Part 46

LE CONTE, JOSEPH (1823-1901), American geologist, of Huguenot descent, was born in Liberty county, Georgia, on the 26th of February 1823. He was educated at Franklin College, Georgia, where he graduated (1841); he afterwards studied medicine and received his degree at the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1845. After practising for three or four years at Macon, Georgia, he entered Harvard, and studied natural history under L. Agassiz. An excursion made with Professors J. Hall and Agassiz to the Helderberg mountains of New York developed a keen interest in geology. After graduating at Harvard, Le Conte in 1851 accompanied Agassiz on an expedition to study the Florida reefs. On his return he became professor of natural science in Oglethorpe University, Georgia; and from 1852 to 1856 professor of natural history and geology in Franklin College. From 1857 to 1869 he was professor of chemistry and geology in South Carolina College, and he was then appointed professor of geology and natural history in the university of California, a post which he held until his death. He published a series of papers on monocular and binocular vision, and also on psychology. His chief contributions, however, related to geology, and in all he wrote he was lucid and philosophical. He described the fissure-eruptions in western America, discoursed on earth-crust movements and their causes and on the great features of the earth's surface. As separate works he published _Elements of Geology_ (1878, 5th ed. 1889); _Religion and Science_ (1874); and _Evolution: its History, its Evidences, and its Relation to Religious Thought_ (1888). He was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1892, and of the Geological Society of America in 1896. He died in the Yosemite Valley, California, on the 6th of June 1901.

See Obituary by J. J. Stevenson, _Annals of New York Acad. of Sciences_, vol. xiv. (1902), p. 150.

LECONTE DE LISLE, CHARLES MARIE RENÉ (1818-1894), French poet, was born in the island of Réunion on the 22nd of October 1818. His father, an army surgeon, who brought him up with great severity, sent him to travel in the East Indies with a view to preparing him for a commercial life. After this voyage he went to Rennes to complete his education, studying especially Greek, Italian and history. He returned once or twice to Réunion, but in 1846 settled definitely in Paris. His first volume, _La Vénus de Milo_, attracted to him a number of friends many of whom were passionately devoted to classical literature. In 1873 he was made assistant librarian at the Luxembourg; in 1886 he was elected to the Academy in succession to Victor Hugo. His _Poèmes antiques_ appeared in 1852; _Poèmes et poésies_ in 1854; _Le Chemin de la croix_ in 1859; the _Poèmes barbares_, in their first form, in 1862; _Les Erinnyes_, a tragedy after the Greek model, in 1872; for which occasional music was provided by Jules Massenet; the _Poèmes tragiques_ in 1884; _L'Apollonide_, another classical tragedy, in 1888; and two posthumous volumes, _Derniers poèmes_ in 1899, and _Premières poésies et lettres intimes_ in 1902. In addition to his original work in verse, he published a series of admirable prose translations of Theocritus, Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Horace. He died at Voisins, near Louveciennes (Seine-et-Oise), on the 18th of July 1894.

In Leconte de Lisle the Parnassian movement seems to crystallize. His verse is clear, sonorous, dignified, deliberate in movement, classically correct in rhythm, full of exotic local colour, of savage names, of realistic rhetoric. It has its own kind of romance, in its "legend of the ages," so different from Hugo's, so much fuller of scholarship and the historic sense, yet with far less of human pity. Coldness cultivated as a kind of artistic distinction seems to turn all his poetry to marble, in spite of the fire at its heart. Most of Leconte de Lisle's poems are little chill epics, in which legend is fossilized. They have the lofty monotony of a single conception of life and of the universe. He sees the world as what Byron called it, "a glorious blunder," and desires only to stand a little apart from the throng, meditating scornfully. Hope, with him, becomes no more than this desperate certainty:--

"Tu te tairas, ô voix sinistre des vivants!"

His only prayer is to Death, "divine Death," that it may gather its children to its breast:--

"Affranchis-nous du temps, du nombre et de l'espace, Et rends-nous le repos que la vie a troublé!"

The interval which is his he accepts with something of the defiance of his own Cain, refusing to fill it with the triviality of happiness, waiting even upon beauty with a certain inflexible austerity. He listens and watches, throughout the world, for echoes and glimpses of great tragic passions, languid with fire in the East, a tumultuous conflagration in the middle ages, a sombre darkness in the heroic ages of the North. The burning emptiness of the desert attracts him, the inexplicable melancholy of the dogs that bark at the moon; he would interpret the jaguar's dreams, the sleep of the condor. He sees nature with the same wrathful impatience as man, praising it for its destructive energies, its haste to crush out human life before the stars fall into chaos, and the world with them, as one of the least of stars. He sings the "Dies Irae" exultingly; only seeming to desire an end of God as well as of man, universal nothingness. He conceives that he does well to be angry, and this anger is indeed the personal note of his pessimism; but it leaves him somewhat apart from the philosophical poets, too fierce for wisdom and not rapturous enough for poetry. (A. Sy.)

See J. Dornis, _Leconte de Lisle intime_ (1895); F. Calmette, _Un Demi siècle littéraire, Leconte de Lisle et ses amis_ (1902); Paul Bourget, _Nouveaux essais de psychologie contemporaine_ (1885); F. Brunetière, _L'Évolution de la poésie lyrique en France au XIX^e siècle_ (1894); Maurice Spronck, _Les Artistes littéraires_ (1889); J. Lemaître, _Les Contemporains_ (2nd series, 1886); F. Brunetière, _Nouveaux essais sur la litt. contemp._ (1895).

LE COQ, ROBERT (d. 1373), French bishop, was born at Montdidier, although he belonged to a bourgeois family of Orléans, where he first attended school before coming to Paris. In Paris he became advocate to the parlement (1347); then King John appointed him master of requests, and in 1351, a year during which he received many other honours, he became bishop of Laon. At the opening of 1354 he was sent with the cardinal of Boulogne, Pierre I., duke of Bourbon, and Jean VI., count of Vendome, to Mantes to treat with Charles the Bad, king of Navarre, who had caused the constable, Charles of Spain, to be assassinated, and from this time dates his connexion with this king. At the meeting of the estates which opened in Paris in October 1356 Le Coq played a leading rôle and was one of the most outspoken of the orators, especially when petitions were presented to the dauphin Charles, denouncing the bad government of the realm and demanding the banishment of the royal councillors. Soon, however, the credit of the estates having gone down, he withdrew to his diocese, but at the request of the bourgeois of Paris he speedily returned. The king of Navarre had succeeded in escaping from prison and had entered Paris, where his party was in the ascendant; and Robert le Coq became the most powerful person in his council. No one dared to contradict him, and he brought into it whom he pleased. He did not scruple to reveal to the king of Navarre secret deliberations, but his fortune soon turned. He ran great danger at the estates of Compiègne in May 1358, where his dismissal was demanded, and he had to flee to St Denis, where Charles the Bad and Étienne Marcel came to find him. After the death of Marcel, he tried, unsuccessfully, to deliver Laon, his episcopal town, to the king of Navarre, and he was excluded from the amnesty promised in the treaty of Calais (1360) by King John to the

## partisans of Charles the Bad. His temporalities had been seized, and he

was obliged to flee from France. In 1363, thanks to the support of the king of Navarre, he was given the bishopric of Calahorra in the kingdom of Aragon, which he administered until his death in 1373.

See L. C. Douët d'Arcq, "Acte d'accusation contre Robert le Coq, évêque de Laon" in _Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Chartes_, 1st series, t. ii., pp. 350-387; and R. Delachenal, "La Bibliothèque d'un avocat du XIV^e siècle, inventaire estimatif des livres de Robert le Coq," in _Nouvelle revue historique de droit français et étranger_ (1887), pp. 524-537.

LECOUVREUR, ADRIENNE (1692-1730), French actress, was born on the 5th of April 1692, at Damery, Marne, the daughter of a hatter, Robert Couvreur. She had an unhappy childhood in Paris. She showed a natural talent for declamation and was instructed by La Grand, _sociétaire_ of the Comédie Française, and with his help she obtained a provincial engagement. It was not until 1717, after a long apprenticeship, that she made her Paris début as Electre, in Crébillon's tragedy of that name, and Angélique in Molière's _George Dandin_. Her success was so great that she was immediately received into the Comédie Française, and for thirteen years she was the queen of tragedy there, attaining a popularity never before accorded an actress. She is said to have played no fewer than 1184 times in a hundred rôles, of which she created twenty-two. She owed her success largely to her courage in abandoning the stilted style of elocution of her predecessors for a naturalness of delivery and a touching simplicity of pathos that delighted and moved her public. In Baron, who returned to the stage at the age of sixty-seven, she had an able and powerful coadjutor in changing the stage traditions of generations. The jealousy she aroused was partly due to her social successes, which were many, in spite of the notorious freedom of her manner of life. She was on visiting and dining terms with half the court, and her _salon_ was frequented by Voltaire and all the other notables and men of letters. She was the mistress of Maurice de Saxe from 1721, and sold her plate and jewels to supply him with funds for his ill-starred adventures as duke of Courland. By him she had a daughter, her third, who was grandmother of the father of George Sand. Adrienne Lecouvreur died on the 20th of March 1730. She was denied the last rites of the Church, and her remains were refused burial in consecrated ground. Voltaire, in a fine poem on her death, expressed his indignation at the barbarous treatment accorded to the woman whose "friend, admirer, lover" he was.

Her life formed the subject of the well-known tragedy (1849), by Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé.

LE CREUSOT, a town of east-central France in the department of Saône-et-Loire, 55 m. S.W. of Dijon on the Paris-Lyon railway. Pop. (1906), town, 22,535; commune, 33,437. Situated at the foot of lofty hills in a district rich in coal and iron, it has the most extensive iron works in France. The coal bed of Le Creusot was discovered in the 13th century; but it was not till 1774 that the first workshops were founded there. The royal crystal works were transferred from Sèvres to Le Creusot in 1787, but this industry came to an end in 1831. Meanwhile two or three enterprises for the manufacture of metal had ended in failure, and it was only in 1836 that the foundation of iron works by Adolphe and Eugène Schneider definitely inaugurated the industrial prosperity of the place. The works supplied large quantities of war material to the French armies during the Crimean and Franco-German wars. Since that time they have continuously enlarged the scope of their operations, which now embrace the manufacture of steel, armour-plate, guns, ordnance-stores, locomotives, electrical machinery and engineering material of every description. A network of railways about 37 m. in length connects the various branches of the works with each other and with the neighbouring Canal du Centre. Special attention is paid to the welfare of the workers who, not including the miners, number about 12,000, and good schools have been established. In 1897 the ordnance-manufacture of the Société des Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée at Havre was acquired by the Company, which also has important branches at Chalon-sur-Saône, where ship-building and bridge-construction is carried on, and at Cette (Hérault).

LECTERN (through O. Fr. _leitrun_, from Late Lat. _lectrum_, or _lectrinum_, _legere_, to read; the French equivalent is _lutrin_; Ital. _leggio_; Ger. _Lesepult_), in the furniture of certain Christian churches, a reading-desk, used more especially for the reading of the lessons and in the Anglican Church practically confined to that purpose. In the early Christian Church this was done from the ambo (q.v.), but in the 15th century, when the books were often of great size, it became necessary to provide a lectern to hold them. These were either in wood or metal, and many fine examples still exist; one at Detling in wood, in which there are shelves on all four sides to hold books, is perhaps the most elaborate. Brass lecterns, as in the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, are common; in the usual type the book is supported on the outspread wings of an eagle or pelican, which is raised on a moulded stem, carried on three projecting ledges or feet with lions on them. In the example in Norwich cathedral, the pelican supporting the book stands on a rock enclosed with a rich cresting of Gothic tabernacle work; the central stem or pillar, on which this rests, is supported by miniature projecting buttresses, standing on a moulded base with lions on it.

LECTION, LECTIONARY. The custom of reading the books of Moses in the synagogues on the Sabbath day was a very ancient one in the Jewish Church. The addition of lections (i.e. readings) from the prophetic books had been made afterwards and was in existence in our Lord's time, as may be gathered from such passages as St Luke iv. 16-20, xvi. 29. This element in synagogue worship was taken over with others into the Christian divine service, additions being made to it from the writings of the apostles and evangelists. We find traces of such additions within the New Testament itself in such directions as are contained in Col. iv. 16; 1 Thess. v. 27.

From the 2nd century onwards references multiply, though the earlier references do not prove the existence of a fixed lectionary or order of lessons, but rather point the other way. Justin Martyr, describing divine worship in the middle of the 2nd century says: "On the day called Sunday all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the Apostles, or the writings of the Prophets are read as long as time permits" (_Apol._ i. cap. 67). Tertullian about half a century later makes frequent reference to the reading of Holy Scripture in public worship (_Apol._ 39; _De praescript._ 36; _De amina_, 9).

In the canons of Hippolytus in the first half of the 3rd century we find this direction: "Let presbyters, subdeacons and readers, and all the people assemble daily in the church at time of cock-crow, and betake themselves to prayers, to psalms and to the reading of the Scriptures, according to the command of the Apostles, until I come attend to reading" (canon xxi.).

But there are traces of fixed lessons coming into existence in the course of this century; Origen refers to the book of Job being read in Holy Week (_Commentaries on Job_, lib. i.). Allusions of a similar kind in the 4th century are frequent. John Cassian (c. 380) tells us that throughout Egypt the Psalms were divided into groups of twelve, and that after each group there followed two lessons, one from the Old, one from the New Testament (_De caenob. inst._ ii. 4), implying but not absolutely stating that there was a fixed order of such lessons just as there was of the Psalms. St Basil the Great mentions fixed lessons on certain occasions taken from Isaiah, Proverbs, St Matthew and Acts (Hom. xiii. _De bapt._). From Chrysostom (Hom. lxiii _in Act._ &c.), and Augustine (Tract. vi. _in Joann._ &c.) we learn that Genesis was read in Lent, Job and Jonah in Passion Week, the Acts of the Apostles in Eastertide, lessons on the Passion on Good Friday and on the Resurrection on Easter Day. In the _Apostolical Constitutions_ (ii. 57) the following service is described and enjoined. First come two lessons from the Old Testament by a reader, the whole of the Old Testament being made use of except the books of the Apocrypha. The Psalms of David are then to be sung. Next the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Paul are to be read, and finally the four Gospels by a deacon or a priest. Whether the selections were _ad libitum_ or according to a fixed table of lessons we are not informed. Nothing in the shape of a lectionary is extant older than the 8th century, though there is evidence that Claudianus Mamercus made one for the church at Vienne in 450, and that Musaeus made one for the church at Marseilles c. 458. The _Liber comitis_ formerly attributed to St Jerome must be three, or nearly three, centuries later than that saint, and the Luxeuil lectionary, or _Lectionarium Gallicanum_, which Mabillon attributed to the 7th, cannot be earlier than the 8th century; yet the oldest MSS. of the Gospels have marginal marks, and sometimes actual interpolations, which can only be accounted for as indicating the beginnings and endings of liturgical lessons. The third council of Carthage in 397 forbade anything but Holy Scripture to be read in church; this rule has been adhered to so far as the liturgical epistle and gospel, and occasional additional lessons in the Roman missal are concerned, but in the divine office, on feasts when nine lessons are read at matins, only the first three lessons are taken from Holy Scripture, the next three being taken from the sermons of ecclesiastical writers, and the last three from expositions of the day's gospel; but sometimes the lives or _Passions_ of the saints, or of some

## particular saints, were substituted for any or all of these breviary

lessons. (F. E. W.)

LECTISTERNIUM (from Lat. _lectum sternere_, "to spread a couch"; [Greek: strômnai] in Dion. Halic. xii. 9), in ancient Rome, a propitiatory ceremony, consisting of a meal offered to gods and goddesses, represented by their busts or statues, or by portable figures of wood, with heads of bronze, wax or marble, and covered with drapery. Another suggestion is that the symbols of the gods consisted of bundles of sacred herbs, tied together in the form of a head, covered by a waxen mask so as to resemble a kind of bust (cf. the straw puppets called Argei). These symbols were laid upon a couch (_lectus_), the left arm resting on a cushion (_pulvinus_, whence the couch itself was often called _pulvinar_) in the attitude of reclining. In front of the couch, which was placed in the open street, a meal was set out on a table. It is definitely stated by Livy (v. 13) that the ceremony took place "for the first time" in Rome in the year 399 B.C., after the Sibylline books had been consulted by their keepers and interpreters (_duumviri sacris faciendis_), on the occasion of a pestilence. Three couches were prepared for three pairs of gods--Apollo and Latona, Hercules and Diana, Mercury and Neptune. The feast, which on that occasion lasted for eight (or seven) days, was also celebrated by private individuals; the citizens kept open house, quarrels were forgotten, debtors and prisoners were released, and everything done to banish sorrow. Similar honours were paid to other divinities in subsequent times--Fortuna, Saturnus, Juno Regina of the Aventine, the three Capitoline deities (Jupiter, Juno, Minerva), and in 217, after the defeat of lake Trasimenus, a lectisternium was held for three days to six pairs of gods, corresponding to the twelve great gods of Olympus--Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Minerva, Mars, Venus, Apollo, Diana, Vulcan, Vesta, Mercury, Ceres. In 205, alarmed by unfavourable prodigies, the Romans were ordered to fetch the Great Mother of the gods from Pessinus in Phrygia; in the following year the image was brought to Rome, and a lectisternium held. In later times, the lectisternium became of constant (even daily) occurrence, and was celebrated in the different temples. Such celebrations must be distinguished from those which were ordered, like the earlier lectisternia, by the Sibylline books in special emergencies. Although undoubtedly offerings of food were made to the gods in very early Roman times on such occasions as the ceremony of _confarreatio_, and the _epulum Jovis_ (often confounded with the lectisternium), it is generally agreed that the lectisternia were of Greek origin. In favour of this may be mentioned: the similarity of the Greek [Greek: Theoxenia], in which, however, the gods played the part of hosts; the gods associated with it were either previously unknown to Roman religion, though often concealed under Roman names, or were provided with a new cult (thus Hercules was not worshipped as at the Ara Maxima, where, according to Servius on _Aeneid_, viii. 176 and Cornelius Balbus, _ap._ Macrobius, _Sat._ iii. 6, a lectisternium was forbidden); the Sibylline books, which decided whether a lectisternium was to be held or not, were of Greek origin; the custom of reclining at meals was Greek. Some, however, assign an Etruscan origin to the ceremony, the Sibylline books themselves being looked upon as old Italian "black books." A probable explanation of the confusion between the lectisternia and genuine old Italian ceremonies is that, as the lectisternia became an almost everyday occurrence in Rome, people forgot their foreign origin and the circumstances in which they were first introduced, and then the word _pulvinar_ with its associations was transferred to times in which it had no existence. In imperial times, according to Tacitus (_Annals_, xv. 44), chairs were substituted for couches in the case of goddesses, and the lectisternium in their case became a sellisternium (the reading, however, is not certain). This was in accordance with Roman custom, since in the earliest times all the members of a family sat at meals, and in later times at least the women and children. This is a point of distinction between the original practice at the lectisternium and the epulum Jovis, the goddesses at the latter being provided with chairs, whereas in the lectisternium they reclined. In Christian times the word was used for a feast in memory of the dead (Sidonius Apollinaris, _Epistulae_, iv. 15).

See article by A. Bouché-Leclercq in Daremberg and Saglio, _Dictionnaire des antiquités_; Marquardt, _Römische Staatsverwaltung_, iii. 45, 187 (1885); G. Wissowa, _Religion und Kultus der Römer_, p. 355 seq.; monograph by Wackermann (Hanau, 1888); C. Pascal, _Studii di antichità e mitologia_ (1896).