VOLUME XII SLICE VI Groups, Theory of to Gwyniad (continued 7)
Reading edition
Guido was faithful to the eclectic principle of the Bolognese school of painting. He had appropriated something from Calvart, much more from Lodovico Caracci; he studied with much zest after Albert Dürer; he adopted the massive, sombre and partly uncouth manner of Caravaggio. One day Annibale Caracci made the remark that a style might be formed reversing that of Caravaggio in such matters as the ponderous shadows and the gross common forms; this observation germinated in Guido’s mind, and he endeavoured after some such style, aiming constantly at suavity. Towards 1602 he went to Rome with Albani, and Rome remained his headquarters for twenty years. Here, in the pontificate of Paul V. (Borghese), he was greatly noted and distinguished. In the garden-house of the Rospigliosi Palace he painted the vast fresco which is justly regarded as his masterpiece—“Phoebus and the Hours preceded by Aurora.” This exhibits his second manner, in which he had deviated far indeed from the promptings of Caravaggio. He founded now chiefly upon the antique, more especially the Niobe group and the “Venus de’ Medici,” modified by suggestions from Raphael, Correggio, Parmigiano and Paul Veronese. Of this last painter, although on the whole he did not get much from him, Guido was a particular admirer; he used to say that he would rather have been Paul Veronese than any other master—Paul was more nature than art. The “Aurora” is beyond doubt a work of pre-eminent beauty and attainment; it is stamped with pleasurable dignity, and, without being effeminate, has a more uniform aim after graceful selectness than can readily be traced in previous painters, greatly superior though some of them had been in impulse and personal fervour of genius. The pontifical chapel of Montecavallo was assigned to Reni to paint; but, being straitened in payments by the ministers, the artist made off to Bologna. He was fetched back by Paul V. with ceremonious éclat, and lodging, living and equipage were supplied to him. At another time he migrated from Rome to Naples, having received a commission to paint the chapel of S. Gennaro. The notorious cabal of three painters resident in Naples—Corenzio, Caracciolo and Ribera—offered, however, as stiff an opposition to Guido as to some other interlopers who preceded and succeeded him. They gave his servant a beating by the hands of two unknown bullies, and sent by him a message to his master to depart or prepare for death; Guido waited for no second warning, and departed. He now returned to Rome; but he finally left that city abruptly, in the pontificate of Urban VIII., in consequence of an offensive reprimand administered to him by Cardinal Spinola. He had received an advance of 400 scudi on account of an altarpiece for St Peter’s, but after some lapse of years had made no beginning with the work. A broad reminder from the cardinal put Reni on his mettle; he returned the 400 scudi, quitted Rome within a few days, and steadily resisted all attempts at recall. He now resettled in Bologna. He had taught as well as painted in Rome, and he left pupils behind him; but on the whole he did not stamp any great mark upon the Roman school of painting, apart from his own numerous works in the papal city.
In Bologna Guido lived in great splendour, and established a celebrated school, numbering more than two hundred scholars. He himself drew in it, even down to his latest years. On first returning to this city, he charged about £21 for a full-length figure (mere portraits are not here in question), half this sum for a half-length, and £5 for a head. These prices must be regarded as handsome, when we consider that Domenichino about the same time received only £10, 10s. for his very large and celebrated picture, the “Last Communion of St Jerome.” But Guido’s reputation was still on the increase, and in process of time he quintupled his prices. He now left Bologna hardly at all; in one instance, however, he went off to Ravenna, and, along with three pupils, he painted the chapel in the cathedral with his admired picture of the “Israelites gathering Manna.” His shining prosperity was not to last till the end. Guido was dissipated, generously but indiscriminately profuse, and an inveterate gambler. The gambling propensity had been his from youth, but until he became elderly it did not noticeably damage his fortunes. It grew upon him, and in a couple of evenings he lost the enormous sum of 14,400 scudi. The vice told still more ruinously on his art than on his character. In his decline he sold his time at so much per hour to certain picture dealers; one of them, the Shylock of his craft, would stand by, watch in hand, and see him work. Half-heartedness, half-performance, blighted his product: self-repetition and mere mannerism, with affectation for sentiment and vapidity for beauty, became the art of Guido. Some of these trade-works, heads or half-figures, were turned out in three hours or even less. It is said that, tardily wise, Reni left off gambling for nearly two years; at last he relapsed, and his relapse was followed not long afterwards by his death, caused by malignant fever. This event took place in Bologna on the 18th of August 1642; he died in debt, but was buried with great pomp in the church of S. Domenico.
Guido was personally modest, although he valued himself on his position in the art, and would tolerate no slight in that relation; he was extremely upright, temperate in diet, nice in his person and his dress. He was fond of stately houses, but could feel also the charm of solitude. In his temper there was a large amount of suspiciousness; and the jealousy which his abilities and his successes excited, now from the Caracci, now from Albani, now from the monopolizing league of Neapolitan painters, may naturally have kept this feeling in active exercise. Of his numerous scholars, Simone Cantarini, named II Pesarese, counts as the most distinguished; he painted an admirable head of Reni, now in the Bolognese Gallery. The portrait in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence is from Reni’s own hand. Two other good scholars were Giacomo Semenza and Francesco Gessi.
The character of Guido’s art is so well known as hardly to call for detailed analysis, beyond what we have already intimated. His most characteristic style exhibits a prepense ideal, of form rather than character, with a slight mode of handling, and silvery, somewhat cold, colour. In working from the nude he aimed at perfection of form, especially marked in the hands and feet. But he was far from always going to choice nature for his model; he transmuted ad libitum, and painted, it is averred, a Magdalene of demonstrative charms from a vulgar-looking colour-grinder. His best works have beauty, great amenity, artistic feeling and high accomplishment of manner, all alloyed by a certain core of commonplace; in the worst pictures the commonplace swamps everything, and Guido has flooded European galleries with trashy and empty pretentiousness, all the more noxious in that its apparent grace of sentiment and form misleads the unwary into approval, and the dilettante dabbler into cheap raptures. Both in Rome and wherever else he worked he introduced increased softness of style, which was then designated as the modern method. His pictures are mostly Scriptural or mythologic in subject, and between two and three hundred of them are to be found in various European collections—more than a hundred of these containing life-sized figures. The portraits which he executed are few—those of Sixtus V., Cardinal Spada and the so-called Beatrice Cenci being among the most noticeable. The identity of the last-named portrait is very dubious; it certainly cannot have been painted direct from Beatrice, who had been executed in Rome before Guido ever resided there. Many etchings are attributed to him—some from his own works, and some after other masters; they are spirited, but rather negligent.
Of other works not already noticed, the following should be named:—in Rome (the Vatican), the “Crucifixion of St Peter,” an example of the painter’s earlier manner; in S. Lorenzo in Lucina, “Christ Crucified”; in Forlì, the “Conception”; in Bologna, the “Alms of St Roch” (early), the “Massacre of the Innocents,” and the “Pietà, or Lament over the Body of Christ” (in the church of the Mendicanti), which is by many regarded as Guido’s prime executive work; in the Dresden Gallery, an “Ecce Homo”; in Milan (Brera Gallery), “Saints Peter and Paul”; in Genoa (church of S. Ambrogio), the “Assumption of the Virgin”; in Berlin, “St Paul the Hermit and St Anthony in the Wilderness.” The celebrated picture of “Fortune” (in the Capitol) is one of Reni’s finest treatments of female form; as a specimen of male form, the “Samson Drinking from the Jawbone of an Ass” might be named beside it. One of his latest works of mark is the “Ariadne,” which used to be in the Gallery of the Capitol. The Louvre contains twenty of his pictures, the National Gallery of London seven, and others were once there, now removed to other public collections. The most interesting of the seven is the small “Coronation of the Virgin,” painted on copper, an elegantly finished work, more pretty than beautiful. It was probably painted before the master quitted Bologna for Rome.
For the life and works of Guido Reni, see Bolognini, Vita di Guido Reni (1839); Passeri, Vite de’ pittori; and Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice; also Lanzi, Storia pitiorica.
(W. M. R.)
GUIENNE, an old French province which corresponded roughly to the Aquitania Secunda of the Romans and the archbishopric of Bordeaux. In the 12th century it formed with Gascony the duchy of Aquitaine, which passed under the dominion of the kings of England by the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry II.; but in the 13th, through the conquests of Philip Augustus, Louis VIII. and Louis IX., it was confined within the narrower limits fixed by the treaty of Paris (1259). It is at this point that Guienne becomes distinct from Aquitaine. It then comprised the Bordelais (the old countship of Bordeaux), the Bazadais, part of Périgord, Limousin, Quercy and Rouergue, the Agenais ceded by Philip III. (the Bold) to Edward I. (1279), and (still united with Gascony) formed a duchy extending from the Charente to the Pyrenees. This duchy was held on the terms of homage to the French kings, an onerous obligation; and both in 1296 and 1324 it was confiscated by the kings of France on the ground that there had been a failure in the feudal duties. At the treaty of Brétigny (1360) Edward III. acquired the full sovereignty of the duchy of Guienne, together with Aunis, Saintonge, Angoumois and Poitou. The victories of du Guesclin and Gaston Phœbus, count of Foix, restored the duchy soon after to its 13th-century limits. In 1451 it was conquered and finally united to the French crown by Charles VII. In 1469 Louis XI. gave it in exchange for Champagne and Brie to his brother Charles, duke of Berry, after whose death in 1472 it was again united to the royal dominion. Guienne then formed a government which from the 17th century onwards was united with Gascony. The government of Guienne and Gascony, with its capital at Bordeaux, lasted till the end of the ancien régime. Under the Revolution the departments formed from Guienne proper were those of Gironde, Lot-et-Garonne, Dordogne, Lot, Aveyron and the chief part of Tarn-et-Garonne.
GUIGNES, JOSEPH DE (1721-1800), French orientalist, was born at Pontoise on the 19th of October 1721. He succeeded Fourmont at the Royal Library as secretary interpreter of the Eastern languages. A Mémoire historique sur l’origine des Huns et des Turcs, published by de Guignes in 1748, obtained his admission to the Royal Society of London in 1752, and he became an associate of the French Academy of Inscriptions in 1754. Two years later he began to publish his learned and laborious Histoire générale des Huns, des Mongoles, des Turcs et des autres Tartares occidentaux (1756-1758); and in 1757 he was appointed to the chair of Syriac at the Collège de France. He maintained that the Chinese nation had originated in Egyptian colonization, an opinion to which, in spite of every argument, he obstinately clung. He died in Paris in 1800. The Histoire had been translated into German by Dähnert (1768-1771). De Guignes left a son, Christian Louis Joseph (1759-1845), who, after learning Chinese from his father, went as consul to Canton, where he spent seventeen years. On his return to France he was charged by the government with the work of preparing a Chinese-French-Latin dictionary (1813). He was also the author of a work of travels (Voyages à Pékin, Manille, et l’île de France, 1808).
See Quérard, La France littéraire, where a list of the memoirs contributed by de Guignes to the Journal des savants is given.
GUILBERT, YVETTE (1869- ), French diseuse, was born in Paris. She served for two years until 1885 in the Magasin du Printemps, when, on the advice of the journalist, Edmond Stoullig, she trained for the stage under Landrol. She made her début at the Bouffes du Nord, then played at the Variétés, and in 1890 she received a regular engagement at the Eldorado to sing a couple of songs at the beginning of the performance. She also sang at the Ambassadeurs. She soon won an immense vogue by her rendering of songs drawn from Parisian lower-class life, or from the humours of the Latin Quarter, “Quatre z’étudiants” and the “Hôtel du numéro trois” being among her early triumphs. Her adoption of an habitual yellow dress and long black gloves, her studied simplicity of diction, and her ingenuous delivery of songs charged with risqué meaning, made her famous. She owed something to M. Xanrof, who for a long time composed songs especially for her, and perhaps still more to Aristide Bruant, who wrote many of her argot songs. She made successful tours in England, Germany and America, and was in great request as an entertainer in private houses. In 1895 she married Dr M. Schiller. In later years she discarded something of her earlier manner, and sang songs of the “pompadour” and the “crinoline” period in costume. She published the novels La Vedette and Les Demi-vieilles, both in 1902.
GUILDFORD, a market town and municipal borough, and the county town of Surrey, England, in the Guildford parliamentary division, 29 m. S.W. of London by the London and South Western railway; served also by the London, Brighton, and South Coast and the South Eastern and Chatham railways. Pop. (1901) 15,938. It is beautifully situated on an acclivity of the northern chalk Downs and on the river Wey. Its older streets contain a number of picturesque gabled houses, with quaint lattices and curious doorways. The ruins of a Norman castle stand finely above the town and are well preserved; while the ground about them is laid out as a public garden. Beneath the Angel Inn and a house in the vicinity are extensive vaults, apparently of Early English date, and traditionally connected with the castle. The church of St Mary is Norman and Early English, with later additions and considerably restored; its aisles retain their eastward apses and it contains many interesting details. The church of St Nicholas is a modern building on an ancient site, and that of Holy Trinity is a brick structure of 1763, with later additions, also on the site of an earlier church, from which some of the monuments are preserved, including that of Archbishop Abbot (1640). The town hall dates from 1683 and contains a number of interesting pictures. Other public buildings are the county hall, corn-market and institute with museum and library. Abbot’s Hospital, founded by Archbishop Abbot in 1619, is a beautiful Tudor brick building. The county hospital (1866) was erected as a memorial to Albert, Prince Consort. The Royal Free Grammar School, founded in 1509, and incorporated by Edward VI., is an important school for boys. At Cranleigh, 6 m. S.E., is a large middle-class county school. The town has flour mills, iron foundries and breweries, and a large trade in grain; while fairs are held for live stock. There is a manufacture of gunpowder in the neighbouring village of Chilworth. Guildford is a suffragan bishopric in the diocese of Winchester. The borough is under a mayor, 4 aldermen and 12 councillors. Area, 2601 acres.
Guildford (Gyldeford, Geldeford), occurs among the possessions of King Alfred, and was a royal borough throughout the middle ages. It probably owed its rise to its position at the junction of trade routes. It is first mentioned as a borough in 1131. Henry III. granted a charter to the men of Guildford in 1256, by which they obtained freedom from toll throughout the kingdom, and the privilege of having the county court held always in their town. Edward III. granted charters to Guildford in 1340, 1346 and 1367; Henry VI. in 1423; Henry VII. in 1488. Elizabeth in 1580 confirmed earlier charters, and other charters were granted in 1603, 1626 and 1686. The borough was incorporated in 1486 under the title of the mayor and good men of Guildford. During the middle ages the government of the town rested with a powerful merchant gild. Two members for Guildford sat in the parliament of 1295, and the borough continued to return two representatives until 1867 when the number was reduced to one. By the Redistribution Act of 1885 Guildford became merged in the county for electoral purposes. Edward II. granted to the town the right of having two fairs, at the feast of St Matthew (21st of September) and at Trinity respectively. Henry VII. granted fairs on the feast of St Martin (11th of November) and St George (23rd of April). Fairs in May for the sale of sheep and in November for the sale of cattle are still held. The market rights date at least from 1276, and three weekly markets are still held for the sale of corn, cattle and vegetables respectively. The cloth trade which formed the staple industry at Guildford in the middle ages is now extinct.
GUILDHALL, the hall of the corporation of the city of London, England. It faces a courtyard opening out of Gresham Street. The date of its original foundation is not known. An ancient crypt remains, but the hall has otherwise undergone much alteration. It was rebuilt in 1411, beautified by the munificence of successive officials, damaged in the Great Fire of 1666, and restored in 1789 by George Dance; while the hall was again restored, with a new roof, in 1870. This fine chamber, 152 ft. in length, is the scene of the state banquets and entertainments of the corporation, and of the municipal meetings “in common hall.” The building also contains a council chamber and various court rooms, with a splendid library, open to the public, a museum and art gallery adjoining. The hall contains several monuments and two giant figures of wood, known as Gog and Magog. These were set up in 1708, but the appearance of giants in city pageants is of much earlier date.
GUILFORD, BARONS AND EARLS OF. Francis North, 1st Baron Guilford (1637-1685), was the third son of the 4th Baron North (see North, Barons), and was created Baron Guilford in 1683, after becoming lord keeper in succession to Lord Nottingham. He had been an eminent lawyer, solicitor-general (1671), attorney-general (1673), and chief-justice of the common pleas (1675), and in 1679 was made a member of the council of thirty and on its dissolution of the cabinet. He was a man of wide culture and a stanch royalist. In 1672 he married Lady Frances Pope, daughter and co-heiress of the earl of Downe, who inherited the Wroxton estate; and he was succeeded as 2nd baron by his son Francis (1673-1729), whose eldest son Francis (1704-1790), after inheriting first his father’s title as 3rd baron, and then (in 1734) the barony of North from his kinsman the 6th Baron North, was in 1752 created 1st earl of Guilford. His first wife was a daughter of the earl of Halifax, and his son and successor Frederick was the English prime minister, commonly known as Lord North, his courtesy title while the 1st earl was alive.
Frederick North, 2nd earl of Guilford, but better known by his courtesy title of Lord North (1732-1792), prime minister of England during the important years of the American War, was born on the 13th of April 1732, and after being educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, was sent to make the grand tour of the continent. On his return he was, though only twenty-two years of age, at once elected M.P. for Banbury, of which town his father was high steward; and he sat for the same town in parliament for nearly forty years. In 1759 he was chosen by the duke of Newcastle to be a lord of the treasury, and continued in the same office under Lord Bute and George Grenville till 1765. He had shown himself such a ready debater that on the fall of the first Rockingham ministry in 1766 he was sworn of the privy council, and made paymaster-general by the duke of Grafton. His reputation for ability grew so high that in December 1767, on the death of the brilliant Charles Townshend, he was made chancellor of the exchequer. His popularity with both the House of Commons and the people continued to increase, for his temper was never ruffled, and his quiet humour perpetually displayed; and, when the retirement of the duke of Grafton was necessitated by the hatred he inspired and the attacks of Junius, no better successor could be found for the premiership than the chancellor of the exchequer. Lord North succeeded the duke in March 1770, and continued in office for twelve of the most eventful years in English history. George III. had at last overthrown the ascendancy of the great Whig families, under which he had so long groaned, and determined to govern as well as rule. He knew that he could only govern by obtaining a majority in parliament to carry out his wishes, and this he had at last obtained by a great expenditure of money in buying seats and by a careful exercise of his patronage. But in addition to a majority he must have a minister who would consent to act as his lieutenant, and such a minister he found in Lord North. How a man of undoubted ability such as Lord North was could allow himself to be thus used as a mere instrument cannot be explained; but the confidential tone of the king’s letters seems to show that there was an unusual intimacy between them, which may account for North’s compliance. The path of the minister in parliament was a hard one; he had to defend measures which he had not designed, and of which he had not approved, and this too in a House of Commons in which all the oratorical ability of Burke and Fox was against him, and when he had only the purchased help of Thurlow and Wedderburne to aid him. The most important events of his ministry were those of the American War of Independence. He cannot be accused of causing it, but one of his first acts was the retention of the tea-duty, and he it was also who introduced the Boston Port Bill in 1774. When the war had broken out he earnestly counselled peace, and it was only the earnest solicitations of the king not to leave his sovereign again at the mercy of the Whigs that induced him to defend a war which from 1779 he knew to be both hopeless and impolitic. At last, in March 1782, he insisted on resigning after the news of Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, and no man left office more blithely. He had been well rewarded for his assistance to the king: his children had good sinecures; his half-brother, Brownlow North (1741-1820), was bishop of Winchester; he himself was chancellor of the university of Oxford, lord-lieutenant of the county of Somerset, and had finally been made a knight of the Garter, an honour which has only been conferred on three other members of the House of Commons, Sir R. Walpole, Lord Castlereagh and Lord Palmerston. Lord North did not remain long out of office, but in April 1783 formed his famous coalition with his old subordinate, C. J. Fox (q.v.), and became secretary of state with him under the nominal premiership of the duke of Portland. He was probably urged to this coalition with his old opponent by a desire to show that he could act independently of the king, and was not a mere royal mouthpiece. The coalition ministry went out of office on Fox’s India Bill in December 1783, and Lord North, who was losing his sight, then finally gave up political ambition. He played, when quite blind, a somewhat important part in the debates on the Regency Bill in 1789, and in the next year succeeded his father as earl of Guilford. He did not long survive his elevation, and died peacefully on the 5th of August 1792. It is impossible to consider Lord North a great statesman, but he was a most good-tempered and humorous member of the House of Commons. In a time of unexampled party feeling he won the esteem and almost the love of his most bitter opponents. Burke finely sums up his character in his Letter to a Noble Lord: “He was a man of admirable parts, of general knowledge, of a versatile understanding, fitted for every sort of business; of infinite wit and pleasantry, of a delightful temper, and with a mind most disinterested. But it would be only to degrade myself,” he continues, “by a weak adulation, and not to honour the memory of a great man, to deny that he wanted something of the vigilance and spirit of command which the times required.”
By his wife Anne (d. 1797), daughter of George Speke of White Lackington, Somerset, Guilford had four sons, the eldest of whom, George Augustus (1757-1802), became 3rd earl on his father’s death. This earl was a member of parliament from 1778 to 1792 and was a member of his father’s ministry and also of the royal household; he left no sons when he died on the 20th of April 1802 and was succeeded in the earldom by his brother Francis (1761-1817), who also left no sons. The youngest brother, Frederick (1766-1827), who now became 5th earl of Guilford, was remarkable for his great knowledge and love of Greece and of the Greek language. He had a good deal to do with the foundation of the Ionian university at Corfu, of which he was the first chancellor and to which he was very liberal. Guilford, who was governor of Ceylon from 1798 to 1805, died unmarried on the 14th of October 1827. His cousin, Francis (1772-1861), a son of Brownlow North, bishop of Winchester from 1781 to 1820, was the 6th earl, and the latter’s descendant, Frederick George (b. 1876), became 8th earl in 1886.
On the death of the 3rd earl of Guilford in 1802 the barony of North fell into abeyance between his three daughters, the survivor of whom, Susan (1797-1884). wife of John Sidney Doyle, who took the name of North, was declared by the House of Lords in 1841 to be Baroness North, and the title passed to her son, William Henry John North, the 11th baron (b. 1836) (see North, Barons).
For the Lord Keeper Guilford see the Lives by the Hon. R. North, edited by A. Jessopp (1890); and E. Foss, The Judges of England, vol. vii. (1848-1864). For the prime minister, Lord North, see Correspondence of George III. with Lord North, edited by W. B. Donne (1867); Horace Walpole, Journal of the Reign of George III. (1859), and Memoirs of the Reign of George III., edited by G. F. R. Barker (1894); Lord Brougham, Historical Sketches of Statesmen, vol. i. (1839); Earl Stanhope, History of England (1858); Sir T. E. May, Constitutional History of England (1863-1865); and W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the 18th century (1878-1890).
GUILFORD, a township, including a borough of the same name, in New Haven county, Connecticut, U.S.A., on Long Island Sound and at the mouth of the Menunkatuck or West river, about 16 m. E. by S. of New Haven. Pop. of the township, including the borough (1900), 2785, of whom 387 were foreign-born; (1910) 3001; pop. of the borough (1910), 1608. The borough is served by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railroad. On a plain is the borough green of nearly 12 acres, which is shaded by some fine old elms and other trees, and in which there is a soldiers’ monument. About the green are several churches and some of the better residences. On an eminence commanding a fine view of the Sound is an old stone house, erected in 1639 for a parsonage, meeting-house and fortification; it was made a state museum in 1898, when extensive alterations were made to restore the interior to its original appearance. The Point of Rocks, in the harbour, is an attractive resort during the summer season. There are about 12 ft. of water on the harbour bar at high tide. The principal industries of Guilford are coastwise trade, the manufacture of iron castings, brass castings, wagon wheels and school furniture, and the canning of vegetables. Near the coast are quarries of fine granite; the stone for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island, in New York Harbour, was taken from them.
Guilford was founded In 1639 as an independent colony by a company of twenty-five or more families from Kent, Surrey and Sussex, England, under the leadership of Rev. Henry Whitfield (1597-1657). While still on shipboard twenty-five members of the company signed a plantation covenant whereby they agreed not to desert the plantation which they were about to establish. Arriving at New Haven early in July 1639, they soon began negotiations with the Indians for the purchase of land, and on the 29th of September a deed was signed by which the Indians conveyed to them the territory between East River and Stony Creek for “12 coates, 12 Fathoms of Wampam, 12 glasses (mirrors), 12 payer of shooes, 12 Hatchetts, 12 paire of Stockings, 12 Hooes, 4 kettles, 12 knives, 12 Hatts, 12 Porringers, 12 spoones, and 2 English coates.” Other purchases of land from the Indians were made later. Before the close of the year the company removed from New Haven and established the new colony; it was known by the Indian name Menuncatuck for about four years and the name Guilford (from Guildford, England) was then substituted. As a provisional arrangement, civil power for the administration of justice and the preservation of the peace was vested in four persons until such time as a church should be organized. This was postponed until 1643 when considerations of safety demanded that the colony should become a member of the New Haven Jurisdiction, and then only to meet the requirements for admission to this union were the church and church state modelled after those of New Haven. Even then, though suffrage was restricted to church members, Guilford planters who were not church members were required to attend town meetings and were allowed to offer objections to any proposed order or law. From 1661 until the absorption of the members of the New Haven Jurisdiction by Connecticut, in 1664, William Leete (1611-1683), one of the founders of Guilford, was governor of the Jurisdiction, and under his leadership Guilford took a prominent part in furthering the submission to Connecticut, which did away with the church state and the restriction of suffrage to freemen. Guilford was the birthplace of Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), the poet; of Samuel Johnson (1696-1771), the first president of King’s College (now Columbia University); of Abraham Baldwin (1754-1807), prominent as a statesman and the founder of the University of Georgia; and of Thomas Chittenden, the first governor of Vermont. The borough was incorporated in 1815.
See B. C. Steiner, A History of the Plantation of Menunca-Tuck and of the Original Town of Guilford, Connecticut (Baltimore, 1897), and Proceedings at the Celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the Settlement of Guilford, Connecticut (New Haven, 1889).
GUILLAUME, JEAN BAPTISTE CLAUDE EUGÈNE (1822-1905), French sculptor, was born at Montbard on the 4th of July 1822, and studied under Cavelier, Millet, and Barrias, at the École des Beaux-Arts, which he entered in 1841, and where he gained the prix de Rome in 1845 with “Theseus finding on a rock his Father’s Sword.” He became director of the École des Beaux-Arts in 1864, and director-general of Fine Arts from 1878 to 1879, when the office was suppressed. Many of his works have been bought for public galleries, and his monuments are to be found in the public squares of the chief cities of France. At Rheims there is his bronze statue of “Colbert,” at Dijon his “Rameau” monument. The Luxembourg Museum has his “Anacreon” (1852), “Les Gracques” (1853), “Faucheur” (1855), and the marble bust of “Mgr Darboy”; the Versailles Museum the portrait of “Thiers”; the Sorbonne Library the marble bust of “Victor le Clerc, doyen de la faculté des lettres.” Other works of his are at Trinity Church, St Germain l’Auxerrois, and the church of St Clotilde, Paris. Guillaume was a prolific writer, principally on sculpture and architecture of the Classic period and of the Italian Renaissance. He was elected member of the Académie Française in 1862, and in 1891 was sent to Rome as director of the Académie de France in that city. He was also elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy, London, 1869, on the institution of that class.
GUILLAUME DE LORRIS (fl. 1230), the author of the earlier section of the Roman de la rose, derives his surname from a small town about equidistant from Montargis and Gien, in the present department of Loiret. This and the fact of his authorship may be said to be the only things positively known about him. The rubric of the poem, where his own part finishes, attributes Jean de Meun’s continuation to a period forty years later than William’s death and the consequent interruption of the romance. Arguing backwards, this death used to be put at about 1260; but Jean de Meun’s own work has recently been dated earlier, and so the composition of the first part has been thrown back to a period before 1240. The author represents himself as having dreamed the dream which furnished the substance of the poem in his twentieth year, and as having set to work to “rhyme it” five years later. The later and longer part of the Roman shows signs of greater intellectual vigour and wider knowledge than the earlier and shorter, but Guillaume de Lorris is to all appearance more original. The great features of his four or five thousand lines are, in the first place, the extraordinary vividness and beauty of his word-pictures, in which for colour, freshness and individuality he has not many rivals except in the greatest masters, and, secondly, the fashion of allegorical presentation, which, hackneyed and wearisome as it afterwards became, was evidently in his time new and striking. There are of course traces of it before, as in some romances, such as those of Raoul de Houdenc, in the troubadours, and in other writers; but it was unquestionably Guillaume de Lorris who fixed the style.
For an attempt to identify Guillaume de Lorris see L. Jarry, Guillaume de Lorris et le testament d’Alphonse de Poitiers (1881). Also Paulin Paris in the Hist. litt. de la France, vol. xxiii.
GUILLAUME DE PALERME (William of Palerne), hero of romance. The French verse romance was written at the desire of a Countess Yolande, generally identified with Yolande, daughter of Baldwin IV., count of Flanders. The English poem in alliterative verse was written about 1350 by a poet called William, at the desire of Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford, (d. 1361). Guillaume, a foundling supposed to be of low degree, is brought up at the court of the emperor of Rome, and loves his daughter Melior who is destined for a Greek prince. The lovers flee into the woods disguised in bear-skins. Alfonso, who is Guillaume’s cousin and a Spanish prince, has been changed into a wolf by his step-mother’s enchantments. He provides food and protection for the fugitives, and Guillaume eventually triumphs over Alfonso’s father, and wins back from him his kingdom. The benevolent werwolf is disenchanted, and marries Guillaume’s sister.
See Guillaume de Palerne, ed. H. Michelant (Soc. d. anc. textes fr., 1876); Hist. litt. de la France, xxii. 829; William of Palerme, ed. Sir F. Madden (Roxburghe Club, 1832), and W. W. Skeat (E. E. Text Soc., extra series No. 1, 1867); M. Kaluza, in Eng. Studien (Heilbronn, iv. 196). The prose version of the French romance, printed by N. Bonfons, passed through several editions.
GUILLAUME D’ORANGE (d. 812), also known as Guillaume Fierabrace, St Guillaume de Gellone, and the Marquis au court nez, was the central figure of the southern cycle of French romance, called by the trouvères the geste of Garin de Monglane. The cycle of Guillaume has more unity than the other great cycles of Charlemagne or of Doon de Mayence, the various poems which compose it forming branches of the main story rather than independent epic poems. There exist numerous cyclic MSS. in which there is an attempt at presenting a continuous histoire poétique of Guillaume and his family. MS. Royal 20 D xi. in the British Museum contains eighteen chansons of the cycle. Guillaume, son of Thierry or Theodoric and of Alde, daughter of Charles Martel, was born in the north of France about the middle of the 8th century. He became one of the best soldiers and trusted counsellors of Charlemagne, and In 790 was made count of Toulouse, when Charles’s son Louis the Pious was put under his charge. He subdued the Gascons, and defended Narbonne against the infidels. In 793 Hescham, the successor of Abd-al-Rahman II., proclaimed a holy war against the Christians, and collected an army of 100,000 men, half of which was directed against the kingdom of the Asturias, while the second invaded France, penetrating as far as Narbonne. Guillaume met the invaders near the river Orbieux, at Villedaigne, where he was defeated, but only after an obstinate resistance which so far exhausted the Saracens that they were compelled to retreat to Spain. He took Barcelona from the Saracens in 803, and in the next year founded the monastery of Gellone (now Saint Guilhem-le Désert), of which he became a member in 806. He died there in the odour of sanctity on the 28th of May 812.
No less than thirteen historical personages bearing the name of William (Guillaume) have been thought by various critics to have their share in the formation of the legend. William, count of Provence, son of Boso II., again delivered southern France from a Saracen invasion by his victory at Fraxinet in 973, and ended his life in a cloister. William Tow-head (Tête d’étoupe), duke of Aquitaine (d. 983), showed a fidelity to Louis IV. paralleled by Guillaume d’Orange’s service to Louis the Pious. The cycle of twenty or more chansons which form the geste of Guillaume reposes on the traditions of the Arab invasions of the south of France, from the battle of Poitiers (732) under Charles Martel onwards, and on the French conquest of Catalonia from the Saracens. In the Norse version of the Carolingian epic Guillaume appears in his proper historical environment, as a chief under Charlemagne; but he plays a leading part in the Couronnement Looys, describing the formal associations of Louis the Pious in the empire at Aix (813, the year after Guillaume’s death), and after the battle of Aliscans it is from the emperor Louis that he seeks reinforcements. This anachronism arises from the fusion of the epic Guillaume with the champion of Louis IV., and from the fact that he was the military and civil chief of Louis the Pious, who was titular king of Aquitaine under his father from the time when he was three years old. The inconsistencies between the real and the epic Guillaume are often left standing in the poems. The personages associated with Guillaume in his Spanish wars belong to Provence, and have names common in the south. The most famous of these are Beuves de Comarchis, Ernaud de Girone, Garin d’Anséun, Aïmer le chétif, so called from his long captivity with the Saracens. The separate existence of Aïmer, who refused to sleep under a roof, and spent his whole life in warring against the infidel, is proved. He was Hadhemar, count of Narbonne, who in 809 and 810 was one of the leaders sent by Louis against Tortosa. No doubt the others had historical prototypes. In the hands of the trouvères they became all brothers of Guillaume, and sons of Aymeri de Narbonne,1 the grandson of Garin de Monglane, and his wife Ermenjart. Nevertheless when Guillaume seeks help from Louis the emperor he finds all his relations in Laon, in accordance with his historic Frankish origin.
The central fact of the geste of Guillaume is the battle of the Archamp or Aliscans, in which perished Guillaume’s heroic nephew, Vezian or Vivien, a second Roland. At the eleventh hour he summoned Guillaume to his help against the overwhelming forces of the Saracens. Guillaume arrived too late to help Vivien, was himself defeated, and returned alone to his wife Guibourc, leaving his knights all dead or prisoners. This event is related in a Norman-French transcript of an old French chanson de geste, the Chançun de Willame—which only was brought to light in 1901 at the sale of the books of Sir Henry Hope Edwardes—in the Covenant Vivien, a recension of an older French chanson and in Aliscans. Aliscans continues the story, telling how Guillaume obtained reinforcements from Laon, and how, with the help of the comic hero, the scullion Rainouart or Rennewart, he avenged the defeat of Aliscans and his nephew’s death. Rainouart turns out to be the brother of Guillaume’s wife Guibourc, who was before her marriage the Saracen princess and enchantress Orable. Two other poems are consecrated to his later exploits, La Bataille Loquifer, the work of a French Sicilian poet, Jendeu de Brie (fl. 1170), and Le Moniage Rainouart. The staring-point of Herbert le duc of Dammartin (fl. 1170) in Foucon de Candie (Candie = Gandia in Spain?) is the return of Guillaume from the battle; and the Italian compilation I Nerbonesi, based on these and other chansons, seems in some cases to represent an earlier tradition than the later of the French chansons, although its author Andrea di Barberino wrote towards the end of the 14th century. The minnesinger Wolfram von Eschenbach based his Willehalm on a French original which must have differed from the versions we have. The variations in the story of the defeat of Aliscans or the Archant, and the numerous inconsistencies of the narratives even when considered separately have occupied many critics. Aliscans (Aleschans, Alyscamps, Elysii Campi) was, however, generally taken to represent the battle of Villedaigne, and to take its name from the famous cemetery outside Arles. Wolfram von Eschenbach even mentions the tombs which studded the field of battle. Indications that this tradition was not unassailable were not lacking before the discovery of the Chançun de Willame, which, although preserved in a very corrupt form, represents the earliest recension we have of the story, dating at least from the beginning of the 12th century. It seems probable that the Archant was situated in Spain near Vivien’s headquarters at Tortosa, and that Guillaume started from Barcelona, not from Orange, to his nephew’s help. The account of the disaster was modified by successive trouvères, and the uncertainty of their methods may be judged by the fact that in the Chançun de Willame two consecutive accounts (11. 450-1326 and 11. 1326-2420) of the fight appear to be set side by side as if they were separate episodes. Le Couronnement Looys, already mentioned, Le Charroi de Nîmes (12th century) in which Guillaume, who had been forgotten in the distribution of fiefs, enumerates his services to the terrified Louis, and Aliscans (12th century), with the earlier Chançun, are among the finest of the French epic poems. The figure of Vivien is among the most heroic elaborated by the trouvères, and the giant Rainouart has more than a touch of Rabelaisian humour.
The chansons de geste of the cycle of Guillaume are: Enfances Garin de Monglane (15th century) and Garin de Monglane (13th century), on which is founded the prose romance of Guérin de Monglane, printed in the 15th century by Jehan Trepperel and often later; Girars de Viane (13th century, by Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube), ed. P. Tarbé (Reims, 1850); Hernaut de Beaulande (fragment 14th century); Renier de Gennes, which only survives in its prose form; Aymeri de Narbonne (c. 1210) by Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube, ed. L. Demaison (Soc. des anc. textes fr., Paris, 2 vols., 1887); Les Enfances Guillaume (13th century); Les Narbonnais, ed. H. Suchier (Soc. des anc. textes fr., 2 vols., 1898), with a Latin fragment dating from the 11th century, preserved at the Hague; Le Couronnement Looys (ed. E. Langlois, 1888), Le Charroi de Nîmes, La Prise d’Orange, Le Covenant Vivien, Aliscans, which were edited by W. J. A. Jonckbloet in vol. i. of his Guillaume d’Orange (The Hague, 1854); a critical text of Aliscans (Halle, 1903, vol. i.) is edited by E. Wienbeck, W. Hartnacke and P. Rasch; Loquifer and Le Moniage Rainouart (12th century); Bovon de Commarchis (13th century), recension of the earlier Siège de Barbastre, by Adenès li Rois, ed. A. Scheler (Brussels, 1874); Guibert d’Andrenas (13th century); La Prise de Cordres (13th century); La Mort Aimeri de Narbonne, ed. J. Couraye de Parc (Soc. des Anciens Textes français, Paris, 1884); Foulque de Candie (ed. P. Tarbé, Reims, 1860); Le Moniage Guillaume (12th century); Les Enfances Vivien (ed. C. Wahlund and H. v. Feilitzen, Upsala and Paris, 1895); Chançun de Willame (Chiswick Press, 1903), described by P. Meyer in Romania (xxxiii. 597-618). The ninth branch of the Karlamagnus Saga (ed. C. R. Unger, Christiania, 1860) deals with the geste of Guillaume. I Nerbonesi is edited by J. G. Isola (Bologna, 1877, &c.).
See C. Révillout, Étude hist. et litt. sur la vita sancti Willelmi (Montpellier, 1876); W. J. A. Jonckbloet, Guillaume d’Orange (2 vols., 1854, The Hague); L. Clarus (ps. for W. Volk), Herzog Wilhelm von Aquitanien (Münster, 1865); P. Paris, in Hist. litt. de la France (vol. xxii., 1852); L. Gautier, Épopées françaises (vol. iv., 2nd ed., 1882); R. Weeks, The newly discovered Chançun de Willame (Chicago, 1904); A. Thomas, Études romanes (Paris, 1891), on Vivien; L. Saltet, “S. Vidian de Martres-Tolosanes” in Bull. de litt. ecclés. (Toulouse, 1902); P. Becker, Die altfrz. Wilhelmsage u. ihre Beziehung zu Wilhelm dem Heiligen (Halle, 1896), and Der südfranzösische Sagenkreis und seine Probleme (Halle, 1898); A. Jeanroy, “Études sur le cycle de Guillaume au court nez” (in Romania, vols. 25 and 26, 1896-1897); H. Suchier, “Recherches sur ... Guillaume d’Orange” (in Romania, vol. 32, 1903). The conclusions arrived at by earlier writers are combated by Joseph Bédier in the first volume, “Le Cycle de Guillaume d’Orange” (1908), of his Légendes épiques, in which he constructs a theory that the cycle of Guillaume d’Orange grew up round the various shrines on the pilgrim route to Saint Gilles of Provence and Saint James of Compostella—that the chansons de geste were, in fact, the product of 11th and 12th century trouvères, exploiting local ecclesiastical traditions, and were not developed from earlier poems dating back perhaps to the lifetime of Guillaume of Toulouse, the saint of Gellone.
1 The poem of Aymeri de Narbonne contains the account of the young Aymeri’s brilliant capture of Narbonne, which he then receives as a fief from Charlemagne, of his marriage with Ermenjart, sister of Boniface, king of the Lombards, and of their children. The fifth daughter, Blanchefleur, is represented as the wife of Louis the Pious. The opening of this poem furnished, though indirectly, the matter of the Aymerillot of Victor Hugo’s Légende des siècles.
GUILLEMOT (Fr. guillemot1), the name accepted by nearly all modern authors for a sea-bird, the Colymbus troile of Linnaeus and the Uria troile of Latham, which nowadays it seems seldom if ever to bear among those who, from their vocation, are most conversant with it, though, according to Willughby and Ray his translator, it was in their time so called “by those of Northumberland and Durham.” Around the coasts of Britain it is variously known as the frowl, kiddaw or skiddaw, langy (cf. Ice. Langvia), lavy, marrock, murre, scout (cf. Coot), scuttock, strany, tinker or tinkershire and willock. In former days the guillemot yearly frequented the cliffs on many parts of the British coasts in countless multitudes, and this is still the case in the northern parts of the United Kingdom; but more to the southward nearly all its smaller settlements have been rendered utterly desolate by the wanton and cruel destruction of their tenants during the breeding season, and even the inhabitants of those which were more crowded had become so thinned that, but for the intervention of the Sea Birds Preservation Act (32 & 33 Vict. cap. 17), which provided under penalty for the safety of this and certain other species at the time of year when they were most exposed to danger, they would unquestionably by this time have been exterminated so far as England is concerned.
Part of the guillemot’s history is still little understood. We know that it arrives at its wonted breeding stations on its accustomed day in spring, that it remains there till, towards the end of the summer, its young are hatched and able, as they soon are, to encounter the perils of a seafaring life, when away go all, parents and progeny. After that time it commonly happens that a few examples are occasionally met with in bays and shallow waters. Tempestuous weather will drive ashore a large number in a state of utter destitution—many of them indeed are not unfrequently washed up dead—but what becomes of the bulk of the birds, not merely the comparatively few thousands that are natives of Britain, but the tens and hundreds of thousands, not to say millions, that are in summer denizens of more northern latitudes, no one can say. This mystery is not peculiar to the guillemot, but is shared by all the Alcidae that inhabit the Atlantic Ocean. Examples stray every season across the Bay of Biscay, are found off the coasts of Spain and Portugal, enter the Mediterranean and reach Italian waters, or, keeping farther south, may even touch the Madeiras, Canaries or Azores; but these bear no proportion whatever to the mighty hosts of whom they are literally the “scouts,” and whose position and movements they no more reveal than do the vedettes of a well-appointed army. The common guillemot of both sides of the Atlantic is replaced farther northward by a species with a stouter bill, the U. arra or U. bruennichi of ornithologists, and on the west coast of North America by the U. californica. The habits of all these are essentially the same, and the structural resemblance between all of them and the Auks is so great that several systematists have relegated them to the genus Alca, confining the genus Uria to the guillemots of another group, of which the type is the U. grylla, the black guillemot of British authors, the dovekey or Greenland dove of sailors, the tysty of Shetlanders. This bird assumes in summer an entirely black plumage with the exception of a white patch on each wing, while in winter it is beautifully marbled with white and black. Allied to it as species or geographical races are the U. mandti, U. columba and U. carbo. All these differ from the larger guillemots by laying two or three eggs, which are generally placed in some secure niche, while the members of the other group lay but a single egg, which is invariably exposed on a bare ledge.
(A. N.)
1 The word, however, seems to be cognate with or derived from the Welsh and Manx Guillem, or Gwilym as Pennant spells it. The association may have no real meaning, but one cannot help comparing the resemblance between the French guillemot and Guillaume with that between the English willock (another name for the bird) and William.
GUILLOCHE, a French word for an ornament, either painted or carved, which was one of the principal decorative bands employed by the Greeks in their temples or on their vases. Guilloches are single, double or triple; they consist of a series of circles equidistant one from the other and enclosed in a band which winds round them and interlaces. This guilloche is of Asiatic origin and was largely employed in the decoration of the Assyrian palaces, where it was probably copied from Chaldaean work, as there is an early example at Erech which dates from the time of Gudea (2294 B.C.). The ornament as painted by the Greeks has almost entirely disappeared, but traces are found in the temple of Nemesis at Rhamnus; and on the terra-cotta slabs by which the timber roofs of Greek temples were protected, it is painted in colours which are almost as brilliant as when first produced, those of the Treasury of Gela at Olympia being of great beauty. These examples are double guilloches, with two rows of circles, each with an independent interlacing band and united by a small arc with palmette inside; in both the single and double guilloches of Greek work there is a flower in the centre of the circles. In the triple guilloche, the centre row of circles comes half-way between the others, and the enclosing band crosses diagonally both ways, interlacing alternately. The best example of the triple guilloche is that which is carved on the torus moulding of the base and on the small convex moulding above the echinus of the capitals of the columns of the Erechtheum at Athens. It was largely employed in Roman work, and the single guilloche is found almost universally as a border in mosaic pavements, not only in Italy but throughout Europe. In the Renaissance in Italy it was also a favourite enrichment for borders and occasionally in France and England.
GUILLON, MARIE NICOLAS SYLVESTRE (1760-1847), French ecclesiastic, was born in Paris on the 1st of January 1760. He was librarian and almoner in the household of the princess de Lamballe, and when in 1792 she was executed, he fled to the provinces, where under the name of Pastel he practised medicine. A man of facile conscience, he afterwards served in turn under Napoleon, the Bourbons and the Orleanists, and became canon of St Denis, bishop of Morocco and dean of the Sorbonne.
Among his many literary works are a Collection des brefs du pape Pie VI (1798), Bibliothèque choisie des pères grecs et latins (1822, 26 vols.) and a French translation of Cyprian with notes (1837, 2 vols.).
GUILLOTINE, the instrument for inflicting capital punishment by decapitation, introduced into France at the period of the Revolution. It consists of two upright posts surmounted by a cross beam, and grooved so as to guide an oblique-edged knife, the back of which is heavily weighted to make it fall swiftly and with force when the cord by which it is held aloft is let go. Some ascribe the invention of the machine to the Persians; and previous to the period when it obtained notoriety under its present name it had been in use in Scotland, England and various parts of the continent. There is still preserved In the antiquarian museum of Edinburgh the rude guillotine called the “maiden” by which the regent Morton was decapitated in 1581. The last persons decapitated by the Scottish “maiden” were the marquis of Argyll in 1661 and his son the earl of Argyll in 1685. It would appear that no similar machine was ever in general use in England; but until 1650 there existed in the forest of Hardwick, which was coextensive with the parish of Halifax, West Riding, Yorkshire, a mode of trial and execution called the gibbet law, by which a felon convicted of theft within the liberty was sentenced to be decapitated by a machine called the Halifax gibbet. A print of it is contained in a small book called Halifax and its Gibbet Law (1708), and in Gibson’s edition of Camden’s Britannia (1722). In Germany the machine was in general use during the middle ages, under the name of the Diele, the Hobel or the Dolabra. Two old German engravings, the one by George Penez, who died in 1550, and the other by Heinrich Aldegrever, with the date 1553, represent the death of a son of Titus Manlius by a similar instrument, and its employment for the execution of a Spartan is the subject of the engraving of the eighteenth symbol in the volume entitled Symbolicae quaestiones de universo genere, by Achilles Bocchi (1555). From the 13th century it was used in Italy under the name of Mannaia for the execution of criminals of noble birth. The Chronique de Jean d’Anton, first published in 1835, gives minute details of an execution in which it was employed at Genoa in 1507; and it is elaborately described by Père Jean Baptiste Labat in his Voyage en Espagne et en Italie en 1730. It is mentioned by Jacques, viscomte de Puységur, in his Mémoires as in use in the south of France, and he describes the execution by it of Marshal Montmorency at Toulouse in 1632. For about a century it had, however, fallen into general disuse on the continent; and Dr Guillotine, who first suggested its use in modern times, is said to have obtained his information regarding it from the description of an execution that took place at Milan in 1702, contained in an anonymous work entitled Voyage historique et politique de Suisse, d’Italie, et d’Allemagne.
Guillotine, who was born at Saintes, May 28, 1738, and elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1789, brought forward on the 1st December of that year two propositions regarding capital punishment, the second of which was that, “in all cases of capital punishment it shall be of the same kind—that is, decapitation—and it shall be executed by means of a machine.” The reasons urged in support of this proposition were that in cases of capital punishment the privilege of execution by decapitation should no longer be confined to the nobles, and that it was desirable to render the process of execution as swift and painless as possible. The debate was brought to a sudden termination in peals of laughter caused by an indiscreet reference of Dr Guillotine to his machine, but his ideas seem gradually to have leavened the minds of the Assembly, and after various debates decapitation was adopted as the method of execution in the penal code which became law on the 6th October 1791. At first it was intended that decapitation should be by the sword, but on account of a memorandum by M. Sanson, the executioner, pointing out the expense and certain other inconveniences attending that method, the Assembly referred the question to a committee, at whose request Dr Antoine Louis, secretary to the Academy of Surgeons, prepared a memorandum on the subject. Without mentioning the name of Guillotine, it recommended the adoption of an instrument similar to that which was formerly suggested by him. The Assembly decided in favour of the report, and the contract was offered to the person who usually provided the instruments of justice; but, as his terms were considered exorbitant, an agreement was ultimately come to with a German of the name of Schmidt, who, under the direction of M. Louis, furnished a machine for each of the French departments. After satisfactory experiments had been made with the machine on several dead bodies in the hospital of Bicêtre, it was erected on the Place de Grève for the execution of the highwayman Pelletier on the 25th April 1792. While the experiments regarding the machine were being carried on, it received the name Louisette or La Petite Louison, but the mind of the nation seems soon to have reverted to Guillotine, who first suggested its use; and in the Journal des révolutions de Paris for 28th April 1792 it is mentioned as la guillotine, a name which it thenceforth bore both popularly and officially. In 1795 the question was much debated as to whether or not death by the guillotine was instantaneous, and in support of the negative side the case of Charlotte Corday was adduced whose countenance, it is said, blushed as if with indignation when the executioner, holding up the head to the public gaze, struck it with his fist. The connexion of the instrument with the horrors of the Revolution has hindered its introduction into other countries, but in 1853 it was adopted under the name of Fallschwert or Fallbeil by the kingdom of Saxony; and it is used for the execution of sentences of death in France, Belgium and some parts of Germany. It has often been stated that Dr Guillotine perished by the instrument which bears his name, but it is beyond question that he survived the Revolution and died a natural death in 1814.
See Sédillot, Réflexions historiques et physiologiques sur le supplice de la guillotine (1795); Sue, Opinion sur le supplice de la guillotine, (1796); Réveillé-Parise, Étude biographique sur Guillotine (Paris, 1851); Notice historique et physiologique sur le supplice de la guillotine (Paris, 1830); Louis Dubois, Recherches historiques et physiologiques sur la guillotine et détails sur Sanson (Paris, 1843); and a paper by J. W. Croker in the Quarterly Review for December 1843, reprinted separately in 1850 under the title The Guillotine, a historical Essay.
GUILT, a lapse from duty, a crime, now usually the fact of wilful wrong-doing, the condition of being guilty of a crime, hence conduct deserving of punishment. The O. Eng. form of the word is gylt. The New English Dictionary rejects for phonetic reasons the usually accepted connexion with the Teutonic root gald-, to pay, seen in Ger. gelten, to be of value, Geld, money, payment, English “yield.”
GUIMARÃES (sometimes written Guimaraens), a town of northern Portugal, in the district of Braga, formerly included in the province of Entre-Minho-e-Douro; 36 m. N.E. of Oporto by the Trofa-Guimarães branch of the Oporto-Corunna railway. Pop. (1900) 9104. Guimarães is a very ancient town with Moorish fortifications; and even the quarters which are locally described as “new” date partly from the 15th century. It occupies a low hill, skirted on the north-west by a small tributary of the river Ave. The citadel, founded in the 11th century by Count Henry of Burgundy, was in 1094 the birthplace of his son Alphonso, the first king of Portugal. The font in which Alphonso was baptized is preserved, among other interesting relics, in the collegiate church of Santa Maria da Oliveira, “St Mary of the Olive,” a Romanesque building of the 14th century, which occupies the site of an older foundation. This church owes its name to the legend that the Visigothic king Wamba (672-680) here declined the crown of Spain, until his olive wood spear-shaft blossomed as a sign that he should consent. The convent of São Domingos, now a museum of antiquities, has a fine 12th-13th century cloister; the town hall is built in the blend of Moorish and Gothic architecture known as Manoelline. Guimarães has a flourishing trade in wine and farm produce; it also manufactures cutlery, linen, leather and preserved fruits. Near the town are Citania, the ruins of a prehistoric Iberian city, and the hot sulphurous springs of Taipas, frequented since the 4th century, when Guimarães itself was founded.
GUIMARD, MARIE MADELEINE (1743-1816), French dancer, was born in Paris on the 10th of October 1743. For twenty-five years she was the star of the Paris Opéra. She made herself even more famous by her love affairs, especially by her long liaison with the prince de Soubise. She bought a magnificent house at Pantin, and built a private theatre connected with it, where Collé’s Partie de chasse de Henri IV which was prohibited in public, and most of the Proverbes of Carmontelle (Louis Carrogis, 1717-1806), and similar licentious performances were given to the delight of high society. In 1772, in defiance of the archbishop of Paris, she opened a gorgeous house with a theatre seating five hundred spectators in the Chaussée d’Antin. In this Temple of Terpsichore, as she named it, the wildest orgies took place. In 1786 she was compelled to get rid of the property, and it was disposed of by lottery for her benefit for the sum of 300,000 francs. Soon after her retirement in 1789 she married Jean Etienne Despréaux (1748-1820), dancer, song-writer and playwright.
GUIMET, JEAN BAPTISTE (1795-1871), French industrial chemist, was born at Voiron on the 20th of July 1795. He studied at the École Polytechnique in Paris, and in 1817 entered the Administration des Poudres et Salpêtres. In 1828 he was awarded the prize offered by the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale for a process of making artificial ultramarine with all the properties of the substance prepared from lapis lazuli; and six years later he resigned his official position in order to devote himself to the commercial production of that material, a factory for which he established at Fleurieux sur Saône. He died on the 8th of April 1871.
His son Émile Étienne Guimet, born at Lyons on the 26th of June 1836, succeeded him in the direction of the factory, and founded the Musée Guimet, which was first located at Lyons in 1879 and was handed over to the state and transferred to Paris in 1885. Devoted to travel, he was in 1876 commissioned by the minister of public instruction to study the religions of the Far East, and the museum contains many of the fruits of this expedition, including a fine collection of Japanese and Chinese porcelain and many objects relating not merely to the religions of the East but also to those of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. He wrote Lettres sur l’Algérie (1877) and Promenades japonaises (1880), and also some musical compositions, including a grand opera, Taï-Tsoung (1894).
GUINEA, the general name applied by Europeans to part of the western coast region of equatorial Africa, and also to the gulf formed by the great bend of the coast line eastward and then southward. Like many other geographical designations the use of which is controlled neither by natural nor political boundaries, the name has been very differently employed by different writers and at different periods. In the widest acceptation of the term, the Guinea coast may be said to extend from 13° N. to 16° S., from the neighbourhood of the Gambia to Cape Negro. Southern or Lower Guinea comprises the coasts of Gabun and Loango (known also as French Congo) and the Portuguese possessions on the south-west coast, and Northern or Upper Guinea stretches from the river Casamance to and inclusive of the Niger delta, Cameroon occupying a middle position. In a narrower use of the name, Guinea is the coast only from Cape Palmas to the Gabun estuary. Originally, on the other hand, Guinea was supposed to begin as far north as Cape Nun, opposite the Canary Islands, and Gomes Azurara, a Portuguese historian of the 15th century, is said to be the first authority who brings the boundary south to the Senegal. The derivation of the name is uncertain, but is probably taken from Ghinea, Ginnie, Genni or Jenné, a town and kingdom in the basin of the Niger, famed for the enterprise of its merchants and dating from the 8th century A.D. The name Guinea is found on maps of the middle of the 14th century, but it did not come into general use in Europe till towards the close of the 15th century.1
Although the term Gulf of Guinea is applied generally to that part of the coast south of Cape Palmas and north of the mouth of the Congo, particular indentations have their peculiar designations. The bay formed by the configuration of the land between Cape St Paul and the Nun mouth of the Niger is known as the Bight of Benin, the name being that of the once powerful native state whose territory formerly extended over the whole district. The Bight of Biafra, or Mafra (named after the town of Mafra in southern Portugal), between Capes Formosa and Lopez, is the most eastern part of the Gulf of Guinea; it contains the islands Fernando Po, Prince’s and St Thomas’s. The name Biafra—as indicating the country—fell into disuse in the later part of the 19th century.
The coast is generally so low as to be visible to navigators only within a very short distance, the mangrove trees being their only sailing marks. In the Bight of Biafra the coast forms an exception, being high and bold, with the Cameroon Mountains for background. At Sierra Leone also there is high land. The coast in many places maintains a dead level for 30 to 50 m. inland. Vegetation is exceedingly luxuriant and varied. The palm-oil tree is indigenous and abundant from the river Gambia to the Congo. The fauna comprises nearly all the more remarkable of African animals. The inhabitants are the true Negro stock.
By the early traders the coast of Upper Guinea was given names founded on the productions characteristic of the different parts. The Grain coast, that part of the Guinea coast extending for 500 m. from Sierra Leone eastward to Cape Palmas received its name from the export of the seeds of several plants of a peppery character, called variously grains of paradise, Guinea pepper and melegueta. The name Grain coast was first applied to this region in 1455. It was occasionally styled the Windy or Windward coast, from the frequency of short but furious tornadoes throughout the year. Towards the end of the 18th century, Guinea pepper was supplanted in Europe by peppers from the East Indies. The name now is seldom used, the Grain coast being divided between the British colony of Sierra Leone and the republic of Liberia. The Ivory coast extends from Cape Palmas to 3° W., and obtained its name from the quantity of ivory exported therefrom. It is now a French possession. Eastwards of the Ivory coast are the Gold and Slave coasts. The Niger delta was for long known as the Oil rivers. To two regions only of the coast is the name Guinea officially applied, the French and Portuguese colonies north of Sierra Leone being so styled.
Of the various names by which the divisions of Lower Guinea were known, Loango was applied to the country south of the Gabun and north of the Congo river. It is now chiefly included in French Congo. Congo was used to designate the country immediately south of the river of the same name, usually spoken of until the last half of the 19th century as the Zaire. Congo is now one of the subdivisions of Portuguese West Africa (see Angola). It must not be confounded with the Belgian Congo.
Few questions in historical geography have been more keenly discussed than that of the first discovery of Guinea by the navigators of modern Europe. Lancelot Malocello, a Genoese, in 1270 reached at least as far as the Canaries. The first direct attempt to find a sea route to India was, it is said, also made by Genoese, Ugolino and Guido de Vivaldo, Tedisio Doria and others who equipped two galleys and sailed south along the African coast in 1291. Beyond the fact that they passed Cape Nun there is no trustworthy record of their voyage. In 1346 a Catalan expedition started for “the river of gold” on the Guinea coast; its fate is unknown. The French claim that between 1364 and 1410 the people of Dieppe sent out several expeditions to Guinea; and Jean de Béthencourt, who settled in the Canaries about 1402, made explorations towards the south. At length the consecutive efforts of the navigators employed by Prince Henry of Portugal—Gil Eannes, Diniz Diaz, Nuno Tristam, Alvaro Fernandez, Cadamosto, Usodimare and Diego Gomez—made known the coast as far as the Gambia, and by the end of the 15th century the whole region was familiar to Europeans.
For further information see Senegal, Gold Coast, Ivory Coast, French Guinea, Portuguese Guinea, Liberia, &c. For the history of European discoveries, consult G. E. de Azurara, Chronica de descobrimento e conquista de Guiné, published, with an introduction, by Barros de Santarem (Paris, 1841), English translation, The Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, by C. R. Beazley and E. Prestage (Hakluyt Society publications, 2 vols., London, 1896-1899, vol. ii. has an introduction on the early history of African exploration, &c. with full bibliographical notes). L. Estancelin, Recherches sur les voyages et découvertes des navigateurs normands en Afrique (Paris, 1832); Villault de Bellefond, Relation des costes d’Afrique appellées Guinée (Paris, 1669); Père Labat, Nouvelle Relation de l’Afrique occidentale (Paris, 1728); Desmarquets, Mém. chron. pour servir à l’hist. de Dieppe (1875); Santarem, Priorité de la découverte des pays situés sur la côte occidentale d’Afrique (Paris, 1842); R. H. Major, Life of Prince Henry the Navigator (London, 1868); and the elaborate review of Major’s work by M. Codine in the Bulletin de la Soc. de Géog. (1873); A. E. Nordenskiöld, Periplus (Stockholm, 1897); The Story of Africa, vol. i. (London, 1892), edited by Dr Robert Brown.
1 Guinea may, however, be derived from Ghana (or Ghanata) the name of the oldest known state in the western Sudan. Ghana dates, according to some authorities, from the 3rd century A.D. From the 7th to the 12th century it was a powerful empire, its dominions extending, apparently, from the Atlantic to the Niger bend. At one time Jenné was included within its borders. Ghana was finally conquered by the Mandingo kings of Melle in the 13th century. Its capital, also called Ghana, was west of the Niger, and is generally placed some 200 m. west of Jenné. In this district L. Desplagnes discovered in 1907 numerous remains of a once extensive city, which he identified as those of Ghana. The ruins lie 25 m. W. of the Niger, on both banks of a marigot, and are about 40 m. N. by E. of Kulikoro (see La Géographie, xvi. 329). By some writers Ghana city is, however, identified with Walata, which town is mentioned by Arab historians as the capital of Ghanata. The identification of Ghana city with Jenné is not justified, though Idrisi seems to be describing Jenné when writing of “Ghana the Great.”
GUINEA, a gold coin at one time current in the United Kingdom. It was first coined in 1663, in the reign of Charles II., from gold imported from the Guinea coast of West Africa by a company of merchants trading under charter from the British crown—hence the name. Many of the first guineas bore an elephant on one side, this being the stamp of the company; in 1675 a castle was added. Issued at the same time as the guinea were five-guinea, two-guinea and half-guinea pieces. The current value of the guinea on its first issue was twenty shillings. It was subsidiary to the silver coinage, but this latter was in such an unsatisfactory state that the guinea in course of time became over-valued in relation to silver, so much so that in 1694 it had risen in value to thirty shillings. The rehabilitation of the silver coinage in William III.’s reign brought down the value of the guinea to 21s. 6d. in 1698, at which it stood until 1717, when its value was fixed at twenty-one shillings. This value the guinea retained until its disappearance from the coinage. It was last coined in 1813, and was superseded in 1817 by the present principal gold coin, the sovereign. In 1718 the quarter-guinea was first coined. The third-guinea was first struck in George III.’s reign (1787). To George III.’s reign also belongs the “spade-guinea,” a guinea having the shield on the reverse pointed at the base or spade-shaped. It is still customary to pay subscriptions, professional fees and honoraria of all kinds, in terms of “guineas,” a guinea being twenty-one shillings.
GUINEA FOWL, a well-known domestic gallinaceous bird, so called from the country whence in modern times it was brought to Europe, the Meleagris and Avis or Gallina Numidica of ancient authors.1 Little is positively known of the wild stock to which we owe our tame birds, nor can the period of its reintroduction (for there is apparently no evidence of its domestication being continuous from the time of the Romans) be assigned more than roughly to that of the African discoveries of the Portuguese. It does not seem to have been commonly known till the middle of the 16th century, when John Caius sent a description and figure, with the name Gallus Mauritanus, to Gesner, who published both in his Paralipomena in 1555, and in the same year Belon also gave a notice and woodcut under the name of Poulle de la Guinée; but while the former authors properly referred their bird to the ancient Meleagris, the latter confounded the Meleagris and the turkey.
The ordinary guinea fowl of the poultry-yard (see also Poultry and Poultry-Farming) is the Numida meleagris of ornithologists. The chief or only changes which domestication seems to have induced in its appearance are a tendency to albinism generally shown in the plumage of its lower parts, and frequently, though not always, the conversion of the colour of its legs and feet from dark greyish-brown to bright orange. That the home of this species is West Africa from the Gambia2 to the Gaboon is certain, but its range in the interior is quite unknown. It appears to have been imported early into the Cape Verd Islands, where, as also in some of the Greater Antilles and in Ascension, it has run wild. Representing the species in South Africa we have the N. coronata, which is very numerous from the Cape Colony to Ovampoland, and the N. cornuta of Drs Finsch and Hartlaub, which replaces it in the west as far as the Zambesi. Madagascar also has its peculiar species, distinguishable by its red crown, the N. mitrata of Pallas, a name which has often been misapplied to the last. This bird has been introduced to Rodriguez, where it is now found wild. Abyssinia is inhabited by another species, the N. ptilorhyncha,3 which differs from all the foregoing by the absence of any red colouring about the head. Very different from all of them, and the finest species known, is the N. vulturina of Zanzibar, conspicuous by the bright blue in its plumage, the hackles that adorn the lower part of its neck, and its long tail. By some writers it is thought to form a separate genus, Acryllium. All these guinea fowls except the last are characterized by having the crown bare of feathers and elevated into a bony “helmet,” but there is another group (to which the name Guttera has been given) in which a thick tuft of feathers ornaments the top of the head. This contains four or five species, all inhabiting some part or other of Africa, the best known being the N. cristata from Sierra Leone and other places on the western coast. This bird, apparently mentioned by Marcgrave more than 200 years ago, but first described by Pallas, is remarkable for the structure—unique, if not possessed by its representative forms—of its furcula, where the head, instead of being the thin plate found in all other Gallinae, is a hollow cup opening upwards, into which the trachea dips, and then emerges on its way to the lungs. Allied to the genus Numida, but readily distinguished form among other characters by the possession of spurs and the absence of a helmet, are two very rare forms, Agelastes and Phasidus, both from western Africa. Of their habits nothing is known. All these birds are beautifully figured in Elliot’s Monograph of the Phasianidae, from drawings by Wolf.
(A. N.)
1 Columella (De re rustica, viii. cap. 2) distinguishes the Meleagris from the Gallina Africana or Numidica, the latter having, he says, a red wattle (palea, a reading obviously preferable to galea), while it was blue in the former. This would look as if the Meleagris had sprung from what is now called Numida ptilorhyncha, while the Gallina Africana originated in the N. meleagris, species which have a different range, and if so the fact would point to two distinct introductions—one by Greeks, the other by Latins.
2 Specimens from the Gambia are said to be smaller, and have been described as distinct under the name of N. rendalli.
3 Darwin (Anim. and Pl. under Domestication, i. 294), gives this as the original stock of the modern domestic birds, but obviously by an accidental error. As before observed, it may possibly have been the true μελεαγρίς of the Greeks.
GUINEA-WORM (Dracontiasis), a disease due to the Filaria medinensis, or Dracunculus, or Guinea-worm, a filarious nematode like a horse-hair, whose most frequent habitat is the subcutaneous and intramuscular tissues of the legs and feet. It is common on the Guinea coast, and in many other tropical and subtropical regions and has been familiarly known since ancient times. The condition of dracontiasis due to it is a very common one, and sometimes amounts to an epidemic. The black races are most liable, but Europeans of almost any social rank and of either sex are not altogether exempt. The worm lives in water, and, like the Filaria sanguinis hominis, appears to have an intermediate host for its larval stage. It is doubtful whether the worm penetrates the skin of the legs directly; it is not impossible that the intermediate host (a cyclops) which contains the larvae may be swallowed with the water, and that the larvae of the Dracunculus may be set free in the course of digestion.
GÜINES, a town in the interior of Havana province, Cuba, about 30 m. S.E. of Havana. Pop. (1907) 8053. It is situated on a plain, in the midst of a rich plantation district, chiefly devoted to the cultivation of tobacco. The first railway in Cuba was built from Havana to Güines between 1835 and 1838. One of the very few good highways of the island also connects Güines with the capital. The pueblo of Güines, which was built on a great private estate of the same name, dates back to about 1735. The church dates from 1850. Güines became a “villa” in 1814, and was destroyed by fire in 1817.
GUINGAMP, a town of north-western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Côtes-du-Nord, on the right bank of the Trieux, 20 m. W.N.W. of St Brieuc on the railway to Brest. Pop. (1906), town 6937, commune 9212. Its chief church, Notre-Dame de Bon-Secours, dates from the 14th to the 16th centuries; two towers rise on each side of the richly sculptured western portal and a third surmounts the crossing. A famous statue of the Virgin, the object of one of the most important “pardons” or religious pilgrimages in Brittany, stands in one of the two northern porches. The central square is decorated by a graceful fountain in the Renaissance style, restored in 1743. Remains of the ramparts and of the château of the dukes of Penthièvre, which belong to the 15th century, still survive. Guingamp is the seat of a sub-prefect and of a tribunal of first instance. It is an important market for dairy-cattle, and its industries include flour-milling, tanning and leather-dressing. Guingamp was the chief town of the countship (subsequently the duchy) of Penthièvre. The Gothic chapel of Grâces, near Guingamp, contains fine sculptures.
GUINNESS, the name of a family of Irish brewers. The firm was founded by Arthur Guinness, who about the middle of the 18th century owned a modest brewing-plant at Leixlip, a village on the upper reaches of the river Liffey. In or about 1759 Arthur Guinness, seeking to extend his trade, purchased a small porter brewery belonging to a Mr Rainsford at St James’s Gate, Dublin. By careful attention to the purity of his product, coupled with a shrewd perception of the public taste, he built up a considerable business. But his third son, Benjamin Lee Guinness (1798-1868), may be regarded as the real maker of the firm, into which he was taken at an early age, and of which about 1825 he was given sole control. Prior to that date the trade in Guinness’s porter and stout had been confined to Ireland, but Benjamin Lee Guinness at once established agencies in the United Kingdom, on the continent, in the British colonies and in America. The export trade soon assumed huge proportions; the brewery was continually enlarged, and when in 1855 his father died, Benjamin Lee Guinness, who in 1851 was elected first lord mayor of Dublin, found himself sole proprietor of the business and the richest man in Ireland. Between 1860 and 1865 he devoted a portion of this wealth to the restoration of St Patrick’s cathedral, Dublin. The work, the progress of which he regularly superintended himself, cost £160,000. Benjamin Lee Guinness represented the city of Dublin in parliament as a Conservative from 1865 till his death, and in 1867 was created a baronet. He died in 1868, and was succeeded in the control of the business by Sir Arthur Edward Guinness (b. 1840), his eldest, and Edward Cecil Guinness (b. 1847), his third, son. Sir Arthur Edward Guinness, who for some time represented Dublin in parliament, was in 1880 raised to the peerage as Baron Ardilaun, and about the same time disposed of his share in the brewery to his brother Edward Cecil Guinness. In 1886 Edward Cecil Guinness disposed of the brewery, the products of which were then being sent all over the world, to a limited company, in which he remained the largest shareholder. Edward Cecil Guinness was created a baronet in 1885, and in 1891 was raised to the peerage as Baron Iveagh.
The Guinness family have been distinguished for their philanthropy and public munificence. Lord Ardilaun gave a recreation ground to Dublin, and the famous Muckross estate at Killarney to the nation. Lord Iveagh set aside £250,000 for the creation of the Guinness trust (1889) for the erection and maintenance of buildings for the labouring poor in London and Dublin, and was a liberal benefactor to the funds of Dublin university.
GUINOBATAN, a town of the province of Albay, Luzon, Philippine Islands, on the Inaya river, 9 m. W. by N. of the town of Albay. Pop. (1903), 20,027. Its chief interest is in hemp, which is grown in large quantities in the neighbouring country.
GUIPÚZCOA, a maritime province of northern Spain, included among the Basque provinces, and bounded on the N. by the Bay of Biscay; W. by the province of Biscay (Vizcaya); S. and S.E. by. Álava and Navarre: and N.E. by the river Bidassoa,1 which separates it from France. Pop. (1900), 195,850; area, 728 sq. m. Situated on the northern slope of the great Cantabrian chain at its junction with the Pyrenees, the province has a great variety of surface in mountain, hill and valley; and its scenery is highly picturesque. The coast is much indented, and has numerous harbours, but none of very great importance; the chief are those of San Sebastian, Pasajes, Guetaria, Deva and Fuenterrabia. The rivers (Deva, Urola, Oria, Urumea, Bidassoa) are all short, rapid and unnavigable. The mountains are for the most part covered with forests of oak, chestnut or pine; holly and arbutus are also common, with furze and heath in the poorer parts. The soil in the lower valleys is generally of hard clay and unfertile; it is cultivated with great care, but the grain raised falls considerably short of what is required for home consumption. The climate, though moist, is mild, pleasant and healthy; fruit is produced in considerable quantities, especially apples for manufacture into zaragua or cider. The chief mineral products are iron, lignite, lead, copper, zinc and cement. Ferruginous and sulphurous springs are very common, and are much frequented every summer by visitors from all parts of the kingdom. There are excellent fisheries, which supply the neighbouring provinces with cod, tunny, sardines and oysters; and the average yearly value of the coasting trade exceeds £400,000. By Irun, Pasajes and the frontier roads £4,000,000 of imports and £3,000,000 of exports pass to and from France, partly in transit for the rest of Europe. Apart from the four Catalan provinces, no province has witnessed such a development of local industries as Guipúzcoa. The principal industrial centres are Irun, Renteria, Villabona, Vergara and Azpéitia for cotton and linen stuffs; Zumarraga for osiers; Eibar, Plasencia and Elgoibar for arms and cannon and gold incrustations; Irun for soap and carriages; San Sebastian, Irun and Onate for paper, glass, chemicals and saw-mills; Tolosa for paper, timber, cloths and furniture; and the banks of the bay of Pasajes for the manufacture of liqueurs of every kind, and the preparation of wines for export and for consumption in the interior of Spain. This last industry occupies several thousand French and Spanish workmen. An arsenal was established at Azpéitia during the Carlist rising of 1870-1874; but the manufacture of ordnance and gunpowder was subsequently discontinued. The main line of the northern railway from Madrid to France runs through the province, giving access, by a loop line, to the chief industrial centres. The custom-house through which it passes on the frontier is one of the most important in Spain. Despite the steep gradients, where traffic is hardly possible except by ox-carts, there are over 350 m. of admirably engineered roads, maintained solely by the local tax-payers. After San Sebastian, the capital (pop. 1900, 37,812), the chief towns are Fuenterrabia (4345) and Irun (9912). Other towns with more than 6000 inhabitants are Azpéitia (6066), Eibar (6583), Tolosa (8111) and Vergara (6196). Guipúzcoa is the smallest and one of the most densely peopled provinces of Spain; for its constant losses by emigration are counterbalanced by a high birth-rate and the influx of settlers from other districts who are attracted by its industrial prosperity.
For an account of its inhabitants and their customs, language and history, see Basques and Basque Provinces.
1 A small island in the Bidassoa, called La Isla de los Faisanes, or l’Isle de la Conférence, is celebrated as the place where the marriage of the duke of Guienne was arranged between Louis XI. and Henry IV. in 1463, where Francis I., the prisoner of Charles V., was exchanged for his two sons in 1526, and where in 1659 “the Peace of the Pyrenees” was concluded between D. Luis de Haro and Cardinal Mazarin.
GUIRAUD, ERNEST (1837-1892), French composer, was born at New Orleans on the 26th of June 1837. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where he won the grand prix de Rome. His father had gained the same distinction many years previously, this being the only instance of both father and son obtaining this prize. Ernest Guiraud composed the following operas: Sylvie (1864); Le Kobold (1870), Madame Turlupin (1872), Piccolino (1876), Galante Aventure (1882), and also the ballet Gretna Green, given at the Opéra in 1873. His opera Frédégonde was left in an unfinished condition and was completed by Camille Saint-Saëns. Guiraud, who was a fellow-student and intimate friend of Georges Bizet, was for some years professor of composition at the Conservatoire. He was the author of an excellent treatise on instrumentation. He died in Paris on the 6th of May 1892.
GUISBOROUGH, or Guisbrough, a market town in the Cleveland parliamentary division of the North Riding of Yorkshire, England, 10 m. E.S.E. of Middlesbrough by a branch of the North-Eastern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901), 5645. It is well situated in a narrow, fertile valley at the N. foot of the Cleveland Hills. The church of St Nicholas is Perpendicular, greatly restored. Other buildings are the town hall, and the modern buildings of the grammar school founded in 1561. Ruins of an Augustinian priory, founded in 1129, are beautifully situated near the eastern extremity of the town. The church contains some fine Decorated work, and the chapter house and parts of the conventual buildings may be traced. Considerable fragments of Norman and transitional work remain. Among the historic personages who were buried within its walls was Robert Bruce, lord of Annandale, the competitor for the throne of Scotland with John Baliol, and the grandfather of King Robert the Bruce. About 1 m. S.E. of the town there is a sulphurous spring discovered in 1822. The district neighbouring to Guisborough is rich in iron-stone. Its working forms the chief industry of the town, and there are also tanneries and breweries.
GUISE, a town of northern France, in the department of Aisne, on the Oise, 31 m. N. of Laon by rail. Pop. (1906), 7562. The town was formerly the capital of the district of Thiérache and afterwards of a countship (see below). There is a château dating in part from the middle of the 16th century. Camille Desmoulins was in 1762 born in the town, which has erected a statue to him. The chief industry is the manufacture of iron stoves and heating apparatus, carried on on the co-operative system in works founded by J. B. A. Godin, who built for his workpeople the huge buildings known as the familistère, in front of which stands his statue. A board of trade-arbitration is among the public institutions.
GUISE, HOUSE OF, a cadet branch of the house of Lorraine (q.v.). René II., duke of Lorraine (d. 1508), united the two branches of the house of Lorraine. From his paternal grandmother, Marie d’Harcourt, René inherited the countships of Aumale, Mayenne, Elbeuf, Lillebonne, Brionne and other French fiefs, in addition to the honours of the elder branch, which included the countship of Guise, the dowry of Marie of Blois on her marriage in 1333 with Rudolph or Raoul of Lorraine. René’s eldest surviving son by his marriage with Philippa, daughter of Adolphus of Egmont, duke of Gelderland, was Anthony, who succeeded his father as duke of Lorraine (d. 1544), while the second, Claude, count and afterwards duke of Guise, received the French fiefs. The Guises, though naturalized in France, continued to interest themselves in the fortunes of Lorraine, and their enemies were always ready to designate them as foreigners. The partition between the brothers Anthony and Claude was ratified by a further agreement in 1530, reserving the lapsed honours of the kingdoms of Jerusalem, Sicily, Aragon, the duchy of Anjou and the countships of Provence and Maine to the duke of Lorraine. Of the other sons of René II., John (1498-1550) became the first cardinal of Lorraine, while Ferri, Louis and Francis fell fighting in the French armies at Marignano (1515), Naples (1528) and Pavia (1525) respectively.
Claude of Lorraine, count and afterwards 1st duke of Guise (1496-1550), was born on the 20th of October 1496. He was educated at the French court, and at seventeen allied himself to the royal house of France by a marriage with Antoinette de Bourbon (1493-1583) daughter of François, Count of Vendôme. Guise distinguished himself at Marignano (1515), and was long in recovering from the twenty-two wounds he received in the battle; in 1521 he fought at Fuenterrabia, when Louise of Savoy ascribed the capture of the place to his efforts; in 1522 he defended northern France, and forced the English to raise the siege of Hesdin; and in 1523 he obtained the government of Champagne and Burgundy, defeating at Neufchâteau the imperial troops who had invaded his province. In 1525 he destroyed the Anabaptist peasant army, which was overrunning Lorraine, at Lupstein, near Saverne (Zabern). On the return of Francis I. from captivity, Guise was erected into a duchy in the peerage of France, though up to this time only princes of the royal house had held the title of duke and peer of France. The Guises, as cadets of the sovereign house of Lorraine and descendants of the house of Anjou, claimed precedence of the Bourbon princes. Their pretensions and ambitions inspired distrust in Francis I., although he rewarded Guise’s services by substantial gifts in land and money. The duke distinguished himself in the Luxemburg campaign in 1542, but for some years before his death he effaced himself before the growing fortunes of his sons. He died on the 12th of April 1550.