THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND GENERAL INFORMATION

ELEVENTH EDITION

VOLUME VI slice I
Châtelet to Chicago

Table of Contents

CHÂTELET (from Med. Lat. castella), the word, sometimes also written castillet, used in France for a building designed for the defence of an outwork or gate, sometimes of great strength or size, but distinguished from the château, or castle proper, in being purely defensive and not residential. In Paris, before the Revolution, this word was applied both to a particular building and to the jurisdiction of which it was the seat. This building, the original Châtelet, had been first a castle defending the approach to the Cité. Tradition traced its existence back to Roman times, and in the 18th century one of the rooms in the great tower was still called the chambre de César. The jurisdiction was that of the provostship (prévôté) and viscountship of Paris, which was certainly of feudal origin, probably going back to the counts of Paris.

It was not till the time of Saint Louis that, with the appointment of Étienne Boileau, the provostship of Paris became a prévôté en garde, i.e. a public office no longer put up to sale. When the baillis (see [Bailiff] AND [Bailie]) were created, the provost of Paris naturally discharged the duties and functions of a bailli, in which capacity he heard appeals from the seigniorial and inferior judges of the city and its neighbourhood, keeping, however, his title of provost. When under Henry II. certain bailliages became presidial jurisdictions (présidiaux), i.e. received to a certain extent the right of judging without appeal, the Châtelet, the court of the provost of Paris, was made a presidial court, but without losing its former name. Finally, various tribunals peculiar to the city of Paris, i.e. courts exercising jurisdictions outside the common law or corresponding to certain cours d’exception which existed in the provinces, were united with the Châtelet, of which they became divisions (chambres). Thus the lieutenant-general of police made it the seat of his jurisdiction, and the provost of the Île de France, who had the same criminal jurisdiction as the provosts of the marshals of France in other provinces, sat there also. As to the personnel of the Châtelet, it was originally the same as in the bailliages, except that after the 14th century it had some special officials, the auditors and the examiners of inquests. Like the baillis, the provost had lieutenants who were deputies for him, and in addition gradually acquired a considerable body of ex officio councillors. This last staff, however, was not yet in existence at the end of the 14th century, for it is not mentioned in the Registre criminel du Châtelet (1389-1392), published by the Société des Bibliophiles Français. In 1674 the whole personnel was doubled, at the time when the new Châtelet was established side by side with the old, the two being soon after amalgamated. On the eve of the Revolution it comprised, beside the provost whose office had become practically honorary, the lieutenant civil, who presided over the chambre de prévôté au parc civil or court of first instance; the lieutenant criminel, who presided over the criminal court; two lieutenants particuliers, who presided in turn over the chambre du présidial or court of appeal from the inferior jurisdictions; a juge auditeur; sixty-four councillors (conseillers); the procureur du roi, four avocats du roi, and eight substituts, i.e. deputies of the procureur (see [Procurator]), beside a host of minor officials. The history of the Châtelet under the Revolution may be briefly told: the Constituent Assembly empowered it to try cases of lèse-nation, and it was also before this court that was opened the inquiry following on the events of the 5th and 6th of August 1789. It was suppressed by the law of the 16th of August 1790, together with the other tribunals of the ancien régime.

(J. P. E.)

CHÂTELLERAULT, a town of western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Vienne, 19 m. N.N.E. of Poitiers on the Orleans railway between that town and Tours. Pop. (1906) 15,214. Châtellerault is situated on the right and eastern bank of the Vienne; it is connected with the suburb of Châteauneuf on the opposite side of the river by a stone bridge of the 16th and 17th centuries, guarded at the western extremity by massive towers. The manufacture of cutlery is carried on on a large scale in villages on the banks of the Clain, south of the town. Of the other industrial establishments the most important is the national small-arms factory, which was established in 1815 in Châteauneuf, and employs from 1500 to 5500 men. Châtellerault (or Châtelherault: Castellum Airaldi) derives its name from a fortress built in the 10th century by Airaud, viscount of its territory. In 1515 it was made a duchy in favour of François de Bourbon, but it was not long after this date that it became reunited to the crown. In 1548 it was bestowed on James Hamilton, 2nd earl of Arran (see [Hamilton]).

CHATHAM, WILLIAM PITT, 1st Earl of (1708-1778), English statesman, was born at Westminster on the 15th of November 1708. He was the younger son of Robert Pitt of Boconnoc, Cornwall, and grandson of Thomas Pitt (1653-1726), governor of Madras, who was known as “Diamond” Pitt, from the fact of his having sold a diamond of extraordinary size to the regent Orleans for something like £135,000. It was mainly by this fortunate transaction that the governor was enabled to raise his family, which was one of old standing, to a position of wealth and political influence. The latter he acquired by purchasing the burgage tenures of Old Sarum.

William Pitt was educated at Eton, and in January 1727 was entered as a gentleman commoner at Trinity College, Oxford. There is evidence that he was an extensively read, if not a minutely accurate classical scholar; and it is interesting to know that Demosthenes was his favourite author, and that he diligently cultivated the faculty of expression by the practice of translation and re-translation. An hereditary gout, from which he had suffered even during his school-days, compelled him to leave the university without taking his degree, in order to travel abroad. He spent some time in France and Italy; but the disease proved intractable, and he continued subject to attacks of growing intensity at frequent intervals till the close of his life. In 1727 his father had died, and on his return home it was necessary for him, as the younger son, to choose a profession. Having chosen the army, he obtained through the interest of his friends a cornet’s commission in the dragoons. But his military career was destined to be short. His elder brother Thomas having been returned at the general election of 1734 both for Oakhampton and for Old Sarum, and having preferred to sit for the former, the family borough fell to the younger brother by the sort of natural right usually recognized in such cases. Accordingly, in February 1735, William Pitt entered parliament as member for Old Sarum. Attaching himself at once to the formidable band of discontented Whigs known as the Patriots, whom Walpole’s love of exclusive power had forced into opposition under Pulteney, he became in a very short time one of its most prominent members. His maiden speech was delivered in April 1736, in the debate on the congratulatory address to the king on the marriage of the prince of Wales. The occasion was one of compliment, and there is nothing striking in the speech as reported; but it served to gain for him the attention of the house when he presented himself, as he soon afterwards did, in debates of a party character. So obnoxious did he become as a critic of the government, that Walpole thought fit to punish him by procuring his dismissal from the army. Some years later he had occasion vigorously to denounce the system of cashiering officers for political differences, but with characteristic loftiness of spirit he disdained to make any reference to his own case. The loss of his commission was soon made up to him. The heir to the throne, as was usually the case in the house of Hanover, if not in reigning families generally, was the patron of the opposition, and the ex-cornet became groom of the bed-chamber to the prince of Wales. In this new position his hostility to the government did not, as may be supposed, in any degree relax. He had all the natural gifts an orator could desire—a commanding presence, a graceful though somewhat theatrical bearing, an eye of piercing brightness, and a voice of the utmost flexibility. His style, if occasionally somewhat turgid, was elevated and passionate, and it always bore the impress of that intensity of conviction which is the most powerful instrument a speaker can have to sway the convictions of an audience. It was natural, therefore, that in the series of stormy debates, protracted through several years, that ended in the downfall of Walpole, his eloquence should have been one of the strongest of the forces that combined to bring about the final result. Specially effective, according to contemporary testimony, were his speeches against the Hanoverian subsidies, against the Spanish convention in 1739, and in favour of the motion in 1742 for an investigation into the last ten years of Walpole’s administration. It must be borne in mind that the reports of these speeches which have come down to us were made from hearsay, or at best from recollection, and are necessarily therefore most imperfect. The best-known specimen of Pitt’s eloquence, his reply to the sneers of Horatio Walpole at his youth and declamatory manner, which has found a place in so many handbooks of elocution, is evidently, in form at least, the work, not of Pitt, but of Dr Johnson, who furnished the report to the Gentleman’s Magazine. Probably Pitt did say something of the kind attributed to him, though even this is by no means certain in view of Johnson’s repentant admission that he had often invented not merely the form, but the substance of entire debates.

In 1742 Walpole was at last forced to succumb to the long-continued attacks of opposition, and was succeeded as prime minister by the earl of Wilmington, though the real power in the new government was divided between Carteret and the Pelhams. Pitt’s conduct on the change of administration was open to grave censure. The relentless vindictiveness with which he insisted on the prosecution of Walpole, and supported the bill of indemnity to witnesses against the fallen minister, was in itself not magnanimous; but it appears positively unworthy when it is known that a short time before Pitt had offered, on certain conditions, to use all his influence in the other direction. Possibly he was embittered at the time by the fact that, owing to the strong personal dislike of the king, caused chiefly by the contemptuous tone in which he had spoken of Hanover, he did not by obtaining a place in the new ministry reap the fruits of the victory to which he had so largely contributed. The so-called “broad-bottom” administration formed by the Pelhams in 1744, after the dismissal of Carteret, though it included several of those with whom he had been accustomed to act, did not at first include Pitt himself even in a subordinate office. Before the obstacle to his admission was overcome, he had received a remarkable accession to his private fortune. The eccentric duchess of Marlborough, dying in 1744, at the age of ninety, left him a legacy of £10,000 as an “acknowledgment of the noble defence he had made for the support of the laws of England and to prevent the ruin of his country.” As her hatred was known to be at least as strong as her love, the legacy was probably as much a mark of her detestation of Walpole as of her admiration of Pitt. It may be mentioned here, though it does not come in chronological order, that Pitt was a second time the object of a form of acknowledgment of public virtue which few statesmen have had the fortune to receive even once. About twenty years after the Marlborough legacy, Sir William Pynsent, a Somersetshire baronet to whom he was personally quite unknown, left him his entire estate, worth about three thousand a year, in testimony of approval of his political career.

It was with no very good grace that the king at length consented to give Pitt a place in the government, although the latter did all he could to ingratiate himself at court, by changing his tone on the questions on which he had made himself offensive. To force the matter, the Pelhams had to resign expressly on the question whether he should be admitted or not, and it was only after all other arrangements had proved impracticable, that they were reinstated with the obnoxious politician as vice-treasurer of Ireland. This was in February 1746. In May of the same year he was promoted to the more important and lucrative office of paymaster-general, which gave him a place in the privy council, though not in the cabinet. Here he had an opportunity of displaying his public spirit and integrity in a way that deeply impressed both the king and the country. It had been the usual practice of previous paymasters to appropriate to themselves the interest of all money lying in their hands by way of advance, and also to accept a commission of ½% on all foreign subsidies. Although there was no strong public sentiment against the practice, Pitt altogether refused to profit by it. All advances were lodged by him in the Bank of England until required, and all subsidies were paid over without deduction, even though it was pressed upon him, so that he did not draw a shilling from his office beyond the salary legally attaching to it. Conduct like this, though obviously disinterested, did not go without immediate and ample reward, in the public confidence which it created, and which formed the mainspring of Pitt’s power as a statesman.

The administration formed in 1746 lasted without material change till 1754. It would appear from his published correspondence that Pitt had a greater influence in shaping its policy than his comparatively subordinate position would in itself have entitled him to. His conduct in supporting measures, such as the Spanish treaty and the continental subsidies, which he had violently denounced when in opposition, had been much criticized; but within certain limits, not indeed very well defined, inconsistency has never been counted a vice in an English statesman. The times change, and he is not blamed for changing with the times. Pitt in office, looking back on the commencement of his public life, might have used the plea “A good deal has happened since then,” at least as justly as some others have done. Allowance must always be made for the restraints and responsibilities of office. In Pitt’s case, too, it is to be borne in mind that the opposition with which he had acted gradually dwindled away, and that it ceased to have any organized existence after the death of the prince of Wales in 1751. Then in regard to the important question with Spain as to the right of search, Pitt has disarmed criticism by acknowledging that the course he followed during Wapole’s administration was indefensible. All due weight being given to these various considerations, it must be admitted, nevertheless, that Pitt did overstep the limits within which inconsistency is usually regarded as venial. His one great object was first to gain office, and then to make his tenure of office secure by conciliating the favour of the king. The entire revolution which much of his policy underwent in order to effect this object bears too close a resemblance to the sudden and inexplicable changes of front habitual to placemen of the Tadpole stamp to be altogether pleasant to contemplate in a politician of pure aims and lofty ambition. Humiliating is not too strong a term to apply to a letter in which he expresses his desire to “efface the past by every action of his life,” in order that he may stand well with the king.

In 1754 Henry Pelham died, and was succeeded at the head of affairs by his brother, the duke of Newcastle. To Pitt the change brought no advancement, and he had thus an opportunity of testing the truth of the description of his chief given by Sir Robert Walpole, “His name is treason.” But there was for a time no open breach. Pitt continued at his post; and at the general election which took place during the year he even accepted a nomination for the duke’s pocket borough of Aldborough. He had sat for Seaford since 1747. When parliament met, however, he was not long in showing the state of his feelings. Ignoring Sir Thomas Robinson, the political nobody to whom Newcastle had entrusted the management of the Commons, he made frequent and vehement attacks on Newcastle himself, though still continuing to serve under him. In this strange state matters continued for about a year. At length, just after the meeting of parliament in November 1751, Pitt was dismissed from office, having on the debate on the address spoken at great length against a new system of continental subsidies, proposed by the government of which he was a member. Fox, who had just before been appointed secretary of state, retained his place, and though the two men continued to be of the same party, and afterwards served again in the same government, there was henceforward a rivalry between them, which makes the celebrated opposition of their illustrious sons seem like an inherited quarrel.

Another year had scarcely passed when Pitt was again in power. The inherent weakness of the government, the vigour and eloquence of his opposition, and a series of military disasters abroad combined to rouse a public feeling of indignation which could not be withstood, and in December 1756 Pitt, who now sat for Okehampton, became secretary of state, and leader of the Commons under the premiership of the duke of Devonshire. He had made it a condition of his joining any administration that Newcastle should be excluded from it, thus showing a resentment which, though natural enough, proved fatal to the lengthened existence of his government. With the king unfriendly, and Newcastle, whose corrupt influence was still dominant in the Commons, estranged, it was impossible to carry on a government by the aid of public opinion alone, however emphatically that might have declared itself on his side. In April 1757, accordingly, he found himself again dismissed from office on account of his opposition to the king’s favourite continental policy. But the power that was insufficient to keep him in office was strong enough to make any arrangement that excluded him impracticable. The public voice spoke in a way that was not to be mistaken. Probably no English minister ever received in so short a time so many proofs of the confidence and admiration of the public, the capital and all the chief towns voting him addresses and the freedom of their corporations. From the political deadlock that ensued relief could only be had by an arrangement between Newcastle and Pitt. After some weeks’ negotiation, in the course of which the firmness and moderation of “the Great Commoner,” as he had come to be called, contrasted favourably with the characteristic tortuosities of the crafty peer, matters were settled on such a basis that, while Newcastle was the nominal, Pitt was the virtual head of the government. On his acceptance of office he was chosen member for Bath.

This celebrated administration was formed in June 1757, and continued in power till 1761. During the four years of its existence it has been usual to say that the biography of Pitt is the history of England, so thoroughly was he identified with the great events which make this period, in so far as the external relations of the country are concerned, one of the most glorious in her annals. A detailed account of these events belongs to history; all that is needed in a biography is to point out the extent to which Pitt’s personal influence may really be traced in them. It is scarcely too much to say that, in the general opinion of his contemporaries, the whole glory of these years was due to his single genius; his alone was the mind that planned, and his the spirit that animated the brilliant achievements of the British arms in all the four quarters of the globe. Posterity, indeed, has been able to recognize more fully the independent genius of those who carried out his purposes. The heroism of Wolfe would have been irrepressible, Clive would have proved himself “a heaven-born general,” and Frederick the Great would have written his name in history as one of the most skilful strategists the world has known, whoever had held the seals of office in England. But Pitt’s relation to all three was such as to entitle him to a large share in the credit of their deeds. It was his discernment that selected Wolfe to lead the attack on Quebec, and gave him the opportunity of dying a victor on the heights of Abraham. He had personally less to do with the successes in India than with the other great enterprises that shed an undying lustre on his administration; but his generous praise in parliament stimulated the genius of Clive, and the forces that acted at the close of the struggle were animated by his indomitable spirit. Pitt, the first real Imperialist in modern English history, was the directing mind in the expansion of his country, and with him the beginning of empire is rightly associated. The Seven Years’ War might well, moreover, have been another Thirty Years’ War if Pitt had not furnished Frederick with an annual subsidy of £700,000, and in addition relieved him of the task of defending western Germany against France.

Contemporary opinion was, of course, incompetent to estimate the permanent results gained for the country by the brilliant foreign policy of Pitt. It has long been generally agreed that by several of his most costly expeditions nothing was really won but glory. It has even been said that the only permanent acquisition that England owed directly to him was her Canadian dominion; and, strictly speaking, this is true, it being admitted that the campaign by which the Indian empire was virtually won was not planned by him, though brought to a successful issue during his ministry. But material aggrandizement, though the only tangible, is not the only real or lasting effect of a war policy. More may be gained by crushing a formidable rival than by conquering a province. The loss of her Canadian possessions was only one of a series of disasters suffered by France, which radically affected the future of Europe and the world. Deprived of her most valuable colonies both in the East and in the West, and thoroughly defeated on the continent, her humiliation was the beginning of a new epoch in history. The victorious policy of Pitt destroyed the military prestige which repeated experience has shown to be in France as in no other country the very life of monarchy, and thus was not the least considerable of the many influences that slowly brought about the French Revolution. It effectually deprived her of the lead in the councils of Europe which she had hitherto arrogated to herself, and so affected the whole course of continental politics. It is such far-reaching results as these, and not the mere acquisition of a single colony, however valuable, that constitute Pitt’s claim to be considered as on the whole the most powerful minister that ever guided the foreign policy of England.

The first and most important of a series of changes which ultimately led to the dissolution of the ministry was the death of George II. on the 25th of October 1760, and the accession of his grandson, George III. The new king had, as was natural, new counsellors of his own, the chief of whom, Lord Bute, was at once admitted to the cabinet as a secretary of state. Between Bute and Pitt there speedily arose an occasion of serious difference. The existence of the so-called family compact by which the Bourbons of France and Spain bound themselves in an offensive alliance against England having been brought to light, Pitt urged that it should be met by an immediate declaration of war with Spain. To this course Bute would not consent, and as his refusal was endorsed by all his colleagues save Temple, Pitt had no choice but to leave a cabinet in which his advice on a vital question had been rejected. On his resignation, which took place in October 1761, the king urged him to accept some signal mark of royal favour in the form most agreeable to himself. Accordingly he obtained a pension of £3000 a year for three lives, and his wife, Lady Hester Grenville, whom he had married in 1754, was created Baroness Chatham in her own right. In connexion with the latter gracefully bestowed honour it may be mentioned that Pitt’s domestic life was a singularly happy one.

Pitt’s spirit was too lofty to admit of his entering on any merely factious opposition to the government he had quitted. On the contrary, his conduct after his retirement was distinguished by a moderation and disinterestedness which, as Burke has remarked, “set a seal upon his character.” The war with Spain, in which he had urged the cabinet to take the initiative, proved inevitable; but he scorned to use the occasion for “altercation and recrimination,” and spoke in support of the government measures for carrying on the war. To the preliminaries of the peace concluded in February 1763 he offered an indignant resistance, considering the terms quite inadequate to the successes that had been gained by the country. When the treaty was discussed in parliament in December of the preceding year, though suffering from a severe attack of gout, he was carried down to the House, and in a speech of three hours’ duration, interrupted more than once by paroxysms of pain, he strongly protested against its various conditions. The physical cause which rendered this effort so painful probably accounts for the infrequency of his appearances in parliament, as well as for much that is otherwise inexplicable in his subsequent conduct. In 1763 he spoke against the obnoxious tax on cider, imposed by his brother-in-law, George Grenville, and his opposition, though unsuccessful in the House, helped to keep alive his popularity with the country, which cordially hated the excise and all connected with it. When next year the question of general warrants was raised in connexion with the case of Wilkes, Pitt vigorously maintained their illegality, thus defending at once the privileges of Parliament and the freedom of the press. During 1765 he seems to have been totally incapacitated for public business. In the following year he supported with great power the proposal of the Rockingham administration for the repeal of the American Stamp Act, arguing that it was unconstitutional to impose taxes upon the colonies. He thus endorsed the contention of the colonists on the ground of principle, while the majority of those who acted with him contented themselves with resisting the disastrous taxation scheme on the ground of expediency. The Repeal Act, indeed, was only passed pari passu with another censuring the American assemblies, and declaring the authority of the British parliament over the colonies “in all cases whatsoever”; so that the House of Commons repudiated in the most formal manner the principle Pitt laid down. His language in approval of the resistance of the colonists was unusually bold, and perhaps no one but himself could have employed it with impunity at a time when the freedom of debate was only imperfectly conceded.

Pitt had not been long out of office when he was solicited to return to it, and the solicitations were more than once renewed. Unsuccessful overtures were made to him in 1763, and twice in 1765, in May and June—the negotiator in May being the king’s uncle, the duke of Cumberland, who went down in person to Hayes, Pitt’s seat in Kent. It is known that he had the opportunity of joining the marquis of Rockingham’s short-lived administration at any time on his own terms, and his conduct in declining an arrangement with that minister has been more generally condemned than any other step in his public life. In July 1766 Rockingham was dismissed, and Pitt was entrusted by the king with the task of forming a government entirely on his own conditions. The result was a cabinet, strong much beyond the average in its individual members, but weak to powerlessness in the diversity of its composition. Burke, in a memorable passage of a memorable speech, has described this “chequered and speckled” administration with great humour, speaking of it as “indeed a very curious show, but utterly unsafe to touch and unsure to stand on.” Pitt chose for himself the office of lord privy seal, which necessitated his removal to the House of Lords; and in August he became earl of Chatham and Viscount Pitt.

By the acceptance of a peerage the great commoner lost at least as much and as suddenly in popularity as he gained in dignity. One significant indication of this may be mentioned. In view of his probable accession to power, preparations were made in the city of London for a banquet and a general illumination to celebrate the event. But the celebration was at once countermanded when it was known that he had become earl of Chatham. The instantaneous revulsion of public feeling was somewhat unreasonable, for Pitt’s health seems now to have been beyond doubt so shattered by his hereditary malady, that he was already in old age though only fifty-eight. It was natural, therefore, that he should choose a sinecure office, and the ease of the Lords. But a popular idol nearly always suffers by removal from immediate contact with the popular sympathy, be the motives for removal what they may.

One of the earliest acts of the new ministry was to lay an embargo upon corn, which was thought necessary in order to prevent a dearth resulting from the unprecedentedly bad harvest of 1766. The measure was strongly opposed, and Lord Chatham delivered his first speech in the House of Lords in support of it. It proved to be almost the only measure introduced by his government in which he personally interested himself. His attention had been directed to the growing importance of the affairs of India, and there is evidence in his correspondence that he was meditating a comprehensive scheme for transferring much of the power of the company to the crown, when he was withdrawn from public business in a manner that has always been regarded as somewhat mysterious. It may be questioned, indeed, whether even had his powers been unimpaired he could have carried out any decided policy on any question with a cabinet representing interests so various and conflicting; but, as it happened, he was incapacitated physically and mentally during nearly the Whole period of his tenure of office. He scarcely ever saw any of his colleagues though they repeatedly and urgently pressed for interviews with him, and even an offer from the king to visit him in person was declined, though in the language of profound and almost abject respect which always marked his communications with the court. It has been insinuated both by contemporary and by later critics that being disappointed at his loss of popularity, and convinced of the impossibility of co-operating with his colleagues, he exaggerated his malady as a pretext for the inaction that was forced upon him by circumstances. But there is no sufficient reason to doubt that he was really, as his friends represented, in a state that utterly unfitted him for business. He seems to have been freed for a time from the pangs of gout only to be afflicted with a species of mental alienation bordering on insanity. This is the most satisfactory, as it is the most obvious, explanation of his utter indifference in presence of one of the most momentous problems that ever pressed for solution on an English statesman. Those who are able to read the history in the light of what occurred later may perhaps be convinced that no policy whatever initiated, after 1766 could have prevented or even materially delayed the declaration of American independence; but to the politicians of that time the coming event had not yet cast so dark a shadow before as to paralyse all action, and if any man could have allayed the growing discontent of the colonists and prevented the ultimate dismemberment of the empire, it would have been Lord Chatham. The fact that he not only did nothing to remove existing difficulties, but remained passive while his colleagues took the fatal step which led directly to separation, is in itself clear proof of his entire incapacity. The imposition of the import duty on tea and other commodities was the project of Charles Townshend, and was carried into effect in 1767 without consultation with Lord Chatham, if not in opposition to his wishes. It is probably the most singular thing in connexion with this singular administration, that its most pregnant measure should thus have been one directly opposed to the well-known principles of its head.

For many months things remained in the curious position that he who was understood to be the head of the cabinet had as little share in the government of the country as an unenfranchised peasant. As the chief could not or would not lead, the subordinates naturally chose their own paths and not his. The lines of Chatham’s policy were abandoned in other cases besides the imposition of the import duty; his opponents were taken into confidence; and friends, such’ as Amherst and Shelburne, were dismissed from their posts. When at length in October 1768 he tendered his resignation on the ground of shattered health, he did not fail to mention the dismissal of Amherst and Shelburne as a personal grievance.

Soon after his resignation a renewed attack of gout freed Chatham from the mental disease under which he had so long suffered. He had been nearly two years and a half in seclusion when, in July 1769, he again appeared in public at a royal levee. It was not, however, until 1770 that he resumed his seat in the House of Lords. He had now almost no personal following, mainly owing to the grave mistake he had made in not forming an alliance with the Rockingham party. But his eloquence was as powerful as ever, and all its power was directed against the government policy in the contest with America, which had become the question of all-absorbing interest. His last appearance in the House of Lords was on the 7th of April 1778, on the occasion of the duke of Richmond’s motion for an address praying the king to conclude peace with America on any terms. In view of the hostile demonstrations of France the various parties had come generally to see the necessity of such a measure. But Chatham could not brook the thought of a step which implied submission to the “natural enemy” whom it had been the main object of his life to humble, and he declaimed for a considerable time, though with sadly diminished vigour, against the motion. After the duke of Richmond had replied, he rose again excitedly as if to speak, pressed his hand upon his breast, and fell down in a fit. He was removed to his seat at Hayes, where he died on the 11th of May. With graceful unanimity all parties combined to show their sense of the national loss. The Commons presented an address to the king praying that the deceased statesman might be buried with the honours of a public funeral, and voted a sum for a public monument which was erected over his grave in Westminster Abbey. Soon after the funeral a bill was passed bestowing a pension of £4000 a year on his successors in the earldom. He had a family of three sons and two daughters, of whom the second son, William, was destined to add fresh lustre to a name which is one of the greatest in the history of England.

Dr Johnson is reported to have said that “Walpole was a minister given by the king to the people, but Pitt was a minister given by the people to the king,” and the remark correctly indicates Chatham’s distinctive place among English statesmen. He was the first minister whose main strength lay in the support of the nation at large as distinct from its representatives in the Commons, where his personal following was always small. He was the first to discern that public opinion, though generally slow to form and slow to act, is in the end the paramount power in the state; and he was the first to use it not in an emergency merely, but throughout a whole political career. He marks the commencement of that vast change in the movement of English politics by which it has come about that the sentiment of the great mass of the people now tells effectively on the action of the government from day to day,—almost from hour to hour. He was well fitted to secure the sympathy and admiration of his countrymen, for his virtues and his failings were alike English. He was often inconsistent, he was generally intractable and overbearing, and he was always pompous and affected to a degree which, Macaulay has remarked, seems scarcely compatible with true greatness. Of the last quality evidence is furnished in the stilted style of his letters, and in the fact recorded by Seward that he never permitted his under-secretaries to sit in his presence. Burke speaks of “some significant, pompous, creeping, explanatory, ambiguous matter, in the true Chathamic style.” But these defects were known only to the inner circle of his associates. To the outside public he was endeared as a statesman who could do or suffer “nothing base,” and who had the rare power of transfusing his own indomitable energy and courage into all who served under him. “A spirited foreign policy” has always been popular in England, and Pitt was the most popular of English ministers, because he was the most successful exponent of such a policy. In domestic affairs his influence was small and almost entirely indirect. He himself confessed his unfitness for dealing with questions of finance. The commercial prosperity that was produced by his war policy was in a great part delusive, as prosperity so produced must always be, though it had permanent effects of the highest moment in the rise of such centres of industry as Glasgow. This, however, was a remote result which he could have neither intended nor foreseen.

The correspondence of Lord Chatham, in four volumes, was published in 1838-1840; and a volume of his letters to Lord Camelford in 1804. The Rev. Francis Thackeray’s History of the Rt. Hon. William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (2 vols., 1827), is a ponderous and shapeless work. Frederic Harrison’s Chatham, in the “Twelve English Statesmen” series (1905), though skilfully executed, takes a rather academic and modern Liberal view. A German work, William Pitt, Graf von Chatham, by Albert von Ruville (3 vols., 1905; English trans. 1907), is the best and most thorough account of Chatham, his period, and his policy, which has appeared. See also the separate article on William Pitt, and the authorities referred to, especially the Rev. William Hunt’s appendix i. to his vol. x. of The Political History of England (1905).

CHATHAM, also called Miramichi, an incorporated town and port of entry in Northumberland county, New Brunswick, Canada, on the Miramichi river, 24 m. from its mouth and 10 m. by rail from Chatham junction on the Intercolonial railway. Pop. (1901) 5000. The town contains the Roman Catholic pro-cathedral, many large saw-mills, pulp-mills, and several establishments for curing and exporting fish. The lumber trade, the fisheries, and the manufacture of pulp are the chief industries.

CHATHAM, a city and port of entry of Ontario, Canada, and the capital of Kent county, situated 64 m. S.W. of London, and 11 m. N. of Lake Erie, on the Thames river and the Grand Trunk, Canadian Pacific and Lake Erie & Detroit River railways. Pop. (1901) 9068. It has steamboat connexion with Detroit and the cities on Lakes Huron and Erie. It is situated in a rich agricultural and fruit-growing district, and carries on a large export trade. It contains a large wagon factory, planing and flour mills, manufactories of fanning mills, binder-twine, woven wire goods, engines, windmills, &c.

CHATHAM, a port and municipal and parliamentary borough of Kent, England, on the right bank of the Medway, 34 m. E.S.E. of London by the South-Eastern & Chatham railway. Pop. (1891) 31,657; (1901) 37,057. Though a distinct borough it is united on the west with Rochester and on the east with Gillingham, so that the three boroughs form, in appearance, a single town with a population which in 1901 exceeded 110,000. With the exception of the dockyards and fortifications there are few objects of interest. St Mary’s church was opened in 1903, but occupies a site which bore a church in Saxon times, though the previous building dated only from 1786. A brass commemorates Stephen Borough (d. 1584), discoverer of the northern passage to Archangel in Russia (1553). St Bartholomew’s chapel, originally attached to the hospital for lepers (one of the first in England), founded by Gundulph, bishop of Rochester, in 1070, is in part Norman. The funds for the maintenance of the hospital were appropriated by decision of the court of chancery to the hospital of St Bartholomew erected in 1863 within the boundaries of Rochester. The almshouse established in 1592 by Sir John Hawkins for decayed seamen and shipwrights is still extant, the building having been re-erected in the 19th century; but the fund called the Chatham Chest, originated by Hawkins and Drake in 1588, was incorporated with Greenwich Hospital in 1802. In front of the Royal Engineers’ Institute is a statue (1890) of General Gordon, and near the railway station another (1888) to Thomas Waghorn, promoter of the overland route to India. In 1905 King Edward VII. unveiled a fine memorial arch commemorating Royal Engineers who fell in the South African War. It stands in the parade ground of the Brompton barracks, facing the Crimean arch. There are numerous brickyards, lime-kilns and flour-mills in the district neighbouring to Chatham; and the town carries on a large retail trade, in great measure owing to the presence of the garrison. The fortifications are among the most elaborate in the kingdom. The so-called Chatham Lines enclose New Brompton, a part of the borough of Gillingham. They were begun in 1758 and completed in 1807, but have been completely modernized. They are strengthened by several detached forts and redoubts. Fort Pitt, which rises above the town to the west, was built in 1779, and is used as a general military hospital. It was regarded as the principal establishment of the kind in the country till the foundation of Netley in Hampshire. The lines include the Chatham, the Royal Marine, the Brompton, the Hut, St Mary’s and naval barracks; the garrison hospital, Melville hospital for sailors and marines, the arsenal, gymnasium, various military schools, convict prison, and finally the extensive dockyard system for which the town is famous. This dockyard covers an area of 516 acres, and has a river frontage of over 3 m. It was brought into its present state by the extensive works begun about 1867. Before that time there was no basin or wet-dock, though the river Medway to some extent answered the same purpose, but a portion of the adjoining salt-marshes was then taken in, and three basins have been constructed, communicating with each other by means of large locks, so that ships can pass from the bend of the Medway at Gillingham to that at Upnor. Four graving docks were also formed, opening out of the first (Upnor) basin. Subsequent improvements included dredging operations in the Medway to improve the approach, and the provision of extra dry-dock accommodation under the Naval Works Acts.

The parliamentary borough returns one member. The town was incorporated in 1890, and is governed by a mayor, six aldermen and eighteen councillors. Area, 4355 acres. The borough includes the suburb (an ecclesiastical parish) of Luton, in which are the waterworks of Chatham and the adjoining towns.

Chatham (Ceteham, Chetham) belonged at the time of the Domesday Survey to Odo, bishop of Bayeux. During the middle ages it formed a suburb of Rochester, but Henry VIII. in founding a regular navy began to establish dockyards, and the harbour formed by the deep channel of the Medway was utilized by Elizabeth, who built a dockyard and established an arsenal here. The dockyard was altered and improved by Charles I. and Charles II., and became the chief naval station of England. In 1708 an act was passed for extending the fortifications of Chatham. During the excavations on Chatham Hill after 1758 a number of tumuli containing human remains, pottery, coins, &c., suggestive of an ancient settlement, were found. Chatham was constituted a parliamentary borough by the Reform Bill of 1832. In the time of Edward III. the lord of the manor had two fairs, one on the 24th of August and the other on the 8th of September. A market to be held on Tuesday, and a fair on the 4th, 5th and 6th of May, were granted by Charles II. in 1679, and another provision market on Saturday by James II. in 1688. In 1738 fairs were held on the 4th of May and the 8th of September, and a market every Saturday.

CHATHAM ISLANDS, a small group in the Pacific Ocean, forming part of New Zealand, 536 m. due E. of Lyttelton in the South Island, about 44° S., 177° W. It consists of three islands, a large one called Whairikauri, or Chatham Island, a smaller one, Rangihaute, or Pitt Island, and a third, Rangatira, or South-east Island. There are also several small rocky islets. Whairikauri, whose highest point reaches about 1000 ft., is remarkable for the number of lakes and tarns it contains, and for the extensive bogs which cover the surface of nearly the whole of the uplands. It is of very irregular form, about 38 m. in length and 25 m. in extreme breadth, with an area of 321 sq. m.—a little larger than Middlesex. The geological formation is principally of volcanic rocks, with schists and tertiary limestone; and an early physical connexion of the islands with New Zealand is indicated by their geology and biology. The climate is colder than that of New Zealand. In the centre of Whairikauri is a large brackish lake called Tewanga, which at the southern end is separated from the sea by a sandbank only 150 yds. wide, which it occasionally bursts through. The southern part of the island has an undulating surface, and is covered either with an open forest or with high ferns. In general the soil is extremely fertile, and where it is naturally drained a rich vegetation of fern and flax occurs. On the north-west are several conical hills of basalt, which are surrounded by oases of fertile soil. On the south-western side is Petre Bay, on which, at the mouth of the river Mantagu, is Waitangi, the principal settlement.

The islands were discovered in 1791 by Lieutenant W.R. Broughton (1762-1821), who gave them the name of Chatham from the brig which he commanded. He described the natives as a bright, pleasure-loving people, dressed in sealskins or mats, and calling themselves Morioris or Maiorioris. In 1831 they were conquered by 800 Maoris who were landed from a European vessel. They were almost exterminated, and an epidemic of influenza in 1839 killed half of those left; ten years later there were only 90 survivors out of a total population of 1200. They subsequently decreased still further. Their language was allied to that of the Maoris of New Zealand, but they differed somewhat from them in physique, and they were probably a cross between an immigrating Polynesian group and a lower indigenous Melanesian stock. The population of the islands includes about 200 whites of various races and the same number of natives (chiefly Maoris). Cattle and sheep are bred, and a trade is carried on in them with the whalers which visit these seas. The chief export from the group is wool, grown upon runs farmed both by Europeans and Morioris. There is also a small export by the natives of the flesh of young albatrosses and other sea-birds, boiled down and cured, for the Maoris of New Zealand, by whom it is reckoned a delicacy. The imports consist of the usual commodities required by a population where little of the land is actually cultivated.

There are no indigenous mammals; the reptiles belong to New Zealand species. The birds—the largest factor in the fauna—have become very greatly reduced through the introduction of cats, dogs and pigs, as well as by the constant persecution of every sort of animal by the natives. The larger bell-bird (Anthornis melanocephala) has become quite scarce; the magnificent fruit-pigeon (Carpophaga chathamensis), and the two endemic rails (Nesolimnas dieffenbachii and Cabalus modestus), the one of which was confined to Whairikauri and the other to Mangare Island, are extinct. Several fossil or subfossil avian forms, very interesting from the point of view of geographical distribution, have been discovered by Dr H.O. Forbes, namely, a true species of raven (Palaeocorax moriorum), a remarkable rail (Diaphorapteryx), closely related to the extinct Aphanapteryx of Mauritius, and a large coot (Palaeolimnas chathamensis). There have also been discovered the remains of a species of swan belonging to the South American genus Chenopis, and of the tuatara (Hatteria) lizard, the unique species of an ancient family now surviving only in New Zealand. The swan is identical with an extinct species found in caves and kitchen-middens in New Zealand, which was contemporaneous with the prehistoric Maoris and was largely used by them for food. One of the finest of the endemic flowering plants of the group is the boraginaceous “Chatham Island lily” (Myositidium nobile), a gigantic forget-me-not, which grows on the shingly shore in a few places only, and always just on the high-water mark, where it is daily deluged by the waves; while dracophyllums, leucopogons and arborescent ragworts are characteristic forms in the vegetation.

See Bruno Weiss, Fünfzig Jahre auf Chatham Island (Berlin, 1900); H.O. Forbes, “The Chatham Islands and their Story,” Fortnightly Review (1893), vol. liii. p. 669, “The Chatham Islands, their relation to a former Southern Continent,” Supplementary Papers, R.G.S., vol. iii. (1893); J.H. Scott, “The Osteology of the Maori and the Moriori,” Trans. New Zealand Institute, vol. xxvi. (1893); C.W. Andrews, “The Extinct Birds of the Chatham Islands,” Novitates Zoologicae, vol. ii. p. 73 (1896).

CHÂTILLON, the name of a French family whose history has furnished material for a large volume in folio by A. du Chesne, a learned Frenchman, published in 1621. But in spite of its merits this book presents a certain number of inaccurate statements, some of which it is important to notice. If, for instance, it be true that the Châtillons came from Châtillon-sur-Marne (Marne, arrondissement of Reims), it is now certain that, since the 11th century, this castle belonged to the count of Champagne, and that the head of the house of Châtillon was merely tenant in that place. One of them, however, Gaucher of Châtillon, lord of Crécy and afterwards constable of France, became in 1290 lord of Châtillon-sur-Marne by exchange, but since 1303 a new agreement allotted to him the countship of Porcien, while Châtillon reverted to the domain of the counts of Champagne. It may be well to mention also that, in consequence of a resemblance of their armorial bearings, du Chesne considered wrongly that the lords of Bazoches and those of Château-Porcien of the 12th and 13th centuries drew their descent from the house of Châtillon.

The most important branches of the house of Châtillon were those of (1) St Pol, beginning with Gaucher III. of Châtillon, who became count of St Pol in right of his wife Isabella in 1205, the last male of the line being Guy V. (d. 1360); (2) Blois, founded by the marriage of Hugh of Châtillon-St Pol (d. 1248) with Mary, daughter of Margaret of Blois (d. 1230),—this branch became extinct with the death of Guy II. in 1397; (3) Porcien, from 1303 to 1400, when Count John sold the countship to Louis, duke of Orleans; (4) Penthièvre, by the marriage of Charles of Blois (d. 1364) with Jeanne (d. 1384), heiress of Guy, count of Penthièvre (d. 1331), the male line becoming extinct in 1457.

See A. du Chesne, Histoire généalogique de la maison de Chastillon-sur-Marne (1621); Anselme, Histoire généalogique de la maison royale de France, vi. 91-124 (1730).

(A. Lo.)

CHÂTILLON-SUR-SEINE, a town of eastern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Côte-d’Or, on the Eastern and Paris-Lyon railways, 67 m. N.N.W. of Dijon, between that city and Troyes. Pop. (1906) 4430. It is situated on both banks of the upper Seine, which is swelled at its entrance to the town by the Douix, one of the most abundant springs in France. Châtillon is constructed on ample lines and rendered attractive by beautiful promenades. Some ruins on an eminence above it mark the site of a château of the dukes of Burgundy. Near by stands the church of St Vorle of the l0th century, but with many additions of later date; it contains a sculptured Holy Sepulchre of the 16th century and a number of frescoes. In a fine park stands a modern château built by Marshal Marmont, duke of Ragusa, born at Châtillon in 1774. It was burnt in 1871, and subsequently rebuilt. The town preserves several interesting old houses. Châtillon has a sub-prefecture, tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a school of agriculture and a communal college. Among its industries are brewing, iron-founding and the manufacture of mineral and other blacks. It has trade in wood, charcoal, lithographic and other stone. Châtillon anciently consisted of two parts, Chaumont, belonging to the duchy of Burgundy, and Bourg, ruled by the bishop of Langres; it did not coalesce into one town till the end of the 16th century. It was taken by the English in 1360 and by Louis XI. in 1475, during his struggle with Charles the Bold. Châtillon was one of the first cities to adhere to the League, but suffered severely from the oppression of its garrisons and governors, and in 1595 made voluntary submission to Henry IV. In modern times it is associated with the abortive conference of 1814 between the representatives of Napoleon and the Allies.

CHATSWORTH, a village of Derbyshire, England, containing a seat belonging to the duke of Devonshire, one of the most splendid private residences in England. Chatsworth House is situated close to the left bank of the river Derwent, 2¾ m. from Bakewell. It is Ionic in style, built foursquare, and enclosing a large open courtyard, with a fountain in the centre. In front, a beautiful stretch of lawn slopes gradually down to the riverside, and a bridge, from which may best be seen the grand façade of the building, as it stands out in relief against the wooded ridge of Bunker’s Hill. The celebrated gardens are adorned with sculptures by Gabriel Gibber; Sir Joseph Paxton designed the great conservatory, unrivalled in Europe, which covers an acre; and the fountains, which include one with a jet 260 ft. high, are said to be surpassed only by those at Versailles. Within the house there is a very fine collection of pictures, including the well-known portraits by Reynolds of Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire. Other paintings are ascribed to Holbein, Dürer, Murillo, Jan van Eyck, Dolci, Veronese and Titian. Hung in the gallery of sketches there are some priceless drawings attributed to Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raffaelle, Correggio, Titian and other old masters. Statues by Canova, Thorwaldsen, Chantrey and R.J. Wyatt are included among the sculptures. In the state apartments the walls and window-panes are in some cases inlaid with marble or porphyry; the woodcarving, marvellous for its intricacy, grace and lightness of effect, is largely the work of Samuel Watson of Heanor (d. 1715). Chatsworth Park is upwards of 11 m. in circuit, and contains many noble forest-trees, the whole being watered by the Derwent, and surrounded by high moors and uplands. Beyond the river, and immediately opposite the house, stands the model village of Edensor, where most of the cottages were built in villa style, with gardens, by order of the 6th duke. The parish church, restored by the same benefactor, contains an old brass in memory of John Beaton, confidential servant to Mary, queen of Scots, who died in 1570; and in the churchyard are the graves of Lord Frederick Cavendish, murdered in 1882 in Phoenix Park, Dublin, and of Sir Joseph Paxton.

Chatsworth (Chetsvorde, Chetelsvorde, “the court of Chetel”) took its name from Chetel, one of its Saxon owners, who held it of Edward the Confessor. It belonged to the crown and was entrusted by the Conqueror to the custody of William Peverell. Chatsworth afterwards belonged for many generations to the family of Leech, and was purchased in the reign of Elizabeth by Sir William Cavendish, husband of the famous Bess of Hardwick. In 1557 he began to build Chatsworth House, and it was completed after his death by his widow, then countess of Shrewsbury. Here Mary, queen of Scots, spent several years of her imprisonment under the care of the earl of Shrewsbury. During the Civil War, Chatsworth was occasionally occupied as a fortress by both parties. It was pulled down, and the present house begun by William, 1st duke of Devonshire in 1688. The little village consists almost exclusively of families employed upon the estate.

CHATTANOOGA, a city and the county-seat of Hamilton county, Tennessee, U.S.A., in the S.E. part of the state, about 300 m. S. of Cincinnati, Ohio, and 150 m. S.E. of Nashville, Tennessee, on the Tennessee river, and near the boundary line between Tennessee and Georgia. Pop. (1860) 2545; (1870) 6093; (1880) 12,892; (1890) 29,100; (1900) 30,154, of whom 994 were foreign-born and 13,122 were negroes; (U.S. census, 1910) 44,604. The city is served by the Alabama Great Southern (Queen and Crescent), the Cincinnati Southern (leased by the Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific railway company), the Nashville, Chattanooga & St Louis (controlled by the Louisville & Nashville), and its leased line, the Western & Atlantic (connecting with Atlanta, Ga.), the Central of Georgia, and the Chattanooga Southern railways, and by freight and passenger steamboat lines on the Tennessee river, which is navigable to and beyond this point during eight months of the year. That branch of the Southern railway extending from Chattanooga to Memphis was formerly the Memphis & Charleston, under which name it became famous in the American Civil War. Chattanooga occupies a picturesque site at a sharp bend of the river. To the south lies Lookout Mountain, whose summit (2126 ft. above the sea; 1495 ft. above the river) commands a magnificent view. To the east rises Missionary Ridge. Fine driveways and electric lines connect with both Lookout Mountain (the summit of which is reached by an inclined plane on which cars are operated by cable) and Missionary Ridge, where there are Federal reservations, as well as with the National Military Park (15 sq. m.; dedicated 1895) on the battlefield of Chickamauga (q.v.); this park was one of the principal mobilization camps of the United States army during the Spanish-American War of 1898. Among the principal buildings are the city hall, the Federal building, the county court house, the public library, the high school and the St Vincent’s and the Baroness Erlanger hospitals. Among Chattanooga’s educational institutions are two commercial colleges, the Chattanooga College for Young Ladies (non-sectarian), the Chattanooga Normal University, and the University of Chattanooga, until June 1907, United States Grant University (whose preparatory department, “The Athens School,” is at Athens, Tenn.), a co-educational institution under Methodist Episcopal control, established in 1867; it has a school of law (1899), a medical school (1889), and a school of theology (1888). East of the city is a large national cemetery containing more than 13,000 graves of Federal soldiers. Chattanooga is an important produce, lumber, coal and iron market, and is the principal trade and jobbing centre for a large district in Eastern Tennessee and Northern Georgia and Alabama. The proximity of coalfields and iron mines has made Chattanooga an iron manufacturing place of importance, its plants including car shops, blast furnaces, foundries, agricultural implement and machinery works, and stove factories; the city has had an important part in the development of the iron and steel industries in this part of the South. There are also flour mills, tanneries (United States Leather Co.), patent medicine, furniture, coffin, woodenware and wagon factories, knitting and spinning mills, planing mills, and sash, door and blind factories—the lumber being obtained from logs floated down the river and by rail. The value of the city’s factory products increased from $10,517,886 in 1900 to $15,193,909 in 1905 or 44.5%.

Chattanooga was first settled about 1835, and was long known as Ross’s Landing. It was incorporated in 1851 as Chattanooga, and received a city charter in 1866. Its growth for the three decades after the Civil War was very rapid. During the American Civil War it was one of the most important strategic points in the Confederacy, and in its immediate vicinity were fought two great battles. During June 1862 it was threatened by a Federal force under General O.M. Mitchel, but the Confederate army of General Braxton Bragg was transferred thither by rail from Corinth, Miss., before Mitchel was able to advance. In September 1863, however, General W.S. Rosecrans, with the Union Army of the Cumberland out-manœuvred Bragg, concentrated his numerous columns in the Chickamauga Valley, and occupied the town, to which, after the defeat of Chickamauga (q.v.), he retired.

From the end of September to the 24th of November the Army of the Cumberland was then invested in Chattanooga by the Confederates, whose position lay along Missionary Ridge from its north end near the river towards Rossville, whence their entrenchments extended westwards to Lookout Mountain, which dominates the whole ground, the Tennessee running directly beneath it. Thus Rosecrans was confined to a semicircle of low ground around Chattanooga itself, and his supplies had to make a long and difficult détour from Bridgeport, the main road being under fire from the Confederate position on Lookout and in the Wauhatchie valley adjacent. Bragg indeed expected that Rosecrans would be starved into retreat. But the Federals once more, and this time on a far larger scale, concentrated in the face of the enemy. The XI. and XII. corps from Virginia under Hooker were transferred by rail to reinforce Rosecrans; other troops were called up from the Mississippi, and on the 16th of October the Federal government reconstituted the western armies under the supreme command of General Grant. The XV. corps of the Army of the Tennessee, under Sherman, was on the march from the Mississippi. Hooker’s troops had already arrived when Grant reached Chattanooga on the 23rd of October. The Army of the Cumberland was now under Thomas, Rosecrans having been recalled. The first action was fought at Brown’s Ferry in the Wauhatchie valley, where Hooker executed with complete precision a plan for the revictualling of Chattanooga, established himself near Wauhatchie on the 28th, and repulsed a determined attack on the same night. But Sherman was still far distant, and the Federal forces at Knoxville, against which a large detachment of Bragg’s army under Longstreet was now sent, were in grave danger. Grant waited for Sherman’s four divisions, but prepared everything for battle in the meantime. His plan was that Thomas in the Chattanooga lines should contain the Confederate centre on Missionary Ridge, while Hooker on the right at Wauhatchie was to attack Lookout Mountain, and Sherman farther up the river was to carry out the decisive attack against Bragg’s extreme right wing at the end of Missionary Ridgg. The last marches of the XV. corps were delayed, by stormy weather, Bragg reinforced Longstreet, and telegraphic communication between Grant and the Federals at Knoxville had already ceased. But Grant would not move forward without Sherman, and the battle of Chattanooga was fought more than two months after Chickamauga. On the 23rd of November a forward move of Thomas’s army, intended as a demonstration, developed into a serious and successful action, whereby the first line of the Confederate centre was driven in for some distance. Bragg was now much weakened by successive detachments having been sent to Knoxville, and on the 24th the real battle began. Sherman’s corps was gradually brought over the river near the mouth of Chickamauga Creek, and formed up on the east side.

The attack began at 1 P.M. and was locally a complete success. The heights attacked were in Sherman’s hands, and fortified against counter-attack, before nightfall. Hooker in the meanwhile had fought the “Battle above the Clouds” on the steep face of Lookout Mountain, and though opposed by an equal force of Confederates, had completely driven the enemy from the mountain. The 24th then had been a day of success for the Federals, and the decisive attack of the three armies in concert was to take place on the 25th. But the maps deceived Grant and Sherman as they had previously deceived Rosecrans. Sherman had captured, not the north point of Missionary Ridge, but a detached hill, and a new and more serious action had to be fought for the possession of Tunnel Hill, where Bragg’s right now lay strongly entrenched. The Confederates used every effort to hold the position and all Sherman’s efforts were made in vain. Hooker, who was moving on Rossville, had not progressed far, and Bragg was still free to reinforce his right. Grant therefore directed Thomas to move forward on the centre to relieve the pressure on Sherman. The Army of the Cumberland was, after all, to strike the decisive blow. About 3.30 P.M. the centre advanced on the Confederate’s trenches at the foot of Missionary Ridge. These were carried at the first rush, and the troops were ordered to lie down and await orders. Then occurred one of the most dramatic episodes of the war. Suddenly, and without orders either from Grant or the officers at the front, the whole line of the Army of the Cumberland rose and rushed up the ridge. Two successive lines of entrenchments were carried at once. In a short time the crest was stormed, and after a last attempt at resistance the enemy’s centre fled in the wildest confusion. The pursuit was pressed home by the divisional generals, notably by Sheridan. Hooker now advanced in earnest on Rossville, and by nightfall the whole Confederate army, except the troops on Tunnel Hill, was retreating in disorder. These too were withdrawn in the night, and the victory of the Federals was complete. Bragg lost 8684 men killed, wounded and prisoners out of perhaps 34,000 men engaged; Grant, with 60,000 men, lost about 6000.

CHATTEL (for derivation see [Cattle]), a term used in English law as equivalent to “personal property,” that is, property which, on the death of the owner, devolves on his executor or administrator to be distributed (unless disposed of by will) among the next of kin according to the Statutes of Distributions. Chattels are divided into chattels real and chattels personal. Chattels real are those interests in land for which no “real action” (see [Action]) lies; estates which are less than freehold (estates for years, at will, or by sufferance) are chattels real. Chattels personal are such things as belong immediately to the person of the owner, and for which, if they are injuriously withheld from him, he has no remedy other than by a personal action. Chattels personal are divided into choses in possession and choses in action (see [Chose]).

A chattel mortgage, in United States law, is a transfer of personal property as security for a debt or obligation in such form that the title to the property will pass to the mortgagee upon the failure of the mortgagor to comply with the terms of the contract. At common law a chattel mortgage might be made without writing, and was valid as between the parties, and even as against third parties if accompanied by possession in the mortgagee, but in most states of the Union legislation now requires a chattel mortgage to be in writing and duly recorded in order to be valid against third parties. At common law a mortgage can be given only of chattels actually in existence and belonging to the mortgagor, though if he acquired title afterwards the mortgage would be good as between the parties, but not as against subsequent purchasers or creditors. In equity, on the other hand, a chattel mortgage, though not good as a conveyance, is valid as an executory agreement.

Goods and chattels is a phrase which, in its widest signification, includes any property other than freehold. The two words, however, have come to be synonymous, and the expression, now practically confined to wills, means merely things movable in possession.

CHATTERIS, a market town in the Wisbech parliamentary division of Cambridgeshire, England, 25½ m. N. by W. of Cambridge by the Great Eastern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 4711. It lies in the midst of the flat Fen country. The church of St Peter is principally Decorated; and there are fragments of a Benedictine convent founded in the 10th century and rebuilt after fire in the first half of the 14th. The town has breweries, and engineering and rope-making works. To the north runs the great Forty-foot Drain, also called Vermuyden’s, after the Dutch engineer whose name is associated with the fen drainage works of the middle of the 17th century.

CHATTERJI, BANKIM CHANDRA [Bankimachandra ChattĀradh-yĀya] (1838-1894), Indian novelist, was born in the district of the Twenty-four Parganas in Bengal on the 27th of June 1838, and was by caste a Brahman. He was educated at the Hugli College, at the Presidency College in Calcutta, and at Calcutta University, where he was the first to take the degree of B.A. (1858). He entered the Indian civil service, and served as deputy magistrate in various districts of Bengal, his official services being recognized, on his retirement in 1891, by the title of rai bahadur and the C.I.E. He died on the 8th of April 1894.

Bankim Chandra was beyond question the greatest novelist of India during the 19th century, whether judged by the amount and quality of his writings, or by the influence which they have continued to exercise. His education had brought him into touch with the works of the great European romance writers, notably Sir Walter Scott, and he created in India a school of fiction on the European model. His first historical novel, the Durges-Nandini or Chief’s Daughter, modelled on Scott, made a great sensation in Bengal; and the Kapala-Kundala and Mrinalini, which followed it, established his fame as a writer whose creative imagination and power of delineation had never been surpassed in India. In 1872 he brought out his first social novel, the Biska-Brikkha or Poison Tree, which was followed by others in rapid succession. It is impossible to exaggerate the effect they produced; for over twenty years Bankim Chandra’s novels were eagerly read by the educated public of Bengal, including the Hindu ladies in the zenanas; and though numerous works of fiction are now produced year by year in every province of India, his influence has increased rather than diminished. Of all his works, however, by far the most important from its astonishing political consequences was the Ananda Math, which was published in 1882, about the time of the agitation arising out of the Ilbert Bill. The story deals with the Sannyasi (i.e. fakir or hermit) rebellion of 1772 near Purmea, Tirhut and Dinapur, and its culminating episode is a crushing victory won by the rebels over the united British and Mussulman forces, a success which was not, however, followed up, owing to the advice of a mysterious “physician” who, speaking as a divinely-inspired prophet, advises Satyananda, the leader of “the children of the Mother,” to abandon further resistance, since a temporary submission to British rule is a necessity; for Hinduism has become too speculative and unpractical, and the mission of the English in India is to teach Hindus how to reconcile theory and speculation with the facts of science. The general moral of the Ananda Math, then, is that British rule and British education are to be accepted as the only alternative to Mussulman oppression, a moral which Bankim Chandra developed also in his Dharmatattwa, an elaborate religious treatise in which he explained his views as to the changes necessary in the moral and religious condition of his fellow-countrymen before they could hope to compete on equal terms with the British and Mahommedans. But though the Ananda Math is in form an apology for the loyal acceptance of British rule, it is none the less inspired by the ideal of the restoration, sooner or later, of a Hindu kingdom in India. This is especially evident in the occasional verses in the book, of which the Bande Mataram is the most famous.

As to the exact significance of this poem a considerable controversy has raged. Bande Mataram is the Sanskrit for “Hail to thee, Mother!” or more literally “I reverence thee, Mother!”, and according to Dr G.A. Grierson (The Times, Sept. 12, 1906) it can have no other possible meaning than an invocation of one of the “mother” goddesses of Hinduism, in his opinion Kali “the goddess of death and destruction.” Sir Henry Cotton, on the other hand (ib. Sept. 13, 1906), sees in it merely an invocation of the “mother-land” Bengal, and quotes in support of this view the free translation of the poem by the late W.H. Lee, a proof which, it may be at once said, is far from convincing. But though, as Dr Grierson points out, the idea of a “mother-land” is wholly alien to Hindu ideas, it is quite possible that Bankim Chandra may have assimilated it with his European culture, and the true explanation is probably that given by Mr J.D. Anderson in The Times of September 24, 1906. He points out that in the 11th chapter of the 1st book of the Ananda Math the Sannyasi rebels are represented as having erected, in addition to the image of Kali, “the Mother who Has Been,” a white marble statue of “the Mother that Shall Be,” which “is apparently a representation of the mother-land. The Bande Mataram hymn is apparently addressed to both idols.”

The poem, then, is the work of a Hindu idealist who personified Bengal under the form of a purified and spiritualized Kali. Of its thirty-six lines, partly written in Sanskrit, partly in Bengali, the greater number are harmless enough. But if the poet sings the praise of the “Mother”

he also praises her as “Durga, bearing ten weapons,” and lines 10, 11 and 12 are capable of very dangerous meanings in the mouths of unscrupulous agitators. Literally translated these run, “She has seventy millions of throats to sing her praise, twice seventy millions of hands to fight for her, how then is Bengal powerless?” As S.M. Mitra points out (Indian Problems, London, 1908), this language is the more significant as the Bande Mataram in the novel was the hymn by singing which the Sannyasis gained strength when attacking the British forces.

During Bankim Chandra Chatterji’s lifetime the Bande Mataram, though its dangerous tendency was recognized, was not used as a party war-cry; it was not raised, for instance, during the Ilbert Bill agitation, nor by the students who flocked round the court during the trial of Surendra Nath Banerji in 1883. It has, however, obtained an evil notoriety in the agitations that followed the partition of Bengal. That Bankim Chandra himself foresaw or desired any such use of it is impossible to believe. According to S.M. Mitra, he composed it “in a fit of patriotic excitement after a good hearty dinner, which he always enjoyed. It was set to Hindu music, known as the Mallar-Kawali-Tal. The extraordinarily stirring character of the air, and its ingenious assimilation of Bengali passages with Sanskrit, served to make it popular.”

Circumstances have made the Bande Mataram the most famous and the most widespread in its effects of Bankim Chandra’s literary works. More permanent, it may be hoped, was the wholesome influence he exercised on the number of literary men he gathered round him, who have left their impress on the literature of Bengal. In his earlier years he served his apprenticeship in literature under Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, the chief poet and satirist of Bengal during the earlier half of the 19th century. Bankim Chandra’s friend and colleague, Dina Bandhu Mitra, was virtually the founder of the modern Bengali drama. Another friend of his, Hem Chandra Banerji, was a poet of recognized merit and talent. And among the younger men who venerated Bankim Chandra, and benefited by his example and advice, may be mentioned two distinguished poets, Nalein Chandra Sen and Rabindra Nath Tagore.

Of Bankim Chandra’s novels some have been translated into English by H.A.D. Phillips and by Mrs M.S. Knight.

CHATTERTON, THOMAS (1752-1770), English poet, was born at Bristol on the 20th of November 1752. His pedigree has a curious significance. The office of sexton of St Mary Redcliffe, at Bristol, one of the most beautiful parish churches in England, had been transmitted for nearly two centuries in the Chatterton family; and throughout the brief life of the poet it was held by his uncle, Richard Phillips. The poet’s father, Thomas Chatterton, was a musical genius, somewhat of a poet, a numismatist, and a dabbler in occult arts. He was one of the sub-chanters of Bristol cathedral, and master of the Pyle Street free school, near Redcliffe church. But whatever hereditary tendencies may have been transmitted from the father, the sole training of the boy necessarily devolved on his mother, who was in the fourth month of her widowhood at the time of his birth. She established a girls’ school, took in sewing and ornamental needlework, and so brought up her two children, a girl and a boy, till the latter attained his eighth year, when he was admitted to Colston’s Charity. But the Bristol blue-coat school, in which the curriculum was limited to reading, writing, arithmetic and the Church Catechism, had little share in the education of its marvellous pupil. The hereditary race of sextons had come to regard the church of St Mary Redcliffe as their own peculiar domain; and, under the guidance of his uncle, the child found there his favourite haunt. The knights, ecclesiastics and civic dignitaries, recumbent on its altar tombs, became his familiar associates; and by and by, when he was able to spell his way through the inscriptions graven on their monuments, he found a fresh interest in certain quaint oaken chests in the muniment room over the porch on the north side of the nave, where parchment deeds, old as the Wars of the Roses, long lay unheeded and forgotten. They formed the child’s playthings almost from his cradle. He learned his first letters from the illuminated capitals of an old musical folio, and learned to read out of a black-letter Bible. He did not like, his sister said, reading out of small books. Wayward, as it seems, almost from his earliest years, and manifesting no sympathy with the ordinary pastimes of children, he was regarded for a time as deficient in intellect. But he was even then ambitious of distinction. His sister relates that on being asked what device he would like painted on a bowl that was to be his, he replied, “Paint me an angel, with wings, and a trumpet, to trumpet my name over the world.”

From his earliest years he was liable to fits of abstraction, sitting for hours in seeming stupor, or yielding after a time to tears, for which he would assign no reason. He had no one near him to sympathize in the strange world of fancy which his imagination had already called into being; and circumstances helped to foster his natural reserve, and to beget that love of mystery which exercised so great an influence on the development of his genius. When the strange child had attained his sixth year his mother began to recognize his capacity; at eight he was so eager for books that he would read and write all day long if undisturbed; and in his eleventh year he had become a contributor to Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal. The occasion of his confirmation inspired some religious poems published in this paper. In 1763 a beautiful cross of curious workmanship, which had adorned the churchyard of St Mary Redcliffe for upwards of three centuries, was destroyed by a churchwarden. The spirit of veneration was strong in the boy, and he sent to the local journal on the 7th of January 1764 a clever satire on the parish Vandal. But his delight was to lock himself in a little attic which he had appropriated as his study; and there, with books, cherished parchments, saved from the loot of the muniment room of St Mary Redcliffe, and drawing materials, the child lived in thought with his 15th-century heroes and heroines. The first of his literary mystifications, the duologue of “Elinoure and Juga,” was written before he was twelve years old, and he showed his poem to the usher at Colston’s hospital, Thomas Phillips, as the work of a 15th-century poet.

Chatterton remained an inmate of Colston’s hospital for upwards of six years, and the slight advantages gained from this scanty education are traceable to the friendly sympathy of Phillips, himself a writer of verse, who encouraged his pupils to write. Three of Chatterton’s companions are named as youths whom Phillips’s taste for poetry stimulated to rivalry; but Chatterton held aloof from these contests, and made at that time no confidant of his own more daring literary adventures. His little pocket-money was spent in borrowing books from a circulating library; and he early ingratiated himself with book collectors, by whose aid he found access to Weever, Dugdale and Collins, as well as to Speght’s edition of Chaucer, Spenser and other books.

His “Rowleian” jargon appears to have been chiefly the result of the study of John Kersey’s Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, and Prof. W. W. Skeat seems to think his knowledge of even Chaucer was very slight. His holidays were mostly spent at his mother’s house; and much of them in the favourite retreat of his attic study there. He had already conceived the romance of Thomas Rowley, an imaginary monk of the 15th century, and lived for the most part in an ideal world of his own, in that elder time when Edward IV. was England’s king, and Master William Canynge—familiar to him among the recumbent effigies in Redcliffe church—still ruled in Bristol’s civic chair. Canynge is represented as an enlightened patron of literature, and Rowley’s dramatic interludes were written for performance at his house. In order to escape a marriage urged by the king, Canynge retired to the college of Westbury in Gloucestershire, where he enjoyed the society of Rowley, and eventually became dean of the institution. In “The Storie of William Canynge,” one of the shorter pieces of his ingenious romance, his early history is recorded.

This beautiful picture of the childhood of the ideal patron of Rowley is in reality that of the poet himself—“the fate-marked babe,” with his wondrous child-genius, and all his romantic dreams realized. The literary masquerade which thus constituted the life-dream of the boy was wrought out by him in fragments of prose and verse into a coherent romance, until the credulous scholars and antiquaries of his day were persuaded into the belief that there had lain in the parish chest of Redcliffe church for upwards of three centuries, a collection of MSS. of rare merit, the work of Thomas Rowley, an unknown priest of Bristol in the days of Henry VI. and his poet laureate, John Lydgate.

Among the Bristol patrons of Chatterton were two pewterers, George Catcott and his partner Henry Burgum. Catcott was one of the most zealous believers in Rowley, and continued to collect his reputed writings long after the death of their real author. On Burgum, who had risen in life by his own exertions, the blue-coat boy palmed off the de Bergham pedigree, and other equally apocryphal evidences of the pewterer’s descent from an ancestry old as the Norman Conquest. The de Bergham quartering, blazoned on a piece of parchment doubtless recovered from the Redcliffe muniment chest, was itself supposed to have lain for centuries in that ancient depository. The pedigree was professedly collected by Chatterton from original records, including “The Rowley MSS.” The pedigree still exists in Chatterton’s own handwriting, copied into a book in which he had previously transcribed portions of antique verse, under the title of “Poems by Thomas Rowley, priest of St. John’s, in the city of Bristol”; and in one of these, “The Tournament,” Syrr Johan de Berghamme plays a conspicuous part. The ennobled pewterer rewarded Chatterton with five shillings, and was satirized for this valuation of a noble pedigree in some of Chatterton’s latest verse.

On the 1st of July 1767, Chatterton was transferred to the office of John Lambert, attorney, to whom he was bound apprentice as a clerk. There he was left much alone; and after fulfilling the routine duties devolving on him, he found leisure for his own favourite pursuits. An ancient stone bridge on the Avon, built in the reign of Henry II., and altered by many later additions into a singularly picturesque but inconvenient thoroughfare, had been displaced by a structure better adapted to modern requirements. In September 1768, when Chatterton was in the second year of his apprenticeship, the new bridge was partially opened for traffic. Shortly afterwards the editor of Felix Farley’s Journal received from a correspondent, signing himself Dunelmus Bristoliensis, a “description of the mayor’s first passing over the old bridge,” professedly derived from an ancient MS. William Barrett, F.S.A., surgeon and antiquary, who was then accumulating materials for a history of Bristol, secured the original manuscript, which is now preserved in the British Museum, along with other Chatterton MSS., most of which were ultimately incorporated by the credulous antiquary into a learned quarto volume, entitled the History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol, published nearly twenty years after the poet’s death. It was at this time that the definite story made its appearance—over which critics and antiquaries wrangled for nearly a century—of numerous ancient poems and other MSS. taken by the elder Chatterton from a coffer in the muniment room of Redcliffe church, and transcribed, and so rescued from oblivion, by his son. The pieces include the “Bristowe Tragedie, or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin,” a ballad celebrating the death of the Lancastrian knight, Charles Baldwin; “Ælla,” a “Tragycal Enterlude,” as Chatterton styles it, but in reality a dramatic poem of sustained power and curious originality of structure; “Goddwyn,” a dramatic fragment; “Tournament,” “Battle of Hastings,” “The Parliament of Sprites,” “Balade of Charitie,” with numerous shorter pieces, forming altogether a volume of poetry, the rare merit of which is indisputable, wholly apart from the fact that it was the production of a mere boy. Unfortunately for him, his ingenious romance had either to be acknowledged as his own creation, and so in all probability be treated with contempt, or it had to be sustained by the manufacture of spurious antiques. To this accordingly Chatterton resorted, and found no difficulty in gulling the most learned of his credulous dupes with his parchments.

The literary labours of the boy, though diligently pursued at his desk, were not allowed to interfere with the duties of Mr Lambert’s office. Nevertheless the Bristol attorney used to search his apprentice’s drawer, and tear up any poems or other manuscripts that he could lay his hands upon; so that it was only during the absences of Mr Lambert from Bristol that he was able to expend his unemployed time in his favourite pursuits. But repeated allusions, both by Chatterton and others, seem to indicate that such intervals of freedom were of frequent occurrence. Some of his modern poems, such as the piece entitled “Resignation,” are of great beauty; and these, with the satires, in which he took his revenge on all the local celebrities whose vanity or meanness had excited his ire, are alone sufficient to fill a volume. The Catcotts, Burgum, Barrett and others of his patrons, figure in these satires, in imprudent yet discriminating caricature, along with mayor, aldermen, bishop, dean and other notabilities of Bristol. Towards Lambert his feelings were of too keen a nature to find relief in such sarcasm.

In December 1768, in his seventeenth year, he wrote to Dodsley, the London publisher, offering to procure for him “copies of several ancient poems, and an interlude, perhaps the oldest dramatic piece extant, wrote by one Rowley, a priest in Bristol, who lived in the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV.” To this letter he appended the initials of his favourite pseudonym, Dunelmus Bristoliensis, but directed the answer to be sent to the care of Thomas Chatterton, Redcliffe Hill, Bristol. To this, as well as to another letter enclosing an extract from the tragedy of “Ælla,” no answer appears to have been returned. Chatterton, conceiving the idea of finding sympathy and aid at the hand of some modern Canynge, bethought him of Horace Walpole, who not only indulged in a medieval renaissance of his own, but was the reputed author of a spurious antique in the Castle of Otranto. He wrote to him offering him a document entitled “The Ryse of Peyncteyne yn Englande, wroten by T. Rowleie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge,” accompanied by notes which included specimens of Rowley’s poetry. To this Walpole replied with courteous acknowledgments. He characterized the verses as “wonderful for their harmony and spirit,” and added, “Give me leave to ask you where Rowley’s poems are to be had? I should not be sorry to print them; or at least a specimen of them, if they have never been printed.” Chatterton replied, enclosing additional specimens of antique verse, and telling Walpole that he was the son of a poor widow, and clerk to an attorney, but had a taste for more refined studies; and he hinted a wish that he might help him to some more congenial occupation. Walpole’s manner underwent an abrupt change. The specimens of verse had been submitted to his friends Gray and Mason, the poets, and pronounced modern. They did not thereby forfeit the wonderful harmony and spirit which Walpole had already professed to recognize in them. But he now coldly advised the boy to stick to the attorney’s office; and “when he should have made a fortune,” he might betake himself to more favourite studies, Chatterton had to write three times before he recovered his MSS. Walpole has been loaded with more than his just share of responsibility for the fate of the unhappy poet, of whom he admitted when too late, “I do not believe there ever existed so masterly a genius.”

Chatterton now turned his attention to periodical literature and politics, and exchanged Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal for the Town and County Magazine and other London periodicals. Assuming the vein of Junius—then in the full blaze of his triumph—he turned his pen against the duke of Grafton, the earl of Bute, and the princess of Wales. He had just despatched one of his political diatribes to the Middlesex Journal, when he sat down on Easter Eve, I7th April 1770, and penned his “Last Will and Testament,” a strange satirical compound of jest and earnest, in which he intimated his intention of putting an end to his life the following evening. Among his satirical bequests, such as his “humility” to the Rev. Mr Camplin, his “religion” to Dean Barton, and his “modesty” along with his “prosody and grammar” to Mr Burgum, he leaves “to Bristol all his spirit and disinterestedness, parcels of goods unknown on its quay since the days of Canynge and Rowley.” In more genuine earnestness he recalls the name of Michael Clayfield, a friend to whom he owed intelligent sympathy. The will was probably purposely prepared in order to frighten his master into letting him go. If so, it had the desired effect. Lambert cancelled his indentures; his friends and acquaintance made him up a purse; and on the 25th or 26th of the month he arrived in London.

Chatterton was already known to the readers of the Middlesex Journal as a rival of Junius, under the nom de plume of Decimus. He had also been a contributor to Hamilton’s Town and County Magazine, and speedily found access to the Freeholder’s Magazine, another political miscellany strong for Wilkes and liberty. His contributions were freely accepted; but the editors paid little or nothing for them. He wrote in the most hopeful terms to his mother and sister, and spent his first earnings in buying gifts for them. His pride and ambition were amply gratified by the promises and interested flattery of editors and political adventurers; Wilkes himself had noted his trenchant style, “and expressed a desire to know the author”; and Lord Mayor Beckford graciously acknowledged a political address of his, and greeted him “as politely as a citizen could.” But of actual money he received but little. He was extremely abstemious, his diligence was great, and his versatility wonderful. He could assume the style of Junius or Smollett, reproduce the satiric bitterness of Churchill, parody Macpherson’s Ossian, or write in the manner of Pope, or with the polished grace of Gray and Collins. He wrote political letters, eclogues, lyrics, operas and satires, both in prose and verse. In June 1770—after Chatterton had been some nine weeks in London—he removed from Shoreditch, where he had hitherto lodged with a relative, to an attic in Brook Street, Holborn. But for most of his productions the payment was delayed; and now state prosecutions of the press rendered letters in the Junius vein no longer admissible, and threw him back on the lighter resources of his pen. In Shoreditch, as in his lodging at the Bristol attorney’s, he had only shared a room; but now, for the first time, he enjoyed uninterrupted solitude. His bed-fellow at Mr Walmsley’s, Shoreditch, noted that much of the night was spent by him in writing; and now he could write all night. The romance of his earlier years revived, and he transcribed from an imaginary parchment of the old priest Rowley his “Excelente Balade of Charitie.” This fine poem, perversely disguised in archaic language, he sent to the editor of the Town and County Magazine, and had it rejected.

The high hopes of the sanguine boy had begun to fade. He had not yet completed his second month in London, and already failure and starvation stared him in the face. Mr Cross, a neighbouring apothecary, repeatedly invited him to join him at dinner or supper; but he refused. His landlady also, suspecting his necessity, pressed him to share her dinner, but in vain. “She knew,” as she afterwards said, “that he had not eaten anything for two or three days.” But he was offended at her urgency, and assured her that he was not hungry. The note of his actual receipts, found in his pocket-book after his death, shows that Hamilton, Fell and other editors who had been so liberal in flattery, had paid him at the rate of a shilling for an article, and somewhat less than eightpence each for his songs; while much which had been accepted was held in reserve, and still unpaid for. The beginning of a new month revealed to him the indefinite postponement of the publication and payment of his work. He had wished, according to his foster-mother, to study medicine with Barrett; in his desperation he now reverted to this, and wrote to Barrett for a letter to help him to an opening as a surgeon’s assistant on board an African trader. He appealed also to Mr Catcott to forward his plan, but in vain. On the 24th of August 1770, he retired for the last time to his attic in Brook Street, carrying with him the arsenic which he there drank, after tearing into fragments whatever literary remains were at hand.

He was only seventeen years and nine months old; but the best of his numerous productions, both in prose and verse, require no allowance to be made for the immature years of their author, when comparing him with the ablest of his contemporaries. He pictures Lydgate, the monk of Bury St Edmunds, challenging Rowley to a trial at versemaking, and under cover of this fiction, produces his “Songe of Ælla,” a piece of rare lyrical beauty, worthy of comparison with any antique or modern production of its class. Again, in his “Tragedy of Goddwyn,” of which only a fragment has been preserved, the “Ode to Liberty,” with which it abruptly closes, may claim a place among the finest martial lyrics in the language. The collection of poems in which such specimens occur furnishes by far the most remarkable example of intellectual precocity in the whole history of letters. Collins, Burns, Keats, Shelley and Byron all awaken sorrow over the premature arrestment of their genius; but the youngest of them survived to his twenty-fifth year, while Chatterton was not eighteen when he perished in his miserable garret. The death of Chatterton attracted little notice at the time; for the few who then entertained any appreciative estimate of the Rowley poems regarded him as their mere transcriber. He was interred in a burying-ground attached to Shoe Lane Workhouse, in the parish of St Andrew’s, Holborn, which has since been converted into a site for Farringdon Market. There is a discredited story that the body of the poet was recovered, and secretly buried by his uncle, Richard Phillips, in Redcliffe Churchyard. There a monument has since been erected to his memory, with the appropriate inscription, borrowed from his “Will,” and so supplied by the poet’s own pen—“To the memory of Thomas Chatterton. Reader! judge not. If thou art a Christian, believe that he shall be judged by a Superior Power. To that Power only is he now answerable.”

Bibliography.—Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others, in the Fifteenth Century (1777) was edited by Thomas Tyrwhitt; Thomas Warton, in his History of English Poetry (1778), vol. ii. section viii., gives Rowley a place among the 15th century poets; but neither of these critics believed in the antiquity of the poems. In 1782 a new edition of Rowley’s poems appeared, with a “Commentary, in which the antiquity of them is considered and defended,” by Jeremiah Milles, dean of Exeter. The controversy which raged round the Rowley poems is discussed in A. Kippis, Biographia Britannica (vol. iv., 1789), where there is a detailed account by G. Gregory of Chatterton’s life (pp. 573-619). This was reprinted in the edition (1803) of Chatterton’s Works by R. Southey and J. Cottle, published for the benefit of the poet’s sister. The neglected condition of the study of earlier English in the 18th century alone accounts for the temporary success of Chatterton’s mystification. It has long been agreed that Chatterton was solely responsible for the Rowley Poems, but the language and style are analysed in confirmation of this view by Prof. W.W. Skeat in an introductory essay prefaced to vol. ii. of The Poetical Works of Thomas Chatterton (1871) in the “Aldine Edition of the British Poets.” This, which is the most convenient edition, also contains a memoir of the poet by Edward Bell. The spelling of the Rowley poems is there modernized, and many of the archaic words are replaced by modern equivalents provided in many cases from Chatterton’s own notes, the theory being that Chatterton usually composed in modern English, and inserted his peculiar words and his complicated orthography afterwards. For some criticism of Prof. Skeat’s success in the very difficult task of reconstituting the text, see H.B. Forman, Thomas Chatterton and his latest Editor (1874). The Chatterton MSS., originally in the possession of William Barrett of Bristol, were left by his heir to the British Museum in 1800. Others are preserved in the Bristol library.

Chatterton’s genius and his tragic death are commemorated by Shelley in Adonais, by Wordsworth in “Resolution and Independence,” by Coleridge in “A Monody on the Death of Chatterton,” by D.G. Rossetti in “Five English Poets,” and John Keats inscribed Endymion “to the memory of Thomas Chatterton.” Alfred de Vigny’s drama of Chatterton gives an altogether fictitious account of the poet. Herbert Croft (q.v.), in his Love and Madness, interpolated a long and valuable account of Chatterton, giving many of the poet’s letters, and much information obtained from his family and friends (pp. 125-244, letter li.). There is a valuable collection of “Chattertoniana” in the British Museum, consisting of separate works by Chatterton, newspaper cuttings, articles, dealing with the Rowley controversy and other subjects, with MS. notes by Joseph Haslewood, and several autograph letters.

Among biographies of Chatterton may be mentioned Chatterton: A Biographical Study (1869), by Daniel Wilson; Chatterton: A Biography (1899; first printed 1856 in a volume of essays), by D. Masson; “Thomas Chatterton” (1900), by Helene Richter, in Wiener Beiträge zur engl. Philologie; Chatterton, by C.E. Russell (1909).

CHATTI, an ancient German tribe inhabiting the upper reaches of the rivers Weser, Eder, Fulda and Werra, a district approximately corresponding to Hesse-Cassel, though probably somewhat more extensive. They frequently came into conflict with the Romans during the early years of the 1st century. Eventually they formed a portion of the Franks and were incorporated in the kingdom of Clovis probably with the Ripuarii, at the beginning of the 6th century.

Tacitus, Annals, i. 2, II, 12, 13; Germania, 30-31; Strabo p. 291 f.

CHAUCER, GEOFFREY (? 1340-1400), English poet. The name Chaucer, a French form of the Latin calcearius, a shoe-maker, is found in London and the eastern counties as early as the second half of the 13th century. Some of the London Chaucers lived in Cordwainer Street, in the shoemakers’ quarter; several of them, however, were vintners, and among others the poet’s father John, and probably also his grandfather Robert. Legal pleadings inform us that in December 1324 John Chaucer was not much over twelve years old, and that he was still unmarried Life. in 1328, the year which used to be considered that of Geoffrey’s birth.The poet was probably born from eight to twelve years later, since in 1386, when giving evidence in Sir Richard le Scrope’s suit against Sir Robert Grosvenor as to the right to bear certain arms, he was set down as “del age de xl ans et plus, armeez par xxvij ans.” At a later date, and probably at the time of the poet’s birth, his father lived in Thames Street, and had to wife a certain Agnes, niece of Hamo de Compton, whom we may regard as Geoffrey Chaucer’s mother. In 1357 Geoffrey is found, apparently as a lad, in the service of Elizabeth, countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, duke of Clarence, entries in two leaves of her household accounts, accidentally preserved, showing that she paid in April, May and December various small sums for his clothing and expenses. In 1359, as we learn from his deposition in the Scrope suit, Chaucer went to the war in France. At some period of the campaign he was at “Retters,” i.e. Rethel, near Reims, and subsequently had the ill luck to be taken prisoner. On the 1st of March 1360 the king contributed £16 to his ransom, and by a year or two later Chaucer must have entered the royal service, since on the 20th of June 1367 Edward granted him a pension of twenty marks for his past and future services. A pension of ten marks had been granted by the king the previous September to a Philippa Chaucer for services to the queen as one of her “domicellae” or “damoiselles,” and it seems probable that at this date Chaucer was already married and this Philippa his wife, a conclusion which used to be resisted on the ground of allusions in his early poems to a hopeless love-affair, now reckoned part of his poetical outfit. Philippa is usually said to have been one of two daughters of a Sir Payne Roet, the other being Katherine, who after the death of her first husband, Sir Hugh de Swynford, in 1372, became governess to John of Gaunt’s children, and subsequently his mistress and (in 1396) his wife. It is possible that Philippa was sister to Sir Hugh and sister-in-law to Katherine. In either case the marriage helps to account for the favour subsequently shown to Chaucer by John of Gaunt.

In the grant of his pension Chaucer is called “dilectus vallectus noster,” our beloved yeoman; before the end of 1368 he had risen to be one of the king’s esquires. In September of the following year John of Gaunt’s wife, the duchess Blanche, died at the age of twenty-nine, and Chaucer wrote in her honour The Book of the Duchesse, a poem of 1334 lines in octosyllabic couplets, the first of his undoubtedly genuine works which can be connected with a definite date. In June 1370 he went abroad on the king’s service, though on what errand, or whither it took him, is not known. He was back probably some time before Michaelmas, and seems to have remained in England till the 1st of December 1372, when he started, with an advance of 100 marks in his pocket, for Italy, as one of the three commissioners to treat with the Genoese as to an English port where they might have special facilities for trade. The accounts which he delivered on his return on the 23rd of May 1373 show that he had also visited Florence on the king’s business, and he probably went also to Padua and there made the acquaintance of Petrarch.

In the second quarter of 1374 Chaucer lived in a whirl of prosperity. On the 23rd of April the king granted him a pitcher of wine daily, subsequently commuted for an annuity of 20 marks. From John of Gaunt, who in August 1372 had granted Philippa Chaucer £10 a year, he himself now received (June 13) a like annuity in reward for his own and his wife’s services. On the 8th of June he was appointed Comptroller of the Custom and Subsidy of Wools, Hides and Woodfells and also of the Petty Customs of Wine in the Port of London. A month before this appointment, and probably in anticipation of it, he took (May 10, 1374) a lease for life from the city of London of the dwelling-house above the gate of Aldgate, and here he lived for the next twelve years. His own and his wife’s income now amounted to over £60, the equivalent of upwards of £1000 in modern money. In the next two years large windfalls came to him in the form of two wardships of Kentish heirs, one of whom paid him £104, and a grant of £71: 4: 6; the value of some confiscated wool. In December 1376 he was sent abroad on the king’s service in the retinue of Sir John Burley; in February 1377 he was sent to Paris and Montreuil in connexion probably with the peace negotiations between England and France, and at the end of April (after a reward of £20 for his good services) he was again despatched to France.

On the accession of Richard II. Chaucer was confirmed in his offices and pensions. In January 1378 he seems to have been in France in connexion with a proposed marriage between Richard and the daughter of the French king; and on the 28th of May of the same year he was sent with Sir Edward de Berkeley to the lord of Milan and Sir John Hawkwood to treat for help in the king’s wars, returning on the 19th of September. This was his last diplomatic journey, and the close of a period of his life generally considered to have been so unprolific of poetry that little beyond the Clerk’s “Tale of Grisilde,” one or two other of the stories afterwards included in the Canterbury Tales, and a few short poems, are attributed to it, though the poet’s actual absences from England during the eight years amount to little more than eighteen months. During the next twelve or fifteen years there is no question that Chaucer was constantly engaged in literary work, though for the first half of them he had no lack of official employment. Abundant favour was shown him by the new king. He was paid £22 as a reward for his later missions in Edward III.’s reign, and was allowed an annual gratuity of 10 marks in addition to his pay of £10 as comptroller of the customs of wool. In April 1382 a new comptrollership, that of the petty customs in the Port of London, was given him, and shortly after he was allowed to exercise it by deputy, a similar licence being given him in February 1385, at the instance of the earl of Oxford, as regards the comptrollership of wool. In October 1385 Chaucer was made a justice of the peace for Kent. In February 1386 we catch a glimpse of his wife Philippa being admitted to the fraternity of Lincoln cathedral in the company of Henry, earl of Derby (afterwards Henry IV.), Sir Thomas de Swynford and other distinguished persons. In August 1386 he was elected one of the two knights of the shire for Kent, and with this dignity, though it was one not much appreciated in those days, his good fortune reached its climax. In December of the same year he was superseded in both his comptrollerships, almost certainly as a result of the absence of his patron, John of Gaunt, in Spain, and the supremacy of the duke of Gloucester. In the following year the cessation of Philippa’s pension suggests that she died between Midsummer and Michaelmas. In May 1388 Chaucer surrendered to the king his two pensions of 20 marks each, and they were re-granted at his request to one John Scalby. The transaction was unusual and probably points to a pressing need for ready money, nor for the next fourteen months do we know of any source of income possessed by Chaucer beyond his annuity of £10 from John of Gaunt.

In July 1389, after John of Gaunt had returned to England, and the king had taken the government into his own hands, Chaucer was appointed clerk of the works at various royal palaces at a salary of two shillings a day, or over £31 a year, worth upwards of £500 present value. To this post was subsequently added the charge of some repairs at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He was also made a commissioner to maintain the banks of the Thames between Woolwich and Greenwich, and was given by the earl of March (grandson of Lionel, duke of Clarence, his old patron) a sub-forestership at North Petherton, Devon, obviously a sinecure. While on the king’s business, in September 1390, Chaucer was twice robbed by highwaymen, losing £20 of the king’s money. In June 1391 he was superseded in his office of clerk of the works, and seems to have suffered another spell of misfortune, of which the first alleviation came in January 1393 when the king made him a present of £10. In February 1394 he was granted a new pension of £20. It is possible, also, that about this time, or a little later, he was in the service of the earl of Derby. In 1397 he received from King Richard a grant of a butt of wine yearly. For this he appears to have asked in terms that suggest poverty, and in May 1398 he obtained letters of protection against his creditors, a step perhaps rendered necessary by an action for debt taken against him earlier in the year. On the accession of Henry IV. a new pension of 40 marks was conferred on Chaucer (13th of October 1399) and Richard II.’s grants were formally confirmed. Henry himself, however, was probably straitened for ready money, and no instalment of the new pension was paid during the few months of his reign that the poet lived. Nevertheless, on the strength of his expectations, on the 24th of December 1399 he leased a tenement in the garden of St Mary’s Chapel, Westminster, and it was probably here that he died, on the 25th of the following October. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and his tomb became the nucleus of what is now known as Poets’ Corner.

The portrait of Chaucer, which the affection of his disciple, Thomas Hoccleve, caused to be painted in a copy of the latter’s Regement of Princes (now Harleian MS. 4866 in the British Museum), shows him an old man with white hair; he has a fresh complexion, grey eyes, a straight nose, a grey moustache and a small double-pointed beard. His dress and hood are black, and he carries in his hands a string of beads. We may imagine that it was thus that during the last months of his life he used to walk about the precincts of the Abbey.

Henry IV.’s promise of an additional pension was doubtless elicited by the Compleynt to his Purs, in the envoy to which Chaucer addresses him as the “conquerour of Brutes Works. Albioun.” Thus within the last year of his life the poet was still writing. Nevertheless, as early as 1393-1394, in lines to his friend Scogan, he had written as if his day for poetry were past, and it seems probable that his longer poems were all composed before this date. In the preceding fifteen—or, if another view be taken, twenty—years, his literary activity was very great, and with the aid of the lists of his works which he gives in the Legende of Good Women (lines 414-431), and the talk on the road which precedes the “Man of Law’s Tale” (Canterbury Tales, B. 46-76), the order in which his main works were written can be traced with approximate certainty,[1] while a few both of these and of the minor poems can be connected with definite dates.

The development of his genius has been attractively summed up as comprised in three stages, French, Italian and English, and there is a rough approximation to the truth in this formula, since his earliest poems are translated from the French or based on French models, and the two great works of his middle period are borrowed from the Italian, while his latest stories have no such obvious and direct originals and in their humour and freedom anticipate the typically English temper of Henry Fielding. But Chaucer’s indebtedness to French poetry was no passing phase. For various reasons—a not very remote French origin of his own family may be one of them—he was in no way interested in older English literature or in the work of his English contemporaries, save possibly that of “the moral Gower.” On the other hand he knew the Roman de la rose as modern English poets know Shakespeare, and the full extent of his debt to his French contemporaries, not merely in 1369, but in 1385 and in 1393 (the dates are approximate), is only gradually being discovered. To be in touch throughout his life with the best French poets of the day was much for Chaucer. Even with their stimulus alone he might have developed no small part of his genius. But it was his great good fortune to add to this continuing French influence, lessons in plot and construction derived from Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Teseide, as well as some glimpses of the higher art of the Divina Commedia. He shows acquaintance also with one of Petrarch’s sonnets, and though, when all is said, the Italian books with which he can be proved to have been intimate are but few, they sufficed. His study of them was but an episode in his literary life, but it was an episode of unique importance. Before it began he had already been making his own artistic experiments, and it is noteworthy that while he learnt so much from Boccaccio he improved on his originals as he translated them. Doubtless his busy life in the service of the crown had taught him self-confidence, and he uses his Italian models in his own way and with the most triumphant and assured success. When he had no more Italian poems to adapt he had learnt his lesson. The art of weaving a plot out of his own imagination was never his, but he could take what might be little more than an anecdote and lend it body and life and colour with a skill which has never been surpassed.

The most direct example of Chaucer’s French studies is his translation of Le Roman de la rose, a poem written in some 4000 lines by Guillaume Lorris about 1237 and extended to over 22,000 by Jean Clopinel, better known as Jean de Meun, forty years later. We know from Chaucer himself that he translated this poem, and the extant English fragment of 7698 lines was generally assigned to him from 1532, when it was first printed, till its authorship was challenged in the early years of the Chaucer Society. The ground of this challenge was its wide divergence from Chaucer’s practice in his undoubtedly genuine works as to certain niceties of rhyme, notable as to not rhyming words ending in -y with others ending -ye. It was subsequently discovered, however, that the whole fragment was divisible linguistically into three portions, of which the first and second end respectively at lines 1705 and 5810, and that in the first of these three sections the variations from Chaucer’s accepted practice are insignificant. Lines 1-1705 have therefore been provisionally accepted as Chaucer’s, and the other two fragments as the work of unknown translators (James I. of Scotland has been suggested as one of them), which somehow came to be pieced together. If, however, the difficulties in the way of this theory are less than those which confront any other, they are still considerable, and the question can hardly be treated as closed.

While our knowledge of Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose is in this unsatisfactory state, another translation of his from the French, the Book of the Lyon (alluded to in the “Retraction” found, in some manuscripts, at the end of the Canterbury Tales), which must certainly have been taken from Guillaume Machault’s Le Dit du lion, has perished altogether. The strength of French influence on Chaucer’s early work may, however, be amply illustrated from the first of his poems with which we are on sure ground, the Book of the Duchesse, or, as it is alternatively called, the Deth of Blaunche. Here not only are individual passages closely imitated from Machault and Froissart, but the dream, the May morning, and the whole machinery of the poem are taken over from contemporary French conventions. But even at this stage Chaucer could prove his right to borrow by the skill with which he makes his materials serve his own purpose, and some of the lines in the Deth of Blaunche are among the most tender and charming he ever wrote.

Chaucer’s A.B.C., a poem in honour of the Blessed Virgin, of which the stanzas begin with the successive letters of the alphabet, is another early example of French influence. It is taken from the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, written by Guillaume de Deguilleville about 1330. The occurrence of some magnificent lines in Chaucer’s version, combined with evidence that he did not yet possess the skill to translate at all literally as soon as rhymes had to be considered, accounts for this poem having been dated sometimes earlier than the Book of the Duchesse, and sometimes several years later. With it is usually moved up and down, though it should surely be placed in the ’seventies, the Compleynt to Pity, a fine poem which yet, from its slight obscurity and absence of Chaucer’s usual ease, may very well some day prove to be a translation from the French.

While Chaucer thus sought to reproduce both the matter and the style of French poetry in England, he found other materials in popular Latin books. Among his lost works are renderings of “Origenes upon the Maudeleyne,” and of Pope Innocent III. on “The Wreced Engendring of Mankinde” (De miseria conditionis humanae). He must have begun his attempts at straightforward narrative with the Lyf of Seynt Cecyle (the weakest of all his works, the second Nun’s Tale in the Canterbury series) from the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, and the story of the patience of Grisilde, taken from Petrarch’s Latin version of a tale by Boccaccio. In both of these he condenses a little, but ventures on very few changes, though he lets his readers see his impatience with his originals. In his story of Constance (afterwards ascribed to the Man of Law), taken from the Anglo-Norman chronicle of Nicholas Trivet, written about 1334, we find him struggling to put some substance into another weak tale, but still without the courage to remedy its radical faults, though here, as with Grisilde, he does as much for his heroine as the conventional exaltation of one virtue at a time permitted. It is possible that other tales which now stand in the Canterbury series were written originally at this period. What is certain is that at some time in the ’seventies three or four Italian poems passed into Chaucer’s possession, and that he set to work busily to make use of them. One of the most interesting of the poems reclaimed for him by Professor Skeat is a fragmentary “Compleynt,” part of which is written in terza rima. While he thus experimented with the metre of the Divina Commedia, he made his first attempt to use the material provided by Boccaccio’s Teseide in another fragment of great interest, that of Quene Anelida and Fals Arcyte. More than a third of this is taken up with another, and quite successful, metrical experiment in Anelida’s “compleynt,” but in the introduction of Anelida herself Chaucer made the first of his three unsuccessful efforts to construct a plot for an important poem out of his own head, and the fragment which begins so well breaks off abruptly at line 357.

For a time the Teseide seems to have been laid aside, and it was perhaps at this moment, in despondency at his failure, that Chaucer wrote his most important prose work, the translation of the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius. Reminiscences of this helped to enrich many of his subsequent poems, and inspired five of his shorter pieces (The Former Age, Fortune, Truth, Gentilesse and Lak of Stedfastnesse), but the translation itself was only a partial success. To borrow his own phrase, his “Englysh was insufficient” to reproduce such difficult Latin. The translation is often barely intelligible without the original, and it is only here and there that it flows with any ease or rhythm.

If Chaucer felt this himself he must have been speedily consold by achieving in Troilus and Criseyde his greatest artistic triumph. Warned by his failure in Anelida and Arcyte, he was content this time to take his plot unaltered from the Filostrato, and to follow Boccaccio step by step through the poem. But he did not follow him as a mere translator. He had done his duty manfully for the saints “of other holinesse” in Cecyle, Grisilde and Constance, whom he was forbidden by the rules of the game to clothe with complete flesh and blood. In this great love-story there were no such restrictions, and the characters which Boccaccio’s treatment left thin and conventional became in Chaucer’s hands convincingly human. No other English poem is so instinct with the glory and tragedy of youth, and in the details of the story Chaucer’s gifts of vivid colouring, of humour and pity, are all at their highest.

An unfortunate theory that the reference in the Legends of Good Women to “al the love of Palamon and Arcyte” is to a hypothetical poem in seven-line stanzas on this theme, which Chaucer is imagined, when he came to plan the Canterbury Tales, to have suppressed in favour of a new version in heroic couplets, has obscured the close connexion in temper and power between what we know as the “Knight’s Tale” and the Troilus. The poem may have been more or less extensively revised before, with admirable fitness, it was assigned to the Knight, but that its main composition can be separated by several years from that of Troilus is aesthetically incredible. Chaucer’s art here again is at its highest. He takes the plot of Boccaccio’s Teseide, but only as much of it as he wants, and what he takes he heightens and humanizes with the same skill which he had shown in transforming the Filostrato. Of the individual characters Theseus himself, the arbiter of the plot, is most notably developed; Emilie and her two lovers receive just as much individuality as they will bear without disturbing the atmosphere of romance. The whole story is pulled together and made more rapid and effective. A comparison of almost any scene as told by the two poets suffices to show Chaucer’s immense superiority. At some subsequent period the “Squire’s Tale” of Cambuscan, the fair Canacee and the Horse of Brass, was gallantly begun in something of the same key, but Chaucer took for it more materials than he could use, and for lack of the help of a leader like Boccaccio he was obliged to leave the story, in Milton’s phrase, “half-told,” though the fragment written certainly takes us very much less than half-way.

Meanwhile, in connexion (as is reasonably believed) with the betrothal or marriage of Anne of Bohemia to Richard II. (i.e. about 1381-1382), Chaucer had brought to a successful completion the Parlement of Foules, a charming sketch of 699 lines, in which the other birds, on Saint Valentine’s day, counsel the “Formel Egle” on her choice of a mate. His success here, as in the case of the Deth of Blaunche the Duchesse, was due to the absence of any need for a climax; and though the materials which he borrowed were mainly Latin (with some help from passages of the Teseide not fully needed for Palamon and Arcyte) his method of handling them would have been quite approved by his friends among the French poets. A more ambitious venture, the Hous of Fame, in which Chaucer imagines himself borne aloft by an eagle to Fame’s temple, describes what he sees and hears there, and then breaks off in apparent inability to get home, shows a curious mixture of the poetic ideals of the Roman de la rose and reminiscences of the Divina Commedia.

As the Hous of Fame is most often remembered and quoted for the personal touches and humour of Chaucer’s conversation with the eagle, so the most-quoted passages in the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women are those in which Chaucer professes his affection for the daisy, and the attack on his loyalty by Cupid and its defence by Alceste. Recent discoveries have shown, however, that (besides obligations to Machault) some of the touches about the daisy and the controversy between the partisans of the Flower and of the Leaf are snatches from poems by his friends Froissart and Deschamps, which Chaucer takes up and returns to them with pretty compliments, and that he was indebted to Froissart for some of the framework of his poem.[2] Both of the two versions of the Prologue to the Legende are charming, and some of the tales, notably that of Cleopatra, rank with Chaucer’s best work. When, however, he had written eight and part of the ninth he tired of his scheme, which was planned to celebrate nineteen of Cupid’s faithful “saints,” with Alcestis as their queen. With his usual hopefulness he had overlooked the risk of monotony, which obviously weighed heavily on him ere he broke off, and the loss of the other ten stories is less to be regretted than that of the celebration of Alceste, and a possible epilogue which might have exceeded in charm the Prologue itself.

Chaucer’s failure to complete the scheme of the Legende of Good Women may have been partly due to the attractions of the Canterbury Tales, which were probably taken up in Canterbury Tales. immediate succession to it. His guardianship of two Kentish wards, his justiceship of the peace, his representing the county in the parliament of 1386, his commissionership of the river-bank between Greenwich and Woolwich, all make it easy to understand his dramatic use of the merry crowds he saw on the Canterbury road, without supposing him to have had recourse to Boccaccio’s Decamerone, a book which there is no proof of his having seen. The pilgrims whom he imagines to have assembled at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, where Harry Bailey was host, are said to have numbered “wel nyne and twenty in a company,” and the Prologue gives full-length sketches of a Knight, a Squire (his son), and their Yeoman; of a Prioress, Monk, Friar, Oxford Clerk, and Parson, with two disreputable hangers-on of the church, a Summoner and Pardoner; of a Serjeant-at-Law and a Doctor of Physic, and of a Franklin, or country gentleman, Merchant, Shipman, Miller, Cook, Manciple, Reeve, Ploughman (the Parson’s brother) and the ever-famous Wife of Bath. Five London burgesses are described in a group, and a Nun and Priest[3] are mentioned as in attendance on the Prioress. Each of these, with Chaucer himself making the twenty-ninth, was pledged to tell two tales, but including one second attempt and a tale told by the Yeoman of a Canon, who overtakes the pilgrims on the road, we have only twenty finished stories, two unfinished and two interrupted ones. As in the case of the Legende of Good Women, our loss is not so much that of the additional stories as of the completed framework. The wonderful character sketches of the Prologue are carried yet farther by the Talks on the Road which link the different tales, and two of these Talks, in which the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner respectively edify the company, have the importance of separate Tales, but between the Tales that have come down to us there are seven links missing,[4] and it was left to a later and weaker hand to narrate, in the “Tale of Beryn,” the adventures of the pilgrims at Canterbury.

The reference to the Lyf of Seynt Cecyle in the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women gives external proof that Chaucer included earlier work in the scheme of the Canterbury Tales, and mention has been made of other stories which are indisputably early. In the absence of any such metrical tests as have proved useful in the case of Shakespeare, the dates at which several of the Tales were composed remain doubtful, while in the case of at least two, the Clerk’s tale of Grisilde and the Monk’s tragedies, there is evidence of early work being revised and supplemented. It is fortunately impossible to separate the prologue to the charmingly told story of “yonge Hugh of Lincoln” from the tale itself, and with the “quod sche” in the second line as proof that Chaucer was here writing specially for his Prioress we are forbidden to limit the new stories to any one metre or tone. There can be no doubt, however, that what may be called the Tales of the Churls (Miller, Reeve, Summoner, Friar, &c.), and the conversational outpourings of the Pardoner and Wife of Bath, form, with the immortal Prologue, the most important and distinctive additions to the older work. In these, and in the Pardoner’s story of Death and the Three Revellers, and the Nun’s Priest’s masterly handling of the fable of the Cock and Fox, both of them free from the grossness which marks the others, Chaucer takes stories which could have been told in a short page of prose and elaborates them with all the skill in narration which he had sedulously cultivated. The conjugal reminiscences of the Wife of Bath and the Reeve’s Tale with its abominable climax (lightened a little by Aleyn’s farewell, lines 316-319) are among the great things in Chaucer, as surely as Troilus, and Palamon and Arcyte and the Prologue. They help notably to give him the width of range which may certainly be claimed for him.

In or soon after 1391 Chaucer wrote in prose for an eleven-year-old reader, whom he addresses as “Litel Lowis my son,” a treatise on the use of the Astrolabe, its short prologue being the prettiest specimen of his prose. The wearisome tale of “Melibee and his wyf Prudence,” which was perhaps as much admired in English as it had been in Latin and French, may have been translated at any time. The sermon on Penitence, used as the Parson’s Tale, was probably the work of his old age. “Envoys” to his friends Scogan and Bukton, a translation of some balades by Sir Otes de Granson, and the Compleynt to his Purs complete the record of his minor poetry. We have his own statement that in his youth he had written many Balades, Roundels and Virelayes in honour of Love, and the two songs embedded respectively in the Parlement of Foules and the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women are charming and musical. His extant shorter poems, however, whether early or late, offer no excuse for claiming high rank for him as a lyrist. He had very little sheer singing power, and though there are fine lines in his short poems, witness the famous “Flee fro the prees and dwell with soothfastnesse,” they lack the sustained concentration of great work. From the drama, again, Chaucer was cut off, and it is idle to argue from the innumerable dramatic touches in his poems and his gift of characterization as to what he might have done had he lived two centuries later. His own age delighted in stories, and he gave it the stories it demanded invested with a humanity, a grace and strength which place him among the world’s greatest narrative poets, and which bring the England of his own day, with all the colour and warmth of life, wonderfully near to all his readers.

The part played by Chaucer in the development of the English language has often been overrated. He neither corrupted it, as used to be said, by introducing French words which Influence. it would otherwise have avoided, nor bore any such part in fixing it as was afterwards played by the translators of the Bible. When he was growing up educated society in England was still bilingual, and the changes in vocabulary and pronunciation which took place during his life were the natural results of a society, which had been bilingual with a bias towards French, giving an exclusive preference to English. The practical identity of Chaucer’s language with that of Gower shows that both merely used the best English of their day with the care and slightly conservative tendency which befitted poets. Chaucer’s service to the English language lies in his decisive success having made it impossible for any later English poet to attain fame, as Gower had done, by writing alternatively in Latin and French. The claim which should be made for him is that, at least as regards poetry, he proved that English was “sufficient.”

Chaucer borrowed both his stanza forms and his “decasyllabic” couplets (mostly with an extra syllable at the end of the line) from Guillaume Machault, and his music, like that of his French master and his successors, depends very largely on assigning to every syllable its full value, and more especially on the due pronunciation of the final -e. The slower movement of change in Scotland allowed time for Chaucer to exercise a potent influence on Scottish poetry, but in England this final -e, to which most of the earlier grammatical forms by Chaucer’s time had been reduced, itself fell rapidly into disuse during the 15th century, and a serious barrier was thus raised to the appreciation of the artistic value of his verse. His disciples, Hoccleve and Lydgate, who at first had caught some echoes of his rhythms, gradually yielded to the change in pronunciation, so that there was no living tradition to hand down his secret, while successive copyists reduced his text to a state in which it was only by accident that lines could be scanned correctly. For fully three centuries his reputation was sustained solely by his narrative power, his warmest panegyrists betraying no consciousness that they were praising one of the greatest technical masters of poetry. Even when thus maimed, however, his works found readers and lovers in every generation, and every improvement in his text has set his fame on a surer basis.

Bibliography.—The Canterbury Tales have always been Chaucer’s most popular work, and, including fragments, upwards of sixty 15th-century manuscripts of it still survive. Two thin volumes of his minor poems were among the little quartos which Caxton printed by way of advertisement immediately on his return to England; the Canterbury Tales and Boethius followed in 1478, Troilus and a second edition of the Tales in 1483, the Hous of Fame in 1484. The Canterbury Tales were subsequently printed in 1492 (Pynson), 1498 (de Worde) and 1526 (Pynson); Troilus in 1517 (de Worde) and 1526 (Pynson); the Hous of Fame in 1526 (Pynson); the Parlement of Foules in 1526 (Pynson) and 1530 (de Worde), and the Mars, “Venus” and Envoy to Bukton by Julyan Notary about 1500. Pynson’s three issues in 1526 almost amounted to a collected edition, but the first to which the title The Workes of Geffray Chaucer was given was that edited by William Thynne in 1532 for Thomas Godfray. Of this there was a new edition in 1542 for John Reynes and William Bonham, and an undated reprint a few years later for Bonham, Kele, Petit and Toye, each of whom put his name on part of the edition. In 1561 a reprint, with numerous additions, edited by John Stowe, was printed by J. Kyngston for J. Wight, and this was re-edited, with fresh additions by Thomas Speght, in 1598 for G. Bishop and again in 1602 for Adam Islip. In 1687 there was an anonymous reprint, and in 1721 John Urry produced the last and worst of the folios. By this time the paraphrasers were already at work, Dryden rewriting the tales of the Knight, the Nun’s Priest and the Wife of Bath, and Pope the Merchant’s. In 1737 (reprinted in 1740) the Prologue and Knight’s Tale were edited (anonymously) by Thomas Morell “from the most authentic manuscripts,” and here, though by dint of much violence and with many mistakes, Chaucer’s lines were for the first time in print given in a form in which they could be scanned. This promise of better things (Morell still thought it necessary to accompany his text with the paraphrases by Betterton and Dryden) was fulfilled by a fine edition of the Canterbury Tales (1775-1778), in which Thomas Tyrwhitt’s scholarly instincts produced a comparatively good text from second-rate manuscripts and accompanied it with valuable illustrative notes. The next edition of any importance was that edited by Thomas Wright for the Percy Society in 1848-1851, based on the erratic but valuable British Museum manuscript Harley 7334, containing readings which must be either Chaucer’s second thoughts or the emendations of a brilliantly clever scribe. In 1866 Richard Morris re-edited this text in a more scholarly manner for the Aldine edition of the British Poets, and in the following year produced for the Clarendon Press Series a school edition of the Prologue and Tales of the Knight and Nun’s Priest, edited with the fulness and care previously bestowed only on Greek and Latin classics.

In 1868 the foundation of the Chaucer Society, with Dr Furnivall as its director and chief worker, and Henry Bradshaw as a leading spirit, led to the publication of a six-text edition of the Canterbury Tales, and the consequent discovery that a manuscript belonging to the Earl of Ellesmere, though undoubtedly “edited,” contained the best available text. The Chaucer Society also printed the best manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde and of all the minor poems, and thus cleared the way for the “Oxford” Chaucer, edited by Professor Skeat, with a wealth of annotation, for the Clarendon Press in 1894, the text of which was used for the splendid folio printed two years later by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, with illustrations by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. A supplementary volume of the Oxford edition, entitled Chaucerian and other Pieces, issued by Professor Skeat in 1897, contains the prose and verse which his early publishers and editors, from Pynson and Thynne onwards, included among his Works by way of illustration, but which had gradually come to be regarded as forming part of his text. The reasons for their rejection are fully stated by Professor Skeat in the work named and also in The Chaucer Canon (1900). Many of these pieces have now been traced to other authors, and their exclusion has helped to clear not only Chaucer’s text but also his biography, which used (as in the “Life” published by William Godwin in two quarto volumes in 1803) to be encumbered with inferences from works now known not to be Chaucer’s, notably the Testament of Love written by Thomas Usk. All information about Chaucer’s life available in 1900 will be found summarized by Mr R.E.G. Kirk in Life-Records of Chaucer, part iv., published by the Chaucer Society in that year. See also Chaucer; a Bibliographical Manual, by Eleanor P. Hammond (1909).

(A. W. Po.)

[1] The positions of the House of Fame and Palamon and Arcyte are still matters of controversy.

[2] The French influences on this Prologue, its connexion with the Flower and the Leaf controversy, and the priority of what had previously been reckoned as the second or “B” form of the Prologue over the “A,” were demonstrated in papers by Prof. Kittredge on “Chaucer and some of his Friends” in Modern Philology, vol. i. (Chicago, 1903), and by Mr J. L. Lowes on “The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women” in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. xix., December 1904.

[3] The Talks on the Road show clearly that only one Priest in attendance on the Prioress, and two tales to each narrator, were originally contemplated, but the “Prestes thre” in line 164 of the Prologue, and the bald couplet (line 793 sq.) explaining that each pilgrim was to tell two tales each way, were probably both alterations made by Chaucer in moments of amazing hopefulness. The journey was reckoned a 3½ days’ ride, and eight or nine tales a day would surely have been a sufficient allowance.

[4] The absence of these links necessitates the division of the Canterbury Tales into nine groups, to which, for purposes of quotation, the letters A to I have been assigned, the line numeration of the Tales in each group being continuous.

CHAUDESAIGUES, a village of central France, in the department of Cantal, at the foot of the mountains of Aubrac, 19 m. S.S.W. of St Flour by road. Pop. (1906) town, 937; commune, 1558. It is celebrated for its hot mineral springs, which vary in temperature from 135° to 177° Fahr., and at their maximum rank as the hottest in France. The water, which contains bicarbonate of soda, is employed not only medicinally (for rheumatism, &c.), but also for the washing of fleeces, the incubation of eggs, and various other economic purposes; and it furnishes a ready means of heating the houses of the town during winter. In the immediate neighbourhood is the cold chalybeate spring of Condamine. The warm springs were known to the Romans, and are mentioned by Sidonius Apollinaris.

CHAUFFEUR (from Fr. chauffer), to heat, a term primarily used in French of a man in charge of a forge or furnace, and so of a stoker on a locomotive or in a steamship, but in its anglicized sense more particularly confined to a professional driver of a motor vehicle. (See also [Brigandage].)

CHAULIEU, GUILLAUME AMFRYE DE (1639-1720), French poet and wit, was born at Fontenay, Normandy, in 1639. His father, maître des comptes of Rouen, sent him to study at the Collège de Navarre. Guillaume early showed the wit that was to distinguish him, and gained the favour of the duke of Vendôme, who procured for him the abbey of Aumale and other benefices. Louis Joseph, duke of Vendôme, and his brother Philippe, grand prior of the Knights of Malta in France, at that time had a joint establishment at the Temple, where they gathered round them a very gay and reckless circle. Chaulieu became the constant companion and adviser of the two princes. He made an expedition to Poland in the suite of the marquis de Béthune, hoping to make a career for himself in the court of John Sobieski; he saw one of the Polish king’s campaigns in Ukraine, but returned to Paris without securing any advancement. Saint-Simon says that the abbé helped his patron the grand prior to rob the duke of Vendôme, and that the king sent orders that the princes should take the management of their affairs from him. This account has been questioned by Sainte-Beuve, who regards Saint-Simon as a prejudiced witness. In his later years Chaulieu spent much time at the little court of the duchesse du Maine at Sceaux. There he became the trusted and devoted friend of Mdlle Delaunay, with whom he carried on an interesting correspondence. Among his poems the best known are “Fontenay” and “La Retraite.” Chaulieu died on the 27th of June 1720.

His works were edited with those of his friend the marquis de la Fare in 1714, 1750 and 1774. See also C.A. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. i.; and Lettres inédites (1850), with a notice by Raymond, marquis de Berenger.

CHAUMETTE, PIERRE GASPARD (1763-1794), French revolutionist, was born at Nevers. Until the Revolution he lived a somewhat wandering life, interesting himself particularly in botany. He was a student of medicine at Paris in 1790, became one of the orators of the club of the Cordeliers, and contributed anonymously to the Révolutions de Paris. As member of the insurrectionary Commune of the 10th of August 1792, he was delegated to visit the prisons, with full power to arrest suspects. He was accused later of having taken part in the massacres of September, but was able to prove that at that time he had been sent by the provisional executive council to Normandy to oversee a requisition of 60,000 men. Returning from this mission, he pronounced an eloquent discourse in favour of the republic. His simple manners, easy speech, ardent temperament and irreproachable private life gave him great influence in Paris, and he was elected president of the Commune, defending the municipality in that capacity at the bar of the Convention on the 31st of October 1792. Re-elected in the municipal elections of the 2nd of December 1792, he was soon charged with the functions of procurator of the Commune, and contributed with success to the enrolments of volunteers by his appeals to the populace. Chaumette was one of the ringleaders in the attacks of the 31st of May and of the 2nd of June 1793 on the Girondists, toward whom he showed himself relentless. He demanded the formation of a revolutionary army, and preached the extermination of all traitors. He was one of the promoters of the worship of Reason, and on the 10th of November 1793 he presented the goddess to the Convention in the guise of an actress. On the 23rd of the same month he obtained a decree closing all the churches of Paris, and placing the priests under strict surveillance; but on the 25th he retraced his steps and obtained from the Commune the free exercise of worship. He wished to save the Hébertists by a new insurrection and struggled against Robespierre; but a revolutionary decree promulgated by the Commune on his demand was overthrown by the Convention. Robespierre had him accused with the Hébertists; he was arrested, imprisoned in the Luxembourg, condemned by the Revolutionary tribunal and executed on the 13th of April 1794. Chaumette’s career had its brighter side. He was an ardent social reformer; he secured the abolition of corporal punishment in the schools, the suppression of lotteries, of houses of ill-fame and of obscene literature; he instituted reforms in the hospitals, and insisted on the honours of public burial for the poor.

Chaumette left some printed speeches and fragments, and memoirs published in the Amateur d’autographes. His memoirs on the 10th of August were published by F.A. Aulard, preceded by a biographical study.

CHAUMONT-EN-BASSIGNY, a town of eastern France, capital of the department of Haute-Marne, a railway junction 163 m. E.S.E. of Paris on the main line of the Eastern railway to Belfort. Pop. (1906) 12,089. Chaumont is picturesquely situated on an eminence between the rivers Marne and Suize in the angle formed by their confluence. To the west a lofty viaduct over the Suize carries the railway. The church of St-Jean-Baptiste dates from the 13th century, the choir and lateral chapels belonging to the 15th and 16th. In the interior the sculptured triforium (15th century), the spiral staircase in the transept and a Holy Sepulchre are of interest. The lycée and the hospital have chapels of the 17th and 16th centuries respectively. The Tour Hautefeuille (a keep of the 11th century) is the principal relic of a château of the counts of Champagne; the rest of the site is occupied by the law courts. In the Place de l’Escargot stands a statue of the chemist Philippe Lebon (1767-1804), born in Haute-Marne. Chaumont is the seat of a prefect and of a court of assizes, and has tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a lycée, training colleges, and a branch of the Bank of France. The main industries are glove-making and leather-dressing. The town has trade in grain, iron, mined in the vicinity, and leather. In 1190 it received a charter from the counts of Champagne. It was here that in 1814 Great Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia concluded the treaty (dated March 1, signed March 9) by which they severally bound themselves not to conclude a separate peace with Napoleon, and to continue the war until France should have been reduced within the boundaries of 1792.

CHAUNCEY, ISAAC (1772-1840), American naval commander, was born at Black Rock, Connecticut, on the 20th of February 1772. He was brought up in the merchant service, and entered the United States navy as a lieutenant in 1798. His first services were rendered against the Barbary pirates. During these operations, more especially at Tripoli, he greatly distinguished himself, and was voted by Congress a sword of honour, which, however, does not appear to have been given him. The most active period of his life is that of his command on the Lakes during the War of 1812. He took the command at Sackett’s Harbor on Lake Ontario in October 1812. There was at that time only one American vessel, the brig “Oneida” (16), and one armed prize, a schooner, on the lake. But Commodore Chauncey brought from 400 to 500 officers and men with him, and local resources for building being abundant, he had by November formed a squadron of ten vessels, with which he attacked the Canadian port, York, taking it in April 1813, capturing one vessel and causing the destruction of another then building. He returned to Sackett’s Harbor. In May Sir James Lucas Yeo (1732-1818) came out from England with some 500 officers and men, to organize a squadron for service on the Lakes. By the end of the month he was ready for service with a squadron of eight ships and brigs, and some small craft. The governor, Sir G. Prevost, gave him no serious support. On the 29th of May, during Chauncey’s absence at Niagara, the Americans were attacked at Sackett’s Harbor and would have been defeated if Prevost had not insisted on a retreat at the very moment when the American shipbuilding yard was in danger of being burnt, with a ship of more than eight hundred tons on the stocks. The retreat of the British force gave Chauncey time to complete this vessel, the “General Pike,” which was so far superior to anything under Yeo’s command that she was said to be equal in effective strength to the whole of the British flotilla. The American commodore was considered by many of his subordinates to have displayed excessive caution. In August he skirmished with Sir James Yeo’s small squadron of six vessels, but made little effective use of his own fourteen. Two of his schooners were upset in a squall, with the loss of all hands, and he allowed two to be cut off by Yeo. Commodore Chauncey showed a preference for relying on his long guns, and a disinclination to come to close quarters. He was described as chasing the British squadron all round the lake, but his encounters did not go beyond artillery duels at long range, and he allowed his enemy to continue in existence long after he might have been destroyed. The winter suspended operations, and both sides made exertions to increase their forces. The Americans had the advantage of commanding greater resources for shipbuilding. Sir James Yeo began by blockading Sackett’s Harbor in the early part of 1814, but when the American squadron was ready he was compelled to retire by the disparity of the forces. The American commodore was now able to blockade the British flotilla at Kingston. When the cruising season of the lake was nearly over he in his turn retired to Sackett’s Harbor, and did not leave it for the rest of the war. During his later years he served as commissioner of the navy, and was president of the board of naval commissioners from 1833 till his death at Washington on the 27th of February 1840.

See Roosevelt’s War of 1812 (1882); and A. T. Mahan, Sea-Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 (1905).

CHAUNCY, CHARLES (1592-1672), president of Harvard College, was born at Yardley-Bury, Hertfordshire, England, in November 1592, and was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow. He was in turn vicar at Ware, Hertfordshire (1627-1633), and at Marston St Lawrence, Northamptonshire (1633-1637). Refusing to observe the ecclesiastical regulations of Archbishop Laud, he was brought before the court of high commission in 1629, and again in 1634, when, for opposing the placing of a rail around the communion table, he was suspended and imprisoned. His formal recantation in February 1637 caused him lasting self-reproach and humiliation. In 1637 he emigrated to America, and from 1638 until 1641 was an associate pastor at Plymouth, where, however, his advocacy of the baptism of infants by immersion caused dissatisfaction. He was the pastor at Scituate, Massachusetts, from 1641 until 1654, and from 1654 until his death was president of Harvard College, as the successor of the first president Henry Dunster (c. 1612-1659). He died on the 19th of February 1672. By his sermons and his writings he exerted a great influence in colonial Massachusetts, and according to Mather was “a most incomparable scholar.” His writings include: The Plain Doctrine of the Justification of a Sinner in the Sight of God (1659) and Antisynodalia Scripta Americana (1662). His son, Isaac Chauncy (1632-1712), who removed to England, was a voluminous writer on theological subjects.

There are biographical sketches of President Chauncy in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana. (London, 1702), and in W.C. Fowler’s Memorials of the Chauncys, including President Chauncy (Boston, 1858).

President Chauncy’s great-grandson, CHARLES CHAUNCY (1705-1787), a prominent American theologian, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 1st of January 1705, and graduated at Harvard in 1721. In 1727 he was chosen as the colleague of Thomas Foxcroft (1697-1769) in the pastorate of the First Church of Boston, continuing as pastor of this church until his death. At the time of the “Great Awakening” of 1740-1743 and afterwards, Chauncy was the leader of the so-called “Old Light” party in New England, which strongly condemned the Whitefieldian revival as an outbreak of emotional extravagance. His views were ably presented in his sermon Enthusiasm and in his Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England (1743), written in answer to Jonathan Edwards’s Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742). He also took a leading part in opposition to the projected establishment of an Anglican Episcopate in America, and before and during the American War of Independence he ardently supported the whig or patriot party. Theologically he has been classed as a precursor of the New England Unitarians. He died in Boston on the 10th of February 1787. His publications include: Compleat View of Episcopacy, as Exhibited in the Fathers of the Christian Church, until the close of the Second Century (1771); Salvation of All Men, Illustrated and Vindicated as a Scripture Doctrine (1782); The Mystery Hid from Ages and Generations made manifest by the Gospel-Revelation (1783); and Five Dissertations on the Fall and its Consequences (1785).

See P.L. Ford’s privately printed Bibliotheca Chaunciana (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1884); and Williston Walker’s Ten New England Leaders (New York, 1901).

CHAUNY, a town of northern France in the department of Aisne, 19 m. S. by W. of St Quentin by rail. Pop. (1906) 10,127. The town is situated on the Oise (which here becomes navigable) and at the junction of the canal of St Quentin with the lateral canal of the Oise, and carries on an active trade. It contains mirror-polishing works, subsidiary to the mirror-works of St Gobain, chemical works, sugar manufactories, metal foundries and breweries. Chauny was the scene of much fighting in the Hundred Years’ War.

CHAUTAUQUA, a village on the west shore of Chautauqua Lake in the town of Chautauqua, Chautauqua county, New York, U.S.A. Pop. of the town (1900), 3590; (1905) 3505; (1910) 3515; of the village (1908) about 750. The lake is a beautiful body of water over 1300 ft. above sea-level, 20 m. long, and from a few hundred yards to 3 m. in width. The town of Chautauqua is situated near the north end and is within easy reach by steamboat and electric car connexions with the main railways between the east and the west. The town is known almost solely as being the permanent home of the Chautauqua Institution, a system of popular education founded in 1874 by Lewis Miller (1829-1899) of Akron, Ohio, and Bishop John H. Vincent (b. 1832). The village, covering about three hundred acres of land, is carefully laid out to provide for the work of the Institution.

The Chautauqua Institution began as a Sunday-School Normal Institute, and for nearly a quarter of a century the administration was in the hands of Mr Miller, who was responsible for the business management, and Bishop Vincent, who was head of the instruction department. Though founded by Methodists, in its earliest years it became non-sectarian and has furnished a meeting-ground for members of all sects and denominations. At the very outset the activities of the assembly were twofold: (1) the conducting of a summer school for Sunday-school teachers, and (2) the presentation of a series of correlated lectures and entertainments. Although the movement was and still is primarily religious, it has always been assumed that the best religious education must necessarily take advantage of the best that the educational world can afford in the literatures, arts and sciences. The scope of the plan rapidly broadened, and in 1879 a regular group of schools with graded courses of study was established. At about the same time, also, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, providing a continuous home-reading system, was founded. The season lasts during June, July and August. In 1907 some 325 lectures, concerts, readings and entertainments were presented by a group of over 190 lecturers, readers and musicians, while at the same time 200 courses in the summer schools were offered by a faculty of instructors drawn from the leading colleges and normal schools of the country.

The Chautauqua movement has had an immense influence on education in the United States, an influence which is especially marked in three directions: (1) in the establishment of about 300 local assemblies or “Chautauquas” in the United States patterned after the mother Chautauqua; (2) in the promotion of the idea of summer education, which has been followed by the founding of summer schools or sessions at a large number of American universities, and of various special summer schools, such as the Catholic Summer School of America, with headquarters at Cliff Haven, Clinton county, New York, and the Jewish Chautauqua Society, with headquarters at Buffalo, N.Y.; and (3) in the establishment of numerous correspondence schools patterned in a general way after the system provided by the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

See John Heyl Vincent, The Chautauqua Movement (Boston, 1886), and Frank C. Bray, A Reading Journey through Chautauqua (Chicago, 1905).

CHAUVELIN, BERNARD FRANÇOIS, Marquis de (1766-1832), French diplomatist and administrator. Though master of the king’s wardrobe in 1789, he joined in the Revolution. He served in the army of Flanders, and then was sent to London in February 1792, to induce England to remain neutral in the war which was about to break out between France and “the king of Bohemia and Hungary.” He was well received at first, but after the 10th of August 1792 he was no longer officially recognized at court, and on the execution of Louis XVI. (21st of January 1793) he was given eight days to leave England. After an unsuccessful embassy in Tuscany, he was imprisoned as a suspect during the Terror, but freed after the 9th Thermidor. Under Napoleon he became a member of the council of state, and from 1812 to 1814 he governed Catalonia under the title of intendant-general, being charged to win over the Catalonians to King Joseph Bonaparte. He remained in private life during the Restoration and the Hundred Days. In 1816 he was elected deputy, and spoke in favour of liberty of the press and extension of the franchise. Though he was again deputy in 1827 he played no part in public affairs, and resigned in 1829.

See G. Pallain, La Mission de Talleyrand à Londres en 1792 (Paris, 1889).

CHAUVIGNY, a town of western France, in the department of Vienne, 20 m. E. of Poitiers by rail. Pop. (1906) 2326. The town is finely situated overlooking the Vienne and a small torrent, and has two interesting Romanesque churches, both restored in modern times. There are also ruins of a château of the bishops of Poitiers, and of other strongholds. Near Chauvigny is the curious bone-cavern of Jioux, the entrance to which is fortified by large blocks of stone. The town carries on lime-burning and plaster-manufacture, and there are stone quarries in the vicinity. Trade is in wool and feathers.

CHAUVIN, ÉTIENNE (1640-1725), French Protestant divine, was born at Nîmes on the 18th of April 1640. At the revocation of the Edict of Nantes he retired to Rotterdam, where he was for some years preacher at the Walloon church; in 1695 the elector of Brandenburg appointed him pastor and professor of philosophy, and later inspector of the French college at Berlin, where he enjoyed considerable reputation as a representative of Cartesianism and as a student of physics. His principal work is a laborious Lexicon Rationale, sive Thesaurus Philosophicus (Rotterdam, 1692; new and enlarged edition, Leuwarden, 1713). He also wrote Theses de Cognitione Dei (1662), and started the Nouveau Journal des Savans (1694-1698).

See E. and E. Haag, La France Protestante, vol. iv. (1884).

CHAUVINISM, a term for unreasonable and exaggerated patriotism, the French equivalent of “Jingoism.” The word originally signified idolatry of Napoleon, being taken from a much-wounded veteran, Nicholas Chauvin, who, by his adoration of the emperor, became the type of blind enthusiasm for national military glory.

CHAUX DE FONDS, LA, a large industrial town in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel. It is about 19 m. by rail N. W. of Neuchâtel, and stands at a height of about 3255 ft. in a valley (5 m. long) of the same name in the Jura. Pop. (1900) 35,968 (only 13,659 in 1850); (1905) 38,700, mainly French-speaking and Protestants; of the 6114 “Catholics” the majority are “Old Catholics.” It is a centre of the watch-making industry, especially of gold watch cases; about 70% of those manufactured in Switzerland are turned out here. In 1900 it exported watches to the value of nearly £3,000,000 sterling. There is a school of industrial art (engraving and enamelling watch cases) and a school of watch-making (including instruction in the manufacture of chronometers and other scientific instruments of precision). It boasts of being le plus gros village de l’Europe, and certainly has preserved some of the features of a big village. Léopold Robert (1794-1835), the painter, was born here.

(W. A. B. C.).

CHAVES, a town of northern Portugal, in the district of Villa Real, formerly included in the province of Traz os Montes; 8 m. S. of the Spanish frontier, on the right bank of the river Tamega. Pop. (1900) 6388. Chaves is the ancient Aquae Flaviae, famous for its hot saline springs, which are still in use. A fine Roman bridge of 18 arches spans the Tamega. In the 16th century Chaves contained 20,000 inhabitants; it was long one of the principal frontier fortresses, and in fact derives its present name from the position which makes it the “keys,” or chaves, of the north. One of its churches contains the tomb of Alphonso I. of Portugal (1139-1185). In 1830 the town gave the title of marquess to Pinto da Fonseca, a leader of the Miguelite party.

CHAZELLES, JEAN MATHIEU DE (1657-1710), French hydrographer, was born at Lyons on the 24th of July 1657. He was nominated professor of hydrography at Marseilles in 1685, and in that capacity carried out various coast surveys. In 1693 he was engaged to publish a second volume of the Neptune français, which was to include the hydrography of the Mediterranean. For this purpose he visited the Levant and Egypt. When in Egypt he measured the pyramids, and, finding that the angles formed by the sides of the largest were in the direction of the four cardinal points, he concluded that this position must have been intended, and also that the poles of the earth and meridians had not deviated since the erection of those structures. He was made a member of the Academy in 1695, and died in Paris on the 16th of January 1710.

CHEADLE, a town in the Altrincham parliamentary division of Cheshire, England, 6 m. S. of Manchester, included in the urban district of Cheadle and Gatley. Pop. (1901) 7916. This is one of the numerous townships of modern growth which fringe the southern boundaries of Manchester, and practically form suburbs of that city. Stockport lies immediately to the east. The name occurs in the formerly separate villages of Cheadle Hulme, Cheadle Bulkeley and Cheadle Moseley. There are cotton printing and bleaching works in the locality. The parish church of St Giles, Cheadle, is Perpendicular, containing an altar-tomb of the 15th century for two knights.

CHEADLE, a market town in the Leek parliamentary division of Staffordshire, England, 13 m. N.E. of Stafford, and the terminus of a branch line from Cresswell on the North Staffordshire railway. Pop. (1901) 5186. The Roman Catholic church of St Giles, with a lofty spire, was designed by Pugin and erected in 1846. The interior is lavishly decorated. There are considerable collieries in the neighbourhood, and silk and tape works in the town. In the neighbouring Froghall district limestone is quarried, and there are manufactures of copper. In Cheadle two fairs of ancient origin are held annually.

CHEATING, “the fraudulently obtaining the property of another by any deceitful practice not amounting to felony, which practice is of such a nature that it directly affects, or may directly affect, the public at large” (Stephen, Digest of Criminal Law, chap. xl. §367). Cheating is either a common law or statutory offence, and is punishable as a misdemeanour. An indictment for cheating at common law is of comparatively rare occurrence, and the statutory crime usually presents itself in the form of obtaining money by false pretences (q.v.). The word “cheat” is a variant of “escheat,” i.e. the reversion of land to a lord of the fee through the failure of blood of the tenant. The shortened form “cheater” for “escheator” is found early in the legal sense, and chetynge appears in the Promptorium Parvulorum, c. 1440, as the equivalent of confiscatio. In the 16th century “cheat” occurs in vocabularies of thieves and other slang, and in such works as the Use of Dice-Play (1532). It is frequent in Thomas Harman’s Caveat or Warening for ... Vagabones (1567), in the sense of “thing,” with a descriptive word attached, e.g. smeling chete = nose. In the tract Mihil Mumchance, his Discoverie of the Art of Cheating, doubtfully attributed to Robert Greene (1560-1592), we find that gamesters call themselves cheaters, “borrowing the term from the lawyers.” The sense development is obscure, but it would seem to be due to the extortionate or fraudulent demands made by legal “escheators.”

CHEBICHEV, PAFNUTIY LVOVICH (1821-1894), Russian mathematician, was born at Borovsk on the 26th of May 1821. He was educated at the university of Moscow, and in 1859 became professor of mathematics in the university of St Petersburg, a position from which he retired in 1880. He was chosen a correspondent of the Institute of France in 1860, and succeeded to the high honour of associé étranger in 1874. He was also a foreign member of the Royal Society of London. After N.I. Lobachevskiy he probably ranks as the most distinguished mathematician Russia has produced. In 1841 he published a valuable paper, “Sur la convergence de la serié de Taylor,” in Crelle’s Journal. His best-known papers, however, deal with prime numbers; in one of these (“Sur les nombres premiers,” 1850) he established the existence of limits within which must be comprised the sum of the logarithms of the primes inferior to a given number. Another question to which he devoted much attention was that of obtaining rectilinear motion by linkage. The parallel motion known by his name is a three-bar linkage, which gives a very close approximation to exact rectilinear motion, but in spite of all his efforts he failed to devise one that produced absolutely true rectilinear motion. At last, indeed, he came to the conclusion that to do so was impossible, and in that conviction set to work to find a rigorous proof of the impossibility. While he was engaged on this task the desired linkage, which moved the highest admiration of J.J. Sylvester, was discovered and exhibited to him by one of his pupils, named Lipkin, who, however, it was afterwards found, had been anticipated by A. Peaucellier. Chebichev further constructed an instrument for drawing large circles, and an arithmetical machine with continuous motion. His mathematical writings, which account for some forty entries in the Royal Society’s catalogue of scientific papers, cover a wide range of subjects, such as the theory of probabilities, quadratic forms, theory of integrals, gearings, the construction of geographical maps, &c. He also published a Traité de la théorie des nombres. He died at St Petersburg on the 8th of December 1894.

CHEBOYGAN, a city and the county-seat of Cheboygan county, Michigan, U.S.A., on South Channel (between Lakes Michigan and Huron), at the mouth of Cheboygan river, in the N. part of the lower peninsula. Pop. (1890) 6235; (1900) 6489, of whom 2101 were foreign-born; (1904) 6730; (1910) 6859. It is served by the Michigan Central and the Detroit & Mackinac railways, and by steamboat lines to Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Sault Ste Marie, Green Bay and other lake ports; and is connected by ferry with Mackinac and Pointe aux Pins. During a great part of the year small boats ply between Cheboygan and the head of Crooked Lake, over the “Inland Route.” Cheboygan is situated in a fertile farming region, for which it is a trade centre, and it has lumber mills, tanneries, paper mills, boiler works, and other manufacturing establishments. The water-works are owned and operated by the municipality. The city, at first called Duncan, then Inverness, and finally Cheboygan, was settled in 1846, incorporated as a village in 1871, reincorporated in 1877, and chartered as a city in 1889.

CHECHENZES, Tchetchen, or Khists (Kisti), the last being the name by which they are known to the Georgians, a people of the eastern Caucasus occupying the whole of west Daghestan. They call themselves Nakhtche, “people.” A wild, fierce people, they fought desperately against Russian aggression in the 18th century under Daûd Beg and Oman Khan and Shamyl, and in the 19th under Khazi-Mollah, and even now some are independent in the mountain districts. On the surrender of the chieftain Shamyl to Russia in 1859 numbers of them migrated into Armenia. In physique the Chechenzes resemble the Circassians, and have the same haughtiness of carriage. They are of a generous temperament, very hospitable, but quick to revenge. They are fond of fine clothes, the women wearing rich robes with wide, pink silk trousers, silver bracelets and yellow sandals. Their houses, however, are mere hovels, some dug out of the ground, others formed of boughs and stones. Before their subjection to Russia they were remarkable for their independence of spirit and love of freedom. Everybody was equal, and they had no slaves except prisoners of war. Government in each commune was by popular assembly, and the administration of justice was in the hands of the wronged. Murder and robbery with violence could be expiated only by death, unless the criminal allowed his hair to grow and the injured man consented to shave it himself and take an oath of brotherhood on the Koran. Otherwise the law of vendetta was fully carried out with curious details. The wronged man, wrapped in a white woollen shroud, and carrying a coin to serve as payment to a priest for saying the prayers for the dead, started out in search of his enemy. When the offender was found he must fight to a finish. A remarkable custom among one tribe is that if a betrothed man or woman dies on the eve of her wedding, the marriage ceremony is still performed, the dead being formally united to the living before witnesses, the father, in case it is the girl who dies, never failing to pay her dowry. The religion of the Chechenzes is Mahommedanism, mixed, however, with Christian doctrines and observances. Three churches near Kistin in honour of St George and the Virgin are visited as places of pilgrimage, and rams are there offered as sacrifices. The Chechenzes number upwards of 200,000. They speak a distinct language, of which there are said to be twenty separate dialects.

See Ernest Chanter, Recherches anthropologiques dans le Caucase (Lyon, 1885-1887); D.G. Brinton, Races of Man (1890); Hutchinson, Living Races of Mankind (London, 1901).

CHECKERS, the name by which the game of draughts (q.v.) is known in America. The origin of the name is the same as that of “chess” (q.v.).

CHEDDAR, a small town in the Wells parliamentary division of Somersetshire, England, 22 m. S.W. of Bristol by a branch of the Great Western railway. Pop. (1901) 1975. The town, with its Perpendicular church and its picturesque market-cross, lies below the south-western face of the Mendip Hills, which rise sharply from 600 to 800 ft. To the west stretches the valley of the river Axe, broad, low and flat. A fine gorge opening from the hills immediately upon the site of the town is known as Cheddar cliffs from the sheer walls which flank it; the contrast of its rocks and rich vegetation, and the falls of a small stream traversing it, make up a beautiful scene admired by many visitors. Several stalactitical caverns are also seen, and prehistoric British and Roman relics discovered in and near them are preserved in a small museum. The two caverns most frequently visited are called respectively Cox’s and Gough’s; in each, but especially in the first, there is a remarkable collection of fantastic and beautiful stalactitical forms. There are other caverns of greater extent but less beauty, but their extent is not completely explored. The remains discovered in the caves give evidence of British and Roman settlements at Cheddar (Cedre, Chedare), which was a convenient trade centre. The manor of Cheddar was a royal demesne in Saxon times, and the witenagemot was held there in 966 and 968. It was granted by John in 1204 to Hugh, archdeacon of Wells, who sold it to the bishop of Bath and Wells in 1229, whose successors were overlords until 1553, when the bishop granted it to the king. It is now owned by the marquis of Bath. By a charter of 1231 extensive liberties in the manor of Cheddar were granted to Bishop Joceline, who by a charter of 1235 obtained the right to hold a weekly market and fair. By a charter of Edward III. (1337) Cheddar was removed from the king’s forest of Mendip. The market was discontinued about 1690. Fairs are now held on the 4th of May and the 29th of October under the original grants. The name of Cheddar is given to a well-known species of cheese (see [Dairy]), the manufacture of which began in the 17th century in the town and neighbourhood.

CHEDUBA, or Man-aung, an island in the Bay of Bengal, situated 10 m. from the coast of Arakan, between 18° 40′ and 18° 56′ N. lat., and between 93° 31′ and 93° 50′ E. long. It forms part of the Kyaukpyu district of Arakan. It extends about 20 m. in length from N. to S., and 17 m. from E. to W., and its area of 220 sq. m. supports a population of 26,899 (in 1901). The channel between the island and the mainland is navigable for boats, but not for large vessels. The surface of the interior is richly diversified by hill and dale, and in the southern portion some of the heights exceed a thousand feet in elevation. There are various indications of former volcanic activity, and along the coast are earthy cones covered with green-sward, from which issue springs of muddy water emitting bubbles of gas. Copper, iron and silver ore have been discovered; but the island is chiefly noted for its petroleum wells, the oil derived from which is of excellent quality, and is extensively used in the composition of paint, as it preserves wood from the ravages of insects. Timber is not abundant, but the gamboge tree and the wood-oil tree are found of a good size. Tobacco, cotton, sugar-cane, hemp and indigo are grown, and the staple article is rice, which is of superior quality, and the chief article of export. The inhabitants of the island are mainly Maghs. Cheduba fell to the Burmese in the latter part of the 18th century. From them it was captured in 1824 by the British, whose possession of it was confirmed in 1826 by the treaty concluded with the Burmese at Yandaboo.

CHEERING, the uttering or making of sounds encouraging, stimulating or exciting to action, indicating approval of acclaiming or welcoming persons, announcements of events and the like. The word “cheer” meant originally face, countenance, expression, and came through the O. Fr. into Mid. Eng. in the 13th century from the Low Lat. cara, head; this is generally referred to the Gr. κάρα. Cara is used by the 6th-century poet Flavius Cresconius Corippus, “Postquam venere verendam Caesaris ante caram” (In Laudem Justini Minoris). “Cheer” was at first qualified with epithets, both of joy and gladness and of sorrow; compare “She thanked Dyomede for alle ... his gode chere” (Chaucer, Troylus) with “If they sing ... ’tis with so dull a cheere” (Shakespeare, Sonnets, xcvii.). An early transference in meaning was to hospitality or entertainment, and hence to food and drink, “good cheer.” The sense of a shout of encouragement or applause is a late use. Defoe (Captain Singleton) speaks of it as a sailor’s word, and the meaning does not appear in Johnson. Of the different words or rather sounds that are used in cheering, “hurrah,” though now generally looked on as the typical British form of cheer, is found in various forms in German, Scandinavian, Russian (urá), French (houra). It is probably onomatopoeic in origin; some connect it with such words as “hurry,” “whirl”; the meaning would then be “haste,” to encourage speed or onset in battle. The English “hurrah” was preceded by “huzza,” stated to be a sailor’s word, and generally connected with “heeze,” to hoist, probably being one of the cries that sailors use when hauling or hoisting. The German hoch, seen in full in hoch lebe der Kaiser, &c., the French vive, Italian and Spanish viva, evviva, are cries rather of acclamation than encouragement. The Japanese shout banzai became familiar during the Russo-Japanese War. In reports of parliamentary and other debates the insertion of “cheers” at any point in a speech indicates that approval was shown by members of the House by emphatic utterances of “hear hear.” Cheering may be tumultuous, or it may be conducted rhythmically by prearrangement, as in the case of the “Hip-hip-hip” by way of introduction to a simultaneous “hurrah.”

Rhythmical cheering has been developed to its greatest extent in America in the college yells, which may be regarded as a development of the primitive war-cry; this custom has no real analogue at English schools and universities, but the New Zealand football team in 1907 familiarized English crowds at their matches with a similar sort of war-cry adopted from the Maoris. In American schools and colleges there is usually one cheer for the institution as a whole and others for the different classes. The oldest and simplest are those of the New England colleges. The original yells of Harvard and Yale are identical in form, being composed of rah (abbreviation of hurrah) nine times repeated, shouted in unison with the name of the university at the end. The Yale cheer is given faster than that of Harvard. Many institutions have several different yells, a favourite variation being the name of the college shouted nine times in a slow and prolonged manner. The best known of these variants is the Yale cheer, partly taken from the Frogs of Aristophanes, which runs thus:

The regular cheer of Princeton is:

This is expanded into the “triple cheer”:

The “railroad cheer” is like the foregoing, but begun very slowly and broadly, and gradually accelerated to the end, which is enunciated as fast as possible. Many cheers are formed like that of Toronto University:

Another variety of yell is illustrated by that of the School of Practical Science of Toronto University:

The cheer of the United States Naval Academy is an imitation of a nautical syren. The Amherst cheer is:

Besides the cheers of individual institutions there are some common to all, generally used to compliment some successful athlete or popular professor. One of the oldest examples of these personal cheers is:

followed by a stamping on the floor in the same rhythm.

College yells are used particularly at athletic contests. In any large college there are several leaders, chosen by the students, who stand in front and call for the different songs and cheers, directing with their arms in the fashion of an orchestral conductor. This cheering and singing form one of the distinctive features of inter-collegiate and scholastic athletic contests in America.

CHEESE (Lat. caseus), a solidified preparation from milk, the essential constituent of which is the proteinous or nitrogenous substance casein. All cheese contains in addition some proportion of fatty matter or butter, and in the more valuable varieties the butter present is often greater in amount than the casein. Cheese being thus a compound substance of no definite composition is found in commerce of many different varieties and qualities; and such qualities are generally recognized by the names of the localities in which they are manufactured. The principal distinctions arise from differences in the composition and condition of the milk operated upon, from variations in the method of preparation and curing, and from the use of the milk of other animals besides the cow, as, for example, the goat and the ewe, from the milk of both of which cheese is manufactured on a commercial scale. For details about different cheeses and cheese-making, see [Dairy]. From the Urdu chiz (“thing”) comes the slang expression “the cheese,” meaning “the perfect thing,” apparently from Anglo-Indian usage.

A useful summary of the history and manufacture of all sorts of cheeses, under their different names, is given in Bulletin 105 of the Bureau of Animal Industry (United States Dep. of Agriculture), Varieties of Cheese, by C.F. Doane and H.W. Lawson (Washington, 1908).

CHEESE CLOTH, the name given to cloth, usually made from flax or tow yarns, of an open character, resembling a fine riddle or sieve, used for wrapping cheese. A finer quality and texture is made for women’s gowns. A similar cloth is used for inside linings in the upholstery trade, and for the ground of embroidery.

CHEETA (Chita), or Hunting-Leopard (Cynaelurus jubatus, formerly known as Gueparda jubata), a member of the family Felidae, distinguished by its claws being only partially retractile (see [Carnivora]). The cheeta attains a length of 3 to 4 ft.; it is of a pale fulvous colour, marked with numerous spots of black on the upper surface and sides, and is nearly white beneath. The fur is somewhat crisp, altogether lacking the sleekness which characterizes the fur of the typical cats, and the tail is long and somewhat bushy at the extremity. In confinement the cheeta soon becomes fond of those who are kind to it, and gives evidence of its attachment in an open, dog-like manner. The cheeta is found throughout Africa and southern Asia, and has been employed for centuries in India and Persia in hunting antelopes and other game. According to Sir W. Jones, this mode of hunting originated with Hushing, king of Persia, 865 B.C., and afterwards became so popular that certain of the Mongol emperors were in the habit of being accompanied in their sporting expeditions by a thousand hunting leopards. In prosecuting this sport at the present day the cheeta is conveyed to the field in a low car without sides, hooded and chained like hunting-birds in Europe in the days of falconry. When a herd of deer or antelopes is seen, the car, which bears a close resemblance to the ordinary vehicles used by the peasants, is usually brought within 200 yds. of the game before the latter takes alarm; the cheeta is then let loose and the hood removed from its eyes. No sooner does it see the herd, than dropping from the car on the side remote from its prey, it approaches stealthily, making use of whatever means of concealment the nature of the ground permits, until observed, when making a few gigantic bounds, it generally arrives in the midst of the herd and brings down its victim with a stroke of its paw. The sportsman then approaches, draws off a bowl of the victim’s blood, and puts it before the cheeta, which is again hooded and led back to the car. Should it not succeed in reaching the herd in the first few bounds, it makes no further effort to pursue, but retires seemingly dispirited to the car. In Africa the cheeta is only valued for its skin, which is worn by chiefs and other people of rank. It should be added that in India the name cheeta (chita) is applied also to the leopard.

CHEFFONIER, properly Chiffonier, a piece of furniture differentiated from the sideboard by its smaller size and by the enclosure of the whole of the front by doors. Its name (which comes from the French for a rag-gatherer) suggests that it was originally intended as a receptacle for odds and ends which had no place elsewhere, but it now usually serves the purpose of a sideboard. It is a remote and illegitimate descendant of the cabinet; it has rarely been elegant and never beautiful. It was one of the many curious developments of the mixed taste, at once cumbrous and bizarre, which prevailed in furniture during the Empire period in England. The earliest cheffoniers date from that time; they are usually of rosewood—the favourite timber of that moment; their “furniture” (the technical name for knobs, handles and escutcheons) was most commonly of brass, and there was very often a raised shelf with a pierced brass gallery at the back. The doors were well panelled and often edged with brass-beading, while the feet were pads or claws, or, in the choicer examples, sphinxes in gilded bronze. Cheffoniers are still made in England in cheap forms and in great number.

CHEH-KIANG, an eastern province of China, bounded N. by the province of Kiang-su, E. by the sea, S. by the province of Fu-kien, and W. by the provinces of Kiang-si and Ngan-hui. It occupies an area of about 36,000 sq. m., and contains a population of 11,800,000. With the exception of a small portion of the great delta plain, which extends across the frontier from the province of Kiang-su, and in which are situated the famous cities of Hu Chow, Ka-hing, Hang-chow, Shao-Sing and Ning-po, the province forms a portion of the Nan-shan of south-eastern China, and is hilly throughout. The Nan-shan ranges run through the centre of the province from south-west to north-east, and divide it into a northern portion, the greater part of which is drained by the Tsien-t’ang-kiang, and a southern portion which is chiefly occupied by the Ta-chi basin. The valleys enclosed between the mountain ranges are numerous, fertile, and for the most part of exquisite beauty. The hilly portion of the province furnishes large supplies of tea, and in the plain which extends along the coast, north of Ning-po, a great quantity of silk is produced. In minerals the province is poor. Coal and iron are occasionally met with, and traces of copper ore are to be found in places, but none of these minerals exists in sufficiently large deposits to make mining remunerative. The province, however, produces cotton, rice, ground-nuts, wheat, indigo, tallow and beans in abundance. The principal cities are Hang-chow, which is famed for the beauty of its surroundings, Ning-po, which has been frequented by foreign ships ever since the Portuguese visited it in the 16th century, and Wênchow. Opposite Ning-po, at a distance of about 50 m., lies the island of Chusan, the largest of a group bearing that general name. This island is 21 m. long, and about 50 m. in circumference. It is very mountainous, and is surrounded by numerous islands and islets. On its south side stands the walled town of Ting-hai, in front of which is the principal harbour. The population is returned as 50,000.

CHEKE, SIR JOHN (1514-1557), English classical scholar, was the son of Peter Cheke, esquire-bedell of Cambridge University. He was educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in 1529. While there he adopted the principles of the Reformation. His learning gained him an exhibition from the king, and in 1540, on Henry VIII.’s foundation of the regius professorships, he was elected to the chair of Greek. Amongst his pupils at St John’s were Lord Burghley, who married Cheke’s sister Mary, and Roger Ascham, who in The Schoolmaster gives Cheke the highest praise for scholarship and character. Together with Sir Thomas Smith, he introduced a new method of Greek pronunciation very similar to that commonly used in England in the 19th century. It was strenuously opposed in the University, where the continental method prevailed, and Bishop Gardiner, as chancellor, issued a decree against it (June 1542); but Cheke ultimately triumphed. On the 10th of July 1554, he was chosen as tutor to Prince Edward, and after his pupil’s accession to the throne he continued his instructions. Cheke took a fairly active share in public life; he sat, as member for Bletchingley, for the parliaments of 1547 and 1552-1553; he was made provost of King’s College, Cambridge (April 1, 1548), was one of the commissioners for visiting that university as well as Oxford and Eton, and was appointed with seven divines to draw up a body of laws for the governance of the church. On the 11th of October 1551 he was knighted; in 1553 he was made one of the secretaries of state, and sworn of the privy council. His zeal for Protestantism induced him to follow the duke of Northumberland, and he filled the office of secretary of state for Lady Jane Grey during her nine days’ reign. In consequence Mary threw him into the Tower (July 27, 1553), and confiscated his wealth. He was, however, released on the 13th of September 1554, and granted permission to travel abroad. He went first to Basel, then visited Italy, giving lectures in Greek at Padua, and finally settled at Strassburg, teaching Greek for his living. In the spring of 1556 he visited Brussels to see his wife; on his way back, between Brussels and Antwerp, he and Sir Peter Carew were treacherously seized (May 15) by order of Philip of Spain, hurried over to England, and imprisoned in the Tower. Cheke was visited by two priests and by Dr John Feckenham, dean of St Paul’s, whom he had formerly tried to convert to Protestantism, and, terrified by a threat of the stake, he gave way and was received into the Church of Rome by Cardinal Pole, being cruelly forced to make two public recantations. Overcome with shame, he did not long survive, but died in London on the 13th of September 1557, carrying, as T. Fuller says (Church History), “God’s pardon and all good men’s pity along with him.” About 1547 Cheke married Mary, daughter of Richard Hill, sergeant of the wine-cellar to Henry VIII., and by her he had three sons. The descendants of one of these, Henry, known only for his translation of an Italian morality play Freewyl (Tragedio del Libero Arbitrio) by Nigri de Bassano, settled at Pyrgo in Essex.

Thomas Wilson, in the epistle prefixed to his translation of the Olynthiacs of Demosthenes (1570), has a long and most interesting eulogy of Cheke; and Thomas Nash, in To the Gentlemen Students, prefixed to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589), calls him “the Exchequer of eloquence, Sir Ihon Cheke, a man of men, supernaturally traded in all tongues.” Many of Cheke’s works are still in MS., some have been altogether lost. One of the most interesting from a historical point of view is the Hurt of Sedition how greueous it is to a Communewelth (1549), written on the occasion of Ket’s rebellion, republished in 1569, 1576 and 1641, on the last occasion with a life of the author by Gerard Langbaine. Others are D. Joannis Chrysostomi homiliae duae (1543), D. Joannis Chrysostomi de providentia Dei (1545), The Gospel according to St Matthew ... translated (c. 1550; ed. James Goodwin, 1843), De obitu Martini Buceri (1551), (Leo VI.’s) de Apparatu bellico (Basel, 1554; but dedicated to Henry VIII., 1544), Carmen Heroicum, aut epitaphium in Antonium Deneium (1551), De pronuntiatione Graecae ... linguae (Basel, 1555). He also translated several Greek works, and lectured admirably upon Demosthenes.

His Life was written by John Strype (1821); additions by J. Gough Nichols in Archaeologia (1860), xxxviii. 98, 127.

CHELLIAN, the name given by the French anthropologist G. de Mortillet to the first epoch of the Quaternary period when the earliest human remains are discoverable. The word is derived from the French town Chelles in the department of Seine-et-Marne. The climate of the Chellian epoch was warm and humid as evidenced by the wild growth of fig-trees and laurels. The animals characteristic of the epoch are the Elephas antiquus, the rhinoceros, the cave-bear, the hippopotamus and the striped hyaena. Man existed and belonged to the Neanderthal type. The implements characteristic of the period are flints chipped into leaf-shaped forms and held in the hand when used. The drift-beds of St Acheul (Amiens), of Menchecourt (Abbeville), of Hoxne (Suffolk), and the detrital laterite of Madras are considered by de Mortillet to be synchronous with the Chellian beds.

See Gabriel de Mortillet, Le Préhistorique (1900); Lord Avebury, Prehistoric Times (1900).

CHELMSFORD, FREDERIC THESIGER, 1st Baron (1794-1878), lord chancellor of England, was the third son of Charles Thesiger, and was born in London on the 15th of April 1794. His father, collector of customs at St Vincent’s, was the son of a Saxon gentleman who had migrated to England and become secretary to Lord Rockingham, and was the brother of Sir Frederic Thesiger, naval A.D.C. to Nelson at Copenhagen. Young Frederic Thesiger was originally destined for a naval career, and he served as a midshipman on board the “Cambrian” frigate in 1807 at the second bombardment of Copenhagen. His only surviving brother, however, died about this time, and he became entitled to succeed to a valuable estate in the West Indies, so it was decided that he should leave the navy and study law, with a view to practising in the West Indies and eventually managing his property in person. Another change of fortune, however, awaited him, for a volcano destroyed the family estate, and he was thrown back upon his prospect of a legal practice in the West Indies. He proceeded to enter at Gray’s Inn in 1813, and was called on the 18th of November 1818, another change in his prospects being brought about by the strong advice of Godfrey Sykes, a special pleader in whose chambers he had been a pupil, that he should remain to try his fortune in England. He accordingly joined the home circuit, and soon got into good practice at the Surrey sessions, while he also made a fortunate purchase in buying the right to appear in the old palace court (see [Lord Steward]). In 1824 he distinguished himself by his defence of Joseph Hunt when on his trial at Hertford with John Thurtell for the murder of Wm. Weare; and eight years later at Chelmsford assizes he won a hard-fought action in an ejectment case after three trials, to which he attributed so much of his subsequent success that when he was raised to the peerage he assumed the title Lord Chelmsford. In 1834 he was made king’s counsel, and in 1835 was briefed in the Dublin election inquiry which unseated Daniel O’Connell. In 1840 he was elected M.P. for Woodstock. In 1844 he became solicitor-general, but having ceased to enjoy the favour of the duke of Marlborough, lost his seat for Woodstock and had to find another at Abingdon. In 1845 he became attorney-general, holding the post until the fall of the Peel administration on the 3rd of July 1846. Thus by three days Thesiger missed being chief justice of the common pleas, for on the 6th of July Sir Nicholas Tindal died, and the seat on the bench, which would have been Thesiger’s as of right, fell to the Liberal attorney-general, Sir Thomas Wilde. Sir Frederic Thesiger remained in parliament, changing his seat, however, again in 1852, and becoming member for Stamford. During this period he enjoyed a very large practice at the bar, being employed in many causes célèbres. On Lord Derby coming into office for the second time in 1858, Sir Frederic Thesiger was raised straight from the bar to the lord chancellorship (as were Lord Brougham, Lord Selborne and Lord Halsbury). In the following year Lord Derby resigned and his cabinet was broken up. Again in 1866, on Lord Derby coming into office for the third time, Lord Chelmsford became lord chancellor for a short period. In 1868 Lord Derby retired, and Disraeli, who took his place as prime minister, wished for Lord Cairns as lord chancellor. Lord Chelmsford was very sore at his supersession and the manner of it, but, according to Lord Malmesbury he retired under a compact made before he took office. Ten years later Lord Chelmsford died in London on the 5th of October 1878. Lord Chelmsford had married in 1822 Anna Maria Tinling. He left four sons and three daughters, of whom the eldest, Frederick Augustus, 2nd Baron Chelmsford (1827-1905), earned distinction as a soldier, while the third, Alfred Henry Thesiger (1838-1880) was made a lord justice of appeal and a privy councillor in 1877, at the early age of thirty-nine, but died only three years later.

See Lives of the Chancellors (1908), by J.B. Atlay, who has had the advantage of access to an unpublished autobiography of Lord Chelmsford’s.

CHELMSFORD, a market town and municipal borough, and the county town of Essex, England, in the Chelmsford parliamentary division, 30 m. E.N.E. from London by the Great Eastern railway. Pop. (1901) 12,580. It is situated in the valley of the Chelmer, at the confluence of the Cann, and has communication by the river with Maldon and the Blackwater estuary 11 m. east. Besides the parish church of St Mary, a graceful Perpendicular edifice, largely rebuilt, the town has a grammar school founded by Edward VI., an endowed charity school and a museum. It is the seat of the county assizes and quarter sessions, and has a handsome shire hall; the county gaol is near the town. Its corn and cattle markets are among the largest in the county; for the first a fine exchange is provided. In the centre of the square in which the corn exchange is situated stands a bronze statue of Lord Chief-Justice Tindal (1776-1846), a native of the parish. There are agricultural implement and iron foundries, large electric light and engineering works, breweries, tanneries, maltings and extensive corn mills. There is a race-course 2 m. south of the town. The borough is under a mayor, 6 aldermen and 18 councillors. Area 2308 acres.

A place of settlement since Palaeolithic times, Chelmsford (Chilmersford, Chelmeresford, Chelmesford) owed its importance to its position on the road from London to Colchester. It consisted of two manors: that of Moulsham, which remained in the possession of Westminster Abbey from Saxon times till the reign of Henry VIII., when it was granted to Thomas Mildmay; and that of Bishop’s Hall, which was held by the bishops of London from the reign of Edward the Confessor to 1545, when it passed to the crown and was granted to Thomas Mildmay in 1563. The medieval history of Chelmsford centred round the manor of Bishop’s Hall. Early in the 12th century Bishop Maurice built the bridge over the Chelmer which brought the road from London directly through the town, thus making it an important stopping-place. The town was not incorporated until 1888. In 1225 Chelmsford was made the centre for the collection of fifteenths from the county of Essex, and in 1227 it became the regular seat of assizes and quarter-sessions. Edward I. confirmed Bishop Richard de Gravesend in his rights of frank pledge in Chelmsford in 1290, and in 1395 Richard II. granted the return of writs to Bishop Robert de Braybroke. In 1377 writs were issued for the return of representatives from Chelmsford to parliament, but no return of members has been found. In 1199 the bishop obtained the grant of a weekly market at the yearly rent of one palfrey, and in 1201 that of an annual fair, now discontinued, for four days from the feast of St Philip and St James.

CHELSEA, a western metropolitan borough of London, England, bounded E. by the city of Westminster, N.W. by Kensington, S.W. by Fulham, and S. by the river Thames. Pop. (1901) 73,842. Its chief thoroughfare is Sloane Street, containing handsome houses and good shops, running south from Knightsbridge to Sloane Square. Hence King’s Road leads west, a wholly commercial highway, named in honour of Charles II., and recalling the king’s private road from St James’s Palace to Fulham, which was maintained until the reign of George IV. The main roads south communicate with the Victoria or Chelsea, Albert and Battersea bridges over the Thames. The beautiful Chelsea embankment, planted with trees and lined with fine houses and, in part, with public gardens, stretches between Victoria and Battersea bridges. The better residential portion of Chelsea is the eastern, near Sloane Street and along the river; the western, extending north to Fulham Road, is mainly a poor quarter.

Chelsea, especially the riverside district, abounds in historical associations. At Cealchythe a synod was held in 785. A similar name occurs in a Saxon charter of the 11th century and in Domesday; in the 16th century it is Chelcith. The later termination ey or ea was associated with the insular character of the land, and the prefix with a gravel bank (ceosol; cf. Chesil Bank, Dorsetshire) thrown up by the river; but the early suffix hythe is common in the meaning of a haven. The manor was originally in the possession of Westminster Abbey, but its history is fragmentary until Tudor times. It then came into the hands of Henry VIII., passed from him to his wife Catharine Parr, and thereafter had a succession of owners, among whom were the Howards, to whom it was granted by Queen Elizabeth, and the Cheynes, from whom it was purchased in 1712 by Sir Hans Sloane, after which it passed to the Cadogans. The memorials which crowd the picturesque church and churchyard of St Luke near the river, commonly known as the Old Church, to a great extent epitomize the history of Chelsea. Such are those of Sir Thomas More (d. 1535); Lord Bray, lord of the manor (1539), his father and son; Lady Jane Guyldeford, duchess of Northumberland, who died “at her maner of Chelse” in 1555; Lord and Lady Dacre (1594-1595); Sir John Lawrence (1638); Lady Jane Cheyne (1698); Francis Thomas, “director of the china porcelain manufactory, Lawrence Street, Chelsea” (1770); Sir Hans Sloane (1753); Thomas Shadwell, poet laureate (1602); Woodfall the printer of Junius (1844), and many others. More’s tomb is dated 1532, as he set it up himself, though it is doubtful whether he lies beneath it. His house was near the present Beaufort Street. In the 18th and 19th centuries Chelsea, especially the parts about the embankment and Cheyne Walk, was the home of many eminent men, particularly of writers and artists, with whom this pleasant quarter has long been in favour. Thus in the earlier part of the period named, Atterbury and Swift lived in Church Lane, Steele and Smollett in Monmouth House. Later, the names of Turner, Rossetti, Whistler, Leigh Hunt, Carlyle (whose house in Cheyne Row is preserved as a public memorial), Count D’Orsay, and Isambard Brunel, are intimately connected with Chelsea. At Lindsey House Count Zinzendorf established a Moravian Society (c. 1750). Sir Robert Walpole’s residence was extant till 1810; and till 1824 the bishops of Winchester had a palace in Cheyne Walk. Queen’s House, the home of D.G. Rossetti (when it was called Tudor House), is believed to take name from Catharine of Braganza.

Chelsea was noted at different periods for two famous places of entertainment, Ranelagh (q.v.) in the second half of the 18th century, and Cremorne Gardens (q.v.) in the middle of the 19th. Don Saltero’s museum, which formed the attraction of a popular coffee-house, was formed of curiosities from Sir Hans Sloane’s famous collections. It was Sloane who gave to the Apothecaries’ Company the ground which they had leased in 1673 for the Physick Garden, which is still extant, but ceased in 1902 to be maintained by the Company. At Chelsea Sir John Danvers (d. 1655) introduced the Italian style of gardening which was so greatly admired by Bacon and soon after became prevalent in England. Chelsea was formerly famous for a manufacture of buns; the original Chelsea bun-house, claiming royal patronage, stood until 1839, and one of its successors until 1888. The porcelain works existed for some 25 years before 1769, when they were sold and removed to Derby. Examples of the original Chelsea ware (see [Ceramics]) are of great value.

Of buildings and institutions the most notable is Chelsea Royal Hospital for invalid soldiers, initiated by Charles II. (according to tradition on the suggestion of Nell Gwynne), and opened in 1694. The hospital itself accommodates upwards of 500 men, but a system of out-pensioning was found necessary from the outset, and now relieves large numbers throughout the empire. The picturesque building by Wren stands in extensive grounds, which include the former Ranelagh Gardens. A theological college (King James’s) formerly occupied the site; it was founded in 1610 and was intended to be of great size, but the scheme was unsuccessful, and only a small part of the buildings was erected. In the vicinity are the Chelsea Barracks (not actually in the borough). The Royal Military Asylum for boys, commonly called the Duke of York’s school, founded in 1801 by Frederick, duke of York, for the education of children connected with the army, was removed in 1909 to new quarters at Dover. Other institutions are the Whitelands training college for school-mistresses, in which Ruskin took deep interest; the St Mark’s college for school-masters; the Victoria and the Cheyne hospitals for children, a cancer hospital, the South-western polytechnic, and a public library containing an excellent collection relative to local history.

The parliamentary borough of Chelsea returns one member, and includes, as a detached portion, Kensal Town, north of Kensington. The borough council consists of a mayor, 6 aldermen and 36 councillors. Area, 659.6 acres.

CHELSEA, a city of Suffolk county, Massachusetts, U.S.A., a suburb of Boston. Pop. (1890) 27,909; (1900) 34,072, of whom 11,203 were foreign-born; (1910) 32,452. It is situated on a peninsula between the Mystic and Chelsea rivers, and Charlestown and East Boston, and is connected with East Boston and Charlestown by bridges. It is served by the Boston & Maine and (for freight) by the Boston & Albany railways. The United States maintains here naval and marine hospitals, and the state a soldiers’ home. Chelsea’s interests are primarily industrial. The value of the city’s factory products in 1905 was $13,879,159, the principal items being rubber and elastic goods ($3,635,211) and boots and shoes ($2,044,250.) The manufacture of stoves, and of mucilage and paste are important industries. Flexible tubing for electric wires (first made at Chelsea 1889) and art tiles are important products. The first settlement was established in 1624 by Samuel Maverick (c. 1602-c. 1670), the first settler (about 1629) of Noddle’s Island (or East Boston), and one of the first slave-holders in Massachusetts; a loyalist and Churchman, in 1664 he was appointed with three others by Charles II. on an important commission sent to Massachusetts and the other New England colonies (see [ Nicolls, Richard]), and spent the last years of his life in New York. Until 1739, under the name of Winnisimmet, Chelsea formed a part of Boston, but in that year it was made a township; it became a city in 1857. In May 1775 a British schooner in the Mystic defended by a force of marines was taken by colonial militia under General John Stark and Israel Putnam,—one of the first conflicts of the War of Independence. A terrible fire swept the central part of the city on the 12th of April 1908.

See Mellen Chamberlain (and others), History of Chelsea (2 vols., Boston, 1908), published by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

CHELTENHAM, a municipal and parliamentary borough of Gloucestershire, England, 109 m. W. by N. of London by the Great Western railway; served also by the west and north line of the Midland railway. Pop. (1901) 49,439. The town is well situated in the valley of the Chelt, a small tributary of the Severn, under the high line of the Cotteswold Hills to the east, and is in high repute as a health resort. Mineral springs were accidentally discovered in 1716. The Montpellier and Pittville Springs supply handsome pump rooms standing in public gardens, and are the property of the corporation. The Montpellier waters are sulphated, and are valuable for their diuretic effect, and as a stimulant to the liver and alimentary canal. The alkaline-saline waters of Pittville are efficacious against diseases resulting from excess of uric acid. The parish church of St Mary dates from the 14th century, but is almost completely modernized. The town, moreover, is wholly modern in appearance. Assembly rooms opened in 1815 by the duke of Wellington were removed in 1901. A new town hall, including a central spa and assembly rooms, was opened in 1903. There are numerous other handsome buildings, especially in High Street, and the Promenade forms a beautiful broad thoroughfare, lined with trees. The town is famous as an educational centre. Cheltenham College (1842) provides education for boys in three departments, classical, military and commercial; and includes a preparatory school. The Ladies’ College (1854), long conducted by Miss Beale (q.v.), is one of the most successful in England. The Normal Training College was founded in 1846 for the training of teachers, male and female, in national and parochial schools. A free grammar school was founded in 1568 by Richard Pate, recorder of Gloucester. The art gallery and museum may be mentioned also. The parliamentary borough returns one member. The municipal borough is under a mayor, 6 aldermen and 18 councillors. Area, 4726 acres. The urban district of Charlton Kings (pop. 3806) forms a south-eastern suburb of Cheltenham.

The site of a British village and burying-ground, Cheltenham (Celtanhomme, Chiltham, Chelteham) was a village with a church in 803. The manor belonged to the crown; it was granted to Henry de Bohun, earl of Hereford, late in the 12th century, but in 1199 was exchanged for other lands with the king. It was granted to William de Longespée, earl of Salisbury, in 1219, but resumed on his death and granted in dower to Eleanor of Provence in 1243. In 1252 the abbey of Fécamp purchased the manor, and it afterwards belonged to the priory of Cormeille, but was confiscated in 1415 as the possession of an alien priory, and was granted in 1461 to the abbey of Lyon, by which it was held until, once more returning to the crown at the Dissolution, it was granted to the family of Dutton. The town is first mentioned in 1223, when William de Longespée leased the benefit of the markets, fairs and hundred of Cheltenham to the men of the town for three years; the lease was renewed by Henry III. in 1226, and again in 1230 for ten years. A market town in the time of Camden, it was governed by commissioners from the 18th century in 1876, when it was incorporated; it became a parliamentary borough in 1832. Henry III. in 1230 had granted to the men of Cheltenham a market on each Thursday, and a fair on the vigil, feast and morrow of St James. Although Camden mentions a considerable trade in malt, the spinning of woollen yarn was the only industry in 1779. After the discovery of springs in 1716, and the erection of a pump-room in 1738, Cheltenham rapidly became fashionable, the visit of George III. and the royal princesses in 1788 ensuring its popularity.

See S. Moreau, A Tour to Cheltenham Spa (Bath, 1738).

CHELYABINSK, a town of Russia, in the Orenburg government, at the east foot of the Urals, is the head of the Siberian railway, 624 m. by rail E.N.E. of Samara and 154 m. by rail S.S.E. of Ekaterinburg. Pop. (1900) 25,505. It has tanneries and distilleries, and is the centre of the trade in corn and produce of cattle for the Ural iron-works. The town was founded in 1658.

CHELYS (Gr. χέλυς, tortoise; Lat. testudo), the common lyre of the ancient Greeks, which had a convex back of tortoiseshell or of wood shaped like the shell. The word chelys was used in allusion to the oldest lyre of the Greeks which was said to have been invented by Hermes. According to tradition he was attracted by sounds of music while walking on the banks of the Nile, and found they proceeded from the shell of a tortoise across which were stretched tendons which the wind had set in vibration (Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 47-51). The word has been applied arbitrarily since classic times to various stringed instruments, some bowed and some twanged, probably owing to the back being much vaulted. Kircher (Musurgia, i. 486) applied the name of chelys to a kind of viol with eight strings. Numerous representations of the chelys lyre or testudo occur on the Greek vases, in which the actual tortoiseshell is depicted; a good illustration is given in Le Antichità, di Ercolano (vol. i. pl. 43). Propertius (iv. 6) calls the instrument the lyra testudinea. Scaliger (on Manilius, Astronomicon, Proleg. 420) was probably the first writer to draw attention to the difference, between chelys and cithara (q.v.).

(K. S.)

CHEMICAL ACTION, the term given to any process in which change in chemical composition occurs. Such processes may be set up by the application of some form of energy (heat, light, electricity, &c.) to a substance, or by the mixing of two or more substances together. If two or more substances be mixed one of three things may occur. First, the particles may be mechanically intermingled, the degree of association being dependent upon the fineness of the particles, &c. Secondly, the substances may intermolecularly penetrate, as in the case of gas-mixtures and solutions. Or thirdly they may react chemically. The question whether, in any given case, we have to deal with a physical mixture or a chemical compound is often decided by the occurrence of very striking phenomena. To take a simple example:—oxygen and hydrogen are two gases which may be mixed in all proportions at ordinary temperatures, and it is easy to show that the properties of the products are simply those of mixtures of the two free gases. If, however, an electric spark be passed through the mixtures, powerful chemical union ensues, with its concomitants, great evolution of heat and consequent rise of temperature, and a compound, water, is formed which presents physical and chemical properties entirely different from those of its constituents.

In general, powerful chemical forces give rise to the evolution of large quantities of heat, and the properties of the resulting substance differ vastly more from those of its components than is the case with simple mixtures. This constitutes a valuable criterion as to whether mere mixture is involved on the one hand, or strong chemical union on the other. When, however, the chemical forces are weak and the reaction, being incomplete, leads to a state of chemical equilibrium, in which all the reacting substances are present side by side, this criterion vanishes. For example, the question whether a salt combines with water molecules when dissolved in water cannot be said even yet to be fully settled, and, although there can be no doubt that solution is, in many cases, attended by chemical processes, still we possess as yet no means of deciding, with certainty, how many molecules of water have bound themselves to a single molecule of the dissolved substance (solute). On the other hand, we possess exact methods of testing whether gases or solutes in dilute solution react one with another and of determining the equilibrium state which is attained. For if one solute react with another on adding the latter to its solution, then corresponding to the decrease of its concentration there must also be a decrease of vapour pressure, and of solubility in other solvents; further, in the case of a mixture of gases, the concentration of each single constituent follows from its solubility in some suitable solvent. We thus obtain the answer to the question: whether the concentration of a certain constituent has decreased during mixing, i.e. whether it has reacted chemically.

When a compound can be obtained in a pure state, analysis affords us an important criterion of its chemical nature, for unlike mixtures, the compositions of which are always variable within wider or narrower limits, chemical compounds present definite and characteristic mass-relations, which find full expression in the atomic theory propounded by Dalton (see [Atom]). According to this theory a mixture is the result of the mutual interpenetration of the molecules of substances, which remain unchanged as such, whilst chemical union involves changes more deeply seated, inasmuch as new molecular species appear. These new substances, if well-defined chemical compounds, have a perfectly definite composition and contain a definite, generally small, number of elementary atoms, and therefore the law of constant proportions follows at once, and the fact that only an integral number of atoms of any element may enter into the composition of any molecule determines the law of multiple proportions.

These considerations bring us face to face with the task of more closely investigating the nature of chemical forces, in other words, of answering the question: Nature of chemical forces. what forces guide the atoms in the formation of a new molecular species? This problem is still far from being completely answered, so that a few general remarks must suffice here.

It is remarkable that among the most stable chemical compounds, we find combinations of atoms of one and the same element. Thus, the stability of the di-atomic molecule N2 is so great, that no trace of dissociation has yet been proved even at the highest temperatures, and as the constituent atoms of the molecule N2 must be regarded as absolutely identical, it is clear that “polar” forces cannot be the cause of all chemical action. On the other hand, especially powerful affinities are also at work when so-called electro-positive and electro-negative elements react. The forces which here come into play appear to be considerably greater than those just mentioned; for instance, potassium fluoride is perhaps the most stable of all known compounds.

It is also to be noticed that the combinations of the electro-negative elements (metalloids) with one another exhibit a metalloid character, and also we find, in the mutual combinations of metals, all the characteristics of the metallic state; but in the formation of a salt from a metal and a metalloid we have an entirely new substance, quite different from its components; and at the same time, the product is seen to be an electrolyte, i.e. to have the power of splitting up into a positively and a negatively charged constituent when dissolved in some solvent. These considerations lead to the conviction that forces of a “polar” origin play an important part here, and indeed we may make the general surmise that in the act of chemical combination forces of both a non-polar and polar nature play a part, and that the latter are in all probability identical with the electric forces.

It now remains to be asked—what are the laws which govern the action of these forces? This question is of fundamental importance, since it leads directly to those laws which regulate the chemical process. Besides the already mentioned fundamental law of chemical combination, that of constant and multiple proportions, there is the law of chemical mass-action, discovered by Guldberg and Waage in 1867, which we will now develop from a kinetic standpoint.

Kinetic Basis of the Law of Chemical Mass-action.—We will assume that the molecular species A1, A2, ... A′1, A′2, ... are present in a homogeneous system, where they can react on each other only according to the scheme

A1 + A2 + ... ↔ A′1 + A′2 + ...;

this is a special case of the general equation

n1A1 + n2A2 + ... ↔ n′1A′1 + n′2A′2 + ...,

in which only one molecule of each substance takes part in the reaction. The reacting substances may be either gaseous or form a liquid mixture, or be dissolved in some selected solvent; but in each case we may state the following considerations regarding the course of the reaction. For a transformation to take place from left to right in the sense of the reaction equation, all the molecules A1, A2, ... must clearly collide at one point; otherwise no reaction is possible, since we shall not consider side-reactions. Such a collision need not of course bring about that transposition of the atoms of the single molecules which constitutes the above reaction. Much rather must it be of such a kind as is favourable to that loosening of the bonds that bind the atoms in the separate molecules, which must precede this transposition. Of a large number of such collisions, therefore, only a certain smaller number will involve a transposition from left to right in the sense of the equation. But this number will be the same under the same external conditions, and the greater the more numerous the collisions; in fact a direct ratio must exist between the two. Bearing in mind now, that the number of collisions must be proportional to each of the concentrations of the bodies A1, A2, ..., and therefore, on the whole, to the product of all these concentrations, we arrive at the conclusion that the velocity v of the transposition from left to right in the sense of the reaction equation is v = kc1c2 ..., in which c1, c2, ... represent the spatial concentrations, i.e. the number of gram-molecules of the substances A1, A2, ... present in one litre, and k is, at a given temperature, a constant which may be called the velocity-coefficient.

Exactly the same consideration applies to the molecules A′1, A′2.... Here the velocity of the change from right to left in the sense of the reaction-equation increases with the number of collisions of all these molecules at one point, and this is proportional to the product of all the concentrations. If k’ denotes the corresponding proportionality-factor, then the velocity v’ of the change from right to left in the sense of the reaction-equation is v′ = k′c′1c′2.... These spatial concentrations are often called the “active masses” of the reacting components. Hence the reaction-velocity in the sense of the reaction-equation from left to right, or the reverse, is proportional to the product of the “active-masses” of the left-hand or right-hand components respectively.

Neither v nor v′ can be separately investigated, and the measurements of the course of a reaction always furnish only the difference of these two quantities. The reaction-velocity Law of chemical statics. actually observed represents the difference of these two partial reaction-velocities, whilst the amount of change observed during any period of time is equal to the change in the one direction, minus the change in the opposite direction. It must not be assumed, however, that on the attainment of equilibrium all action has ceased, but rather that the velocity of change in one direction has become equal to that in the opposite direction, with the result that no further total change can be observed, i.e. the system has reached equilibrium, for which the relation v - v′ = 0 must therefore hold, or what is the same thing

kc1c2 ... = k’c’1c’2 ...,

this is the fundamental law of chemical statics.

The conception that the equilibrium is not to be attributed to absolute indifference between the reacting bodies, but that these continue to exert their mutual actions undiminished and the opposing changes now balance, is of fundamental significance in the interpretation of changes of matter in general. This is generally expressed in the form: the equilibrium in this and other analogous cases is not static but dynamic. This conception was a direct result of the kinetic-molecular considerations, and was applied with special success to the development of the kinetic theory of gases. Thus with Clausius, we conceive the equilibrium of water-vapour with water, not as if neither water vaporized nor vapour condensed, but rather as though the two processes went on unhindered in the equilibrium state, i.e. during contact of saturated vapour with water, in a given time, as many water molecules passed through the water surface in one direction as in the opposite direction. This view, as applied to chemical changes, was first advanced by A.W. Williamson (1851), and further developed by C.M. Guldberg and P. Waage and others.

From the previous considerations it follows that the reaction-velocity at every moment, i.e. the velocity with which the chemical process advances towards the Law of chemical kinetics. equilibrium state, is given by the equation

V = v - v′ = kc1c2 ... - k′c′1c′2 ...;

this states the fundamental law of chemical kinetics.

The equilibrium equation is simply a special case of this more general one, and results when the total velocity is written zero, just as in analytical mechanics the equilibrium conditions follow at once by specialization of the general equations of motion.

No difficulty presents itself in the generalization of the previous equations for the reaction which proceeds after the scheme

n1A1 + n2A2 + ... = n′1A′1 + n′2A′2 + ...,

where n1, n2, ..., n′1, n′2, ... denote the numbers of molecules of the separate substances which take part in the reaction, and are therefore whole, mostly small, numbers (generally one or two, seldom three or more). Here as before, v and v′ are to be regarded as proportional to the number of collisions at one point of all molecules necessary to the respective reaction, but now n1 molecules of A1, n2 molecules of A2, &c., must collide for the reaction to advance from left to right in the sense of the equation; and similarly n′1 molecules of A′1, n′2 molecules of A′2, &c., must collide for the reaction to proceed in the opposite direction. If we consider the path of a single, arbitrarily chosen molecule over a certain time, then the number of its collisions with other similar molecules will be proportional to the concentration C of that kind of molecule to which it belongs. The number of encounters between two molecules of the kind in question, during the same time, will be in general C times as many, i.e. the number of encounters of two of the same molecules is proportional to the square of the concentration C; and generally, the number of encounters of n molecules of one kind must be regarded as proportional to the nth power of C, i.e. Cn.

The number of collisions of n1 molecules of A1, n2 molecules of A2 ... is accordingly proportional to C1n1C2n2 ..., and the reaction-velocity corresponding to it is therefore

v = kC1n1C2n2 ...,

and similarly the opposed reaction-velocity is

v′ = k′C′1n′1C′2n′2 ...;

the resultant reaction-velocity, being the difference of these two partial velocities, is therefore

V = v - v′ = kC1n1C2n2 ... - k′C′1n′1C′2n′2 ...

This is the most general expression of the law of chemical mass-action, for the case of homogeneous systems.

Equating V to zero, we obtain the equation for the equilibrium state, viz.

C1n1C2n2 ... / C′1n′1C′2n′2 ... = k / k′ = K;

K is called the “equilibrium-constant.”

These formulae hold for gases and for dilute solutions, but assume the system to be homogeneous, i.e. to be either a homogeneous gas-mixture or a homogeneous dilute solution. Limitations and applications of the laws. The case in which other states of matter share in the equilibrium permits of simple treatment when the substances in question may be regarded as pure, and consequently as possessing definite vapour-pressures or solubilities at a given temperature. In this case the molecular species in question, which is, at the same time, present in excess and is hence usually, called a Bodenkörper, must possess a constant concentration in the gas-space or solution. But since the left-hand side of the last equation contains only variable quantities, it is simplest and most convenient to absorb these constant concentrations into the equilibrium-constant; whence we have the rule: leave the molecular species present as Bodenkörper out of account, when determining the concentration-product. Guldberg and Waage expressed this in the form “the active mass of a solid substance is constant.” The same is true of liquids when these participate in the pure state in the equilibrium, and possess therefore a definite vapour-pressure or solubility. When, finally, we are not dealing with a dilute solution but with any kind of mixture whatever, it is simplest to apply the law of mass-action to the gaseous mixture in equilibrium with this. The composition of the liquid mixture is then determinable when the vapour-pressures of the separate components are known. This, however, is not often the case; but in principle this consideration is important, since it involves the possibility of extending the law of chemical mass-action from ideal gas-mixtures and dilute solutions, for which it primarily holds, to any other system whatever.

The more recent development of theoretical chemistry, as well as the detailed study of many chemical processes which have found technical application, leads more and more convincingly to the recognition that in the law of chemical mass-action we have a law of as fundamental significance as the law of constant and multiple proportions. It is therefore not without interest to briefly touch upon the development of the doctrine of chemical affinity.

Historical Development of the Law of Mass-action.—The theory developed by Torbern Olof Bergman in 1775 must be regarded as the first attempt of importance to account for the mode of action of chemical forces. The essential principle of this may be stated as follows:—The magnitude of chemical affinity may be expressed by a definite number; if the affinity of the substance A is greater for the substance B than for the substance C, then the latter (C) will be completely expelled by B from its compound with A, in the sense of the equation A·C + B = A·B + C. This theory fails, however, to take account of the influence of the relative masses of the reacting substances, and had to be abandoned as soon as such an influence was noticed. An attempt to consider this factor was made by Claude Louis Berthollet (1801), who introduced the conception of chemical equilibrium. The views of this French chemist may be summed up in the following sentence:—Different substances have different affinities for each other, which only come into play on immediate contact. The condition of equilibrium depends not only upon the chemical affinity, but also essentially upon the relative masses of the reacting substances.

Essentially, Berthollet’s idea is to-day the guiding principle of the doctrine of affinity. This is especially true of our conceptions of many reactions which, in the sense of Bergman’s idea, proceed to completion, i.e. until the reacting substances are all used up; but only for this reason, viz. that one or more of the products of the reaction is removed from the reaction mixture (either by crystallization, evaporation or some other process), and hence the reverse reaction becomes impossible. Following Berthollet’s idea, two Norwegian investigators, C.M. Guldberg and Peter Waage, succeeded in formulating the influence of the reacting masses in a simple law—the law of chemical mass-action already defined. The results of their theoretical and experimental studies were published at Christiania in 1867 (Études sur les affinités chimiques); this work marks a new epoch in the history of chemistry. Even before this, formulae to describe the progress of certain chemical reactions, which must be regarded as applications of the law of mass-action, had been put forward by Ludwig Wilhelmy (1850), and by A.G. Vernon-Harcourt and William Esson (1856), but the service of Guldberg and Waage in having grasped the law in its full significance and logically applied it in all directions, remains of course undiminished. Their treatise remained quite unknown; and so it happened that John Hewitt Jellett (1873), J.H. van’t Hoff (1877), and others independently developed the same law. The thermodynamic basis of the law of mass-action is primarily due to Horstmann, J. Willard Gibbs and van’t Hoff.

Applications.—Let us consider, as an example of the application of the law of mass-action, the case of the dissociation of water-vapour, which takes place at high temperatures in the sense of the equation 2H2O = 2H2 + O2. Representing the concentrations of the corresponding molecular species by [H2], &c., the expression [H2]² [O2] / [H2O]² must be constant at any given temperature. This shows that the dissociation is set back by increasing the pressure; for if the concentrations of all three kinds of molecules be increased by strong compression, say to ten times the former amounts, then the numerator is increased one thousand, the denominator only one hundred times. Hence if the original equilibrium-constant is to hold, the dissociation must go back, and, what is more, by an exactly determinable amount. At 2000° C. water-vapour is only dissociated to the extent of a few per cent; therefore, even when only a small excess of oxygen or hydrogen be present, the numerator in the foregoing expression is much increased, and it is obvious that in order to restore the equilibrium state, the concentration of the other component, hydrogen or oxygen as the case may be, must diminish. In the case of slightly dissociated substances, therefore, even a relatively small excess of one component is sufficient to set back the dissociation substantially.

Chemical Kinetics.—It has been already mentioned that the law of chemical mass-action not only defines the conditions for chemical equilibrium, but contains at the same time the principles of chemical kinetics. The previous considerations show indeed that the actual progress of the reaction is determined by the difference of the reaction-velocities in the one and the other (opposed) direction, in the sense of the corresponding reaction-equation. Since the reaction-velocity is given by the amount of chemical change in a small interval of time, the law of chemical mass-action supplies a differential equation, which, when integrated, provides formulae which, as numerous experiments have shown, very happily summarize the course of the reaction. For the simplest case, in which a single species of molecule undergoes almost complete decomposition, so that the reaction-velocity in the reverse direction may be neglected, we have the simple equation

dx/dt = k(a-x)

and if x = 0 when t = 0 we have by integration

k = t-1 log {a / (a-x) }.