VOLUME VIII SLICE VIII Dubner to Dyeing (continued 7)

DUPORT, ADRIEN (1759-1798), French politician, was born in Paris. He became an influential advocate in the parlement, becoming prominent in opposition to the ministers Calonne and Loménie de Brienne. Elected in 1789 to the states-general by the noblesse of Paris, he soon revealed a remarkable eloquence. A learned jurist, he contributed during the Constituent Assembly to the organization of the judiciary of France. His report of the 29th of March 1790 is especially notable. In it he advocated trial by jury; but he was unable to obtain the jury system in civil cases. Duport had formed with Barnave and Alexandre de Lameth a group known as the “triumvirate,” which was popular at first. But after the flight of the king to Varennes, Duport sought to defend him; as member of the commission charged to question the king, he tried to excuse him, and on the 14th of July 1791 he opposed the formal accusation. He was thus led to separate himself from the Jacobins and to join the Feuillant party. After the Constituent Assembly he became president of the criminal tribunal of Paris, but was arrested during the insurrection of the 10th of August 1792. He escaped, thanks probably to the complicity of Danton, returned to France after the 9th of Thermidor of the year II., left it in exile again after the republican coup d’état of the 18th of Fructidor of the year V., and died at Appenzell in Switzerland in 1798.

See F.A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de la Constituante (2nd ed., Paris, 1905, 8vo).

DUPORT, JAMES (1606-1679), English classical scholar, was born at Cambridge. His father, John Duport, who was descended from an old Norman family (the Du Ports of Caen, who settled in Leicestershire during the reign of Henry IV.), was master of Jesus College. The son was educated at Westminster and at Trinity College, where he became fellow and subsequently vicemaster. In 1639 he was appointed regius professor of Greek, in 1664 dean of Peterborough, and in 1668 master of Magdalene College. He died at Peterborough on the 17th of July 1679. Throughout the troublous times of the Civil War, in spite of the loss of his clerical offices and eventually of his professorship, Duport quietly continued his lectures. He is best known by his Homeri gnomologia (1660), a collection of all the aphorisms, maxims and remarkable opinions in the Iliad and Odyssey, illustrated by quotations from the Bible and classical literature. His other published works chiefly consist of translations (from the Bible and Prayer Book into Greek) and short original poems, collected under the title of Horae subsecivae or Stromata. They include congratulatory odes (inscribed to the king); funeral odes; carmina comitialia (tripos verses on different theses maintained in the schools, remarkable for their philosophical and metaphysical knowledge); sacred epigrams; and three books of miscellaneous poems (Sylvae). The character of Duport’s work is not such as to appeal to modern scholars, but he deserves the credit of having done much to keep alive the study of classical literature in his day.

The chief authority for the life of Duport is J.H. Monk’s “Memoir” (1825); see also Sandys, Hist. Class. Schol. (1908), ii. 349.

DÜPPEL, a village of Germany, in the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein, opposite the town of Sonderburg (on the island of Alsen). (Pop. 600.) The position of Düppel, forming as it does a bridge-head for the defenders of the island of Alsen, played a conspicuous part in the wars between Denmark and the Germans. On the 28th of May 1848 the German federal troops were there defeated by the Danes under General Hedemann, and a second battle was fought on the 6th of June 1848. On the 13th of April 1849 an indecisive battle was fought between the federal troops under von Prittwitz and the Danes under von Bulow. The most important event in the military history of Düppel was, however, the siege by the Prussians of the Danish position in 1864. The flanks of the defenders’ line rested upon the Alsen Sund and the sea, and it was strengthened by ten redoubts. A second line of trenches with lunettes at intervals was constructed behind the front attacked, and a small réduit opposite Sonderburg to cover the bridges between Alsen and the mainland. The Prussian siege corps was commanded by Prince Frederick Charles (headquarters, Düppel village), and after three weeks’ skirmishing a regular siege was begun, the batteries being opened on the 15th of March. The first parallel was completed fifteen days later, the front of attack being redoubts II. to VI., forming the centre of the Danish entrenchments on the road Düppel-Sonderburg. The siege was pushed rapidly from the first parallel and the assault delivered on the 18th of April, against the redoubts I. to VI., each redoubt being attacked by a separate column. The whole line was carried after a brief but severe conflict, and the Prussians had penetrated to and captured the réduit opposite Sonderburg by 2 P.M. The loss of the Danes, half of whose forces were not engaged, included 1800 killed and wounded and 3400 prisoners. This operation was followed by the daring passage of the Alsen Sund, effected by the Prussians in boats almost under the guns of the Danish war-ships, and resulting in the capture of the whole island of Alsen (June 29th, 1864). After being still further strengthened and linked with similar defences at Sonderburg, the Düppel entrenchments were abandoned in 1881 in favour of landward fortifications around Kiel.

See R. Neumann, Über den Angriff der Düppeler Schanzen in der Zeit vom 15. März bis 18. April 1864 (Berlin, 1865); and Der deutschdänische Krieg 1864, published by the Prussian General Staff (Berlin, 1887).

DU PRAT, ANTOINE (1463-1535), chancellor of France and cardinal, was born at Issoire on the 17th of January 1463. He began life as a lawyer, and rose rapidly in the legal hierarchy owing to the influence of his cousin Antoine Bohier, cardinal archbishop of Bourges. The first office which he held was that of lieutenant-general in the bailliage of Montferrand; in 1507 he became first president of the parlement of Paris. Louise of Savoy had employed him as her adviser in her affairs, and had made him tutor to her son. When Francis I. ascended the throne he made Du Prat chancellor of France, in which capacity he played an important part in the government. It was he who negotiated with Leo X. concerning the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction and the establishment of a concordat. After the meeting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520) he was engaged in unsuccessful negotiations with Wolsey. During the regency of Louise of Savoy he, together with Florimond Robertet, was at the head of affairs. He took an active part in the suit brought by Louise of Savoy against the Constable de Bourbon, and in 1532 completed the work of uniting Brittany to France. After the death of his wife in 1507 Du Prat had taken orders; he received the bishoprics of Valence, Die, Meaux and Albi, and the archbishopric of Sens (1525); in 1527 he became cardinal, and in 1530 papal legate. He was a determined adversary of the Reformation. He died on the 9th of July 1535.

See the marquis Du Prat, Vie d’Antoine Du Prat (Paris, 1857).

DUPRÉ, JULES (1812-1889), French painter, was one of the chief members of the Barbizon group of romantic landscape painters. If Corot stands for the lyric and Rousseau for the epic aspect of the poetry of nature, Dupré is the exponent of her tragic and dramatic aspects. He was the son of a porcelain manufacturer, and started his career in his father’s works, whence he went to his uncle’s china factory at Sèvres. After studying for some time under Diébold, a painter of clock faces, he had to pass through a short period of privation, until he attracted the attention of a wealthy patron, who came to his studio and bought all the studies on the walls at the price demanded by the artist—20 francs apiece. Dupré exhibited first at the Salon in 1831, and three years later was awarded a second-class medal. In the same year he came to England, where he was deeply impressed by the genius of Constable. From him he learnt how to express movement in nature; and the district of Southampton and Plymouth, with its wide, unbroken expanses of water, sky and ground, gave him good opportunities for studying the tempestuous motion of storm-clouds and the movement of foliage driven by the wind. He received the cross of the Legion of Honour in 1848. Dupré’s colour is sonorous and resonant; the subjects for which he showed marked preference are dramatic sunset effects and stormy skies and seas. Late in life he changed his style and gained appreciably in largeness of handling and arrived at greater simplicity in his colour harmonies. Among his chief works are the “Morning” and “Evening” at the Louvre, and the early “Crossing the Bridge” in the Wallace Collection.

DUPUIS, CHARLES FRANÇOIS (1742-1809), French scientific writer and politician, was born of poor parents at Trye-Château, between Gisors and Chaumont, on the 26th of October 1742. His father, who was a teacher, instructed him in mathematics and land-surveying. While he was engaged in measuring a tower by a geometrical method, the duc de la Rochefoucauld met him and was so taken by the lad’s intelligence that he gave him a bursary in the college of Harcourt. Dupuis made such rapid progress that, at the age of twenty-four, he was appointed professor of rhetoric at the college of Lisieux, where he had previously passed as a licentiate of theology. In his hours of leisure he studied law, and in 1770 he abandoned the clerical career and became an advocate. Two university discourses which he delivered in Latin were printed, and laid the foundation of his literary fame. His chief attention, however, was devoted to mathematics, the object of his early studies; and for some years he attended the astronomical lectures of Lalande, with whom he formed an intimate friendship. In 1778 he constructed a telegraph on the principle suggested by Guillaume Amontons (q.v.), and employed it in keeping up a correspondence with his friend Jean Fortin in the neighbouring village of Bagneux, until the Revolution made it necessary to destroy his machine to avoid suspicion. About the same time Dupuis formed his theory as to the origin of the Greek months. He endeavoured to account for the want of any resemblance between the groups of stars and the names by which they are known, by supposing that the zodiac was, for the people who invented it, a sort of calendar at once astronomical and rural, and that the figures chosen for the constellations were such as would naturally suggest the agricultural operations of the season. It seemed only necessary, therefore, to discover the clime and the period in which the constellation of Capricorn must have arisen with the sun on the day of the summer solstice, and the vernal equinox must have occurred under Libra. It appeared to Dupuis that this clime was Upper Egypt, and that the perfect correspondence between the signs and their significations had existed in that country at a period of between fifteen and sixteen thousand years before the present time; that it had existed only there; and that this harmony had been disturbed by the effect of the precession of the equinoxes. He therefore ascribed the invention of the signs of the zodiac to the people who then inhabited Upper Egypt or Ethiopia. This was the basis on which Dupuis established his mythological system, and endeavoured to explain fabulous history and the whole system of the theogony and theology of the ancients. Dupuis published several detached parts of his system in the Journal des savants for 1777 and 1781. These he afterwards collected and published, first in Lalande’s Astronomy, and then in a separate volume in 4to, 1781, under the title of Mémoire sur l’origine des constellations et sur l’explication de la fable par l’astronomie. The theory propounded in this memoir was refuted by J.S. Bailly in his Histoire de l’astronomie, but, at the same time, with a just acknowledgment of the erudition and ingenuity exhibited by the author.

Condorcet proposed Dupuis to Frederick the Great of Prussia as a fit person to succeed Thiébault in the professorship of literature at Berlin; and Dupuis had accepted the invitation, when the death of the king cancelled the engagement. The chair of humanity in the College of France having at the same time become vacant, it was conferred on Dupuis; and in 1788 he became a member of the Academy of Inscriptions. He now resigned his professorship at Lisieux, and was appointed by the administrators of the department of Paris one of the four commissioners of public instruction. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary troubles Dupuis sought safety at Évreux; and, having been chosen a member of the National Convention by the department of Seine-et-Oise, he distinguished himself by his moderation. In the third year of the republic he was elected secretary to the Assembly, and in the fourth he was chosen a member of the Council of Five Hundred. After Bonaparte’s coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire he was elected by the department of Seine-et-Oise a member of the Legislative Body, of which he became the president. He was proposed as a candidate for the senate, but resolved to abandon politics, devoting himself during the rest of his life to his favourite studies.

In 1795 he published the work by which he is best known, entitled Origine de tous les cultes, ou la religion universelle (3 vols. 4to, with an atlas, or 12 vols. 12mo). This work, of which an edition revised by P.R. Auguis was published in 1822 (10th ed., 1835-1836), became the subject of much bitter controversy, and the theory it propounded as to the origin of mythology in Upper Egypt led to the expedition organized by Napoleon for the exploration of that country. In 1798 Dupuis published an abridgment of his work in one volume 8vo, which met with no better success than the original. Another abridgment of the same work, executed upon a much more methodical plan, was published by M. de Tracy. The other works of Dupuis consist of two memoirs on the Pelasgi, inserted in the Memoirs of the Institute; a memoir “On the Zodiac of Tentyra,” published in the Revue philosophique for May 1806; and a Mémoire explicatif du zodiaque chronologique et mythologique, published the same year, in one volume 4to. He died on the 29th of September 1809.

DUPUY, CHARLES ALEXANDRE (1851- ), French statesman, was born at Le Puy on the 5th of November 1851, his father being a local official. After being a professor of philosophy in the provinces, he was appointed a school inspector, and thus obtained a practical acquaintance with the needs of French education. In 1885 he was elected to the chamber as an Opportunist Republican. After acting as “reporter” of the budget for public instruction, he became minister for the department, in M. Ribot’s cabinet, in 1892. In April 1893 he formed a ministry himself, taking as his office that of minister of the interior, but resigned at the end of November, and on 5th December was elected president of the chamber. During his first week of office an anarchist, Vaillant, who had managed to gain admission to the chamber, threw a bomb at the president, and M. Dupuy’s collected bearing, and his historic words: “Messieurs, la séance continue,” gained him much credit. In May 1894 he again became premier and minister of the interior; and he was by President Carnot’s side when the latter was stabbed to death at Lyons in June. He then became a candidate for the presidency, but was defeated, and his cabinet remained in office till January 1895; it was under it that Captain Dreyfus was arrested and condemned (23rd of December 1894). The progress of l’affaire then cast its shadow upon M. Dupuy, along with other French “ministrables,” but in November 1898, after M. Brisson had at last remitted the case to the judgment of the court of cassation, he formed a cabinet of Republican concentration. In view of the apparent likelihood that the judges of the criminal division of the court of cassation—who formed the ordinary tribunal for such an appeal—would decide in favour of Dreyfus, it was thought that M. Dupuy’s new cabinet would be strong enough to reconcile public opinion to such a result; but, to the surprise of outside observers, it was no sooner discovered how the judges were likely to decide than M. Dupuy proposed a law in the chamber transferring the decision to a full court of all the divisions of the court of cassation. This arbitrary act, though adopted by the chamber, was at once construed as a fresh attempt to maintain the judgment of the first court-martial; but in the interval President Faure (an anti-Dreyfusard) died, and the accession of M. Loubet doubtless had some effect in quieting public feeling. At all events, the whole court of cassation decided that there must be a new court-martial, and M. Dupuy at once resigned (June 1899). In June 1900 he was elected senator for the Haute Saône.

DUPUY, PIERRE (1582-1651), French scholar, otherwise known as Puteanus, was born at Agen (Lot-et-Garonne) on the 27th of November 1582. In 1615 he was commissioned by Mathieu Molé, first president of the parlement of Paris, to draw up an inventory of the documents which constituted what at that time was known as the Trésor des chartes. This work occupied eleven years. His MS. inventory is preserved in the original and in copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and transcriptions are in the national archives in Paris, at the record office in London, and elsewhere. Dupuy’s classification is still regarded with respect, but the inventory has been partially replaced by the publication of the Layettes du trésor (four volumes, coming down to 1270; 1863-1902). Dupuy also published, with his brother Jacques, and their friend Nicolas Rigault, the History of Aug. de Thou (1620, 1626). The two brothers then bought from Rigault the post of keeper of the king’s library, and drew up a catalogue of the library (Nos. 9352-9354 and 10366-10367 of the Latin collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale). In the course of this work, Dupuy became acquainted with and copied an enormous mass of unpublished documents, which furnished him with the material for some excellent works: Traité des droits et des libertés de l’église gallicane, avec les preuves (1639), Histoire de l’ordre militaire des Templiers (1654), Histoire générale du schisme qui a été dans l’église depuis 1378 jusqu’à 1428 (1654), and Histoire du différend entre le pape Boniface VIII et le roi Philippe le Bel (1655). These works, especially the last, are important contributions to the history of the relations of church and state in the middle ages. They were written from the Gallican standpoint, i.e. in favour of the rights of the crown in temporal and political matters, and this explains the delay in their publication until after Dupuy’s death. He wrote also Traité des régences et des majorités des rois de France (1655) and Recueil des droits du roi (1658). Dupuy’s papers, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, were inventoried by Léon Dorez (Catalogue de la collection Dupuy, 1899). See also L. Delisle’s Le Cabinet des manuscrits de la bibliothèque impériale. Dupuy died in Paris on the 14th of December 1651.

DUPUY DE LÔME, STANISLAS CHARLES HENRI LAURENT (1816-1885), French naval architect, the son of a retired naval officer, was born at Ploemeur, near Lorient, on the 15th of October 1816. He entered the École Polytechnique in 1835, and in 1842 was sent to England to study and report on iron shipbuilding. Acting on his report, which was published in 1844, the government built their first iron vessels under his supervision. He planned and built the steam line-of-battle ship “Napoleon” (1848-1852), and devised the method of altering sailing ships of the line into steamers, which was afterwards extensively practised in both France and England. He also showed the practicability of armouring the sides of a ship, and the frigate “Gloire” gave a very clear demonstration of his views. It was the beginning of the great change in the construction of ships of war which has been going on ever since. In 1857 Dupuy de Lôme was appointed “chef de la direction du matériel,” at Paris; and in 1861, “inspecteur général du matériel de la marine.” In 1866 he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences. At the beginning of the Franco-German War he was appointed a member of the committee of defence, and during the siege of Paris occupied himself with planning a steerable balloon, for carrying out which he was given a credit of 40,000 fr.; but the balloon was not ready till a few days before the capitulation. The experiments that were afterwards made with it did not prove entirely satisfactory. In 1875 he was busy over a scheme for embarking a railway train at Calais, and exhibited plans of the improved harbour and models of the “bateaux porte-trains” to the Academy of Sciences in July. In 1877 he was elected a senator for life. He received the cross of the Legion of Honour in 1845, was made a commander in 1858, and grand officer in December 1863. He died at Paris on the 1st of February 1885.

DUPUYTREN, GUILLAUME, Baron (1777-1835), French anatomist and surgeon, was born on the 6th of October 1777 at Pierre Buffière (Haute Vienne). He studied medicine in Paris at the newly established École de Médecine, and was appointed by competition prosector when only eighteen years of age. His early studies were directed chiefly to morbid anatomy. In 1803 he was appointed assistant-surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu, and in 1811 professor of operative surgery in succession to R.B. Sabatier (1732-1811). In 1815 he was appointed to the chair of clinical surgery, and became head surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu. Dupuytren’s energy and industry were alike remarkable. He visited the Hôtel-Dieu morning and evening, performing at each time several operations, lectured to vast throngs of students, gave advice to his outdoor patients, and fulfilled the duties consequent upon one of the largest practices of modern times. By his indefatigable activity he amassed a fortune of £300,000, the bulk of which he bequeathed to his daughter, with the deduction of considerable sums for the endowment of the anatomical chair in the École de Médecine, and the establishment of a benevolent institution for distressed medical men. The most important of Dupuytren’s writings is his Treatise on Artificial Anus, in which he applied the principles laid down by John Hunter. In his operations he was remarkable for his skill and dexterity, and for his great readiness of resource. He died in Paris on the 8th of February 1835.

DUQUE DE ESTRADA, DIEGO (1589-?), Spanish memoir writer, soldier and adventurer, son of Juan Duque de Estrada, also a soldier of rank, was born at Toledo on the 15th of August 1589. Having been left an orphan when very young, he was educated by a cousin. While still young he was betrothed to his cousin’s daughter. One night he found an intruder in the house, a gentleman with whom he was acquainted, and in a fit of jealousy killed both him and the young lady. The prevailing code of honour was considered a sufficient justification for Duque de Estrada’s violence, but the law looked upon the act as a vulgar assassination, and he had to flee. After leading a vagabond life in the south of Spain, he was arrested at Ecija, was brought to Toledo, and was there put to the torture with extreme ferocity, in order to extort a general confession as to his life during the past months. He had the strength not to yield to pain, and was finally able to escape from prison, partly by the help of a nun in a religious house which faced the prison, and partly by the intervention of friends. He made his way to Naples, where he entered the service of the duke of Osuna (q.v.), at that time viceroy. Duque de Estrada saw a good deal of fighting both with the Turks and the Venetians; but he is mainly interesting because he was employed by the viceroy in the conspiracy against Venice. He was one of the disguised Spanish soldiers who were sent into the town to destroy the arsenal, and who were warned in time that the conspiracy had been betrayed, and therefore escaped. After the fall of his patron, Duque de Estrada resumed his vagabond life, served under Bethlen Gabor in Transylvania, and in the Thirty Years’ War. In 1633 he entered the order of San Juan de Dios, and died at some time after 1637 in Sardinia, where he is known to have taken part in the defence of the island against an attack by the French. He left a book of memoirs, entitled Comentarios de el desengeñado de si Mismo prueba de todos estados, y eleccion del Mejor de ellos—“The Commentaries of one who knew his own little worth, the touchtstone of all the state of man, and the choice of the best.” They were written at different times, and part has been lost. The style is incorrect, and it would be unsafe to trust them in every detail, but they are amazingly vivid, and contain a wonderful picture of the moral and intellectual state of a large part of Spanish society at the time.

The memoirs have been reprinted by Don Pascual de Gayangos in the Memorial histórico español, vol. xii. (Madrid, 1860).

DUQUESNE, ARRAHAM, Marquis (1610-1688), French naval officer, was born at Dieppe in 1610. Born in a stirring seaport, the son of a distinguished naval officer, he naturally adopted the profession of a sailor. He spent his youth in the merchant service, and obtained his first distinction in naval warfare by the capture of the island of Lerins from the Spaniards in May 1637. About the same time his father was killed in an engagement with the Spaniards, and the news raised his hatred of the national enemy to the pitch of a personal and bitter animosity. For the next five years he sought every opportunity of inflicting defeat and humiliation on the Spanish navy, and he distinguished himself by his bravery in the engagement at Guetaria (1638), the expedition to Corunna (1639), and in battles at Tarragona (1641), Barcelona (1643), and the Cabo de Gata. The French navy being left unemployed during the minority of Louis XIV., Duquesne obtained leave to offer his services to the king of Sweden, who gave him a commission as vice-admiral in 1643. In this capacity he defeated the Danish fleet near Gothenburg and thus raised the siege of the city. The Danes returned to the struggle with increased forces under the command of King Christian in person, but they were again defeated—their admiral being killed and his ship taken. Peace having been concluded between Sweden and Denmark in 1645, Duquesne returned to France. The revolt at Bordeaux, supported as it was by material aid from Spain, gave him the opportunity of at once serving his country and gratifying his long-cherished hatred of the Spaniards. In 1650 he fitted out at his own expense a squadron with which he blockaded the mouth of the Gironde, and compelled the city to surrender. For this service he was promoted in rank, and received a gift of the castle and isle of Indre, near Nantes. Peace with Spain was concluded in 1659, and for some years afterwards Duquesne was occupied in endeavours to suppress piracy in the Mediterranean. On the revolt of Messina from Spain, he was sent to support the insurgents, and had to encounter the united fleets of Spain and Holland under the command of the celebrated Admiral de Ruyter. After several battles, in which the advantage was generally on the side of the French, a decisive engagement took place near Catania, on the 20th of April 1676, when the Dutch fleet was totally routed and de Ruyter mortally wounded. The greater part of the defeated fleet was afterwards burned in the harbour of Palermo, where it had taken refuge, and the French thus secured the undisputed command of the Mediterranean. For this important service Duquesne received a letter of thanks from Louis XIV., together with the title of marquis and the estate of Bouchet. His last achievements were the bombardment of Algiers (1682-1683), in order to effect the deliverance of the Christian captives, and the bombardment of Genoa in 1684. He retired from service in 1684, on the ground of age and ill-health. It is probable also that he foresaw the revocation of the edict of Nantes, which took place in the following year. He died in Paris on the 2nd of February 1688.

See Jal, Abraham Duquesne, et la marine de son temps (1873).

DUQUESNE, a borough of Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., on the Monongahela river, about 12 m. S.E. of Pittsburg. Pop. (1900) 9036, of whom 3451 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 15,727. It is served by the Pennsylvania railway. Its most prominent buildings are the Carnegie free library and club (opened in 1904 and containing 17,500 volumes in 1908), and the city hall. A short distance N. of the borough limits Kennywood Park, with a large auditorium and pavilion, is an attractive resort. By far the most important industry of the borough is the manufacture of steel. The value of the borough’s factory products increased from $20,333,476 in 1900 to $28,494,303 in 1905, or 40.1%. The municipality owns and operates its water-works. Duquesne was settled in 1885 and was incorporated in 1891.

DURAMEN (a rare Latin word, meaning hardness, from durus, hard), a botanical term for the inner, harder wood of a tree, the heart-wood.

DURAN, a Jewish Provençal family of rabbis and scholars, of whom the following are the most important.

1. Profiaṭ Duran, called also Ephodi. He was in 1391 compelled to profess Christianity, but remained devoted to Judaism. His chief works were grammatical and philosophical. In the former realm his most important contribution was the Ma’aseh ‘Ephod (completed in 1403); in the latter, his commentary to the Guide of the Perplexed by Maimonides (q.v.).

2. Simon Ben Ẓemaḥ Duran (1361-1441), rabbi of Algiers. He was one of the first of the medieval rabbis to be a salaried official of the synagogue. Before the 14th century the rabbinical post had been almost invariably honorary, and filled by men who derived their income from a profession, especially medicine. Duran wrote a systematic work on theology, Magen ‘Aboth, but is chiefly famous for his numerous Responsa (known as Tashbaz) published in three vols. in 1738-1739. These Responsa, “Answers to questions sent from many lands,” give valuable information as to social and religious conditions in the earlier part of the 15th century.

(I. A.)

DURÁN, AGUSTÍN (1789-1862), Spanish scholar, was born in 1789 at Madrid, where his father was court physician. He was sent to the seminary at Vergara, whence he returned learned in the traditions of Spanish romance. In 1817 he began the study of philosophy and law at the university of Seville, and in due course was admitted to the bar at Valladolid. From 1821 to 1823 he held a post in the education department at Madrid, but in the latter year he was suspended on account of his political opinions. In 1834 he became secretary of the board for the censorship of the press, and shortly afterwards obtained a post in the national library at Madrid. The revolution of 1840 led to his dismissal; but he was reinstated in 1843, and in 1854 was appointed chief librarian. Next year, however, he retired to devote himself to his literary work. In 1828, shortly after his first discharge from office, he published anonymously his Discurso sobre el influjo que ha tenido la crítica moderna en la decadencia del teatro antiguo; this treatise greatly influenced the younger dramatists of the day. He next endeavoured to interest his fellow-countrymen in their ancient, neglected ballads, and in the forgotten dramas of the 17th century. Five volumes of a Romancero general appeared from 1828 to 1832 (republished, with considerable additions, in 2 vols. 1849-1851), and Talia española (1834), a reprint of old Spanish comedies. Durán’s Romancero general is the fullest collection of the kind and is therefore unlikely to be superseded, though the texts are inferior to those edited by Menendez y Pelayo.

DURANCE (anc. Druentia), one of the principal rivers descending from the French slope of the Alps towards the Mediterranean. Its total length from its source to its junction with the Rhone (of which it is one of the principal affluents), a little below Avignon, is 217½ m. For the greater part of its course it flows in a south-westerly direction, but near Pertuis gradually bends N.W. and thenceforth preserves this direction. It passes through the departments of Hautes-Alpes, of Basses-Alpes, and between those of Vaucluse and Bouches-du-Rhône. It is commonly said to take its origin in some small lakes a little south of the summit plateau of the Mont Genèvre Pass. But really this stream is surpassed both in volume and length of course by two others which it joins beneath Briançon:—the Clairée, flowing in from the north, through the smiling Névache glen, at the head of which, not far from the foot of the Mont Thabor (10,440 ft.), it rises in some small lakes, on the east side of the Col des Rochilles; and the Guisane (flowing in from the north-west and rising near the Col du Lautaret, 6808 ft.). The united stream soon receives its first affluent, the Cerveyrette (left), and, after having passed through some fine deep-cut gorges, the Gyronde (right). It then runs through a stony plain, where it frequently overflows and causes great damage, this being indeed the main characteristic of the Durance throughout its course. At the foot of the fortress of Mont Dauphin it receives (left) the Guil, which flows through the Queyras valley from near the foot of Monte Viso. Some way beyond it passes beneath Embrun, the first important town on its banks. It soon becomes the boundary for a while between the departments of the Hautes-Alpes and of the Basses-Alpes, and receives successively the considerable Ubaye river, flowing from near the foot of Monte Viso past Barcelonnette (left), and then the small stream of the Luye (right), on which, a few miles above, is Gap. It enters the Basses-Alpes shortly before reaching Sisteron, where it is joined (right) by the wild torrent of the Buëch, flowing from the desolate region of the Dévoluy, and receives the Bléone (left) (on which Digne, the capital of the department, is situated) and the Asse (left), before quitting the department of the Basses-Alpes just as it is reinforced (left) by the Verdon, flowing from the lower summits of the Maritime Alps past Castellane. After passing through some narrow gorges near Sisteron the bed of the river becomes wide, and spreads desolation around, the frequent overflows being kept within bounds by numerous dykes and embankments. These features are especially marked when the river, after leaving the Basses-Alpes, soon bends N.W. and, always serving as the boundary between the departments of Vaucluse (N.) and of the Bouches-du-Rhône (S.), passes Cavaillon before it effects its junction with the Rhône. The drainage area of the Durance is about 5166 sq. m., while the height it descends is 6550 ft., if reckoned from the lakes on the Mont Genèvre, or 7850 ft. if we take those at the head of the Névache valley as the true source of the river.

(W. A. B. C.)

DURAND, ASHER BROWN (1796-1886), American painter and engraver, was born at South Orange, New Jersey, on the 21st of August 1796. He worked with his father, a watchmaker; was apprenticed in 1812 to an engraver named Peter Maverick; and his first work, the head of an old beggar after Waldo, attracted the attention of the artist Trumbull. Durand established his reputation by his engraving of Trumbull’s “Declaration of Independence.” After 1835, however, he devoted himself chiefly to portrait painting. He painted several of the presidents of the United States and many other men of political and social prominence. In 1840 he visited Europe, where he studied the work of the old masters; after his return he devoted himself almost entirely to landscape. He died at South Orange on the 17th of September 1886. He had been one of the founders of the National Academy of Design in 1826, and was its president in 1845-1861. Durand may be called the father of the Hudson River School. Although there was something hard and unsympathetic about his landscapes, and unnecessary details and trivialities were over-prominent, he was a well-trained craftsman, and his work is marked by sincerity.

DURAND, GUILLAUME (Guillelmus Durandus), also known as Duranti or Durantis, from the Italian form of Durandi filius, as he sometimes signed himself (c. 1230-1296), French canonist and liturgical writer, and bishop of Mende, was born at Puimisson, near Beziers, of a noble family of Languedoc. He studied law at Bologna, especially with Bernardus of Parma, and about 1264 was teaching canon law with success at Modena. Clement IV., his fellow-countryman, called him to the pontifical court as a chaplain and auditor of the palace, and in 1274 he accompanied Clement’s successor Gregory X. to the council of Lyons, the constitutions of which he drew up, along with some other prelates. As spiritual and temporal legate of the patrimony of St Peter, he received in 1278, in the name of the pope, the homage of Bologna and of the other cities of Romagna. Martin IV. made him vicar spiritual in 1281, then governor of Romagna and of the March of Ancona (1283). In the midst of the struggles between Guelfs and Ghibellines, Durandus successfully defended the papal territories, both by diplomacy and by arms. Honorius IV. retained him in his offices, and although elected bishop of Mende in 1286, he remained in Italy until 1291. In 1295 he refused the archbishopric of Ravenna, offered him by Boniface VIII., but accepted the task of pacifying again his former provinces of Romagna and the March of Ancona. In 1296 he withdrew to Rome, where he died on the 1st of November.

Durandus’ principal work is the Speculum judiciale, which was drawn up in 1271, and revised in 1286 and 1291. It is a general explanation of civil, criminal and canonical procedure, and also includes a survey of the subject of contracts. It is a remarkable synthesis of Roman and ecclesiastical law, distinguished by its clarity, its method, and especially its practical sense, in a field in which it was pioneer, and its repute was as great and lasting in the courts as in the schools. It won for Durandus the name of “The Speculator.” It was commented upon by Giovanni Andrea (in 1346), and by Baldus, and in 1306 Cardinal Béranger drew up an alphabetical table of its contents (Inventorium). There are many manuscripts of the Speculum, and several editions, of which the most usual is that of Turin in 1578 in 2 volumes, containing all additions and tables. This edition was reproduced at Frankfort in 1612 and 1668. The next important work of Durandus is the Rationale divinorum officiorum, a liturgical treatise written in Italy before 1286, on the origin and symbolic sense of the Christian ritual. It presents a picture of the liturgy of the 13th century in the West, studied in its various forms, its traditional sources, and its relation to the church buildings and furniture. With Martène’s De antiquis Ecclesiae ritibus it is the main authority on Western liturgies. It has run through various editions, from its first publication in 1459 to the last edition at Naples, 1866. The other important works of Durandus comprise a Repertorium juris canonici (Breviarium aureum), a collection of citations from canonists on questions of controversy—often published along with the Speculum; a Commentarius in sacrosanctum Lugdunense concilium (ed. Fano, 1569), of especial value owing to the share of Durandus in the elaboration of the constitutions of this council (1274), and inserted by Boniface VIII. in the Sextus.

A nephew of “The Speculator,” also named Guillaume Durand (d. 1330), and also a canonist, was rector of the university of Toulouse and succeeded his uncle as bishop of Mende. He wrote in 1311, in connexion with the council of Vienne, De modo celebrandi concilii et corruptelis in Ecclesia reformandis. It attacks the abuses of the Church with extreme sincerity and vigour.

On the elder Durand see V. Leclerc in Histoire littéraire de la France, vol. xx. pp. 411-497 (1842); Schulte, Geschichte der Quellen des canonischen Rechts (1877); E. Male, L’Art religieux au XIIIe siècle en France (1898). On the nephew see B. Hauréau, in Journal des savants (1892), 64.

DURAND, GUILLAUME (d. 1334), French scholastic theologian, known also by the Latin form of his name as Durandus of St Pourçain (de Sancto Porciano), and as Doctor Resolutissimus, was born at St Pourçain-sur-Sioule in the Bourbonnois. He entered the Dominican order at Clermont, and in 1313 was made a doctor in Paris, where he taught till Pope John XXII. called him to Avignon as master of the sacred palace, i.e. theological adviser and preacher to the pope. He subsequently became bishop of Limoux (1317), of Le Puy (1318) and of Meaux (1326). He composed a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, in which, breaking with the realism of St Thomas Aquinas, he anticipated the terminism of William of Occam, and gave up the attempt to show that dogmas can be demonstrated by reason. In the question of the beatific vision, arising out of opinions promulgated by John XXII. (q.v.), he sided with Thomas Walleis, Armand de Bellovisu and the doctors of the faculty of theology in Paris against the pope, and composed his De statu animarum post separationem a corpore. Mention should also be made of his De origine jurisdictionum quibus populus regitur, sive de jurisdictione ecclesiastica et de legibus.

See B. Hauréau, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique (2nd ed., Paris, 1872); C. Werner, Die Scholastik des spateren Mittelalters, vol. ii. (Vienna, 1883); H.S. Denifle, in Archiv f. Litteratur und Kirchengeschichte, ii. (1886); U. Chevalier, Rép. des sources hist. du moyen âge, s.v. Durand de St Pourçain.

DURANDO, GIACOMO (1807-1894), Italian general and statesman, was born at Mondovì in Piedmont. He was implicated in the revolutionary movements of 1831 and 1832, after which he was obliged to take refuge abroad. He served in the Belgian army, taking part in the war of 1832, and fought in Portugal in 1833. The following year he entered the service of Spain, when he fought in various campaigns, and was promoted colonel in 1838. After a short stay in France he returned to Italy and identified himself with the Liberal movement; he became an active journalist, and founded a newspaper called L’Opinione in 1847. In 1848 he was one of those who asked King Charles Albert for the constitution. On the outbreak of the war with Austria he took command of the Lombard volunteers as major-general, and in the campaign of 1849 he was aide-de-camp to the king. He was elected member of the first Piedmontese parliament and was a strenuous supporter of Cavour; during the Crimean campaign he took General La Marmora’s place as war minister. In 1855 he was nominated senator, lieutenant-general in 1856, ambassador at Constantinople in 1859, and minister for foreign affairs in the Rattazzi cabinet two years later. He was president of the senate from 1884 to 1887, after which year he retired from the army. He died in 1894.

His brother, Giovanni Durando (1804-1869), was in early life driven into exile on account of his Liberal opinions. He served in the armies of Belgium, Portugal and Spain, distinguishing himself in many engagements. Returning to Italy on the outbreak of the revolution of 1848, he was appointed commander of a division of the pontifical forces, and fought against the Austrians in Venetia until the fall of Vicenza, when he returned to Piedmont as major-general. In the campaign of 1849 he commanded the first Piedmontese division; he subsequently served in the Crimea, in the war of 1859, and in that of 1866 as commander of the I. Army Corps. In 1867 he was appointed president of the supreme military and naval tribunal.

DURANGO, a state of northern Mexico, bounded N. by Chihuahua, E. and S.E. by Coahuila, S. by Zacatecas and the territory of Tepic, and W. by Sinaloa. Pop. (1895) 292,549; (1900) 370,294. Area 38,009 sq. m. Durango is a continuation southward of the high, semi-arid plateau of Chihuahua, with the Sierra Madre extending along its western side. The Bolsón de Mapimí covers its N.E. angle, and in the S. there are peculiar volcanic hills, covering about 1000 sq. m. and known as La Breña. The Bolsón de Mapimí, previous to the building of the Mexican Central railway across it, had been considered an uninhabitable desert, but irrigation experiments have demonstrated that its soil is highly fertile and well adapted to the production of cotton and fruit. The rainfall is very light in the eastern part of the state, a succession of years sometimes passing without any precipitation whatever, but in the W. it is sufficient to produce good pasturage and considerable areas of forest. There are no rivers of any magnitude in the state. The largest is the Rio Nazas, which flows eastward into the lakes of the Mapimí depression, and the Mezquital, which flows S.W. through the sierras to the Pacific coast. The climate is generally dry and healthful. Cotton is produced to a limited extent, especially where irrigation is employed, and wheat, Indian corn, tobacco, sugar-cane and grapes are also grown. In the elevated valleys of the sierras stock-raising is successful. The principal industry of Durango, however, is mining, and some of the richest and best known mines of Mexico are found in the state. Besides silver, which has been extensively mined since the first arrival of the Spanish under Francisco de Ibarra (1554-1562), gold, copper, iron, cinnabar, tin, coal and rubies are found. The famous Cerro del Mercado, 2 m. from the city of Durango, is a hill composed in great part of remarkably pure iron ore, and is estimated to contain 300,000,000 tons of that metal. Near it are iron and steel works. The principal mining districts of Durango include San Dimas (on the western slope of the main sierra), Guarisamey, Buenavista, Gavilanes, Guanaceví, Mapimí, El Oro and Indé. In the first-named is the celebrated Candelaria mine, where the ores (largely argentite) assay between $70 and $140 a ton, the aggregate output being estimated as over $100,000,000 before the close of the 19th century. With the exception of silver, the mineral resources of the state have been but slightly developed because of difficult and expensive transportation. The Mexican Central railway crosses the eastern side of the state, and the Mexican International crosses N.E. to S.W. through the state capital on its way to the port of Mazatlán. The history of Durango is similar to that of Chihuahua, the state originally forming part of the province of Nueva Viscaya. The capital is Durango, and among the principal towns are Guanaceví (pop. 6859), El Oro, Nombre de Dios (the first Spanish settlement in the state), San Juan de Guadalupe, San Dimas and Villa Lerdo. These are comparatively small mining towns. Mapimí lies 130 m. N.N.E. of Durango and gives its name to the great arid depression situated still farther north.

DURANGO, sometimes called Ciudad de Victoria, a city of Mexico, capital of the state of Durango, 574 m. N.W. of the federal capital, in lat. 24° 25′ N., long. 105° 55′ W. Pop. (1900) 31,092. Durango is served by the Mexican International railway. The city stands in the picturesque Guadiana valley formed by easterly spurs of the Sierra Madre, about 6850 ft. above the sea. It has a mild, healthy climate, and is surrounded by a district of considerable fertility. Durango is an important mining and commercial centre, and was for a time one of the most influential towns of northern Mexico. It is the seat of a bishop, and has a handsome cathedral, ten parish churches, a national institute or college, an episcopal seminary, government buildings, a public library, hospital, penitentiary and bull-ring. The city is provided with urban and suburban tramways, electric light, telephone service and an abundant water-supply, and there are thermal springs in its vicinity. Its manufacturing establishments include reduction works, cotton and woollen mills, glass works, iron foundries, tanneries, flour mills, sugar refineries and tobacco factories. Durango was founded in 1563 by Alonso Pacheco under the direction of Governor Francisco de Ibarra, who named it after a city of his native province in Spain. It was known, however, as Guadiana for a century thereafter, and its first bishops were given that title. It was the capital of Ibarra’s new province of Nueva Viscaya, which included Durango and Chihuahua, and continued as such down to their separation in 1823.

DURANI, or Durrani, the dominant race of Afghans, to which the ruling family at Kabul belongs. The Duranis number 100,000 fighting men, and have two branches, the Zirak and the Panjpai. To the former section belong the Popalzai, Alikozai, Barakzai and Achakzai; and to the latter the Nurzai, Alizai, Isakzai, Khokani and Maku tribes. The Saddozai clan of the Popalzai Duranis furnished the first independent shahs of the Durani dynasty (A.D. 1747), the Barakzais furnishing the amirs. The line of the shahs was overthrown in the third generation (A.D. 1834), after a protracted period of anarchy and dissension, which broke out on the death in A.D. 1773 of Ahmad Shah Durani, the founder of Afghan national independence.

Bar Durani is a name sometimes applied to the independent Pathan tribes who inhabit the hill districts south of the Hindu Kush, parts of the Indus valley, the Salt Range, and the range of Suliman, which were first conceded to them by Ahmad Shah. Bar Durani includes the Yusafzai, Utman Khel, Tarkanis, Mohmands, Afridis, Orakzais and Shinwaris, as well as the Pathan tribes of the plains of Peshawar and those of Bangash and Khattak, although the derivation of some of these tribes from the true Durani stock is doubtful.

DURANTE, FRANCESCO (1684-1755), Italian composer, was born at Frattamaggiore, in the kingdom of Naples, on the 15th of March 1684. At an early age he entered the Conservatorio dei poveri di Gesù Cristo, at Naples, where he received lessons from Gaetano Greco, later he became a pupil of Alessandro Scarlatti at the Conservatorio di Sant’ Onofrio. He is also supposed to have studied under Pasquini and Pitoni in Rome, but no documentary proof of this statement can be given. He is said to have succeeded Scarlatti in 1725 at Sant’ Onofrio, and to have remained there until 1742, when he succeeded Porpora as head of the Conservatorio di Santa Maria di Loreto, also at Naples. This post he held for thirteen years, till his death on the 13th of August 1755 at Naples. He was married three times. His fame as a teacher was all but unrivalled, and Jommelli, Paesiello, Pergolesi, Piccini and Vinci were amongst his pupils. A complete collection of Durante’s works, consisting all but exclusively of sacred compositions, was presented by Selvaggi, a Neapolitan lover of art, to the Paris library. A catalogue of it may be found in Fétis’s Biographie universelle. The imperial library of Vienna also preserves a valuable collection of Durante’s manuscripts. Two requiems, several masses (one of which, a most original work, is the Pastoral Mass for four voices) and the Lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah are amongst his most important settings. The fact that Durante never composed for the stage brought him a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a composer of sacred music. Although certainly one of the best church composers of his style and period, he is far inferior to Leo, and seems to have been the founder of the sentimental school of Italian church music. Leo and Scarlatti at their best have a solidity and dignity entirely wanting in Durante, and Alessandro Scarlatti at his worst is frivolous rather than sentimental. This type of music is characteristic of Durante as a man; intellectually uncultured, but sincerely devout. As a teacher he insisted on the strict observance of rules for which he either would not or could not give a reason, differing thus from Alessandro Scarlatti, whose first care was to develop his pupils’ talents according to their own individualities, regarding all rules as subservient to his exquisite sense of musical beauty. Hasse rightly protested against Durante’s being described as the greatest harmonist of Italy, a title which could be claimed only by Alessandro Scarlatti.

(E. J. D.)

DURÃO, JOSÉ DE SANTA RITA (1720-1784), Brazilian poet, was born near Marianna, in the province of Minas Geraes, in 1720, and died in Lisbon in 1754. He studied at Coimbra, in Portugal, graduated as a doctor of divinity, became a member of the Augustinian order of friars, and obtained a great reputation as a preacher. Having irritated the minister Pombal by his defence of the Jesuits, he retired from Portugal in 1759; and, after being imprisoned in Spain as a spy, found his way to Italy in 1763, where he became acquainted with Alfieri, Pindemonte, Casti and other literary men of the time. On his return to Portugal he delivered the opening address at the university of Coimbra for the year 1777; but soon after retired to the cloisters of a Gratian convent. At the time of his death he taught in the little college belonging to that order in Lisbon. His epic in ten cantos, entitled Caramúru, poema epico do descubrimento da Bahia, appeared in Lisbon in 1781, but proved at first a total failure. Its value has gradually been recognized, and it now ranks as one of the best poems in Brazilian literature—remarkable especially for its fine descriptions of scenery and native life in South America. The historic institute of Rio de Janeiro offered a prize to the author of the best essay on the legend of Caramúru; and the successful competitor published a new edition of Durão’s poem. There is a French translation which appeared in Paris in 1829.

See Adolfo de Varnhagen, Epicos Brazileiros (1845); Pereira da Silva, Os Varões illustres do Brasil (1858); Wolf, Le Brésil littéraire (Berlin, 1863); Sotero dos Reis, Curso de litteratura Portugueza e Brazileira, vol. iv. (Maranhão, 1868); José Verissimo, Estudos de literatura Brazileira, segunda serie (Rio, 1901).

DURAZZO (anc. Epidamnus and Dyrrachium; Albanian, Durresi; Turkish and Slavonic, Drach), a seaport and capital of the sanjak of Durazzo, in the vilayet of Iannina, Albania, Turkey. Pop. (1900) about 5000. Durazzo is about 50 m. S. of Scutari, on the Bay of Durazzo, an inlet of the Adriatic Sea. It is the seat of a Roman Catholic archbishop and a Greek metropolitan, but in every respect has greatly declined from its former prosperity. The walls are dilapidated; plane-trees grow on the gigantic ruins of its old Byzantine citadel; and its harbour, once equally commodious and safe, is gradually becoming silted up. The only features worthy of notice are the quay, with its rows of cannon, and the bridge, 750 ft. long, which leads across the marshes stretching along the coast. The chief exports are olive oil—largely manufactured in the district—wheat, oats, barley, pottery and skins.

Epidamnus was founded by a joint colony of Corcyreans and Corinthians towards the close of the 7th century B.C., and from its admirable position and the fertility of the surrounding country soon rose into very considerable importance. The dissolution of its original oligarchical government by the democratic opposition, the consequent quarrel between Corcyra and the oligarchical city of Corinth, and the intervention of Athens on behalf of Corcyra, are usually included among the contributory causes of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.). In 312 B.C., Epidamnus was seized by the Illyrian king Glaucias, and shortly afterwards it passed into the power of the Romans. As the name Epidamnus sounded to Roman ears like an evil omen, as though it were derived from the Latin damnum, “loss” or “harm,” the alternative name of Dyrrachium, which the city possibly received from the rugged nature of the adjoining sea-coast, came into general use. Thenceforward Epidamnus rose rapidly in importance. It was a favourite point of debarcation for the Roman armies; the great military road known as the Via Egnatia led from Dyrrachium to Thessalonica (Salonica); and another highway passed southwards to Buthrotum and Ambracia. Broad swamps rendered the city almost impregnable, and in 48 B.C. it became famous as the place where Pompey made his last successful resistance to Caesar. After the battle of Actium in 31 B.C., Augustus made over Dyrrachium to a colony of his veterans; it became a civitas libera and a great commercial emporium (for coins see Maier, Numis. Zeitschr., 1908). The summit of its prosperity was reached about the end of the 4th century, when it was made the capital of Epirus Nova. Its bishopric, created about A.D. 58, was raised to an archbishopric in 449. In 481 the city was besieged by Theodoric, the king of the East Goths; and in the 10th and 11th centuries it frequently had to defend itself against the Bulgarians. In 1082 it was stormed by the Norman Robert Guiscard, who in the previous year had defeated the Greeks under their emperor Alexius; and in 1185 it fell into the hands of King William of Sicily. Surrendered to Venice in 1202, it afterwards broke loose from the republic and in 1268 passed into the possession of Charles of Anjou. In 1273 it was laid in ruins by an earthquake, but it soon recovered from the disaster, and became an independent duchy under John, the grandson of Charles (1294-1304), and afterwards under Philip of Otranto. In 1333 it was annexed to Achaea, in 1336 to Servia, and in 1394 to Venice. The Turks obtained possession in 1501.

D’URBAN, SIR BENJAMIN (1777-1849), British general and colonial administrator, was born in 1777, and entered the British army in 1793. Promoted lieutenant and captain in 1794 he took part in that year in operations in Holland and Westphalia. In 1795 he served under Sir Ralph Abercromby in San Domingo. He went on half-pay in 1800, joining the Royal Military College, where he remained until 1805, when he went to Hanover with the force under Lord Cathcart. Returning to England he filled various staff offices, and in November 1807 went to Dublin as assistant-quartermaster-general, being transferred successively to Limerick and the Curragh. He joined the army in the Peninsula in 1808, and his marked abilities as a staff officer led to his selection by General (afterwards Viscount) Beresford as quartermaster-general in the reorganization of the Portuguese army. He served throughout the Peninsular War without once going on leave and took part in nine pitched battles and sieges, Busaco, Albuera, Badajoz, Salamanca, Vittoria, the Pyrenees, the Nivelle, the Nive and Toulouse. He was promoted major-general in the Portuguese army and colonel in the British army in 1813, and made a K.C.B. in 1815. He remained in Portugal until 1816, when he was summoned home to take up the posts of colonel of the royal staff corps and deputy quartermaster-general at the Horse Guards. In 1819 he became major-general and in 1837 lieutenant-general. From 1829 he was colonel of the 51st Foot.

Sir Benjamin began his career as colonial administrator in 1820 when he was made governor of Antigua. In 1824 he was transferred to Demerara and Essequibo, then in a disturbed condition owing to a rising among the slaves consequent on the emancipation movement in Great Britain. D’Urban’s rule proved successful, and in 1831 he carried out the amalgamation of Berbice with the other counties, the whole forming the colony of British Guiana, of which D’Urban was first governor. The ability with which he had for nine years governed a community of which the white element was largely of Dutch origin led to his appointment as governor of Cape Colony. He assumed office in January 1834, and the four years during which he held that post were of great importance in the history of South Africa. They witnessed the abolition of slavery, the establishment of a legislative council and municipal councils in Cape Colony, the first great Kaffir war and the beginning of the Great Trek. The firmness and justice of his administration won the cordial support of the British and Dutch colonists. The greater part of 1835 was occupied in repelling an unprovoked invasion of the eastern borders of the colony by Xosa Kaffirs. To protect the inhabitants of the eastern province Sir Benjamin extended the boundary of the colony to the Kei river and erected military posts in the district, allowing the Xosa to remain under British supervision. Since his appointment to the Cape there had been a change of ministry in England, and Lord Glenelg had become secretary for the Colonies in the second Melbourne administration. Prejudiced against any extension of British authority and lending a ready ear to a small but influential party in South Africa, Glenelg adopted the view that the Kaffirs had been the victims of systematic injustice. In a momentous despatch dated the 26th of December 1835 he set forth his views and instructed Sir Benjamin D’Urban to give up the newly annexed territory. At the same time Sir Andries Stockenstrom, Bart. (1792-1864), was appointed lieutenant-governor for the eastern provinces of the colony to carry out the policy of the home government, in which the Kaffir chiefs were treated as being on terms of full equality with Europeans. D’Urban in vain warned Glenelg of the disastrous consequences of his decision, the beginning of the long course of vacillation which wrought great harm to South Africa. One result of the new policy was to recreate a state of insecurity, bordering on anarchy, in the eastern province, and this condition was one of the causes of the Great Trek of the Dutch farmers which began in 1836. In various despatches D’Urban justified his position, characterizing the Trek as due to “insecurity of life and property occasioned by the recent measures, inadequate compensation for the loss of the slaves, and despair of obtaining recompense for the ruinous losses by the Kaffir invasion.” (See further South Africa: History, and Cape Colony: History.) But Glenelg was not to be convinced by any argument, however cogent, and in a despatch dated the 1st of May 1837 he informed Sir Benjamin that he had been relieved of office. D’Urban, however, remained governor until the arrival of his successor, Sir George Napier, in January 1838.

During his governorship Sir Benjamin endeavoured to help the British settlers at Port Natal, who in 1835 named their town D’Urban (now written Durban) in his honour, but his suggestion that the district should be occupied as a British possession was vetoed by Lord Glenelg. Though no longer in office D’Urban remained in South Africa until April 1846. In 1840 he was made a G.C.B., and in 1842 declined a high military appointment in India offered him by Sir Robert Peel. In January 1847 he took up the command of the troops in Canada, and was still in command at the time of his death at Montreal on the 25th of May 1849.

DURBAN, the principal seaport and largest city of Natal, South Africa, the harbour being known as Port Natal, in 29° 52′ 48″ S. 31° 42′ 49″ E. It is 6810 m. from London via Madeira and 7785 via Suez, 823 m. by water E.N.E. from Cape Town and 483 m. by rail S.S.E. of Johannesburg. Pop. (1904) 67,842, of whom 31,302 were whites, 15,631 Asiatics (chiefly British Indians), 18,929 natives and 1980 of mixed race. From its situation and the character of its buildings Durban is one of the finest cities in South Africa. The climate is generally hot and humid, but not unhealthy. Although nearly half the citizens are British, the large number of Indians engaged in every kind of work gives to Durban an oriental aspect possessed by no other town in South Africa. The town is built on the E. side of a bay (Durban Bay or Bay of Natal), the entrance to which is marked on the west by a bold cliff, the Bluff, whose summit is 195 ft. above the sea, and on the east by a low sandy spit called the Point. The city extends from the Point along the side of the bay and also for some distance along the coast of the Indian Ocean, and stretches inland to a range of low hills called the Berea.

The chief streets, Smith, West and Pine, are in the lower town, parallel to one another and to the bay. They contain the principal public buildings, warehouses and shops, the Berea being a residential quarter. Of the three streets mentioned, West Street, the central thoroughfare, is the busiest. In its centre are the public gardens, in which is a handsome block of buildings in the Renaissance style, built in 1906-1908 at a cost of over £300,000, containing the town hall, municipal offices, public library, museum and art gallery. The art gallery holds many pictures of the modern British school. Opposite the municipal buildings are the post and telegraph offices, a fine edifice (built 1881-1885) with a clock tower 164 ft. high. The post office formerly served as town hall. In Pine Street is the Central railway station and the spacious Market House. Among the churches St Cyprian’s (Anglican), in Smith Street, has a handsome chancel. The Roman Catholic cathedral is a fine building in the Gothic style. The town possesses several parks, one, the Victoria Park, facing the Indian Ocean. This part of the town is laid out with pleasure grounds and esplanades. The botanic gardens, in the upper town, contain a very fine collection of flowering shrubs and semi-tropical trees. Above the gardens is the observatory. There is a fine statue of Queen Victoria by Hamo Thornycroft, R.A., in the public gardens, and a memorial to Vasco da Gama at the Point. There is an extensive system of electric trams. Another favourite means of conveyance is by rickshaw, the runners being Zulus. The town is governed by a municipality which owns the water and electric lighting supplies and the tramway system. The sanitary services are excellent. The main water-supply is the Umlaas river, which enters the ocean 10 m. S. of the port. The municipal valuation, which is based on capital value, was £9,494,400 in 1909, the rate, including water, being 2½d. in the £.

The entrance to the harbour was obstructed by a formidable sand bar, but as the result of dredging operations there is now a minimum depth of water at the opening of the channel into the bay of over 30 ft., with a maximum depth of over 33 ft. The width of the passage between the Bluff and the Point is 450 ft. From the foot of the Bluff a breakwater extends over 2000 ft. into the sea, and parallel to it, starting from the Point, is a pier. The harbour is landlocked, and covers 7½ sq. m. Much of this area is shoal water, but the accommodation available was largely increased by the removal during 1904-1908 of 24,000,000 tons of sand. The port has over 3 m. of wharfage. It possesses a floating dock capable of lifting a vessel of 8500 tons, a floating workshop, a patent slip for small craft, hydraulic cranes, &c. The minimum depth alongside the quays at low water is 23 ft., increased at places to over 30 ft. The principal wharves, where passengers, mails and general merchandise are landed, are along the Point. On the opposite side at the foot of the Bluff land has been reclaimed and extensive accommodation provided for ships coaling. At Congella at the N.E. end of the harbour some 65 acres of land were reclaimed during 1905-1906, and wharves built for the handling of heavy and bulky goods such as timber and corrugated iron. Here also are situated warehouses and railway works. The port is defended by batteries armed with modern heavy guns. The trade of the port is almost coextensive with the foreign trade of Natal.

History.—The early history of Durban is closely identified with that of the colony of Natal. The first permanent settlement by white men in the bay was made by Englishmen in 1824, when Lieutenant F.G. Farewell, R.N., and about ten companions went thither from Cape Town in the brig “Salisbury,” from which circumstance the island in the bay gets its name. In 1835 a township was laid out and the colonists gave it the name of D’Urban, in honour of Sir Benjamin D’Urban, then governor of Cape Colony. At this time a mission church was built on the heights overlooking the bay by Captain Allen Gardner, R.N., who named the hill Berea in gratitude for support received from the settlers, whom he found “more noble than those of” Zululand—Dingaan having refused to allow the captain to start a mission among his people. From December 1838 to December 1839 a small British military force was stationed at the port. On its recall the little settlement was taken possession of by Dutch emigrants from the Cape, who had defeated the Zulu king Dingaan, and who the year before at the upper end of the bay had formed an encampment, Kangela (look-out), the present Congella. The Dutch claimed independence, and on the block-house at Durban hoisted the flag of the “Republic of Natalia.” In 1842, however, a British military force reoccupied Durban, and on the 15th of July of that year a treaty was signed in which the Dutch recognized British sovereignty (see further Natal: History). From that date Durban, though not the seat of government, became the principal town in Natal. In 1850 there were 500 white inhabitants, and in 1853 the town was granted municipal government. The first mayor was Mr George Cato (c. 1810-1893), one of the earliest settlers in Natal. In 1860 a railway from the Point to the town, the first railway in South Africa, was opened. The discovery of the gold-mines on the Rand greatly increased the importance of the port, and renewed efforts were made to remove the bar which obstructed the entrance to the bay. The Harbour Board, which was formed in 1881 and ceased to exist in 1893, effected, under the guidance of Mr Harry Escombe, enormous improvements in the port—on which the prosperity of Durban is dependent. But it was not until 1904 that the fairway was deepened sufficiently to allow mail steamers of the largest class to enter the harbour. The growth of the port as illustrated by customs receipts is shown in the increase from £250,000 in 1880 to £981,000 in 1904. In 1846 the customs revenue was returned at £3510.

See Durban: Fifty Years’ Municipal History, compiled for the corporation by W.P.M. Henderson, Asst. Town Clerk (Durban, 1904); G. Russell, History of Old Durban [to 1860] (Durban, 1899).

DURBAR, a term in India for a court or levee, from the Persian darbar. A durbar may be either a council for administering affairs of state, or a purely ceremonial gathering. In the former sense the native rulers of India in the past, like the amir of Afghanistan to-day, received visitors and conducted business in durbar. A durbar is the executive council of a native state. In the latter sense the word has come to be applied to great ceremonial gatherings like Lord Lytton’s durbar for the proclamation of the queen empress in India in 1877, or the Delhi durbar of 1903.

DÜREN, a town of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine province, on the right bank of the Roer, 19 m. E. from Aix-la-Chapelle on the main line of railway to Cologne. Pop. (1905) 29,270. It has two Protestant and six Roman Catholic churches, among the latter the Gothic St Annakirche, said to contain a portion of the head of the saint, to the shrine of which frequent pilgrimages are made. There are several high grade schools, monuments to the emperor William I., Bismarck and Moltke, and, in the town-hall, a collection of antiquities. It is the seat of considerable manufactures, notably cloth, paper, flax-spinning, carpet, artificial wool, sugar, iron wares and needles.

Düren derives its name, not, as was at one time believed, from the Marcodurum of the Ubii, mentioned in Tacitus, but from the Dura or Duria, assemblies held by the Carolingians in the 8th century. It received civic rights early in the 13th century. Hypothecated by the emperor Frederick II. to Count William of Jülich, it became incorporated with the duchy of that name, and with it passed to Prussia in 1816.

DURENE (1·2·4·5 tetramethyl benzene) C6H2(CH3)4, a hydro-carbon which has been recognized as a constituent of coal-tar. It may be prepared by the action of methyl iodide on brom-pseudocumene or 4.6 dibrom metaxylene, in the presence of sodium; or by the action of methyl chloride on toluene, in the presence of anhydrous aluminium chloride. It crystallizes in plates, having a camphor-like smell, melting at 79-80° C. and boiling at 189-191° C. It is easily soluble in alcohol, ether and benzene, and sublimes slowly at ordinary temperature. On oxidation with chromic acid mixture, it is completely decomposed into carbon dioxide and acetic acid; nitric acid oxidizes it to durylic and cumidic acids [C6H2·(CH3)2·(COOH)2].

DÜRER, ALBRECHT (1471-1528), German painter, draughtsman and engraver, was born at Nuremberg on the 21st of May 1471. His family was not of Nuremberg descent, but came from the village of Eytas in Hungary. The name, however, is German, and the family device—an open door—points to an original form Thürer, meaning a maker of doors or carpenter. Albrecht Dürer the elder was a goldsmith by trade, and settled soon after the middle of the 15th century in Nuremberg. He served as assistant under a master-goldsmith of the city, Hieronymus Holper, and in 1468 married his master’s daughter Barbara, the bridegroom being forty and the bride fifteen years of age. They had eighteen children, of whom Albrecht was the second. The elder Dürer was an esteemed craftsman and pious citizen, sometimes, as was natural, straitened in means by the pressure of his numerous progeny. His famous son writes with reverence and affection of both parents, and has left a touching narrative of their death-bed hours. He painted the portrait of his father twice, first in 1490, next in 1497. The former of these is in the Uffizi at Florence; of the latter, four versions exist, that in the National Gallery (formerly in the Ashburton-Northampton collections) having the best claim to originality.

The young Albrecht was his father’s favourite son. “My father,” he writes, “took special delight in me. Seeing that I was industrious in working and learning, he put me to school; and when I had learned to read and write, he took me home from school and taught me the goldsmith’s trade.” By and by the boy found himself drawn by preference from goldsmith’s work to painting; his father, after some hesitation on the score of the time already spent in learning the former trade, gave way and apprenticed him for three years, at the age of fifteen and a half, to the principal painter of the town, Michael Wolgemut. Wolgemut furnishes a complete type of the German painter of that age. At the head of a large shop with many assistants, his business was to turn out, generally for a small price, devotional pieces commissioned by mercantile corporations or private persons to decorate their chapels in the churches—the preference being usually for scenes of the Passion, or for tortures and martyrdoms of the saints. In such work the painters of Upper Germany at this time, working in the spirit of the late Gothic style just before the dawn of the Renaissance, show considerable technical attainments, with a love of quaint costumes and rich draperies crumpled in complicated angular folds, some feeling for romance in landscape backgrounds, none at all for clearness or balance in composition, and in the attitudes and expressions of their overcrowded figures a degree of grotesqueness and exaggeration amounting often to undesigned caricature. There were also produced in the workshop of Wolgemut, as in that of other artist-craftsmen of his town, a great number of woodcuts for book illustration. We cannot with certainty identify any of these as being by the ’prentice hand of the young Dürer. Authentic drawings done by him in boyhood, however, exist, including one in silver-point of his own likeness at the age of thirteen in the Albertina at Vienna, and others of two or three years later in the print room at Berlin, at the British Museum and at Bremen.

In the school of Wolgemut Dürer learned much, by his own account, but suffered not a little from the roughness of his companions. At the end of his apprenticeship in 1490 he entered upon the usual course of travels—the Wanderjahre—of a German youth. Their direction we cannot retrace with certainty. There had been no one at Nuremberg skilled enough in the art of metal-engraving to teach it him to much purpose, and it had at one time been his father’s intention to apprentice him to Martin Schongauer of Colmar, the most refined and accomplished German painter-engraver of his time. But after travelling two years in various parts of Germany, where we are unable to follow him, the young Dürer arrived at Colmar in 1492, only to find that Schongauer had died the previous year. He was received kindly by three brothers of the deceased master established there, and afterwards, still in 1492, by a fourth brother at Basel. Under them he evidently had some practice both in metal-engraving and in furnishing designs for the woodcutter. There is in the museum at Basel a wood-block of St Jerome executed by him and elaborately signed on the back with his name. This was used in an edition of Jerome’s letters printed in the same city in the same year, 1492. Some critics also maintain that his hand is to be recognized in several series of small blocks done about the same date or somewhat later for Bergmann and other printers of Basel, some of them being illustrations to Terence (which were never printed), some to the romance of the Ritter vom Turm, and some to the Narrenschiff of Sebastian Brandt. But the prevailing opinion is against this conjecture, and sees in these designs the work not of a strenuous student and searcher such as Dürer was, but of a riper and more facile hand working in a spirit of settled routine. Whether the young Dürer’s stay at Basel was long or short, or whether, as has been supposed, he travelled from there into the Low Countries, it is certain that in the early part of 1494 he was working at Strassburg, and returned to his home at Nuremberg immediately after Whitsuntide in that year. Of works certainly executed by him during his years of travel there are extant, besides the Basel wood-block, only a much-injured portrait of himself, very finely dressed and in the first bloom of his admirable manly beauty, dated 1493 and originally painted on vellum but since transferred to canvas (this is the portrait of the Felix Goldschmid collection); a miniature painting on vellum at Vienna (a small figure of the Child-Christ); and some half a dozen drawings, of which the most important are the characteristic pen portrait of himself at Erlangen, with a Holy Family on the reverse much in the manner of Schongauer; another Holy Family in nearly the same style at Berlin; a study from the female nude in the Bonnat collection; a man and woman on horseback in Berlin; a man on horseback, and an executioner about to behead a young man, at the British Museum, &c. These drawings all show Dürer intent above all things on the sternly accurate delineation of ungeneralized individual forms by means of strongly accented outline and shadings curved, somewhat like the shadings of Martin Schongauer’s engravings, so as to follow their modellings and roundness.

Within a few weeks of his return (July 7th, 1494) Dürer was married, according to an arrangement apparently made between the parents during his absence, to Agnes Frey, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant of the city. By the autumn of the same year, probably feeling the incompleteness of the artistic training that could be obtained north of the Alps, he must have taken advantage of some opportunity, we know not what, to make an excursion of some months to Italy, leaving his lately married wife at Nuremberg. The evidences of this travel (which are really incontestable, though a small minority of critics still decline to admit them) consist of (1) some fine drawings, three of them dated 1494 and others undated, but plainly of the same time, in which Dürer has copied, or rather boldly translated into his own Gothic and German style, two famous engravings by Mantegna, a number of the “Tarocchi” prints of single figures which pass erroneously under that master’s name, and one by yet another minor master of the North-Italian school; with another drawing dated 1495 and plainly copied from a lost original by Antonio Pollaiuolo, and yet another of an infant Christ copied in 1495 from Lorenzo di Credi, from whom also Dürer took a motive for the composition of one of his earliest Madonnas; (2) several landscape drawings done in the passes of Tirol and the Trentino, which technically will not fit in with any other period of his work, and furnish a clear record of his having crossed the Alps about this date; (3) two or three drawings of the costumes of Venetian courtesans, which he could not have made anywhere but in Venice itself, and one of which is used in his great woodcut Apocalypse series of 1498; (4) a general preoccupation which he shows for some years from this date with the problems of the female nude, treated in a manner for which Italy only could have set him the example; and (5) the clear implication contained in a letter written from Venice in 1506 that he had been there already eleven years before; when things, he says, pleased him much which at the time of writing please him no more. Some time in 1495 Dürer must have returned from this first Italian journey to his home in Nuremberg, where he seems to have lived, without further change or removal, in the active practice of his art for the next ten years.

The hour when Dürer, the typical artist of the German nation, attained maturity was one of the most pregnant in the history of his race. It was the crisis, in northern Europe, of the transition between the middle ages and our own. The awakening of Germany at the Renaissance was not, like the awakening of Italy a generation or two earlier, a movement almost exclusively intellectual. It was indeed from Italy that the races of the north caught the impulse of intellectual freedom, the spirit of science and curiosity, the eager retrospect towards the classic past; but joined with these in Germany was a moral impulse which was her own, a craving after truth and right, a rebellion against spiritual tyranny and corruption—the Renaissance was big in the north, as it was not in the south, with a Reformation to come. The art of printing had been invented in good time to help and hasten the new movement of men’s minds. Nor was it by the diffusion of written ideas only that the new art supplied the means of popular enlightenment. Along with word-printing, or indeed in advance of it, there had sprung into use another kind of printing, picture-printing, or what is commonly called engraving. Just as books were the means of multiplying, cheapening and disseminating ideas, so engravings on copper or wood were the means of multiplying, cheapening and disseminating images which gave vividness to the ideas, or served, for those ignorant of letters, in their stead. Technically one of these arts, that of line-engraving on copper, sprang from the craft of the goldsmith and metal-chaser; while that of wood-engraving sprang from the craft of the printers of pattern-blocks and playing cards. The engraver on metal habitually cut his own designs, and between the arts of the goldsmith and the painter there had always been a close alliance, both being habitually exercised by persons of the same family and sometimes by one and the same person; so that there was no lack of hands ready-trained for the new craft which required of the man who practised it that he should design like a painter and cut metal like a goldsmith. Designs intended to be cut on wood, on the other hand, were usually drawn by the artist on the block and handed over for cutting to a class of workmen—Formschneider or Briefmaler—especially devoted to that industry. Both kinds of engraving soon came to be in great demand. Independently of the illustration of written or printed books, for which purpose woodcuts were almost exclusively used, separate engravings or sets of engravings in both kinds were produced, the more finely wrought and more expensive, appealing especially to the more educated classes, on copper, the bolder, simpler and cheaper on wood; and both kinds found a ready sale at all the markets, fairs and church festivals of the land. Subjects of popular devotion predominated. Figures of the Virgin and Child, of the apostles and evangelists, the fathers of the Church, the saints and martyrs, with illustrations of sacred history and the Apocalypse, were supplied in endless repetition to satisfy the cravings of a pious and simple-minded people. But to these were quickly added subjects of allegory, of classical learning, of witchcraft and superstition and of daily life; scenes of the parlour and the cloister, of the shop, the field, the market and the camp; and lastly portraits of famous men, with scenes of court life and princely pageant and ceremony. Thus the new art became a mirror of almost all the life and thoughts of the age. The genius of Albrecht Dürer cannot be rightly estimated without taking into account the position which the arts of engraving on metal and on wood thus held in the culture of this time. He was indeed professionally and in the first place a painter; but throughout his career a great, and on the whole the most successful, part of his industry was devoted to drawing on the block for the woodcutter or engraving with his own hand on copper. The town of Nuremberg in Franconia, in the age of Dürer’s early manhood, was a favourable home for the growth and exercise of his powers. Of the free imperial cities of central Germany, none had a greater historic fame or a more settled and patriotic government. None was more the favourite of the emperors, nor the seat of a more active and flourishing commerce. Nuremberg was the chief mart for the merchandise that came to central Europe from the east through Venice and over the passes of Tirol. She held not only a close commercial intercourse, but also a close intellectual intercourse, with Italy. Without being so forward as the rival city of Augsburg to embrace the architectural fashions of the Italian renaissance—continuing, indeed, to be profoundly imbued with the old and homely German burgher spirit, and to wear, in a degree which time has not very much impaired even yet, the quaintness of the old German civic aspect—she had imported before the close of the 15th century a fair share of the new learning of Italy, and numbered among her citizens distinguished humanists like Hartmann Schedel, Sebald Schreier, Willibald Pirkheimer and Conrad Celtes. From associates like these Dürer could imbibe the spirit of Renaissance culture and research; but the external aspects and artistic traditions which surrounded him were purely Gothic, and he had to work out for himself the style and form-language fit to express what was in him. During the first seven or eight years of his settled life in his native city from 1495, he betrays a conflict of artistic tendencies as well as no small sense of spiritual strain and strife. His finest work in this period was that which he provided for the woodcutter. After some half—dozen miscellaneous single prints—“Samson and the Lion,” the “Annunciation,” the “Ten Thousand Martyrs,” the “Knight and Men-at-arms,” the “Men’s Bath,” &c.—he undertook and by 1498 completed his famous series of sixteen great designs for the Apocalypse. The northern mind had long dwelt with eagerness on these phantasmagoric mysteries of things to come, and among the earliest block-books printed in Germany is an edition of the Apocalypse with rude figures. Founding himself to some extent on the traditional motives, Dürer conceived and carried out a set of designs in which the qualities of the German late Gothic style, its rugged strength and restless vehemence, its love of gnarled forms, writhing actions and agitated lines, are fused by the fire of the young master’s spirit into vital combination with something of the majestic power and classic severity which he had seen and admired in the works of Mantegna. Of a little later date, and of almost as fine a quality, are the first seven of a large series of woodcuts known as the Great Passion; and a little later again (probably after 1500), a series of eleven subjects of the Holy Family and of saints singly or in groups: then, towards 1504-1505, come the first seventeen of a set illustrating the life of the Virgin: neither these nor the Great Passion were published till several years later.

In copper-engraving Dürer was at the same time diligently training himself to develop the methods practised by Martin Schongauer and earlier masters into one suitable for his own self-expression. He attempted no subjects at all commensurate with those of his great woodcuts, but contented himself for the most part with Madonnas, single figures of scripture or of the saints, some nude mythologies of a kind wholly new in northern art and founded upon the impressions received in Italy, and groups, sometimes bordering on the satirical, of humble folk and peasants. In the earliest of the Madonnas, the “Virgin with the Dragon-fly” (1495-1496), Dürer has thrown something of his own rugged energy into a design of the traditional Schongauer type. In examples of a few years later, like the “Virgin with the Monkey,” the design of Mother and Child clearly betrays the influence of Italy and specifically of Lorenzo di Credi. The subjects of the “Prodigal Son” and “St Jerome in the Wilderness” he on the other hand treats in an almost purely northern spirit. In the nudes of the next four or five years, which included a “St Sebastian,” the so-called “Four Witches” (1497), the “Dream” or “Temptation,” the “Rape of Amymome,” and the “Jealousy” or “Great Hercules,” Venetian, Paduan and Florentine memories are found, in the treatment of the human form, competing somewhat uncomfortably with his own inherited Gothic and northern instincts. In these early engravings the highly-wrought landscape backgrounds, whenever they occur, are generally the most satisfying feature. This feature reaches a climax of beauty and elaboration in the large print of “St Eustace and the Stag,” while the figures and animals remain still somewhat cramped and immature. In the first three or four years of the 16th century, we find Dürer in his graver-work still contending with the problems of the nude, but now with added power, though by methods which in different subjects contrast curiously with one another. Thus the “Nemesis,” belonging probably to 1503, is a marvellously wrought piece of quite unflinching realism in the rendering of a common type of mature, muscular, unshapely German womanhood. The conception and attributes of the figure are taken, as has lately been recognized, from a description in the “Manto” of Politian: the goddess, to whose shoulders are appended a pair of huge wings, stands like Fortune on a revolving ball, holding the emblems of the cup and bridle, and below her feet is spread a rich landscape of hill and valley. In the “Adam and Eve” of the next year, we find Dürer treating the human form in an entirely opposite manner; constructing it, that is, on principles of abstract geometrical proportion. The Venetian painter-etcher, Jacopo de Barbari, whom Dürer had already, it would seem, met in Venice in 1494-1495, and by the example of whose engravings he had already been much influenced, came to settle for a while in Nuremberg in 1500. He was conversant to some extent with the new sciences of perspective, anatomy and proportion, which had been making their way for years past in Italy, and from him it is likely that Dürer received the impulse to similar studies and speculations. At any rate a whole series of extant drawings enables us to trace the German gradually working out his own ideas of a canon of human proportion in the composition of his famous engraving of “Adam and Eve” (1504); which at first, as a drawing in the British Museum proves, had been intended to be an Apollo and Diana conceived on lines somewhat similar to one of Barbari’s. The drama of the subject has in this instance not interested him at all, but only the forms and designs of the figures, the realization of the quality of flesh surfaces by the subtlest use of the graving-tool known to him, and the rendering, by methods of which he had become the greatest of all masters, of the richness and intricacy of the forest background. Two or three other technical masterpieces of the engraver’s art, the “Coat-of-Arms with the Skull,” the “Nativity,” with its exquisite background of ruined buildings, the “Little Horse” and the “Great Horse,” both of 1505, complete the list of the master’s chief productions in this kind before he started in the last-named year for a second visit to Italy.

The pictures of this earlier Nuremberg period are not many in number and not very admirable. Dürer’s powers of hand and eye are already extraordinary and in their way almost unparalleled, but they are often applied to the too insistent, too glittering, too emphatic rendering of particular details and individual forms, without due regard to subordination or the harmony of the whole. Among the earliest seem to be two examples of a method practised in Italy especially by the school of Mantegna, but almost without precedent in Germany, that of tempera-painting on linen. One of these is the portrait of Frederick the Wise of Saxony, formerly in the Hamilton collection and now at Berlin; the second, much disfigured by restoration, is the Dresden altarpiece with a Madonna and Child in the middle and St Anthony and Sebastian in the wings. A mythology reminiscent of Italy is the “Hercules and the Stymphalian Birds” in the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg, founded directly upon the “Hercules and Centaur Nessus” of Pollaiuolo, now at New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A. Of portraits, besides that of his father already mentioned as done in 1497, there is his own of 1498 at Madrid. Two totally dissimilar portraits of young women, both existing in duplicate examples (one pair at Augsburg and Frankfort, the other pair in the collections of M. Hengel in Paris and Baron Speck von Sternburg at Lützschema, for each of which has been claimed the name Fürlegerin, that is, a member of the Fürleger family at Nuremberg), belong to nearly the same time. Other panel portraits of the period are three small ones of members of the Tucher family at Weimar and Cassel, and the striking, restlessly elaborated half-length of Oswald Krell at Munich. In some devotional pictures of the time Dürer seems to have been much helped by pupils, as in the two different compositions of the Maries weeping over the body of Christ preserved respectively at Munich and Nuremberg. In an altarpiece at Ober St Veit and in the scattered wings of the Jabach altarpiece severally preserved at Munich, Frankfort and Cologne, the workmanship seems to be exclusively that of journeymen working from his drawings. The period is closed, so far as paintings are concerned, by two examples of far higher value than those above named, that is to say the Paumgartner altarpiece at Munich, with its romantically attractive composition of the Nativity with angels and donors in the central panel, and the fine armed figures of St George and St Eustace (lately freed from the over-paintings which disfigured them) on the wings; and the happily conceived and harmoniously finished “Adoration of the Magi” in the Uffizi at Florence.