THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

A DICTIONARY OF ARTS, SCIENCES, LITERATURE AND GENERAL INFORMATION

ELEVENTH EDITION

VOLUME XVI SLICE IV
Lefebvre, Tanneguy to Letronne, Jean Antoine

Articles in This Slice

LEFEBVRE, TANNEGUY (Tanaquillus Faber) (1615-1672), French classical scholar, was born at Caen. After completing his studies in Paris, he was appointed by Cardinal Richelieu inspector of the printing-press at the Louvre. After Richelieu’s death he left Paris, joined the Reformed Church, and in 1651 obtained a professorship at the academy of Saumur, which he filled with great success for nearly twenty years. His increasing ill-health and a certain moral laxity (as shown in his judgment on Sappho) led to a quarrel with the consistory, as a result of which he resigned his professorship. Several universities were eager to obtain his services, and he had accepted a post offered him by the elector palatine at Heidelberg, when he died suddenly on the 12th of September, 1672. One of his children was the famous Madame Dacier. Lefebvre, who was by no means a typical student in dress or manners, was a highly cultivated man and a thorough classical scholar. He brought out editions of various Greek and Latin authors—Longinus, Anacreon and Sappho, Virgil, Horace, Lucretius and many others. His most important original works are: Les Vies des poètes Grecs (1665); Méthode pour commencer les humanités Grecques et Latines (2nd ed., 1731), of which several English adaptations have appeared; Epistolae Criticae (1659).

In addition to the Mémoires pour ... la vie de Tanneguy Lefebvre, by F. Graverol (1686), see the article in the Nouvelle biographie générale, based partly on the MS. registers of the Saumur Académie.

LEFEBVRE-DESNOËTTES, CHARLES, Comte (1773-1822), French cavalry general, joined the army in 1792 and served with the armies of the North, of the Sambre-and-Meuse and Rhine-and-Moselle in the various campaigns of the Revolution. Six years later he had become captain and aide-de-camp to General Bonaparte. At Marengo he won further promotion, and at Austerlitz became colonel, serving also in the Prussian campaigns of 1806-1807. In 1808 he was made general of brigade and created a count of the Empire. Sent with the army into Spain, he conducted the first and unsuccessful siege of Saragossa. The battlefield of Tudela showed his talents to better advantage, but towards the end of 1808 he was taken prisoner in the action of Benavente by the British cavalry under Paget (later Lord Uxbridge, and subsequently Marquis of Anglesey). For over two years he remained a prisoner in England, living on parole at Cheltenham. In 1811 he escaped, and in the invasion of Russia in 1812 was again at the head of his cavalry. In 1813 and 1814 his men distinguished themselves in most of the great battles, especially La Rothière and Montmirail. He joined Napoleon in the Hundred Days and was wounded at Waterloo. For his part in these events he was condemned to death, but he escaped to the United States, and spent the next few years farming in Louisiana. His frequent appeals to Louis XVIII. eventually obtained his permission to return, but the “Albion,” the vessel on which he was returning to France, went down off the coast of Ireland with all on board on the 22nd of May 1822.

LE FÈVRE, JEAN (c. 1395-1468), Burgundian chronicler and seigneur of Saint Remy, is also known as Toison d’or from his long connexion with the order of the Golden Fleece. Of noble birth, he adopted the profession of arms and with other Burgundians fought in the English ranks at Agincourt. In 1430, on the foundation of the order of the Golden Fleece by Philip III. the Good, duke of Burgundy, Le Fèvre was appointed its king of arms and he soon became a very influential person at the Burgundian court. He frequently assisted Philip in conducting negotiations with foreign powers, and he was an arbiter in tournaments and on all questions of chivalry, where his wide knowledge of heraldry was highly useful. He died at Bruges on the 16th of June 1468.

Le Fèvre wrote a Chronique, or Histoire de Charles VI., roy de France. The greater part of this chronicle is merely a copy of the work of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, but Le Fèvre is an original authority for the years between 1428 and 1436 and makes some valuable additions to our knowledge, especially about the chivalry of the Burgundian court. He is more concise than Monstrelet, but is equally partial to the dukes of Burgundy. The Chronique has been edited by F. Morand for the Société de l’histoire de France (Paris, 1876). Le Fèvre is usually regarded as the author of the Livre des faites de Jacques de Lalaing.

LEG (a word of Scandinavian origin, from the Old Norwegian leggr, cf. Swed. lägg, Dan. laég; the O. Eng. word was sceanca, shank), the general name for those limbs in animals which support and move the body, and in man for the lower limbs of the body (see [Anatomy], Superficial and Artistic; [Skeleton], Appendicular; [Muscular System]). The word is in common use for many objects which resemble the leg in shape or function. As a slang term, “leg,” a shortened form of “blackleg,” has been in use since the end of the 18th century for a swindler, especially in connexion with racing or gambling. The term “blackleg” is now also applied by trade-unionists to a workman who, during a strike or lockout, continues working or is brought to take the place of the withdrawn workers.

LEGACY (Lat. legatum), in English law, some particular thing or things given or left by a testator in his will, to be paid or performed by his executor or administrator. The word is primarily applicable to gifts of personalty or gifts charged upon real estate; but if there is nothing else to which it can refer it may refer to realty; the proper word, however, for gifts of realty is devise.

Legacies may be either specific, general or demonstrative. A specific legacy is “something which a testator, identifying it by a sufficient description and manifesting an intention that it should be enjoyed in the state and condition indicated by that description, separates in favour of a particular legatee from the general mass of his personal estate,” e.g. a gift of “my portrait by X,” naming the artist. A general legacy is a gift not so distinguished from the general mass of the personal estate, e.g. a gift of £100 or of a gold ring. A demonstrative legacy partakes of the nature of both the preceding kinds of legacies, e.g. a gift of £100 payable out of a named fund is a specific legacy so far as the fund named is available to pay the legacy; after the fund is exhausted the balance of the legacy is a general legacy and recourse must be had to the general estate to satisfy such balance. Sometimes a testator bequeaths two or more legacies to the same person; in such a case it is a question whether the later legacies are in substitution for, or in addition to, the earlier ones. In the latter case they are known as cumulative. In each case the intention of the testator is the rule of construction; this can often be gathered from the terms of the will or codicil, but in the absence of such evidence the following rules are followed by the courts. Where the same specific thing is bequeathed twice to the same legatee or where two legacies of equal amount are bequeathed by the same instrument the second bequest is mere repetition; but where legacies of equal amounts are bequeathed by different instruments or of unequal amounts by the same instruments they are considered to be cumulative.

If the estate of the testator is insufficient to satisfy all the legacies these must abate, i.e. be reduced rateably; as to this it should be noticed that specific and demonstrative legacies have a prior claim to be paid in full out of the specific fund before general legacies, and that general legacies abate rateably inter se in the absence of any provision to the contrary by the testator. Specific legacies are liable to ademption where the specific thing perishes or ceases to belong to the testator, e.g. in the instance given above if the testator sells the portrait the legatee will get nothing by virtue of the legacy. As a general rule, legacies given to persons who predecease the testator do not take effect; they are said to lapse. This is so even if the gift be to A and his executors, administrators and assigns, but this is not so if the testator has shown a contrary intention, thus, a gift to A or his personal representative will be effective even though A predecease the testator; further, by the Wills Act 1837, devises of estates tail and gifts to a child or other issue of the testator will not lapse if any issue of the legatee survive the testator. Lapsed legacies fall into and form part of the residuary estate. In the absence of any indication to the contrary a legacy becomes due on the day of the death of the testator, though for the convenience of the executor it is not payable till a year after that date; this delay does not prevent the legacy vesting on the testator’s death. It frequently happens, however, that a legacy is given payable at a future date; in such a case, if the legatee dies after the testator but prior to the date when the legacy is payable it is necessary to discover whether the legacy was vested or contingent, as in the former case it becomes payable to the legatee’s representative; in the latter, it lapses. In this, as in other cases, the test is the intention of the testator as expressed in the will; generally it may be said that a gift “payable” or “to be paid” at a certain fixed time confers a vested interest on the legatee, while a gift to A “at” a fixed time, e.g. twenty-one years of age, only confers on A an interest contingent on his attaining the age of twenty-one.

Legacy Duty is a duty charged by the state upon personal property devolving upon the legatees or next of kin of a dead person, either by virtue of his will or upon his intestacy. The duty was first imposed in England in 1780, but the principal act dealing with the subject is the Legacy Duty Act 1796. The principal points as to the duty are these. The duty is charged on personalty only. It is payable only where the person on whose death the property passes was domiciled in the United Kingdom. The rate of duty varies from 1 to 10% according to the relationship between the testator and legatee. As between husband and wife no duty is payable. The duty is payable by the executors and deducted from the legacy unless the testator directs otherwise. Special provisions as to valuation are in force where the gift is of an annuity or is settled on various persons in succession, or the legacy is given in joint tenancy and other cases. In some cases the duty is payable by instalments which carry interest at 3%. In various cases legacies are exempt from duty—the more important are gifts to a member of the royal family, specific legacies under £20 (pecuniary legacies under £20 pay duty), legacies of books, prints, &c., given to a body corporate for preservation, not for sale, and legacies given out of an estate the principal value of which is less than £100. Further, by the Finance Act 1894, payment of the estate duty thereby created absorbs the 1% duty paid by lineal ancestors or descendants of the deceased[1] and the duty on a settled legacy, and, lastly, in the event of estate duty being paid on an estate the total value of which is under £1000, no legacy duty is payable. The legacy duty payable in Ireland is now for all practical purposes assimilated to that in Great Britain. The principal statute in that country is an act of 1814.

[1] The Finance Bill 1909-1910 re-imposed this duty, and extended it to husbands and wives as well as descendants and ancestors.

LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD (1866-  ), English poet and critic, was born in Liverpool on the 20th of January 1866. He started life in a business office in Liverpool, but abandoned this to turn author. My Lady’s Sonnets appeared at Liverpool in 1887, and in 1889 he became for a short time literary secretary to Wilson Barrett. In the same year he published Volumes in Folio, The Book Bills of Narcissus and George Meredith: some Characteristics (new ed., 1900). He joined the staff of the Star in 1891, and wrote for various papers over the signature of “Logroller.” English Poems (1892), R. L. Stevenson and other Poems (1895), a paraphrase (1897) of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and Odes from the Divan of Hafiz (1903), contained some light, graceful verse, but he is best known by the fantastic prose essays and sketches of Prose Fancies (2 series, 1894-1896), Sleeping Beauty and other Prose Fancies (1900), The Religion of a Literary Man (1893), The Quest of the Golden Girl (1897), The Life Romantic (1901), &c. His first wife, Mildred Lee, died in 1894, and in 1897 he married Julie Norregard, subsequently taking up his residence in the United States. In 1906 he translated, from the Danish, Peter Nansen’s Love’s Trilogy.

LEGARÉ, HUGH SWINTON (1797-1843), American lawyer and statesman, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on the 2nd of January 1797, of Huguenot and Scotch stock. Partly on account of his inability to share in the amusements of his fellows by reason of a deformity due to vaccine poisoning before he was five (the poison permanently arresting the growth and development of his legs), he was an eager student, and in 1814 he graduated at the College of South Carolina with the highest rank in his class and with a reputation throughout the state for scholarship and eloquence. He studied law for three years in South Carolina, and then spent two years abroad, studying French and Italian in Paris and jurisprudence at Edinburgh. In 1820-1822 and in 1824-1830 he was a member of the South Carolina legislature. In 1827, with Stephen Elliott (1771-1830), the naturalist, he founded the Southern Review, of which he was the sole editor after Elliott’s death until 1834, when it was discontinued, and to which he contributed articles on law, travel, and modern and classical literature. In 1830-1832 he was attorney-general of South Carolina, and, although a State’s Rights man, he strongly opposed nullification. During his term of office he appeared in a case before the United States Supreme Court, where his knowledge of civil law so strongly impressed Edward Livingston, the secretary of state, who was himself an admirer of Roman Law, that he urged Legaré to devote himself to the study of this subject with the hope that he might influence American law toward the spirit and philosophy and even the forms and processes of Roman jurisprudence. Through Livingston, Legaré was appointed American chargé d’affaires at Brussels, where from 1833 to 1836 he perfected himself in civil law and in the German commentaries on civil law. In 1837-1839, as a Union Democrat, he was a member of the national House of Representatives, and there ably opposed Van Buren’s financial policy in spite of the enthusiasm in South Carolina for the sub-treasury project. He supported Harrison in the presidential campaign of 1840, and when the cabinet was reconstructed by Tyler in 1841, Legaré was appointed attorney-general of the United States. On the 9th of May 1843 he was appointed secretary of state ad interim, after the resignation of Daniel Webster. On the 20th of June 1843 he died suddenly at Boston. His great work, the forcing into common law of the principles of civil law, was unaccomplished; but Story says “he seemed about to accomplish [it]; for his arguments before the Supreme Court were crowded with the principles of the Roman Law, wrought into the texture of the Common Law with great success.” As attorney-general he argued the famous cases, the United States v. Miranda, Wood v. the United States, and Jewell v. Jewell.

See The Writings of Hugh Swinton Legaré (2 vols., Charleston, S.C., 1846), edited by his sister, Mrs Mary Bullen, who contributed a biographical sketch; and two articles by B. J. Ramage in The Sewanee Review, vol. x. (New York, 1902).

LEGAS, one of the Shangalla group of tribes, regarded as among the purest types of the Galla race. They occupy the upper Yabus valley, S.W. Abyssinia, near the Sudan frontier. The Legas are physically distinct from the Negro Shangalla. They are of very light complexion, tall and thin, with narrow hollow-cheeked faces, small heads and high foreheads. The chiefs’ families are of more mixed blood, with perceptible Negro strain. The Legas are estimated to number upwards of a hundred thousand, of whom some 20,000 are warriors. They are, however, a peaceful race, kind to their women and slaves, and energetic agriculturists. Formerly independent, they came about 1900 under the sway of Abyssinia. The Legas are pagans, but Mahommedanism has gained many converts among them.

LEGATE, BARTHOLOMEW (c. 1575-1612), English fanatic, was born in Essex and became a dealer in cloth. About the beginning of the 17th century he became a preacher among a sect called the “Seekers,” and appears to have held unorthodox opinions about the divinity of Jesus Christ. Together with his brother Thomas he was put in prison for heresy in 1611. Thomas died in Newgate gaol, London, but Bartholomew’s imprisonment was not a rigorous one. James I. argued with him, and on several occasions he was brought before the Consistory Court of London, but without any definite result. Eventually, after having threatened to bring an action for wrongful imprisonment, Legate was tried before a full Consistory Court in February 1612, was found guilty of heresy, and was delivered to the secular authorities for punishment. Refusing to retract his opinions he was burned to death at Smithfield on the 18th of March 1612. Legate was the last person burned in London for his religious opinions, and Edward Wightman, who was burned at Lichfield in April 1612, was the last to suffer in this way in England.

See T. Fuller, Church History of Britain (1655); and S. R. Gardiner, History of England, vol. ii. (London, 1904).

LEGATE (Lat. legatus, past part. of legare, to send as deputy), a title now generally confined to the highest class of diplomatic representatives of the pope, though still occasionally used, in its original Latin sense, of any ambassador or diplomatic agent. According to the Nova Compilatio Decretalium of Gregory IX., under the title “De officio legati” the canon law recognizes two sorts of legate, the legatus natus and the legatus datus or missus. The legatus datus (missus) may be either (1) delegatus, or (2) nuncius apostolicus, or (3) legatus a latere (lateralis, collateralis). The rights of the legatus natus, which included concurrent jurisdiction with that of all the bishops within his province, have been much curtailed since the 16th century; they were altogether suspended in presence of the higher claims of a legatus a latere, and the title is now almost quite honorary. It was attached to the see of Canterbury till the Reformation and it still attaches to the sees of Seville, Toledo, Aries, Reims, Lyons, Gran, Prague, Gnesen-Posen, Cologne, Salzburg, among others. The commission of the legatus delegatus (generally a member of the local clergy) is of a limited nature, and relates only to some definite piece of work. The nuncius apostolicus (who has the privilege of red apparel, a white horse and golden spurs) possesses ordinary jurisdiction within the province to which he has been sent, but his powers otherwise are restricted by the terms of his mandate. The legatus a latere (almost invariably a cardinal, though the power can be conferred on other prelates) is in the fullest sense the plenipotentiary representative of the pope, and possesses the high prerogative implied in the words of Gregory VII., “nostra vice quae corrigenda sunt corrigat, quae statuend constituat.” He has the power of suspending all the bishops in his province, and no judicial cases are reserved from his judgment. Without special mandate, however, he cannot depose bishops or unite or separate bishoprics. At present legati a latere are not sent by the holy see, but diplomatic relations, where they exist, are maintained by means of nuncios, internuncios and other agents.

The history of the office of papal legate is closely involved with that of the papacy itself. If it were proved that papal legates exercised the prerogatives of the primacy in the early councils, it would be one of the strongest points for the Roman Catholic view of the papal history. Thus it is claimed that Hosius of Cordova presided over the council of Nicaea (325) in the name of the pope. But the claim rests on slender evidence, since the first source in which Hosius is referred to as representative of the pope is Gelasius of Cyzicus in the Propontis, who wrote toward the end of the 5th century. It is even open to dispute whether Hosius was president at Nicaea, and though he certainly presided over the council of Sardica in 343, it was probably as representative of the emperors Constans and Constantius, who had summoned the council. Pope Julius I. was represented at Sardica by two presbyters. Yet the fifth canon, which provides for appeal by a bishop to Rome, sanctions the use of embassies a latere. If the appellant wishes the pope to send priests from his own household, the pope shall be free to do so, and to furnish them with full authority from himself (“ut de latere suo presbyteros mittat ... habentes ejus auctoritatem a quo destinati sunt”). The decrees of Sardica, an obscure council, were later confused with those of Nicaea and thus gained weight. In the synod of Ephesus in 431, Pope Celestine I. instructed his representatives to conduct themselves not as disputants but as judges, and Cyril of Alexandria presided not only in his own name but in that of the pope (and of the bishop of Jerusalem). Instances of delegation of the papal authority in various degrees become numerous in the 5th century, especially during the pontificate of Leo I. Thus Leo writes in 444 (Ep. 6) to Anastasius of Thessalonica, appointing him his vicar for the province of Illyria; the same arrangement, he informs us, had been made by Pope Siricius in favour of Anysius, the predecessor of Anastasius. Similar vicarial or legatine powers had been conferred in 418 by Zosimus upon Patroclus, bishop of Arles. In 449 Leo was represented at the “Robber Synod,” from which his legates hardly escaped with life; at Chalcedon, in 451, they were treated with singular honour, though the imperial commissioners presided. Again, in 453 the same pope writes to the empress Pulcheria, naming Julianus of Cos as his representative in the defence of the interests of orthodoxy and ecclesiastical discipline at Constantinople (Ep. 112); the instructions to Julianus are given in Ep. 113 (“hanc specialem curam vice mea functus assumas”). The designation of Anastasius as vicar apostolic over Illyria may be said to mark the beginning of the custom of conferring, ex officio, the title of legatus upon the holders of important sees, who ultimately came to be known as legati nati, with the rank of primate; the appointment of Julianus at Constantinople gradually developed into the long permanent office of apocrisiarius or responsalis. Another sort of delegation is exemplified in Leo’s letter to the African bishops (Ep. 12), in which he sends Potentius, with instructions to inquire in his name, and to report (“vicem curae nostrae fratri et consacerdoti nostro Potentio delegantes qui de episcopis, quorum culpabilis ferebatur electio, quid veritas haberet inquireret, nobisque omnia fideliter indicaret”). Passing on to the time of Gregory the Great, we find him sending two representatives to Gaul in 599, to suppress simony, and one to Spain in 603. Augustine of Canterbury is sometimes spoken of as legate, but it does not appear that in his case this title was used in any strictly technical sense, although the archbishop of Canterbury afterwards attained the permanent dignity of a legatus natus. Boniface, the apostle of Germany, was in like manner constituted, according to Hincmar (Ep. 30), a legate of the apostolic see by Popes Gregory II. and Gregory III. According to Hefele (Conc. iv. 239), Rodoald of Porto and Zecharias of Anagni, who were sent by Pope Nicolas to Constantinople in 860, were the first actually called legati a latere. The policy of Gregory VII. naturally led to a great development of the legatine as distinguished from the ordinary episcopal function. From the creation of the medieval papal monarchy until the close of the middle ages, the papal legate played a most important rôle in national as well as church history. The further definition of his powers proceeded throughout the 12th and 13th centuries. From the 16th century legates a latere give way almost entirely to nuncios (q.v.).

See P. Hinschius, Kirchenrecht, i. 498 ff.; G. Phillips, Kirchenrecht, vol. vi. 680 ff.

LEGATION (Lat. legatio, a sending or mission), a diplomatic mission of the second rank. The term is also applied to the building in which the minister resides and to the area round it covered by his diplomatic immunities. See [Diplomacy].

LEGEND (through the French from the med. Lat. legenda, things to be read, from legere, to read), in its primary meaning the history or life-story of a saint, and so applied to portions of Scripture and selections from the lives of the saints as read at divine service. The statute of 3 and 4 Edward VI. dealing with the abolition of certain books and images (1549), cap. 10, sect. 1, says that “all bookes ... called processionalles, manuelles, legends ... shall be ... abolished.” The “Golden Legend,” or Aurea Legenda, was the name given to a book containing lives of the saints and descriptions of festivals, written by Jacobus de Voragine, archbishop of Genoa, in the 13th century. From the original application of the word to stories of the saints containing wonders and miracles, the word came to be applied to a story handed down without any foundation in history, but popularly believed to be true. “Legend” is also used of a writing, inscription, or motto on coins or medals, and in connexion with coats of arms, shields, monuments, &c.

LEGENDRE, ADRIEN MARIE (1752-1833), French mathematician, was born at Paris (or, according to some accounts, at Toulouse) in 1752. He was brought up at Paris, where he completed his studies at the Collège Mazarin. His first published writings consist of articles forming part of the Traité de mécanique (1774) of the Abbé Marie, who was his professor; Legendre’s name, however, is not mentioned. Soon afterwards he was appointed professor of mathematics in the École Militaire at Paris, and he was afterwards professor in the École Normale. In 1782 he received the prize from the Berlin Academy for his “Dissertation sur la question de balistique,” a memoir relating to the paths of projectiles in resisting media. He also, about this time, wrote his “Recherches sur la figure des planètes,” published in the Mémoires of the French Academy, of which he was elected a member in succession to J. le Rond d’Alembert in 1783. He was also appointed a commissioner for connecting geodetically Paris and Greenwich, his colleagues being P. F. A. Méchain and C. F. Cassini de Thury; General William Roy conducted the operations on behalf of England. The French observations were published in 1792 (Exposé des opérations faites en France in 1787 pour la jonction des observatoires de Paris et de Greenwich). During the Revolution, he was one of the three members of the council established to introduce the decimal system, and he was also a member of the commission appointed to determine the length of the metre, for which purpose the calculations, &c., connected with the arc of the meridian from Barcelona to Dunkirk were revised. He was also associated with G. C. F. M. Prony (1755-1839) in the formation of the great French tables of logarithms of numbers, sines, and tangents, and natural sines, called the Tables du Cadastre, in which the quadrant was divided centesimally; these tables have never been published (see [Logarithms]). He was examiner in the École Polytechnique, but held few important state offices. He died at Paris on the 10th of January 1833, and the discourse at his grave was pronounced by S. D. Poisson. The last of the three supplements to his Traité des fonctions elliptiques was published in 1832, and Poisson in his funeral oration remarked: “M. Legendre a eu cela de commun avec la plupart des géomètres qui l’ont précédé, que ses travaux n’ont fini qu’avec sa vie. Le dernier volume de nos mémoires renferme encore un mémoire de lui, sur une question difficile de la théorie des nombres; et peu de temps avant la maladie qui l’a conduit au tombeau, il se procura les observations les plus récentes des comètes à courtes périodes, dont il allait se servir pour appliquer et perfectionner ses méthodes.”

It will be convenient, in giving an account of his writings, to consider them under the different subjects which are especially associated with his name.

Elliptic Functions.—This is the subject with which Legendre’s name will always be most closely connected, and his researches upon it extend over a period of more than forty years. His first published writings upon the subject consist of two papers in the Mémoires de l’Académie Française for 1786 upon elliptic arcs. In 1792 he presented to the Academy a memoir on elliptic transcendents. The contents of these memoirs are included in the first volume of his Exercices de calcul intégral (1811). The third volume (1816) contains the very elaborate and now well-known tables of the elliptic integrals which were calculated by Legendre himself, with an account of the mode of their construction. In 1827 appeared the Traité des fonctions elliptiques (2 vols., the first dated 1825, the second 1826), a great part of the first volume agrees very closely with the contents of the Exercices; the tables, &c., are given in the second volume. Three supplements, relating to the researches of N. H. Abel and C. G. J. Jacobi, were published in 1828-1832, and form a third volume. Legendre had pursued the subject which would now be called elliptic integrals alone from 1786 to 1827, the results of his labours having been almost entirely neglected by his contemporaries, but his work had scarcely appeared in 1827 when the discoveries which were independently made by the two young and as yet unknown mathematicians Abel and Jacobi placed the subject on a new basis, and revolutionized it completely. The readiness with which Legendre, who was then seventy-six years of age, welcomed these important researches, that quite overshadowed his own, and included them in successive supplements to his work, does the highest honour to him (see [Function]).

Eulerian Integrals and Integral Calculus.—The Exercices de calcul intégral consist of three volumes, a great portion of the first and the whole of the third being devoted to elliptic functions. The remainder of the first volume relates to the Eulerian integrals and to quadratures. The second volume (1817) relates to the Eulerian integrals, and to various integrals and series, developments, mechanical problems, &c., connected with the integral calculus; this volume contains also a numerical table of the values of the gamma function. The latter portion of the second volume of the Traité des fonctions elliptiques (1826) is also devoted to the Eulerian integrals, the table being reproduced. Legendre’s researches connected with the “gamma function” are of importance, and are well known; the subject was also treated by K. F. Gauss in his memoir Disquisitiones generales circa series infinitas (1816), but in a very different manner. The results given in the second volume of the Exercices are of too miscellaneous a character to admit of being briefly described. In 1788 Legendre published a memoir on double integrals, and in 1809 one on definite integrals.

Theory of Numbers.—Legendre’s Théorie des nombres and Gauss’s Disquisitiones arithmeticae (1801) are still standard works upon this subject. The first edition of the former appeared in 1798 under the title Essai sur la théorie des nombres; there was a second edition in 1808; a first supplement was published in 1816, and a second in 1825. The third edition, under the title Théorie des nombres, appeared in 1830 in two volumes. The fourth edition appeared in 1900. To Legendre is due the theorem known as the law of quadratic reciprocity, the most important general result in the science of numbers which has been discovered since the time of P. de Fermat, and which was called by Gauss the “gem of arithmetic.” It was first given by Legendre in the Mémoires of the Academy for 1785, but the demonstration that accompanied it was incomplete. The symbol (a/p) which is known as Legendre’s symbol, and denotes the positive or negative unit which is the remainder when a1/2p(−1) is divided by a prime number p, does not appear in this memoir, but was first used in the Essai sur la théorie des nombres. Legendre’s formula x: (log x−1.08366) for the approximate number of forms inferior to a given number x was first given by him also in this work (2nd ed., p. 394) (see [Number]).

Attractions of Ellipsoids.—Legendre was the author of four important memoirs on this subject. In the first of these, entitled “Recherches sur l’attraction des sphéroides homogènes,” published in the Mémoires of the Academy for 1785, but communicated to it at an earlier period, Legendre introduces the celebrated expressions which, though frequently called Laplace’s coefficients, are more correctly named after Legendre. The definition of the coefficients is that if (1 − 2h cos φ + h2)−1/2 be expanded in ascending powers of h, and if the general term be denoted by Pnhn, then Pn is of the Legendrian coefficient of the nth order. In this memoir also the function which is now called the potential was, at the suggestion of Laplace, first introduced. Legendre shows that Maclaurin’s theorem with respect to confocal ellipsoids is true for any position of the external point when the ellipsoids are solids of revolution. Of this memoir Isaac Todhunter writes: “We may affirm that no single memoir in the history of our subject can rival this in interest and importance. During forty years the resources of analysis, even in the hands of d’Alembert, Lagrange and Laplace, had not carried the theory of the attraction of ellipsoids beyond the point which the geometry of Maclaurin had reached. The introduction of the coefficients now called Laplace’s, and their application, commence a new era in mathematical physics.” Legendre’s second memoir was communicated to the Académie in 1784, and relates to the conditions of equilibrium of a mass of rotating fluid in the form of a figure of revolution which does not deviate much from a sphere. The third memoir relates to Laplace’s theorem respecting confocal ellipsoids. Of the fourth memoir Todhunter writes: “It occupies an important position in the history of our subject. The most striking addition which is here made to previous researches consists in the treatment of a planet supposed entirely fluid; the general equation for the form of a stratum is given for the first time and discussed. For the first time we have a correct and convenient expression for Laplace’s nth coefficient.” (See Todhunter’s History of the Mathematical Theories of Attraction and the Figure of the Earth (1873), the twentieth, twenty-second, twenty-fourth, and twenty-fifth chapters of which contain a full and complete account of Legendre’s four memoirs. See also [Spherical Harmonics].)

Geodesy.—Besides the work upon the geodetical operations connecting Paris and Greenwich, of which Legendre was one of the authors, he published in the Mémoires de l’Académie for 1787 two papers on trigonometrical operations depending upon the figure of the earth, containing many theorems relating to this subject. The best known of these, which is called Legendre’s theorem, is usually given in treatises on spherical trigonometry; by means of it a small spherical triangle may be treated as a plane triangle, certain corrections being applied to the angles. Legendre was also the author of a memoir upon triangles drawn upon a spheroid. Legendre’s theorem is a fundamental one in geodesy, and his contributions to the subject are of the greatest importance.

Method of Least Squares.—In 1806 appeared Legendre’s Nouvelles Méthodes pour la détermination des orbites des comètes, which is memorable as containing the first published suggestion of the method of least squares (see [Probability]). In the preface Legendre remarks: “La méthode qui me paroît la plus simple et la plus générale consiste à rendre minimum la somme des quarrés des erreurs, ... et que j’appelle méthode des moindres quarrés”; and in an appendix in which the application of the method is explained his words are: “De tous les principes qu’on peut proposer pour cet objet, je pense qu’il n’en est pas de plus général, de plus exact, ni d’une application plus facile que celui dont nous avons fait usage dans les recherches précédentes, et qui consiste à rendre minimum la somme des quarrés des erreurs.” The method was proposed by Legendre only as a convenient process for treating observations, without reference to the theory of probability. It had, however, been applied by Gauss as early as 1795, and the method was fully explained, and the law of facility for the first time given by him in 1809. Laplace also justified the method by means of the principles of the theory of probability; and this led Legendre to republish the part of his Nouvelles Méthodes which related to it in the Mémoires de l’Académie for 1810. Thus, although the method of least squares was first formally proposed by Legendre, the theory and algorithm and mathematical foundation of the process are due to Gauss and Laplace. Legendre published two supplements to his Nouvelles Méthodes in 1806 and 1820.

The Elements of Geometry.—Legendre’s name is most widely known on account of his Eléments de géométrie, the most successful of the numerous attempts that have been made to supersede Euclid as a text-book on geometry. It first appeared in 1794, and went through very many editions, and has been translated into almost all languages. An English translation, by Sir David Brewster, from the eleventh French edition, was published in 1823, and is well known in England. The earlier editions did not contain the trigonometry. In one of the notes Legendre gives a proof of the irrationality of π. This had been first proved by J. H. Lambert in the Berlin Memoirs for 1768. Legendre’s proof is similar in principle to Lambert’s, but much simpler. On account of the objections urged against the treatment of parallels in this work, Legendre was induced to publish in 1803 his Nouvelle Théorie des parallèles. His Géométrie gave rise in England also to a lengthened discussion on the difficult question of the treatment of the theory of parallels.

It will thus be seen that Legendre’s works have placed him in the very foremost rank in the widely distinct subjects of elliptic functions, theory of numbers, attractions, and geodesy, and have given him a conspicuous position in connexion with the integral calculus and other branches of mathematics. He published a memoir on the integration of partial differential equations and a few others which have not been noticed above, but they relate to subjects with which his name is not especially associated. A good account of the principal works of Legendre is given in the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève for 1833, pp. 45-82.

See Élie de Beaumont, “Memoir de Legendre,” translated by C. A. Alexander, Smithsonian Report (1874).

(J. W. L. G.)

LEGENDRE, LOUIS (1752-1797), French revolutionist, was born at Versailles on the 22nd of May 1752. When the Revolution broke out, he kept a butcher’s shop in Paris, in the rue des Boucheries St Germain. He was an ardent supporter of the ideas of the Revolution, a member of the Jacobin Club, and one of the founders of the club of the Cordeliers. In spite of the incorrectness of his diction, he was gifted with a genuine eloquence, and well knew how to carry the populace with him. He was a prominent actor in the taking of the Bastille (14th of July 1789), in the massacre of the Champ de Mars (July 1791), and in the attack on the Tuileries (10th of August 1792). Deputy from Paris to the Convention, he voted for the death of Louis XVI., and was sent on mission to Lyons (27th of February 1793) before the revolt of that town, and was on mission from August to October 1793 in Seine-Inférieure. He was a member of the Comité de Sûreté Générale, and contributed to the downfall of the Girondists. When Danton was arrested, Legendre at first defended him, but was soon cowed and withdrew his defence. After the fall of Robespierre, Legendre took part in the reactionary movement, undertook the closing of the Jacobin Club, was elected president of the Convention, and helped to bring about the impeachment of J. B. Carrier, the perpetrator of the noyades of Nantes. He was subsequently elected a member of the Council of Ancients, and died on the 13th of December 1797.

See F. A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Législative et de la Convention (2nd ed., Paris, 1906, 2 vols.); “Correspondance de Legendre” in the Révolution française (vol. xl., 1901).

LEGERDEMAIN (Fr. léger-de-main, i.e. light or sleight of hand), the name given specifically to that form of conjuring in which the performer relies on dexterity of manipulation rather than on mechanical apparatus. See [Conjuring].

LEGGE, afterwards Bilson-Legge, HENRY (1708-1764), English statesman, fourth son of William Legge, 1st earl of Dartmouth (1672-1750), was born on the 29th of May 1708. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, he became private secretary to Sir Robert Walpole, and in 1739 was appointed secretary of Ireland by the lord-lieutenant, the 3rd duke of Devonshire; being chosen member of parliament for the borough of East Looe in 1740, and for Orford, Suffolk, at the general election in the succeeding year. Legge only shared temporarily in the downfall of Walpole, and became in quick succession surveyor-general of woods and forests, a lord of the admiralty, and a lord of the treasury. In 1748 he was sent as envoy extraordinary to Frederick the Great, and although his conduct in Berlin was sharply censured by George II., he became treasurer of the navy soon after his return to England. In April 1754 he joined the ministry of the duke of Newcastle as chancellor of the exchequer, the king consenting to this appointment although refusing to hold any intercourse with the minister; but Legge shared the elder Pitt’s dislike of the policy of paying subsidies to the landgrave of Hesse, and was dismissed from office in November 1755. Twelve months later he returned to his post at the exchequer in the administration of Pitt and the 4th duke of Devonshire, retaining office until April 1757 when he shared both the dismissal and the ensuing popularity of Pitt. When in conjunction with the duke of Newcastle Pitt returned to power in the following July, Legge became chancellor of the exchequer for the third time. He imposed new taxes upon houses and windows, and he appears to have lost to some extent the friendship of Pitt, while the king refused to make him a peer. In 1759 he obtained the sinecure position of surveyor of the petty customs and subsidies in the port of London, and having in consequence to resign his seat in parliament he was chosen one of the members for Hampshire, a proceeding which greatly incensed the earl of Bute, who desired this seat for one of his friends. Having thus incurred Bute’s displeasure Legge was again dismissed from the exchequer in March 1761, but he continued to take part in parliamentary debates until his death at Tunbridge Wells on the 23rd of August 1764. Legge appears to have been a capable financier, but the position of chancellor of the exchequer was not at that time a cabinet office. He took the additional name of Bilson on succeeding to the estates of a relative, Thomas Bettersworth Bilson, in 1754. Pitt called Legge, “the child, and deservedly the favourite child, of the Whigs.” Horace Walpole said he was “of a creeping, underhand nature, and aspired to the lion’s place by the manœuvre of the mole,” but afterwards he spoke in high terms of his talents. Legge married Mary, daughter and heiress of Edward, 4th and last Baron Stawel (d. 1755). This lady, who in 1760 was created Baroness Stawel of Somerton, bore him an only child, Henry Stawel Bilson-Legge (1757-1820), who became Baron Stawel on his mother’s death in 1780. When Stawel died without sons his title became extinct. His only daughter, Mary (d. 1864), married John Dutton, 2nd Baron Sherborne.

See John Butier, bishop of Hereford, Some Account of the Character of the late Rt. Hon. H. Bilson-Legge (1765); Horace Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George II. (London, 1847); and Memoirs of the Reign of George III., edited by G. F. R. Barker (London, 1894); W. E. H. Lecky, History of England, vol. ii. (London, 1892); and the memoirs and collections of correspondence of the time.

LEGGE, JAMES (1815-1897), British Chinese scholar, was born at Huntly, Aberdeenshire, in 1815, and educated at King’s College, Aberdeen. After studying at the Highbury Theological College, London, he went in 1839 as a missionary to the Chinese, but, as China was not yet open to Europeans, he remained at Malacca three years, in charge of the Anglo-Chinese College there. The College was subsequently moved to Hong-Kong, where Legge lived for thirty years. Impressed with the necessity of missionaries being able to comprehend the ideas and culture of the Chinese, he began in 1841 a translation in many volumes of the Chinese classics, a monumental task admirably executed and completed a few years before his death. In 1870 he was made an LL.D. of Aberdeen and in 1884 of Edinburgh University. In 1875 several gentlemen connected with the China trade suggested to the university of Oxford a Chair of Chinese Language and Literature to be occupied by Dr Legge. The university responded liberally, Corpus Christi College contributed the emoluments of a fellowship, and the chair was constituted in 1876. In addition to his other work Legge wrote The Life and Teaching of Confucius (1867); The Life and Teaching of Mencius (1875); The Religions of China (1880); and other books on Chinese literature and religion. He died at Oxford on the 29th of November 1897.

LEGHORN (Ital. Livorno, Fr. Livourne), a city of Tuscany, Italy, chief town of the province of the same name, which consists of the commune of Leghorn and the islands of Elba and Gorgona. The town is the seat of a bishopric and of a large naval academy—the only one in Italy—and the third largest commercial port in the kingdom, situated on the west coast, 12 m. S.W. of Pisa by rail, 10 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1901) 78,308 (town), 96,528 (commune). It is built along the seashore upon a healthy and fertile tract of land, which forms, as it were, an oasis in a zone of Maremma. Behind is a range of hills, the most conspicuous of which, the Monte Nero, is crowned by a frequented pilgrimage church and also by villas and hotels, to which a funicular railway runs. The town itself is almost entirely modern. The 16th-century Fortezza Vecchia, guarding the harbour, is picturesque, and there is a good bronze statue of the grand duke Ferdinand I. by Pietro Tacca (1577-1640), a pupil of Giovanni da Bologna. The lofty Torre del Marzocco, erected in 1423 by the Florentines, is fine. The façade of the cathedral was designed by Inigo Jones. The old Protestant cemetery contains the tombs of Tobias Smollett (d. 1771) and Francis Horner (d. 1817). There is also a large synagogue founded in 1581. The exchange, the chamber of commerce and the clearing-house (one of the oldest in the world, dating from 1764) are united under one roof in the Palazzo del Commercio, opened in 1907. Several improvements have been carried out in the city and port, and the place is developing rapidly as an industrial centre. The naval academy, formerly established partly at Naples and partly at Genoa, has been transferred to Leghorn. Some of the navigable canals which connected the harbour with the interior of the city have been either modified or filled up. Several streets have been widened, and a road along the shore has been transformed into a fine and shady promenade. Leghorn is the principal sea-bathing resort in this part of Italy, the season lasting from the end of June to the end of August. A spa for the use of the Acque della Salute has been constructed. Leghorn is on the main line from Pisa to Rome; another line runs to Colle Salvetti. A considerable number of important steamship lines call here. The new rectilinear mole, sanctioned in 1881, has been built out into the sea for a distance of 600 yds. from the old Vegliaia lighthouse, and the docking basin has been lengthened to 490 ft. Inside the breakwater the depth varies from 10 to 26 ft. The total trade of the port increased from £3,853,593 in 1897 to £5,675,285 in 1905 and £7,009,758 in 1906 (the large increase being mainly due to a rise of over £1,000,000 in imports—mainly of coal, building materials and machinery), the average ratio of imports to exports being as three to two. The imports consist principally of machinery, coal, grain, dried fish, tobacco and hides, and the exports of hemp, hides, olive oil, soap, coral, candied fruit, wine, straw hats, boracic acid, mercury, and marble and alabaster. In 1885 the total number of vessels that entered the port was 4281 of 1,434,000 tons; of these, 1251 of 750,000 tons were foreign; 688,000 tons of merchandise were loaded and unloaded. In 1906, after considerable fluctuations during the interval, the total number that entered was 4623 vessels of 2,372,551 tons; of these, 935 of 1,002,119 tons were foreign; British ships representing about half this tonnage. In 1906 the total imports and exports amounted to 1,470,000 tons including coasting trade. A great obstacle to the development of the port is the absence of modern mechanical appliances for loading and unloading vessels, and of quay space and dock accommodation. The older shipyards have been considerably extended, and shipbuilding is actively carried on, especially by the Orlando yard which builds large ships for the Italian navy, while new industries—namely, glass-making and copper and brass-founding, electric power works, a cement factory, porcelain factories, flour-mills, oil-mills, a cotton yarn spinning factory, electric plant works, a ship-breaking yard, a motor-boat yard, &c.—have been established. Other important firms, Tuscan wine-growers, oil-growers, timber traders, colour manufacturers, &c., have their head offices and stores at Leghorn, with a view to export. The former British “factory” here was of great importance for the trade with the Levant, but was closed in 1825. The two villages of Ardenza and Antignano, which form part of the commune, have acquired considerable importance, the former in part for sea-bathing.

The earliest mention of Leghorn occurs in a document of 891, relating to the first church here; in 1017 it is called a castle. In the 13th century the Pisans tried to attract a population to the spot, but it was not till the 14th that Leghorn became a rival of Porto Pisano at the mouth of the Arno, which it was destined ultimately to supplant. It was at Leghorn that Urban V. and Gregory XI. landed on their return from Avignon. When in 1405 the king of France sold Pisa to the Florentines he kept possession of Leghorn; but he afterwards (1407) sold it for 26,000 ducats to the Genoese, and from the Genoese the Florentines purchased it in 1421. In 1496 the city showed its devotion to its new masters by a successful defence against Maximilian and his allies, but it was still a small place; in 1551 there were only 749 inhabitants. With the rise of the Medici came a rapid increase of prosperity; Cosmo, Francis and Ferdinand erected fortifications and harbour works, warehouses and churches, with equal liberality, and the last especially gave a stimulus to trade by inviting “men of the East and the West, Spanish and Portuguese, Greeks, Germans, Italians, Hebrews, Turks, Moors, Armenians, Persians and others,” to settle and traffic in the city, as it became in 1606. Declared free and neutral in 1691, Leghorn was permanently invested with these privileges by the Quadruple Alliance in 1718; but in 1796 Napoleon seized all the hostile vessels in its port. It ceased to be a free city by the law of 1867.

(T. As.)

LEGION (Lat. legio), in early Rome, the levy of citizens marching out en masse to war, like the citizen-army of any other primitive state. As Rome came to need more than one army at once and warfare grew more complex, legio came to denote a unit of 4000-6000 heavy infantry (including, however, at first some light infantry and at various times a handful of cavalry) who were by political status Roman citizens and were distinct from the “allies,” auxilia, and other troops of the second class. The legionaries were regarded as the best and most characteristic Roman soldiers, the most trustworthy and truly Roman; they enjoyed better pay and conditions of service than the “auxiliaries.” In A.D. 14 (death of Augustus) there were 25 such legions: later, the number was slightly increased; finally about A.D. 290 Diocletian reduced the size and greatly increased the number of the legions. Throughout, the dominant features of the legions were heavy infantry and Roman citizenship. They lost their importance when the Barbarian invasions altered the character of ancient warfare and made cavalry a more important arm than infantry, in the late 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. In the middle ages the word “legion” seems not to have been used as a technical term. In modern times it has been employed for organizations of an unusual or exceptional character, such as a corps of foreign volunteers or mercenaries. See further [Roman Army].

(F. J. H.)

The term legion has been used to designate regiments or corps of all arms in modern times, perhaps the earliest example of this being the Provincial Legions formed in France by Francis I. (see [Infantry]). Napoleon, in accordance with this precedent, employed the word to designate the second-line formations which he maintained in France and which supplied the Grande Armée with drafts. The term “Foreign Legion” is often used for irregular volunteer corps of foreign sympathizers raised by states at war, often by smaller states fighting for independence. Unlike most foreign legions the “British Legion” which, raised in Great Britain and commanded by Sir de Lacy Evans (q.v.), fought in the Carlist wars, was a regularly enlisted and paid force. The term “foreign legion” is colloquially but incorrectly applied to-day to the Régiments étrangers in the French service, which are composed of adventurous spirits of all nationalities and have been employed in many arduous colonial campaigns.

The most famous of the corps that have borne the name of legion in modern times was the King’s German Legion (see Beamish’s history of the corps). The electorate of Hanover being in 1805 threatened by the French, and no effective resistance being considered possible, the British government wished to take the greater part of the Hanoverian army into its service. But the acceptance by the Hanoverian government of this offer was delayed until too late, and it was only after the French had entered the country and the army as a unit had been disbanded that the formation of the “King’s German Regiment,” as it was at first called, was begun in England. This enlisted not only ex-Hanoverian soldiers, but other Germans as well, as individuals. Lieut.-Colonel von der Decken and Major Colin Halkett were the officers entrusted with the formation of the new corps, which in January 1805 had become a corps of all arms with the title of King’s German Legion. It then consisted of a dragoon and a hussar regiment, five batteries, two light and four line battalions and an engineer section, all these being afterwards increased. Its services included the abortive German expedition of November 1805, the expedition to Copenhagen in 1807, the minor sieges and combats in Sicily 1808-14, the Walcheren expedition of 1809, the expedition to Sweden under Sir John Moore in 1808, and the campaign of 1813 in north Germany. But its title to fame is its part in the Peninsular War, in which from first to last it was an acknowledged corps d’élite—its cavalry especially, whose services both on reconnaissance and in battle were of the highest value. The exploit of the two dragoon regiments of the Legion at Garcia Hernandez after the battle of Salamanca, where they charged and broke up two French infantry squares and captured some 1400 prisoners, is one of the most notable incidents in the history of the cavalry arm (see Sir E. Wood’s Achievements of Cavalry). A general officer of the Legion, Charles Alten (q.v.), commanded the British Light Division in the latter part of the war. It should be said that the Legion was rarely engaged as a unit. It was considered rather as a small army of the British type, most of which served abroad by regiments and battalions while a small portion and depot units were at home, the total numbers under arms being about 25,000. In 1815 the period of service of the corps had almost expired when Napoleon returned from Elba, but its members voluntarily offered to prolong their service. It lost heavily at Waterloo, in which Baring’s battalion of the light infantry distinguished itself by its gallant defence of La Haye Sainte. The strength of the Legion at the time of its disbandment was 1100 officers and 23,500 men. A short-lived “King’s German Legion” was raised by the British government for service in the Crimean War. Certain Hanoverian regiments of the German army to-day represent the units of the Legion and carry Peninsular battle-honours on their standards and colours.

LEGITIM, or Bairn’s Part, in Scots law, the legal share of the movable property of a father due on his death to his children. If a father dies leaving a widow and children, the movable property is divided into three equal parts; one-third part is divided equally among all the children who survive, although they may be of different marriages (the issue of predeceased children do not share); another third goes to the widow as her jus relictae, and the remaining third, called “dead’s part,” may be disposed of by the father by will as he pleases. If the father die intestate the dead’s part goes to the children as next of kin. Should the father leave no widow, one-half of the movable estate is legitim and one-half dead’s part. In claiming legitim, however, credit must be given for any advance made by the father out of his movable estate during his lifetime.

LEGITIMACY, and LEGITIMATION, the status derived by individuals in consequence of being born in legal wedlock, and the means by which the same status is given to persons not so born. Under the Roman or civil law a child born before the marriage of the parents was made legitimate by their subsequent marriage. This method of legitimation was accepted by the canon law, by the legal systems of the continent of Europe, of Scotland and of some of the states of the United States. The early Germanic codes, however, did not recognize such legitimation, nor among the Anglo-Saxons had the natural-born child any rights of inheritance, or possibly any right other than that of protection, even when acknowledged by its father. The principle of the civil and canon law was at one time advocated by the clergy of England, but was summarily rejected by the barons at the parliament of Merton in 1236, when they replied Nolumus leges Angliae mutare.

English law takes account solely of the fact that marriage precedes the birth of the child; at whatever period the birth happens after the marriage, the offspring is prima facie legitimate. The presumption of law is always in favour of the legitimacy of the child of a married woman, and at one time it was so strong that Sir Edward Coke held that “if the husband be within the four seas, i.e. within the jurisdiction of the king of England, and the wife hath issue, no proof shall be admitted to prove the child a bastard unless the husband hath an apparent impossibility of procreation.” It is now settled, however, that the presumption of legitimacy may be rebutted by evidence showing non-access on the part of the husband, or any other circumstance showing that the husband could not in the course of nature have been the father of his wife’s child. If the husband had access, or the access be not clearly negatived, even though others at the same time were carrying on an illicit intercourse with the wife, a child born under such circumstances is legitimate. If the husband had access intercourse must be presumed, unless there is irresistible evidence to the contrary. Neither husband or wife will be permitted to prove the non-access directly or indirectly. Children born after a divorce a mensa et thoro will, however, be presumed to be bastards unless access be proved. A child born so long after the death of a husband that he could not in the ordinary course of nature have been the father is illegitimate. The period of gestation is presumed to be about nine calendar months; and if there were any circumstances from which an unusually long or short period of gestation could be inferred, special medical testimony would be required.

A marriage between persons within the prohibited degrees of affinity was before 1835 not void, but only voidable, and the ecclesiastical courts were restrained from bastardizing the issue after the death of either of the parents. Lord Lyndhurst’s act (1835) declared all such existing marriages valid, but all subsequent marriages between persons within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity or affinity were made null and void and the issue illegitimate (see [Marriage]). By the Legitimacy Declaration Act 1858, application may be made to the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Court (in Scotland, to the Court of Session by action of declarator) for a declaration of legitimacy and of the validity of a marriage. The status of legitimacy in any country depending upon the fact of the child having been born in wedlock, it may be concluded that any question as to the legitimacy of a child turns either on the validity of the marriage or on whether the child has been born in wedlock.

Legitimation effected by the subsequent marriage of the parents of the illegitimate child is technically known as legitimation per subsequens matrimonium. This adoption of the Roman law principle is followed by most of the states of the continent of Europe (with distinctions, of course, as to certain illegitimate children, or as to the forms of acknowledgment by the parent or parents), in the Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey, Lower Canada, St Lucia, Trinidad, Demerara, Berbice, Cape Colony, Ceylon, Mauritius; it has been adopted in New Zealand (Legitimation Act 1894), South Australia (Legitimation Act 1898, amended 1902), Queensland (Legitimation Act 1899), New South Wales (Legitimation Act 1902), and Victoria (Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages Act 1903). It is to be noted, however, that in these states the mere fact of the parents marrying does not legitimate the child; indeed, the parents may marry, yet the child remain illegitimate. In order to legitimate the child it is necessary for the father to make application for its registration; in South Australia, the application must be made by both parents; so also in Victoria, if the mother is living, if not, application by the father will suffice. In New Zealand, Queensland and New South Wales, registration may be made at any time after the marriage; in Victoria, within six months from the date of the marriage; in South Australia, by the act of 1898, registration was permissible only within thirty days before or after the marriage, but by the amending act of 1902 it is allowed at any time more than thirty days after the marriage, provided the applicants prove before a magistrate that they are the parents of the child. In all cases the legitimation is retrospective, taking effect from the birth of the child. Legitimation by subsequent marriage exists also in the following states of the American Union: Maine, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, California, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, N. and S. Dakota, Idaho, Montana and New Mexico. In Massachusetts, Vermont, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arizona, in addition to the marriage the father must recognize or acknowledge the illegitimate child as his. In New Hampshire, Connecticut and Louisiana both parents must acknowledge the child, either by an authentic act before marriage or by the contract of marriage. In some states (California, Nevada, N. and S. Dakota and Idaho) if the father of an illegitimate child receives it into his house (with the consent of his wife, if married), and treats it as if it were legitimate, it becomes legitimate for all purposes. In other states (N. Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and New Mexico) the putative father can legitimize the child by process in court. Those states of the United States which have not been mentioned follow the English common law, which also prevails in Ireland, some of the West Indies and part of Canada. In Scotland, on the other hand, the principle of the civil law is followed. In Scotland, bastards could be legitimized in two ways: either by the subsequent intermarriage of the mother of the child with the father, or by letters of legitimation from the sovereign. With respect to the last, however, it is to be observed that letters of legitimation, be their clauses ever so strong, could not enable the bastard to succeed to his natural father; for the sovereign could not, by any prerogative, cut off the private right of third parties. But by a special clause in the letters of legitimation, the sovereign could renounce his right to the bastard’s succession, failing legitimate descendants, in favour of him who would have been the bastard’s heir had he been born in lawful wedlock, such renunciation encroaching upon no right competent to any third person.

The question remains, how far, if at all, English law recognizes the legitimacy of a person born out of wedlock. Strictly speaking, English law does not recognize any such person as legitimate (though the supreme power of an act of parliament can, of course, confer the rights of legitimacy), but under certain circumstances it will recognize, for purposes of succession to property, a legitimated person as legitimate. The general maxim of law is that the status of legitimacy must be tried by the law of the country where it originates, and where the law of the father’s domicile at the time of the child’s birth, and of the father’s domicile at the time of the subsequent marriage, taken together, legitimize the child, English law will recognize the legitimacy. For purposes of succession to real property, however, legitimacy must be determined by the lex loci rei sitae; so that, for example, a legitimized Scotsman would be recognized as legitimate in England, but not legitimate so far as to take lands as heir (Birtwhistle v. Vardill, 1840). The conflict of laws on the subject yields some curious results. Thus, a domiciled Scotsman had a son born in Scotland and then married the mother in Scotland. The son died possessed of land in England, and it was held that the father could not inherit from the son. On the other hand, where an unmarried woman, domiciled in England died intestate there, it was held that her brother’s daughter, born before marriage, but whilst the father was domiciled in Holland, and legitimized by the parents’ marriage while they were still domiciled in Holland, was entitled to succeed to the personal property of her aunt (In re Goodman’s Trusts, 1880). In re Grey’s Trusts (1892) decided that, where real estate was bequeathed to the children of a person domiciled in a foreign country and these children were legitimized by the subsequent marriage in that country of their father with their mother, that they were entitled to share as legitimate children in a devise of English realty. It is to be noted that this decision does not clash with that of Birtwhistle v. Vardill.

See J. A. Foote, Private International Law; A. V. Dicey, Conflict of Laws; L. von Bar, Private International Law; Story, Conflict of Laws; J. Westlake, International Law.

LEGITIMISTS (Fr. légitimistes, from légitime, lawful, legitimate), the name of the party in France which after the revolution of 1830 continued to support the claims of the elder line of the house of Bourbon as the legitimate sovereigns “by divine right.” The death of the comte de Chambord in 1883 dissolved the parti légitimiste, only an insignificant remnant, known as the Blancs d’Espagne, repudiating the act of renunciation of Philip V. of Spain and upholding the rights of the Bourbons of the line of Anjou. The word légitimiste was not admitted by the French Academy until 1878; but meanwhile it had spread beyond France, and the English word legitimist is now applied to any supporter of monarchy by hereditary right as against a parliamentary or other title.

LEGNAGO, a fortified town of Venetia, Italy, in the province of Verona, on the Adige, 29 m. by rail E. of Mantua, 52 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1906) 2731 (town), 17,000 (commune). Legnago is one of the famous Quadrilateral fortresses. The present fortifications were planned and made in 1815, the older defences having been destroyed by Napoleon I. in 1801. The situation is low and unhealthy, but the territory is fertile, rice, cereals and sugar being grown. Legnago is the birthplace of G. B. Cavalcaselle, the art historian (1827-1897). A branch line runs hence to Rovigo.

LEGNANO, a town of Lombardy, Italy, in the province of Milan, 17 m. N.W. of that city by rail, 682 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1881) 7153, (1901) 18,285. The church of S. Magno, built in the style of Bramante by G. Lampugnano (1504-1529), contains an altar-piece considered one of Luini’s best works. There are also remains of a castle of the Visconti. Legnano is the seat of important cotton and silk industries, with machine-shops, boiler-works, and dyeing and printing of woven goods, and thread. Close by, the Lombard League defeated Frederick Barbarossa in 1176; a monument in commemoration of the battle was erected on the field in 1876, while there is another by Butti erected in 1900 in the Piazza Federico Barbarossa.

LEGOUVÉ, GABRIEL JEAN BAPTISTE ERNEST WILFRID (1807-1903), French dramatist, son of the poet Gabriel Legouvé (1764-1812), who wrote a pastoral La Mort d’Abel (1793) and a tragedy of Epicharis et Néron, was born in Paris on the 5th of February 1807. His mother died in 1810, and almost immediately afterwards his father was removed to a lunatic asylum. The child, however, inherited a considerable fortune, and was carefully educated. Jean Nicolas Bouilly (1763-1842) was his tutor, and early instilled into the young Legouvé a passion for literature, to which the example of his father and of his grandfather, J. B. Legouvé (1729-1783), predisposed him. As early as 1829 he carried away a prize of the French Academy for a poem on the discovery of printing; and in 1832 he published a curious little volume of verses, entitled Les Morts Bizarres. In those early days Legouvé brought out a succession of novels, of which Edith de Falsen enjoyed a considerable success. In 1847 he began the work by which he is best remembered, his contributions to the development and education of the female mind, by lecturing at the College of France on the moral history of women: these discourses were collected into a volume in 1848, and enjoyed a great success. Legouvé wrote considerably for the stage, and in 1849 he collaborated with A. E. Scribe in Adrienne Lecouvreur. In 1855 he brought out his tragedy of Médée, the success of which had much to do with his election to the French Academy. He succeeded to the fauteuil of J. A. Ancelot, and was received by Flourens, who dwelt on the plays of Legouvé as his principal claim to consideration. As time passed on, however, he became less prominent as a playwright, and more so as a lecturer and propagandist on woman’s rights and the advanced education of children, in both of which directions he was a pioneer in French society. His La Femme en France au XIX^me siècle (1864), reissued, much enlarged, in 1878; his Messieurs les enfants (1868), his Conférences Parisiennes (1872), his Nos filles et nos fils (1877), and his Une Éducation de jeune fille (1884) were works of wide-reaching influence in the moral order. In 1886-1887 he published, in two volumes, his Soixante ans de souvenirs, an excellent specimen of autobiography. He was raised in 1887 to the highest grade of the Legion of Honour, and held for many years the post of inspector-general of female education in the national schools. Legouvé was always an advocate of physical training. He was long accounted one of the best shots in France, and although, from a conscientious objection, he never fought a duel, he made the art of fencing his life-long hobby. After the death of Désiré Nisard in 1888, Legouvé became the “father” of the French Academy. He died on the 14th of March 1903.

LEGROS, ALPHONSE (1837-  ), painter and etcher, was born at Dijon on the 8th of May 1837. His father was an accountant, and came from the neighbouring village of Veronnes. Young Legros frequently visited the farms of his relatives, and the peasants and landscapes of that part of France are the subjects of many of his pictures and etchings. He was sent to the art school at Dijon with a view to qualifying for a trade, and was apprenticed to Maître Nicolardo, house decorator and painter of images. In 1851 Legros left for Paris to take another situation; but passing through Lyons he worked for six months as journeyman wall-painter under the decorator Beuchot, who was painting the chapel of Cardinal Bonald in the cathedral. In Paris he studied with Cambon, scene-painter and decorator of theatres, an experience which developed a breadth of touch such as Stanfield and Cox picked up in similar circumstances. At this time he attended the drawing-school of Lecoq de Boisbaudran. In 1855 Legros attended the evening classes of the École des Beaux Arts, and perhaps gained there his love of drawing from the antique, some of the results of which may be seen in the Print Room of the British Museum. He sent two portraits to the Salon of 1857: one was rejected, and formed part of the exhibition of protest organized by Bonvin in his studio; the other, which was accepted, was a profile portrait of his father. This work was presented to the museum at Tours by the artist when his friend Cazin was curator. Champfleury saw the work in the Salon, and sought out the artist to enlist him in the small army of so-called “Realists,” comprising (round the noisy glory of Courbet) all those who raised protest against the academical trifles of the degenerate Romantics. In 1859 Legros’s “Angelus” was exhibited, the first of those quiet church interiors, with kneeling figures of patient women, by which he is best known as a painter. “Ex Voto,” a work of great power and insight, painted in 1861, now in the museum at Dijon, was received by his friends with enthusiasm, but it only obtained a mention at the Salon. Legros came to England in 1863, and in 1864 married Miss Frances Rosetta Hodgson. At first he lived by his etching and teaching. He then became teacher of etching at the South Kensington School of Art, and in 1876 Slade Professor at University College, London. He was naturalized as an Englishman in 1881, and remained at University College seventeen years. His influence there was exerted to encourage a certain distinction, severity and truth of character in the work of his pupils, with a simple technique and a respect for the traditions of the old masters, until then somewhat foreign to English art. He would draw or paint a torso or a head before the students in an hour or even less, so that the attention of the pupils might not be dulled. As students had been known to take weeks and even months over a single drawing, Legros ordered the positions of the casts in the Antique School to be changed once every week. In the painting school he insisted upon a good outline, preserved by a thin rub in of umber, and then the work was to be finished in a single painting, “premier coup.” Experiments in all varieties of art work were practised; whenever the professor saw a fine example in the museum, or when a process interested him in a workshop, he never rested until he had mastered the technique and his students were trying their ’prentice hands at it. As he had casually picked up the art of etching by watching a comrade in Paris working at a commercial engraving, so he began the making of medals after a walk in the British Museum, studying the masterpieces of Pisanello, and a visit to the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris. Legros considered the traditional journey to Italy a very important part of artistic training, and in order that his students should have the benefit of such study he devoted a part of his salary to augment the income available for a travelling studentship. His later works, after he resigned his professorship in 1892, were more in the free and ardent manner of his early days—imaginative landscapes, castles in Spain, and farms in Burgundy, etchings like the series of “The Triumph of Death,” and the sculptured fountains for the gardens of the duke of Portland at Welbeck.

Pictures and drawings by Legros, besides those already mentioned, may be seen in the following galleries and museums: “Amende Honorable,” “Dead Christ,” bronzes, medals and twenty-two drawings, in the Luxembourg, Paris; “Landscape,” “Study of a Head,” and portraits of Browning, Burne-Jones, Cassel, Huxley and Marshall, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Kensington; “Femmes en prière,” National Gallery of British Art; “The Tinker,” and six other works from the Ionides Collection, bequeathed to South Kensington; “Christening,” “Barricade,” “The Poor at Meat,” two portraits and several drawings and etchings, collection of Lord Carlisle; “Two Priests at the Organ,” “Landscape” and etchings, collection of Rev. Stopford Brooke; “Head of a Priest,” collection of Mr Vereker Hamilton; “The Weed-burner,” some sculpture and a large collection of etchings and drawings, Mr Guy Knowles; “Psyche,” collection of Mr L. W. Hodson; “Snow Scene,” collection of Mr G. F. Watts, R.A.; thirty-five drawings and etchings, the Print Room, British Museum; “Jacob’s Dream” and twelve drawings of the antique, Cambridge; “Saint Jerome,” two studies of heads and some drawings, Manchester; “The Pilgrimage” and “Study made before the Class,” Liverpool Walker Art Gallery; “Study of Heads,” Peel Park Museum, Salford.

See Dr Hans W. Singer, “Alphonse Legros,” Die graphischen Künste (1898); Léonce Bénédite, “Alphonse Legros,” Revue de l’art (Paris, 1900); Cosmo Monkhouse, “Professor Legros,” Magazine of Art (1882).

(C. H.*)

LEGUMINOSAE, the second largest family of seed-plants, containing about 430 genera with 7000 species. It belongs to the series Rosales of the Dicotyledons, and contains three well-marked suborders, Papilionatae, Mimosoideae and Caesalpinioideae. The plants are trees, shrubs or herbs of very various habit. The British representatives, all of which belong to the suborder Papilionatae, include a few shrubs, such as Ulex (gorse, furze), Cytisus (broom) and Genista, but the majority, and this applies to the suborder as a whole, are herbs, such as the clovers, Medicago, Melilotus, &c., sometimes climbing by aid of tendrils which are modified leaf-structures, as in Lathyrus and the vetches (Vicia). Scarlet runner (Phaseolus multiflorus) has a herbaceous twining stem. Woody climbers (lianes) are represented by species of Bauhinia (Caesalpinioideae), which with their curiously flattened twisted stems are characteristic features of tropical forests, and Entada scandens (Mimosoideae) also common in the tropics; these two suborders, which are confined to the warmer parts of the earth, consist chiefly of trees and shrubs such as Acacia and Mimosa belonging to the Mimosoideae, and the Judas tree of southern Europe (Cercis) and tamarind belonging to the Caesalpinioideae. The so-called acacia of European gardens (Robinia Pseudacacia) and laburnum are examples of the tree habit in the Papilionatae. Water plants are rare, but are represented by Aeschynomene and Neptunia, tropical genera. The roots of many species bear nodular swellings (tubercles), the cells of which contain bacterium-like bodies which have the power of fixing the nitrogen of the atmosphere in such a form as to make it available for plant food. Hence the value of these plants as a crop on poor soil or as a member of a series of rotation of crops, since they enrich the soil by the nitrogen liberated by the decay of their roots or of the whole plant if ploughed in as green manure.

The leaves are alternate in arrangement and generally compound and stipulate. A common form is illustrated by the trefoil or clovers, which have three leaflets springing from a common point (digitately trifoliate); pinnate leaves are also frequent as in laburnum and Robinia. In Mimosoideae the leaves are generally bipinnate (figs. 1, 2, 3). Rarely are the leaves simple as in Bauhinia. Various departures from the usual leaf-type occur in association with adaptations to different functions or environments. In leaf-climbers, such as pea or vetch, the end of the rachis and one or more pairs of leaflets are changed into tendrils. In gorse the leaf is reduced to a slender spine-like structure, though the leaves of the seedling have one to three leaflets. In many Australian acacias the leaf surface in the adult plant is much reduced, the petiole being at the same time flattened and enlarged (fig. 1), frequently the leaf is reduced to a petiole flattened in the vertical plane; by this means a minimum surface is exposed to the intense sunlight. In the garden pea the stipules are large and foliaceous, replacing the leaflets, which are tendrils; in Robinia the stipules are spiny and persist after leaf-fall. In some acacias (q.v.) the thorns are hollow, and inhabited by ants as in A. sphaerocephala, a central American plant (fig. 2) and others. In some species of Astragalus, Onobrychis and others, the leaf-stalk persists after the fall of the leaf and becomes hard and spiny.

From Strasburger’s Lehrbuch der Botanik, by permission of Gustav Fischer.
Fig. 2.—Acacia sphaerocephala.
I, Leaf and part of stem; D, hollowthorns in which the ants live; F, foodbodies at the apices of the lower pinnules;N, nectary on the petiole. (Reduced.)	II, Single pinnule with food-body,F. (Somewhat enlarged.)

Leaf-movements occur in many of the genera. Such are the sleep-movement in the clovers, runner bean (Phaseolus), Robinia and acacia, where the leaflets assume a vertical position at nightfall. Spontaneous movements are exemplified in the telegraph-plant (Desmodium gyrans), native of tropical Asia, where the small lateral leaflets move up and down every few minutes. The sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica) is an example of movement in response to contact, the leaves assuming a sleep-position if touched. The seat of the movement is the swollen base of the leaf-stalk, the so-called pulvinus (fig. 3).

The stem of the lianes shows some remarkable deviations from the normal in form and structure. In Papilionatae anomalous secondary thickening arises from the production of new cambium zones outside the original ring (Mucuna, Wistaria) forming concentric rings or transverse or broader strands; where, as in Rhyncosia the successive cambiums are active only at two opposite points, a flat ribbon-like stem is produced. The climbing Bauhinias (Caesalpinioideae) have a flattened stem with basin-like undulations; in some growth in thickness is normal, in others new cambium-zones are found concentrically, while in others new and distinct growth-centres, each with its cambium-zone, arise outside the primary zone. The climbing Mimosoideae show no anomalous growth in thickness, but in some cases the stem becomes strongly winged. Gum passages in the pith and medullary rays occur, especially in species of acacia and Astragalus; gum-arabic is an exudation from the branches of Acacia Senegal, gum-tragacanth from Astragalus gummifer and other species. Logwood is the coloured heartwood of Haematoxylon campechianum; red sandalwood of Pterocarpus santalinus.

The flowers are arranged in racemose inflorescences, such as the simple raceme (Laburnum, Robinia), which is condensed to a head in Trifolium; in Acacia and Mimosa the flowers are densely crowded (fig. 4). The flower is characterized by a hypogynous or slightly perigynous arrangement of parts, the anterior position of the odd sepal, the free petals, and the single median carpel with a terminal style, simple stigma and two alternating rows of ovules on the ventral suture of the ovary which faces the back of the flower.

Fig. 4.—Acacia obscura, flowering branch about 1⁄3 natural size.
1, Part of stem with leaf and itssubtended inflorescence,about natural size.	2, Flower, much enlarged. 3, Floral diagram of Acacia latifolia.(After Eichler.)

The arrangement of the petals and the number and cohesion of the stamens vary in the three suborders. In Mimosoideae, the smallest of the three, the flower is regular (fig. 4 [3]), and the sepals and petals have a valvate aestivation, and are generally pentamerous, but 3-6-merous flowers also occur. The sepals are more or less united into a cup (fig. 4 [2]), and the petals sometimes cohere at the base. The stamens vary widely in number and cohesion; in Acacia (fig. 4) they are indefinite and free, in the tribe Ingeae, indefinite and monadelphous, in other tribes as many or twice as many as the petals. Frequently, as in Mimosa, the long yellow stamens are the most conspicuous feature of the flower. In Caesalpinioideae (fig. 5) the flowers are zygomorphic in a median plane and generally pentamerous. The sepals are free, or the two upper ones united as in tamarind, and imbricate in aestivation, rarely as in the Judas-tree (fig. 5 [2]), valvate. The corolla shows great variety in form; it is imbricate in aestivation, the posterior petal being innermost. In Cercis (fig. 5) it clearly resembles the papilionaceous type; the odd petal stands erect, the median pair are reflexed and wing-like, and the lower pair enclose the essential organs. In Cassia all five petals are subequal and spreading; in Amherstia the anterior pair are small or absent while the three upper ones are large; in Krameria, the anterior pair are represented by glandular scales, and in Tamarindus are suppressed. Apetalous flowers occur in Copaifera and Ceratonia. The stamens, generally ten in number, are free, as in Cercis (fig. 5) or more or less united as in Amherstia, where the posterior one is free and the rest are united. In tamarind only three stamens are fertile. The largest suborder, Papilionatae, has a flower zygomorphic in the median plane (figs. 6, 7). The five sepals are generally united (figs. 7, 9), and have an ascending imbricate arrangement (fig. 6); the calyx is often two-lipped (fig. 9 [1]). The corolla has five unequal petals with a descending imbricate arrangement; the upper and largest, the standard (vexillum), stands erect, the lateral pair, the wings or alae, are long-clawed, while the anterior pair cohere to form the keel or carina, in which are enclosed the stamens and pistil. The ten stamens are monadelphous as in gorse or broom (fig. 9), or diadelphous as in sweet pea (fig. 8) (the posterior one being free), or almost or quite free; these differences are associated with differences in the methods of pollination. The ten stamens here, as in the last suborder, though arranged in a single whorl, arise in two series, the five opposite the sepals arising first.

The carpel is sometimes stalked and often surrounded at the base by a honey-secreting disk; the style is terminal and in the zygomorphic flowers is often curved and somewhat flattened with a definite back and front. Sometimes as in species of Trifolium and Medicago the ovules are reduced to one. The pod or legume splits along both sutures (fig. 10) into a pair of membranous, leathery or sometimes fleshy valves, bearing the seeds on the ventral suture. Dehiscence is often explosive, the valves separating elastically and twisting spirally, thus shooting out the seeds, as in gorse, broom and others. In Desmodium, Entada and others the pod is constricted between each seed, and breaks up into indehiscent one-seeded parts; it is then called a lomentum (fig. 11); in Astragalus it is divided by a longitudinal septum.

The pods show a very great variety in form and size. Thus in the clovers they are a small fraction of an inch, while in the common tropical climber Entada scandens they are woody structures more than a yard long and several inches wide. They are generally more or less flattened, but sometimes round and rod-like, as in species of Cassia, or are spirally coiled as in Medicago. Indehiscent one-seeded pods occur in species of clover and in Medicago, also in Dalbergia and allied genera, where they are winged. In Colutea, the bladder-senna of gardens, the pod forms an inflated bladder which bursts under pressure; it often becomes detached and is blown some distance before bursting. An arillar outgrowth is often developed on the funicle, and is sometimes brightly coloured, rendering the seed conspicuous and favouring dissemination by birds; in such cases the seed-coat is hard. In other cases the hard seed-coat itself is bright-coloured as in the scarlet seeds of Abrus precatorius, the so-called weather-plant. Animals also act as the agents of distribution in the case of fleshy edible pods containing seeds with a hard smooth testa, which will pass uninjured through the body, as in tamarind and the fruit of the carob-tree (Ceratonia). In the ground-nut (Arachis hypogaea), Trifolium subterraneum and others, the flower-stalks grow downwards after fertilization of the ovules and bury the fruit in the earth. In the suborders Mimosoideae and Papilionatae the embryo fills the seed or a small quantity of endosperm occurs, chiefly round the radicle. In Caesalpinioideae endosperm is absent, or present forming a thin layer round the embryo as in the tribe Bauhinieae, or copious and cartilaginous as in the Cassieae. The embryo has generally flat leaf-like or fleshy cotyledons with a short radicle.

Fig. 9.—Broom (Cytisus scoparius). (2-7 slightly reduced.)
1, Calyx. 2, Standard. 3, Wing. 4, Keel.	5, Monadelphous stamens and style. 6, Pistil. 7, Pod.

Insects play an important part in the pollination of the flowers. In the two smaller suborders the stamens and stigma are freely exposed and the conspicuous coloured stamens serve as well as the petals to attract insects; in Mimosa and Acacia the flowers are crowded in conspicuous heads or spikes. The relation of insects to the flower has been carefully studied in the Papilionatae, chiefly in European species. Where honey is present it is secreted on the inside of the base of the stamens and accumulated in the base of the tube formed by the united filaments round the ovary. It is accessible only to insects with long probosces, such as bees. In these cases the posterior stamen is free, allowing access to the honey. The flowers stand more or less horizontally; the large erect white or coloured standard renders them conspicuous, the wings form a platform on which the insect rests and the keel encloses the stamens and pistil, protecting them from rain and the attacks of unbidden pollen-eating insects. In his book on the fertilization of flowers, Hermann Müller distinguishes four types of papilionaceous flowers according to the way in which the pollen is applied to the bee:

(1) Those in which the stamens and stigma return within the carina and thus admit of repeated visits, such are the clovers, Melilotus and laburnum. (2) Explosive flowers where stamens and style are confined within the keel under tension and the pressure of the insect causes their sudden release and the scattering of the pollen, as in broom and Genista; these contain no honey but are visited for the sake of the pollen. (3) The piston-mechanism as in bird’s-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus), Anthyllis, Ononis and Lupinus, where the pressure of the bee upon the carina while probing for honey squeezes a narrow ribbon of pollen through the opening at the tip. The pollen has been shed into the cone-like tip of the carina, and the heads of the five outer stamens form a piston beneath it, pushing it out at the tip when pressure is exerted on the keel; a further pressure causes the protrusion of the stigma, which is thus brought in contact with the insect’s belly. (4) The style bears a brush of hairs which sweeps small quantities of pollen out of the tip of the carina, as in Lathyrus, Pisum, Vicia and Phaseolus.

From Vines’s Students’ Text-Bookof Botany, by permissionof Swan, Sonnenschein& Co.	Fig. 11.—Lomentumor lomentaceous legumeof a species ofDesmodium. Eachseed is contained in aseparate cavity by thefolding inwards of thewalls of the legume atequal intervals; thelegume, when ripe, separatestransversely intosingle-seeded portionsor mericarps.
Fig. 10.—Dry dehiscentFruit. The pod(legume) of the Pea.r, The dorsal suture; b,the ventral; c, calyx; s,seeds.

Leguminosae is a cosmopolitan order, and often affords a characteristic feature of the vegetation. Mimosoideae and Caesalpinioideae are richly developed in the tropical rain forests, where Papilionatae are less conspicuous and mostly herbaceous; in subtropical forests arborescent forms of all three suborders occur. In the temperate regions, tree-forms are rare—thus Mimosoideae are unrepresented in Europe; Caesalpinioideae are represented by species of Cercis, Gymnocladus and Gleditschia; Papilionatae by Robinia; but herbaceous Papilionatae abound and penetrate to the limit of growth of seed-plants in arctic and high alpine regions. Shrubs and undershrubs, such as Ulex, Genista, Cytisus are a characteristic feature in Europe and the Mediterranean area. Acacias are an important component of the evergreen bush-vegetation of Australia, together with genera of the tribe Podalyrieae of Papilionatae (Chorizema, Oxylobium, &c.). Astragalus, Oxytropis, Hedysarum, Onobrychis, and others are characteristic of the steppe-formations of eastern Europe and western Asia.

The order is a most important one economically. The seeds, which are rich in starch and proteids, form valuable foods, as in pea, the various beans, vetch, lentil, ground-nut (Arachis) and others; seeds of Arachis and others yield oils; those of Physostigma venenosum, the Calabar ordeal bean, contain a strong poison. Many are useful fodder-plants, as the clovers (Trifolium) (q.v.), Medicago (e.g. M. sativa, lucerne (q.v.), or alfalfa); Melilotus, Vicia, Onobrychis (O. sativa is sainfoin, q.v.); species of Trifolium, lupine and others are used as green manure. Many of the tropical trees afford useful timber; Crotalaria, Sesbania, Aeschynomene and others yield fibre; species of Acacia and Astragalus yield gum; Copaifera, Hymenaea and others balsams and resins; dyes are obtained from Genista (yellow), Indigofera (blue) and others; Haematoxylon campechianum is logwood; of medicinal value are species of Cassia (senna leaves) and Astragalus; Tamarindus indica is tamarind, Glycyrrhiza glabra yields liquorice root. Well-known ornamental trees and shrubs are Cercis (C. siliquastrum is the Judas-tree), Gleditschia, Genista, Cytisus (broom), Colutea (C. arborescens is bladder-senna), Robinia and Acacia; Wisteria sinensis, a native of China, is a well-known climbing shrub; Phaseolus multiflorus is the scarlet runner; Lathyrus (sweet and everlasting peas), Lupinus, Galega (goat’s-rue) and others are herbaceous garden plants. Ceratonia Siliqua is the carob-tree of the Mediterranean, the pods of which (algaroba or St John’s bread) contain a sweet juicy pulp and are largely used for feeding stock.

The order is well represented in Britain. Thus Genista tinctoria is dyers’ greenweed, yielding a yellow dye; G. anglica is needle furze; other shrubs are Ulex (U. europaeus, gorse, furze or whin, U. nanus, a dwarf species) and Cytisus scoparius, broom. Herbaceous plants are Ononis spinosa (rest-harrow), Medicago (medick), Melilotus (melilot), Trifolium (the clovers), Anthyllis Vulneraria (kidney-vetch), Lotus corniculatus (bird’s-foot trefoil), Astragalus (milk-vetch), Vicia (vetch, tare) and Lathyrus.

LÈGYA, called by the Shans Lai-Hka, a state in the central division of the southern Shan States of Burma, lying approximately between 20° 15′ and 21° 30′ N. and 97° 50′ and 98° 30′ E., with an area of 1433 sq. m. The population was estimated at 30,000 in 1881. On the downfall of King Thibaw civil war broke out, and reduced the population to a few hundreds. In 1901 it had risen again to 25,811. About seven-ninths of the land under cultivation consists of wet rice cultivation. A certain amount of upland rice is also cultivated, and cotton, sugar-cane and garden produce make up the rest; recently large orange groves have been planted in the west of the state. Laihka, the capital, is noted for its iron-work, both the iron and the implements made being produced at Pang Lōng in the west of the state. This and lacquer-ware are the chief exports, as also a considerable amount of pottery. The imports are chiefly cotton piece-goods and salt. The general character of the state is that of an undulating plateau, with a broad plain near the capital and along the Nam Tēng, which is the chief river, with a general altitude of a little under 3000 ft.

LEH, the capital of Ladakh, India, situated 4 m. from the right bank of the upper Indus 11,500 ft. above the sea, 243 m. from Srinagar and 482 m. from Yarkand. It is the great emporium of the trade which passes between India, Chinese Turkestan and Tibet. Here meet the routes leading from the central Asian khanates, Kashgar, Yarkand, Khotan and Lhasa. The two chief roads from Leh to India pass via Srinagar and through the Kulu valley respectively. Under a commercial treaty with the maharaja of Kashmir, a British officer is deputed to Leh to regulate and control the traders and the traffic, conjointly with the governor appointed by the Kashmir state. Lying upon the western border of Tibet, Leh has formed the starting-point of many an adventurous journey into that country, the best-known route being that called the Janglam, the great trade route to Lhasa and China, passing by the Manasarowar lakes and the Mariam La pass into the valley of the Tsanpo. Pop. (1901) 2079. A Moravian mission has long been established here, with an efficient little hospital. There is also a meteorological observatory, the most elevated in Asia, where the average mean temperature ranges from 19.3° in January to 64.4° in July. The annual rainfall is only 3 in.

LEHMANN, JOHANN GOTTLOB (?-1767), German mineralogist and geologist, was educated at Berlin where he took his degree of doctor of medicine. He became a teacher of mineralogy and mining in that city, and was afterwards (1761) appointed professor of chemistry and director of the imperial museum at St Petersburg. While distinguished for his chemical and mineralogical researches, he may also be regarded as one of the pioneers in geological investigation. Although he accepted the view of a universal deluge, he gave in 1756 careful descriptions of the rocks and stratified formations in Prussia, and introduced the now familiar terms Zechstein and Rothes Todtliegendes (Rothliegende) for subdivisions of the strata since grouped as Permian. His chief observations were published in Versuch einer Geschichte von Flötz-Gebūrgen, betreffend deren Entstehung, Lage, darinne befindliche Metallen, Mineralien und Fossilien (1756). He died at St Petersburg on the 22nd of January 1767.

LEHMANN, PETER MARTIN ORLA (1810-1870), Danish statesman, was born at Copenhagen on the 15th of May 1810. Although of German extraction his sympathies were with the Danish national party and he contributed to the liberal journal the Kjöbenhavnsposten while he was a student of law at the university of Copenhagen, and from 1839 to 1842 edited, with Christian N. David, the Fädrelandet. In 1842 he was condemned to three months’ imprisonment for a radical speech. He took a considerable part in the demonstrations of 1848, and was regarded as the leader of the “Eiderdänen,” that is, of the party which regarded the Eider as the boundary of Denmark, and the duchy of Schleswig as an integral part of the kingdom. He entered the cabinet of Count A. W. Moltke in March 1848, and was employed on diplomatic missions to London and Berlin in connexion with the Schleswig-Holstein question. He was for some months in 1849 a prisoner of the Schleswig-Holsteiners at Gottorp. A member of the Folkething from 1851 to 1853, of the Landsthing from 1854 to 1870, and from 1856 to 1866 of the Reichsrat, he became minister of the interior in 1861 in the cabinet of K. C. Hall, retiring with him in 1863. He died at Copenhagen on the 13th of September 1870. His book On the Causes of the Misfortunes of Denmark (1864) went through many editions, and his posthumous works were published in 4 vols., 1872-1874.

See Reinhardt, Orla Lehmann og hans samtid (Copenhagen, 1871); J. Clausen, Af O. Lehmanns Papirer (Copenhagen, 1903).

LEHNIN, a village and health resort of Germany, in the Prussian province of Brandenburg, situated between two lakes, which are connected by the navigable Emster with the Havel, 12 m. S.W. from Potsdam, and with a station on the main line Berlin-Magdeburg, and a branch line to Grosskreuz. Pop. (1900) 2379. It contains the ruins of a Cistercian monastery called Himmelpfort am See, founded in 1180 and dissolved in 1542; a handsome parish church, formerly the monasterial chapel, restored in 1872-1877; and a fine statue of the emperor Frederick III. Boat-building and saw-milling are the chief industries.

See Heffter, Geschichte des Klosters Lehnin (Brandenburg, 1851); and Sello, Lehnin, Beiträge zur Geschichte von Kloster und Amt (Berlin, 1881).

The Lehnin Prophecy (Lehninsche Weissagung, Vaticinium Lehninense), a poem in 100 Leonine verses, reputed to be from the pen of a monk, Hermann of Lehnin, who lived about the year 1300, made its appearance about 1690 and caused much controversy. This so-called prophecy bewails the extinction of the Ascanian rulers of Brandenburg and the rise of the Hohenzollern dynasty to power; each successive ruler of the latter house down to the eleventh generation is described, the date of the extinction of the race fixed, and the restoration of the Roman Catholic Church foretold. But as the narrative is only exact in details down to the death of Frederick William, the great elector, in 1688, and as all prophecies of the period subsequent to that time were falsified by events, the poem came to be regarded as a compilation and the date of its authorship placed about the year 1684. Andreas Fromm (d. 1685), rector of St Peter’s church in Berlin, an ardent Lutheran, is commonly believed to have been the forger. This cleric, resisting certain measures taken by the great elector against the Lutheran pastors, fled the country in 1668 to avoid prosecution, and having been received at Prague into the Roman Catholic Church was appointed canon of Leitmeritz in Bohemia, where he died. During the earlier part of the 19th century the poem was eagerly scanned by the enemies of the Hohenzollerns, some of whom believed that the race would end with King Frederick William III., the representative of the eleventh generation of the family.

The “Vaticinium” was first published in Lilienthal’s Gelehrtes Preussen (Königsberg, 1723), and has been many times reprinted. See Boost, Die Weissagungen des Mönchs Hermann zu Lehnin (Augsburg, 1848); Hilgenfeld, Die Lehninische Weissagung (Leipzig, 1875); Sabell, Literatur der sogenannten Lehninschen Weissagung (Heilbronn, 1879) and Kampers, Die Lehninsche Weissagung über das Haus Hohenzollern (Münster, 1897).

LEHRS, KARL (1802-1878), German classical scholar, was born at Königsberg on the 2nd of June 1802. He was of Jewish extraction, but in 1822 he embraced Christianity. In 1845 he was appointed professor of ancient Greek philology in Königsberg University, which post he held till his death on the 9th of June 1878. His most important works are: De Aristarchi Studiis Homericis (1833, 2nd ed. by A. Ludwich, 1882), which laid a new foundation for Homeric exegesis (on the Aristarchean lines of explaining Homer from the text itself) and textual criticism; Quaestiones Epicae (1837); De Asclepiade Myrleano (1845); Herodiani Scripta Tria emendatiora (1848); Populäre Aufsätze aus dem Altertum (1856, 2nd much enlarged ed., 1875), his best-known work; Horatius Flaccus (1869), in which, on aesthetic grounds, he rejected many of the odes as spurious; Die Pindarscholien (1873). Lehrs was a man of very decided opinions, “one of the most masculine of German scholars”; his enthusiasm for everything Greek led him to adhere firmly to the undivided authorship of the Iliad; comparative mythology and the symbolical interpretation of myths he regarded as a species of sacrilege.

See the exhaustive article by L. Friedländer in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, xviii.; E. Kammer in C. Bursian’s Jahresbericht (1879); A. Jung, Zur Erinnerung an Karl Lehrs (progr. Meseritz, 1880); A. Ludwich edited Lehrs’ select correspondence (1894) and his Kleine Schriften (1902).

LEIBNITZ (Leibniz), GOTTFRIED WILHELM (1646-1716), German philosopher, mathematician and man of affairs, was born on the 1st of July 1646 at Leipzig, where his father was professor of moral philosophy. Though the name Leibniz, Leibnitz or Lubeniecz was originally Slavonic, his ancestors were German, and for three generations had been in the employment of the Saxon government. Young Leibnitz was sent to the Nicolai school at Leipzig, but, from 1652 when his father died, seems to have been for the most part his own teacher. From his father he had acquired a love of historical study. The German books at his command were soon read through, and with the help of two Latin books—the Thesaurus Chronologicus of Calvisius and an illustrated edition of Livy—he learned Latin at the age of eight. His father’s library was now thrown open to him, to his great joy, with the permission, “Tolle, lege.” Before he was twelve he could read Latin easily and had begun Greek; he had also remarkable facility in writing Latin verse. He next turned to the study of logic, attempting already to reform its doctrines, and zealously reading the scholastics and some of the Protestant theologians.

At the age of fifteen, he entered the university of Leipzig as a law student. His first two years were devoted to philosophy under Jakob Thomasius, a Neo-Aristotelian, who is looked upon as having founded the scientific study of the history of philosophy in Germany. It was at this time probably that he first made acquaintance with the modern thinkers who had already revolutionized science and philosophy, Francis Bacon, Cardan and Campanella, Kepler, Galileo and Descartes; and he began to consider the difference between the old and new ways of regarding nature. He resolved to study mathematics. It was not, however, till the summer of 1663, which he spent at Jena under E. Weigel, that he obtained the instructions of a mathematician of repute; nor was the deeper study of mathematics entered upon till his visit to Paris and acquaintance with Huygens many years later.

The next three years he devoted to legal studies, and in 1666 applied for the degree of doctor of law, with a view to obtaining the post of assessor. Being refused on the ground of his youth he left his native town for ever. The doctor’s degree refused him there was at once (November 5, 1666) conferred on him at Altdorf—the university town of the free city of Nuremberg—where his brilliant dissertation procured him the immediate offer of a professor’s chair. This, however, he declined, having, as he said, “very different things in view.”

Leibnitz, not yet twenty-one years of age, was already the author of several remarkable essays. In his bachelor’s dissertation De principio individui (1663), he defended the nominalistic doctrine that individuality is constituted by the whole entity or essence of a thing; his arithmetical tract De complexionibus, published in an extended form under the title De arte combinatoria (1666), is an essay towards his life-long project of a re-formed symbolism and method of thought; and besides these there are our juridical essays, including the Nova methodus docendi discendique juris, written in the intervals of his journey from Leipzig to Altdorf. This last essay is remarkable, not only for the reconstruction it attempted of the Corpus Juris, but as containing the first clear recognition of the importance of the historical method in law. Nuremberg was a centre of the Rosicrucians, and Leibnitz, busying himself with writings of the alchemists, soon gained such a knowledge of their tenets that he was supposed to be one of the secret brotherhood, and was even elected their secretary. A more important result of his visit to Nuremberg was his acquaintance with Johann Christian von Boyneburg (1622-1672), formerly first minister to the elector of Mainz, and one of the most distinguished German statesmen of the day. By his advice Leibnitz printed his Nova methodus in 1667, dedicated it to the elector, and, going to Mainz, presented it to him in person. It was thus that Leibnitz entered the service of the elector of Mainz, at first as an assistant in the revision of the statute-book, afterwards on more important work.

The policy of the elector, which the pen of Leibnitz was now called upon to promote, was to maintain the security of the German empire, threatened on the west by the aggressive power of France, on the east by Turkey and Russia. Thus when in 1669 the crown of Poland became vacant, it fell to Leibnitz to support the claims of the German candidate, which he did in his first political writing, Specimen demonstrationum politicarum pro rege Polonorum eligendo, attempting, under the guise of a Catholic Polish nobleman, to show by mathematical demonstration that it was necessary in the interest of Poland that it should have the count palatine of Neuburg as its king. But neither the diplomatic skill of Boyneburg, who had been sent as plenipotentiary to the election at Warsaw, nor the arguments of Leibnitz were successful, and a Polish prince was elected to fill the vacant throne.

A greater danger threatened Germany in the aggressions of Louis XIV. (see [France]: History). Though Holland was in most immediate danger, the seizure of Lorraine in 1670 showed that Germany too was threatened. It was in this year that Leibnitz wrote his Thoughts on Public Safety,[1] in which he urged the formation of a new “Rheinbund” for the protection of Germany, and contended that the states of Europe should employ their power, not against one another, but in the conquest of the non-Christian world, in which Egypt, “one of the best situated lands in the world,” would fall to France. The plan thus proposed of averting the threatened attack on Germany by a French expedition to Egypt was discussed with Boyneburg, and obtained the approval of the elector. French relations with Turkey were at the time so strained as to make a breach imminent, and at the close of 1671, about the time when the war with Holland broke out, Louis himself was approached by a letter from Boyneburg and a short memorial from the pen of Leibnitz, who attempted to show that Holland itself, as a mercantile power trading with the East, might be best attacked through Egypt, while nothing would be easier for France or would more largely increase her power than the conquest of Egypt. On February 12, 1672, a request came from the French secretary of state, Simon Arnauld de Pomponne (1618-1699), that Leibnitz should go to Paris. Louis seems still to have kept the matter in view, but never granted Leibnitz the personal interview he desired, while Pomponne wrote, “I have nothing against the plan of a holy war, but such plans, you know, since the days of St Louis, have ceased to be the fashion.” Not yet discouraged, Leibnitz wrote a full account of his project for the king,[2] and a summary of the same[3] evidently intended for Boyneburg. But Boyneburg died in December 1672, before the latter could be sent to him. Nor did the former ever reach its destination. The French quarrel with the Porte was made up, and the plan of a French expedition to Egypt disappeared from practical politics till the time of Napoleon. The history of this scheme, and the reason of Leibnitz’s journey to Paris, long remained hidden in the archives of the Hanoverian library. It was on his taking possession of Hanover in 1803 that Napoleon learned, through the Consilium Aegyptiacum, that the idea of a French conquest of Egypt had been first put forward by a German philosopher. In the same year there was published in London an account of the Justa dissertatio[4] of which the British Government had procured a copy in 1799. But it was only with the appearance of the edition of Leibnitz’s works begun by Onno Klopp in 1864 that the full history of the scheme was made known.

Leibnitz had other than political ends in view in his visit to France. It was as the centre of literature and science that Paris chiefly attracted him. Political duties never made him lose sight of his philosophical and scientific interests. At Mainz he was still busied with the question of the relation between the old and new methods in philosophy. In a letter to Jakob Thomasius (1669) he contends that the mechanical explanation of nature by magnitude, figure and motion alone is not inconsistent with the doctrines of Aristotle’s Physics, in which he finds more truth than in the Meditations of Descartes. Yet these qualities of bodies, he argues in 1668 (in an essay published without his knowledge under the title Confessio naturae contra atheistas), require an incorporeal principle, or God, for their ultimate explanation. He also wrote at this time a defence of the doctrine of the Trinity against Wissowatius (1669), and an essay on philosophic style, introductory to an edition of the Anti-barbarus of Nizolius (1670). Clearness and distinctness alone, he says, are what makes a philosophic style, and no language is better suited for this popular exposition than the German. In 1671 he issued a Hypothesis physica nova, in which, agreeing with Descartes that corporeal phenomena should be explained from motion, he carried out the mechanical explanation of nature by contending that the original of this motion is a fine aether, similar to light, or rather constituting it, which, penetrating all bodies in the direction of the earth’s axis, produces the phenomena of gravity, elasticity, &c. The first part of the essay, on concrete motion, was dedicated to the Royal Society of London, the second, on abstract motion, to the French Academy.

At Paris Leibnitz met with Arnauld, Malebranche and, more important still, with Christian Huygens. This was pre-eminently the period of his mathematical and physical activity. Before leaving Mainz he was able to announce[5] an imposing list of discoveries, and plans for discoveries, arrived at by means of his new logical art, in natural philosophy, mathematics, mechanics, optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and nautical science, not to speak of new ideas in law, theology and politics. Chief among these discoveries was that of a calculating machine for performing more complicated operations than that of Pascal—multiplying, dividing and extracting roots, as well as adding and subtracting. This machine was exhibited to the Academy of Paris and to the Royal Society of London, and Leibnitz was elected a fellow of the latter society in April 1673.[6] In January of this year he had gone to London as an attaché on a political mission from the elector of Mainz, returning in March to Paris, and while in London had become personally acquainted with Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, with whom he had already corresponded, with Boyle the chemist and Pell the mathematician. It is from this period that we must date the impulse that directed him anew to mathematics. By Pell he had been referred to Mercator’s Logarithmotechnica as already containing some numerical observations which Leibnitz had thought original on his own part; and, on his return to Paris, he devoted himself to the study of higher geometry under Huygens, entering almost at once upon the series of investigations which culminated in his discovery of the differential and integral calculus (see [Infinitesimal Calculus]).

Shortly after his return to Paris in 1673, Leibnitz ceased to be in the Mainz service any more than in name, but in the same year entered the employment of Duke John Frederick of Brunswick-Lüneburg, with whom he had corresponded for some time. In 1676 he removed at the duke’s request to Hanover, travelling thither by way of London and Amsterdam. At Amsterdam he saw and conversed with Spinoza, and carried away with him extracts from the latter’s unpublished Ethica.

For the next forty years, and under three successive princes, Leibnitz was in the service of the Brunswick family, and his headquarters were at Hanover, where he had charge of the ducal library. Leibnitz thus passed into a political atmosphere formed by the dynastic aims of the typical German state (see [Hanover]; [Brunswick]). He supported the claim of Hanover to appoint an ambassador at the congress of Nimeguen (1676)[7] to defend the establishment of primogeniture in the Lüneburg branch of the Brunswick family; and, when the proposal was made to raise the duke of Hanover to the electorate, he had to show that this did not interfere with the rights of the duke of Württemberg. In 1692 the duke of Hanover was made elector. Before, and with a view to this, Leibnitz had been employed by him to write the history of the Brunswick-Lüneburg family, and, to collect material for his history, had undertaken a journey through Germany and Italy in 1687-1690, visiting and examining the records in Marburg, Frankfort-on-the-Main, Munich, Vienna (where he remained nine months), Venice, Modena and Rome. At Rome he was offered the custodianship of the Vatican library on condition of his joining the Catholic Church.

About this time, too, his thoughts and energies were partly taken up with the scheme for the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. At Mainz he had joined in an attempt made by the elector and Boyneburg to bring about a reconciliation, and now, chiefly through the energy and skill of the Catholic Royas de Spinola, and from the spirit of moderation which prevailed among the theologians he met with at Hanover in 1683, it almost seemed as if some agreement might be arrived at. In 1686 Leibnitz wrote his Systema theologicum,[8] in which he strove to find common ground for Protestants and Catholics in the details of their creeds. But the English revolution of 1688 interfered with the scheme in Hanover, and it was soon found that the religious difficulties were greater than had at one time appeared. In the letters to Leibnitz from Bossuet, the landgrave of Hessen-Rheinfels, and Madame de Brinon, the aim is obviously to make converts to Catholicism, not to arrive at a compromise with Protestantism, and when it was found that Leibnitz refused to be converted the correspondence ceased. A further scheme of church union in which Leibnitz was engaged, that between the Reformed and Lutheran Churches, met with no better success.

Returning from Italy in 1690, Leibnitz was appointed librarian at Wolfenbüttel by Duke Anton of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Some years afterwards began his connexion with Berlin through his friendship with the electress Sophie Charlotte of Brandenburg and her mother the princess Sophie of Hanover. He was invited to Berlin in 1700, and on the 11th July of that year the academy (Akademie der Wissenschaften) he had planned was founded, with himself as its president for life. In the same year he was made a privy councillor of justice by the elector of Brandenburg. Four years before he had received a like honour from the elector of Hanover, and twelve years afterwards the same distinction was conferred upon him by Peter the Great, to whom he gave a plan for an academy at St Petersburg, carried out after the czar’s death. After the death of his royal pupil in 1705 his visits to Berlin became less frequent and less welcome, and in 1711 he was there for the last time. In the following year he undertook his fifth and last journey to Vienna, where he stayed till 1714. An attempt to found an academy of science there was defeated by the opposition of the Jesuits, but he now attained the honour he had coveted of an imperial privy councillorship (1712), and, either at this time or on a previous occasion (1709), was made a baron of the empire (Reichsfreiherr). Leibnitz returned to Hanover in September 1714, but found the elector George Louis had already gone to assume the crown of England. Leibnitz would gladly have followed him to London, but was bidden to remain at Hanover and finish his history of Brunswick.

During the last thirty years Leibnitz had been busy with many matters. Mathematics, natural science,[9] philosophy, theology, history jurisprudence, politics (particularly the French wars with Germany, and the question of the Spanish succession), economics and philology, all gained a share of his attention; almost all of them he enriched with original observations.

His genealogical researches in Italy—through which he established the common origin of the families of Brunswick and Este—were not only preceded by an immense collection of historical sources, but enabled him to publish materials for a code of international law.[10] The history of Brunswick itself was the last work of his life, and had covered the period from 768 to 1005 when death ended his labours. But the government, in whose service and at whose order the work had been carried out, left it in the archives of the Hanover library till it was published by Pertz in 1843.

It was in the years between 1690 and 1716 that Leibnitz’s chief philosophical works were composed, and during the first ten of these years the accounts of his system were, for the most part, preliminary sketches. Indeed, he never gave a full and systematic account of his doctrines. His views have to be gathered from letters to friends, from occasional articles in the Acta Eruditorum, the Journal des Savants, and other journals, and from one or two more extensive works. It is evident, however, that philosophy had not been entirely neglected in the years in which his pen was almost solely occupied with other matters. A letter to the duke of Brunswick, and another to Arnauld, in 1671, show that he had already reached his new notion of substance; but it is in the correspondence with Antoine Arnauld, between 1686 and 1690, that his fundamental ideas and the reasons for them are for the first time made clear. The appearance of Locke’s Essay in 1690 induced him (1696) to note down his objections to it, and his own ideas on the same subjects. In 1703-1704 these were worked out in detail and ready for publication, when the death of the author whom they criticized prevented their appearance (first published by Raspe, 1765). In 1710 appeared the only complete and systematic philosophical work of his lifetime, Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme, et l’origine du mal, originally undertaken at the request of the late queen of Prussia, who had wished a reply to Bayle’s opposition of faith and reason. In 1714 he wrote, for Prince Eugene of Savoy, a sketch of his system under the title of La Monadologie, and in the same year appeared his Principes de la nature et de la grâce. The last few years of his life were perhaps more occupied with correspondence than any others, and, in a philosophical regard, were chiefly notable for the letters, which, through the desire of the new queen of England, he interchanged with Clarke, sur Dieu, l’âme, l’espace, la durée.

Leibnitz died on the 14th of November 1716, his closing years enfeebled by disease, harassed by controversy, embittered by neglect; but to the last he preserved the indomitable energy and power of work to which is largely due the position he holds as, more perhaps than any one in modern times, a man of almost universal attainments and almost universal genius. Neither at Berlin, in the academy which he had founded, nor in London, whither his sovereign had gone to rule, was any notice taken of his death. At Hanover, Eckhart, his secretary, was his only mourner; “he was buried,” says an eyewitness, “more like a robber than what he really was, the ornament of his country.”[11] Only in the French Academy was the loss recognized, and a worthy eulogium devoted to his memory (November 13, 1717). The 200th anniversary of his birth was celebrated in 1846, and in the same year were opened the Königlichsächsische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften and the Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Leipzig and Vienna respectively. In 1883, a statue was erected to him at Leipzig.

Leibnitz possessed a wonderful power of rapid and continuous work. Even in travelling his time was employed in solving mathematical problems. He is described as moderate in his habits, quick of temper but easily appeased, charitable in his judgments of others, and tolerant of differences of opinion, though impatient of contradiction on small matters. He is also said to have been fond of money to the point of covetousness; he was certainly desirous of honour, and felt keenly the neglect in which his last years were passed.

Philosophy.—The central point in the philosophy of Leibnitz was only arrived at after many advances and corrections in his opinions. This point is his new doctrine of substance (p. 702),[12] and it is through it that unity is given to the succession of occasional writings, scattered over fifty years, in which he explained his views. More inclined to agree than to differ with what he read (p. 425), and borrowing from almost every philosophical system, his own standpoint is yet most closely related to that of Descartes, partly as consequence, partly by way of opposition. Cartesianism, Leibnitz often asserted, is the ante-room of truth, but the ante-room only. Descartes’s separation of things into two heterogeneous substances only connected by the omnipotence of God, and the more logical absorption of both by Spinoza into the one divine substance, followed from an erroneous conception of what the true nature of substance is. Substance, the ultimate reality, can only be conceived as force. Hence Leibnitz’s metaphysical view of the monads as simple, percipient, self-active beings, the constituent elements of all things, his physical doctrines of the reality and constancy of force at the same time that space, matter and motion are merely phenomenal, and his psychological conception of the continuity and development of consciousness. In the closest connexion with the same stand his logical principles of consistency and sufficient reason, and the method he developed from them, his ethical end of perfection, and his crowning theological conception of the universe as the best possible world, and of God both as its efficient cause and its final harmony.

The ultimate elements of the universe are, according to Leibnitz, individual centres of force or monads. Why they should be individual, and not manifestations of one world-force, he never clearly proves.[13] His doctrine of individuality seems to have been arrived at, not by strict deduction from the nature of force, but rather from the empirical observation that it is by the manifestation of its activity that the separate existence of the individual becomes evident; for his system individuality is as fundamental as activity. “The monads,” he says, “are the very atoms of nature—in a word, the elements of things,” but, as centres of force, they have neither parts, extension nor figure (p. 705). Hence their distinction from the atoms of Democritus and the materialists. They are metaphysical points or rather spiritual beings whose very nature it is to act. As the bent bow springs back of itself, so the monads naturally pass and are always passing into action without any aid but the absence of opposition (p. 122). Nor do they, like the atoms, act upon one another (p. 680); the action of each excludes that of every other. The activity of each is the result of its own past state, the determinator of its own future (pp. 706, 722). “The monads have no windows by which anything may go in or out” (p. 705).

Further, since all substances are of the nature of force, it follows that—“in imitation of the notion which we have of souls”—they must contain something analogous to feeling and appetite. It is the nature of the monad to represent the many in one, and this is perception, by which external events are mirrored internally (p. 438). Through their own activity the monads mirror the universe (p. 725), but each in its own way and from its own point of view, that is, with a more or less perfect perception (p. 127); for the Cartesians were wrong in ignoring the infinite grades of perception, and identifying it with the reflex cognizance of it which may be called apperception. Every monad is thus a microcosm, the universe in little,[14] and according to the degree of its activity is the distinctness of its representation of the universe (p. 709). Thus Leibnitz, borrowing the Aristotelian term, calls the monads entelechies, because they have a certain perfection (τὸ ἐντελές) and sufficiency (αὐτάρκεια) which make them sources of their internal actions and, so to speak, incorporeal automata (p. 706). That the monads are not pure entelechies is shown by the differences amongst them. Excluding all external limitation, they are yet limited by their own nature. All created monads contain a passive element or materia prima (pp. 440, 687, 725), in virtue of which their perceptions are more or less confused. As the activity of the monad consists in perception, this is inhibited by the passive principle, so that there arises in the monad an appetite or tendency to overcome the inhibition and become more perceptive, whence follows the change from one perception to another (pp. 706, 714). By the proportion of activity to passivity in it one monad is differentiated from another. The greater the amount of activity or of distinct perceptions the more perfect is the monad; the stronger the element of passivity, the more confused its perceptions, the less perfect is it (p. 709). The soul would be a divinity had it nothing but distinct perceptions (p. 520).

The monad is never without a perception; but, when it has a number of little perceptions with no means of distinction, a state similar to that of being stunned ensues, the monade nue being perpetually in this state (p. 707). Between this and the most distinct perception there is room for an infinite diversity of nature among the monads themselves. Thus no one monad is exactly the same as another; for, were it possible that there should be two identical, there would be no sufficient reason why God, who brings them into actual existence, should put one of them at one definite time and place, the other at a different time and place. This is Leibnitz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles (pp. 277, 755); by it his early problem as to the principle of individuation is solved by the distinction between genus and individual being abolished, and every individual made sui generis. The principle thus established is formulated in Leibnitz’s law of continuity, founded, he says, on the doctrine of the mathematical infinite, essential to geometry, and of importance in physics (pp. 104, 105), in accordance with which there is neither vacuum nor break in nature, but “everything takes place by degrees” (p. 392), the different species of creatures rising by insensible steps from the lowest to the most perfect form (p. 312).

As in every monad each succeeding state is the consequence of the preceding, and as it is of the nature of every monad to mirror or represent the universe, it follows (p. 774) that the perceptive content of each monad is in “accord” or correspondence with that of every other (cf. p. 127), though this content is represented with infinitely varying degrees of perfection. This is Leibnitz’s famous doctrine of pre-established harmony, in virtue of which the infinitely numerous independent substances of which the world is composed are related to each other and form one universe. It is essential to notice that it proceeds from the very nature of the monads as percipient, self-acting beings, and not from an arbitrary determination of the Deity.

From this harmony of self-determining percipient units Leibnitz has to explain the world of nature and mind. As everything that really exists is of the nature of spiritual or metaphysical points (p. 126), it follows that space and matter in the ordinary sense can only have a phenomenal existence (p. 745), being dependent not on the nature of the monads themselves but on the way in which they are perceived. Considering that several things exist at the same time and in a certain order of co-existence, and mistaking this constant relation for something that exists outside of them, the mind forms the confused perception of space (p. 768). But space and time are merely relative, the former an order of coexistences, the latter of successions (pp. 682, 752). Hence not only the secondary qualities of Descartes and Locke, but their so-called primary qualities as well, are merely phenomenal (p. 445). The monads are really without position or distance from each other; but, as we perceive several simple substances, there is for us an aggregate or extended mass. Body is thus active extension (pp. 110, 111). The unity of the aggregate depends entirely on our perceiving the monads composing it together. There is no such thing as an absolute vacuum or empty space, any more than there are indivisible material units or atoms from which all things are built up (pp. 126, 186, 277). Body, corporeal mass, or, as Leibnitz calls it, to distinguish it from the materia prima of which every monad partakes (p. 440), materia secunda, is thus only a “phenomenon bene fundatum” (p. 436). It is not a substantia but substantiae or substantiatum (p. 745). While this, however, is the only view consistent with Leibnitz’s fundamental principles, and is often clearly stated by himself, he also speaks at other times of the materia secunda as itself a composite substance, and of a real metaphysical bond between soul and body. But these expressions occur chiefly in the letters to des Bosses, in which Leibnitz is trying to reconcile his views with the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, especially with that of the real presence in the Eucharist, and are usually referred to by him as doctrines of faith or as hypothetical (see especially p. 680). The true vinculum substantiale is not the materia secunda, which a consistent development of Leibnitz’s principles can only regard as phenomenal, but the materia prima, through which the monads are individualized and distinguished and their connexion rendered possible. And Leibnitz seems to recognize that the opposite assumption is inconsistent with his cardinal metaphysical view of the monads as the only realities.

From Leibnitz’s doctrine of force as the ultimate reality it follows that his view of nature must be throughout dynamical. And though his project of a dynamic, or theory of natural philosophy, was never carried out, the outlines of his own theory and his criticism of the mechanical physics of Descartes are known to us. The whole distinction between the two lies in the difference between the mechanical and the dynamical views of nature. Descartes started from the reality of extension as constituting the nature of material substance, and found in magnitude, figure and motion the explanation of the material universe. Leibnitz, too, admitted the mechanical view of nature as giving the laws of corporeal phenomena (p. 438), applying also to everything that takes place in animal organisms,[15] even the human body (p. 777). But, as phenomenal, these laws must find their explanation in metaphysics, and thus in final causes (p. 155). All things, he says (in his Specimen Dynamicum), can be explained either by efficient or by final causes. But the latter method is not appropriate to individual occurrences,[16] though it must be applied when the laws of mechanism themselves need explanation (p. 678). For Descartes’s doctrine of the constancy of the quantity of motion (i.e. momentum) in the world Leibnitz substitutes the principle of the conservation of vis viva, and contends that the Cartesian position that motion is measured by velocity should be superseded by the law that moving force (vis motrix) is measured by the square of the velocity (pp. 192, 193). The long controversy raised by this criticism was really caused by the ambiguity of the terms employed. The principles held by Descartes and Leibnitz were both correct, though different, and their conflict only apparent. Descartes’s principle is now enunciated as the conservation of momentum, that of Leibnitz as the conservation of energy. Leibnitz further criticizes the Cartesian view that the mind can alter the direction of motion though it cannot initiate it, and contends that the quantity of “vis directiva,” estimated between the same parts, is constant (p. 108)—a position developed in his statical theorem for determining geometrically the resultant of any number of forces acting at a point.

Like the monad, body, which is its analogue, has a passive and an active element. The former is the capacity of resistance, and includes impenetrability and inertia; the latter is active force (pp. 250, 687). Bodies, too, like the monads, are self-contained activities, receiving no impulse from without—it is only by an accommodation to ordinary language that we speak of them as doing so—but moving themselves in harmony with each other (p. 250).

The psychology of Leibnitz is chiefly developed in the Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, written in answer to Locke’s famous Essay, and criticizing it chapter by chapter. In these essays he worked out a theory of the origin and development of knowledge in harmony with his metaphysical views, and thus without Locke’s implied assumption of the mutual influence of soul and body. When one monad in an aggregate perceives the others so clearly that they are in comparison with it bare monads (monades nues), it is said to be the ruling monad of the aggregate, not because it actually does exert an influence over the rest, but because, being in close correspondence with them, and yet having so much clearer perception, it seems to do so (p. 683). This monad is called the entelechy or soul of the aggregate or body, and as such mirrors the aggregate in the first place and the universe through it (p. 710). Each soul or entelechy is surrounded by an infinite number of monads forming its body (p. 714); soul and body together make a living being, and, as their laws are in perfect harmony—a harmony established between the whole realm of final causes and that of efficient causes (p. 714)—we have the same result as if one influenced the other. This is further explained by Leibnitz in his well-known illustration of the different ways in which two clocks may keep exactly the same time. The machinery of the one may actually move that of the other, or whenever one moves the mechanician may make a similar alteration in the other, or they may have been so perfectly constructed at first as to continue to correspond at every instant without any further influence (pp. 133, 134). The first way represents the common (Locke’s) theory of mutual influence, the second the method of the occasionalists, the third that of pre-established harmony. Thus the body does not act on the soul in the production of cognition, nor the soul on the body in the production of motion. The body acts just as if it had no soul, the soul as if it had no body (p. 711). Instead, therefore, of all knowledge coming to us directly or indirectly through the bodily senses, it is all developed by the soul’s own activity, and sensuous perception is itself but a confused kind of cognition. Not a certain select class of our ideas only (as Descartes held), but all our ideas, are innate, though only worked up into actual cognition in the development of knowledge (p. 212). To the aphorism made use of by Locke, “Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu,” must be added the clause, “nisi intellectus ipse” (p. 223). The soul at birth is not comparable to a tabula rasa, but rather to an unworked block of marble, the hidden veins of which already determine the form it is to assume in the hands of the sculptor (p. 196). Nor, again, can the soul ever be without perception; for it has no other nature than that of a percipient active being (p. 246). Apparently dreamless sleep is to be accounted for by unconscious perception (p. 223); and it is by such insensible perceptions that Leibnitz explains his doctrine of pre-established harmony (p. 197).

In the human soul perception is developed into thought, and there is thus an infinite though gradual difference between it and the mere monad (p. 464). As all knowledge is implicit in the soul, it follows that its perfection depends on the efficiency of the instrument by which it is developed. Hence the importance, in Leibnitz’s system, of the logical principles and method, the consideration of which occupied him at intervals throughout his whole career.

There are two kinds of truths—(1) truths of reasoning, and (2) truths of fact (pp. 83, 99, 707). The former rest on the principle of identity (or contradiction) or of possibility, in virtue of which that is false which contains a contradiction, and that true which is contradictory to the false. The latter rest on the principle of sufficient reason or of reality (compossibilité), according to which no fact is true unless there be a sufficient reason why it should be so and not otherwise (agreeing thus with the principium melioris or final cause). God alone, the purely active monad, has an a priori knowledge of the latter class of truths; they have their source in the human mind only in so far as it mirrors the outer world, i.e. in its passivity, whereas the truths of reason have their source in our mind in itself or in its activity.

Both kinds of truths fall into two classes, primitive and derivative. The primitive truths of fact are, as Descartes held, those of internal experience, and the derivative truths are inferred from them in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason, by their agreement with our perception of the world as a whole. They are thus reached by probable arguments—a department of logic which Leibnitz was the first to bring into prominence (pp. 84, 164, 168, 169, 343). The primitive truths of reasoning are identical (in later terminology, analytical) propositions, the derivative truths being deduced from them by the principle of contradiction. The part of his logic on which Leibnitz laid the greatest stress was the separation of these rational cognitions into their simplest elements—for he held that the root-notions (cogitationes primae) would be found to be few in number (pp. 92, 93)—and the designation of them by universal characters or symbols,[17] composite notions being denoted by the formulae formed by the union of several definite characters, and judgments by the relation of aequipollence among these formulae, so as to reduce the syllogism to a calculus. This is the main idea of Leibnitz’s “universal characteristic,” never fully worked out by him, which he regarded as one of the greatest discoveries of the age. An incidental result of its adoption would be the introduction of a universal symbolism of thought comparable to the symbolism of mathematics and intelligible in all languages (cf. p. 356). But the great revolution it would effect would chiefly consist in this, that truth and falsehood would be no longer matters of opinion but of correctness or error in calculation,[18] (pp. 83, 84, 89, 93). The old Aristotelian analytic is not to be superseded; but it is to be supplemented by this new method, for of itself it is but the ABC of logic.

But the logic of Leibnitz is an art of discovery (p. 85) as well as of proof, and, as such, applies both to the sphere of reasoning and to that of fact. In the former it has by attention to render explicit what is otherwise only implicit, and by the intellect to introduce order into the a priori truths of reason, so that one may follow from another and they may constitute together a monde intellectuel. To this art of orderly combination Leibnitz attached the greatest importance, and to it one of his earliest writings was devoted. Similarly, in the sphere of experience, it is the business of the art of discovery to find out and classify the primitive facts or data, referring every other fact to them as its sufficient reason, so that new truths of experience may be brought to light.

As the perception of the monad when clarified becomes thought, so the appetite of which all monads partake is raised to will, their spontaneity to freedom, in man (p. 669). The will is an effort or tendency to that which one finds good (p. 251), and is free only in the sense of being exempt from external control[19] (pp. 262, 513, 521), for it must always have a sufficient reason for its action determined by what seems good to it. The end determining the will is pleasure (p. 269), and pleasure is the sense of an increase of perfection (p. 670). A will guided by reason will sacrifice transitory and pursue constant pleasures or happiness, and in this weighing of pleasures consists true wisdom. Leibnitz, like Spinoza, says that freedom consists in following reason, servitude in following the passions (p. 669), and that the passions proceed from confused perceptions (pp. 188, 269). In love one finds joy in the happiness of another; and from love follow justice and law. “Our reason,” says Leibnitz,[20] “illumined by the spirit of God, reveals the law of nature,” and with it positive law must not conflict. Natural law rises from the strict command to avoid offence, through the maxim of equity which gives to each his due, to that of probity or piety (honeste vivere),—the highest ethical perfection,—which presupposes a belief in God, providence and a future life.[21] Moral immortality—not merely the simple continuity which belongs to every monad—comes from God having provided that the changes of matter will not make man lose his individuality (pp. 126, 466).

Leibnitz thus makes the existence of God a postulate of morality as well as necessary for the realization of the monads. It is in the Théodicée that his theology is worked out and his view of the universe as the best possible world defended. In it he contends that faith and reason are essentially harmonious (pp. 402, 479), and that nothing can be received as an article of faith which contradicts an eternal truth, though the ordinary physical order may be superseded by a higher.[22]

The ordinary arguments for the being of God are retained by Leibnitz in a modified form (p. 375). Descartes’s ontological proof is supplemented by the clause that God as the ens a se must either exist or be impossible (pp. 80, 177, 708); in the cosmological proof he passes from the infinite series of finite causes to their sufficient reason which contains all changes in the series necessarily in itself (pp. 147, 708); and he argues teleologically from the existence of harmony among the monads without any mutual influence to God as the author of this harmony (p. 430).

In these proofs Leibnitz seems to have in view an extramundane power to whom the monads owe their reality, though such a conception evidently breaks the continuity and harmony of his system, and can only be externally connected with it. But he also speaks in one place at any rate[23] of God as the “universal harmony”; and the historians Erdmann and Zeller are of opinion that this is the only sense in which his system can be consistently theistic. Yet it would seem that to assume a purely active and therefore perfect monad as the source of all things is in accordance with the principle of continuity and with Leibnitz’s conception of the gradation of existences. In this sense he sometimes speaks of God as the first or highest of the monads (p. 678), and of created substances proceeding from Him continually by “fulgurations” (p. 708) or by “a sort of emanation as we produce our thoughts.”[24]

The positive properties or perfections of the monads, Leibnitz holds, exist eminenter, i.e. without the limitation that attaches to created monads (p. 716), in God—their perception as His wisdom or intellect, and their appetite as His absolute will or goodness (p. 654); while the absence of all limitation is the divine independence or power, which again consists in this, that the possibility of things depends on His intellect, their reality on His will (p. 506). The universe in its harmonious order is thus the realization of the divine end, and as such must be the best possible (p. 506). The teleology of Leibnitz becomes necessarily a Théodicée. God created a world to manifest and communicate His perfection (p. 524), and, in choosing this world out of the infinite number that exist in the region of ideas (p. 515), was guided by the principium melioris (p. 506). With this thorough-going optimism Leibnitz has to reconcile the existence of evil in the best of all possible worlds.[25] With this end in view he distinguishes (p. 655) between (1) metaphysical evil or imperfection, which is unconditionally willed by God as essential to created beings; (2) physical evil, such as pain, which is conditionally willed by God as punishment or as a means to greater good (cf. p. 510); and (3) moral evil, in which the great difficulty lies, and which Leibnitz makes various attempts to explain. He says that it was merely permitted not willed by God (p. 655), and, that being obviously no explanation, adds that it was permitted because it was foreseen that the world with evil would nevertheless be better than any other possible world (p. 350). He also speaks of the evil as a mere set-off to the good in the world, which it increases by contrast (p. 149), and at other times reduces moral to metaphysical evil by giving it a merely negative existence, or says that their evil actions are to be referred to men alone, while it is only the power of action that comes from God, and the power of action is good (p. 658).

The great problem of Leibnitz’s Théodicée thus remains unsolved. The suggestion that evil consists in a mere imperfection, like his idea of the monads proceeding from God by a continual emanation, was too bold and too inconsistent with his immediate apologetic aim to be carried out by him. Had he done so his theory would have transcended the independence of the monads with which it started, and found a deeper unity in the world than that resulting from the somewhat arbitrary assertion that the monads reflect the universe.

The philosophy of Leibnitz, in the more systematic and abstract form it received at the hands of Wolf, ruled the schools of Germany for nearly a century, and largely determined the character of the critical philosophy by which it was superseded. On it Baumgarten laid the foundations of a science of aesthetic. Its treatment of theological questions heralded the German Aufklärung. And on many special points—in its physical doctrine of the conservation of force, its psychological hypothesis of unconscious perception, its attempt at a logical symbolism—it has suggested ideas fruitful for the progress of science.

Bibliography.—(1) Editions: Up to 1900 no attempt had been made to publish the complete works. Several editions existed, but a vast mass of MSS. (letters, &c.) remained only roughly classified in the Hanover library. The chief editions were: (1) L. Dutens (Geneva, 1768), called Opera Omnia, but far from complete; (2) G. H. Pertz, Leibnizens gesammelte Werke (Berlin, 1843-1863) (1st ser. History, 4 vols.; 2nd ser. Philosophy, vol. i. correspondence with Arnauld, &c., ed. C. L. Grotefend; 3rd ser. Mathematics, 7 vols., ed. C. J. Gerhardt); (3) Foucher de Careil (planned in 20 vols., 7 published, Paris, 1859-1875), the same editor having previously published Lettres et opuscules inédits de Leibniz (Paris, 1854-1857); (4) Onno Klopp, Die Werke von Leibniz gemäss seinem Handschriftlichen Nachlasse in der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Hannover (1st series, Historico-Political and Political, 10 vols., 1864-1877). The Œuvres de Leibnitz, by A. Jacques (2 vols., Paris, 1846) also deserves mention. The philosophical writings had been published by Raspe (Amsterdam and Leipzig, 1765), by J. E. Erdmann, Leibnitii opera philos. quae extant Latina, Gallica, Germanica, omnia (Berlin, 1840), by P. Janet (2 vols., Paris, 1866, 2nd ed. 1900), and the fullest by C. J. Gerhardt, Die Philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz (7 vols., 1875-1890); cf. also Die kleineren philos. wichtigeren Schriften (trans. with commentary, J. H. von Kirchmann, 1879). The German works had also been partly published separately; G. E. Guhrauer (Berlin, 1838-1840). Of the letters various collections had been published up to 1900, e.g.: C. J. Gerhardt (Halle, 1860) and Der Briefwechsel von G. W. Leibnitz mit Mathematikern (1899); Corrispondenza tra L. A. Muratori e G. Leibnitz (1899); and cf. Neue Beiträge zum Briefwechsel zwischen D. E. Jablonsky und G. W. Leibnitz (1899).

In 1900 it was decided by scholars in Berlin and Paris that a really complete edition should be published, and with this object four German and four French critics were entrusted with the preliminary task of correlating the MSS. in the royal library at Hanover. This process resulted in the preparation of the Kritischer Katalog der Leibnitz-Handschriften zur Vorbereitung der interakademischen Leibnitz-Ausgabe unternommen (1908), and also in certain other preliminary publications, e.g. L. Couturat, Opuscules et fragments inédits (1903); E. Gerland, Leibnizens nachgelassene Schriften physikalischen, mechanischen und technischen Inhalts (1906); Jean Baruzi, Leibniz (1909), containing unedited MSS. and a sketch-biography; cf. the same author’s Leibniz et l’organisation religieuse de la terre (1907).

Translations.—Of the Systema Theologicum (1850, C. W. Russell), of the correspondence with Clarke (1717); Works, by G. M. Duncan (New Haven, 1890); of the Nouveaux Essais, by A. G. Langley (London, 1894); the Monadology and other Writings, by R. Latta (Oxford, 1898).

Biographical.—The materials for the life of Leibnitz, in addition to his own works, are the notes of Eckhart (not published till 1779), the Éloge by Fontenelle (read to the French Academy in 1717), the “Eulogium,” by Wolf, in the Acta Eruditorium for July 1717, and the “Supplementum” to the same by Feller, published in his Otium Hannoveranum (Leipzig, 1718). The best biography is that of G. E. Guhrauer, G. W. Freiherr von Leibnitz (2 vols., Breslau, 1842; Nachträge, Breslau, 1846). A shorter Life of G. W. von Leibnitz, on the Basis of the German Work of Guhrauer, has been published by J. M. Mackie (Boston, 1845). More recent works are those of L. Grote, Leibniz und seine Zeit (Hanover, 1869); E. Pfleiderer, Leibniz als Patriot, Staatsmann, und Bildungsträger (Leipzig, 1870); the slighter volume of F. Kirchner, G. W. Leibniz: sein Leben und Denken (Köthen, 1876); Kuno Fischer, vol. iii. in Gesch. der neuern Philosophie (4th ed., 1902).

Critical.—The monographs and essays on Leibnitz are too numerous to mention, but reference may be made to Feuerbach, Darstellung, Entwicklung, und Kritik der Leibnitz’schen Phil. (2nd ed., Leipzig, 1844); Nourrisson, La Philosophie de Leibniz (Paris, 1860); R. Zimmermann, Leibnitz und Herbart: eine Vergleichung ihrer Monadologien (Vienna, 1849); O. Caspari, Leibniz’ Philosophie beleuchtet vom Gesichtspunkt der physikalischen Grundbegriffe von Kraft und Stoff (Leipzig, 1870); G. Hartenstein, “Locke’s Lehre von der menschl. Erk. in Vergl. mit Leibniz’s Kritik derselben dargestellt,” in the Abhandl. d. philol.-hist. Cl. d. K. Sächs. Gesells. d. Wiss., vol. iv. (Leipzig, 1865); G. Class, Die metaph. Voraussetzungen des Leibnitzischen Determinismus (Tübingen, 1874); F. B. Květ, Leibnitzens Logik (Prague, 1857); the essays on Leibnitz in Trendelenburg’s Beiträge, vols. ii. and iii. (Berlin, 1855, 1867); L. Neff, Leibniz als Sprachforscher (Heidelberg, 1870-1871); J. Schmidt, Leibniz und Baumgarten (Halle, 1875); D. Nolen, La Critique de Kant et la Métaphysique de Leibniz (Paris, 1875); and the exhaustive work of A. Pichler, Die Theologie des Leibniz (Munich, 1869-1870). Among the more recent works are: C. Braig, Leibniz: sein Leben und die Bedeutung seiner Lehre (1907); E. Cassirer, Leibniz’ System in seinem wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (1902); L. Couturat, La Logique de Leibniz d’après des documents inédits (1901); L. Davillé, Leibniz historien (1909); Kuno Fischer, G. W. Leibniz (1889); R. B. Frenzel, Der Associationsbegriff bei Leibniz (1898); R. Herbertz, Die Lehre vom Unbewussten im System des Leibniz (1905); H. Hoffmann, Die Leibniz’sche Religions-philosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Stellung (1903); W. Kabitz, Die Philosophie des jungen Leibniz (1909), a study of the development of the Leibnitzian system; H. L. Koch, Materie und Organismus bei Leibniz (1908); G. Niel, L’Optimisme de Leibniz (1888); Bertrand A. W. Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900); F. Schmöger, Leibniz in seiner Stellung zur tellurischen Physik (1901); A. Silberstein, Leibnizens Apriorismus in Verhältnis zu seiner Metaphysik (1904); Stein, Leibniz und Spinoza (1890); F. Thilly, Leibnizens Streit gegen Locke in Ansehung der angeborenen Ideen (1891); R. Urbach, Leibnizens Rechtfertigung des Uebels in der besten Welt (1901); W. Werckmeister, Der Leibnizsche Substanzbegriff (1899); F. G. F. Wernicke, Leibniz’ Lehre von der Freiheit des menschlichen Willens (1890).

(W. R. So.)

[1] Bedenken, welchergestalt securitas publica interna et externa und status praesens jetzigen Umständen nach im Reich auf festen Fuss zu stellen.

[2] De expeditione Aegyptiaca regi Franciae proponenda justa dissertatio.

[3] Consilium Aegyptiacum.

[4] A Summary Account of Leibnitz’s Memoir addressed to Lewis the Fourteenth, &c. [edited by Granville Penn], (London, 1803).

[5] In a letter to the duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (autumn 1671), Werke, ed. Klopp, iii. 253 sq.

[6] He was made a foreign member of the French Academy in 1700.

[7] Caesarini Furstenerii tractatus de jure suprematus ac legationis principum Germaniae (Amsterdam, 1677); Entretiens de Philarète et d’Eugène sur le droit d’ambassade (Duisb., 1677).

[8] Not published till 1819. It is on this work that the assertion has been founded that Leibnitz was at heart a Catholic—a supposition clearly disproved by his correspondence.

[9] In his Protogaea (1691) he developed the notion of the historical genesis of the present condition of the earth’s surface. Cf. O. Peschel, Gesch. d. Erdkunde (Munich, 1865), pp. 615 sq.

[10] Codex juris gentium diplomaticus (1693); Mantissa codicis juri gentium diplomatici (1700).

[11] Memoirs of John Ker of Kersland, by himself (1726), i. 118.

[12] When not otherwise stated, the references are to Erdmann’s edition of the Opera philosophica.

[13] See Considérations sur la doctrine d’un esprit universel (1702).

[14] Cf. Opera, ed. Dutens, II. ii. 20.

[15] The difference between an organic and an inorganic body consists, he says, in this, that the former is a machine even in its smallest parts.

[16] Opera, ed. Dutens, iii. 321.

[17] Different symbolic systems were proposed by Leibnitz at different periods; cf. Květ, Leibnitzens Logik (1857), p. 37.

[18] The places at which Leibnitz anticipated the modern theory of logic mainly due to Boole are pointed out in Mr Venn’s Symbolic Logic (1881).

[19] Hence the difference of his determinism from that of Spinoza, though Leibnitz too says in one place that “it is difficult enough to distinguish the actions of God from those of the creatures” (Werke, ed. Pertz, 2nd ser. vol. i. p. 160).

[20] Opera omnia, ed. Dutens, IV. iii. 282.

[21] Ibid. IV. iii. 295. Cf. Bluntschli, Gesch. d. allg. Staatsrechts u. Politik (1864), pp. 143 sqq.

[22] P. 480; cf. Werke, ed. Pertz, 2nd ser. vol. i. pp. 158, 159.

[23] Werke, ed. Klopp, iii. 259; cf. Op. phil., p. 716.

[24] Werke, ed. Pertz, 2nd ser. vol. i. p. 167.

[25] “Si c’est ici le meilleur des mondes possibles, que sont donc les autres?”—Voltaire, Candide, ch. vi.

LEICESTER, EARLS OF. The first holder of this English earldom belonged to the family of Beaumont, although a certain Saxon named Edgar has been described as the 1st earl of Leicester. Robert de Beaumont (d. 1118) is frequently but erroneously considered to have received the earldom from Henry I., about 1107; he had, however, some authority in the county of Leicester and his son Robert was undoubtedly earl of Leicester in 1131. The 3rd Beaumont earl, another Robert, was also steward of England, a dignity which was attached to the earldom of Leicester from this time until 1399. The earldom reverted to the crown when Robert de Beaumont, the 4th earl, died in January 1204.

In 1207 Simon IV., count of Montfort (q.v.), nephew and heir of Earl Robert, was confirmed in the possession of the earldom by King John, but it was forfeited when his son, the famous Simon de Montfort, was attainted and was killed at Evesham in August 1265. Henry III.’s son Edmund, earl of Lancaster, was also earl of Leicester and steward of England, obtaining these offices a few months after Earl Simon’s death. Edmund’s sons, Thomas and Henry, both earls of Lancaster, and his grandson Henry, duke of Lancaster, in turn held the earldom, which then passed to a son-in-law of Duke Henry, William V., count of Holland (c. 1327-1389), and then to another and more celebrated son-in-law, John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster. When in 1399 Gaunt’s son became king as Henry IV. the earldom was merged in the crown.

In 1564 Queen Elizabeth created her favourite, Lord Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. The new earl was a son of John Dudley, duke of Northumberland; he left no children, or rather none of undoubted legitimacy, and when he died in September 1588 the title became extinct.

In 1618 the earldom of Leicester was revived in favour of Robert Sidney, Viscount Lisle, a nephew of the late earl and a brother of Sir Philip Sidney; it remained in this family until the death of Jocelyn (1682-1743), the 7th earl of this line, in July 1743. Jocelyn left no legitimate children, but a certain John Sidney claimed to be his son and consequently to be 8th earl of Leicester.

In 1744, the year after Jocelyn’s death, Thomas Coke, Baron Lovel (c. 1695-1759), was made earl of Leicester, but the title became extinct on his death in April 1759. The next family to hold the earldom was that of Townshend, George Townshend (1755-1811) being created earl of Leicester in 1784. In 1807 George succeeded his father as 2nd marquess Townshend, and when his son George Ferrars Townshend, the 3rd marquess (1778-1855), died in December 1855 the earldom again became extinct. Before this date, however, another earldom of Leicester was in existence. This was created in 1837 in favour of Thomas William Coke, who had inherited the estates of his relative Thomas Coke, earl of Leicester. To distinguish his earldom from that held by the Townshends Coke was ennobled as earl of Leicester of Holkham; his son Thomas William Coke (1822-1909) became 2nd earl of Leicester in 1842, and the latter’s son Thomas William (b. 1848) became 3rd earl.

See G. E. C(okayne), Complete Peerage, vol. v. (1893).

LEICESTER, ROBERT DUDLEY, Earl of (c. 1531-1588). This favourite of Queen Elizabeth came of an ambitious family. They were not, indeed, such mere upstarts as their enemies loved to represent them; for Leicester’s grandfather—the notorious Edmund Dudley who was one of the chief instruments of Henry VII.’s extortions—was descended from a younger branch of the barons of Dudley. But the love of power was a passion which seems to have increased in them with each succeeding generation, and though the grandfather was beheaded by Henry VIII. for his too devoted services in the preceding reign, the father grew powerful enough in the days of Edward VI. to trouble the succession to the crown. This was that John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, who contrived the marriage of Lady Jane Grey with his own son Guildford Dudley, and involved both her and her husband in a common ruin with himself. Robert Dudley, the subject of this article, was an elder brother of Guildford, and shared at that time in the misfortunes of the whole family. Having taken up arms with them against Queen Mary, he was sent to the Tower, and was sentenced to death; but the queen not only pardoned and restored him to liberty, but appointed him master of the ordnance. On the accession of Elizabeth he was also made master of the horse. He was then, perhaps, about seven-and-twenty, and was evidently rising rapidly in the queen’s favour. At an early age he had been married to Amy, daughter of Sir John Robsart. The match had been arranged by his father, who was very studious to provide in this way for the future fortunes of his children, and the wedding was graced by the presence of King Edward. But if it was not a love match, there seems to have been no positive estrangement between the couple. Amy visited her husband in the Tower during his imprisonment; but afterwards when, under the new queen, he was much at court, she lived a good deal apart from him. He visited her, however, at times, in different parts of the country, and his expenses show that he treated her liberally. In September 1560 she was staying at Cumnor Hall in Berkshire, the house of one Anthony Forster, when she met her death under circumstances which certainly aroused suspicions of foul play. It is quite clear that her death had been surmised some time before as a thing that would remove an obstacle to Dudley’s marriage with the queen, with whom he stood in so high favour. We may take it, perhaps, from Venetian sources, that she was then in delicate health, while Spanish state papers show further that there were scandalous rumours of a design to poison her; which were all the more propagated by malice after the event. The occurrence, however, was explained as owing to a fall down stairs in which she broke her neck; and the explanation seems perfectly adequate to account for all we know about it. Certain it is that Dudley continued to rise in the queen’s favour. She made him a Knight of the Garter, and bestowed on him the castle of Kenilworth, the lordship of Denbigh and other lands of very great value in Warwickshire and in Wales. In September 1564 she created him baron of Denbigh, and immediately afterwards earl of Leicester. In the preceding month, when she visited Cambridge, she at his request addressed the university in Latin. The honours shown him excited jealousy, especially as it was well known that he entertained still more ambitious hopes, which the queen apparently did not altogether discourage. The earl of Sussex, in opposition to him, strongly favoured a match with the archduke Charles of Austria. The court was divided, and, while arguments were set forth on the one side against the queen’s marrying a subject, the other party insisted strongly on the disadvantages of a foreign alliance. The queen, however, was so far from being foolishly in love with him that in 1564 she recommended him as a husband for Mary Queen of Scots. But this, it was believed, was only a blind, and it may be doubted how far the proposal was serious. After his creation as earl of Leicester great attention was paid to him both at home and abroad. The university of Oxford made him their chancellor, and Charles IX. of France sent him the order of St Michael. A few years later he formed an ambiguous connexion with the baroness dowager of Sheffield, which was maintained by the lady, if not with truth at least with great plausibility, to have been a valid marriage, though it was concealed from the queen. Her own subsequent conduct, however, went far to discredit her statements; for she married again during Leicester’s life, when he, too, had found a new conjugal partner. Long afterwards, in the days of James I., her son, Sir Robert Dudley, a man of extraordinary talents, sought to establish his legitimacy; but his suit was suddenly brought to a stop, the witnesses discredited and the documents connected with it sealed up by an order of the Star Chamber.

In 1575 Queen Elizabeth visited the earl at Kenilworth, where she was entertained for some days with great magnificence. The picturesque account of the event given by Sir Walter Scott has made every one familiar with the general character of the scene. Next year Walter, earl of Essex, died in Ireland, and Leicester’s subsequent marriage with his widow again gave rise to very serious imputations against him. For report said that he had had two children by her during her husband’s absence in Ireland, and, as the feud between the two earls was notorious, Leicester’s many enemies easily suggested that he had poisoned his rival. This marriage, at all events, tended to Leicester’s discredit and was kept secret at first; but it was revealed to the queen in 1579 by Simier, an emissary of the duke of Alençon, to whose projected match with Elizabeth the earl seemed to be the principal obstacle. The queen showed great displeasure at the news, and had some thought, it is said, of committing Leicester to the Tower, but was dissuaded from doing so by his rival the earl of Sussex. He had not, indeed, favoured the Alençon marriage, but otherwise he had sought to promote a league with France against Spain. He and Burleigh had listened to proposals from France for the conquest and division of Flanders, and they were in the secret about the capture of Brill. When Alençon actually arrived, indeed, in August 1579, Dudley being in disgrace, showed himself for a time anti-French; but he soon returned to his former policy. He encouraged Drake’s piratical expeditions against the Spaniards and had a share in the booty brought home. In February 1582 he, with a number of other noblemen and gentlemen, escorted the duke of Alençon on his return to Antwerp to be invested with the government of the Low Countries. In 1584 he inaugurated an association for the protection of Queen Elizabeth against conspirators. About this time there issued from the press the famous pamphlet, supposed to have been the work of Parsons the Jesuit, entitled Leicester’s Commonwealth, which was intended to suggest that the English constitution was subverted and the government handed over to one who was at heart an atheist and a traitor, besides being a man of infamous life and morals. The book was ordered to be suppressed by letters from the privy council, in which it was declared that the charges against the earl were to the queen’s certain knowledge untrue; nevertheless they produced a very strong impression, and were believed in by some who had no sympathy with Jesuits long after Leicester’s death. In 1585 he was appointed commander of an expedition to the Low Countries in aid of the revolted provinces, and sailed with a fleet of fifty ships to Flushing, where he was received with great enthusiasm. In January following he was invested with the government of the provinces, but immediately received a strong reprimand from the queen for taking upon himself a function which she had not authorized. Both he and the states general were obliged to apologize; but the latter protested that they had no intention of giving him absolute control of their affairs, and that it would be extremely dangerous to them to revoke the appointment. Leicester accordingly was allowed to retain his dignity; but the incident was inauspicious, nor did affairs prosper greatly under his management. The most brilliant achievement of the war was the action at Zutphen, in which his nephew Sir Philip Sidney was slain. But complaints were made by the states general of the conduct of the whole campaign. He returned to England for a time, and went back in 1587, when he made an abortive effort to raise the siege of Sluys. Disagreements increasing between him and the states, he was recalled by the queen, from whom he met with a very good reception; and he continued in such favour that in the following summer (the year being that of the Armada, 1588) he was appointed lieutenant-general of the army mustered at Tilbury to resist Spanish invasion. After the crisis was past he was returning homewards from the court to Kenilworth, when he was attacked by a sudden illness and died at his house at Cornbury in Oxfordshire, on the 4th September.

Such are the main facts of Leicester’s life. Of his character it is more difficult to speak with confidence, but some features of it are indisputable. Being in person tall and remarkably handsome, he improved these advantages by a very ingratiating manner. A man of no small ability and still more ambition, he was nevertheless vain, and presumed at times upon his influence with the queen to a degree that brought upon him a sharp rebuff. Yet Elizabeth stood by him. That she was ever really in love with him, as modern writers have supposed, is extremely questionable; but she saw in him some valuable qualities which marked him as the fitting recipient of high favours. He was a man of princely tastes, especially in architecture. At court he became latterly the leader of the Puritan party. and his letters were pervaded by expressions of religious feeling which it is hard to believe were insincere. Of the darker suspicions against him it is enough to say that much was certainly reported beyond the truth; but there remain some facts sufficiently disagreeable, and others, perhaps, sufficiently mysterious, to make a just estimate of the man a rather perplexing problem.

No special biography of Leicester has yet been written except in biographical dictionaries and encyclopaedias. A general account of him will be found in the Memoirs of the Sidneys prefixed to Collins’s Letters and Memorials of State; but the fullest yet published is Mr Sidney Lee’s article in the Dictionary of National Biography (London, 1888) where the sources are given. Leicester’s career has to be made out from documents and state papers, especially from the Hatfield MSS. and Major Hume’s Calendar of documents from the Spanish archives bearing on the history of Queen Elizabeth. This last is the most recent source. Of others the principal are Digges’s Compleat Ambassador (1655), John Nichols’s Progresses of Queen Elizabeth and the Leycester Correspondence edited by J. Bruce for the Camden Society. The death of Dudley’s first wife has been a fruitful source of literary controversy. The most recent addition to the evidences, which considerably alters their complexion, will be found in the English Historical Review, xiii. 83, giving the full text (in English) of De Quadra’s letter of Sept. 11, 1560, on which so much has been built.

(J. Ga.)

LEICESTER, ROBERT SIDNEY, Earl of (1563-1626), second son of Sir Henry Sidney (q.v.), was born on the 19th of November 1563, and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, afterwards travelling on the Continent for some years between 1578 and 1583. In 1585 he was elected member of parliament for Glamorganshire; and in the same year he went with his elder brother Sir Philip Sidney (q.v.) to the Netherlands, where he served in the war against Spain under his uncle Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. He was present at the engagement where Sir Philip Sidney was mortally wounded, and remained with his brother till the latter’s death in October 1586. After visiting Scotland on a diplomatic mission in 1588, and France on a similar errand in 1593, he returned to the Netherlands in 1596, where he rendered distinguished service in the war for the next two years. He had been appointed governor of Flushing in 1588, and he spent much time there till 1603, when, on the accession of James I., he returned to England. James raised him at once to the peerage as Baron Sidney of Penshurst, and he was appointed chamberlain to the queen consort. In 1605 he was created Viscount Lisle, and in 1618 earl of Leicester, the latter title having become extinct in 1588 on the death of his uncle, whose property he had inherited (see [Leicester, Earls of]). Leicester was a man of taste and a patron of literature, whose cultured mode of life at his country seat, Penshurst, was celebrated in verse by Ben Jonson. The earl died at Penshurst on the 13th of July 1626. He was twice married; first to Barbara, daughter of John Gamage, a Glamorganshire gentleman; and secondly to Sarah, daughter of William Blount, and widow of Sir Thomas Smythe. By his first wife he had a large family. His eldest son having died unmarried in 1613, Robert, the second son (see below), succeeded to the earldom; one of his daughters married Sir John Hobart, ancestor of the earls of Buckinghamshire.

Robert Sidney, 2nd earl of Leicester of the 1618 creation (1595-1677), was born on the 1st of December 1595, and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford; he was called to the bar in in 1618, having already served in the army in the Netherlands during his father’s governorship of Flushing, and having entered parliament as member for Wilton in 1614. In 1616 he was given command of an English regiment in the Dutch service; and having succeeded his father as earl of Leicester in 1626, he was employed on diplomatic business in Denmark in 1632, and in France from 1636 to 1641. He was then appointed lord-lieutenant of Ireland in place of the earl of Strafford, but he waited in vain for instructions from the king, and in 1643 he was compelled to resign the office without having set foot in Ireland. He shared the literary and cultivated tastes of his family, without possessing the statesmanship of his uncle Sir Philip Sidney; his character was lacking in decision, and, as commonly befalls men of moderate views in times of acute party strife, he failed to win the confidence of either of the opposing parties. His sincere protestantism offended Laud, without being sufficiently extreme to please the puritans of the parliamentary faction; his fidelity to the king restrained him from any act tainted with rebellion, while his dislike for arbitrary government prevented him giving whole-hearted support to Charles I. When, therefore, the king summoned him to Oxford in November 1642, Leicester’s conduct bore the appearance of vacillation, and his loyalty of uncertainty. Accordingly, after his resignation of the lord-lieutenancy of Ireland at the end of 1643, he retired into private life. In 1649 the younger children of the king were for a time committed to his care at Penshurst. He took no part in public affairs during the Commonwealth; and although at the Restoration he took his seat in the House of Lords and was sworn of the privy council, he continued to live for the most part in retirement at Penshurst, where he died on the 2nd of November 1677. Leicester married, in 1616, Dorothy, daughter of Henry Percy, 9th earl of Northumberland, by whom he had fifteen children. Of his nine daughters, the eldest, Dorothy, the “Sacharissa” of the poet Waller, married Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland; and Lucy married John Pelham, by whom she was the ancestress of the 18th-century statesmen, Henry Pelham, and Thomas Pelham, duke of Newcastle. Algernon Sidney (q.v.), and Henry Sidney, earl of Romney (q.v.), were younger sons of the earl.

Leicester’s eldest son, Philip, 3rd earl (1619-1698), known for most of his life as Lord Lisle, took a somewhat prominent part during the civil war. Being sent to Ireland in 1642 in command of a regiment of horse, he became lieutenant-general under Ormonde; he strongly favoured the parliamentary cause, and in 1647 he was appointed lord-lieutenant of Ireland by the parliament. Named one of Charles I.’s judges, he refused to take part in the trial; but he afterwards served in Cromwell’s Council of State, and sat in the Protector’s House of Lords. Lisle stood high in Cromwell’s favour, but nevertheless obtained a pardon at the Restoration. He carried on the Sidney family tradition by his patronage of men of letters; and, having succeeded to the earldom on his father’s death in 1677, he died in 1698, and was succeeded in the peerage by his son Robert, 4th earl of Leicester (1649-1702), whose mother was Catherine, daughter of William Cecil, 2nd earl of Salisbury.

See Sydney Papers, edited by A. Collins (2 vols., London, 1746); Sydney Papers, edited by R. W. Blencowe (London, 1825) containing the 2nd earl of Leicester’s journal; Lord Clarendon History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (8 vols, Oxford, 1826); S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War (3 vols., London, 1886-1891).

(R. J. M.)

LEICESTER, THOMAS WILLIAM COKE, Earl of (1754-1842), English agriculturist, known as Coke of Norfolk, was the eldest son of Wenman Roberts, who assumed the name of Coke in 1750. In 1759 Wenman Coke’s maternal uncle Thomas Coke, earl of Leicester, died leaving him his estates, subject, however, to the life-interest of his widow, Margaret, Baroness de Clifford in her own right. This lady’s death in 1775 was followed by that of Wenman Coke in 1776, when the latter’s son, Thomas William, born on the 6th of May 1754, succeeded to his father’s estates at Holkham and elsewhere. From 1776 to 1784, from 1790 to 1806, and again from 1807 to 1832 Coke was member of parliament for Norfolk; he was a friend and supporter of Charles James Fox and a sturdy and aggressive Whig, acting upon the maxim taught him by his father “never to trust a Tory.” Coke’s chief interests, however, were in the country, and his fame is that of an agriculturist. His land around Holkham in Norfolk was poor and neglected, but he introduced many improvements, obtained the best expert advice, and in a few years wheat was grown upon his farms, and the breed of cattle, sheep and pigs greatly improved. It has been said that “his practice is really the basis of every treatise on modern agriculture.” Under his direction the rental of the Holkham estate is said to have increased from £2200 to over £20,000 a year. In 1837 Coke was created earl of Leicester of Holkham. Leicester, who was a strong and handsome man and a fine sportsman, died at Longford Hall in Derbyshire on the 30th of June 1842. He was twice married, and Thomas William, his son by his second marriage, succeeded to his earldom.

See A. M. W. Stirling, Coke of Norfolk and his Friends (1907).

LEICESTER, a municipal county and parliamentary borough, and the county town of Leicestershire, England; on the river Soar, a southern tributary of the Trent. Pop. (1891) 174,624, (1901) 211,579. It is 99 m. N.N.W. from London by the Midland railway, and is served by the Great Central and branches of the Great Northern and London and North-Western railways, and by the Leicester canal.

This was the Roman Ratae (Ratae Coritanorum), and Roman remains of high interest are preserved. They include a portion of Roman masonry known as the Jewry Wall; several pavements have been unearthed; and in the museum, among other remains, is a milestone from the Fosse Way, marking a distance of 2 m. from Ratae. St Nicholas church is a good example of early Norman work, in the building of which Roman bricks are used. St Mary de Castro church, with Norman remains, including sedilia, shows rich Early English work in the tower and elsewhere, and has a Decorated spire and later additions. All Saints church has Norman remains. St Martin’s is mainly Early English, a fine cruciform structure. St Margaret’s, with Early English nave, has extensive additions of beautiful Perpendicular workmanship. North of the town are slight remains of an abbey of Black Canons founded in 1143. There are a number of modern churches. Of the Castle there are parts of the Norman hall, modernized, two gateways and other remains, together with the artificial Mount on which the keep stood. The following public buildings and institutions may be mentioned—municipal buildings (1876), old town hall, formerly the gild-hall of Corpus Christi; market house, free library, opera house and other theatres and museum. The free library has several branches; there are also a valuable old library founded in the 17th century, a permanent library and a literary and philosophical society. Among several hospitals are Trinity hospital, founded in 1331 by Henry Plantagenet, earl of Lancaster and of Leicester, and Wyggeston’s hospital (1513). The Wyggeston schools and Queen Elizabeth’s grammar school are amalgamated, and include high schools for boys and girls; there are also Newton’s greencoat school for boys, and municipal technical and art schools. A memorial clock tower was erected in 1868 to Simon de Montfort and other historical figures connected with the town. The Abbey Park is a beautiful pleasure ground; there are also Victoria Park, St Margaret’s Pasture and other grounds. The staple trade is hosiery, an old-established industry; there are also manufactures of elastic webbing, cotton and lace, iron-works, makings and brick-works. Leicester became a county borough in 1888, and the bounds were extended and constituted one civil parish in 1892. It is a suffragan bishopric in the diocese of Peterborough. The parliamentary borough returns two members. Area, 8586 acres.

The Romano-British town of Ratae Coritanorum, on the Fosse Way, was a municipality in A.D. 120-121. Its importance, both commercial and military, was considerable, as is attested by the many remains found here. Leicester (Ledecestre, Legecestria, Leyrcestria) was called a “burh” in 918, and a city in Domesday. Until 874 it was the seat of a bishopric. In 1086 both the king and Hugh de Grantmesnil had much land in Leicester; by 1101 the latter’s share had passed to Robert of Meulan, to whom the rest of the town belonged before his death. Leicester thus became the largest mesne borough. Between 1103 and 1118 Robert granted his first charter to the burgesses, confirming their merchant gild. The portmanmote was confirmed by his son. In the 13th century the town developed its own form of government by a mayor and 24 jurats. In 1464 Edward IV. made the mayor and 4 of the council justices of the peace. In 1489 Henry VII. added 48 burgesses to the council for certain purposes, and made it a close body; he granted another charter in 1505. In 1589 Elizabeth incorporated the town, and gave another charter in 1599. James I. granted charters in 1605 and 1610; and Charles I. in 1630. In 1684 the charters were surrendered; a new one granted by James II. was rescinded by proclamation in 1688.

Leicester has been represented in parliament by two members since 1295. It has had a prescriptive market since the 13th century, now held on Wednesday and Saturday. Before 1228-1229 the burgesses had a fair from July 31 to August 14; changes were made in its date, which was fixed in 1360 at September 26 to October 2. It is now held on the second Thursday in October and three following days. In 1473 another fair was granted on April 27 to May 4. It is now held on the second Thursday in May and the three following days. Henry VIII. granted two three-day fairs beginning on December 8 and June 26; the first is now held on the second Friday in December; the second was held in 1888 on the last Tuesday in June. In 1307 Edward III. granted a fair for seventeen days after the feast of the Holy Trinity. This would fall in May or June, and may have merged in other fairs. In 1794 the corporation sanctioned fairs on January 4, June 1, August 1, September 13 and November 2. Other fairs are now held on the second Fridays in March and July and the Saturdays next before Easter and in Easter week. Leicester has been a centre for brewing and the manufacture of woollen goods since the 13th century. Knitting frames for hosiery were introduced about 1680. Boot manufacture became important in the 19th century.

See Victoria County History, Leicester; M. Bateson, Records of Borough of Leicester (Cambridge, 1899).

LEICESTERSHIRE, a midland county of England, bounded N. by Nottinghamshire, E. by Lincolnshire and Rutland, S.E. by Northamptonshire, S.W. by Warwickshire, and N.W. by Derbyshire, also touching Staffordshire on the W. The area is 823.6 sq. m. The surface of the county is an undulating tableland, the highest eminences being the rugged hills of Charnwood Forest (q.v.) in the north-west, one of which, Bardon Hill, has an elevation of 912 ft. The county belongs chiefly to the basin of the Trent, which forms for a short distance its boundary with Derbyshire. The principal tributary of the Trent in Leicestershire is the Soar, from whose old designation the Leire the county is said to derive its name, and which rises near Hinckley in the S.E., and forms the boundary with Nottinghamshire for some distance above its junction with the Trent. The Wreak, which, under the name of the Eye, rises on the borders of Rutland, flows S.W. to the Soar. Besides the Soar the other tributaries of the Trent are the Anker, touching the boundary with Warwickshire, the Devon and the Mease. A portion of the county in the S. drains to the Avon, which forms part of the boundary with Northamptonshire, and receives the Swift. The Welland forms for some distance the boundary with Northamptonshire.

Geology.—The oldest rocks in the county belong to the Charnian System, a Pre-Cambrian series of volcanic ashes, grits and slates, into which porphyroid and syenite were afterwards intruded. These rocks emerge from the plain formed by the Keuper Marls of the Triassic System as a group of isolated hills and peaks (known as Charnwood Forest); these are the tops of an old mountain-range, the lower slopes of which are still buried under the surrounding Keuper Marls. West of this district lies the Leicestershire coalfield, where the poor state of development of the Carboniferous Limestone shows that the Charnian rocks formed shoals or islands in the Carboniferous Limestone sea. The Millstone Grit just enters the county to the north of the same region, while the Coal Measures occupy a considerable area round Ashby-de-la-Zouch and contain valuable coal-seams. The rest of the county is almost equally divided between the red Keuper Marls of the Trias on the west and the grey limestones and shales of the Lias on the east. The former were deposited in lagoons into which the land was gradually lowered after a prolonged period of desert conditions. The Rhaetic beds which follow the Keuper mark the incoming of the sea and introduce the fossiliferous Liassic deposits. On the eastern margin of the county a few small outliers of the Inferior Oolite sands and limestones are present. The Glacial Period has left boulder-clay, gravel and erratic blocks scattered over the surface, while later gravels, with remains of mammoth, reindeer, &c., border some of the present streams.

Slates, honestones, setts and roadstone from the Charnian rocks, limestone and cement from the Carboniferous and Lias, and coal from the Coal Measures are the chief mineral products.

Agriculture.—The climate is mild, and, on account of the inland position of the county, and the absence of any very high elevations, the rainfall is very moderate. The soil is of a loamy character, the richest district being that east of the Soar, which is occupied by pasture, while the corn crops are grown chiefly on a lighter soil resting above the Red Sandstone formation. About nine-tenths of the total area is under cultivation. The proportion of pasture land is large and increasing. It is especially rich along the river-banks. Dairy-farming is extensively carried on, the famous Stilton cheese being produced near Melton Mowbray. Cattle are reared in large numbers, while of sheep the New Leicester breed is well known. It was introduced by Robert Bakewell the agriculturist, who was born near Loughborough in 1725. He also improved the breed of horses by the importation of mares from Flanders.

The county is especially famed for fox-hunting, Leicester and Melton Mowbray being favourite centres, while the kennels of the Quorn hunt are located at Quorndon near Mount Sorrel. For this reason Leicestershire is rich in good riding horses.

Other Industries.—Coal is worked in the districts about Moira, Coleorton and Coalville. Limestone is worked in various parts, freestone is plentiful, gypsum is found, and a kind of granite, extensively used for paving, is obtained in the Charnwood district, as at Bardon and Mount Sorrel, and at Sapcote and Stoney Stanton in the south-west. Apart from the mining industries, the staple manufacture of Leicestershire is hosiery, for which the wool is obtained principally from home-bred sheep. Its principal seats are Leicester, Loughborough, Hinckley and Castle Donington. Cotton hose are likewise made, and other industries include the manufacture of boots and shoes, as at Market Harborough, elastic webbing, and bricks, also iron founding. Melton Mowbray gives name to a well-known manufacture of pork pies.

Communications.—The main line of the Midland railway serves Market Harborough, Leicester, and Loughborough, having an important junction at Trent (on that river) for Derby and Nottingham. Branches radiate from Leicester to Melton Mowbray, to Coalville, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Moira and Burton-upon-Trent, with others through the mining district of the N.W., which is also served by the branch of the London & North-Western railway from Nuneaton to Market Bosworth, Coalville and Loughborough. This company serves Market Harborough from Rugby, and branches of the Great Northern serve Market Harborough, Leicester and Melton Mowbray. The main line of the Great Central railway passes through Lutterworth, Leicester and Loughborough. The principal canals are the Union and Grand Union, with which various branches are connected with the Grand Junction, and the Ashby-de-la-Zouch canal, which joins the Coventry canal at Nuneaton. The Loughborough canal serves that town, connecting with the river Soar.

Population and Administration.—The area of the ancient county is 527,123 acres; pop. (1891) 373,584, (1901) 434,019. The area of the administrative county is 532,788 acres. The county contains six hundreds. The municipal boroughs are: Leicester, the county town and a county borough (pop. 211,579), Loughborough (21,508). The urban districts are: Ashby-de-la-Zouch (4726), Ashby Woulds (2799), Coalville (15,281), Hinckley (11,304), Market Harborough (7735), Melton Mowbray (7454), Quorndon (2173), Shepshed (5293). Thurmaston (1732), Wigston Magna (8404). The county is in the Midland circuit, has one court of quarter sessions, and is divided into 9 petty sessional divisions. The county borough of Leicester has a separate court of quarter sessions and a separate commission of the peace. There are 327 civil parishes. The county is divided into four parliamentary divisions (Eastern or Melton, Mid or Loughborough, Western or Bosworth, Southern or Harborough), each returning one member; and the parliamentary borough of Leicester returns 2 members. The county is in the diocese of Peterborough, with the exception of small parts in those of Southwell and Worcester; and contains 255 ecclesiastical parishes or districts, wholly or in part.

History.—The district which is now Leicestershire was reached in the 6th century by Anglian invaders who, making their way across the Trent, penetrated Charnwood Forest as far as Leicester, the fall of which may be dated at about 556. In 679 the district formed the kingdom of the Middle Angles within the kingdom of Mercia, and on the subdivision of the Mercian see in that year was formed into a separate bishopric having its see at Leicester. In the 9th century the district was subjugated by the Danes, and Leicester became one of the five Danish boroughs. It was recovered by Æthelflaed in 918, but the Northmen regained their supremacy shortly after, and the prevalence of Scandinavian place-names in the county bears evidence of the extent of their settlement.

Leicestershire probably originated as a shire in the 10th century, and at the time of the Domesday Survey was divided into the four wapentakes of Guthlaxton, Framland, Goscote and Gartree. The Leicestershire Survey of the 12th century shows an additional grouping of the vills into small local hundreds, manorial rather than administrative divisions, which have completely disappeared. In the reign of Edward I. the divisions appear as hundreds, and in the reign of Edward III. the additional hundred of Sparkenhoe was formed out of Guthlaxton. Before the 17th century Goscote was divided into East and West Goscote, and since then the hundreds have undergone little change. Until 1566 Leicestershire and Warwickshire had a common sheriff, the shire-court for the former being held at Leicester.

Leicestershire constituted an archdeaconry within the diocese of Lincoln from 1092 until its transference to Peterborough in 1837. In 1291 it comprised the deaneries of Akeley, Leicester (now Christianity), Framland, Gartree, Goscote, Guthlaxton and Sparkenhoe. The deaneries remained unaltered until 1865. Since 1894 they have been as follows: East, South and West Akeley, Christianity, Framland (3 portions), Sparkenhoe (2 portions), Gartree (3 portions), Goscote (2 portions), Guthlaxton (3 portions).

Among the earliest historical events connected with the county were the siege and capture of Leicester by Henry II. in 1173 on the rebellion of the earl of Leicester; the surrender of Leicester to Prince Edward in 1264; and the parliament held at Leicester in 1414. During the Wars of the Roses Leicester was a great Lancastrian stronghold. In 1485 the battle of Bosworth was fought in the county. In the Civil War of the 17th century the greater part of the county favoured the parliament, though the mayor and some members of the corporation of Leicester sided with the king, and in 1642 the citizens of Leicester on a summons from Prince Rupert lent Charles £500. In 1645 Leicester was twice captured by the Royalist forces.

Before the Conquest large estates in Leicestershire were held by Earls Ralf, Morcar, Waltheof and Harold, but the Domesday Survey of 1086 reveals an almost total displacement of English by Norman landholders, only a few estates being retained by Englishmen as under-tenants. The first lay-tenant mentioned in the survey is Robert, count of Meulan, ancestor of the Beaumont family and afterwards earl of Leicester, to whose fief was afterwards annexed the vast holding of Hugh de Grantmesnil, lord high steward of England. Robert de Toeni, another Domesday tenant, founded Belvoir Castle and Priory. The fief of Robert de Buci was bestowed on Richard Basset, founder of Laund Abbey, in the reign of Henry I. Loughborough was an ancient seat of the Despenser family, and Brookesby was the seat of the Villiers and the birthplace of George Villiers, the famous duke of Buckingham. Melton Mowbray was named from its former lords, the Mowbrays, descendants of Nigel de Albini, the founder of Axholme Priory. Lady Jane Grey was born at Bradgate near Leicester, and Bishop Latimer was born at Thurcaston.

The woollen industry flourished in Leicestershire in Norman times, and in 1343 Leicestershire wool was rated at a higher value than that of most other counties. Coal was worked at Coleorton in the early 15th century and at Measham in the 17th century. The famous blue slate of Swithland has been quarried from time immemorial, and the limestone quarry at Barrow-on-Soar is also of very ancient repute, the monks of the abbey of St Mary de Pré formerly enjoying the tithe of its produce. The staple manufacture of the county, that of hosiery, originated in the 17th century, the chief centres being Leicester, Hinckley and Loughborough, and before the development of steam-driven frames in the 19th century hand framework knitting of hose and gloves was carried on in about a hundred villages. Wool-carding was also an extensive industry before 1840.

In 1290 Leicestershire returned two members to parliament, and in 1295 Leicester was also represented by two members. Under the Reform Act of 1832 the county returned four members in two divisions until the Redistribution of Seats Act of 1885, under which it returned four members in four divisions.

Antiquities.—Remains of monastic foundations are slight, though there were a considerable number of these. There are traces of Leicester Abbey and of Gracedieu near Coalville, while at Ulverscroft in Charnwood, where there was an Augustinian priory of the 12th century, there are fine Decorated remains, including a tower. The most noteworthy churches are found in the towns, as at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Hinckley, Leicester, Loughborough, Lutterworth, Market Bosworth, Market Harborough, and Melton Mowbray (qq.v.). The principal old castle is that of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, while at Kirby Muxloe there is a picturesque fortified mansion of Tudor date. There are several good Elizabethan mansions, as that at Laund in the E. of the county. Among modern mansions that of the dukes of Rutland, Belvoir Castle in the extreme N.E., is a massive mansion of the early 19th century, finely placed on the summit of a hill.

See Victoria County History, Leicestershire; W. Burton, Description of Leicestershire (London, 1622; 2nd ed., Lynn, 1777); John Nicholls, History and Antiquities of The County of Leicester (4 vols., London, 1795-1815); John Curtis, A Topographical History of the County of Leicester (Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 1831).

LEIDEN or Leyden, a city in the province of South Holland, the kingdom of the Netherlands, on the Old Rhine, and a junction station 18 m. by rail S.S.W. of Haarlem. It is connected by steam tramway with Haarlem and The Hague respectively, and with the seaside resorts of Katwyk and Noordwyk. There is also regular steamboat connexion with Katwyk, Noordwyk, Amsterdam and Gouda. The population of Leiden which, it is estimated, reached 100,000 in 1640, had sunk to 30,000 between 1796 and 1811, and in 1904 was 56,044. The two branches of the Rhine which enter Leiden on the east unite in the centre of the town, which is further intersected by numerous small and sombre canals, with tree-bordered quays and old houses. On the south side of the town pleasant gardens extend along the old Singel, or outer canal, and there is a large open space, the Van der Werf Park, named after the burgomaster, Pieter Andriaanszoon van der Werf, who defended the town against the Spaniards in 1574. This open space was formed by the accidental explosion of a powdership in 1807, hundreds of houses being demolished, including that of the Elzevir family of printers. At the junction of the two arms of the Rhine stands the old castle (De Burcht), a circular tower built on an earthen mound. Its origin is unknown, but some connect it with Roman days and others with the Saxon Hengist. Of Leiden’s old gateways only two—both dating from the end of the 17th century—are standing. Of the numerous churches the chief are the Hooglandsche Kerk, or the church of St Pancras, built in the 15th century and restored in 1885-1902, containing the monument of Pieter Andriaanszoon van der Werf, and the Pieterskerk (1315) with monuments to Scaliger, Boerhaave and other famous scholars. The most interesting buildings are the town hall (Stadhuis), a fine example of 16th-century Dutch building; the Gemeenlandshuis van Rynland (1596, restored 1878); the weight-house built by Pieter Post (1658); the former court-house, now a military storehouse; and the ancient gymnasium (1599) and the so-called city timber-house (Stads Timmerhuis) (1612), both built by Lieven de Key (c. 1560-1627).

In spite of a certain industrial activity and the periodical bustle of its cattle and dairy markets, Leiden remains essentially an academic city. The university is a flourishing institution. It was founded by William of Orange in 1575 as a reward for the heroic defence of the previous year, the tradition being that the citizens were offered the choice between a university and a certain exemption from taxes. Originally located in the convent of St Barbara, the university was removed in 1581 to the convent of the White Nuns, the site of which it still occupies, though that building was destroyed in 1616. The presence within half a century of the date of its foundation of such scholars as Justus Lipsius, Joseph Scaliger, Francis Gomarus, Hugo Grotius, Jacobus Arminius, Daniel Heinsius and Guardas Johannes Vossius at once raised Leiden university to the highest European fame, a position which the learning and reputation of Jacobus Gronovius, Hermann Boerhaave, Tiberius Hemsterhuis and David Ruhnken, among others, enabled it to maintain down to the end of the 18th century. The portraits of many famous professors since the earliest days hang in the university aula, one of the most memorable places, as Niebuhr called it, in the history of science. The university library contains upwards of 190,000 volumes and 6000 MSS. and pamphlet portfolios, and is very rich in Oriental and Greek MSS. and old Dutch travels. Among the institutions connected with the university are the national institution for East Indian languages, ethnology and geography; the fine botanical gardens, founded in 1587; the observatory (1860); the natural history museum, with a very complete anatomical cabinet; the museum of antiquities (Museum van Oudheden), with specially valuable Egyptian and Indian departments; a museum of Dutch antiquities from the earliest times; and three ethnographical museums, of which the nucleus was P. F. von Siebold’s Japanese collections. The anatomical and pathological laboratories of the university are modern, and the museums of geology and mineralogy have been restored. The university has now five faculties, of which those of law and medicine are the most celebrated, and is attended by about 1200 students.

The municipal museum, founded in 1869 and located in the old cloth-hall (Laeckenhalle) (1640), contains a varied collection of antiquities connected with Leiden, as well as some paintings including works by the elder van Swanenburgh, Cornelius Engelbrechtszoon, Lucas van Leiden and Jan Steen, who were all natives of Leiden. Jan van Goyen, Gabriel Metsu, Gerard Dou and Rembrandt were also natives of this town. There is also a small collection of paintings in the Meermansburg. The Thysian library occupies an old Renaissance building of the year 1655, and is especially rich in legal works and native chronicles. Noteworthy also are the collection of the Society of Dutch Literature (1766); the collections of casts and of engravings; the seamen’s training school; the Remonstrant seminary, transferred hither from Amsterdam in 1873; the two hospitals (one of which is private); the house of correction; and the court-house.

Leiden is an ancient town, although it is not the Lugdunum Batavorum of the Romans. Its early name was Leithen, and it was governed until 1420 by burgraves, the representatives of the courts of Holland. The most celebrated event in its history is its siege by the Spaniards in 1574. Besieged from May until October, it was at length relieved by the cutting of the dikes, thus enabling ships to carry provisions to the inhabitants of the flooded town. The weaving establishments (mainly broadcloth) of Leiden at the close of the 15th century were very important, and after the expulsion of the Spaniards Leiden cloth, Leiden baize and Leiden camlet were familiar terms. These industries afterwards declined, and in the beginning of the 19th century the baize manufacture was altogether given up. Linen and woollen manufactures are now the most important industries, while there is a considerable transit trade in butter and cheese.

Katwyk, or Katwijk, 6 m. N.W. of Leiden, is a popular seaside resort and fishing village. Close by are the great locks constructed in 1807 by the engineer, F. W. Conrad (d. 1808), through which the Rhine (here called the Katwyk canal) is admitted into the sea at low tide. The shore and the entrance to the canal are strengthened by huge dikes. In 1520 an ancient Roman camp known as the Brittenburg was discovered here. It was square in shape, each side measuring 82 yds., and the remains stood about 10 ft. high. By the middle of the 18th century it had been destroyed and covered by the sea.

See P. J. Blok, Eine hollandsche stad in de middeleeuwen (The Hague, 1883); and for the siege see J. L. Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1896).

LEIDY, JOSEPH (1823-1891), American naturalist and palaeontologist, was born in Philadelphia on the 9th of September 1823. He studied mineralogy and botany without an instructor, and graduated in medicine at the university of Pennsylvania in 1844. Continuing his work in anatomy and physiology, he visited Europe in 1848, but both before and after this period of foreign study lectured and taught in American medical colleges. In 1853 he was appointed professor of anatomy in the university of Pennsylvania, paying special attention to comparative anatomy. In 1884 he promoted the establishment in the same institution of the department of biology, of which he became director, and meanwhile taught natural history in Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia. His papers on biology and palaeontology were very numerous, covering both fauna and flora, and ranging from microscopic forms of animal life to the higher vertebrates. He wrote also occasional papers on minerals. He was an active member of the Boston Society of Natural History and of the American Philosophical Society; and was the recipient of various American and foreign degrees and honours. His Cretaceous Reptiles of the United States (1865) and Contributions to the Extinct Vertebrate Fauna of the Western Territories (1873) were the most important of his larger works; the best known and most widely circulated was an Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy (1860, afterwards revised in new editions). He died in Philadelphia on the 30th of April 1891.

See Memoir and portrait in Amer. Geologist, vol. ix. (Jan. 1892) and Bibliography in vol. viii. (Nov. 1891) and Memoir by H. C. Chapman in Proc. Acad. Nat. Sc. (Philadelphia, 1891), p. 342.

LEIF ERICSSON [Leifr Eiriksson] (fl. 999-1000), Scandinavian explorer, of Icelandic family, the first known European discoverer of “Vinland,” “Vineland” or “Wineland, the Good,” in North America. He was a son of Eric the Red (Eirikr hinn raudi Thorvaldsson), the founder of the earliest Scandinavian settlements—from Iceland—in Greenland (985). In 999 he went from Greenland to the court of King Olaf Tryggvason in Norway, stopping in the Hebrides on the way. On his departure from Norway in 1000, the king commissioned him to proclaim Christianity in Greenland. As on his outward voyage, Leif was again driven far out of his course by contrary weather—this time to lands (in America) “of which he had previously had no knowledge,” where “self-sown” wheat grew, and vines, and “mösur” (maple?) wood. Leif took specimens of all these, and sailing away came home safely to his father’s home in Brattahlid on Ericsfiord in Greenland. On his voyage from this Vineland to Greenland, Leif rescued some shipwrecked men, and from this, and his discoveries, gained his name of “The Lucky” (hinn heppni). On the subsequent expedition of Thorfinn Karlsefni for the further exploration and settlement of the Far Western vine-country, it is recorded that certain Gaels, incredibly fleet of foot, who had been given to Leif by Olaf Tryggvason, and whom Leif had offered to Thorfinn, were put on shore to scout.

Such is the account of the Saga of Eric the Red, supported by a number of briefer references in early Icelandic and other literature. The less trustworthy history of the Flatey Book makes Biarni Heriulfsson in 985 discover Helluland (Labrador?) as well as other western lands which he does not explore, not even permitting his men to land; while Leif Ericsson follows up Biarni’s discoveries, begins the exploration of Helluland, Markland and Vinland, and realizes some of the charms of the last named, where he winters. But this secondary authority (the Flatey Book narrative), which till lately formed the basis of all general knowledge as to Vinland, abounds in contradictions and difficulties from which Eric the Red Saga is comparatively free. Thus (in Flatey) the grapes of Vinland are found in winter and gathered in spring; the man who first finds them, Leif’s foster-father Tyrker the German, gets drunk from eating the fruit; and the vines themselves are spoken of as big trees affording timber. Looking at the record in Eric the Red Saga, it would seem probable that Leif’s Vinland answers to some part of southern Nova Scotia. See [Vinland]. (As to Helluland and Markland see [Thorfinn Karlsefni].)

The MSS. of Eric the Red’s Saga are Nos. 544 and 557 of the Arne-Magnaean collection in Copenhagen; the MS. of the Flatey Book, so called because it was long the property of a family living on Flat Island in Broad Firth (Flatey in Breiðafjord [B-eidafj-d]), on the north-west coast of Iceland, was presented in 1662 to the Royal Library of Denmark, of which it is still one of the chief treasures. These leading narratives are supplemented by Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, chap. 38 (247 Lappenberg) of book iv. (often separately entitled Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis; Adam’s is the earliest extant reference to Vinland, c. 1070): we have also notices of Vinland in the Libellus Islandorum of Ari Frodi (c. 1120), the oldest Icelandic historian; in the Kristni Saga (repeated in Snorri Sturlason’s Heimskringla); in Eyrbyggia Saga (c. 1250); in Gretti Saga (c. 1290); and in an Icelandic chorography of the 14th century, or earlier, partly derived from the famous traveller Abbot Nicolas of Thing-eyrar (†1159).

See Gustav Storm, “Studies on the Vineland Voyages,” in the Mémoires de la Société royale des Antiquaires du Nord (Copenhagen, 1888); and Eiriks Saga Raudha (Copenhagen, 1891); A. M. Reeves, Finding of Wineland the Good: the History of the Icelandic Discovery of America (London, 1890); in this work the original authorities are given in full, with photographic facsimiles, English translations and adequate commentary; Rafn’s Antiquitates Americanae (Copenhagen, 1837) contains all the sources, but the editor’s personal views have in many cases failed to satisfy criticism; the Flatey text is printed also by Vigfusson and Unger in Flateyjar-bok, vol. i. (Christiania, 1860). There are also translations of Flatey and Red Eric Saga in Beamish, Discovery of North America, by the Northmen (Lond., 1841); E. F. Slafter, Voyages of the Northmen (Boston, 1877); B. F. de Costa, Pre-Columbian Discovery of America by the Northmen (Albany, 1901); and Original Narratives of Early American History; The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, pp. 1-66 (New York, 1906). See also C. Raymond Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography ii. 48-83 (London, 1901); Josef Fischer, Die Entdeckungen der Normannen in Amerika (Freiburg i. B., 1902); John Fiske, Discovery of America, vol. i.; Juul Dieserud, “Norse Discoveries in America,” in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (February, 1901); G. Vigfusson, Origines Islandicae (1905), which strangely expresses a preference for the Flatey Book “account of the first sighting of the American continent” by the Norsemen.

(C. R. B.)

LEIGH, EDWARD (1602-1671), English Puritan and theologian, was born at Shawell, Leicestershire. He was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, from 1616, and subsequently became a member of the Middle Temple. In 1636 he entered parliament as member for Stafford, and during the Civil War held a colonelcy in the parliamentary army. He has sometimes been confounded with John Ley (1583-1662), and so represented as having sat in the Westminster Assembly. The public career of Leigh terminated with his expulsion from parliament with the rest of the Presbyterian party in 1648. From an early age he had studied theology and produced numerous compilations, the most important being the Critica Sacra, containing Observations on all the Radices of the Hebrew Words of the Old and the Greek of the New Testament (1639-1644; new ed., with supplement, 1662), for which the author received the thanks of the Westminster Assembly, to whom it was dedicated. His other works include Select and Choice Observations concerning the First Twelve Caesars (1635); A Treatise of Divinity (1646-1651); Annotations upon the New Testament (1650), of which a Latin translation by Arnold was published at Leipzig in 1732; A Body of Divinity (1654); A Treatise of Religion and Learning (1656); Annotations of the Five Poetical Books of the Old Testament (1657). Leigh died in Staffordshire in June 1671.

LEIGH, a market town and municipal borough in the Leigh parliamentary division of Lancashire, England, 11 m. W. by N. from Manchester by the London & North-Western railway. Pop. (1891) 30,882, (1901) 40,001. The ancient parish church of St Mary the Virgin was, with the exception of the tower, rebuilt in 1873 in the Perpendicular style. The grammar school, the date of whose foundation is unknown, received its principal endowments in 1655, 1662 and 1681. The staple manufactures are silk and cotton; there are also glass works, foundries, breweries, and flour mills, with extensive collieries. Though the neighbourhood is principally an industrial district, several fine old houses are left near Leigh. The town was incorporated in 1899, and the corporation consists of a mayor, 8 aldermen and 24 councillors. Area, 6358 acres.

LEIGHTON, FREDERICK LEIGHTON, Baron (1830-1896), English painter and sculptor, the son of a physician, was born at Scarborough on the 3rd of December 1830. His grandfather, Sir James Leighton, also a physician, was long resident at the court of St Petersburg. Frederick Leighton was taken abroad at a very early age. In 1840 he learnt drawing at Rome under Signor Meli. The family moved to Dresden and Berlin, where he attended classes at the Academy. In 1843 he was sent to school at Frankfort, and in the winter of 1844 accompanied his family to Florence, where his future career as an artist was decided. There he studied under Bezzuoli and Segnolini at the Accademia delle Belle Arti, and attended anatomy classes under Zanetti; but he soon returned to complete his general education at Frankfort, receiving no further direct instruction in art for five years. He went to Brussels in 1848, where he met Wiertz and Gallait, and painted some pictures, including “Cimabue finding Giotto,” and a portrait of himself. In 1849 he studied for a few months in Paris, where he copied Titian and Correggio in the Louvre, and then returned to Frankfort, where he settled down to serious art work under Edward Steinle, whose pupil he declared he was “in the fullest sense of the term.” Though his artistic training was mainly German, and his master belonged to the same school as Cornelius and Overbeck, he loved Italian art and Italy and the first picture by which he became known to the British public was “Cimabue’s Madonna carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence,” which appeared at the Royal Academy in 1855. At this time the works of the Pre-Raphaelites almost absorbed public interest in art—it was the year of Holman Hunt’s “Light of the World,” and the “Rescue,” by Millais. Yet Leighton’s picture, painted in quite a different style, created a sensation, and was purchased by Queen Victoria. Although, since his infancy, he had only visited England once (in 1851, when he came to see the Great Exhibition), he was not quite unknown in the cultured and artistic world of London, as he had made many friends during a residence in Rome of some two years or more after he left Frankfort in 1852. Amongst these were Giovanni Costa, Robert Browning, James Knowles, George Mason and Sir Edward Poynter, then a youth, whom he allowed to work in his studio. He also met Thackeray, who wrote from Rome to the young Millais: “Here is a versatile young dog, who will run you close for the presidentship one of these days.” During these years he painted several Florentine subjects—“Tybalt and Romeo,” “The Death of Brunelleschi,” a cartoon of “The Pest in Florence according to Boccaccio,” and “The Reconciliation of the Montagues and the Capulets.” He now turned his attention to themes of classic legend, which at first he treated in a “Romantic spirit.” His next picture, exhibited in 1856, was “The Triumph of Music: Orpheus by the Power of his Art redeems his Wife from Hades.” It was not a success, and he did not again exhibit till 1858, when he sent a little picture of “The Fisherman and the Syren” to the Royal Academy, and “Samson and Delilah” to the Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street. In 1858 he visited London and made the acquaintance of the leading Pre-Raphaelites—Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais. In the spring of 1859 he was at Capri, always a favourite resort of his, and made many studies from nature, including a very famous drawing of a lemon tree. It was not till 1860 that he settled in London, when he took up his quarters at 2 Orme Square, Bayswater, where he stayed till, in 1860, he moved to his celebrated house in Holland Park Road, with its Arab hall decorated with Damascus tiles. There he lived till his death. He now began to fulfil the promise of his “Cimabue,” and by such pictures as “Paolo e Francesca,” “The Star of Bethlehem,” “Jezebel and Ahab taking Possession of Naboth’s Vineyard,” “Michael Angelo musing over his Dying Servant,” “A Girl feeding Peacocks,” and “The Odalisque,” all exhibited in 1861-1863, rose rapidly to the head of his profession. The two latter pictures were marked by the rhythm of line and luxury of colour which are among the most constant attributes of his art, and may be regarded as his first dreams of Oriental beauty, with which he afterwards showed so great a sympathy. In 1864 he exhibited “Dante in Exile” (the greatest of his Italian pictures), “Orpheus and Eurydice” and “Golden Hours.” In the winter of the same year he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. After this the main effort of his life was to realize visions of beauty suggested by classic myth and history. If we add to pictures of this class a few Scriptural subjects, a few Oriental dreams, one or two of tender sentiment like “Wedded” (one of the most popular of his pictures, and well known by not only an engraving, but a statuette modelled by an Italian sculptor), a number of studies of very various types of female beauty, “Teresina,” “Biondina,” “Bianca,” “Moretta,” &c., and an occasional portrait, we shall nearly exhaust the two classes into which Lord Leighton’s work (as a painter) can be divided.

Amongst the finest of his classical pictures were—“Syracusan Bride leading Wild Beasts in Procession to the Temple of Diana” (1866), “Venus disrobing for the Bath” (1867), “Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon,” and “Helios and Rhodos” (1869), “Hercules wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis” (1871), “Clytemnestra” (1874), “The Daphnephoria” (1876), “Nausicaa” (1878), “An Idyll” (1881), two lovers under a spreading oak listening to the piping of a shepherd and gazing on the rich plain below; “Phryne” (1882), a nude figure standing in the sun; “Cymon and Iphigenia” (1884), “Captive Andromache” (1888), now in the Manchester Art Gallery; with the “Last Watch of Hero” (1887), “The Bath of Psyche” (1890), now in the Chantrey Bequest collection; “The Garden of the Hesperides” (1892), “Perseus and Andromeda” and “The Return of Persephone,” now in the Leeds Gallery (1891); and “Clytie,” his last work (1896). All these pictures are characterized by nobility of conception, by almost perfect draughtsmanship, by colour which, if not of the highest quality, is always original, choice and effective. They often reach distinction and dignity of attitude and gesture, and occasionally, as in the “Hercules and Death,” the “Electra” and the “Clytemnestra,” a noble intensity of feeling. Perhaps, amidst the great variety of qualities which they possess, none is more universal and more characteristic than a rich elegance, combined with an almost fastidious selection of beautiful forms. It is the super-eminence of these qualities, associated with great decorative skill, that make the splendid pageant of the “Daphnephoria” the most perfect expression of his individual genius. Here we have his composition, his colour, his sense of the joy and movement of life, his love of art and nature at their purest and most spontaneous, and the result is a work without a rival of its kind in the British School.

Leighton was one of the most thorough draughtsmen of his day. His sketches and studies for his pictures are numerous and very highly esteemed. They contain the essence of his conceptions, and much of their spiritual beauty and subtlety of expression was often lost in the elaboration of the finished picture. He seldom succeeded in retaining the freshness of his first idea more completely than in his last picture—“Clytie”—which was left unfinished on his easel. He rarely painted sacred subjects. The most beautiful of his few pictures of this kind was the “David musing on the Housetop” (1865). Others were “Elijah in the Wilderness” (1879), “Elisha raising the Son of the Shunammite” (1881) and a design intended for the decoration of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, “And the Sea gave up the Dead which were in it” (1892), now in the Tate Gallery, and the terrible “Rizpah” of 1893. His diploma picture was “St Jerome,” exhibited in 1869. Besides these pictures of sacred subjects, he made some designs for Dalziel’s Bible, which for force of imagination excel the paintings. The finest of these are “Cain and Abel,” and “Samson with the Gates of Gaza.”

Not so easily to be classed, but among the most individual and beautiful of his pictures, are a few of which the motive was purely aesthetic. Amongst these may specially be noted “The Summer Moon,” two Greek girls sleeping on a marble bench, and “The Music Lesson,” in which a lovely little girl is seated on her lovely young mother’s lap learning to play the lute. With these, as a work produced without any literary suggestion, though very different in feeling, may be associated the “Eastern Slinger scaring Birds in the Harvest-time: Moon-rise” (1875), a nude figure standing on a raised platform in a field of wheat.

Leighton also painted a few portraits, including those of Signor Costa, the Italian landscape painter, Mr F. P. Cockerell, Mrs Sutherland Orr (his sister), Amy, Lady Coleridge, Mrs Stephen Ralli and (the finest of all) Sir Richard Burton, the traveller and Eastern scholar, which was exhibited in 1876 and is now in the National Portrait Gallery.

Like other painters of the day, notably G. F. Watts, Lord Leighton executed a few pieces of sculpture. His “Athlete struggling with a Python” was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1877, and was purchased for the Chantrey Bequest collection. Another statue, “The Sluggard,” of equal merit, was exhibited in 1886; and a charming statuette of a nude figure of a girl looking over her shoulder at a frog, called “Needless Alarms,” was completed in the same year, and presented by the artist to Sir John Millais in acknowledgment of the gift by the latter of his picture, “Shelling Peas.” He made the beautiful design for the reverse of the Jubilee Medal of 1887. It was also his habit to make sketch models in wax for the figures in his pictures, many of which are in the possession of the Royal Academy. As an illustrator in black and white he also deserves to be remembered, especially for the cuts to Dalziel’s Bible, already mentioned, and his illustrations to George Eliot’s Romola, which appeared in the Cornhill Magazine. The latter are full of the spirit of Florence and the Florentines, and show a keen sense of humour, elsewhere excluded from his work. Of his decorative paintings, the best known are the elegant compositions (in spirit fresco) on the walls of the Victoria and Albert Museum, representing “The Industrial Arts of War and Peace.” There, also, is the refined and spirited figure of “Cimabue” in mosaic. In Lyndhurst church are mural decorations to the memory of Mr Pepys Cockerell, illustrating “The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins.”

Leighton’s life was throughout marked by distinction, artistic and social. Though not tall, he had a fine presence and manners, at once genial and courtly. He was welcomed in all societies, from the palace to the studio. He spoke German, Italian and French, as well as English. He had much taste and love for music, and considerable gifts as an orator of a florid type. His Presidential Discourses (published, London, 1896) were full of elegance and culture. For seven years (1876-1883) he commanded the 20th Middlesex (Artists) Rifle Volunteers, retiring with the rank of honorary colonel, and subsequently receiving the Volunteer Decoration. Yet no social attractions or successes diverted him from his devotion to his profession, the welfare of his brethren in art or of the Royal Academy. As president he was punctilious in the discharge of his duties, ready to give help and encouragement to artists young and old, and his tenure of the office was marked by some wise and liberal reforms. He frequently went abroad, generally to Italy, where he was well known and appreciated. He visited Spain in 1866, Egypt in 1868, when he went up the Nile with Ferdinand de Lesseps in a steamer lent by the Khedive. He was at Damascus for a short time in 1873. It was his custom on all these trips to make little lively sketches of landscape and buildings. These fresh little flowers of his leisure used to decorate the walls of his studio, and at the sale of its contents after his death realized considerable prices. It was when he was in the full tide of his popularity and success, and apparently in the full tide of his personal vigour also, that he was struck with angina pectoris. For a long time he struggled bravely with this cruel disease, never omitting except from absolute necessity any of his official duties except during a brief period of rest abroad, which failed to produce the desired effect. His death occurred on the 25th of January 1896.

Leighton was elected an Academician in 1868, and succeeded Sir Francis Grant as President in 1878, when he was knighted. He was created a baronet in 1886, and was raised to the peerage in 1896, a few days before his death. He held honorary degrees at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh and Durham, was an Associate of the Institute of France; a Commander of the Legion of Honour, and of the Order of Leopold. He was a Knight of the Coburg Order, “Dem Verdienste,” and of the Prussian Order, “Pour le Mérite,” and a member of at least ten foreign Academies. In 1859 he won a medal of the second class at the Paris Salon, and at the Exposition Universelle of 1889 a gold medal. As a sculptor he was awarded a medal of the first class in 1878 and the Grand Prix in 1889.

See Art Annual (Mrs A. Lang), 1884; Royal Academy Catalogue, Winter Exhibition, 1897; National Gallery of British Art Catalogue; C. Monkhouse, British Contemporary Artists (London, 1899); Ernest Rhys, Frederick, Lord Leighton (London, 1898, 1900).

(C. Mo.)

LEIGHTON, ROBERT (1611-1684), archbishop of Glasgow, was born, probably in London (others say at Ulishaven, Forfarshire), in 1611, the eldest son of Dr Alexander Leighton, the author of Zion’s Plea against the Prelacie, whose terrible sufferings for having dared to question the divine right of Episcopacy, under the persecution of Laud, form one of the most disgraceful incidents of the reign of Charles I. Dr Leighton is said to have been of the old family of Ulishaven in Forfarshire. From his earliest childhood, according to Burnet, Robert Leighton was distinguished for his saintly disposition. In his sixteenth year (1627) he was sent to the university of Edinburgh, where, after studying with distinguished success for four years, he took the degree of M.A. in 1631. His father then sent him to travel abroad, and he is understood to have spent several years in France, where he acquired a complete mastery of the French language. While there he passed a good deal of time with relatives at Douai who had become Roman Catholics, and with whom he kept up a correspondence for many years afterwards. Either at this time or on some subsequent visit he had also a good deal of intercourse with members of the Jansenist party. This intercourse contributed to the charity towards those who differed from him in religious opinion, which ever afterwards formed a feature in his character. The exact period of his return to Scotland has not been ascertained; but in 1641 he was ordained Presbyterian minister of Newbattle in Midlothian. In 1652 he resigned his charge and went to reside in Edinburgh. What led him to take this step does not distinctly appear. The account given is that he had little sympathy with the fiery zeal of his brother clergymen on certain political questions, and that this led to severe censures on their part.

Early in 1653 he was appointed principal of the university of Edinburgh, and primarius professor of divinity. In this post he continued for seven or eight years. A considerable number of his Latin prelections and other addresses (published after his death) are remarkable for the purity and elegance of their Latinity, and their subdued and meditative eloquence. They are valuable instructions in the art of living a holy life rather than a body of scientific divinity. Throughout, however, they bear the marks of a deeply learned and accomplished mind, saturated with both classical and patristic reading, and like all his works they breathe the spirit of one who lived very much above the world. His mental temper was too unlike the temper of his time to secure success as a teacher.

In 1661, when Charles II. had resolved to force Episcopacy once more upon Scotland, he fixed upon Leighton for one of his bishops (see [Scotland, Church of]). Leighton, living very much out of the world, and being somewhat deficient in what may be called the political sense, was too open to the persuasions used to induce him to enter a sphere for which he instinctively felt he was ill qualified. The Episcopacy which he contemplated was that modified form which had been suggested by Archbishop Ussher, and to which Baxter and many of the best of the English Nonconformists would have readily given their adherence. It is significant that he always refused to be addressed as “my lord,” and it is stated that when dining with his clergy on one occasion he wished to seat himself at the foot of the table.

Leighton soon began to discover the sort of men with whom he was to be associated in the episcopate. He travelled with them in the same coach from London towards Scotland, but having become, as he told Burnet, very weary of their company (as he doubted not they were of his), and having found that they intended to make a kind of triumphal entrance into Edinburgh, he left them at Morpeth and retired to the earl of Lothian’s at Newbattle. He very soon lost all hope of being able to build up the church by the means which the government had set on foot, and his work, as he confessed to Burnet, “seemed to him a fighting against God.” He did, however, what he could, governing his diocese (that of Dunblane) with the utmost mildness, as far as he could, preventing the persecuting measures in active operation elsewhere, and endeavouring to persuade the Presbyterian clergy to come to an accommodation with their Episcopal brethren. After a hopeless struggle of three or four years to induce the government to put a stop to their fierce persecution of the Covenanters, he determined to resign his bishopric, and went up to London in 1665 for this purpose. He so far worked upon the mind of Charles that he promised to enforce the adoption of milder measures, but it does not appear that any material improvement took place. In 1669 Leighton again went to London and made fresh representations on the subject, but little result followed. The slight disposition, however, shown by the government to accommodate matters appears to have inspired Leighton with so much hope that in the following year he agreed, though with a good deal of hesitation, to accept the archbishopric of Glasgow. In this higher sphere he redoubled his efforts with the Presbyterians to bring about some degree of conciliation with Episcopacy, but the only result was to embroil himself with the hot-headed Episcopal party as well as with the Presbyterians. In utter despair, therefore, of being able to be of any further service to the cause of religion, he resigned the archbishopric in 1674 and retired to the house of his widowed sister, Mrs Lightmaker, at Broadhurst in Sussex. Here he spent the remaining ten years, probably the happiest of his life, and died suddenly on a visit to London in 1684.

It is difficult to form a just or at least a full estimate of Leighton’s character. He stands almost alone in his age. In some respects he was immeasurably superior both in intellect and in piety to most of the Scottish ecclesiastics of his time; and yet he seems to have had almost no influence in moulding the characters or conduct of his contemporaries. So intense was his absorption in the love of God that little room seems to have been left in his heart for human sympathy or affection. Can it be that there was after all something to repel in his outward manner? Burnet tells us that he had never seen him laugh, and very seldom even smile. In other respects, too, he gives the impression of standing aloof from human interests and ties. It may go for little that he never married, but it was surely a curious idiosyncrasy that he habitually cherished the wish (which was granted him) that he might die in an inn. In fact, holy meditation seems to have been the one absorbing interest of his life. At Dunblane tradition preserved the memory of “the good bishop,” silent and companionless, pacing up and down the sloping walk by the river’s bank under the beautiful west window of his cathedral. And from a letter of the earl of Lothian to his countess it appears that, whatever other reasons Leighton might have had for resigning his charge at Newbattle, the main object which he had in view was to be left to his own thoughts. It is therefore not very wonderful that he was completely misjudged and even disliked both by the Presbyterian and by the Episcopal party.

It was characteristic of him that he could never be made to understand that anything which he wrote possessed the smallest value. None of his works were published by himself, and it is stated that he left orders that all his MSS. should be destroyed after his death. But fortunately for the world this charge was disregarded. Like all the best writing, it seems to flow without effort; it is the easy unaffected outcome of his saintly nature. Throughout, however, it is the language of a scholar and a man of perfect literary taste; and with all its spirituality of thought there are no mystical raptures, such as are often found mingled with the Scottish practical theology of the 17th century. It was a common reproach against Leighton that he had leanings towards Roman Catholicism, and perhaps this is so far true that he had formed himself in some degree upon the model of some of the saintly persons of that faith, such as Pascal and Thomas à Kempis.

The best account of Leighton’s character is that of Bishop Burnet in Hist. of his Own Times (1723-1734). No perfectly satisfactory edition of Leighton’s works exists. After his death his Commentary on Peter and several of his other works were published under the editorship of his friend Dr Fall, and those early editions may be said to be, with some drawbacks, by far the best. His later editors have been possessed by the mania of reducing his good archaic and nervous language to the bald feebleness of modern phraseology. It is unfortunately impossible to exempt from this criticism even the edition, in other respects very valuable and meritorious, published under the superintendence of the Rev. W. West (7 vols., London, 1869-1875); see also volume of selections (with biography) by Dr Blair of Dunblane (1883), who also contributed “Bibliography of Archbishop Leighton” to the British and Foreign Evangelical Review (July 1883); Andrew Lang, History of Scotland (1902).

(J. T. Br.; D. Mn.)