Part 28

CALVERLEY, CHARLES STUART (1831-1884), English poet and wit, and the literary father of what may be called the university school of humour, was born at Martley in Worcestershire on the 22nd of December 1831. His father, the Rev. Henry Blayds, resumed in 1852 the old family name of Calverley, which his grandfather had exchanged for Blayds in 1807. It was as Charles Stuart Blayds that most of the son's university distinctions were attained. He went up to Balliol from Harrow in 1850, and was soon known in Oxford as the most daring and most high-spirited undergraduate of his time. He was a universal favourite, a delightful companion, a brilliant scholar and the playful enemy of all "dons." In 1851 he won the Chancellor's prize for Latin verse, and it is said that the entire exercise was written in an afternoon, when his friends had locked him into his rooms, declining to let him out till he had finished what they were confident would prove the prize poem. A year later he took his name off the books, to avoid the consequences of a college escapade, and migrated to Christ's College, Cambridge. Here he was again successful in Latin verse, and remains the unique example of an undergraduate who has won the Chancellor's prize at both universities. In 1856 he took second place in the first class in the Classical Tripos. He was elected fellow of Christ's (1858), published _Verses and Translations_ in 1862, and was called to the bar in 1865. Owing to an accident while skating he was prevented from following up a professional career, and during the last years of his life he was an invalid. His _Translations into English and Latin_ appeared in 1866; his _Theocritus translated into English Verse_ in 1869; _Fly Leaves_ in 1872; and _Literary Remains_ in 1885. He died on the 17th of February 1884. Calverley was one of the most brilliant men of his day; and, had he enjoyed health, might have achieved distinction in any career he chose. Constitutionally indolent, he was endowed with singular gifts in every department of culture; he was a scholar, a musician, an athlete and a brilliant talker. What is left us marks only a small portion of his talent, but his sparkling, dancing verses, which have had many clever imitators, are still without a rival in their own line. His humour was illumined by good nature; his satire was keen but kind; his laughter was of that human sort which is often on the verge of tears. Imbued with the classical spirit, he introduced into the making of light verse the polish and elegance of the great masters, and even in its most whimsical mood his verse is raised to the level of poetry by the saving excellence of style.

His _Complete Works,_ with a biographical notice by Sir W.J. Sendall, appeared in 1901. (A. Wa.)

CALVERT, the name of three English artists: Charles (1785-1852), a well-known landscape-painter; Edward (1803-1883), an important wood-engraver and follower of Blake; and Frederick, an excellent topographical draughtsman, whose work in water-colour is represented at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and who published a volume of _Picturesque Views in Staffordshire and Shropshire_ (1830).

CALVERT, FREDERICK CRACE (1819-1873), English chemist, was born in London on the 14th of November 1819. From about 1836 till 1846 he lived in France, where, after a course of study at Paris, he became manager of some chemical works, later acting as assistant to M.E. Chevreul. On his return to England he settled in Manchester as a consulting chemist, and was appointed professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution in that city. Devoting himself almost entirely to industrial chemistry, he gave much attention to the manufacture of coal-tar products, and particularly carbolic acid, for the production of which he established large works in Manchester in 1865. Besides contributing extensively to the English and French scientific journals, he published a work on _Dyeing and Calico-Printing._ He died in Manchester on the 24th of October 1873.

CALVERT, SIR HARRY, BART. (c. 1763-1826), British general, was probably born early in 1763 at Hampton, near London. He was educated at Harrow, and at the age of fifteen entered the army. In the following year he served with his regiment in America, being present at the siege of Charleston, and serving through the campaign of Lord Cornwallis which ended with the surrender of Yorktown. From 1781 to 1783 he was a prisoner of war. Returning to England in 1784, he next saw active service in 1793-1794 in the Low Countries, where he was aide-de-camp to the duke of York, and in 1795 was engaged on a confidential mission to Brunswick and Berlin. In 1799, having already served as deputy adjutant general, he was made adjutant general, holding the post till 1818. In this capacity he effected many improvements in the organization and discipline of the service. He greatly improved the administration of the army medical and hospital department, introduced regimental schools, developed the two existing military colleges (since united at Sandhurst), and was largely responsible for the founding of the Duke of York's school, Chelsea. In recognition of his work as adjutant general he was made a G.C.B. (1815), and, on retiring from office, received a baronetcy (1818). In 1820 he was made governor of Chelsea hospital. He died on the 3rd of September 1826, at Middle Claydon, Buckinghamshire.

CALVES' HEAD CLUB, a club established shortly after his death in derision of the memory of Charles I. Its chief meeting was held on the 30th of each January, the anniversary of the king's execution, when the dishes served were a cod's head to represent the individual, Charles Stuart; a pike representing tyranny; a boar's head representing the king preying on his subjects; and calves' heads representing Charles as king and his adherents. On the table an axe held the place of honour. After the banquet a copy of the king's _Ikon Basilike_ was burnt, and the toast was "To those worthy patriots who killed the tyrant." After the Restoration the club met secretly. The first mention of it is in a tract reprinted in the _Harleian Miscellany_ entitled "The Secret History of the Calves' Head Club." The club survived till 1734, when the diners were mobbed owing to the popular ill-feeling which their outrages on good taste provoked, and the riot which ensued put a final stop to the meetings.

CALVI, a sea-port in Corsica, capital of an arrondissement in the N.W. of the island, 112 m. N. of Ajaccio by road. Pop. (1906) 1967. It is situated on the Bay of Calvi, in a malarial region, and is the port in Corsica nearest to France, being 109 m. from Antibes; the harbour, however, is exposed to the east and north-east winds. The modern town lies at the foot of a rock, on which stands the old town with its steep rock-paved streets and fortified walls, commanded by the Fort Muzello. Fishing is carried on, and timber, oil, wine, lemons and other sub-tropical fruits are exported to some extent. The most important buildings are the old palace of the Genoese governor, used as barracks, and the church (16th century), with the monument of the Baglioni family, which was intimately associated with the history of the town.

Calvi was founded in the 13th century and in 1278 passed into the hands of the Genoese. From that date it was remarkable for its adherence to their side, especially in 1553 when it repulsed two attacks of the united forces of the French and Turks. In recognition thereof the Genoese senate caused the words _Civitas Calvi semper fidelis_ to be carved on the chief gate of the city, which still preserves the inscription. In 1794 Calvi was captured by the English, but it was retaken by the Corsicans in the following year.

CALVIN, JOHN (1500-1564), Swiss divine and reformer, was born at Noyon, in Picardy, on the 10th of July 1509. His father, Gérard Cauvin or Calvin,[1] was a notary-apostolic and procurator-fiscal for the lordship of Noyon, besides holding certain ecclesiastical offices in connexion with that diocese. The name of his mother was Jeanne le Franc; she was the daughter of an innkeeper at Cambrai, who afterwards came to reside at Noyon. Gérard Cauvin was esteemed as a man of considerable sagacity and prudence, and his wife was a godly and attractive lady. She bore him five sons, of whom John was the second. By a second wife there were two daughters.

Of Calvin's early years only a few notices remain. His father destined him from the first for an ecclesiastical career, and paid for his education in the household of the noble family of Hangest de Montmor. In May 1521 he was appointed to a chaplaincy attached to the altar of La Gésine in the cathedral of Noyon, and received the tonsure. The actual duties of the office were in such cases carried out by ordained and older men for a fraction of the stipend. The plague having visited Noyon, the young Hangests were sent to Paris in August 1523, and Calvin accompanied them, being enabled to do so by the income received from his benefice. He lived with his uncle and attended as an out-student the Collège de la Marche, at that time under the regency of Mathurin Cordier, a man of character, learning and repute as a teacher, who in later days followed his pupil to Switzerland, taught at Neuchâtel, and died in Geneva in 1564. In dedicating to him his _Commentary on the First Epistle to the Thessalonians,_ as "eximiae pietatis et doctrinae viro," he declares that so had he been aided by his instruction that whatever subsequent progress he had made he only regarded as received from him, and "this," he adds, "I wish to testify to posterity that if any utility accrue to any from my writings they may acknowledge it as having in part flowed from thee." From the Collège de la Marche he removed to the Collège de Montaigu,[2] where the atmosphere was more ecclesiastical and where he had for instructor a Spaniard who is described as a man of learning and to whom Calvin was indebted for some sound training in dialectics and the scholastic philosophy. He speedily outstripped all his competitors in grammatical studies, and by his skill and acumen as a student of philosophy, and in the college disputations gave fruitful promise of that consummate excellence as a reasoner in the department of speculative truth which he afterwards displayed. Among his friends were the Hangests (especially Claude), Nicolas and Michel Cop, sons of the king's Swiss physician, and his own kinsman Pierre Robert, better known as Olivétan. Such friendships testify both to the worth and the attractiveness of his character, and contradict the old legend that he was an unsociable misanthrope. Pleased with his success, the canons at Noyon gave him the curacy of St Martin de Marteville in September 1527. After holding this preferment for nearly two years, he exchanged it in July 1529 for the cure of Pont L'Évêque, a village near to Noyon, and the place to which his father originally belonged. He appears to have been not a little elated by his early promotion, and although not ordained, he preached several sermons to the people. But though the career of ecclesiastical preferment was thus early opened to him, Calvin was destined not to become a priest. A change came over the mind both of his father and himself respecting his future career. Gérard Cauvin began to suspect that he had not chosen the most lucrative profession for his son, and that the law offered to a youth of his talents and industry a more promising sphere.[3] He was also now out of favour with the cathedral chapter at Noyon. It is said also that John himself, on the advice of his relative, Pierre Robert Olivétan, the first translator of the Bible into French, had begun to study the Scriptures and to dissent from the Roman worship. At any rate he readily complied with his father's suggestion, and removed from Paris to Orleans (March 1528) in order to study law under Pierre Taisan de l'Etoile, the most distinguished jurisconsult of his day. The university atmosphere here was less ascetic than at Paris, but Calvin's ardour knew no slackening, and such was his progress in legal knowledge that he was frequently called upon to lecture, in the absence of one or other of the regular staff. Other studies, however, besides those of law occupied him while in this city, and moved by the humanistic spirit of the age he eagerly developed his classical knowledge. "By protracted vigils," says Beza, "he secured indeed a solid erudition and an excellent memory; but it is probable he at the same time sowed the seeds of that disease (dyspepsia) which occasioned him various illnesses in after life, and at last brought upon him premature death."[4] His friends here were Melchior Wolmar, a German schoolmaster and a man of exemplary scholarship and character, François Daniel, Francois de Connam and Nicolas Duchemin; to these his earliest letters were written.

From Orleans Calvin went to Bourges in the autumn of 1529 to continue his studies under the brilliant Italian, Andrea Alciati (1492-1550), whom Francis I. had invited into France and settled as a professor of law in that university. His friend Daniel went with him, and Wolmar followed a year later. By Wolmar Calvin was taught Greek, and introduced to the study of the New Testament in the original, a service which he gratefully acknowledges in one of his printed works.[5] The conversation of Wolmar may also have been of use to him in his consideration of the doctrines of the Reformation, which were now beginning to be widely diffused through France. Twelve years had elapsed since Luther had published his theses against indulgences--twelve years of intense excitement and anxious discussion, not in Germany only, but in almost all the adjacent countries. In France there had not been as yet any overt revolt against the Church of Rome, but multitudes were in sympathy with any attempt to improve the church by education, by purer morals, by better preaching and by a return to the primitive and uncorrupted faith. Though we cannot with Beza regard Calvin at this time as a centre of Protestant activity, he may well have preached at Lignières as a reformatory Catholic of the school of Erasmus. Calvin's own record of his "conversion" is so scanty and devoid of chronological data that it is extremely difficult to trace his religious development with any certainty. But it seems probable that at least up to 1532 he was far more concerned about classical scholarship than about religion.

His residence at Bourges was cut short by the death of his father in May 1531. Immediately after this event he went to Paris, where the "new learning" was now at length ousting the medieval scholasticism from the university. He lodged in the Collège Fortet, reading Greek with Pierre Danès and beginning Hebrew with François Vatable. It was at this time (April 1532) that Calvin issued his first publication, a commentary in Latin on Seneca's tract _De Clementia_. This book he published at his own cost, and dedicated to Claude Hangest, abbot of St Éloi, a member of the de Montmor family, with whom Calvin had been brought up. It was formerly thought that Calvin published this work with a view to influence the king to put a stop to the attacks on the Protestants, but there is nothing in the treatise itself or in the commentary to favour this opinion.

Soon after the publication of his first book Calvin returned to Orleans, where he stayed for a year, perhaps again reading law, and still undecided as to his life's work. He visited Noyon in August 1533, and by October of the same year was settled again in Paris. Here and now his destiny became certain. The conservative theology was becoming discredited, and humanists like Jacques Lefèvre of Étaples (Faber Stapulensis) and Gérard Roussel were favoured by the court under the influence of Margaret of Angoulême, queen of Navarre and sister of Francis I. Calvin's old friend, Nicolas Cop, had just been elected rector of the university and had to deliver an oration according to custom in the church of the Mathurins, on the feast of All Saints. The oration (certainly influenced but hardly composed by Calvin) was in effect a defence of the reformed opinions, especially of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. It is to the period between April 1532 and November 1533, and in particular to the time of his second sojourn at Orleans, that we may most fittingly assign the great change in Calvin which he describes (_Praef. ad Psalmos_; opera xxxi. 21-24) as his "sudden conversion" and attributes to direct divine agency. It must have been at least after his _Commentary on Seneca's De Clementia_ that his heart was "so subdued and reduced to docility that in comparison with his zeal for true piety he regarded all other studies with indifference, though not entirely forsaking them. Though himself a beginner, many flocked to him to learn the pure doctrine, and he began to seek some hiding-place and means of withdrawal from people." This indeed was forced upon him, for Cop's address was more than the conservative party could bear, and Cop, being summoned to appear before the parlement of Paris, found it necessary, as he failed to secure the support either of the king, or of the university, to make his escape to Basel. An attempt was at the same time made to seize Calvin, but, being forewarned of the design by his friends, he also made his escape. His room in the Collège Fortet, however, was searched, and his books and papers seized, to the imminent peril of some of his friends, whose letters were found in his repositories. He went to Noyon, but, proceedings against him being dropped, soon returned to Paris. But desiring both security and solitude for study he left the city again about New Year of 1534 and became the guest of Louis du Tillet, a canon of the cathedral, at Angoulême, where at the request of his host he prepared some short discourses, which were circulated in the surrounding parishes, and read in public to the people. Here, too in du Tillet's splendid library, he began the studies which resulted in his great work, the _Institutes_, and paid a visit to Nérac, where the venerable Lefèvre, whose revised translation of the Bible into French was published about this time, was spending his last years under the kindly care of Margaret of Navarre.

Calvin was now nearly twenty-five years of age, and in the ordinary way would have been ordained to the priesthood. Up till this time his work for the evangelical cause was not so much that of the public preacher or reformer as that of the retiring but influential scholar and adviser. Now, however, he had to decide whether, like Roussel and other of his friends, he should strive to combine the new doctrines with a position in the old church, or whether he should definitely break away from Rome. His mind was made up, and on the 4th of May he resigned his chaplaincy at Noyon and his rectorship at Pont l'Évêque. Towards the end of the same month he was arrested and suffered two short terms of imprisonment, the charges against him being not strong enough to be pressed. He seems to have gone next to Paris, staying perhaps with Étienne de la Forge, a Protestant merchant who suffered for his faith in February 1535. To this time belongs the story of the proposed meeting between Calvin and the Spanish reformer Servetus. Calvin's movements at this time are difficult to trace, but he visited both Orleans and Poitiers, and each visit marked a stage in his development.

The Anabaptists of Germany had spread into France, and were disseminating many wild and fanatical opinions among those who had seceded from the Church of Rome. Among other notions which they had imbibed was that of a sleep of the soul after death. To Calvin this notion appeared so pernicious that he composed a treatise in refutation of it, under the title of _Psychopannychia_. The preface to this treatise is dated Orleans 1534, but it was not printed till 1542. In it he chiefly dwells upon the evidence from Scripture in favour of the belief that the soul retains its intelligent consciousness after its separation from the body--passing by questions of philosophical speculation, as tending on such a subject only to minister to an idle curiosity. At Poitiers Calvin gathered round him a company of cultured and gentle men whom in private intercourse he influenced considerably. Here too in a grotto near the town he for the first time celebrated the communion in the Evangelical Church of France, using a piece of the rock as a table.

The year 1534 was thus decisive for Calvin. From this time forward his influence became supreme, and all who had accepted the reformed doctrines in France turned to him for counsel and instruction, attracted not only by his power as a teacher, but still more, perhaps because they saw in him so full a development of the Christian life according to the evangelical model. Renan, no prejudiced judge, pronounces him "the most Christian man of his time," and attributes to this his success as a reformer. Certain it is that already he had become conspicuous as a prophet of the new religion; his life was in danger, and he was obliged to seek safety in flight. In company with his friend Louis du Tillet, whom he had again gone to Angoulême to visit, he set out for Basel. On their way they were robbed by one of their servants, and it was only by borrowing ten crowns from their other servant that they were enabled to get to Strassburg, and thence to Basel. Here Calvin was welcomed by the band of scholars and theologians who had conspired to make that city the Athens of Switzerland, and especially by Oswald Myconius, the chief pastor, Pierre Viret and Heinrich Bullinger. Under the aupices and guidance of Sebastian Münster, Calvin now gave himself to the study of Hebrew.