The Théâtre of Jacques Grévin was printed in 1562, and in the Ancien Théâtre français, vol. iv. (1855-1856). See L. Pinvert, Jacques Grévin (1899).
GRÈVY, FRANÇOIS PAUL JULES (1813-1891). President of the French Republic, was born at Mont-sous-Vaudrey in the Jura, on the 15th of August 1813. He became an advocate in 1837, and, having steadily maintained republican principles under the Orleans monarchy, was elected by his native department to the Constituent Assembly of 1848. Foreseeing that Louis Bonaparte would be elected president by the people, he proposed to vest the chief authority in a president of the Council elected and removable by the Assembly, or in other words, to suppress the Presidency of the Republic. After the coup d’état this proposition gained Grévy a reputation for sagacity, and upon his return to public life in 1868 he took a prominent place in the republican party. After the fall of the Empire he was chosen president of the Assembly on the 16th of February 1871, and occupied this position till the 2nd of April 1876, when he resigned on account of the opposition of the Right, which blamed him for having called one of its members to order in the session of the previous day. On the 8th of March 1876 he was elected president of the Chamber of Deputies, a post which he filled with such efficiency that upon the resignation of Marshal MacMahon he seemed to step naturally into the Presidency of the Republic (30th January 1879), and was elected without opposition by the republican parties (see [France]: History). Quiet, shrewd, attentive to the public interest and his own, but without any particular distinction, he would have left an unblemished reputation if he had not unfortunately accepted a second term (18th December 1885). Shortly afterwards the traffic of his son-in-law (Daniel Wilson) in the decorations of the Legion of Honour came to light. Grévy was not accused of personal participation in these scandals, but he was somewhat obstinate in refusing to realize that he was responsible indirectly for the use which his relative had made of the Élysée, and it had to be unpleasantly impressed upon him that his resignation was inevitable (2nd December 1887). He died at Mont-sous-Vaudrey on the 9th of September 1891. He owed both his success and his failure to the completeness with which he represented the particular type of the thrifty, generally sensible and patriotic, but narrow-minded and frequently egoistic bourgeois.
See his Discours politiques et judiciaires, rapports et messages ... accompagnés de notices historiques et précédés d’une introduction par L. Delabrousse (2 vols., 1888).
GREW, NEHEMIAH (1641-1712), English vegetable anatomist and physiologist, was the only son of Obadiah Grew (1607-1688), Nonconformist divine and vicar of St Michael’s, Coventry, and was born in Warwickshire in 1641. He graduated at Cambridge in 1661, and ten years later took the degree of M.D. at Leiden, his thesis being Disputatio medico-physica ... de liquore nervoso. He began observations on the anatomy of plants in 1664, and in 1670 his essay, The Anatomy of Vegetables begun, was communicated to the Royal Society by Bishop Wilkins, on whose recommendation he was in the following year elected a fellow. In 1672, when the essay was published, he settled in London, and soon acquired an extensive practice as a physician. In 1673 he published his Idea of a Phytological History, which consisted of papers he had communicated to the Royal Society in the preceding year, and in 1677 he succeeded Henry Oldenburg as secretary of the society. He edited the Philosophical Transactions in 1678-1679, and in 1681 he published “by request” a descriptive catalogue of the rarities preserved at Gresham College, with which were printed some papers he had read to the Royal Society on the Comparative Anatomy of Stomachs and Guts. In 1682 appeared his great work on the Anatomy of Plants, which also was largely a collection of previous publications. It was divided into four books, Anatomy of Vegetables begun, Anatomy of Roots, Anatomy of Trunks and Anatomy of Leaves, Flowers, Fruits and Seeds, and was illustrated with eighty-two plates, while appended to it were seven papers mostly of a chemical character. Among his other publications were Sea-water made Fresh (1684), the Nature and Use of the Salt contained in Epsom and such other Waters (1697), which was a rendering of his Tractatus de salis ... usu (1695), and Cosmologia sacra (1701). He died suddenly on the 25th of March 1712. Linnaeus named a genus of trees Grewia (nat. ord. Tiliaceae) in his honour.
GREY, CHARLES GREY, 2nd Earl (1764-1845), English statesman, was the eldest surviving son of General Sir Charles Grey, afterwards 1st Earl Grey. He was born at his father’s residence, Fallodon, near Alnwick, on the 13th of March 1764. General Grey (1729-1807), who was a younger son of the house of Grey of Howick, one of the most considerable territorial families in Northumberland, had already begun a career of active service which, like the political career of his son, covered nearly half a century. Before the latter was born, General Grey had served on the staff of Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick in the Seven Years’ War and had been wounded at Minden. While the son was making verses at Eton, the father was serving against the revolted colonists in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and while the young member for Northumberland was denouncing Pitt’s war against the Convention, the veteran soldier was destroying the remnant of the French colonial empire by the capture of Martinique and Guadeloupe. When Napoleon threatened an invasion, General Grey took the command of the southern district, and at the peace of Amiens he was rewarded with a peerage, as Baron Grey of Alnwick, being created in 1806 Earl Grey and Viscount Howick. His elder brother, Sir Henry Grey of Howick, the head of the family, had supported the government in parliament. But the political career of young Grey, who was heir-presumptive to the family estates, took a different complexion.
Young Grey expected to reoccupy the seat which had been his uncle’s; and his early years were spent in preparation for a parliamentary career. He was sent to Eton, and proceeded thence to Cambridge. William Pitt, a youth five years older, was then in residence as a master of arts, studiously paying court to the Whigs of the university; and at the general election of 1780 he came forward as a candidate for the academical seat. His name stood last on the poll, but he was brought in elsewhere, and his first speech proved him a man of the first mark. The unparalleled successes which followed portended grave changes. Pitt’s elevation to the premiership, his brilliant and hard-fought battle in the house, and his complete rout of the Whig party at the general election of 1784, when he came in for Cambridge at the head of the poll, threatened the great territorial interest with nothing less than extinction. It was to this interest that Grey belonged; and hence, when at length returned for Northumberland in 1786, he at once came forward as a vigorous assailant of the government of Pitt. He was hailed by the opposition, and associated with Fox, Burke and Sheridan as a manager in the Hastings impeachment. During the nineteen years which remained of the career of Fox, he followed the great Whig statesman with absolute fidelity, and succeeded him as leader of the party. The shortcomings of Fox’s statesmanship were inherited by Grey. Both were equally devoid of political originality, shunned the severer labours of the politician, and instinctively feared any deviation from the traditions of their party. Such men cannot save a party in its decadence, and the history of Fox and Grey has been aptly termed the history of the decline and fall of Whiggism.
The stunning blow of 1784 was the first incident in this history. Its full significance was not at once perceived. An opposition, however weak in the beginning, generally has a tendency to revive, and Grey’s early successes in the house helped to revive the Foxites. The European situation became favourable to this revival. The struggle in France for popular rights, culminating in the great Revolution, was watched by Fox with interested sympathy. He affected to regard the domination of Pitt as the domination of the crown, and as leading logically to absolutism, and saw in that popular sympathy for the French Revolution which naturally arose in England an instrument which might be employed to overthrow this domination.