayor has by usage a right, subject to His Majesty’s pleasure, to attend the Abbey during the coronation and bear the crystal mace.”
Bibliography.—The earliest description of London is that written by the monk Fitzstephen in 1174 as an introduction to his life of Archbishop Thomas à Becket. This was first printed by Stow in his Survey. It was reprinted by Strype in his editions of Stow; by Hearne in his edition of Leland’s Itinerary (vol. 8), by Samuel Pegge in 1772, and elsewhere. The first history is contained in A Survey of London by John Stow (1598, 1603). The author died in 1605, and his work was continued by Anthony Munday and others (1618, 1633) and in the next century by John Strype (1720, 1754-1755). Stow’s original work was reprinted by W. J. Thoms in 1842 and a monumental edition has been published by C. L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1908).
The following are the most important of subsequent histories arranged in order of publication; James Howell, Londinopolis (1657); W. Stow, Remarks on London and Westminster (1722); Robert Seymour (John Mottley), Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster (1734, another edition 1753); William Maitland, History of London (1739, other editions 1756, 1760, 1769, continued by John Entick 1775); John Entick, A New and Accurate History of London, Westminster, Southwark (1766); The City Remembrancer, Narratives of the Plague 1665, Fire 1666 and Great Storm 1703 (1769); A New and Compleat History and Survey, by a Society of Gentlemen (1770, revised by H. Chamberlain, folio revised by W. Thornton 1784); J. Noorthouck, A New History (1773); Walter Harrison, A New and Universal History (1775); J. P. Malcolm, Londinium Redivivum or an Ancient History and Modern Description of London (1803); David Hughson (E. Pugh), London (1805-1809); B. Lambert, History and Survey of London (1806); Henry Hunter, History of London (1811); J. W. Abbott, History of London (1821); Thomas Allen, History and Antiquities of London (1827-1829, continued by Thomas Wright 1839); William Smith, A New History of London (1833); Charles Mackay, A History of London (1838); The History of London, illustrated by W. G. Fearnside (1838); George Grant, A Comprehensive History of London (Dublin, 1849); John Timbs, Curiosities of London (1855, later editions 1855, 1868, 1875, 1876); Old London Papers, Archaeological Institute (1867); W. J. Loftie, A History of London (1883); W. J. Loftie, Historic Towns (London, 1887); Claude de la Roche Francis, London, Historic and Social (Philadelphia, 1902); Sir Walter Besant, The Survey of London (1902-1908)—Early London, Prehistoric, Roman, Saxon and Norman (1908); Medieval London, vol. 1, Historical and Social (1906), vol. 2, Ecclesiastical (1906); London in the Time of the Tudors (1904); London in the Time of the Stuarts (1903); London in the Eighteenth Century (1902); H. B. Wheatley, The Story of London [Medieval Towns] (London, 1904).
The following are some of the Chronicles of London which have been printed, arranged in order of publication: R. Grafton, Chronicle 1189-1558 (1809); R. Arnold, London Chronicle (1811); A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 written in the Fifteenth Century (1827); William Gregory’s Chronicle of London, 1189-1469 (1876); Historical Collections of a Citizen of London, edited by James Gairdner (Camden Society, 1876); Chronicles of London [1200-1516], edited by C. L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1905).
Many books have been published on the government of London, of which the following is a selection: City Law (1647, 1658); Lex Londinensis or the City Law (1680); W. Bohun, Privilegia Londini (1723); Giles Jacob, City Liberties (1733); Laws and Customs, Rights, Liberties and Privileges of the City of London (1765); David Hughson, Epitome of the Privileges of London (1816); George Norton, Commentaries on the History, Constitution and Chartered Franchises of the City of London (1829, 3rd ed. 1869); Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, edited by H. T. Riley—vol. 1, Liber Albus (1419), vol. 2, Liber Custumarum (1859); Liber Albus: the White Book of the City of London, translated by H. T. Riley (1861); H. T. Riley, Memorials of London and London Life in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries (1868); De Antiquis Legibus Liber. Curante Thoma Stapleton (Camden Society, 1846); Chronicles of the Mayors and Sheriffs of London 1188-1274, translated from the Liber de Antiquis Legibus by H. T. Riley. French Chronicle of London 1259-1343 (1863); Analytical Index to the Series of Records known as the Remembrancia 1579-1664 (1888); Calendar of Letter-Books [circa 1275-1399] preserved among the Archives of the Corporation of London at the Guildhall, edited by Reginald R. Sharpe, D.C.L. (1899-1907); W. and R. Woodcock, Lives of Lord Mayors (1846); J. F. B. Firth, Municipal London (1876); Walter Delgray Birch, Historical Charters and Constitutional Documents of the City of London (1884, 1887); J. H. Round, The Commune of London and other Studies (1899); Reginald R. Sharpe, London and the Kingdom; a History derived mainly from the Archives at Guildhall (1894); G. L. Gomme, The Governance of London. Studies on the Place occupied by London in English Institutions (1907); Alfred B. Beaven, The Aldermen of the City of London temp. Henry III. (1908).
In connexion with the government of London may be noted works on the following: Inns of Court. William Herbert, Antiquities of the Inns of Court and Chancery (1804); Robert P. Pearce, History (1848). Artillery Company, Anthony Highmore, History of the Hon. Artillery Co. of London to 1802 (1804); G. A. Raikes, History of the Hon. Artillery Co. (1878). William Herbert published in 1837 History of the Twelve great Livery Companies of London, and in 1869 Thomas Arundell published Historical Reminiscences of the City and its Livery Companies. Since then have appeared The Livery Companies of the City of London, by W. Carew Hazlitt (1892); The City Companies of London, by P. H. Ditchfield (1904); The Gilds and Companies of London, by George Unwin (1908). Separate histories have been published of the chief London companies.
The following are some of the chief works connected with the topography of London: Thomas Pennant, Of London (1790, 1793, 1805, 1813, translated into German 1791); John T. Smith, Antient Topography of London (1815); David Hughson [E. Pugh], Walks through London (1817); London (edited by Charles Knight 1841-1844, reprinted 1851, revised by E. Walford 1875-1877); J. H. Jesse, Literary and Historical Memorials of London (1847); Leigh Hunt, The Town, its Memorable Character and Events (1848, new ed. 1859); Peter Cunningham, A Handbook of London past and present (1849, 2nd ed. 1850, enlarged into a new work in 1891); Henry B. Wheatley, London past and present; Vestiges of Old London, etchings by J. W. Archer (1851); A New Survey of London (1853); G. W. Thornbury, Haunted London (1865, new ed. by E. Walford 1880); Old and New London, vols. i.-ii. by G. W. Thornbury, vols. iii.-vi. by Edward Walford (1873-1878); Walter Besant, London, Westminster, South London, East London (1891-1902); East London Antiquities, edited by Walter A. Locks (East London Advertiser, 1902); Philip Norman, London vanished and vanishing (1905); Records of the London Topographical Society; Monographs of the Committee for the Survey of the Memorials of Greater London.
The following books on the population of London have been published: John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations on the Bills of Mortality (1661, other editions 1662, 1665, 1676); Essay in Political Arithmetick (1683); Five Essays on Political Arithmetick (1687); Several Essays in Political Arithmetick (1699, 1711, 1751, 1755); Essay concerning the Multiplication of Mankind (1682, 1683, 1686), all by Sir William Petty; Corbyn Morris, Observations on the past Growth and present State of the City of London (1751); Collection of the Yearly Bills of Mortality from 1657 to 1758 (ed. by T. Birch, D.D. 1759); Graunt’s Observations, Petty’s Another Essay and C. Morris’s Observations are reprinted in this collection. Graunt and Petty’s Essays are reprinted in Economic Writings of Sir W. Petty (1899).
(H. B. W.*)
See map in London Statistics (vol. xix., 1909), an annual publication of the London County Council, which besides these divisions shows “Water London,” the London main drainage area, and the Central Criminal Court district.
Charing Cross station was the scene of a remarkable catastrophe on the 5th of December 1905, when a large part of the roof collapsed, and the falling débris did very serious damage to the Avenue theatre, which stands close to the station at a lower level.
The report appeared in eight volumes, the first of which, containing the general conclusions to which allusion is here made, bore the number, as a blue-book. Cd. 2597.
Over 200 local acts were repealed by schemes made under the act of 1899.
A valuable article on “The Conqueror’s Footprints in Domesday” was published in the English Historical Review in 1898 (vol. xiii. p. 17). This article contains an account of Duke William’s movements after the battle of Senlac between Enfield, Edmonton, Tottenham and Berkhampstead.
“A map of London engraved on copper-plate, dated 1497,” which was bought by Ferdinand Columbus during his travels in Europe about 1518-1525, is entered in the catalogue of Ferdinand’s books, maps, &c., made by himself and preserved in the Cathedral Library at Seville, but there is no clue to its existence.
One is in the Guildhall Library, and the other among the Pepysian maps in Magdalene College, Cambridge.
This map of London by Norden is dated 1593, as stated above. The same topographer published in his Middlesex a map of Westminster as well as this one of the City of London.
Various changes in the names of the taverns are made in the folio edition of this play (1616) from the quarto (1601); thus the Mermaid of the quarto becomes the Windmill in the folio, and the Mitre of the quarto is the Star of the folio.
The Great Revolt of 1381 (Oxford, 1906), p. 27.
In a valuable paper on “The Population of Old London” in Blackwood’s Magazine for April 1891.
The old Bills of Mortality, although of value from being the only authority on the subject, were never complete owing to various causes: one being that large numbers of Roman Catholics and Dissenters were not registered in the returns of the parish clerk who was a church officer. The bills were killed by the action of the Registration Act for England and Wales, which came into operation July 1, 1837. The weekly Returns of the Registrar-General began in 1840.
“The invention of ‘bills of mortality’ is not so modern as has been generally supposed, for their proper designation may be found in the language of ancient Rome. Libitina was the goddess of funerals; her officers were the Libitinarii our undertakers; her temple in which all business connected with the last rites was transacted, in which the account of deaths—ratio Libitinae—was kept, served the purpose of a register office.”—Journal Statistical Society, xvii. 117 (1854).
The return was made “by special command from the Right Honourable the Lords of His Majesty’s Privy Council.” The Privy Council were at this time apprehensive of an approaching scarcity of food. The numbers (130,268) were made up as follows: London Within the Walls 71,029, London Without the Walls 40,579, Old Borough of Southwark (Bridge Without) 18,660.
R. R. Sharpe, London and the Kingdom (1894), i. 541.
LONDON CLAY, in geology, the most important member of the Lower Eocene strata in the south of England. It is well developed in the London basin, though not frequently exposed, partly because it is to a great extent covered by more recent gravels and partly because it is not often worked on a large scale. It is a stiff, tenacious, bluish clay that becomes brown on weathering, occasionally it becomes distinctly sandy, sometimes glauconitic, especially towards the top; large calcareous septarian concretions are common, and have been used in the manufacture of cement, being dug for this purpose at Sheppey, near Southend, and at Harwich, and dredged off the Hampshire coast. Nodular lumps of pyrites and crystals of selenite are of frequent occurrence. The clay has been employed for making bricks, tiles and coarse pottery, but it is usually too tenacious for this purpose except in well-weathered or sandy portions. The base of the clay is very regularly indicated by a few inches of rounded flint pebbles with green and yellowish sand, parts of this layer being frequently cemented by carbonate of lime. The average thickness of the London Clay in the London basin is about 450 ft.; at Windsor it is 400 ft. thick; beneath London it is rather thicker, while in the south of Essex it is over 480 ft. In Wiltshire it only reaches a few feet in thickness, while in Berkshire it is some 50 or 60 ft. It is found in the Isle of Wight, where it is 300 ft. thick at Whitecliff Bay—here the beds are vertical and even slightly reversed—and in Alum Bay it is 220 ft. thick. In Hampshire it is sometimes known as the Bognor Beds, and certain layers of calcareous sandstone within the clays are called Barnes or Bognor Rock. In the eastern part of the London basin in east Kent the pebbly basement bed becomes a thick deposit (60 ft.), forming part of the Oldhaven and Blackheath Beds.
The London Clay is a marine deposit, and its fossils indicate a moderately warm climate, the flora having a tropical aspect. Among the fossils may be mentioned Panopoea intermedia, Ditrupa plana, Teredina personata, Conus concinnus, Rostellaria ampla, Nautilus centralis, Belosepia, foraminifera and diatoms. Fish remains include Otodus obliquus, Sphyroenodus crassidens; birds are represented by Halcyornis Toliapicus, Lithornis and Odontopteryx, and reptiles by Chelone gigas, and other turtles, Palaeophis, a serpent and crocodiles. Hyracotherium leporinum, Palaeotherium and a few other mammals are recorded. Plant remains in a pyritized condition are found in great abundance and perfection on the shore of Sheppey; numerous species of palms, screw pines, water lilies, cypresses, yews, leguminous plants and many others occur; logs of coniferous wood bored through by annelids and Teredo are common, and fossil resin has been found at Highgate.
See Eocene; also W. Whitaker, “The Geology of London and part of the Thames Valley,” Mem. Geol. Survey (1889), and Sheet Memoirs of the Geol. Survey, London, Nos. 314, 315, 268, 329, 332, and Memoirs on the Geology of the Isle of Wight (1889).
LONDONDERRY, EARLS AND MARQUESSES OF. The 1st earl of Londonderry was Thomas Ridgeway (c. 1565-1631), a Devon man, who was treasurer in Ireland from 1606 to 1616 and was engaged in the plantation of Ulster. Ridgeway was made a baronet in 1611, Baron Ridgeway in 1616 and earl of Londonderry in 1623. The Ridgeways held the earldom until March 1714, when Robert, the 4th earl, died without sons. In 1726 Robert’s son-in-law, Thomas Pitt (c. 1688-1729), son of Thomas Pitt, “Diamond Pitt,” governor at Madras and uncle of the great earl of Chatham, was created earl of Londonderry, the earldom again becoming extinct when his younger son Ridgeway, the 3rd earl of this line, died unmarried in January 1765. In 1796 Robert Stewart (1739-1821), of Mount Stewart, Co. Down, was made earl of Londonderry in the Irish peerage. He had been created Baron Londonderry in 1789 and Viscount Castlereagh in 1795; in 1816 he was advanced to the rank of marquess of Londonderry. The 3rd marquess married the heiress of the Vane-Tempests and took the name of Vane instead of Stewart; the 5th marquess called himself Vane-Tempest and the 6th marquess Vane-Tempest-Stewart.
LONDONDERRY, CHARLES WILLIAM STEWART (VANE), 3rd Marquess of (1778-1854), British soldier and diplomatist, was the son of the 1st marquess by a second marriage with the daughter of the 1st Earl Camden. He entered the army and served in the Netherlands (1794), on the Rhine and Danube (1795), in the Irish rebellion (1798), and Holland (1799), rising to be colonel; and having been elected to parliament for Kerry he became under secretary for war under his half-brother Castlereagh in 1807. In 1808 he was given a cavalry command in the Peninsula, where he brilliantly distinguished himself. In 1809, and again in the campaigns of 1810, 1811, having become a major-general, he served under Wellington in the Peninsula as his adjutant-general, and was at the capture of Ciudad Rodrigo, but at the beginning of 1812 he was invalided home. Castlereagh (see Londonderry, 2nd Marquess of) then sent him to Berlin as minister, to represent Great Britain in the allied British, Russian and Prussian armies; and as a cavalry leader he played an important part in the subsequent fighting, while ably seconding Castlereagh’s diplomacy. In 1814 he was made a peer as Baron Stewart, and later in the year was appointed ambassador at Vienna, and was a member of the important congresses which followed. In 1822 his half-brother’s death made him 3rd marquess of Londonderry, and shortly afterwards, disagreeing with Canning, he resigned, being created Earl Vane (1823), and for some years lived quietly in England, improving his Seaham estates. In 1835 he was for a short time ambassador at St Petersburg. In 1852, after the death of Wellington, when he was one of the pall-bearers, he received the order of the Garter. He died on the 6th of March 1854. He was twice married, first in 1808 to the daughter of the earl of Darnley, and secondly in 1819 to the heiress of Sir Harry Vane-Tempest (a descendant of Sir Piers Tempest, who served at Agincourt, and heir to Sir Henry Vane, Bart.), when he assumed the name of Vane. Frederick William Robert (1805-1872), his son by the first marriage, became 4th marquess; and on the latter’s death in 1872, George Henry (1821-1884), the eldest son by the second marriage, after succeeding as Earl Vane (according to the patent of 1823), became 5th marquess. In 1884 he was succeeded as 6th marquess by his son Charles Stewart Vane-Tempest-Stewart (b. 1852), a prominent Conservative politician, who was viceroy of Ireland (1886-1889), chairman of the London School Board (1895-1897), postmaster-general (1900-1902), president of the Board of Education (1902-1905) and lord president of the Council (1903-1905).
LONDONDERRY, ROBERT STEWART, 2nd Marquess of (1769-1822), British statesman, was the eldest son of Robert Stewart of Ballylawn Castle, in Donegal, and Mount Stewart in Down, an Ulster landowner, of kin to the Galloway Stewarts, who became baron, viscount, earl and marquess in the peerage of Ireland. The son, known in history as Lord Castlereagh, was born on the 18th of June in the same year as Napoleon and Wellington. His mother was Lady Sarah Seymour, daughter of the earl of Hertford. He went from Armagh school to St John’s College, Cambridge, but left at the end of his first year. With Lord Downshire, then holding sway over the County Down, Lord Stewart had a standing feud, and he put forward his son, in July 1790, for one of the seats. Young Stewart was returned, but at a vast cost to his family, when he was barely twenty-one. He took his seat in the Irish House of Commons at the same time as his friend, Arthur Wellesley, M.P. for Trim, but sat later for two close boroughs in England, still remaining member for Down at College Green.
From 1796, when his father became an earl, he took the courtesy title of Viscount Castlereagh, and becoming keeper of the privy seal in Ireland, he acted as chief secretary, during the prolonged absence of Mr Pelham, from February 1797. Castlereagh’s conviction was that, in presence of threatened invasion and rebellion, Ireland could only be made safe by union with Great Britain. In Lord Camden, as afterwards in Lord Cornwallis, Castlereagh found a congenial chief; though his favour with these statesmen was jealously viewed both by the Irish oligarchy and by the English politicians who wished to keep the machine of Irish administration in their own hands. Pitt himself was doubtful of the expediency of making an Irishman chief secretary, but his view was changed by the influence of Cornwallis. In suppressing Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s conspiracy, and the rebellion which followed in 1798, Castlereagh’s vigilance and firmness were invaluable. His administration was denounced by a faction as harsh and cruel—a charge afterwards repudiated by Grattan and Plunket—but he was always on the side of lenity. The disloyal in Ireland, both Jacobins and priest-led, the Protestant zealots and others who feared the consequence of the Union, coalesced against him in Dublin. Even there Castlereagh, though defeated in a first campaign (1799), impressed Pitt with his ability and tact, with Cornwallis he joined in holding out, during the second Union campaign (1800), the prospect of emancipation to the Roman Catholics. They were aided by free expenditure of money and promises of honours, methods too familiar in Irish politics. When the Act of Union was carried through the Irish parliament, in the summer of 1800, Castlereagh’s official connexion with his native land practically ended. Before the Imperial Parliament met he urged upon Pitt the measures which he and Cornwallis thought requisite to make the Union effective. In spite of his services and of Pitt’s support, disillusion awaited him. The king’s reluctance to yield to the Roman Catholic claims was underestimated by Pitt, while Cornwallis imprudently permitted himself to use language which, though not amounting to a pledge, was construed as one. George III. resented the arguments brought forward by Castlereagh—“this young man” who had come over to talk him out of his coronation oath. He peremptorily refused to sanction emancipation, and Pitt and his cabinet made way for the Addington administration. Thereupon Castlereagh resigned, with Cornwallis. He took his seat at Westminster for Down, the constituency he had represented for ten years in Dublin. The leadership of an Irish party was offered to him, but he declined so to limit his political activity. His father accepted, at Portland’s request, an Irish marquessate, on the understanding that in the future he or his heirs might claim the same rank in the Imperial Legislature; so that Castlereagh was able to sit in the House of Commons as Marquess in 1821-1822. Wilberforce discussed with Pitt the possibility of sending out Castlereagh to India as governor-general, when the friction between Lord Wellesley and the directors became grave; but Pitt objected, as the plan would remove Castlereagh from the House of Commons, which should be “the theatre of his future fame.”
In 1802, Castlereagh, at Pitt’s suggestion, became president of the Board of Control in the Addington cabinet. He had, though not in office, taken charge of Irish measures under Addington, including the repression of the Rebellion Bill, and the temporary suspension of the Habeas Corpus in 1801, and continued to advocate Catholic relief, tithe reform, state payment of Catholic and dissenting clergy and “the steady application of authority in support of the laws.” To Lord Wellesley’s Indian policy he gave a staunch support, warmly recognized by the governor-general. On Pitt’s return to office (May 1804), Castlereagh retained his post, and, next year, took over also the duties of secretary for war and the colonies. Socially and politically, the gifts of his wife, Lady Emily Hobart, daughter of a former Irish viceroy, whom he had married in 1794, assisted him to make his house a meeting-place of the party; and his influence in parliament grew notwithstanding his defects of style, spoken and written. As a manager of men he had no equal. After Pitt’s death his surviving colleagues failed to form a cabinet strong enough to face the formidable combination known as “All the Talents,” and Castlereagh acquiesced in the resignation. But to the foreign policy of the Fox-Greville ministry and its conduct of the war he was always opposed. His objections to the Whig doctrine of withdrawal from “Continental entanglements” and to the reduction of military expenditure were justified when Fox himself was compelled “to nail his country’s colours to the mast.”
The cabinet of “All the Talents,” weakened by the death of Fox and the renewed quarrel with the king, went out in April 1807. Castlereagh returned to the War Office under Portland, but grave difficulties arose, though Canning at the Foreign Office was then thoroughly at one with him. A priceless opportunity had been missed after Eylau. The Whigs had crippled the transport service, and the operations to avert the ruin of the coalition at Friedland came too late. The Tsar Alexander believed that England would no longer concern herself with the Continental struggle, and Friedland was followed by Tilsit. The secret articles of that compact, denied at the time by the Opposition and by French apologists, have now been revealed from official records in M. Vandal’s work, Napoléon et Alexandre. Castlereagh and Canning saw the vital importance of nullifying the aim of this project. The seizure of the Danish squadron at Copenhagen, and the measures taken to rescue the fleets of Portugal and Sweden from Napoleon, crushed a combination as menacing as that defeated at Trafalgar. The expedition to Portugal, though Castlereagh’s influence was able only to secure Arthur Wellesley a secondary part at first, soon dwarfed other issues. In the debates on the Convention of Cintra, Castlereagh defended Wellesley against parliamentary attacks: “A brother,” the latter wrote, “could not have done more.” The depression produced by Moore’s campaign in northern Spain, and the king’s repugnance to the Peninsular operations, seemed to cut short Wellesley’s career; but early in 1809, Castlereagh, with no little difficulty, secured his friend’s appointment as commander-in-chief of the second Portuguese expedition. The merit has been claimed for Canning by Stapleton, but the evidence is all the other way.
Meanwhile, Castlereagh’s policy led to a crisis that clouded his own fortunes. The breach between him and Canning was not due to his incompetence in the conduct of the Walcheren expedition, In fact, Castlereagh’s ejection was decided by Canning’s intrigues, though concealed from the victim, months before the armament was sent out to the Scheldt. In the selection of the earl of Chatham as commander the king’s personal preference was known, but there is evidence also that it was one of Canning’s schemes, as he reckoned, if Chatham succeeded, on turning him into a convenient ministerial figurehead. Canning was not openly opposed to the Walcheren expedition, and on the Peninsular question he mainly differed from Castlereagh and Wellington in fixing his hopes on national enthusiasm and popular uprisings. Military opinion is generally agreed that the plan of striking from Walcheren at Antwerp, the French naval base, was sound. Napoleon heard the news with dismay; in principle Wellington approved the plan. Castlereagh’s proposal was for a coup de main, under strict conditions of celerity and secrecy, as Antwerp was unable to make any adequate defence. But Chatham, the naval authorities and the cabinet proceeded with a deliberation explained by the fact that the war secretary had been condemned in secret. The expedition, planned at the end of March, did not reach Walcheren till the end of July 1809; and more time was lost in movements against Batz and Flushing, protracted until an unhealthy autumn prostrated the army, which was withdrawn, discredited and disabled, in September. Public opinion threw the whole blame upon Castlereagh, who then found that, in deference to Canning, his colleagues had decreed his removal half a year earlier, though they kept silence till the troops were brought back from Walcheren. When Castlereagh learned from Percival that the slur cast on him had its origin in a secret attack on him many months before, he was cruelly hurt. The main charge against him was, he says, that he would not throw over officers on whom unpopularity fell, at the first shadow of ill-fortune. His refusal to rush into censure of Moore, following Canning’s sudden change from eulogy to denunciation, requires no defence. According to the ideas then prevailing Castlereagh held himself justified in sending a challenge to the original author, as he held, of a disloyal intrigue against a colleague. In the subsequent duel Canning was wounded and the rivals simultaneously resigned. In private letters to his father and brother, Castlereagh urged that he was bound to show that he “was not privy to his own disgrace.” When Canning published a lengthy explanation of his conduct, many who had sided with him were convinced that Castlereagh had been much wronged. The excuse that the protest upon which the cabinet decided against Castlereagh did not mention the minister’s name was regarded as a quibble. Men widely differing in character and opinions—Walter Scott, Sidney Smith, Brougham and Cobbett—took this view. Castlereagh loyally supported the government in parliament, after Lord Wellesley’s appointment to the Foreign Office. Though Wellington’s retreat after Talavera had been included, with the disasters of the Corunna and Walcheren campaigns, in the censures on Castlereagh, and though ministers were often depressed and doubtful, Castlereagh never lost faith in Wellington’s genius. Lord Wellesley’s resignation in 1812, when the Whigs failed to come to terms with the regent, led to Castlereagh’s return to office as foreign secretary (March 1812). The assassination of Percival soon threw upon him the leadership of the House of Commons, and this double burden he continued to bear during the rest of his life.
From March 1812 to July 1822 Castlereagh’s biography is, in truth, the history of England. Though never technically prime minister, during these years he wielded a power such as few ministers have exercised. Political opponents and personal ill-wishers admitted that he was the ablest leader who ever controlled the House of Commons for so long a period. As a diplomatist, nobody save Marlborough had the same influence over men or was given equal freedom by his colleagues at home. Foreigners saw in him the living presence of England in the camp of the Allies. At the War Office he had been hampered by the lack of technical knowledge, while nature had not granted him, as an organizer, the powers of a Carnot or Roon. But in diplomacy his peculiar combination of strength and charm, of patience and conciliatory adroitness, was acknowledged by all. At the Foreign Office he set himself at once to meet Napoleon’s designs in northern Europe, where Russia was preparing for her life-and-death struggle. Lord Wellesley paid a high tribute to Castlereagh’s conduct in this situation, and Wellington declared that he had then “rendered to the world the most important service that ever fell to the lot of any individual to perform.” Castlereagh wisely rejected Napoleon’s insincere overtures for peace. After the Moscow débâcle Napoleon’s fate was affected not only by Wellington’s progress in Spain, but by the attitude of the northern powers and by the action of Turkey, due to Castlereagh’s opportune disclosure to the Porte of the scheme of partition at Tilsit. At home, the repeal of the Orders in Council was carried, the damage to British trade plainly outweighing the injury inflicted on France by the restrictive system. The British subsidies to the Allies were largely increased as the operations of 1813 developed, but all Castlereagh’s skill was needed to keep the Coalition together. The Allied powers were willing, even after Leipzig, to treat with France on the basis of restoring her “natural frontiers”—the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees; but Castlereagh protested. He would not allow the enemy to take ground for another tiger-spring. Before the Conference of Châtillon, where Napoleon sent Caulaincourt to negotiate for peace—with the message scribbled on the margin of his instructions, “Ne signez rien”—Aberdeen wrote to hasten Castlereagh’s coming: “Everything which has been so long smothered is now bursting forth”; and again, “Your presence has done much and would, I have no doubt, continue to sustain them (the Allies) in misfortune.” The Liverpool cabinet then and later were as urgent in pressing him to return to lead the House of Commons. He had lost his seat for Down in 1805, and afterwards sat for British boroughs; but in 1812 he was re-elected by his old constituents; and again in 1818 and 1820, sitting, after he became marquess of Londonderry in 1821, for Orford. Early in 1814 his colleagues reluctantly consented to his visit to the allied headquarters. The Great Alliance showed signs of weakness and division. Austria was holding back; Prussia had almost broken away; above all, the ambiguous conduct of Alexander bred alarm and doubt. This situation became increasingly serious while Napoleon was giving daily proofs that his military genius, confronting a hesitant and divided enemy, was at its best. Castlereagh strove to keep the Allies together, to give no excuse for those separate arrangements upon which Napoleon was reckoning, to assert no selfish policy for England, to be tied by no theoretical consistency. At the Châtillon conferences England was represented by others, but Castlereagh was present with supreme authority over all, and it was he who determined the result. He declined to commit his country either to a blank refusal to negotiate with Napoleon or to the advocacy of a Bourbon restoration. He was ready to give up almost the whole of England’s conquests, but he insisted on the return of France within her ancient limits as the basis of a settlement. Caulaincourt’s advice was to take advantage of these overtures; but his master was not to be advised. The counter-projects that he urged Caulaincourt to submit to were advanced after his victory at Montereau, when he boasted that he was nearer to Munich than the Allies were to Paris. Even before the Châtillon conference was dissolved (March 18th), Castlereagh saw that Caulaincourt’s efforts would never bend Napoleon’s will. The Allies adopted his view and signed the treaty of Chaumont (March 1st), “my treaty,” as Castlereagh called it, with an unusual touch of personal pride; adding “Upon the face of the treaty this year our engagement is equivalent to theirs united.” The power of England when she threw her purse into the scale had been just exhibited at Bar-sur-Aube, when at a council of all the representatives of the powers the retreat of the allied armies was discussed. Bernadotte, playing a waiting game in Holland, was unwilling to reinforce Blücher, then in a dangerous position, by the Russian and Prussian divisions of Winzingerode and Bülow, temporarily placed under his orders. Having asked for and received the assurance that the military leaders were agreed in holding the transfer necessary, Castlereagh declared that he took upon himself the responsibility of bringing the Swedish prince to reason. The withholding of the British subsidies was a vital matter, not only with Bernadotte but with all the powers. Castlereagh’s avowed intention to take this step without waiting for sanction from his cabinet put an end to evasion and delay. Blücher was reinforced by the two divisions; the battle of Laon was fought and won, and the allies occupied the French capital. In April 1814 Castlereagh arrived in Paris. He did not disguise his discontent with Napoleon’s position at Elba, close to the French coast, though he advised England not to separate herself at this crisis from her allies. His uneasiness led him to summon Wellington from the south to the Embassy in Paris. He hastened himself to London during the visit of the allied sovereigns, and met with a splendid reception. He was honoured with the Garter, being one of the few commoners ever admitted to that order. When the House of Commons offered to the Crown its congratulations upon the treaty of peace, Castlereagh’s triumph was signalized by a brilliantly eloquent panegyric from Canning, and by a recantation of his former doubts and denunciations from Whitbread. His own dignified language vindicated his country from the charge of selfish ambition.
His appointment as British representative at Vienna, where the congress was to meet in September, was foreseen; but meanwhile he was not idle. The war with the United States, originating in the non-intercourse dispute and the Orders in Council, did not cease with the repeal of the latter. It lasted through 1814 till the signing of the treaty of Ghent, soon before the flight from Elba. In parliament the ministry, during Castlereagh’s absence, had been poorly championed. Canning had thrown away his chance by his unwise refusal of the Foreign Office. None of the ministers had any pretension to lead when Castlereagh was busy abroad and Canning was sulking at home, and Castlereagh’s letters to Vansittart, the chancellor of the exchequer, show how these difficulties weighed upon him in facing the position at Vienna, where it was imperative for him to appear. At Vienna he realized at once that the ambition of Russia might be as formidable to Europe and to Great Britain as that of the fallen tyrant. His aim throughout had been to rescue Europe from military domination; and when he found that Russia and Prussia were pursuing ends incompatible with the general interest, he did not hesitate to take a new line. He brought about the secret treaty (Jan. 3, 1815) between Great Britain, Austria and France, directed against the plans of Russia in Poland and of Prussia in Saxony. Through Castlereagh’s efforts, the Polish and Saxon questions were settled on the basis of compromise. The threat of Russian interference in the Low Countries was dropped.
While the Congress was still unfinished, Napoleon’s escape from Elba came like a thunderclap. Castlereagh had come home for a short visit (Feb. 1815), at the urgent request of the cabinet, just before the flight was known. The shock revived the Great Alliance under the compact of Chaumont. All energies were directed to preparing for the campaign of Waterloo. Castlereagh’s words in parliament were, “Whatever measures you adopt or decision you arrive at must rest on your own power and not on reliance on this man.” Napoleon promptly published the secret treaty which Castlereagh had concluded with Metternich and Talleyrand, and the last left in the French archives. But Russia and Prussia, though much displeased, saw that, in the face of Bonaparte’s return, they dared not weaken the Alliance. British subsidies were again poured out like water. After Napoleon’s overthrow, Castlereagh successfully urged his removal to St Helena, where his custodians were charged to treat him “with all the respect due to his rank, but under such precautions as should render his escape a matter of impossibility.” Some of the continental powers demanded, after Waterloo, fines and cessions that would have crushed France; but in November a peace was finally concluded, mainly by Castlereagh’s endeavours, minimising the penalties exacted, and abandoning on England’s part the whole of her share of the indemnity. The war created an economic situation at home which strengthened the Whigs and Radicals, previously discredited by their hostility to a patriotic struggle. In 1816 the Income Tax was remitted, despite Castlereagh’s contention that something should first be done to reduce the Debt Charge. His policy, impressed upon British representatives abroad, was “to turn the confidence Great Britain inspired to the account of peace, by exercising a conciliatory influence in Europe.” Brougham’s action, at the end of 1815, denouncing the Holy Alliance, even in its early form, was calculated to embarrass England, though she was no party to what Castlereagh described as a “piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense.”
While he saw no reason in this for breaking up the Grand Alliance, which he looked upon as a convenient organ of diplomatic intercourse and as essential for the maintenance of peace, he regarded with alarm “the little spirit of German intrigue,” and agreed with Wellington that to attempt to crush France, as the Prussians desired, or to keep her in a perpetual condition of tutelage under a European concert from which she herself should be excluded, would be to invite the very disaster which it was the object of the Alliance to avoid. It was not till Metternich’s idea of extending the scope of the Alliance, by using it to crush “the revolution” wherever it should raise its head, began to take shape, from the conference of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818) onward, that Great Britain’s separation from her continental allies became inevitable. Against this policy of the reactionary powers Castlereagh from the first vigorously protested. As little was he prepared to accept the visionary schemes of the emperor Alexander for founding an effective “confederation of Europe” upon the inclusive basis of the Holy Alliance (see Alexander I. of Russia).
Meanwhile financial troubles at home, complicated by the resumption of cash payments in 1819, led to acute social tension. “Peterloo” and the “Six Acts” were furiously denounced, though the bills introduced by Sidmouth and Castlereagh were carried in both Houses by overwhelming majorities. The danger that justified them was proved beyond contest by the Cato Street Conspiracy in 1820. It is now admitted by Liberal writers that the “Six Acts,” in the circumstances, were reasonable and necessary. Throughout, Castlereagh maintained his tranquil ascendancy in the House of Commons, though he had few colleagues who were capable of standing up against Brougham. Canning, indeed, had returned to office and had defended the “Six Acts,” but Castlereagh bore the whole burden of parliamentary leadership, as well as the enormous responsibilities of the Foreign Office. His appetite for work caused him to engage in debates and enquiries on financial and legal questions when he might have delegated the task to others. Althorp was struck with his unsleeping energy on the Agricultural Distress Committee; “His exertions, coupled with his other duties—and unfortunately he was always obstinate in refusing assistance—strained his constitution fearfully, as was shown by his careworn brow and increasing paleness.” In 1821, on Sidmouth’s retirement, he took upon himself the laborious functions of the Home Office. The diplomatic situation had become serious. The policy of “intervention,” with which Great Britain had consistently refused to identify herself, had been proclaimed to the world by the famous Troppau Protocol, signed by Russia, Austria and Prussia (see Troppau, Congress of). The immediate occasion was the revolution at Naples, where the egregious Spanish constitution of 1812 had been forced on the king by a military rising. With military revolts, as with paper constitutions of an unworkable type, Castlereagh had no sympathy; and in this particular case the revolution, in his opinion, was wholly without excuse or palliation. He was prepared to allow the intervention of Austria, if she considered her rights under the treaty of 1813 violated, or her position as an Italian Power imperilled. But he protested against the general claim, embodied in the Protocol, of the European powers to interfere, uninvited, in the internal concerns of sovereign states; he refused to make Great Britain, even tacitly, a party to such interference, and again insisted that her part in the Alliance was defined by the letter of the treaties, beyond which she was not prepared to go. In no case, he affirmed, would Great Britain “undertake the moral responsibility for administering a general European police,” which she would never tolerate as applied to herself.
To Troppau, accordingly, no British plenipotentiary was sent, since the outcome of the conferences was a foregone conclusion; though Lord Stewart came from Vienna to watch the course of events. At Laibach an attempt to revive the Troppau proposals was defeated by the firm opposition of Stewart; but a renewal of the struggle at Verona in the autumn of 1822 was certain. Castlereagh, now marquess of Londonderry, was again to be the British representative, and he drew up for himself instructions that were handed over unaltered by Canning, his successor at the Foreign Office, to the new plenipotentiary, Wellington. In the threatened intervention of the continental powers in Spain, as in their earlier action towards Naples and Sardinia, England refused to take part. The Spanish revolutionary movement, Castlereagh wrote, “was a matter with which, in the opinion of the English cabinet, no foreign power had the smallest right to interfere.” Before, however, the question of intervention in Spain had reached its most critical stage the development of the Greek insurrection against the Ottoman government brought up the Eastern Question in an acute form, which profoundly modified the relations of the powers within the Alliance, and again drew Metternich and Castlereagh together in common dread of an isolated attack by Russia upon Turkey. A visit of King George IV. to Hanover, in October 1821, was made the occasion of a meeting between Lord Londonderry and the Austrian chancellor. A meeting so liable to misinterpretation was in Castlereagh’s opinion justified by the urgency of the crisis in the East, “a practical consideration of the greatest moment,” which had nothing in common with the objectionable “theoretical” question with which the British government had refused to concern itself. Yet Castlereagh, on this occasion, showed that he could use the theories of others for his own practical ends; and he joined cordially with Metternich in taking advantage of the emperor Alexander’s devotion to the principles of the Alliance to prevent his taking an independent line in the Eastern Question. It was, indeed, the belief that this question would be made the matter of common discussion at the congress that led Castlereagh to agree to be present at Verona; and in his Instructions he foreshadowed the policy afterwards carried out by Canning, pointing out that the development of the war had made the recognition of the belligerent rights of the Greeks inevitable, and quoting the precedent of the Spanish American colonies as exactly applicable. With regard to the Spanish colonies, moreover, though he was not as yet prepared to recognize their independence de jure, he was strongly of opinion that the Spanish government should do so since “other states would acknowledge them sooner or later, and it is to the interest of Spain herself to find the means of restoring an intercourse when she cannot succeed in restoring a dominion.”
But the tragic ending of Castlereagh’s strenuous life was near; and the credit of carrying out the policy foreshadowed in the Instructions was to fall to his rival Canning. Lord Londonderry’s exhaustion became evident during the toilsome session of 1822. Both the king and Wellington were struck by his overwrought condition, which his family attributed to an attack of the gout and the lowering remedies employed. Wellington warned Dr Bankhead that Castlereagh was unwell, and, perhaps, mentally disordered. Bankhead went down to North Cray and took due precautions. Castlereagh’s razors were taken away, but a penknife was forgotten in a drawer, and with this he cut his throat (August 12, 1822). He had just before said, “My mind, my mind, is, as it were, gone”; and, when he saw his wife and Bankhead talking together, he moaned “there is a conspiracy laid against me.” It was as clear a case of brain disease as any on record. But this did not prevent his enemies of the baser sort from asserting, without a shadow of proof, that the suicide was caused by terror at some hideous and undefined charge. The testimony of statesmen of the highest character and of all parties to Castlereagh’s gifts and charm is in strong contrast with the flood of vituperation and calumny poured out upon his memory by those who knew him not.
Bibliography.—Castlereagh’s correspondence and papers were published by his brother and successor (1850-1853) in twelve volumes. Sir Archibald Alison’s Biography in three volumes came out in 1861, with copious extracts from the manuscripts preserved at Wynyard. It was made the subject of an interesting essay in the Quarterly Review for January 1862, reprinted in Essays by the late Marquis of Salisbury (London, 1905). A graceful sketch by Theresa, Marchioness of Londonderry (London, 1904), originally brought out in the Anglo-Saxon Review, contains some extracts from Castlereagh’s unpublished correspondence with his wife, the record of an enduring and passionate attachment which throws a new light on the man.
(E. D. J. W.)
LONDONDERRY, a northern county of Ireland in the province of Ulster, bounded N. by the Atlantic, W. by Lough Foyle and Donegal, E. by Antrim and Lough Neagh, and S. by Tyrone. The area is 522,315 acres, or about 816 sq. m. The county consists chiefly of river valleys surrounded by elevated table-lands rising occasionally into mountains, while on the borders of the sea-coast the surface is generally level. The principal river is the Roe, which flows northward from the borders of Tyrone into Lough Foyle below Newton-Limavady, and divides the county into two unequal parts. Farther west the Faughan also falls into Lough Foyle, and the river Foyle passes through a small portion of the county near its north-western boundary. In the south-east the Moyola falls into Lough Neagh, and the Lower Bann from Lough Neagh forms for some distance its eastern boundary with Antrim. The only lake in the county is Lough Finn on the borders of Tyrone, but Lough Neagh forms about 6 m. of its south-eastern boundary. The scenery of the shores of Lough Foyle and the neighbouring coast is attractive, and Castlerock, Downhill, Magilligan and Portstewart are favourite seaside resorts. On the flat Magilligan peninsula, which forms the eastern horn of Lough Foyle, the base-line of the trigonometrical survey of Ireland was measured in 1826. The scenery of the Roe valley, with the picturesque towns of Limavady and Dungiven, is also attractive, and the roads from the latter place to Draperstown and to Maghera, traversing the passes of Evishgore and Glenshane respectively, afford fine views of the Sperrin and Slieve Gallion mountains.
The west of this county consists of Dalradian mica-schist, with some quartzite, and is a continuation of the northern region of Tyrone. An inlier of these rocks appears in the rising ground east of Dungiven, including dark grey crystalline limestone. Old Red Sandstone and Lower Carboniferous Sandstone overlie these old rocks in the south and east, meeting the igneous “green rocks” of Tyrone, and the granite intrusive in them, at the north end of Slieve Gallion. Triassic sandstone covers the lower slope of Slieve Gallion on the south-east towards Moneymore, and rises above the Carboniferous Sandstone from Dungiven northward. At Moneymore we reach the western scarp of the white Limestone (Chalk) and the overlying basalt of the great plateaus, which dip down eastward under Lough Neagh. The basalt scarp, protecting chalk and patches of Liassic and Rhaetic strata, rises to 1260 ft. in Benevenagh north of Limavady, and repeats the finest features of the Antrim coast. A raised shelf with post-glacial marine clays forms the flat land west of Limavady. Haematite has been mined on the south flank of Slieve Gallion.
The excessive rainfall and the cold and uncertain climate are unfavourable for agriculture. Along the sea-coast there is a district of red clay formed by the decomposition of sandstone, and near the mouth of the Roe there is a tract of marl. Along the valleys the soil is often fertile, and the elevated districts of the clay-slate region afford pasture for sheep. The acreage of pasture-land does not greatly exceed that of tillage. Oats, potatoes and turnips are chiefly grown, with some flax; and cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry are kept in considerable numbers. The staple manufacture of the county is linen. The manufacture of coarse earthenware is also carried on, and there are large distilleries and breweries and some salt-works. There are fisheries for salmon and eels on the Bann, for which Coleraine is the headquarters. The deep-sea and coast fisheries are valuable, and are centred at Moville in Co. Donegal. The city of Londonderry is an important railway centre. The Northern Counties (Midland) main line reaches it by way of Coleraine and the north coast of the county, and the same railway serves the eastern part of the county, with branches from Antrim to Magherafelt, and Magherafelt to Cookstown (Co. Tyrone), to Draperstown and to Coleraine, and from Limavady to Dungiven. The Great Northern railway reaches Londonderry from the south, and the city is also the starting-point of the County Donegal, and the Londonderry and Lough Swilly railways.
The population decreases (152,009 in 1891; 144,404 in 1901) and emigration is extensive, though both decrease and emigration are well below the average of the Irish counties. Of the total, about 43% are Roman Catholics, and nearly 50% Presbyterians or Protestant Episcopalians. Londonderry (pop. 38,892), Coleraine (6958) and Limavady (2692) are the principal towns, while Magherafelt and Moneymore are lesser market towns. The county comprises six baronies. Assizes are held at Londonderry, and quarter sessions at Coleraine, Londonderry and Magherafelt. The county is represented in parliament by two members, for the north and south divisions respectively. The Protestant and Roman Catholic dioceses of Armagh, Derry and Down each include parts of the county.
At an early period the county was inhabited by the O’Cathans or O’Catrans, who were tributary to the O’Neills. Towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth the county was seized, with the purpose of checking the power of the O’Neills, when it received the name of Coleraine, having that town for its capital. In 1609, after the confiscation of the estates of the O’Neills, the citizens of London obtained possession of the towns of Londonderry and Coleraine and adjoining lands, 60 acres out of every 1000 being assigned for church lands. The common council of London undertook to expend £20,000 on the reclamation of the property, and elected a body of twenty-six for its management, who in 1613 were incorporated as the Irish Society, and retained possession of the towns of Londonderry and Coleraine, the remainder of the property being divided among twelve of the great livery companies. Their estates were sequestrated by James I., and in 1637 the charter of the Irish Society was cancelled. Cromwell restored the society to its former position, and Charles II. at the Restoration granted it a new charter, and confirmed the companies in their estates. In the insurrection of 1641 Moneymore was seized by the Irish, and Magherafelt and Bellaghy, then called Vintner’s Town, burned, as well as other towns and villages. There are several stone circles, and a large number of artificial caves. The most ancient castle of Irish origin is that of Carrickreagh; and of the castles erected by the English those of Dungiven and Muff are in good preservation. The abbey of Dungiven, founded in 1109, and standing on a rock about 200 ft. above the river Roe, is a picturesque ruin.
LONDONDERRY, or Derry, a city, county of a city, parliamentary borough (returning one member) and the chief town of Co. Londonderry, Ireland, 4 m. from the junction of the river Foyle with Lough Foyle, and 95 m. N.N.W. of Belfast. Pop. (1901) 38,892. The city is situated on an eminence rising abruptly from the west side of the river to a height of about 120 ft. The eminence is surrounded by hills which reach, a few miles to the north, an elevation of upwards of 1500 ft., and the river and lough complete an admirable picture. The city is surrounded by an ancient rampart about a mile in circumference, having seven gates and several bastions, but buildings now extend beyond this boundary. The summit of the hill, at the centre of the town, is occupied by a quadrangular area from which the main streets diverge. Some old houses with high pyramidal gables remain but are much modernized. The Protestant cathedral of St Columba, in Perpendicular style, was completed from the design of Sir John Vanbrugh in 1633, at a cost of £4000 contributed by the city of London, and was enlarged and restored in 1887. The spire was added in 1778 and rebuilt in 1802. The bishop’s palace, erected in 1716, occupies the site of the abbey founded by Columba. The abbot of this monastery, on being made bishop, erected in 1164 Temple More or the “Great Church,” one of the finest buildings in Ireland previous to the Anglo-Norman invasion. The original abbey church was called the “Black Church,” but both it and the “Great Church” were demolished in 1600 and their materials used in fortifying the city. There is a large Roman Catholic cathedral, erected c. 1870 and dedicated to St Eugenius. For Foyle College, founded in 1617, a new building was erected in 1814. This and the Academical Institution, a foundation of 1868, were amalgamated in 1896. Magee College, taking its name from its foundress, Mrs Magee of Dublin, was instituted in 1857 as a training-school for the Presbyterian ministry.
The staple manufacture of the town is linen (especially shirt-making), and there are also shipbuilding yards, iron-foundries, saw-mills, manure-works, distilleries, breweries and flour-mills. The salmon fishery on the Foyle is valuable. The river affords a commodious harbour, its greatest depth being 33 ft. at high tide, and 12 ft. at low tide. It is under the jurisdiction of the Irish Society. The port has a considerable shipping trade with Great Britain, exporting agricultural produce and provisions. Regular services of passenger steamers serve Londonderry from Glasgow, Liverpool, Morecambe, Belfast and local coast stations. In 1898 Londonderry was constituted one of the six county boroughs which have separate county councils.
About 5 m. W. of the city, on a hill 803 ft. high, is a remarkable fort, consisting of three concentric ramparts, and an interior fortification of stone. It is named the Grianan of Aileach, and was a residence of the O’Neills, kings of Ulster. It was restored in 1878.
Derry, the original name of Londonderry, is derived from Doire, the “place of oaks.” It owes its origin to the monastery founded by Columba about 546. With the bishopric which arose in connexion with this foundation, that of Raphoe was amalgamated in 1834. From the 9th to the 11th century the town was frequently in the possession of the Danes, and was often devastated, but they were finally driven from it by Murtagh O’Brien about the beginning of the 12th century. In 1311 it was granted by Edward II. to Richard de Burgh. After the Irish Society of London obtained possession of it, it was incorporated in 1613 under the name of Londonderry. From this year until the Union in 1800 two members were returned to the Irish parliament. The fortifications, which were begun in 1600, were completed in 1618. In 1688 Derry had become the chief stronghold of the Protestants of the north. On the 7th of December certain of the apprentices in the city practically put themselves and it in a stage of siege by closing the gates, and on the 19th of April 1689 the forces of James II. began in earnest the famous siege of Derry. The rector of Donaghmore, George Walker, who, with Major Baker, was chosen to govern Derry, established fame for himself for his bravery and hopefulness during this period of privation, and the historic answer of “No surrender,” which became the watchword of the men of Derry, was given to the proposals of the besiegers. The garrison was at the last extremity when, on the 30th of July, ships broke through the obstruction across the harbour and brought relief. Walker and the siege are commemorated by a lofty column (1828), bearing a statue of the governor, on the Royal Bastion, from which the town standards defied the enemy; and the anniversary of the relief is still observed.
LONG, GEORGE (1800-1879), English classical scholar, was born at Poulton, Lancashire, on the 4th of November 1800, and educated at Macclesfield grammar-school and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was Craven university scholar in 1821 (bracketed with Lord Macaulay and Henry Malden), wrangler and senior chancellor’s medallist in 1822 and became a fellow of Trinity in 1823. In 1824 he was elected professor of ancient languages in the new university of Virginia at Charlottesville, U.S.A., but after four years returned to England as the first Greek professor at the newly founded university of London. In 1842 he succeeded T. H. Key as professor of Latin at University College; in 1846-1849 he was reader in jurisprudence and civil law in the Middle Temple, and finally (1849-1871) classical lecturer at Brighton College. Subsequently he lived in retirement at Portfield, Chichester, in receipt (from 1873) of a Civil List pension of £100 a year obtained for him by Gladstone. He was one of the founders (1830), and for twenty years an officer, of the Royal Geographical Society; an active member of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, for which he edited the quarterly Journal of Education (1831-1835) as well as many of its text-books; the editor (at first with Charles Knight, afterwards alone) of the Penny Cyclopaedia and of Knight’s Political Dictionary; and a member of the Society for Central Education instituted in London in 1837. He contributed the Roman law articles to Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, and wrote also for the companion dictionaries of Biography and Geography. He is remembered, however, mainly as the editor of the Bibliotheca Classica series—the first serious attempt to produce scholarly editions of classical texts with English commentaries—to which he contributed the edition of Cicero’s Orations (1851-1862). He died on the 10th of August 1879.
Among his other works are: Summary of Herodotus (1829); editions of Herodotus (1830-1833) and Xenophon’s Anabasis (1831); revised editions of J. A. Macleane’s Juvenal and Persius (1867) and Horace (1869); the Civil Wars of Rome; a translation with notes of thirteen of Plutarch’s Lives (1844-1848); translations of the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius (1862) and the Discourses of Epictetus (1877); Decline of the Roman Republic (1864-1874), 5 vols. See H. J. Matthews, “In Memoriam,” reprinted from the Brighton College Magazine, 1879.
LONG, JOHN DAVIS (1838- ), American lawyer and political leader, was born in Buckfield, Oxford county, Maine, on the 27th of October 1838. He graduated at Harvard in 1857, studied law at the Harvard Law School and in 1861 was admitted to the bar. He practised in Boston, became active in politics as a Republican, was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1875-1878 and its speaker in 1876-1878, lieutenant-governor of the state in 1879, and governor in 1880-1882. In 1883-1889 he was a member of the National House of Representatives, and from March 1897 to May 1902 was secretary of the navy, in the cabinet, first of President McKinley and then of President Roosevelt. In 1902 he became president of the Board of Overseers of Harvard College. His publications include a version of the Aeneid (1879), After-Dinner and Other Speeches (1895) and The New American Navy (1903).
LONG BRANCH, a city of Monmouth county, New Jersey, U.S.A., on the easternmost or “long” branch of the Shrewsbury river and on the Atlantic coast, about 30 m. S. of New York City. Pop. (1890) 7231; (1900) 8872, of whom 1431 were foreign-born and 987 were negroes; (1910 census) 13,298. It is served by the Pennsylvania, the Central of New Jersey, the New York & Long Branch, and electric railways, and by steamboats to New York. The carriage roads in the vicinity are unusually good. Long Branch is one of the oldest American watering-places. It is situated on a bluff which rises abruptly 20-35 ft. above the beach, and along the front of which bulkheads and jetties have been erected as a protection from the waves; along or near the edge of the bluff, Ocean Avenue, 60 ft. wide and about 5 m. long (from Seabright to Deal), commands delightful views of the ocean. A “bluff walk” runs above the water for 2 m. The city has one public park, Ocean Park (about 10 acres), and two privately owned parks, one of which is Pleasure Bay Park (25 acres), on the Shrewsbury river, where operas are given in the open air. The principal public institutions are the Monmouth Memorial Hospital and the Long Branch Circulating Library. In Long Branch the Monmouth County Horse Show is held annually in July. The southern part of Long Branch, known as Elberon, contains some beautiful summer residences—in one of its cottages General U. S. Grant spent his summers for many years, and in another, the Francklyn, President J. A. Garfield died in 1881. In 1909 a monument to Garfield was erected in Ocean Park. Adjoining Long Branch on the N. is the borough of Monmouth Beach (incorporated in 1906; population, 1910, 485). Before the War of Independence the site of Long Branch was owned by Colonel White, a British officer. It was confiscated as a result of the war, and late in the century its development as a watering-place began. Long Branch was chartered as a city in 1904.
LONGCHAMP, WILLIAM (d. 1197), chancellor of England and bishop of Ely, entered public life at the close of Henry II.’s reign as official to the king’s son Geoffrey, for the archdeaconry of Rouen. Henry II., who disliked him, called him the “son of two traitors.” He soon deserted Geoffrey for Richard, who made him chancellor of the duchy of Aquitaine. He always showed himself an able diplomatist. He first distinguished himself at Paris, as Richard’s envoy, when he defeated Henry II.’s attempt to make peace with Philip Augustus (1189). On Richard’s accession William became chancellor of the kingdom and bishop of Ely. When Richard left England (Dec. 1189), he put the tower of London in his hands and chose him to share with Hugh de Puiset, the great bishop of Durham, the office of chief justiciar. William immediately quarrelled with Hugh, and by April 1190 had managed to oust him completely from office. In June 1190 he received a commission as legate from Pope Celestine. He was then master in church as well as state. But his disagreeable appearance and manners, his pride, his contempt for everything English made him detested. His progresses through the country with a train of a thousand knights were ruinous to those on whom devolved the burden of entertaining him. Even John seemed preferable to him. John returned to England in 1191; he and his adherents were immediately involved in disputes with William, who was always worsted. At last (June 1191) Geoffrey, archbishop of York and William’s earliest benefactor, was violently arrested by William’s subordinates on landing at Dover. They exceeded their orders, which were to prevent the archbishop from entering England until he had sworn fealty to Richard. But this outrage was made a pretext for a general rising against William, whose legatine commission had now expired, and whose power was balanced by the presence of the archbishop of Rouen, Walter Coutances, with a commission from the king, William shut himself up in the Tower, but he was forced to surrender his castles and expelled from the kingdom. In 1193 he joined Richard in Germany, and Richard seems to have attributed the settlement soon after concluded between himself and the emperor, to his “dearest chancellor.” For the rest of the reign Longchamp was employed in confidential and diplomatic missions by Richard all over the continent, in Germany, in France and at Rome. He died in January 1197. His loyalty to Richard was unswerving, and it was no doubt through his unscrupulous devotion to the royal interest that he incurred the hatred of Richard’s English subjects.
Authorities.—Benedictus, Gesta Henrici, vol. ii.; Giraldus Cambrensis, De Vita Galfridi; Stubbs’ Preface to Roger of Hoveden, vol. iii.; L. Bovine-Champeaux, Notice sur Guillaume de Longchamp (Évreux, 1885).
LONGCLOTH, a plain cotton cloth originally made in comparatively long pieces. The name was applied particularly to cloth made in India. Longcloth, which is now commonly bleached, comprehends a number of various qualities. It is heavier than cambric, and finer than medium or Mexican. As it is used principally for underclothing and shirts, most of the longcloth sold in Great Britain passes through the hands of the shirt and underclothing manufacturers, who sell to the shopkeepers, though there is still a considerable if decreasing retail trade in piece-goods. The lower kinds of longcloth, which are made from American cotton, correspond in quality to the better kinds of “shirting” made for the East, but the best longcloths are made from Egyptian cotton, and are fine and fairly costly goods.
LONG EATON, an urban district in the Ilkeston parliamentary division of Derbyshire, England, 10 m. E.S.E. of Derby, on the Midland railway. Pop. (1891) 9636; (1901) 13,045. It lies in the open valley of the Trent, at a short distance from the river, and near the important Trent Junction on the Midland railway system. The church of St Lawrence has Norman portions, and an arch and window apparently of pre-Conquest date. The large industrial population of the town is occupied in the manufacture of lace, which extended hither from Nottingham; there are also railway carriage works. To the north is the township of Sandiacre (pop. 2954), where the church has a fine Decorated chancel.
LONGEVITY, a term applied to express either the length or the duration of life in any organism, but, as cases of long duration excite most interest, frequently used to denote a relatively unusual prolongation of life. There is no reason to suppose that protoplasm, the living material of organisms, has a necessarily limited duration of life, provided that the conditions proper to it are maintained, and it has been argued that since every living organism comes into existence as a piece of the protoplasm of a pre-existing living organism, protoplasm is potentially immortal. Living organisms exist, however, as particles or communities of particles of protoplasm (see Life), and as such have a limited duration of life. Longevity, as E. Ray Lankester pointed out in 1869, for practical purposes must be understood to mean the “length of time during which life is exhibited in an individual.” The word “individual” must be taken in its ordinary sense as a wholly or partially independent, organized mass produced from a pre-existing organized mass, as otherwise the problem will be confused by arguments as to the meaning of biological individuality.
Empirical Data.—A multitude of observations show that only a very brief life, ranging from a few hours to a few days, is the normal fate of the vast majority of single-celled organisms, whether these be animal or vegetable or on the border-line between the two kingdoms. Death comes to them rapidly from internal or external causes, or the individual life ends in conjugation or division or spore-formation. Under special conditions, natural or artificial, the individual life may be prolonged by desiccation, or freezing, or by some similar arrest of functional activity.
The duration of life among plants is varied. The popular division into annuals, biennials and perennials is not absolute, for natural and artificial conditions readily prolong the lives of annuals and biennials for several seasons, whereas the case of perennials is much complicated by the mode of growth, and the problem of individuality, however we desire to exclude it, obtrudes itself. In the vast majority of cases where a plant is obviously a simple individual, its life is short, ranging from a few days in the case of fungi, to two seasons in the case of biennial herbs. Most of the simple algae are annual, their life enduring only for part of the year; the branching algae are more often perennial, but in their cases not only are observations as to duration lacking, but however simply we may use the term individual, its application is difficult. The larger terrestrial plants with woody tissues which we denote roughly as shrubs and trees have an individuality which, although different from that of a hyacinth or carrot, is usually obvious. Shrubs live from four to ten or more years, and it apparently is the case that odoriferous shrubs such as sage and lavender display the longer duration. Trees with soft wood, such as poplars and willows, last for about fifty years, fruit-trees rather longer. Estimates of the age which large trees can attain, based partly on attempts to count the annual rings, have been given by many writers, and range from about three hundred years in the case of the elm to three to five thousand years in the case of Sequoia gigantea of California, and over five thousand years in that of the baobab (Adansonia digitata) of Cape Verde. It is impossible to place exact reliance on these estimates, but it is at least certain that very many trees have a duration of life exceedingly great in comparison with the longest-lived animals.
The duration of life amongst multicellular invertebrate animals is little known, except in the frequent instances where it is normally brief. Many sponges and polyps die at the end of the season, leaving winter eggs or buds. The much-branched masses of the larger sponges and compound hydrozoa certainly may be perennial. A sea-anemone (Actinia mesembryanthemum), captured in 1828 by Sir John Dalyell, a Scottish naturalist, and then guessed to be about seven years old, lived in captivity in Edinburgh until 1887, the cause of death being unknown. As other instances of great ages attained by sea-anemones are on record, it is plain that these animals, although simple polyps, are long-lived. Echinoderms are inferred to live to considerable ages, as they grow slowly and as there is great difference in size amongst fully adult specimens. On similar reasoning, considerable age is attributed to the larger annulates and crustacea, but the smaller forms in many cases are known to have very short lives. The variation in the length of life of molluscs appears to be great. Many species of gastropods live only a few years; others, such as Natica heros, have reached thirty years, whilst the large Tridacna gigas is stated to live from sixty to a hundred years. Among insects, the adult stage has usually only a very short duration of life, extending from a few hours to a few months, but the larval stages may last much longer. Including these latter, the range of duration among insects, taking the whole life from hatching to death, appears to lie between the limits of a few weeks in the case of plant-lice to seventeen years in the case of the American Cicada septemdecim, the larva of which lives seventeen years, the adult only a month. Most butterflies are annuals, but those which fail to copulate may hibernate and live through a second season, whilst the lives of some have been preserved artificially for seven years. Worker bees and drones do not survive the season, but queens may live from two to five years. In the case of vertebrates, the duration of life appears to be greater among fish and reptiles than among birds and mammals. The ancient Romans have noted that eels, kept in aquaria, could reach the age of sixty years. Estimates based on size and rate of growth have led to the inference that salmon may live to the age of a hundred years, whilst G. L. L. Buffon set down the period of life of carp in ponds as one hundred and fifty years, and there is evidence for a pike having reached the age of over two centuries. More recently it has been claimed that the age of fish can be ascertained exactly by counting the annual rings of the otoliths. No great ages have as yet been recorded by this method, whilst, on the other hand, by revealing great variations of weight and size in fishes with the same number of annual rings, it has thrown doubt on the validity of estimates of age based on size and rate of growth. The evidence as a whole is unsatisfactory, but it is highly probable that in the absence of accidents most fish can attain very great ages. The duration of life among batrachia is little known, but small frogs have been recorded as living over twelve years, and toads up to thirty-six years.
Almost nothing is known as to the longevity of snakes and lizards, but it is probable that no great ages are reached. Crocodiles, alligators and caymans grow slowly and are believed to live very long. There is exact evidence as to alligators in captivity in Europe reaching forty years without signs of senescence, and some of the sacred crocodiles of India are believed to be more than a hundred years old. Chelonians live still longer. A tortoise has lived for eighty years in the garden of the governor of Cape Town, and is believed to be at least two hundred years old. There are records of small land-tortoises that have been kept in captivity for over a century, whilst the very large tortoises of the Galapagos Islands certainly attain ages of at least two centuries and possibly much more. A considerable body of information exists regarding the longevity of birds, and much of this has been brought together by J. H. Gurney. From his lists, which include more than fifty species, it appears that the duration is least in the case of small passerine and picarian birds, where it ranges from eight or nine years (goat-suckers and swifts) to a maximum of twenty-five years, the latter age having been approached by larks, canaries and goldfinch. Gulls have been recorded as living over forty years, ducks and geese over fifty years (the duchess of Bedford has recorded the case of a Chinese goose having been in possession of the same family for fifty-seven years). Parrots frequently live over eighty years, swans nearly as long, ravens and owls rather less, whilst there is excellent evidence of eagles and falcons considerably exceeding a hundred years. Notwithstanding their relatively large size, struthious birds do not reach great ages. The records for cassowaries and rheas do not exceed thirty years, and the maximum for ostriches is fifty years, and that on doubtful evidence.
Exact records regarding the longevity of mammals are surprisingly few. There is no evidence as to Monotremes. The life of Marsupials in captivity is seldom long; a phalanger has lived in the London Zoological Gardens and showed no signs of age at more than ten years old; it may be inferred that the larger forms are capable of living longer. Reliable records as to Edentates do not exist; those in captivity have short lives, but the size and structure of some of the extinct forms suggests that they may have reached a great age. Nothing is known regarding the longevity of Sirenians, except that they do not live long in captivity. In the case of Cetaceans, estimates based on the growth of whale-bone assign an age of several centuries to whale-bone whales; exact records do not exist. More is known regarding Ungulates, as many of these are domesticated, semi-domesticated or are frequently kept in captivity. Great length of life has been assigned to the rhinoceros, but the longest actual record is that of an Indian rhinoceros which lived for thirty-seven years in the London Zoological Gardens. The usual duration of life in the case of horses, asses and zebras is from fifteen to thirty years, but instances of individuals reaching fifty years are fairly well authenticated. Domestic cattle may live from twenty-five to thirty years, sheep and goats from twelve to fourteen years, antelopes rather longer, especially in the case of the larger forms. A giraffe has lived for nineteen years in the London Zoological Gardens. Deer are reputed to live longer than sheep, and records of individuals at the London Gardens confirm this, but it is doubtful if they live as long as cattle. Camels are long-lived, according to repute, but actual records show no great age; a llama which died in the London Gardens at the age of seventeen years showed unmistakable signs of senility. The hippopotamus is another large ungulate to which great longevity has been assigned, but the longest actual record is the case of a female born in the London Gardens which died in its thirty-fifth year. The duration of life assigned to domestic swine is about twenty years; an Indian wild boar, alive in the London Zoological Gardens in 1910, and apparently in full vigour, was fifteen years old. Elephants are usually supposed capable of reaching great ages, but the actual records of menagerie and military animals show that thirty to forty years is a normal limit. Facts as to rodents are not numerous; the larger forms such as hares and rabbits may live for ten years, smaller forms such as rats and mice, for five or six years. Bats have a reputation for long duration of life, and tropical fruit-bats are known to have lived for seventeen years. No great ages have been recorded for Carnivora, but the average is fairly high. Twenty-five years appears to be a limit very rarely exceeded by lions, tigers or bears; domestic cats may live for from twelve to twenty-three years, and dogs from sixteen to eighteen years, though cases of as many as thirty-four years have been noted. Less is known of the smaller forms, but menagerie records show that ages between twelve and twenty are frequently reached. There were in 1910 in the London Zoological Gardens, apparently in good health, a meerkat at least twelve years old, a sand-badger fourteen years and a ratel nineteen years of age. Records regarding monkeys are unsatisfactory, for these creatures are notoriously delicate in captivity, and it is practically certain that under such circumstances they rarely die of old age. A grey lemur eleven years old and a chimpanzee eleven and a half, both in good health in the London Zoological Gardens, appear to be the oldest primates definitely recorded. Estimates based on size, condition of the skull and so forth obtained by examination of wild specimens that have been killed would seem to establish a rough correspondence between the size of monkeys and their duration of life, and to set the limits as between seven or eight and thirty years.
With regard to the human race, there seems to be almost no doubt but that the average duration of life has increased with civilization; the generally improved conditions of life, the greater care of the young and of the aged and the advance in medical and surgical science far more than outweigh any depressing effect caused by the more strenuous and nervous activity required by modern social organization. The expectation of life of those who attain the age of sixty varies with race, sex and occupation, but is certainly increasing, and an increasing number of persons have a chance of reaching and do reach ages between ninety and one hundred. Careful investigation has thrown doubt almost amounting to disproof on the much-quoted cases of great longevity, such as that of Thomas Parr, the Shropshire peasant, who was supposed to have reached his hundred and fifty-third year, and, although the existence of centenarians is thoroughly established, any ages exceeding a hundred by more than two or three years are, at the most, dubious.
A survey of the facts of longevity, so far as these are established on reasonable evidence, discloses that the recorded ages both of men and animals are much shorter than those assigned in popular belief. The duration of life is usually brief in the animal kingdom, and except for some fish and reptiles, and possibly whales, it is certain that a man enjoys the longest average duration of life and that centenarians occur more frequently amongst men than amongst most of the lower animals.
Theories of Longevity.—Ray Lankester has pointed out that several meanings are attached to the word longevity. It may be used of an individual, and in this sense has little importance, partly because of the inevitable variability of the individual, and partly because there may be individuals that are abnormal in duration of life, just as there are abnormalities in weight or height. It may be used for the average duration of life of all the individuals of a species and so be another way of expressing the average mortality that affects the species, and that varies not only with structure and constitution but with the kind of enemies, accidents and conditions to which the members of the species are subject. If we reflect on the large incidence of mortality from external causes affecting a species and particularly the young of a species, we shall see that we must conclude that intrinsic, physiological causes can have relatively little weight in determining the average mortality rate. Finally, longevity may be used, and is most conveniently used, to denote the specific potential longevity, that is to say the duration of life that would be attained by normal individuals of a species if the conditions were most favourable. It is necessary to keep in mind these various applications of the term when considering the theoretical explanations that have been associated with the empirical facts.
There is a certain relation between size and longevity. As a general rule small animals do not live so long as larger creatures. Whales survive elephants, elephants live longer than camels, horses and deer, and these again than rabbits and mice. But the relation is not absolute; parrots, ravens and geese live longer than most mammals and than many larger birds. G. L. L. Buffon tried to find a more definite measure of longevity, and believed that it was given by the ratio between the whole period of life and the period of growth. He believed that the possible duration of life was six or seven times that of the period of growth. Man, he said, takes fourteen years to grow, and his duration of life is ninety to one hundred years; the horse has reached its full size at four years of age and may live for a total period of twenty-five to thirty years. M. J. P. Flourens attempted to make Buffon’s suggestion more exact; he took the end of the period of growth as the time at which the epiphyses of the long bones united with the bones themselves, and on this basis held that the duration of life was five times the length of the period of growth. The theories of Buffon and Flourens, however, do not apply to all vertebrates and have no meaning in the case of invertebrates. Y. Bunge has suggested that in the case of mammals the period taken by the new-born young to double in weight is an index of the rapidity of growth and is in a definite relation to the possible duration of life. M. Oustalet has discussed the existence of definite relations between duration of life and size, rate of growth, period of gestation and so forth, and found so many exceptions that no general conclusion could be drawn. He finally suggested that diet was the chief factor in determining the span of life. E. Metchnikoff has provided the most recent and fullest criticism and theory of the physiological causes of longevity. He admits that many factors must be involved, as the results vary so much in different kinds of animals. He thinks that too little is known of the physiological processes of invertebrates to draw any valid conclusions in their case. With regard to vertebrates, he calls attention to the gradual reduction of longevity as the scale of life is ascended. On the whole, reptiles live much longer than birds, and birds than mammals, the contrast being specially notable when birds and mammals are compared. He dismisses the effect of the reproductive tax from possible causes of short duration of life, for the obvious reason that longevity is nearly equal in the two sexes, although females have a much greater reproductive drain. He points out that the hind-gut or large intestine is least developed in fishes, relatively small in reptiles, still small but relatively larger in birds and largest in mammals, relatively and absolutely, the caecum or caeca being reckoned as part of the hind-gut. The area of the intestinal tract in question is of relatively little importance in digestion, although a considerable amount of absorption may take place from it. It serves chiefly as a reservoir of waste matter and is usually the seat of extensive putrefactive change. The products of putrefaction are absorbed by the blood and there results a constant auto-intoxication of the body which Metchnikoff believes to be the principal agent in senile degeneration. Mammals, if they escape from enemies, diseases and accidents, fall victims to premature senility as the result of the putrefactive changes in their intestines, and the average mortality of the species is much too high, the normal specific longevity being rarely if ever attained. Metchnikoff urges, and so far probably is followed by all competent authorities, that improvements in the conditions of life, greater knowledge of disease and of hygiene and simplification of habits are tending to reduce the average mortality of man and the domestic animals, and to bring the average longevity nearer the specific longevity. He adds to this, however, a more special theory, which, although it appears rapidly to be gaining ground, is yet far from being accepted. The theory is that duration of life may be prolonged by measures directed against intestinal putrefaction.
The process of putrefaction takes place in masses of badly-digested food, and may be combated by careful dieting, avoidance of rich foods of all kinds and particularly of flesh and alcohol. Putrefaction, however, cannot take place except in the presence of a particular group of bacteria, the entrance of which to the body can be prevented to a certain extent. But it would be impossible or impracticable to secure a sterilized diet, and Metchnikoff urges that the bacteria of putrefaction can be replaced or suppressed by another set of microbes. He found that there was a widely spread popular belief in the advantage of diet consisting largely of products of soured milk and that there was a fair parallel between unusual longevity and such a diet. Experimentally he showed that the presence of the bacilli which produce lactic acid inhibited the process of putrefaction. Accordingly he recommends that the diet of human beings should include preparations of milk soured by cultures of selected lactic acid bacilli, or that the spores of such bacilli should be taken along with food favourable to their development. In a short time the bacilli establish themselves in the large intestine and rapidly stop putrefactive change. The treatment has not yet been persisted in sufficiently long by a sufficient number of different persons to be accepted as universally satisfactory, and there is even more difference of opinion as to Metchnikoff’s theory that the chief agent in senile degeneration is the stimulation of phagocytes by the products of putrefaction with the resulting destruction of the specific cells of the tissues. Metchnikoff, however, gave it to the world, not as a proved and completed doctrine, but as the line of inquiry that he himself had found most promising. He has suggested further that if the normal specific longevity were attained by human beings, old and not degenerate individuals would lose the instinct for life and acquire an instinct for death, and that as they had fulfilled the normal cycle of life, they would accept death with the same relieved acquiescence that they now accept sleep.
The various writers whose opinions have been briefly discussed agree in supposing that there is a normal specific longevity, although Metchnikoff alone has urged that this differs markedly from the average longevity, and has propounded a theory of the causes of the divergence. It is common ground that they believe the organism to be wound up, so to say, for a definite period, but have no very definite theory as to how this period is determined. A. Weismann, on the other hand, in a well-known essay on the duration of life, has developed a theory to explain the various fashions in which the gift of life is measured out to different kinds of creatures. He accepts the position that purely physiological conditions set a limit to the number of years that can be attained by each kind of multicellular organism, but holds that these conditions leave room for a considerable amount of variation. Duration of life, in fact, according to Weismann, is a character that can be influenced by the environment and that by a process of natural selection can be adapted to the conditions of existence of different species.
If a species is to maintain its existence or to increase, it is obvious that its members must be able to replace the losses caused by death. It is necessary, moreover, for the success of the species, that an average population of full vigour should be maintained. Weismann argues that death itself is an adaptation to secure the removal of useless and worn-out individuals and that it comes as soon as may be after the period of reproductive activity. It is understood that the term reproductive activity covers not merely the production of new individuals but the care of these by the parents until they are self-sufficient. The average longevity, according to Weismann, is adapted to the needs of the species; it is sufficiently long to secure that the requisite number of new individuals is produced and protected. He has brought together a large number of instances which show that there is a relation between duration of life and fertility. Birds of prey, which breed slowly, usually producing an annual brood of no more than one or two, live to great ages, whilst rabbits which produce large litters at frequent intervals have relatively short lives. Allowance has to be made in cases where the young are largely preyed upon by enemies, for this counteracts the effect of high fecundity. In short, the duration of life is so adapted that a pair of individuals on the average succeed in rearing a pair of offspring. Metchnikoff, however, has pointed out that the longevity of such fecund creatures must have arisen independently, as otherwise species subject to high risks of this nature would have ceased to exist and would have disappeared, as many species have vanished in the past of the world’s history.
The normal specific longevity, the age to which all normal individuals of a species would survive under the most favourable conditions, must depend on constitution and structure. No doubt selection is involved, as it is obvious that creatures would perish if their constitution and structure were not such that they could live long enough to reproduce their kind. The direct explanation, however, must be sought for in size, complexity of structure, length of period of growth, capacity to withstand the wear and tear of life and such other intrinsic qualities. The average specific longevity, on the other hand, depends on a multitude of extrinsic conditions operating on the intrinsic constitution; these extrinsic conditions are given by the environment of the species as it affects the young and the adults, enemies, diseases, abundance of food, climatic conditions and so forth. It would seem most natural to suppose that in all cases, except perhaps those of intelligent man and the domestic animals or plants he harbours, the average longevity must vary enormously with changing conditions, and must be a factor of greater importance in the survival of the species than the ideal normal specific longevity. It also seems more probable that the reproductive capacity, which is extremely variable, has been adapted to the average longevity of the species, than that, as Weismann supposed, it should itself be the determining cause of the duration of life.
References.—G. L. L. Buffon, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, vol. ii. (Paris, 1749); Y. Bunge, Archiv. f. die gesammte Physiologie, vol. xcv. (Bonn, 1903); M. J. P. Flourens, De la longévité humaine et de la quantité de vie sur le globe (Paris, 1855); J. H. Gurney, On the Comparative Ages to which Birds live, Ibis, p. 19 (1899); Sir E. Ray Lankester, Comparative Longevity in Man and the Lower Animals (London, 1870); E. Metchnikoff, The Prolongation of Life (London, 1908); M. Oustalet, La Nature, p. 378 (1900); A. Weismann, Essays upon Heredity (Oxford, 1889).
(P. C. M.)
LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH (1807-1882), American poet, was born on the 27th of February 1807, at Portland, Maine. His ancestor, William Longfellow, had immigrated to Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1676, from Yorkshire, England. His father was Stephen Longfellow, a lawyer and United States congressman, and his mother, Zilpha Wadsworth, a descendant of John Alden and of “Priscilla, the Puritan maiden.”
Longfellow’s external life presents little that is of stirring interest. It is the life of a modest, deep-hearted gentleman, whose highest ambition was to be a perfect man, and, through sympathy and love, to help others to be the same. His boyhood was spent mostly in his native town, which he never ceased to love, and whose beautiful surroundings and quiet, pure life he has described in his poem “My Lost Youth.” Here he grew up in the midst of majestic peace, which was but once broken, and that by an event which made a deep impression on him—the war of 1812. He never forgot
“the sea-fight far away.
How it thundered o’er the tide.
And the dead captains as they lay
In their graves o’erlooking the tranquil bay.
Where they in battle died.”
The “tranquil bay” is Casco Bay, one of the most beautiful in the world, studded with bold, green islands, well fitted to be the Hesperides of a poet’s boyish dreams. At the age of fifteen Longfellow entered Bowdoin College at Brunswick, a town situated near the romantic falls of the Androscoggin river, about 25 m. from Portland, and in a region full of Indian scenery and legend. Here he had among his classfellows Nathaniel Hawthorne, George B. Cheever and J. S. C. Abbott. During the latter years of his college life he contributed to the United States Literary Gazette some half-dozen poems, which are interesting for two reasons—(1) as showing the poet’s early, book-mediated sympathy with nature and legendary heroisms, and (2) as being almost entirely free from that supernatural view of nature which his subsequent residence in Europe imparted to him. He graduated in 1825, at the age of eighteen, with honours, among others that of writing the “class poem”—taking the fourth place in a class of thirty-eight. He then entered his father’s law office, without intending, however, it would appear, to devote himself to the study of the law. For this profession he was, both by capacity and tastes, utterly unfitted, and it was fortunate that, shortly after his graduation, he received an offer of a professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin College. In order the better to qualify himself for this appointment, he went to Europe (May 15th, 1826) and spent three years and a half travelling in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Holland and England, learning languages, for which he had unusual talent, and drinking in the spirit of the history and life of these countries. The effect of Longfellow’s visit was twofold. On the one hand, it widened his sympathies, gave him confidence in himself and supplied him with many poetical themes; on the other, it traditionalized his mind, coloured for him the pure light of nature and rendered him in some measure unfit to feel or express the spirit of American nature and life. His sojourn in Europe fell exactly in the time when, in England, the reaction against the sentimental atheism of Shelley, the pagan sensitivity of Keats, and the sublime, Satanic outcastness of Byron was at its height; when, in the Catholic countries, the negative exaggerations of the French Revolution were inducing a counter current of positive faith, which threw men into the arms of a half-sentimental, half-aesthetic medievalism; and when, in Germany, the aristocratic paganism of Goethe was being swept aside by that tide of dutiful, romantic patriotism which flooded the country, as soon as it began to feel that it still existed after being run over by Napoleon’s war-chariot. He returned to America in 1829, and remained six years at Bowdoin College (1829-1835), during which he published various text-books for the study of modern languages. In his twenty-fourth year (1831) he married Miss Mary Story Potter, one of his “early loves.” In 1833 he made a series of translations from the Spanish, with an essay on the moral and devotional poetry of Spain, and these were incorporated in 1835 in Outre-mer: a Pilgrimage beyond the Sea.
In 1835 Longfellow was chosen to succeed George Ticknor as professor of modern languages and belles-lettres in Harvard. On receiving this appointment, he paid a second visit of some fifteen months to Europe, this time devoting special attention to the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland. During this visit he lost his wife, who died at Rotterdam, on the 29th of November 1835.
On his return to America in December 1836, Longfellow took up his residence in Cambridge, and began to lecture at Harvard and to write. In his new home he found himself amid surroundings entirely congenial to him. Its spaciousness and free rural aspect, its old graveyards and towering elms, its great university, its cultivated society and its vicinity to humane, substantial, busy Boston, were all attractions for such a man. In 1837-1838 several essays of Longfellow’s appeared in the North American Review, and in 1839 he published Hyperion: a Romance, and his first volume of original poetry, entitled Voices of the Night. Hyperion, a poetical account of his travels, had, at the time of its publication, an immense popularity, due mainly to its sentimental romanticism. At present few persons beyond their teens would care to read it through, so unnatural and stilted is its language, so thin its material and so consciously mediated its sentiment. Nevertheless it has a certain historical importance, for two reasons—(1) because it marks that period in Longfellow’s career when, though he had left nature, he had not yet found art, and (2) because it opened the sluices through which the flood of German sentimental poetry flowed into the United States. The Voices of the Night contains some of his best minor poems, e.g. “The Psalm of Life” and “Footsteps of Angels.” In 1842 Longfellow published a small volume of Ballads and other Poems, containing some of his most popular pieces, e.g. “The Skeleton in Armour,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Village Blacksmith,” “To a Child,” “The Bridge,” “Excelsior.” In the same year he paid a third brief visit to Europe, spending the summer on the Rhine. During his return-passage across the Atlantic he wrote his Poems on Slavery (1842), with a dedication to Channing. These poems went far to wake in the youth of New England a sense of the great national wrong, and to prepare them for that bitter struggle in which it was wiped out at the expense of the lives of so many of them. In 1843 he married again, his wife being Miss Frances Elizabeth Appleton of Boston, a daughter of Hon. Nathan Appleton, one of the founders of Lowell, and a sister of Thomas G. Appleton, himself no mean poet.
About the same time he bought, and fixed his residence in, the Craigie House, where he had formerly only been a lodger, an old “revolutionary house,” built about the beginning of the 18th century, and occupied by General Washington in 1776. This quaint old wooden house, in the midst of a large garden full of splendid elms, continued to be his chief residence till the day of his death. Of the lectures on Dante which he delivered about this time, James Russell Lowell says: “These lectures, illustrated by admirable translations, are remembered with grateful pleasure by many who were thus led to learn the full significance of the great Christian poet.” Indeed, as a professor, Longfellow was eminently successful. Shortly after the Poems on Slavery, there appeared in 1843 a more ambitious work, The Spanish Student, a Play in Three Acts, a kind of sentimental “Morality,” without any special merit but good intention. If published nowadays it would hardly attract notice; but in those gushing, emotion-craving times it had considerable popularity, and helped to increase the poet’s now rapidly widening fame. A huge collection of translations of foreign poetry edited by him, and entitled The Poets and Poetry of Europe, appeared in 1845, and, in 1846, a few minor poems—songs and sonnets—under the title The Belfry of Bruges. In 1847 he published at Boston the greatest of all his works, Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie. It was, in some degree, an imitation of Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea, and its plot, which was derived from Hawthorne’s American Note-Books, is even simpler than that of the German poem, not to say much more touching. At the violent removal by the British government of a colony of French settlers from Acadie (Nova Scotia) in 1755, a young couple, on the very day of their wedding, were separated and carried in different directions, so that they lost all trace of each other. The poem describes the wanderings of the bride in search of her lover, and her final discovery of him as an old man on his death-bed, in a public hospital which she had entered as a nurse. Slight as the story is, it is worked out into one of the most affecting poems in the language, and gives to literature one of its most perfect types of womanhood and of “affection that hopes and endures and is patient.” Though written in a metre deemed foreign to English ears, the poem immediately attained a wide popularity, which it has never lost, and secured to the dactylic hexameter a recognized place among English metres.
In 1849 Longfellow published a novel of no great merit, Kavanagh, and also a volume of poems entitled The Seaside and the Fireside, a title which has reference to his two homes, the seaside one on the charming peninsula of Nahant, the fireside one in Cambridge. One of the poems in this collection, “Resignation,” has taken a permanent place in literature; another, “Hymn for my Brother’s Ordination,” shows plainly the nature of the poet’s Christianity. His brother, the Rev. Samuel Longfellow, was a minister of the Unitarian Church.
Longfellow’s genius, in its choice of subjects, always oscillated between America and Europe, between the colonial period of American history and the Middle and Romantic Ages of European feeling. When tired of the broad daylight of American activity, he sought refuge and rest in the dim twilight of medieval legend and German sentiment. In 1851 appeared The Golden Legend, a long lyric drama based upon Hartmann von Aue’s beautiful story of self-sacrifice, Der arme Heinrich. Next to Evangeline, this is at once the best and the most popular of the poet’s longer works, and contains many passages of great beauty. Bringing his imagination back to America, he next applied himself to the elaboration of an Indian legend. In 1854 he resigned his professorship. In the following year he gave to the world the Indian Edda, The Song of Hiawatha, a conscious imitation, both in subject and metre, of the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, with which he had become acquainted during his second visit to Europe. The metre is monotonous and easily ridiculed, but it suits the subject, and the poem is very popular. In 1858 appeared The Courtship of Miles Standish, based on a charming incident in the early history of the Plymouth colony, and, along with it, a number of minor poems, included under the modest title, Birds of Passage. One of these is “My Lost Youth.”
Two events now occurred which served to cast a gloom over the poet’s life and to interrupt his activity,—the outbreak of the Civil war, and the tragic fate of his wife, who, having accidentally allowed her dress to catch fire, was burnt to death in her own house in 1861. It was long before he recovered from the shock caused by this terrible event, and in his subsequent published poems he never ventured even to allude to it. When he did in some measure find himself again, he gave to the world his charming Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), and in 1865 his Household Poems. Among the latter is a poem entitled “The Children’s Hour,” which affords a glance into the home life of the widowed poet, who had been left with five children—two sons, Ernest and Charles, and three daughters,
“Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.”
A small volume entitled Flower de Luce (1867) contains, among other fine things, the beautiful “threnos” on the burial of Hawthorne, and “The Bells of Lynn.” Once more the poet sought refuge in medieval life by completing his translation of the Divina Commedia, parts of which he had rendered into English as much as thirty years before. This work appeared in 1867, and gave a great impulse to the study of Dante in America. It is a masterpiece of literal translation. Next came the New England Tragedies (1868) and The Divine Tragedy (1871), which found no large public. In 1868-1869 the poet visited Europe, and was everywhere received with the greatest honour. In 1872 appeared Three Books of Song, containing translated as well as original pieces, in 1873 Aftermath and in 1875 The Mask of Pandora, and other Poems. Among these “other poems” were “The Hanging of the Crane,” “Morituri Salutamus” and “A Book of Sonnets.” The Mask of Pandora is a proof of that growing appreciation of pagan naturalism which marked the poet’s later years. Though not a great poem, it is full of beautiful passages, many of which point to the riddle of life as yet unsolved, a conviction which grew ever more and more upon the poet, as the ebulliency of romanticism gave way to the calm of classic feeling. In the “Book of Sonnets” are some of the finest things he ever wrote, especially the five sonnets entitled “Three Friends of Mine.” These “three friends” were Cornelius Felton, Louis Agassiz and Charles Sumner, whom he calls
“The noble three,
Who half my life were more than friends to me.”
The loss of Agassiz was a blow from which he never entirely recovered; and, when Sumner also left him, he wrote:—
“Thou hast but taken thy lamp and gone to bed;
I stay a little longer, as one stays
To cover up the embers that still burn.”
He did stay a little longer; but the embers that still burnt in him refused to be covered up. He would fain have ceased writing, and used to say, “It’s a great thing to know when to stop”; but he could not stop, and did not stop, till the last. He continued to publish from time to time, in the magazines, poems which showed a clearness of vision and a perfection of workmanship such as he never had equalled at any period of his life. Indeed it may be said that his finest poems were his last. Of these a small collection appeared under the title of Keramos, and other Poems (1878). Besides these, in the years 1875-1878 he edited a collection of Poems of Places in thirty-one small volumes. In 1880 appeared Ultima Thule, meant to be his last work, and it was nearly so. In October 1881 he wrote a touching sonnet on the death of President Garfield, and in January 1882, when the hand of death was already upon him, his poem, Hermes Trismegistus, in which he gives utterance, in language as rich as that of the early gods, to that strange feeling of awe without fear, and hope without form, with which every man of spotless life and upright intellect withdraws from the phenomena of time to the realities of eternity.
In the last years of his life he suffered a great deal from rheumatism, and was, as he sometimes cheerfully said, “never free from pain.” Still he remained as sunny and genial as ever, looking from his Cambridge study windows across the Brighton meadows to the Brookline hills, or enjoying the “free wild winds of the Atlantic,” and listening to “The Bells of Lynn” in his Nahant home. He still continued to receive all visitors, and to take occasional runs up to Castine and Portland, the homes of his family. About the beginning of 1882, however, a serious change took place in his condition. Dizziness and want of strength confined him to his room for some time, and, although after some weeks he partially recovered, his elasticity and powers were gone. On the 19th of March he was seized with what proved to be peritonitis, and he died on the 24th. The poet was buried two days afterwards near his “three friends” in Mount Auburn cemetery. The regret for his loss was universal; for no modern man was ever better loved or better deserved to be loved.
Longfellow was made an LL.D. of Bowdoin College in 1828, at the age of twenty-one, of Harvard in 1859 and of Cambridge (England) in 1868, and D.C.L. of Oxford in 1869. In 1873 he was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Science, and in 1877 of the Spanish Academy.
In person, Longfellow was rather below middle height, broad shouldered and well built. His head and face were extremely handsome, his forehead broad and high, his eyes full of clear, warming fire, his nose straight and graceful, his chin and lips rich and full of feeling as those of the Praxitelean Hermes, and his voice low, melodious and full of tender cadences. His hair, originally dark, became, in his later years, silvery white, and its wavy locks combined with those of his flowing beard to give him that leonine appearance so familiar through his later portraits. Charles Kingsley said of Longfellow’s face that it was the most beautiful human face he had ever seen. A bust to his memory was erected in the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1884.
In Longfellow, the poet was the flower and fruit of the man. His nature was essentially poetic, and his life the greatest of his poems. Those who knew only the poems he wrote could form but a faint notion of the harmony, the sweetness, the manliness and the tenderness of that which he lived. What he would have been as a poet, if, instead of visiting Europe in early life and drinking in the spirit of the middle ages under the shadows of cathedral towers, he had, like Whittier, grown old amid American scenery and life, we can only guess from his earlier poems, which are as naturalistic, fresh and unmystical as could be desired; but certain it is that, from his long familiarity with the medieval view of nature, and its semi-pagan offspring, the romantic view, he was brought, for the greater part of his life, to look upon the world of men and things either as the middle scene of a miracle play, with a heaven of rewarding happiness above and a purgatory of purifying pain below, or else as a garment concealing, while it revealed, spiritual forms of unfathomed mystery. During this time he could hear “the trailing garments of the night sweep through her marble halls,” and see “the stars come out to listen to the music of the seas.” Later on, as he approached his second youth (he was spared a second childhood), he tended to a more pagan view. About the time when he was writing The Mask of Pandora, he could see “in the sunset Jason’s fleece of gold,” and hear “the waves of the distracted sea piteously calling and lamenting” his lost friend. But through all the periods of his life his view of the world was essentially religious and subjective, and, consequently, his manner of dealing with it hymnal or lyric. This fact, even more than his merits as an artist, serves to account for his immense popularity. Too well-informed, too appreciative and too modest to deem himself the peer of the “grand old masters,” or one of “those far stars that come in sight once in a century,” he made it his aim to write something that should “make a purer faith and manhood shine in the untutored heart,” and to do this in the way that should best reach that heart. This aim determined at once his choice of subjects and his mode of treating them.
The subjects of Longfellow’s poetry are, for the most part, aspects of nature as influencing human feeling, either directly or through historical association, the tender or pathetic sides and incidents of life, or heroic deeds preserved in legend or history. He had a special fondness for records of human devotion and self-sacrifice, whether they were monkish legends, Indian tales, Norse drápas or bits of American history. His mode of treatment is subjective and lyric. No matter what form his works assume, whether the epic, as in Evangeline, The Courtship of Miles Standish and Hiawatha, the dramatic, as in The Spanish Student, The Golden Legend and The Mask of Pandora, or the didactic, as in The Psalm of Life and many of the minor poems; they are all subjective. This is not the highest praise that can be given to works of art; but it implies less dispraise in Longfellow’s case than in almost any other, by reason of his noble subjectivity.
If we look in Longfellow’s poetry for originality of thought, profound psychological analysis or new insights into nature, we shall be disappointed. Though very far from being hampered by any dogmatic philosophical or religious system of the past, his mind, until near the end, found sufficient satisfaction in the Christian view of life to make it indifferent to the restless, inquiring spirit of the present, and disinclined to play with any more recent solution of life’s problems. He had no sympathy with either scepticism or formal dogmatism, and no need to hazard rash guesses respecting man’s destiny. He disliked the psychological school of art, believing it to be essentially morbid and unhealthy. He had no sympathy with the tendency represented by George Eliot, or with any attempt to be analytic in art. He held art to be essentially synthetic, creative and manifesting, not analytic, destructive or questioning. Hence he never strove to draw from nature some new secret, or to show in her relations never discovered before. His aim was to impress upon her familiar facts and aspects the seal of his own gracious nature. A man in intellect and courage, yet without conceit or bravado; a woman in sensibility and tenderness, yet without shrinking or weakness; a saint in purity of life and devotion of heart, yet without asceticism or religiosity; a knight-errant in hatred of wrong and contempt of baseness, yet without self-righteousness or cynicism; a prince in dignity and courtesy, yet without formality or condescension; a poet in thought and feeling, yet without jealousy or affectation; a scholar in tastes and habits, yet without aloofness or bookishness; a dutiful son, a loving husband, a judicious father, a trusty friend, a useful citizen and an enthusiastic patriot,—he united in his strong, transparent humanity almost every virtue under heaven. A thoroughly healthy, well-balanced, harmonious nature, accepting life as it came, with all its joys and sorrows, and living it beautifully and hopefully, without canker and without uncharity. No man ever lived more completely in the light than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Perhaps the most remarkable traits in Longfellow’s character were his accessibility and his charity. Though a great worker, he seemed always to have time for anything he was asked to do. He was never too busy to see a caller, to answer a letter, or to assist, by word or deed, any one that needed assistance. His courtesy to all visitors, even to strangers and children who called to look at him, or who, not venturing to call, hung about his garden-gate in order to catch a glimpse of him, was almost a marvel. He always took it for granted that they had come to see Washington’s study, and, accordingly, took the greatest interest in showing them that. He never, as long as he could write, was known to refuse his autograph, and so far was he from trying to protect himself from intruders that he rarely drew the blinds of his study windows at night, though that study was on the ground floor and faced the street. His acts of charity, though performed in secret, were neither few nor small. Of him it may be said with perfect truth, “He went about doing good”; and not with his money merely, but also with his presence and his encouragement. To how many sad hearts did he come like an angel, with the rich tones of his voice waking harmonics of hope, where before there had been despair and silence? How many young literary people, disappointed at the unsuccess of their first attempts, did he comfort and spur on to renewed and higher efforts! How careful he was to quench no smoking flax! How utterly free he was from jealousy or revengefulness! While poor, morbid Edgar Allan Poe was writing violent and scurrilous articles upon him, accusing him of plagiarism and other literary misdemeanours, he was delivering enthusiastic lectures to his classes on Poe’s poetry. His charity was unbounded. Once, when the present writer proposed to the president of the Harvard University Visiting Committee that Longfellow should be placed on that committee, the president replied: “What would be the use? Longfellow could never be brought to find fault with anybody or anything.” And it was true. His whole life was bathed in that sympathy, that love which suffers long and envies not, which forgives unto seventy times seven times, and as many more if need be. Even in his last years, when loss of friends and continual physical pain made life somewhat “cold, and dark and dreary” for him, he never complained, lamented or blamed the arrangements of nature, and the only way in which it was possible to know that he suffered was through his ever-increasing delight in the health and strength of younger men. His whole nature was summed up in the lines of his favourite poet:—
“Luce intellettual, piena d’amore.
Amor di vero ben, pien di letizia.
Letizia che trascende ogni dolzore.”
See his Life ... with Extracts from his Journals and Correspondence, by Samuel Longfellow, and the “Riverside” edition of the prose and poems (Boston, 11 vols., 1886-1890). An enlarged edition of the Life (3 vols., 1891) included the journals and correspondence, 1866-1882, published in 1887 as Final Memorials (Boston and New York). Also the volume by T. W. Higginson in the “American Men of Letters” series (1902); E. C. Stedman’s criticism in Poets of America; and an article in W. D. Howells’ My Literary Friends and Acquaintance (New York, 1900) which contains a valuable account of Longfellow’s later life.
(T. Da.)
LONG FIVES. This game, though played in a tennis-court, bears but a slight resemblance to tennis, but is nevertheless a valuable form of preparatory practice. The game is 8 or 11 points, each stroke won counting one point to the winner. The server gives 3 points in 8, or 4 points in 11 to the striker-out. There are no chases. The winning openings count as at tennis. If a ball be struck into any other gallery or opening, it may be counted, by arrangement, either as a “let” (the rest being annulled) or against the striker; a similar arrangement is made for balls that make any chase on the hazard-side, or a chase of the last gallery on the service-side.
LONGFORD, a county of Ireland in the province of Leinster, bounded N.W. by Leitrim, N.E. by Cavan, E. and S. by Westmeath and W. by Lough Ree and Roscommon. With the exception of Carlow, Louth and Dublin, it is the smallest county in Ireland, the area being 269,408 acres, or about 421 sq. m. The general level surface is broken occasionally by low hills, which cover a considerable area at its northern angle. The principal rivers are the Camlin, which rises near Granard and flows past Longford to the Shannon, and the Inny, which entering the county from Westmeath crosses its southern corner and falls into Lough Ree. Lough Ree is partly included in Longford, and the other principal lakes are Lough Gowna, Derrylough, Lough Drum and Lough Bannow.
The Silurian axis of Newry reaches the north of this county, where Lough Gowna lies upon it. The rest of the county, but for anticlinals which bring up Old Red Sandstone at Longford town and Ardagh, belongs to the Carboniferous Limestone plain, in which Lough Ree forms a very characteristic lake, with signs of extension by solution along its shores. Marble of fine quality has been raised. In the north indications of iron are abundant, and there are also some traces of lead.
The climate is somewhat moist and cold, and there is a large extent of marsh and bog. The soil in the southern districts resting on the limestone is a deep loam well adapted for pasture, but in the north it is often poor. The proportion of tillage to pasture is roughly as 1 to 2. Oats and potatoes, in decreasing quantities, are the principal crops. The numbers of cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry are well maintained. The population is almost wholly rural, but the principal industry of agriculture is supplemented by a slight manufacture of coarse woollens and linen. The Midland Great Western line from Mullingar to Sligo crosses the centre of the county by way of the county town of Longford; and the Cavan branch touches the extreme east. The Royal Canal enters the county in the south at Abbeyshrule, and joins the Shannon near Cloondara.
The population (52,647 in 1891; 46,672 in 1901) decreases seriously, owing to emigration. About 90% of the total are Roman Catholics. The only towns of any importance are Longford (the county town, pop. 3747) and Granard (1622). The county includes six baronies. Assizes are held at Longford, and quarter sessions at Ballymahon, Granard and Longford. The county is in the Protestant diocese of Ardagh, and the Roman Catholic dioceses of Ardagh and Meath. It is divided into two parliamentary divisions, north and south, each returning one member.
The early name of Longford was Annaly or Analé, and it was a principality of the O’Farrels. Along with the province of Meath, in which it was then included, it was granted by Henry II. to Hugh de Lacy, who planted an English colony. On the division of Meath into two counties in 1543, Annaly was included in Westmeath, but under a statute of 1569, for the shiring of countries not already shired, it was made shire ground under the name of Longford.
Among antiquarian remains the chief ruin is the rath called the Moat of Granard, at the end of the main street of that town. There are monastic remains at Ardagh, a former bishopric, Longford, Moydow and on several of the islands of Lough Ree. The principal old castles are those of Rathcline near Lanesborough, and Ballymahon on the Inny. The principal modern seats are those of Carrickglass on the Camlin, and Castle Forbes, the seat of the earls of Granard. Oliver Goldsmith was born at Pallas, a village near Ballymahon, in this county; and at Edgeworthstown the family of Edgeworth, of which the famous novelist Maria Edgeworth was a member, established themselves in the 16th century.
LONGFORD, the county town of Co. Longford, Ireland, on the river Camlin, and on a branch of the Midland Great Western railway, 75 m. W.N.W. of Dublin. Pop. (1901) 3747. The principal building is St Mel’s Roman Catholic cathedral for the diocese of Ardagh, one of the finest Roman Catholic churches in Ireland. The town has a considerable trade in grain, butter and bacon. There are corn-mills, a spool factory and tanneries. Longford is governed by an urban district council. The ancient name of the town was Athfada, and here a monastery is said to have been founded by St Idus, a disciple of St Patrick. The town obtained a fair and market from James I. and a charter of incorporation from Charles II., as well as the right to return two members to parliament. It was disfranchised at the Union in 1800.
LONGHI, PIETRO (1702-1762), Venetian painter, was born in Venice. He was a pupil of Antonio Palestra and Giuseppe Maria Crespi at Bologna, and devoted himself to the painting of the elegance of the social life in 18th-century Venice. The republic was dying fast, but her sons, even in this period of political decline, retained their love of pageants and ceremonies and of extravagant splendour in attire. The art of Venice was vanishing like her political power; and the only painters who attempted to stem the tide of artistic decadence were the Canaletti, Guardi, Tiepolo and Longhi. But whilst the Canaletti and Guardi dwelt upon the architectural glories of Venice, and Tiepolo applied himself to decorative schemes in which he continued the tradition of Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto, Longhi became the chronicler of the life of his compatriots. In a way his art may be set beside Hogarth’s, though the Venetian did not play the part of a satirical moralist. He has aptly been called the Goldoni of painting. His sphere is that of light social comedy—the life at the café, the hairdresser’s, at the dancing-school, at the dressmaker’s. The tragic, or even the serious, note is hardly sounded in his work, which, in its colour, is generally distinguished by a rich mellow quality of tone. Most of his paintings are in the public and private collections of Venice. They are generally on a small scale, but the staircase of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice is decorated by him with seven frescoes, representing scenes of fashionable life. At the Venice academy are a number of his genre pictures and a portrait of the architect Temanza; at the Palazzo Quirini-Stampalia the portrait of Daniele Dolfino, “The Seven Sacraments” (etched by Pitteri), a “Temptation of St Anthony,” a “Circus,” a “Gambling Scene,” and several other genre pictures and portraits; at the Museo Correr a dozen scenes of Venetian life and a portrait of Goldoni. In England the National Gallery owns “The Exhibition of a Rhinoceros in an Arena,” a “Domestic Group,” “The Fortune-Teller,” and the portrait of the Chevalier Andrea Tron; two genre pictures are at Hampton Court Palace, and others in the Richter and Mond collections. Many of his works have been engraved by Alessandro Longhi, Bartolozzi, Cattini, Faldoni and others. Longhi died in Venice in 1762.
LONGINUS, CASSIUS (c. A.D. 213-273), Greek rhetorician and philosophical critic, surnamed Philologus. The origin of his gentile name Cassius is unknown; it can only be conjectured that he adopted it from a Roman patron. He was perhaps a native of Emesa (Homs) in Syria, the birthplace of his uncle Fronto the rhetorician. He studied at Alexandria under Origen the heathen, and taught for thirty years at Athens, one of his pupils being the Neoplatonist Porphyry. Longinus did not embrace the new speculations then being developed by Plotinus, but continued a Platonist of the old type. He upheld, in opposition to Plotinus, the doctrine that the Platonic ideas existed outside the divine ὅτι ἔξω τοῦ νοῦ ὑφέστηκε τὰ νοητά: see F. Überweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 9th ed., 1903, i. § 72). Plotinus, after reading his treatise Περὶ ἀρχῶν (On First Principles), remarked that Longinus might be a scholar (φιλόλογος), but that he was no philosopher (φιλόσοφος). The reputation which Longinus acquired by his learning was immense; he is described by Porphyry as “the first of critics,” and by Eunapius as “a living library and a walking museum” or encyclopaedia. During a visit to the East he became teacher in Greek, and subsequently chief counsellor in state affairs, to Zenobia, queen of Palmyra. It was by his advice that she endeavoured to regain her independence; Aurelian, however, crushed the attempt, and while Zenobia was led captive to Rome to grace Aurelian’s triumph, Longinus paid the forfeit of his life.
Longinus was the author of a large number of works, nearly all of which have perished. Among those mentioned by Suïdas are Quaestiones Homericae, An Homerus fuerit philosophus, Problemata Homeri et solutiones, Atticorum vocabulorum editiones duae; the most important of his philological works, Φιλόλογοι ὁμιλίαι (Philological Discourses) consisting of at least 21 books, is omitted. A considerable fragment of the Περὶ τέλους (De finibus, On the Chief End) is preserved in the Life of Plotinus by Porphyry (§ 20). Under his name there are also extant Prolegomena to the Encheiridion of Hephaestion on metre (printed in R. Westphal, Scriptores Metrici Graeci, i. 1866) and the fragment of a treatise on rhetoric (L. Spengel, Rhetores Graeci, i. pp. 299-320), inserted in the middle of a similar treatise by Apsines. It gives brief practical hints on invention, arrangement, style, memory and other things useful to the student. Some important excerpts ἐκ τῶν Λογγίνου (Spengel, i. 325-328) may possibly be from the φιλόλογοι ὁμιλίαι.
It is as the reputed author of the well-known and remarkable work Περὶ ὕψους (generally, but inadequately, rendered On the Sublime) that Longinus is best known. Modern scholars, however, with few exceptions, are agreed that it cannot with any certainty be ascribed to him, and that the question of authorship cannot be determined (see Introduction to Roberts’s edition). The following are the chief arguments against Longinus. (1) The treatise is not mentioned by any classical author, nor in any lists of the works attributed to him. (2) The evidence of the MSS. shows that doubts existed even in early times. In the most important (No. 2036 in the Paris Library, 10th century) the heading is Διονυσίου ἥ Λογγίνου, thus giving an alternative author Dionysius; in the Laurentian MS. at Florence the title has ἀνωνύμου, implying that the author was unknown. The ascription in the Paris MS. led to the addition of Dionysius to the name of the reputed author—Dionysius Cassius Longinus, accounted for by the supposition that his early name was Dionysius, Cassius Longinus being subsequently adopted from a Roman patron whose client he had been. (3) The absence of any reference to the famous writers on rhetoric of the age of the Antonines, such as Hermogenes and Alexander son of Numenius. (4) The opening sentences show that the Περὶ ὕψους was written with a view of correcting the faults of style and method in a treatise by Caecilius (q.v.) of Calactē on the same subject. As Caecilius flourished during the reign of Augustus, it is hardly likely that his work would have been selected for purposes of criticism in the 3rd century. (5) General considerations of style and language and of the point of view from which the work is written. In favour of Longinus: (1) The traditional ascription, which held its ground unchallenged till the beginning of the 18th century. (2) The philosophical colouring of the first chapter and the numerous quotations from Plato are in accordance with what is known of his philosophical opinions. (3) The treatise is the kind of work to be expected from one who was styled “the first of critics.” (4) The Ammonius referred to (xiii. 3) is supposed to be Ammonius Saccas (c. 175-242), but it appears from the Venetian scholia to the Iliad that there was an earlier Ammonius (fl. c. 140 B.C.), a pupil and successor of Aristarchus at Alexandria, who, judging from the context, is no doubt the writer in question. The reference is therefore an argument against Longinus.
The work is dedicated to a certain Terentianus, of whom nothing is known (see Roberts’s edition, p. 18).
The alternative author Dionysius of the MSS. has been variously identified with the rhetorician and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the Atticist Aelius Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Dionysius Atticus of Pergamum, Dionysius of Miletus. Other suggested claimants to the authorship are Plutarch (L. Vaucher in Études critiques sur le traité du sublime (Geneva, 1854) and Aelius Theon of Alexandria (W. Christ), the author of a work on the Arrangement of Speech. But it seems most probable that the author was an unknown writer who flourished in the 1st century soon after Caecilius and before Hermogenes. Wilamowitz-Möllendorff gives his date as about A.D. 40.
The rendering On the Sublime implies more than is intended by the Greek Περὶ ὕψους (“impressiveness in style,” Jebb). Nothing abnormal, such as is associated with the word “sublime,” is the subject of discussion; it is rather a treatise on style. According to the author’s own definitions, “Sublimity is a certain distinction and excellence in expression,” “sublimity consists in elevation,” “sublimity is the echo (or expression) of a great soul” (see note in Roberts).
The treatise is especially valuable for the numerous quotations from classical authors, above all, for the preservation of the famous fragment of Sappho, the ode to Anactoria, beginning
φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν,
imitated by Catullus (li.) Ad Lesbiam,
“Ille mi par esse deo videtur.”
“Its main object is to point out the essential elements of an impressive style which, avoiding all tumidity, puerility, affectation and bad taste, finds its inspiration in grandeur of thought and intensity of feeling, and its expression in nobility of diction and in skilfully ordered composition” (Sandys).
A full bibliography of the subject will be found in the edition by W. R. Roberts (Cambridge, 2nd ed., 1907), containing an Introduction, Analysis, Translation and Appendices (textual, linguistic, literary and bibliographical), to which may be added F. Marx, Wiener Studien, xx. (1898), and F. Kaibel, Hermes, xxxiv. (1899), who respectively advocate and reject the claims of Longinus to the authorship; J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship (2nd ed., 1906), pp. 288, 338, should also be consulted. The number of translations in all the languages of Europe is large, including the famous one by Boileau, which made the work a favourite text-book of the bellelettristic critics of the 18th century. A text and translation was published by A. O. Prickard (1907-1908).
LONG ISLAND, an island, 118 m. long and 12 to 23 m. wide, with its axis E.N.E. and W.S.W., roughly parallel with the S. shore of Connecticut, U.S.A., from which it is separated by Long Island Sound (115 m. long and 20-25 m. wide) and lying S.E. of the mainland of New York state, of which it is a part, and immediately E. of Manhattan Island. Area, 1682 sq. m. The east end is divided into two narrow peninsulas (the northern culminating in Orient Point about 25 m. long, the southern ending in Montauk Point, the eastern extremity of the island, about 40 m. long) by the three bays, Great Peconic, Little Peconic (in which lies Shelter Island) and Gardiners (in which lies Gardiners Island). The N. shore is broken in its western half by the fjords of Flushing Bay, Little Neck Bay, Manhasset Bay, Cold Spring Harbor; Huntington Bay (nearly landlocked), Smithtown Bay and Port Jefferson Harbor, which also is nearly landlocked. East of Port Jefferson the N. shore is comparatively unbroken. The S. shore has two bays, Jamaica Bay with many low islands and nearly cut off from the ocean by the narrow spur of Rockaway Beach; and the ill-defined Great South Bay, which is separated from the Atlantic by the narrow Long Beach, Jones Beach and Oak Island Beach, and by the long peninsula (35 or 40 m.), called Fire Island or Great South Beach. Still farther E. and immediately S. of Great Peconic Bay is Shinnecock Bay, about 10 m. long and cut off from the ocean by a narrow beach.
The N. side of the island was largely built by deposits along the front of the continental glacier, and its peculiar surface is due to such deposits. At Astoria the dark gneiss bed rock is visible. The S. half of the island is mostly built of a light sandy or loamy soil and is low, except for the hills (140-195 ft.) of Montauk peninsula, which are a part of the “back-bone” of the island elsewhere running through the centre from E. to W. and reaching its highest point in its western extremity, Oakley’s High Hill (384 ft.) and Hempstead Harbor Hill, W. of which are the flat and fertile Hempstead Plains. North of the back-bone or central ridge the country is hilly with glacial drift and many boulders along the coast and with soil stonier and more fertile than that of the “South Side.” There is good clay at Whitestone and at Lloyd’s Point on the north side. This north shore is comparatively well wooded; the middle of the island is covered with stunted oaks and scrubby pines; the south side is a floral mean between the other divisions. It is cut in its middle part by a few creeks and tidal rivers flowing into the Great South Bay. Another “river,” the Peconic, about 15 m. long, runs E. into Peconic Bay. On the north side there are few waterways save Nissequoge river, partly tidal, which runs N. into Smithtown Bay. Near the centre of the island is Lake Ronkonkoma, which is well below the level of the surrounding country, and whose deep cold waters with their unexplained ebb and flow are said to have been so feared by the Indians that they would not fish there. There are salt marshes (probably 100 sq. m. in all) on the shore of the Sound and of the Great South Bay.
As regards its fauna Long Island is a meeting-place for equatorial and arctic species of birds and fish; in winter it is visited occasionally by the auk and in summer sometimes by the turkey buzzard. James E. DeKay in his botanical and zoological survey (1842-1849) of New York state estimated that on Long Island there were representatives of two-thirds of the species of land birds of the United States and seven-eighths of the water birds—probably an exaggerated estimate for the time and certainly not true now. There is snipe and duck shooting, especially on the shores of the Great South Bay; there is good deer hunting, especially in Islip town; and there are several private preserves, some stocked with English game birds, within 50 m. of New York City. There are many excellent trout streams and the island was known in aboriginal times for its fresh and salt water fish. Indian names referring to fishing places are discussed in Wm. W. Tooker’s Some Indian Fishing Stations upon Long Island. Long Island wampum was singularly good—the Indian name, Seawanhacky (Seawanhaka, &c.), of the island has been interpreted to mean “shell treasury”—and black wampum was made from the purple part of the shell of the quahaug. Soft clams are dug on the north shore at low tide and hard clams are found along the southern shore, where (at Islip) they were first successfully canned; scallops and other small shell fish are taken, especially at the E. end of the island. But the most important shell fishery is that of oysters. The famous Blue Points grow in the Great South Bay, particularly at Sayville and Bellport, where seed oysters planted from Long Island Sound develop into the Blue Points with characteristics of no other variety of oyster. Farther west, on the S. shore are grown the well-known Rockaway oysters. The New York State Fish Commission has a hatchery at Cold Spring Harbor on the N. shore. The largest commercial fisheries are on the south side, in the ocean off Fire Island Beach, where there are great “pounds” in which captured fish are kept alive before shipment to market. Sag Harbor and East Hampton on the E. end of the island were important whaling ports in the 18th century and the first part of the 19th, and they and other fishing villages afterward did a large business in the capture of menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus), a small shad-like fish, which, following the custom of the Indians, they manufactured into fertilizer. At Glen Cove there are now great starch factories.
The west end of the island has been called New York’s market garden. On the Hempstead Plains and immediately E. of them along the north shore great quantities of cabbage and cucumbers are grown and manufactured into sauerkraut and pickles. There are large cranberry fields near the village of Calverton, immediately W. of Riverhead.
There are a few large farms on Long Island, mostly on the north side, but it is becoming more and more a place of suburban residence. This change is due in part to cool summer and warm winter winds from the ocean, which makes the July mean temperature 68° to 70° F. at the east end and the south side, and 72° on the north shore, as contrasted with 74° for the west end and New York City. The range of temperature is said to be less than in any other place in the United States with the exception of Corpus Christi (Tex.), Eureka (California), Galveston (Texas), and Key West (Florida). Even on the south shore the humidity for August and September is less than that of any location on the Atlantic coast, or Los Angeles and San Diego on the Pacific, according to Dr Le Grand N. Denslow in a paper, “The Climate of Long Island” (1901). Surf-bathing on the south shore, yachting and boating on the Sound, the Great South Bay and the Ocean, and hunting and fishing are attractions. At Garden City, Nassau (Glen Cove), Great River and Shinnecock Hills are well-known golf links; there are several hunt clubs; and at Southampton are some of the best turf tennis-courts in the United States. Few parts of the island are summer resorts in the ordinary use of the word; there are large hotels hardly anywhere save on Coney Island, at Far Rockaway, on Long Beach and on Shelter Island; and a large part of the summer population lives in private mansions. Some Long Island “country places” are huge estates with game and fish preserves and luxurious “châteaux.” The roads are good. The course of the Vanderbilt automobile races is along the roads of the Hempstead Plains. Also on the Hempstead Plains are the Creedmoor Rifle Range, where, in an Interstate Park, E. of Jamaica, annual international rifle shooting tournaments for the championship of America were held until 1909; Garden City, which was founded by A. T. Stewart for the purpose of providing comfortable homes at low cost to his employés and others, and where are the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation, St Paul’s School for Boys and St Mary’s School for Girls; and, near Hempstead, the grounds of the Meadowbrook (hunt and polo) Club and those of the Farm Kennel Club. The only railway is the Long Island Railroad (owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad) with western termini on Manhattan and in Long Island City and Brooklyn, whence lines meet at Jamaica, and thence three principal lines branch, the north shore to Wading River, the main line to Greenport, and the south side to Montauk.
Long Island is a part of New York State, its western third forming Brooklyn and Queens boroughs of New York City—these boroughs were formed respectively from Kings county and from the w. half of Queens county upon the erection of Greater New York, what was formerly the E. half of Queens county then became Nassau county (area 252 sq. m.; pop., in 1900, 55,448, in 1905, 69,477), whose county-seat is Mineola. The eastern and the larger part of the island is the less thickly settled Suffolk county with an area of 918 sq. m. and a population in 1900 of 77,582 and in 1905 of 81,653. The county-seat of Suffolk county is Riverhead, so named from its position at the head of the Peconic river on the W. end of Great Peconic Bay. The ten townships of Suffolk county are large governmental units, showing, by their similarity to the towns of New England, the relation of the early settlers to New England. The largest in area is Brookhaven, which reaches all the way across the island near its central part. The townships of Suffolk county with their population in 1905 were: Huntington (10,236). Babylon (7919), Smithtown (3325), Islip (13,721), Brookhaven (16,050), Riverhead (4950), Shelter Island (1105), Easthampton (4303), Southold (8989) and Southampton (11,024). The total population of Long Island was 1,452,611 in 1900, and 1,718,056 in 1905 (state census), the population of the borough of Brooklyn alone for these years being 1,166,582 and 1,358,686.
History.—The principal Indian tribes on Long Island at the time of the first settlement by the whites were the Montauk, on the eastern end of the island, where they gave their name to the “point” and where their last “king,” David Pharoah, died in 1785; the Shinnecock, who, much admixed with negro blood, now live on the reservation between Canoe Place and Shinnecock Hills; the Manhasset, on what is now Shelter Island; the Patchogue, near the present village of that name; the Massapequa, between the Hempstead Plains and what is now Islip, who were defeated and practically exterminated in 1653 by John Underhill; the Canarsie, who lived near the present Jamaica; and on the north side the Nessaquague or Nissequoge (in the present town of Smithtown), and the Sealtocot who gave their name to Setauket in Brookhaven town. The first pastor of the church (Presbyterian-Congregational) at Easthampton, Thomas James (c. 1620-1696), is supposed to have translated a catechism and parts of the Bible into the dialect of the Montauk, among whom Samson Occum had a school between 1755 and 1765.
The territory of Long Island was included in the grant of 1620 by James I. to the Plymouth Company and in 1635 was conveyed to William Alexander, earl of Stirling. The conflicting claims of English and Dutch were the subject of the treaty concluded at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1650, by which the Dutch were to hold everything west of Oyster Bay, the English everything east—a provision which accomplished no agreement, since Oyster Bay itself was the matter of contention, and English settlers on what the Dutch called the west side of Oyster Bay refused to remove. Long Island was included in the territory assigned to the duke of York in 1663-1664, when the New England towns on the island objected to separation from Connecticut. On the recovery of New York by the Dutch in 1673 the eastern towns refused to submit to the Dutch governor. In 1674 by the treaty of Westminster Long Island became a part of the British colony of New York. The Dutch settlements were more important ethnically than historically; on the west end of the Island the Dutch Reformed Church is still strong and there are many Dutch names; at West Sayville, on the “south side,” about 50 m. from New York, in a settlement made about 1786 by Gustav Tukker, who did much to develop the oyster fisheries, Holland Dutch was the common speech until the last quarter of the 19th century. The “Five Dutch Towns” were: Nieuw Amersfoord (after 1801 officially called Flatlands), on Jamaica Bay, where the first settlement was made about 1623 and the first grant in 1636; Midwout (later Vlackte-Bosch and Flatbush), settled between 1645 and 1650 and having in 1654 the first Dutch church; Nieuw Utrecht, settled soon after 1650 and incorporated in 1660; Breuckelen (now Brooklyn), which was settled a little before its organization as a town in 1646; and Boswijck (Bushwick), first settled by Swedes and Norwegians and incorporated in 1660. These five towns became one administrative district in 1661.
Apparently the earliest English settlement was at Hempstead in 1640 by colonists from Lynn, Massachusetts, who based their claim on the patent (1621) of Nova Scotia to Lord Stirling, but were almost immediately driven out by the Dutch. In 1643 another English settlement was made at Hempstead by men from Stamford, Connecticut, who in 1644 secured a patent from Governor Kieft of New Netherland. In 1645 Kieft granted land at Gravesend to Lady Deborah Moody, who had settled there about 1643, when she had left Lynn and the Salem church because of her anti-pedobaptist views. At Gravesend in 1664 Colonel Richard Nicolls first landed the English troops which occupied the island; and in 1693 it became one of its three ports of entry. The Connecticut towns on Long Island were as follows: Southampton was settled in 1640 by the Lynn men driven out of Hempstead by the Dutch, and in 1644-1664 was in the Connecticut jurisdiction. Southold (the “South Hold of New Haven”), called from 1640 until 1644 by the Indian name Yennicock, had a church in 1640, and a court based on the Levitical law, which was abolished in 1643 upon the remonstrance of the authorities of New Haven. The Southold settlers were from Hingham, Norfolk and New Haven, and the colony joined New Haven in 1648, in which year the colony of Forrett’s (now Shelter) Island also submitted to New Haven. Easthampton was settled in 1648 from Lynn. Oyster Bay was also settled by Lynn men in 1640 and contested by the Dutch and English. Newtown, officially called Middleburgh, was settled in 1652, purchased from the Indians in 1656, “annexed to the other side of the Sound” in 1662, in the same year took the name of Hastings, in 1706 was the scene of the arrest of the Presbyterian itinerants Francis Mackemie and John Hampton, and in 1766 was the site of the Methodist Episcopal Society at Middle Village, the second oldest of that denomination in America. Huntington was settled in 1653 from New Haven, Hempstead, Southold and Southampton. Other early settlements were: Jamaica, about 1657; Brookhaven, first settled at Ashford (now Setauket) from Boston in 1655, and Smithtown, patented in 1677 to Richard Smith of Setauket, who was said to be a soldier of Cromwell, and of whom there is a story that having bargained with the Indians for as much land as a bull could cover in a day he rode his trained bull in a great circuit about the land he coveted and was thereafter known as “Bull” Smith. Almost all these English settlements were made by Presbyterians and from Jamaica east this was the prevailing denomination. During the war of Independence the battle of Long Island (see below) was fought within what is now the borough of Brooklyn.
Authorities.—Benj. F. Thompson, The History of Long Island (New York, 2nd ed. 1843); Nathaniel S. Prime, History of Long Island (New York, 1845), especially valuable for ecclesiastical history, particularly of the Presbyterian church; Martha B. Flint, Early Long Island (New York, 1896); Gabriel Furman, Antiquities of Long Island (New York, 1875), edited by Frank Moore; and the publications of the Long Island Historical Society (of Brooklyn) and of the Suffolk County Historical Society (of Riverhead).
(R. We.)
Battle of Long Island, 1776.—The interest of this battle lies in the fact that it was the first engagement in the campaign of 1776 (see American War of Independence) and was expected in England to be decisive of the contest in the colonies. After the evacuation of Boston (March 1776), Lord Howe moved against New York City, which he thought would afford a better base of operations for the future. The Americans undertook its defence although recognizing the difficulties in the case, as the bay and rivers adjoining would enable the British fleet to co-operate effectively with the army. To protect his left flank Washington was forced to throw a portion of his troops over to the Long Island side of the East river; they fortified themselves there on the site of the present Borough of Brooklyn. Lord Howe, who had encamped on Staten Island at the entrance to the harbour, determined to attack this isolated left wing, and on the 22nd of August landed at Gravesend Bay, Long Island, with about 20,000 men. The Americans maintained strong outposts in the wooded hills in advance of their fortified lines. On the morning of the 27th Howe, after four days’ reconnaissance, attacked these posts with three columns, the left and centre delivering the holding attack, and the right and strongest column turning the enemy’s left by a détour. Howe himself, accompanied by Generals (Sir H.) Clinton and Lord Cornwallis, led the turning movement, which came upon the rear of the enemy at the moment when they were engaged with the two other columns. By noon the Americans had been driven back into the Brooklyn lines in considerable confusion, and with the loss of about half their number. This constituted the battle. The completeness of the English victory was due to the neglect of the Americans in guarding the left of their outposts. Howe has been criticized for not immediately assaulting the American works which he might have carried on the evening of the battle. In view of the fact that he had only defeated a small portion of the American forces, and that the works were of considerable strength, he decided to make a formal siege, and Washington took advantage of the delay in operations to retreat across the river to New York on the night of the 29th. This successful movement repaired to some extent the bad moral effect of the defeat of the 27th in the American camp. In the engagement of Long Island Washington lost about 1200 prisoners and 30 guns, and 400 killed and wounded; of the latter the British lost nearly the same number.
(C. F. A.)
G. K. Gilbert, in an article, “The Deflection of Streams” in the American Journal of Science (xxvii. 427-432), points out that each of these streams is “bounded on the west or right side by a bluff 10 to 20 ft. high.”
LONG ISLAND CITY, formerly a city of Queens county, New York, U.S.A., and since the 1st of January 1898 the first ward of the Borough of Queens, New York City. Pop. (1880) 17,129, (1890) 30,506, (1900) 48,272, of whom 15,899 were foreign-born. It has a river front, on East river and Long Island Sound, of 10 m., and is the eastern terminal and the headquarters of the Long Island railway, having a large Y.M.C.A. building (the gift of Mrs Russell Sage) for employees of this railway. Among manufactures are chemicals, pottery, varnish, silk, &c., and there are oil-storage warehouses. Most of the borough offices of Queens borough are in Long Island City, which was formerly the county-seat of Queens county. The first settlement within the limits of what subsequently became Long Island City was made in 1640 by a Dutch blacksmith, Hendrick Harmensen, who soon afterward was murdered by an Indian. Other settlers, both Dutch and English, soon followed, and established detached villages, which became known as Hunter’s Point, Blissville, Astoria, Ravenswood, Dutch Kills, Middleton and Steinway. In 1853 this group of villages, by that time virtually one community, was called Long Island City, and it was formally incorporated under that name in 1870. In 1871-1872 the city was laid out by a commission of which General W. B. Franklin was president. Political convictions, economic considerations and fear combined to make the residents in this region largely loyalist in their attitude during the War of Independence. From 1776 to 1783 British troops occupied Newtown, a village to the S. E. In January 1776 the committee on the state of New York in Congress reported a resolution that “Whereas a majority of the inhabitants of Queens county, in the colony of New York, being incapable of resolving to live and die free men,... all such persons as voted against sending deputies to the present convention in New York ... be put out of the protection of the United Colonies,” &c., an action which led to the arrest and imprisonment of many of the accused persons.
See J. S. Kelsey, History of Long Island City (Long Island City, 1896).
LONGITUDE (from Lat. longitudo, “length”), the angle which the terrestrial meridian from the pole through a point on the earth’s surface makes with some standard meridian, commonly that of Greenwich. It is equal to the difference between local time on the standard meridian, and at the place defined, one hour of time corresponding to 15° difference of longitude. Formerly each nation took its own capital or principal observatory as the standard meridian from which longitudes were measured. Another system had a meridian passing through or near the island of Ferro, defined as 20° W. of Paris, as the standard. While the system of counting from the capital of the country is still used for local purposes, the tendency in recent years is to use the meridian of Greenwich for nautical and international purposes. France, however, uses the meridian of the Paris observatory as its standard for all nautical and astronomical purposes (see Time). In astronomy, the longitude of a celestial body is the distance of its projection upon the ecliptic from the vernal equinox, counted in the direction west to east from 0° to 360°.
LONGLEY, CHARLES THOMAS (1794-1868), archbishop of Canterbury, was born at Rochester, and educated at Westminster and Oxford. He was ordained in 1818, and was appointed vicar of Cowley, Oxford, in 1823. In 1827 he received the rectory of west Tytherley, Hampshire, and two years later he was elected headmaster of Harrow. This office he held until 1836, when he was consecrated bishop of the new see of Ripon. In 1856 he was translated to the see of Durham, and in 1860 he became archbishop of York. In 1862 he succeeded John Bird Sumner as archbishop of Canterbury. Soon afterwards the questions connected with the deposition of Bishop Colenso were referred to him, but, while regarding Colenso’s opinions as heretical and his deposition as justifiable, he refused to pronounce upon the legal difficulties of the case. The chief event of his primacy was the meeting at Lambeth, in 1867, of the first Pan-Anglican conference of British, colonial and foreign bishops (see Lambeth Conferences). His published works include numerous sermons and addresses. He died on the 27th of October 1868 at Addington Park, near Croydon.
LONGMANS, a firm of English publishers. The founder of the firm, Thomas Longman (1) (1699-1755), born in 1699, was the son of Ezekiel Longman (d. 1708), a gentleman of Bristol. Thomas was apprenticed in 1716 to John Osborn, a London bookseller. At the expiration of his apprenticeship he married Osborn’s daughter, and in August 1724 purchased the stock and household goods of William Taylor, the first publisher of Robinson Crusoe, for £2282 9s. 6d. Taylor’s two shops were known respectively as the Black Swan and the Ship, and occupied the ground in Paternoster Row upon which the present publishing house stands. Osborn, who afterwards entered into partnership with his son-in-law, held one-sixth of the shares in Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of the Arts and Sciences, and Thomas Longman was one of the six booksellers who undertook the responsibility of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary. In 1754 Thomas Longman took his nephew into partnership, the title of the firm becoming T. and T. Longman.
Upon the death of his uncle in 1755, Thomas Longman (2) (1730-1797) became sole proprietor. He greatly extended the colonial trade of the firm. He had three sons. Of these, Thomas Norton Longman (3) (1771-1842) succeeded to the business. In 1794 Owen Rees became a partner, and Thomas Brown, who was for many years after 1811 a partner, entered the house as an apprentice. Brown died in 1869 at the age of 92. In 1799 Longman purchased the copyright of Lindley Murray’s English Grammar, which had an annual sale of about 50,000 copies; he also purchased, about 1800, the copyright, from Joseph Cottle, of Bristol, of Southey’s Joan of Arc and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. He published the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Scott, and acted as London agent for the Edinburgh Review, which was started in 1802. In 1804 two more partners were admitted; and in 1824 the title of the firm was changed to Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green. In 1814 arrangements were made with Thomas Moore for the publication of Lalla Rookh, for which he received £3000; and when Archibald Constable failed in 1826, Longmans became the proprietors of the Edinburgh Review. They issued in 1829 Lardner’s Cabinet Encyclopaedia, and in 1832 M’Culloch’s Commercial Dictionary.
Thomas Norton Longman (3) died on the 29th of August 1842, leaving his two sons, Thomas (4) (1804-1879) and William Longman (1813-1877), in control of the business in Paternoster Row. Their first success was the publication of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, which was followed in 1849 by the issue of the first two volumes of his History of England, which in a few years had a sale of 40,000 copies. The two brothers were well known for their literary talent; Thomas Longman edited a beautifully illustrated edition of the New Testament, and William Longman was the author of several important books, among them a History of the Three Cathedrals dedicated to St Paul (1869) and a work on the History of the Life and Times of Edward III. (1873). In 1863 the firm took over the business of Mr J. W. Parker, and with it Fraser’s Magazine, and the publication of the works of John Stuart Mill and J. A. Froude; while in 1890 they incorporated with their own all the publications of the old firm of Rivington, established in 1711. The family control of the firm (now Longmans, Green & Co.) was continued by Thomas Norton Longman (5), son of Thomas Longman (4).
LONGOMONTANUS (or Longberg), CHRISTIAN SEVERIN(1562-1647), Danish astronomer, was born at the village of Longberg in Jutland, Denmark, on the 4th of October 1562. The appellation Longomontanus was a Latinized form of the name of his birthplace. His father, a poor labourer called Sören, or Severin, died when he was eight years old. An uncle thereupon took charge of him, and procured him instruction at Lemvig; but after three years sent him back to his mother, who needed his help in field-work. She agreed, however, to permit him to study during the winter months with the clergyman of the parish; and this arrangement subsisted until 1577, when the illwill of some of his relatives and his own desire for knowledge impelled him to run away to Viborg. There he attended the grammar-school, defraying his expenses by manual labour, and carried with him to Copenhagen in 1588 a high reputation for learning and ability. Engaged by Tycho Brahe in 1589 as his assistant in his great astronomical observatory of Uraniborg, he rendered him invaluable services there during eight years. He quitted the island of Hveen with his master, but obtained his discharge at Copenhagen on the 1st of June 1597, for the purpose of studying at some German universities. He rejoined Tycho at Prague in January 1600, and having completed the Tychonic lunar theory, turned homeward again in August. He visited Frauenburg, where Copernicus had made his observations, took a master’s degree at Rostock, and at Copenhagen found a patron in Christian Friis, chancellor of Denmark, who gave him employment in his household. Appointed in 1603 rector of the school of Viborg, he was elected two years later to a professorship in the university of Copenhagen, and his promotion to the chair of mathematics ensued in 1607. This post he held till his death, on the 8th of October 1647.
Longomontanus, although an excellent astronomer, was not an advanced thinker. He adhered to Tycho’s erroneous views about refraction, held comets to be messengers of evil and imagined that he had squared the circle. He found that the circle whose diameter is 43 has for its circumference the square root of 18252—which gives 3.14185... for the value of π. John Pell and others vainly endeavoured to convince him of his error. He inaugurated, at Copenhagen in 1632, the erection of a stately astronomical tower, but did not live to witness its completion. Christian IV. of Denmark, to whom he dedicated his Astronomia Danica, an exposition of the Tychonic system of the world, conferred upon him the canonry of Lunden in Schleswig.
The following is a list of his more important works in mathematics and astronomy: Systematis Mathematici, &c. (1611); Cyclometria e Lunulis reciproce demonstrata, &c. (1612); Disputatio de Eclipsibus (1616); Astronomia Danica, &c. (1622); Disputationes quatuor Astrologicae (1622); Pentas Problematum Philosophiae (1623); De Chronolabio Historico, seu de Tempore Disputationes tres (1627); Geometriae quaesita XIII. de Cyclometria rationali et vera (1631); Inventio Quadraturae Circuli (1634); Disputatio de Matheseos Indole (1636); Coronis Problematica ex Mysteriis trium Numerorum (1637); Problemata duo Geometrica (1638); Problema contra Paulum Guldinum de Circuli Mensura (1638); Introductio in Theatrum Astronomicum (1639); Rotundi in Plano, &c. (1644); Admiranda Operatio trium Numerorum 6, 7, 8, &c. (1645); Caput tertium Libri primi de absoluta Mensura Rotundi plani, &c. (1646).
See E. P. F. Vindingius, Regia Academia Havinensis, p. 212 (1665); R. Nyerup and Kraft, Almindeligt Litteraturlexikon, p. 350 (1820); Ch. G. Jöcher, Allgemeines Gelehrten-lexikon, ii. 2518, iii. 2111; Jens Worm, Forsög til et Lexikon over danske, norske og islandske laerde Maend, p. 617, 1771, &c.; P. Bayle, Hist. and Crit. Dictionary, iii. 861 (2nd ed. 1736); J. B. J. Delambre, Hist. de l’astr. moderne, i. 262; J. S. Bailly, Hist. de l’astr. moderne, ii. 141; J. L. E. Dreyer, Tycho Brahe, pp. 126, 259, 288, 299; F. Hoeffer, Hist. de l’astronomie, p. 391; J. Mädler, Geschichte der Himmelskunde, i. 195; J. F. Weidler, Hist. Astronomiae, p. 451.
LONGSTREET, JAMES (1821-1904), American soldier, lieutenant-general in the Confederate army, was born on the 8th of February 1821 in Edgefield district, South Carolina, and graduated at West Point in 1842. He served in the Mexican War, was severely wounded, and received two brevets for gallantry. In 1861, having attained the rank of major, he resigned when his state seceded, and became a brigadier-general in the Confederate army. In this rank he fought at the first battle of Bull Run, and subsequently at the head of a division in the Peninsular campaign and the Seven Days. This division subsequently became the nucleus of the I. corps, Army of Northern Virginia, which was commanded throughout the war by Longstreet. This corps took part in the battles of second Bull Run and Antietam, and held the left of Lee’s front at Fredericksburg. Most of the corps was absent in North Carolina when the battle of Chancellorsville took place, but Longstreet, now a lieutenant-general, returned to Lee in time to take part in the campaign of Gettysburg. At that battle he disapproved of the attack because of the exceptionally strong position of the Federals. He has been charged with tardiness in getting into the action, but his delay was in part authorized by Lee to await an absent brigade, and in part was the result of instructions to conceal his movements, which caused circuitous marching. The most conspicuous fighting in the battle was conducted by Longstreet. In September 1863 he took his corps to the west and bore a conspicuous part in the great battle of Chickamauga. In November he commanded the unsuccessful expedition against Knoxville. In 1864 he rejoined Lee’s army in Virginia, and on the 6th of May arrived upon the field of the Wilderness as the Confederate right had been turned and routed. His attack was a model of impetuosity and skill, and drove the enemy back until their entire force upon that flank was in confusion. At this critical moment, as Longstreet in person, at the head of fresh troops, was pushing the attack in the forest, he was fired upon by mistake by his own men and desperately wounded. This mischance stayed the Confederate assault for two hours, and enabled the enemy to provide effective means to meet it. In October 1864 he resumed command of his corps, which he retained until the surrender, although paralysed in his right arm. During the period of Reconstruction Longstreet’s attitude towards the political problem, and the discussion of certain military incidents, notably the responsibility for the Gettysburg failure, brought the general into extreme unpopularity, and in the course of a controversy, which lasted for many years, much was said and written by both sides which could be condoned only by irritation. His acceptance of a Federal office at New Orleans brought him, in a riot, into armed conflict with his old Confederate soldiers. His admiration for General Grant and his loyalty to the Republican party accentuated the ill-feeling of the Southern people. But in time his services in former days were recalled, and he became once more “General Lee’s war-horse” to his old soldiers and the people of the South. He held several civil offices, among them being that of minister to Turkey under Grant and that of commissioner of Pacific railways under Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt. In 1896 he published From Manassas to Appomattox, and in his later years he prepared an account of Gettysburg, which was published soon after his death, with notes and reminiscences of his whole military career. General Longstreet died at Gainesville, Georgia, on the 2nd of January 1904.
See Lee and Longstreet at High Tide, by Helen D. Longstreet (Gainesville, Ga., 1904).
LONGTON, a market-town of Staffordshire, England, on the North Staffordshire railway, 2½ m. S.E. of Stoke-on-Trent, within which parliamentary and municipal borough it is included. Pop. (1901) 35,815. The town is in the Potteries district, and in the neighbourhood of coal and iron mines. It was governed by a mayor, 10 aldermen and 30 councillors until under the “Potteries Federation” scheme (1908) it became part of the borough of Stoke-on-Trent in 1910.
LONGUEVILLE, the name of a French family which originated with Jean, count of Dunois, the “Bastard of Orleans,” to whom Charles VII. gave the countship of Longueville in Normandy in 1443. François of Orleans, count of Longueville, was created duke in 1505. The marriage of his brother Louis with Jeanne, daughter and heiress of Philip, count of Baden-Hochberg-Sausenberg (d. 1503), added considerable estates to the house of Longueville. Henry, duc de Longueville (d. 1663), took an important part in the Fronde, and for a long time held the royal troops in check in Normandy. His wife, Anne Geneviève (see below), was a leading figure in the political dissensions of the time. The last of the family was Jean Louis, the Abbé d’Orléans, who died in 1694. The numismatist, Charles d’Orléans-Rothelin (1691-1744), belonged to a bastard branch of the family.
LONGUEVILLE, ANNE GENEVIÈVE, Duchesse de (1619-1679), was the only daughter of Henri de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, and his wife Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency, and the sister of Louis, the great Condé. She was born on the 28th of August 1619, in the prison of Vincennes, into which her father and mother had been thrown for opposition to Marshal D’Ancre, the favourite of Marie de’ Medici, who was then regent in the minority of Louis XIII. She was educated with great strictness in the convent of the Carmelites in the Rue St Jacques at Paris. Her early years were clouded by the execution of the duc de Montmorency, her mother’s only brother, for intriguing against Richelieu in 1631, and that of her mother’s cousin the comte de Montmorency-Boutteville for duelling in 1635; but her parents made their peace with Richelieu, and being introduced into society in 1635 she soon became one of the stars of the Hôtel Rambouillet, at that time the centre of all that was learned, witty and gay in France. In 1642 she was married to the duc de Longueville, governor of Normandy, a widower twice her age. The marriage was not happy. After Richelieu’s death her father became chief of the council of regency during the minority of Louis XIV., her brother Louis won the great victory of Rocroy in 1643 (see Condé), and the duchess became of political importance. In 1646 she accompanied her husband to Münster, where he was sent by Mazarin as chief envoy, and where she charmed the German diplomatists who were making the treaty of Westphalia, and was addressed as the “goddess of peace and concord.” On her return she fell in love with the duc de la Rochefoucauld, the author of the Maxims, who made use of her love to obtain influence over her brother, and thus win honours for himself. She was the guiding spirit of the first Fronde, when she brought over Armand, Prince de Conti, her second brother, and her husband to the malcontents, but she failed to attract Condé himself, whose loyalty to the court overthrew the first Fronde. It was during the first Fronde that she lived at the Hôtel de Ville and took the city of Paris as god-mother for the child born to her there. The peace did not satisfy her, although La Rochefoucauld won the titles he desired. The second Fronde was largely her work, and in it she played the most prominent part in attracting to the rebels first Condé and later Turenne. In the last year of the war she was accompanied into Guienne by the duc de Nemours, her intimacy with whom gave La Rochefoucauld an excuse for abandoning her, and who himself immediately returned to his old mistress the duchesse de Chevreuse. Thus abandoned, and in disgrace at court, the duchess betook herself to religion. She accompanied her husband to his government at Rouen, and devoted herself to good works. She took for her director M. Singlin, famous in the history of Port Royal. She chiefly lived in Normandy till 1663, when her husband died, and she came to Paris. There she became more and more Jansenist in opinion, and her piety and the remembrance of her influence during the disastrous days of the Fronde, and above all the love her brother, the great Condé, bore her, made her conspicuous. The king pardoned her and in every way showed respect for her. She became the great protectress of the Jansenists; it was in her house that Arnauld, Nicole and De Lane were protected; and to her influence must be in great part attributed the release of Lemaistre De Sacy from the Bastille, the introduction of Pomponne into the ministry and of Arnauld to the king. Her famous letters to the pope are part of the history of Port Royal (q.v.), and as long as she lived the nuns of Port Royal des Champs were left in safety. Her elder son resigned his title and estates, and became a Jesuit under the name of the Abbé d’Orléans, while the younger, after leading a debauched life, was killed leading the attack in the passage of the Rhine in 1673. As her health failed she hardly ever left the convent of the Carmelites in which she had been educated. On her death in 1679 she was buried with great splendour by her brother Condé, and her heart, as she had directed, was sent to the nuns of the Port Royal des Champs.
The chief authority for Madame de Longueville’s life is a little book in two volumes by Villefore the Jansenist, published in 1738. Victor Cousin has devoted four volumes to her, which, though immensely diffuse, give a vivid picture of her time. See also Sainte-Beuve, Portraits des femmes (1840). Her connexion with Port Royal should be studied in Arnauld’s Memoirs, and in the different histories of that institution.
LONGUS, Greek sophist and romancer, author of Daphnis and Chloë. Nothing is known of his life, and all that can be said is that he probably lived at the end of the 2nd or the beginning of the 3rd century A.D. It has been suggested that the name Longus is merely a misreading of the last word of the title Λεσβιακῶν ἐρωτικῶν λόγοι δ´ in the Florentine MS.; Seiler also observes that the best MS. begins and ends with λόγου (not λόγγου) ποιμενικῶν. If his name was really Longus, he was probably a freedman of some Roman family which bore it. Longus’s style is rhetorical, his shepherds and shepherdesses are wholly conventional, but he has imparted human interest to a purely fanciful picture. As an analysis of feeling, Daphnis and Chloë makes a nearer approach to the modern novel than its chief rival among Greek erotic romances, the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, which is remarkable mainly for the ingenious succession of incidents. Daphnis and Chloë, two children found by shepherds, grow up together, nourishing a mutual love which neither suspects. The development of this simple passion forms the chief interest, and there are few incidents. Chloë is carried off by a pirate, and ultimately regains her family. Rivals alarm the peace of mind of Daphnis; but the two lovers are recognized by their parents, and return to a happy married life in the country. Daphnis and Chloë was the model of La Sireine of Honoré d’Urfé, the Diana enamorada of Montemayor, the Aminta of Tasso, and The Gentle Shepherd of Allan Ramsay. The celebrated Paul et Virginie is an echo of the same story.
See J. Dunlop’s History of Prose Fiction (1888), and especially E. Rohde, Der griechische Roman (1900). Longus found an incomparable translator in Jacques Amyot, bishop of Auxerre, whose French version, as revised by Paul Louis Courier, is better known than the original. It appeared in 1559, thirty-nine years before the publication of the Greek text at Florence by Columbani. The chief subsequent editions are those by G. Jungermann (1605), J. B. de Villoison (1778, the first standard text with commentary), A. Coraes (Coray) (1802), P. L. Courier (1810, with a newly discovered passage), E. Seiler (1835), R. Hercher (1858), N. Piccolos (Paris, 1866) and Kiefer (Leipzig, 1904), W. D. Lowe (Cambridge, 1908). A. J. Pons’s edition (1878) of Courier’s version contains an exhaustive bibliography. There are English translations by G. Thorneley (1733, reprinted 1893), C. V. Le Grice (1803), R. Smith (in Bohn’s Classical Library), and the rare Elizabethan version by Angel Day from Amyot’s translation (ed. J. Jacobs in Tudor Library, 1890). The illustrated editions, generally of Amyot’s version, are numerous and some are beautiful, Prudhon’s designs being especially celebrated.
LONGWY, a fortified town of north-eastern France in the department of Meurthe-et-Moselle, 89 m. N.N.W of Nancy by rail. Pop. (1906) 8523. Longwy is situated on a plateau overlooking the Chiers, a right-bank affluent of the Meuse, near the frontiers of Belgium and Luxemburg. It comprises an upper and a lower town; the former, on a hill, 390 ft. above the Chiers valley, commands the Luxemburg road, and is strengthened by an enceinte and a few outlying fortifications. There is garrison accommodation for 5000 men and 800 horses, but the permanent garrison is small. The lower town is the industrial centre. The 17th-century church has a lofty square tower, the hôtel de ville dates from 1730, and there is a fine hospital. Iron is extensively mined in the district, and supplies numerous blast furnaces. Several iron and steel works are in operation, and metal utensils, fire-proof ware and porcelain are manufactured. Longwy (Longus vicus) came into the possession of the French in 1678 and was at once fortified by Vauban. It was captured by the Prussians in 1792, 1815 and 1871.
LÖNNROT, ELIAS (1802-1884), Finnish philologist and discoverer of the Kalevala, was born at Nyland in Finland on the 9th of April 1802. He was an apothecary’s assistant, but entered the university of Åbo in 1822, and after taking his successive degrees became a physician in 1832. But before this, as early as 1827, he had begun to publish contributions to the study of the ancient Finnish language, and to collect the national ballads and folklore, a field which was at that time uncultivated. In 1833 he settled as a doctor in the country district of Kajana, and began to travel throughout Finland and the adjoining Russian provinces in his leisure time, collecting songs and legends. In this way he was able to put together the great epic of Finland, the Kalevala, the first edition of which he published in 1835; he continued to add to it, and in 1849 issued a larger and completer text. In 1840 Lönnrot issued his important collection of the Kanteletar, or folk-songs of ancient Finland, which he had taken down from oral tradition. The Proverbs of Finland followed in 1842. In 1853, on the death of Castrén, Lönnrot became professor of the Finnish language and literature at the high school of Helsingfors; he retired from this chair in 1862. He died on the 19th of March 1884.
LONSDALE, EARLS OF. This English earldom is held by the ancient family of Lowther, which traces its descent to Sir Hugh Lowther, who flourished in the reign of Edward I. Sir Hugh’s descendant Sir Richard Lowther (1529-1607) received Mary queen of Scots on her flight into England in 1568, and in the two following years was concerned with his brother Gerard in attempts to release her from captivity. He was sheriff of Cumberland and lord warden of the west marches. A house built by Gerard Lowther at Penrith is now the “Two Lions Inn.” Sir Richard’s eldest son, Sir Christopher Lowther (d. 1617), was the ancestor of the later Lowthers, and another son. Sir Gerard Lowther (d. 1624), was judge of the common pleas in Ireland.
One of Sir Christopher’s descendants was Sir John Lowther, Bart. (d. 1706), the founder of the trade of Whitehaven, and another was John Lowther (1655-1700), who was created Viscount Lonsdale in 1696. Before this creation John had succeeded his grandfather, another Sir John Lowther (d. 1675), as a baronet, and had been member of parliament for Westmorland from 1675 to 1696. In 1688 he was serviceable in securing Cumberland and Westmorland for William of Orange; in 1690 he was first lord of the treasury, and he was lord privy seal from March 1699 until his death in July 1700. Lonsdale wrote: Memoirs of the Reign of James II., which were printed in 1808 and again in 1857. His family became extinct when his son Henry, the 3rd viscount (1694-1751), died unmarried in March 1751.
James Lowther, 1st earl of Lonsdale (1736-1802), was a son of Robert Lowther (d. 1745) of Maulds Meaburn, Westmorland, who was for some time governor of Barbados, and was descended from Sir Christopher Lowther; through his mother Catherine Pennington, James was a great-grandson of the 1st viscount Lonsdale. He inherited one of the family baronetcies in 1751, and from three sources he obtained immense wealth, being the heir of the 3rd viscount Lonsdale, of Sir James Lowther, Bart. (d. 1755) of Whitehaven, and of Sir William Lowther, Bart. (d. 1756). From 1757 to 1784 he was a member of parliament, exercising enormous influence on elections in the north of England and usually controlling nine seats in the House of Commons, where his nominees were known as “Sir James’s ninepins.” He secured the election of William Pitt as member for his borough of Appleby in 1781, and his dispute with the 3rd duke of Portland over the possession of the socage manor of Carlisle and the forest of Inglewood gave rise to lengthy proceedings, both in parliament and in the law courts. In 1784 Lowther was created earl of Lonsdale and in 1797 Viscount Lowther with an extended remainder. The earl’s enormous wealth enabled him to gratify his political ambitions. Sir N. W. Wraxall (Historical and Posthumous Memoirs, ed. H. B. Wheatley, 1884), who gives interesting glimpses of his life, speaks of his “prodigious property” and quotes Junius, who called him “the little contemptible tyrant of the north.” He was known as the “bad earl,” and Horace Walpole and others speak slightingly of him; he was, however, a benefactor to Whitehaven, where he boasted he owned the “land, fire and water.”
He married Mary (1768-1824) daughter of George III.’s favourite, John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, but died childless on the 24th of May 1802, when the earldom became extinct; but a kinsman, Sir William Lowther, Bart. (1757-1844), of Swillington, became 2nd viscount Lowther. This viscount, who was created earl of Lonsdale in 1807, is chiefly famous as the friend of Wordsworth and the builder of Lowther Castle, Penrith. His son, William Lowther, 3rd earl of Lonsdale (1787-1872), held several subordinate positions in various Tory ministries, and was lord president of the council in 1852. He died unmarried, and was succeeded by his nephew Henry (1818-1876), whose son Hugh Cecil (b. 1857) succeeded his brother as 6th earl of Lonsdale in 1882.
Other prominent members of the Lowther family are the Right Hon. James William Lowther (b. 1855), who became speaker of the House of Commons in 1905; Sir Gerard Augustus Lowther (b. 1858), who became British ambassador at Constantinople in 1908; and the Right Hon. James Lowther (1840-1904), who was a well-known Conservative member of parliament from 1865, onwards, and chief secretary for Ireland from 1878 to 1880.
LONSDALE, WILLIAM (1794-1871), English geologist and palaeontologist, was born at Bath on the 9th of September 1794. He was educated for the army and in 1810 obtained a commission as ensign in the 4th (King’s Own) regiment. He served in the Peninsular War at the battles of Salamanca and Waterloo, for both of which he received medals; and he retired as lieutenant. Residing afterwards for some years at Batheaston he collected a series of rocks and fossils which he presented to the Literary and Scientific Institution of Bath. He became the first honorary curator of the natural history department of the museum, and worked until 1829 when he was appointed assistant secretary and curator of the Geological Society of London at Somerset House. There he held office until 1842, when ill-health led him to resign. The ability with which he edited the publications of the society and advised the council “on every obscure and difficult point” was commented on by Murchison in his presidential address (1843). In 1829 Lonsdale read before the society an important paper “On the Oolitic District of Bath” (Trans. Geol. Soc. ser. 2, vol. iii.), the results of a survey begun in 1827; later he was engaged in a survey of the Oolitic strata of Gloucestershire (1832), at the instigation of the Geological Society, and he laid down on the one-inch ordnance maps the boundaries of the various geological formations. He gave particular attention to the study of corals, becoming the highest authority in England on the subject, and he described fossil forms from the Tertiary and Cretaceous strata of North America and from the older strata of Britain and Russia. In 1837 he suggested from a study of the fossils of the South Devon limestones that they would prove to be of an age intermediate between the Carboniferous and Silurian systems. This suggestion was adopted by Sedgwick and Murchison in 1839, and may be regarded as the basis on which they founded the Devonian system. Lonsdale’s paper, “Notes on the Age of the Limestones of South Devonshire” (read 1840), was published in the same volume of the Transactions of the Geological Society (ser. 2, vol. v.) with Sedgwick and Murchison’s famous paper “On the Physical Structure of Devonshire,” and these authors observe that “the conclusion arrived at by Mr Lonsdale, we now apply without reserve both to the five groups of our North Devon section, and to the fossiliferous slates of Cornwall.” The later years of Lonsdale’s life were spent in retirement, and he died at Bristol on the 11th of November 1871.
(H. B. Wo.)
LONS-LE-SAUNIER, a town of eastern France, capital of the department of Jura, 76 m. N.N.E. of Lyons on the Paris-Lyons railway, on which it is a junction for Chalon-sur-Saône, Dôle, Besançon and Champagnole. Pop. (1906) 10,648. The town is built on both sides of the river Vallière and is surrounded by the vine-clad hills of the western Jura. It owes its name to the salt mines of Montmorot, its western suburb, which have been used from a very remote period. The church of St Désiré, a building of the 12th and 15th centuries, preserves a huge Romanesque crypt. The town is the seat of a prefects and of a court of assizes, and there are tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a chamber of commerce, lycées and training-colleges for both sexes, and a branch of the Bank of France. There is an establishment for the use of the mineral waters, which are sodio-chlorinated and have strengthening properties. The principal industry of the place is the manufacture of sparkling wines, the Étoile growth being the best for this purpose. Trade is in cheese, cereals, horses, cattle, wood, &c.
Lons-le-Saunier, known as Ledo in the time of the Gauls, was fortified by the Romans, who added the surname Salinarius to the Gallic name. An object of contention owing to the value of its salt, it belonged for a long time during the medieval period to the powerful house of Chalon, a younger branch of that of Burgundy. It was burned in 1364 by the English, and again in 1637, when it was seized by the duke of Longueville for Louis XIII. It became definitively French in 1674. It was here that the meeting between Ney and Napoleon took place, on the return of the latter from Elba in 1815. Rouget de l’Isle, the author of the Marseillaise, was born at Montaigu near this town, where there is a statue erected to him.
LOO (formerly called “Lanterloo,” Fr. lanturlu, the refrain of a popular 17th-century song), a round game of cards, played by any number of persons; from five to seven makes the best game. “Three-card loo” is the game usually played. An ordinary pack of fifty-two cards is used and the deal passes after each round. Each player must have the same number of deals; but if there is a “loo” (the sum forfeited by a player who plays, but does not win a trick) in the last deal of a round, the game continues till there is a hand without a loo. The dealer deals three cards face downwards, one by one, to each player and an extra hand called “miss,” and turns up the top of the undealt cards for trumps. Each player contributes to the pool a sum previously agreed upon. The unit for a single stake should be divisible by three without a remainder, e.g. three counters or three pence. The players are bound to put in the stake before the deal is completed. Each player in rotation, beginning from the dealer’s left, looks at his cards, and declares whether he will play, or pass, or take “miss.” If the former, he says “I play.” If he takes miss he places his cards face downwards in the middle of the table, and takes up the extra hand. If he passes, he similarly places his cards face downwards in the middle of the table. If miss is taken, the subsequent players only have the option of playing or passing. A player who takes miss must play. Those who are now left in play one card each in rotation, beginning from the dealer’s left, the cards thus played constituting a trick. The trick is won by the highest card of the suit led, or, if trumped, by the highest trump, the cards ranking as at whist. The winner of the trick leads to the next, and so on, until the hand is played out. The cards remain face upwards in front of the persons placing them.
If the leader holds ace of trumps he must lead it (or king, if ace is turned up). If the leader has two trumps he must lead one of them, and if one is ace (or king, ace being turned up) he must lead it. With this exception the leader is not bound to lead his highest trump if more than two declare to play; but if there are only two declared players the leader with more than one trump must lead the highest. Except with trumps as above stated he may lead any card he chooses. The subsequent players must head the trick if able, and must follow suit if able. Holding none of the suit led, they must head the trick with a trump, if able. Otherwise they may play any card they please. The winner of the first trick is subject to the rules already stated respecting the lead, and in addition he must lead a trump if able (called trump after trick).
When the hand has been played out, the winners of the tricks divide the pool, each receiving one-third of the amount for each trick. If only one has declared to play, the dealer plays miss either for himself or for the pool. If he plays for the pool he must declare before seeing miss that he does not play for himself. Any tricks he may win, when playing for the pool, remain there as an addition to the next pool. Other rules provide that the dealer must play, if only one player stands, with his own cards or with “miss.” If miss is gone and against him, he may defend with the three top cards of the pack, excluding the trump card; these cards are called “master.”
If each declared player wins at least one trick it is a single, i.e. a fresh pool is made as already described; but if one of the declared players fails to make a trick he is looed. Then only the player who is looed contributes to the next pool. If more than one player is looed, each has to contribute.
At unlimited loo each player looed has to put in the amount there was in the pool. But it is often agreed to limit the loo, so that it shall not exceed a certain fixed sum. Thus, at eighteen-penny loo, the loo is generally limited to half a guinea. If there is less than the limit in the pool the payment is regulated as before; but if there is more than the limit, the loo is the fixed sum agreed on.
The game is sometimes varied by “forces,” i.e. by compelling every one to play in the first deal, or when there is no loo the previous deal, or whenever clubs are trumps (“club law”). When there is a force no miss is dealt. “Irish loo” is played by allowing declared players to exchange some or all of their cards for cards dealt from the top of the pack. There is no miss, and it is not compulsory to lead a trump with two trumps, unless there are only two declared players. At “five-card loo” each player has five cards instead of three, and a single stake should be divisible by five. “Pam” (knave of clubs) ranks as the highest trump, whatever suit is turned up. There is no miss, and cards may be exchanged as at Irish loo. If ace of trumps is led, the leader says “Pam be civil,” when the holder of that card must pass the trick if he can do so without revoking. A flush (five cards of the same suit, or four with Pam) “loos the board,” i.e. the holder receives the amount of a loo from every one, and the hand is not played. A trump flush takes precedence of flushes in other suits. If more than one flush is held, or if Pam is held, the holder is exempted from payment. As between two flushes which do not take precedence, the elder hand wins. A single stake should be divisible by five.
LOOE, a seaport and market town in the Bodmin parliamentary division of Cornwall, England, 17 m. by sea W. of Plymouth, a terminus of the Liskeard & Looe light railway. Pop. (1901) 2548. It is divided by the river into East Looe and West Looe; and is sheltered so completely by the surrounding hills that myrtles, geraniums, fuchsias and other delicate plants flourish at all seasons in the open air. Its lanes are narrow, steep and winding; many of the houses are entered by wooden staircases; and though considerably modernized the town has a medieval air. Inland, the shores of the river are richly wooded; and towards the sea they rise on the south into rugged cliffs. The parish church of St Martin, which stands 1 m. outside the town, has a Norman doorway and font. Among other buildings may be mentioned the ancient chapel of St Nicholas in West Looe, restored in 1862; and the old town-hall, where the ancient pillory is preserved. A considerable export trade in copper, tin and granite was formerly carried on, and the last is still exported, but the chief trade is in grain; while timber, coal and limestone are imported. There are also thriving fisheries, the Looe fishermen being particularly expert with the seine on a rocky bottom. The inlet of Trelawne is one of the most exquisite wooded coombes in Cornwall. At its head are the remains of a camp, connected with the Giant’s Hedge, a raised earthwork which extends for 7 m. in a straight line, as far as a larger camp, on Bury Down, and is of Danish or Saxon construction. Trelawne, a fine old mansion belonging to the family of Trelawny, dates in part from the 15th century, but has been very largely restored.
The harbourage was probably the original cause of settlement at Looe. At the time of the Domesday Survey East Looe was assessed under Pendrym, which was of the king’s demesne and West Looe under Hamelin’s manor of Trelowia. In the 14th century the former manor was held by the family of Bodrugan; the latter by that of Dauney, who had inherited it from the Treverbyns. In 1237 Henry Bodrugan received the grant of a market on Fridays and a fair at Michaelmas in his manor of Pendrym. In 1301 his grandson and namesake granted to East Looe a market and fair, view of frank pledge, ducking stool and pillory and assize of bread and ale. Otto Bodrugan in 1320 granted the burgesses the privilege of electing their own portreeve and controlling the trade of the town. A charter of incorporation was granted in 1558 under which the common council was to consist of a mayor and 8 chief burgesses. There was to be a court of record, a market on Saturdays and fairs at Michaelmas and Candlemas. In 1685 James II. provided that there should be a mayor and 11 aldermen, 36 free burgesses, 4 fairs and a court of pie powder. East Looe was governed under this charter until 1885. West Looe (known also as Porpighan or Porbuan) benefited by a charter granted by Richard king of the Romans to Odo Treverbyn and ratified in 1325 constituting it a free borough whose burgesses were to be free of all custom throughout Cornwall. Residence for a year and a day within the borough conferred freedom from servitude. There were to be a market on Wednesdays and a fair at Michaelmas. Hugh son of Odo Treverbyn gave West Looe the privileges enjoyed by Helston and Launceston. Upon the attainder of the earl of Devon in 1539 the borough fell to the crown and was annexed to the duchy. In 1574 a charter of incorporation was granted, providing for a mayor and 11 burgesses, also for a market on Wednesdays and two fairs. West Looe continued to be administered under this charter until 1869, when the death of the mayor deprived the council of its only surviving member and elector. Parliamentary representation was conferred upon East Looe in 1571 and upon West Looe in 1553. In the debate on the reform bill O’Connell stated that there was but one borough more rotten than East Looe and that was West Looe. Looe was second only to Fowey as a port in the 15th century. It furnished 20 ships for the siege of Calais. Of the markets and fairs only the markets on Wednesdays and Saturdays and a fair on the 6th of May remain.
LOOM, or Loon (Icelandic, Lómr), a name applied to water-birds of three distinct families, remarkable for their clumsy gait on land. The first is the Colymbidae, to which the term diver (q.v.) is usually restricted in books; the second the Podicipedidae, or grebes (q.v.); and the third the Alcidae. The form loon is most commonly used both in the British Islands and in North America for all species of the genus Colymbus, or Eudytes according to some ornithologists, frequently with the prefix sprat, indicating the fish on which they are supposed to prey; though it is the local name of the great crested grebe (Podiceps cristatus) wherever that bird is sufficiently well known to have one; and, as appears from Grew (Mus. Reg. Soc. p. 69), it was formerly given to the little grebe or dabchick (P. fluviatilis or minor). The other form loom seems more confined in its application to the north, and is said by T. Edmonston (Etym. Gloss. Shetl. and Orkn. Dialect, p. 67) to be the proper name in Shetland of Colymbus septentrionalis; but it has come into use among Arctic seamen as the name of the guillemot (Alca arra or bruennichi) which throngs the cliffs of northern lands, from whose “loomeries” they obtain a wholesome food; while the writer believes he has heard the word locally applied to the razorbill (q.v.).
(A. N.)
The word also takes the form “lumme” (fide Montagu), and, as Professor Skeat observes, is probably connected with lame. The signification of loon, a clumsy fellow, and metaphorically a simpleton, is obvious to any one who has seen the attempt of the birds to which the name is given to walk.
Dunn and Saxby, however, agree in giving “rain-goose” as the name of the species in Scotland.
LOOM, a machine for weaving fabrics by intersecting the longitudinal threads, the “warp,” i.e. “that which is thrown across” (O.E. wearp, from weorpan, to throw, cf. Ger. werfen) with the transverse threads, the “weft,” i.e. “that which is woven” (O.E. wefta, from wefan, to weave, cf. Ger. weben). The O.E. geloma and M.E. lome meant an implement or tool of any kind. In the sense of property, furniture, &c., it appears in heirloom (q.v.). The earliest example with its specific meaning quoted by the New English Dictionary is from the Nottingham Records of 1404 (see Weaving).
“Loom” in the sense of “to appear indistinctly,” to come into view in an exaggerated indistinct shape, must be distinguished from the above word. This appears to have been a sailor’s term for the indistinct or exaggerated appearance of land, a vessel or other object through haze or darkness at sea. It is of obscure origin, but has been connected through the O. Fr. lumer, modern allumer, with Lat. lumen, light, and with the root seen in “lame,” in the sense of “moving slowly towards one.”
LOÓN, the largest town of the province of Bohol, island of Bohol, Philippine Islands, on the extreme W. coast. Pop. (1903) 18,114. Loón is picturesquely situated on the W. slope of a hill, and is reached from the sea by steps cut in the rocks. The harbour is in a sheltered bay on the N. side of the town. The cultivation of coco-nuts, coffee, cocoa, maguey, tobacco, cotton and Indian corn, and the raising of livestock are the principal industries; there is also considerable commerce and some manufacturing. The language is chiefly Bohol-Visayan.
LOOP. (1) A curve or bend, particularly a bend in a string, rope, &c., formed by doubling back one part so as to leave an opening; similarly a ring of metal or other material leaving an aperture. (2) In architecture or fortification, “loop,” more usually in the form “loophole,” is an opening in the wall of a building, very narrow on the outside and splayed within, from which arrows or darts might be discharged on an enemy, or through which light might be admitted. They are often in the form of a cross, and generally have round holes at the ends (see Oillets). (3) The word is also a term in iron and steel manufacturing for a mass of metal ready for hammering or rolling, a “bloom.”
This last word is represented in French by loupe, from which it is probably adapted. The earlier English form was also loupe, and it was also applied to precious stones which were of inferior brilliancy; the same also appears in French. Of the word in its two first meanings, a bend or circle in a line of string, metal, rails, &c., and “loophole,” the derivation is uncertain. Skeat takes the word in both meanings to be the same and to be of Scandinavian origin, the old Norwegian hlaup, a leap, being the direct source. The base is the Teutonic hlaufan, to run, to leap, German laufen. The New English Dictionary considers the Swedish example, löp-knut, “running knot,” and others given by Skeat in support of his derivation to be Germanisms, and also that the pronunciation of the word would have been lowp rather than lūp. “Loop” in meaning (2) “loophole” is also taken to be a different word, and is derived from Dutch luipen, to peer, watch. In modern Dutch the word for a narrow opening is gluip.
LOOSESTRIFE, in botany, the common name of Lysimachia vulgaris, an erect plant, 2 to 4 ft. high, common on river banks in England; the branched stem bears tapering leaves in pairs or whorls, and terminal panicles of rather large deep yellow flowers. It is a member of the primrose family. L. nemorum, yellow pimpernel, or wood loosestrife, a low-growing plant with slender spreading stem, and somewhat similar yellow flowers standing singly in the leaf-axils, is frequent in copses. L. Nummularia is the well-known creeping jenny or money-wort, a larger plant with widely creeping stem, pairs of shining leaves and large solitary yellow flowers; it is found on banks of rivers and damp woods, and is a common rockery plant. Purple loosestrife, Lythrum Salicaria, belongs to a different family, Lythraceae. It is a handsome plant growing 2 to 6 ft. high on river banks and ditches, with a branched angled stem bearing whorls of narrow pointed stalkless leaves and ending in tall tapering spikes of beautiful rose-purple flowers. The flowers are trimorphic, that is to say, exist in three forms which differ in the relative length of the styles and stamens and are known as long-styled, mid-styled and short-styled forms respectively; the size and colour of the pollen also differ. These differences play an important part in the pollination of the flower.
LOOT, plunder or spoil taken from an enemy in war, especially the indiscriminate plunder taken by the victor after the capture of a city. The word came into English from India. It is adapted from the Hindi lūt, which is either from Sanskrit luṇṭ, to rob, plunder, or lōtra, lōptra, booty.
LOPES, FERNÃO (1380?-1459?), the patriarch of Portuguese historians, was appointed keeper of the royal archives, then housed in the castle of St George in Lisbon, by King John I. in November 1418. He acted as private secretary to the Infants D. Duarte and D. Fernando, and when the former ascended the throne he charged Lopes, by letter of the 19th of March 1434, with the work of “putting into chronicles the stories of the kings of old time as well as the great and lofty actions of the most virtuous king my lord and father” (John I.). The form of the appointment marked its limits, and is a sufficient reply to those modern critics who have censured Lopes for partiality. Notwithstanding his official title of chief chronicler of the realm, he was the king’s man (Vassallo del Rei), and received his salary from the royal treasury. King Alphonso V. confirmed him in his post by letter of the 3rd of June 1449, and in 1454, after thirty-six years’ service in the archives and twenty as chronicler, he resigned in favour of Gomez Eannes de Azurara. The latter pays a tribute to his predecessor as “a notable person, a man of rare knowledge and great authority,” and the modern historian Herculano says, “there is not only history in the chronicles of Fernão Lopes, there is poetry and drama as well; there is the middle age with its faith, its enthusiasm, its love of glory.” Lopes has been called the Portuguese Froissart, and that rare gift, the power of making their subjects live, is common to the two writers; indeed, had the former written in a better-known language, there can be little doubt that the general opinion of critics would have confirmed that of Robert Southey, who called Lopes “beyond all comparison the best chronicler of any age or nation.” Lopes was the first to put in order the stories of the earlier Portuguese monarchs, and he composed a general chronicle of the kingdom, which, though it never appeared under his name, almost certainly served as a foundation for the chronicles of Ruy de Pina (q.v.). Lopes prepared himself for his work with care and diligence, as he tells us, not only by wide reading of books in different languages, but also by a study of the archives belonging to municipalities, monasteries and churches, both in Portugal and Spain. He is usually a trustworthy guide in facts, and charms the reader by the naïve simplicity of his style.
His works that have come down are: (1) Chronica del Rei D. João I. de boa memoria, parts 1 and 2 (Lisbon, 1644). The third part relating the capture of Ceuta was added by Azurara. A corrected text of the chronicle has been issued by instalments in the Archivo Historico Portuguez. (2) “Chronica do senhor rei D. Pedro I.,” in vol. iv. of the Colleccão de Livros Ineditos da Historia Portugueza, published by the Academy of Sciences (Lisbon, 1816); a much better text than that published by Father Bayão in his edition of the same chronicle (Lisbon, 1760). (3) Chronica do senhor rei D. Fernando published in the same volume and collection. The British Museum has some important 16th-century MSS. of the chronicles.
See Damião de Goes, Chronica del Rei Dom Manoel, part iv. ch. 38; Araãgo Morato, introduction to vol. iv. of the above collection; Herculano, Opusculos, vol. v.
(E. Pr.)
LOPEZ, CARLOS ANTONIO (1790-1862), Paraguayan autocrat, was born at Asuncion on the 4th of November 1790, and was educated in the ecclesiastical seminary of that city. He attracted the hostility of the dictator, Francia, and he was forced to keep in hiding for several years. He acquired, however, so unusual a knowledge of law and governmental affairs that, on Francia’s death in 1840, he obtained an almost undisputed control of the Paraguayan state, which he maintained uninterruptedly until his death on the 10th of September 1862. He was successively secretary of the ruling military junta (1840-1841), one of the two consuls (1841-1844), and president with dictatorial powers (1844-1862) by successive elections for ten and three years, and in 1857 again for ten years, with power to nominate his own successor. Though nominally a president acting under a republican constitution, he ruled despotically. His government was in general directed with wise energy towards developing the material resources and strengthening the military power of the country. His jealousy of foreign approach several times involved him in diplomatic disputes with Brazil, England, and the United States, which nearly resulted in war, but each time he extricated himself by skilful evasions.
His eldest son, Francisco Solano Lopez (1826-1870), was born near Asuncion on the 24th of July 1826. When in his nineteenth year he was made commander-in-chief of the Paraguayan army, during the spasmodic hostilities then prevailing with the Argentine Republic. He was sent in 1853 as minister to England, France and Italy, and spent a year and a half in Europe. He purchased large quantities of arms and military supplies, together with several steamers, and organized a project for building a railroad and establishing a French colony in Paraguay. He also formed the acquaintance of Madame Lynch, an Irish adventuress of many talents and popular qualities, who became his mistress, and strongly influenced his later ambitious schemes. Returning to Paraguay, he became in 1855 minister of war, and on his father’s death in 1862 at once assumed the reins of government as vice-president, in accordance with a provision of his father’s will, and called a congress by which he was chosen president for ten years. In 1864, in his self-styled capacity of “protector of the equilibrium of the La Plata,” he demanded that Brazil should abandon her armed interference in a revolutionary struggle then in progress in Uruguay. No attention being paid to his demand, he seized a Brazilian merchant steamer in the harbour of Asuncion, and threw into prison the Brazilian governor of the province of Matto Grosso who was on board. In the following month (December 1864) he despatched a force to invade Matto Grosso, which seized and sacked its capital Cuyabá, and took possession of the province and its diamond mines. Lopez next sought to send an army to the relief of the Uruguayan president Aguirro against the revolutionary aspirant Flores, who was supported by Brazilian troops. The refusal of the Argentine president, Mitre, to allow this force to cross the intervening province of Corrientes, was seized upon by Lopez as an occasion for war with the Argentine Republic. A congress, hastily summoned, and composed of his own nominees, bestowed upon Lopez the title of marshal, with extraordinary war powers, and on April 13, 1865, he declared war, at the same time seizing two Argentine war-vessels in the bay of Corrientes, and on the next day occupied the town of Corrientes, instituted a provisional government of his Argentine partisans, and summarily announced the annexation to Paraguay of the provinces of Corrientes and Entre Rios. Meantime the party of Flores had been successful in Uruguay, and that state on April the 18th united with the Argentine Republic in a declaration of war on Paraguay. On the 1st of May Brazil joined these two states in a secret alliance, which stipulated that they should unitedly prosecute the war “until the existing government of Paraguay should be overthrown,” and “until no arms or elements of war should be left to it.” This agreement was literally carried out. The war which ensued, lasting until the 1st of April 1870, was carried on with great stubbornness and with alternating fortunes, though with a steadily increasing tide of disasters to Lopez (see Paraguay). In 1868, when the allies were pressing him hard, his mind, naturally suspicious and revengeful, led him to conceive that a conspiracy had been formed against his life in his own capital and by his chief adherents. Thereupon several hundred of the chief Paraguayan citizens were seized and executed by his order, including his brothers and brothers-in-law, cabinet ministers, judges, prefects, military officers, bishops and priests, and nine-tenths of the civil officers, together with more than two hundred foreigners, among them several members of the diplomatic legations. Lopez was at last driven with a mere handful of troops to the northern frontier of Paraguay, where, on the 1st of April 1870, he was surprised by a Brazilian force and killed as he was endeavouring to escape by swimming the river Aquidaban.
LOPEZ DE GÓMARA, FRANCISCO (1510?-1555?), Spanish historian, was educated at the university of Alcalá, where he took orders. Soon after 1540 he entered the household of the famous Cortés, who supplied him with most of the material for his Historia de las Indias (1552), and Crónica de la conquista de Nueva España (1552). The pleasing style and novel matter enchanted the Spanish public, but the unmeasured laudation of Cortés at the expense of his lieutenants and companions brought about a violent reaction. Though the Historia was dedicated to Charles V., both works were forbidden on the 17th of November 1553, and no editions of them were issued between 1554 and 1727. Italian and French versions of his books were published in 1556 and 1578 respectively.
LOP-NOR or Lob-nor, a lake of Central Asia, in the Gobi Desert, between the Astin-tagh (Altyn-tagh) on the south and the Kuruk-tagh on the north. Previous to 1876 it was placed in nearly all maps at 42° 30′ N., a position which agreed with the accounts and the maps of ancient Chinese geographers. In the year mentioned the Russian explorer Przhevalsky discovered two closely connected lake-basins, Kara-buran and Kara-koshun, fully one degree farther south, and considerably east of the site of the old Lop-nor, which lake-basins he nevertheless regarded as being identical with the old Lop-nor of the Chinese. But the water they contained he pronounced to be fresh water. This identification was disputed by Baron von Richthofen, on the ground that the Lop-nor, the “Salt Lake” of the Chinese geographers, could not be filled with fresh water; moreover, being the final gathering basin of the desert stream, the Tarim, it was bound to be salt, more especially as the lake had no outflow. Przhevalsky visited the Lop-nor region again in 1885, and adhered to his opinion. But ten years later it was explored anew by Dr Sven Hedin, who ascertained that the Tarim empties part of its waters into another lake, or rather string of lakes (Avullu-köl, Kara-köl, Tayek-köl and Arka-köl), which are situated in 42° 30′ N., and thus so far justified the views of von Richthofen, and confirmed the Chinese accounts. At the same time he advanced reasons for believing that Przhevalsky’s lake-basins, the southern Lop-nor, are of quite recent origin—indeed, he fixed upon 1720 as the probably approximate date of their formation, a date which von Richthofen would alter to 1750. Besides this, Sven Hedin argued that there exists a close inter-relation between the northern Lop-nor lakes and the southern Lop-nor lakes, so that as the water in the one group increases, it decreases to the same proportion and volume in the other. He also argued that the four lakes of northern Lop-nor are slowly moving westwards under the incessant impetus of wind and sandstorm (buran). These conclusions were afterwards controverted by the Russian traveller, P. K. Kozlov, who visited the Lop-nor region in 1893-1894—that is, before Dr Sven Hedin’s examination. He practically only reiterated Przhevalsky’s contention, that the ancient Chinese maps were erroneously drawn, and that the Kara-koshun, in spite of the freshness of its water, was the old Lop-nor, the Salt Lake par excellence of the Chinese. Finally, in 1900, Dr Sven Hedin, following up the course of the Kum-darya, discovered—at the foot of the Kuruk-tagh, and at the E. (lowest) extremity of the now desiccated Kuruk-darya, with traces of dead forest and other vegetation beside it and beside the river-bed—the basin of a desiccated salt lake, which he holds to be the true ancient Lop-nor of the Chinese geographers, and at the same time he found that the Kara-koshun or Lop-nor of Przhevalsky had extended towards the north, but shrunk on the south. Thus the old Lop-nor no longer exists, but in place of it there are a number of much smaller lakes of newer formation. It may fairly be inferred that, owing to the uniform level of the region, the sluggish flow of the Tarim, its unceasing tendency to divide and reunite, conjoined with the violence and persistency of the winds (mostly from the east and north-east), and the rapid and dense growth of the reed-beds in the shallow marshes, the drainage waters of the Tarim basin gather now in greater volume in one depression, and now in greater volume in another; and this view derives support from the extreme shallowness of the lakes in both Sven Hedin’s northern Lop-nor and Przhevalsky’s southern Lop-nor, together with the uniformly horizontal level of the entire region.
See Delmar Morgan’s translation of Przhevalsky’s From Kuja across the Tian-shan to Lop-nor (London, 1879); Von Richthofen’s “Bemerkungen zu den Ergebnissen von Oberst-Leutenant Prjewalskis Reise nach dem Lop-nor” in Verhandl. der Gesch. f. Erdkunde zu Berlin (1878), pp. 121 seq.; Sven Hedin’s Scientific Results of a Journey in Central Asia, 1899-1902 (vols. i. and ii., Stockholm, 1905-1906), where Kozlov’s share of the controversy is summarized (cf. ii., 270-280).
(J. T. Be.)
LOQUAT, Japanese Plum or Japanese Medlar, known botanically as Eriobotrya japonica, small evergreen tree belonging to the natural order Rosaceae, with large thick oval-oblong leaves borne near the ends of the branches, and dark green above with a rusty tomentum on the lower face. The fruit is pear-shaped, yellow, about 1½ in. long and contains large stony seeds; it has an agreeable acid flavour. The plant is a native of China and Japan, but is widely grown for its fruit and as a decorative plant. It is a familiar object in the Mediterranean region and in the southern United States.
LORAIN, a city of Lorain county, Ohio, U.S.A., on Lake Erie, at the mouth of the Black river, and about 25 m. W. by S. of Cleveland. Pop. (1890) 4863; (1900) 16,028, of whom 4730 were foreign-born and 359 negroes; (1910 census) 28,883. Lorain is served by the New York, Chicago & St. Louis, and the Baltimore & Ohio railways, by the Lake Shore Electric railway, and by several of the more important steamboat lines on the Great Lakes. It has a Carnegie library, the Lake View Hospital and the Saint Joseph’s Hospital. There is a good harbour, and the city’s chief interests are in the shipping of great quantities of coal, iron-ore, grain and lumber, in the building of large steel vessels, in railway shops, and in the manufacture of iron pipes, gas engines, stoves and automatic steam shovels. The value of the factory products increased from $9,481,388 in 1900 to $14,491,091 in 1905, or 52.8%. The municipality owns and operates the waterworks. A Moravian mission was established here in 1787-1788, and a trading post in 1807, but no permanent settlement was made until several years later. In 1836 the place was incorporated as a village under the name “Charleston”; in 1874 the present name was adopted, and in 1896 Lorain became a city of the second class.
LORALAI, a town and district of India, in Baluchistan. The town, which is situated 4700 ft. above the sea, 35 m. by road from the railway station of Harnai, was occupied as a military station in 1886, and has quarters for a native cavalry and a native infantry regiment. Pop. (1901) 3561.
The District of Loralai was formed in 1903. It consists of a series of long, narrow valleys, hemmed in by rugged mountains, and bordered E. by Dera Ghazi Khan district of the Punjab. Area 7999 sq. m.; pop. (1901) 67,864, of whom the majority are Afghans. The principal crops are wheat and millet; but the chief wealth of the inhabitants is derived from their herds of cattle, sheep and goats.
LORCA, a town of eastern Spain, in the province of Murcia, on the right bank of the river Sangonera (here called the Guadalantin or Guadalentin) and on the Murcia-Baza railway. Pop. (1900) 69,836. It occupies a height crowned by a medieval fortress, among the foothills of the Sierra del Caño. Its older parts, Moorish in many features and with narrow irregular streets, contrast with the modern parts, which have broad streets and squares, and many fine public buildings—theatre, town hall, hospitals, courts of justice and a bridge over the Sangonera. There is an important trade in agricultural products and live stock, as well as manufactures of woollen stuffs, leather, gunpowder, chemicals and porcelain. Silver, sulphur and lead are found in the neighbourhood.
Lorca is the Roman Eliocroca (perhaps also the Ilorci of Pliny, N.H. iii. 3) and the Moorish Lurka. It was the key of Murcia during the Moorish wars, and was frequently taken and retaken. On the 30th of April 1802 it suffered severely by the bursting of the reservoir known as the Pantano de Puentes, in which the waters of the Sangonera were stored for purposes of irrigation (1775-1785); the district adjoining the river, known as the Barrio de San Cristobal, was completely ruined, and more than six hundred persons perished. In 1810 Lorca suffered greatly from the French invasion. In 1886 the Pantano, which was one of the largest of European reservoirs, being formed by a dam 800 ft. long and 160 ft. high, was successfully rebuilt.
LORCH, a town in the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau, romantically situated on the right bank of the Rhine, 8 m. below Rüdesheim by the railway Frankfort-on-Main-Wiesbaden-Cologne. Pop. (1905) 2269. It has a fine Gothic Roman Catholic church—St Martin’s—dating from the 14th century. The slopes of the hills descending to the Rhine are covered with vineyards, which produce excellent wine. In the neighbourhood of Lorch, which was mentioned as early as 832, is the ruined castle of Nollich.
LORCH, a town in the kingdom of Württemberg, on the Rems, 26 m. E. from Stuttgart by the railway to Nördlingen. Pop. (1905) 3033. It possesses a fine Protestant church dating from the 12th century. Its industries include carriage-building and the manufacture of cement and paper. On the Marienberg lying above the town stands the former Benedictine monastery of Lorch, founded about 1108 by Frederick of Hohenstaufen, and in 1563 converted into an Evangelical college. Here Schiller passed a portion of his school days. The church contains several tombs of the Hohenstaufen family. The Roman limes began at Lorch and Roman remains have been found in the neighbourhood of the town.
See Kirn, Führer durch das Kloster Lorch (Lorch, 1888); and Steimle, Kastell Lorch (Heidelberg, 1897).
LORD, JOHN (1810-1894), American historical writer and lecturer, was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the 27th of December 1810. He was the nephew of Nathan Lord (1792-1870), president of Dartmouth College from 1828 to 1863. He graduated at Dartmouth in 1833, and at Andover Theological Seminary in 1837. His course at the Seminary was interrupted by a period of teaching—at Windham, Connecticut (1834), and at Norwich (1834-1835)—and by a tour in 1836 through New York and Ohio, in which he lectured on the dark ages. He was agent and lecturer for the American Peace Society (1837-1839), and for a brief time was a Congregational pastor in turn at New Marlboro and West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and at Utica, New York. About 1840 he became a professional lecturer on history. He lectured extensively for fifty years, especially in the United States and Great Britain, and introduced, with success, the mid-day lecture. He was lecturer on history in Dartmouth from 1869 to 1876. He received, in 1864, the degree of LL.D. from the University of the City of New York. From 1854 he made his home in Stamford, Connecticut, where he died on the 15th of December 1894. His works include, besides several school and college histories, The Old Roman World: the Grandeur and Failure of Civilization (1867); Ancient States and Empires (1869); Two German Giants: Frederick the Great and Bismarck (1885); and Beacon Lights of History (8 vols., 1884-1896), his chief contribution to historical literature.
See The Life of John Lord (1896) by Rev. Alexander S. Twombley, D. D. (in “Beacon Lights of History”), which is based chiefly upon Lord’s Reminiscences of Fifty Years in the Lecture Field.
LORD (O. Eng. hláford, i.e. hláfweard, the warder or keeper of bread, hláf, loaf; the word is not represented in any other Teutonic language), in its primary sense, the head of a household, the master of those dependent on him for their daily bread, correlative to O. Eng. hláf-aéta, loaf-eater, servant; the word frequently occurs in this sense in the Bible, cf. Matt. xxiv. 45. As a term implying the ownership of property, “lord” survives in “lord of the manor” and “landlord.” The chief applications are due to its use as the equivalent of Lat. dominus, Gr. κύριος and Fr. seigneur; thus in the Old Testament it represents Yahweh, Jehovah, and in the New Testament κύριος, as a title of Jesus Christ. Selden’s words may be quoted for the more general meanings of “lord”; “the name Dominus is ... to be thought of only as a distinguishing attribute of Greatness and as our English word Lord is; and that without any relation of it to an Interest of property or to servitude, and only as it denotes such Superiours as King or Subjects of the greater Nobility with us and men of special Eminency in other States, known by the names of Heeren, Dons, Sieurs, signiors, seigneurs ... and the like.” It is thus not only a general word for a prince or sovereign, but also the common word for a feudal superior, and particularly of a feudal tenant holding directly of the king, a baron (q.v.), hence a peer of the realm, a member of the House of Lords, constituted of the lords temporal and the lords spiritual; this is the chief modern usage. The prefix “lord” is ordinarily used as a less formal alternative to the full title, whether held by right or by courtesy, of marquess, earl or viscount, and is always so used in the case of a baron (which in English usage is generally confined to the holder of a foreign title). Where the name is territorial, the “of” is dropped, thus, the marquess of A., but Lord A. The younger sons of dukes and marquesses have, by courtesy, the title of Lord prefixed to the Christian and surname, e.g. Lord John Russell. In the case of bishops, the full and formal title of address is the Lord Bishop of A., whether he be a spiritual peer or not. Many high officials of the British government have the word “lord” prefixed to their titles; some of them are treated in separate articles; for lord privy seal see Privy Seal. In certain cases the members of a board which has taken the place of an office of state are known as lords commissioners or, shortly, lords of the office in question, e.g. lords of the treasury, civil or naval lords of the admiralty. For lord lieutenant and lord mayor see Lieutenant and Mayor. As the proper form of address “my lord” is used not only to those members of the nobility to whom the title “Lord” is applicable, and to bishops, but also to all judges of the High Court in England, and of the Scottish and Irish Superior Courts, and to lord mayors and lord provosts (see also Lady).
LORD ADVOCATE, or king’s advocate, the principal law-officer of the crown in Scotland. His business is to act as a public prosecutor, and to plead in all causes that concern the crown. He is at the head of the system of public prosecutions by which criminal justice is administered in Scotland, and thus his functions are of a far more extensive character than those of the English law-officers of the crown. He is aided by a solicitor-general and by subordinate assistants called advocates-depute. The office of king’s advocate seems to have been established about the beginning of the 16th century. Originally he had no power to prosecute crimes without the concurrence of a private party; but in the year 1597 he was empowered to prosecute crimes at his own instance. He has the privilege of pleading in court with his hat on.