CELLA, in architecture, the Latin name for the sanctuary of a Roman temple, corresponding with the naos of the Greek temple. In the Etruscan temples, according to Vitruvius, there were three cellas, side by side; and in the temple of Venus built by Hadrian at Rome there were two cellas, both enclosed, however, in a single peristyle.
CELLARET (i.e. little cellar), strictly that portion of a sideboard which is used for holding bottles and decanters, so called from a cellar (which in general may be any underground unlighted apartment) being commonly used for keeping wine. Sometimes it is a drawer, divided into compartments lined with zinc, and sometimes a cupboard, but still an integral part of the sideboard. In the latter part of the 18th century, when the sideboard was in process of evolution from a side-table with drawers into the large and important piece of furniture which it eventually became, the cellaret was a detached receptacle. It was most commonly of mahogany or rosewood, many-sided or even octagonal, and occasionally oval, bound with broad bands of brass and lined with zinc partitions to hold the ice for cooling wine. Sometimes a tap was fixed in the lower part for drawing off the water from the melted ice. Cellarets were usually placed under the sideboard, and were, as a rule, handsome and well-proportioned; but as the artistic impulse which created the great 18th-century English school of furniture died away, their form grew debased, and under the influence of the English Empire fashion, which drew its inspiration from a bastard classicism, they assumed the shape of sarcophagi incongruously mounted with lions’ heads and claw-feet. Hepplewhite called them “gardes du vin”; they are now nearly always known as “wine-coolers.”
CELLE, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of Hanover, on the left bank of the navigable Aller, near its junction with the Fuse and the Lachte, 23 m. N.E. of Hanover, on the main Lehrte-Hamburg railway. Pop. (1905) 21,400. The town has a Roman Catholic and five Protestant churches, among the latter the town-church with the burial vault of the dukes of Lüneburg-Celle. Here rest the remains of Sophia Dorothea, wife of the elector George of Hanover, afterwards George I. of England, and those of Caroline Matilda, the divorced wife of Christian VII. of Denmark and sister of George III. of England, who resided here from 1772 until her death in 1775. The most interesting building in Celle is the former ducal palace, begun in 1485 in Late Gothic style, but with extensive Renaissance additions of the close of the 17th century. The building of the court of appeal (Oberlandesgericht), with a valuable library of 60,000 volumes and many MSS., including a priceless copy of the Sachsenspiegel, the museum and the hall of the estates (Landschaftshaus) are also worthy of notice. There are manufactures of woollen yarn, tobacco, biscuits, umbrellas and printers’ ink, and a lively trade is carried on in wax, honey, wool and timber. Celle is the seat of the court of appeal from the superior courts of Aurich, Detmold, Göttingen, Hanover, Hildesheim, Lüneburg, Osnabrück, Stade and Verden. Founded in 1292, the town was the residence of the dukes of Lüneburg-Celle, a cadet branch of the ducal house of Brunswick, from the 14th century until 1705.
See Dehning, Geschichte der Stadt Celle (Celle, 1891).
CELLIER, ALFRED (1844-1891), English musical composer, was born at Hackney on the 1st of December 1844. From 1855 to 1860 he was a chorister at the Chapel Royal, St James’s, under the Rev. Thomas Helmore, where Arthur Sullivan was one of his youthful colleagues. His first appointment was that of organist at All Saints’ church, Blackheath (1862). In 1866 he succeeded Dr Chipp as director of the Ulster Hall concerts, Belfast, at the same time acting as conductor of the Belfast Philharmonic Society. In 1868 he returned to London as organist of St Alban’s, Holborn. From 1871 to 1875 he was conductor at the Prince’s theatre, Manchester; and from 1877 to 1879 at various London theatres. During this period he composed many comic operas and operettas, of which the most successful was The Sultan of Mocha, which was produced at Manchester in 1874, in London at the St James’s theatre in 1876, and revived at the Strand theatre in 1887. In 1880 Cellier visited America, producing a musical version of Longfellow’s Masque of Pandora at Boston (1881). In 1883 his setting of Gray’s Elegy in the form of a cantata was produced at the Leeds Festival. In 1886 he won the great success of his life in Dorothy, a comic opera written to a libretto by B.C. Stephenson, which was produced at the Gaiety theatre on the 25th of September 1886, and, transferred first to the Prince of Wales theatre and subsequently to the Lyric theatre, ran until April 1889. Doris (1889), and The Mountebanks, which was produced in January 1892, a few days after the composer’s death, were less successful. Cellier owed much to the influence of Sir Arthur Sullivan. He had little of the latter’s humour and vivacity, but he was a fertile melodist, and his writing is invariably distinguished by elegance and refinement. He died in London on the 28th of December 1891.