VOLUME XVI SLICE I L to Lamellibranchia (continued 7)

See O. Ribbeck, Geschichte der römischen Dichtung, i.; H. de la Ville de Mirmont, Étude biographique et littéraire sur le poète Laevius (Paris, 1900), with critical ed. of the fragments, and remarks on vocabulary and syntax; A. Weichert, Poëtarum latinorum reliquiae (Leipzig, 1830); M. Schanz, Geschichte der römischen Litteratur (2nd ed.), pt. i. p. 163; W. Teuffel, Hist. of Roman Literature (Eng. tr.), § 150, 4; a convenient summary in F. Plessis, La Poésie latine (1909), pp. 139-142.

LAEVULINIC ACID (β-acetopropionic acid), C5H8O3 or CH3CO·CH2·CH2·CO2H, a ketonic acid prepared from laevulose, inulin, starch, &c., by boiling them with dilute hydrochloric or sulphuric acids. It may be synthesized by condensing sodium acetoacetate with monochloracetic ester, the acetosuccinic ester produced being then hydrolysed with dilute hydrochloric acid (M. Conrad, Ann., 1877, 188, p. 222).

It may also be prepared by heating the anhydride of γ-methyloxy-glutaric acid with concentrated sulphuric acid, and by oxidation of methyl heptenone and of geraniol. It crystallizes in plates, which melt at 32.5-33° C. and boil at 148-149° (15 mm.) (A. Michael, Jour. prak. Chem., 1891 [2], 44, p. 114). It is readily soluble in alcohol, ether and water. The acid, when distilled slowly, is decomposed and yields α- and β-angelica lactones. When heated with hydriodic acid and phosphorus, it yields n-valeric acid; and with iodine and caustic soda solution it gives iodoform, even in the cold. With hydroxylamine it yields an oxime, which by the action of concentrated sulphuric acid rearranges itself to N-methylsuccinimide [CH2·CO]2N·CH3.

LA FARGE, JOHN (1835-1910), American artist, was born in New York, on the 31st of March 1835, of French parentage. He received instruction in drawing from his grandfather, Binsse de St Victor, a painter of miniatures; studied law and architecture; entered the atelier of Thomas Couture in Paris, where he remained a short time, giving especial attention to the study and copying of old masters at the Louvre; and began by making illustrations to the poets (1859). An intimacy with the artist William M. Hunt had a strong influence on him, the two working together at Newport, Rhode Island. La Farge painted landscape, still life and figure alike in the early sixties. But from 1866 on he was for some time incapacitated for work, and when he regained strength he did some decorative work for Trinity church, Boston, in 1876, and turned his attention to stained glass, becoming president of the Society of Mural Painters. Some of his important commissions include windows for St Thomas’s church (1877), St Peter’s church, the Paulist church, the Brick church (1882), the churches of the Incarnation (1885) and the Ascension (1887), New York; Trinity church, Buffalo, and the “Battle Window” in Memorial Hall at Harvard; ceilings and windows for the house of Cornelius Vanderbilt, windows for the houses of W. H. Vanderbilt and D. O. Mills, and panels for the house of Whitelaw Reid, New York; panels for the Congressional Library, Washington; Bowdoin College, the Capitol at St Paul, Minn., besides designs for many stained glass windows. He was also a prolific painter in oil and water colour, the latter seen notably in some water-colour sketches, the result of a voyage in the South Seas, shown in 1895. His influence on American art was powerfully exhibited in such men as Augustus St Gaudens, Wilton Lockwood, Francis Lathrop and John Humphreys Johnston. He became president of the Society of American Artists, a member of the National Academy of Design in 1869; an officer of the Legion of Honour of France; and received many medals and decorations. He published Considerations on Painting (New York, 1895), Hokŭsai: A Talk about Hokŭsai (New York, 1897), and An Artist’s Letters from Japan (New York, 1897).

See Cecilia Waern, John La Farge, Artist and Writer (London, 1896, No. 26 of The Portfolio).

LA FARINA, GIUSEPPE (1815-1863), Italian author and politician, was born at Messina. On account of the part he took in the insurrection of 1837 he had to leave Sicily, but returning in 1839 he conducted various newspapers of liberal tendencies, until his efforts were completely interdicted, when he removed to Florence. In 1840 he had published Messina ed i suoi monumenti, and after his removal to Florence he brought out La Germania coi suoi monumenti (1842), L’ Italia coi suoi monumenti (1842), La Svizzera storica ed artistica (1842-1843), La China, 4 vols. (1843-1847), and Storia d’ Italia, 7 vols. (1846-1854). In 1847 he established at Florence a democratic journal, L’ Alba, in the interests of Italian freedom and unity, but on the outbreak of the revolution in Sicily in 1848 he returned thither and was elected deputy and member of the committee of war. In August of that year he was appointed minister of public instruction and later of war and marine. After vigorously conducting a campaign against the Bourbon troops, he was forced into exile, and repaired to France in 1849. In 1850 he published his Storia documentata della Rivoluzione Siciliana del 1848-1849, and in 1851-1852 his Storia d’ Italia dal 1815 al 1848, in 6 vols. He returned to Italy in 1854 and settled at Turin, and in 1856 he founded the Piccolo Corriere d’ Italia, an organ which had great influence in propagating the political sentiments of the Società Nazionale Italiana, of which he ultimately was chosen president. With Daniele Manin (q.v.), one of the founders of that society, he advocated the unity of Italy under Victor Emmanuel even before Cavour, with whom at one time he had daily interviews, and organized the emigration of volunteers from all parts of Italy into the Piedmontese army. He also negotiated an interview between Cavour and Garibaldi, with the result that the latter was appointed commander of the Cacciatori delle Alpi in the war of 1859. Later he supported Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily, where he himself went soon after the occupation of Palermo, but he failed to bring about the immediate annexation of the island to Piedmont as Cavour wished. In 1860 he was chosen a member of the first Italian parliament and was subsequently made councillor of state. He died on the 5th of September 1863.

See A. Franchi, Epistolario di Giuseppe La Farina (2 vols., 1869) and L. Carpi, Il Risorgimento Italiano, vol. i. (Milan, 1884).

LA FAYETTE, GILBERT MOTIER DE (1380-1462), marshal of France, was brought up at the court of Louis II., 3rd duke of Bourbon. He served under Marshal Boucicaut in Italy, and on his return to France after the evacuation of Genoa in 1409 became seneschal of the Bourbonnais. In the English wars he was with John I., 4th duke of Bourbon, at the capture of Soubise in 1413, and of Compiègne in 1415. The duke then made him lieutenant-general in Languedoc and Guienne. He failed to defend Caen and Falaise in the interest of the dauphin (afterwards Charles VII.) against Henry V. in 1417 and 1418, but in the latter year he held Lyons for some time against Jean sans Peur, duke of Burgundy. A series of successes over the English and Burgundians on the Loire was rewarded in 1420 with the government of Dauphiny and the office of marshal of France. La Fayette commanded the Franco-Scottish troops at the battle of Baugé (1422), though he did not, as has been sometimes stated, slay Thomas, duke of Clarence, with his own hand. In 1424 he was taken prisoner by the English at Verneuil, but was released shortly afterwards, and fought with Joan of Arc at Orleans and Patay in 1429. The marshal had become a member of the grand council of Charles VII., and with the exception of a short disgrace about 1430, due to the ill-will of Georges de la Trémouille, he retained the royal favour all his life. He took an active part in the army reform initiated by Charles VII., and the establishment of military posts for the suppression of brigandage. His last campaign was against the English in Normandy in 1449. He died on the 23rd of February 1462. His line was continued by Gilbert IV. de La Fayette, son of his second marriage with Jeanne de Joyeuse.

LA FAYETTE, LOUISE DE (c. 1616-1665), was one of the fourteen children of John, comte de La Fayette, and Marguerite de Bourbon-Busset. Louise became maid of honour to Anne of Austria, and Richelieu sought to attract the attention of Louis XIII. to her in the hope that she might counterbalance the influence exercised over him by Marie de Hautefort. The affair did not turn out as the minister wished. The king did indeed make her the confidante of his affairs and of his resentment against the cardinal, but she, far from repeating his confidences to the minister, set herself to encourage the king in his resistance to Richelieu’s dominion. She refused, nevertheless, to become Louis’s mistress, and after taking leave of the king in Anne of Austria’s presence retired to the convent of the Filles de Sainte-Marie in 1637. Here she was repeatedly visited by Louis, with whom she maintained a correspondence. Richelieu intercepted the letters, and by omissions and falsifications succeeded in destroying their mutual confidence. The cessation of their intercourse was regretted by the queen, who had been reconciled with her husband through the influence of Louise. At the time of her death in January 1665 Mlle de La Fayette was superior of a convent of her order which she had founded at Chaillot.

See Mémoires de Madame de Motteville; Victor Cousin, Madame de Hautefort (Paris, 1868); L’Abbé Sorin, Louise-Angèle de La Fayette (Paris, 1893).

LA FAYETTE, MARIE JOSEPH PAUL YVES ROCH GILBERT DU MOTIER. Marquis de (1757-1834), was born at the château of Chavaniac in Auvergne, France, on the 6th of September 1757. His father1 was killed at Minden in 1759, and his mother and his grandfather died in 1770, and thus at the age of thirteen he was left an orphan with a princely fortune. He married at sixteen Marie Adrienne Françoise de Noailles (d. 1807), daughter of the duc d’Ayen and granddaughter of the duc de Noailles, then one of the most influential families in the kingdom. La Fayette chose to follow the career of his father, and entered the Guards.

La Fayette was nineteen and a captain of dragoons when the English colonies in America proclaimed their independence. “At the first news of this quarrel,” he afterwards wrote in his memoirs, “my heart was enrolled in it.” The count de Broglie, whom he consulted, discouraged his zeal for the cause of liberty. Finding his purpose unchangeable, however, he presented the young enthusiast to Johann Kalb, who was also seeking service in America, and through Silas Deane, American agent in Paris, an arrangement was concluded, on the 7th of December 1776, by which La Fayette was to enter the American service as major-general. At this moment the news arrived of grave disasters to the American arms. La Fayette’s friends again advised him to abandon his purpose. Even the American envoys, Franklin and Arthur Lee, who had superseded Deane, withheld further encouragement and the king himself forbade his leaving. At the instance of the British ambassador at Versailles orders were issued to seize the ship La Fayette was fitting out at Bordeaux, and La Fayette himself was arrested. But the ship was sent from Bordeaux to a neighbouring port in Spain, La Fayette escaped from custody in disguise, and before a second lettre de cachet could reach him he was afloat with eleven chosen companions. Though two British cruisers had been sent in pursuit of him, he landed safely near Georgetown, S.C., after a tedious voyage of nearly two months, and hastened to Philadelphia, then the seat of government of the colonies.

When this lad of nineteen, with the command of only what little English he had been able to pick up on his voyage, presented himself to Congress with Deane’s authority to demand a commission of the highest rank after the commander-in-chief, his reception was a little chilly. Deane’s contracts were so numerous, and for officers of such high rank, that it was impossible for Congress to ratify them without injustice to Americans who had become entitled by their service to promotion. La Fayette appreciated the situation as soon as it was explained to him, and immediately expressed his desire to serve in the American army upon two conditions—that he should receive no pay, and that he should act as a volunteer. These terms were so different from those made by other foreigners, they had been attended with such substantial sacrifices, and they promised such important indirect advantages, that Congress passed a resolution, on the 31st of July 1777, “that his services be accepted, and that, in consideration of his zeal, illustrious family and connexions, he have the rank and commission of major-general of the United States.” Next day La Fayette met Washington, whose lifelong friend he became. Congress intended his appointment as purely honorary, and the question of giving him a command was left entirely to Washington’s discretion. His first battle was Brandywine (q.v.) on the 11th of September 1777, where he showed courage and activity and received a wound. Shortly afterwards he secured what he most desired, the command of a division—the immediate result of a communication from Washington to Congress of November 1, 1777, in which he said:—

“The marquis de La Fayette is extremely solicitous of having a command equal to his rank. I do not know in what light Congress will view the matter, but it appears to me, from a consideration of his illustrious and important connexions, the attachment which he has manifested for our cause, and the consequences which his return in disgust might produce, that it will be advisable to gratify his wishes, and the more so as several gentlemen from France who came over under some assurances have gone back disappointed in their expectations. His conduct with respect to them stands in a favourable point of view—having interested himself to remove their uneasiness and urged the impropriety of their making any unfavourable representations upon their arrival at home. Besides, he is sensible, discreet in his manners, has made great proficiency in our language, and from the disposition he discovered at the battle of Brandywine possesses a large share of bravery and military ardour.”

Of La Fayette’s military career in the United States there is not much to be said. Though the commander of a division, he never had many troops in his charge, and whatever military talents he possessed were not of the kind which appeared to conspicuous advantage on the theatre to which his wealth and family influence rather than his soldierly gifts had called him. In the first months of 1778 he commanded troops detailed for the projected expedition against Canada. His retreat from Barren Hill (May 28, 1778) was commended as masterly; and he fought at the battle of Monmouth (June 28,) and received from Congress a formal recognition of his services in the Rhode Island expedition (August 1778).

The treaties of commerce and defensive alliance, signed by the insurgents and France on the 6th of February 1778, were promptly followed by a declaration of war by England against the latter, and La Fayette asked leave to revisit France and to consult his king as to the further direction of his services. This leave was readily granted; it was not difficult for Washington to replace the major-general, but it was impossible to find another equally competent, influential and devoted champion of the American cause near the court of Louis XVI. In fact, he went on a mission rather than a visit. He embarked on the 11th of January 1779, was received with enthusiasm, and was made a colonel in the French cavalry. On the 4th of March following Franklin wrote to the president of Congress: “The marquis de La Fayette ... is infinitely esteemed and beloved here, and I am persuaded will do everything in his power to merit a continuance of the same affection from America.” He won the confidence of Vergennes.

La Fayette was absent from America about six months, and his return was the occasion of a complimentary resolution of Congress. From April until October 1781 he was charged with the defence of Virginia, in which Washington gave him the credit of doing all that was possible with the forces at his disposal; and he showed his zeal by borrowing money on his own account to provide his soldiers with necessaries. The battle of Yorktown, in which La Fayette bore an honourable if not a distinguished part, was the last of the war, and terminated his military career in the United States. He immediately obtained leave to return to France, where it was supposed he might be useful in negotiations for a general peace. He was also occupied in the preparations for a combined French and Spanish expedition against some of the British West India Islands, of which he had been appointed chief of staff, and a formidable fleet assembled at Cadiz, but the armistice signed on the 20th of January 1783 between the belligerents put a stop to the expedition. He had been promoted (1781) to the rank of maréchal de camp (major-general) in the French army, and he received every token of regard from his sovereign and his countrymen. He visited the United States again in 1784, and remained some five months as the guest of the nation.

La Fayette did not appear again prominently in public life until 1787, though he did good service to the French Protestants, and became actively interested in plans to abolish slavery. In 1787 he took his seat in the Assembly of Notables. He demanded, and he alone signed the demand, that the king convoke the states-general, thus becoming a leader in the French Revolution. He showed Liberal tendencies both in that assembly and after its dispersal, and in 1788 was deprived, in consequence, of his active command. In 1789 La Fayette was elected to the states-general, and took a prominent part in its proceedings. He was chosen vice-president of the National Assembly, and on the 11th of July 1789 presented a declaration of rights, modelled on Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in 1776. On the 15th of July, the second day of the new régime, La Fayette was chosen by acclamation colonel-general of the new National Guard of Paris. He also proposed the combination of the colours of Paris, red and blue, and the royal white, into the famous tricolour cockade of modern France (July 17). For the succeeding three years, until the end of the constitutional monarchy in 1792, his history is largely the history of France. His life was beset with very great responsibility and perils, for he was ever the minister of humanity and order among a frenzied people who had come to regard order and humanity as phases of treason. He rescued the queen from the hands of the populace on the 5th and 6th of October 1789, saved many humbler victims who had been condemned to death, and he risked his life in many unsuccessful attempts to rescue others. Before this, disgusted with enormities which he was powerless to prevent, he had resigned his commission; but so impossible was it to replace him that he was induced to resume it. In the Constituent Assembly he pleaded for the abolition of arbitrary imprisonment, for religious tolerance, for popular representation, for the establishment of trial by jury, for the gradual emancipation of slaves, for the freedom of the press, for the abolition of titles of nobility, and the suppression of privileged orders. In February 1790 he refused the supreme command of the National Guard of the kingdom. In May he founded the “Society of 1789” which afterwards became the Feuillants Club. He took a prominent part in the celebration of July 14, 1790, the first anniversary of the destruction of the Bastille. After suppressing an émeute in April 1791 he again resigned his commission, and was again compelled to retain it. He was the friend of liberty as well as of order, and when Louis XVI. fled to Varennes he issued orders to stop him. Shortly afterwards he was made lieutenant-general in the army. He commanded the troops in the suppression of another émeute, on the occasion of the proclamation of the constitution (September 18, 1791), after which, feeling that his task was done, he retired into private life. This did not prevent his friends from proposing him for the mayoralty of Paris in opposition to Pétion.

When, in December 1791, three armies were formed on the western frontier to attack Austria, La Fayette was placed in command of one of them. But events moved faster than La Fayette’s moderate and humane republicanism, and seeing that the lives of the king and queen were each day more and more in danger, he definitely opposed himself to the further advance of the Jacobin party, intending eventually to use his army for the restoration of a limited monarchy. On the 19th of August 1792 the Assembly declared him a traitor. He was compelled to take refuge in the neutral territory of Liége, whence as one of the prime movers in the Revolution he was taken and held as a prisoner of state for five years, first in Prussian and afterwards in Austrian prisons, in spite of the intercession of America and the pleadings of his wife. Napoleon, however, though he had a low opinion of his capacities, stipulated in the treaty of Campo Formio (1797) for La Fayette’s release. He was not allowed to return to France by the Directory. He returned in 1799; in 1802 voted against the life consulate of Napoleon; and in 1804 he voted against the imperial title. He lived in retirement during the First Empire, but returned to public affairs under the First Restoration and took some part in the political events of the Hundred Days. From 1818 to 1824 he was deputy for the Sarthe, speaking and voting always on the Liberal side, and even becoming a carbonaro. He then revisited America (July 1824-September 1825) where he was overwhelmed with popular applause and voted the sum of $200,000 and a township of land. From 1825 to his death he sat in the Chamber of Deputies for Meaux. During the revolution of 1830 he again took command of the National Guard and pursued the same line of conduct, with equal want of success, as in the first revolution. In 1834 he made his last speech—on behalf of Polish political refugees. He died at Paris on the 20th of May 1834. In 1876 in the city of New York a monument was erected to him, and in 1883 another was erected at Puy.

Few men have owed more of their success and usefulness to their family rank than La Fayette, and still fewer have abused it less. He never achieved distinction in the field, and his political career proved him to be incapable of ruling a great national movement; but he had strong convictions which always impelled him to study the interests of humanity, and a pertinacity in maintaining them, which, in all the strange vicissitudes of his eventful life, secured him a very unusual measure of public respect. No citizen of a foreign country has ever had so many and such warm admirers in America, nor does any statesman in France appear to have ever possessed uninterruptedly for so many years so large a measure of popular influence and respect. He had what Jefferson called a “canine appetite” for popularity and fame, but in him the appetite only seemed to make him more anxious to merit the fame which he enjoyed. He was brave to rashness; and he never shrank from danger or responsibility if he saw the way open to spare life or suffering, to protect the defenceless, to sustain the law and preserve order.

His son, Georges Washington Motier de La Fayette (1779-1849), entered the army and was aide-de-camp to General Grouchy through the Austrian, Prussian and Polish (1805-07) campaigns. Napoleon’s distrust of his father rendering promotion improbable, Georges de La Fayette retired into private life in 1807 until the Restoration, when he entered the Chamber of Representatives and voted consistently on the Liberal side. He was away from Paris during the revolution of July 1830, but he took an active part in the “campaign of the banquets,” which led up to that of 1848. He died in December of the next year. His son, Oscar Thomas Gilbert Motier de La Fayette (1815-1881), was educated at the École Polytechnique, and served as an artillery officer in Algeria. He entered the Chamber of Representatives in 1846 and voted, like his father, with the extreme Left. After the revolution of 1848 he received a post in the provisional government, and as a member of the Constituent Assembly he became secretary of the war committee. After the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly in 1851, he retired from public life, but emerged on the establishment of the third republic, becoming a life senator in 1875. His brother Edmond Motier de La Fayette (1818-1890) shared his political opinions. He was one of the secretaries of the Constituent Assembly, and a member of the senate from 1876 to 1888.

See Mémoires historiques et pièces authentiques sur M. de La Fayette pour servir à l’histoire des révolutions (Paris, An II., 1793-1794); B. Sarrans, La Fayette et la Révolution de 1830, histoire des choses et des hommes de Juillet (Paris, 1834); Mémoires, correspondances et manuscrits de La Fayette, published by his family (6 vols., Paris, 1837-1838); Regnault Warin, Mémoires pour servir à la vie du général La Fayette (Paris, 1824); A. Bardoux, La jeunesse de La Fayette (Paris, 1892); Les Dernières années de La Fayette (Paris, 1893); E. Charavaray, Le Général La Fayette (Paris, 1895); A. Levasseur, La Fayette en Amérique 1824 (Paris, 1829); J. Cloquet, Souvenirs de la vie privée du général La Fayette (Paris, 1836); Max Büdinger, La Fayette in Oesterreich (Vienna, 1898); and M. M. Crawford, The Wife of Lafayette (1908); Bayard Tuckerman, Life of Lafayette (New York, 1889); Charlemagne Tower, The Marquis de La Fayette in the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1895).

1 The family of La Fayette, to the cadet branch of which he belonged, received its name from an estate in Aix, Auvergne, which belonged in the 13th century to the Motier family.

LA FAYETTE, MARIE-MADELEINE PIOCHE DE LA VERGNE, Comtesse de (1634-1692), French novelist, was baptized in Paris, on the 18th of March 1634. Her father, Marc Pioche de la Vergne, commandant of Havre, died when she was sixteen, and her mother seems to have been more occupied with her own than her daughter’s interests. Mme de la Vergne married in 1651 the chevalier de Sévigné, and Marie thus became connected with Mme de Sévigné, who was destined to be a lifelong friend. She studied Greek, Latin and Italian, and inspired in one of her tutors, Gilles de Ménage, an enthusiastic admiration which he expressed in verse in three or four languages. Marie married in 1655 François Motier, comte de La Fayette. They lived on the count’s estates in Auvergne, according to her own account (in a letter to Ménage) quite happily; but after the birth of her two sons her husband disappeared so effectually that it was long supposed that he died about 1660, though he really lived until 1683. Mme de La Fayette had returned to Paris, and about 1665 contracted an intimacy with the duc de la Rochefoucauld, then engaged on his Maximes. The constancy and affection that marked this liaison on both sides justified it in the eyes of society, and when in 1680 La Rochefoucauld died Mme de La Fayette received the sincerest sympathy. Her first novel, La Princesse de Montpensier, was published anonymously in 1662; Zayde appeared in 1670 under the name of J. R. de Segrais; and in 1678 her masterpiece, La Princesse de Clèves, also under the name of Segrais. The history of the modern novel of sentiment begins with the Princesse de Clèves. The interminable pages of Mlle de Scudéry with the Précieuses and their admirers masquerading as Persians or ancient Romans had already been discredited by the burlesques of Paul Scarron and Antoine Furetière. It remained for Mme de La Fayette to achieve the more difficult task of substituting something more satisfactory than the disconnected episodes of the roman comique. This she accomplished in a story offering in its shortness and simplicity a complete contrast to the extravagant and lengthy romances of the time. The interest of the story depends not on incident but on the characters of the personages. They act in a perfectly reasonable way and their motives are analysed with the finest discrimination. No doubt the semi-autobiographical character of the material partially explains Mme de La Fayette’s refusal to acknowledge the book. Contemporary critics, even Mme de Sévigné amongst them, found fault with the avowal made by Mme de Clèves to her husband. In answer to these criticisms, which her anonymity prevented her from answering directly, Mme de La Fayette wrote her last novel, the Comtesse de Tende.

The character of her work and her history have combined to give an impression of melancholy and sweetness that only represents one side of her character, for a correspondence brought to light comparatively recently showed her as the acute diplomatic agent of Jeanne de Nemours, duchess of Savoy, at the court of Louis XIV. She had from her early days also been intimate with Henrietta of England, duchess of Orleans, under whose immediate direction she wrote her Histoire de Madame Henriette d’Angleterre, which only appeared in 1720. She wrote memoirs of the reign of Louis XIV., which, with the exception of two chapters, for the years 1688 and 1689 (published at Amsterdam, 1731), were lost through her son’s carelessness. Madame de La Fayette died on the 25th of May 1692.

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes; the comte d’Haussonville, Madame de La Fayette (1891), in the series of Grands écrivains français; M. de Lescure’s notice prefixed to an edition of the Princesse de Clèves (1881); and a critical edition of the historical memoirs by Eugène Asse (1890). See also L. Rea, Marie Madeleine, comtesse de La Fayette (1908).

LAFAYETTE, a city and the county-seat of Tippecanoe county, Indiana, U.S.A., situated at the former head of navigation on the Wabash river, about 64 m. N.W. of Indianapolis. Pop. (1900) 18,116, of whom 2266 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 20,081. It is served by the Chicago, Indianapolis & Louisville, the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis, the Lake Erie & Western, and the Wabash railways, and by the Terre Haute, Indianapolis & Eastern (electric), and the Fort Wayne & Wabash Valley (electric) railways. The river is not now navigable at this point. Lafayette is in the valley of the Wabash river, which is sunk below the normal level of the plain, the surrounding heights being the walls of the Wabash basin. The city has an excellent system of public schools, a good public library, two hospitals, the Wabash Valley Sanitarium (Seventh Day Adventist), St Anthony’s Home for old people and two orphan asylums. It is the seat of Purdue University, a co-educational, technical and agricultural institution, opened in 1874 and named in honour of John Purdue (1802-1876), who gave it $150,000. This university is under state control, and received the proceeds of the Federal agricultural college grant of 1862 and of the second Morrill Act of 1890; in connexion with it there is an agricultural experiment station. It had in 1908-1909 180 instructors, 1900 students, and a library of 25,000 volumes and pamphlets. Just outside the city is the State Soldiers’ Home, where provision is also made for the wives and widows of soldiers; in 1908 it contained 553 men and 700 women. The city lies in the heart of a rich agricultural region, and is an important market for grain, produce and horses. Among its manufactures are beer, foundry and machine shop products (the Chicago, Indianapolis & Louisville railway has shops here), straw board, telephone apparatus, paper, wagons, packed meats, canned goods, flour and carpets; the value of the factory product increased from $3,514,276 in 1900 to $4,631,415 in 1905, or 31.8%. The municipality owns its water works.

Lafayette is about 5 m. N.E. of the site of the ancient Wea (Miami) Indian village known as Ouiatanon, where the French established a post about 1720. The French garrison gave way to the English about 1760; the stockade fort was destroyed during the conspiracy of Pontiac, and was never rebuilt. The headquarters of Tecumseh and his brother, the “Prophet,” were established 7 m. N. of Lafayette near the mouth of the Tippecanoe river, and the settlement there was known as the “Prophet’s Town.” Near this place, and near the site of the present village of Battle Ground (where the Indiana Methodists now have a summer encampment and a camp meeting in August), was fought on the 7th of November 1811 the battle of Tippecanoe, in which the Indians were decisively defeated by Governor William Henry Harrison, the whites losing 188 in killed and wounded and the Indians about an equal number. The battle ground is owned by the state; in 1907 the state legislature and the United States Congress each appropriated $12,500 for a monument, which took the form of a granite shaft 90 ft. high. The first American settlers on the site of Lafayette appeared about 1820, and the town was laid out in 1825, but for many years its growth was slow. The completion of the Wabash and Erie canal marked a new era in its development, and in 1854 Lafayette was incorporated.

LA FERTÉ, the name of a number of localities in France, differentiated by agnomens. La Ferté Imbault (department of Loir-et-Cher) was in the possession of Jacques d’Étampes (1590-1668), marshal of France and ambassador in England, who was known as the marquis of La Ferté Imbault. La Ferté Nabert (the modern La Ferté Saint Aubin, department of Loiret) was acquired in the 16th century by the house of Saint Nectaire (corrupted to Senneterre), and erected into a duchy in the peerage of France (duché-pairie) in 1665 for Henri de Saint Nectaire, marshal of France. It was called La Ferté Lowendal after it had been acquired by Marshal Lowendal in 1748.

LA FERTÉ-BERNARD, a town of western France, in the department of Sarthe, on the Huisne, 27 m. N.E. of Le Mans, on the railway from Paris to that town. Pop. (1906) 4358. La Ferté carries on cloth manufacture and flour-milling and has trade in horses and cattle. Its church of Nôtre Dame has a choir (16th century) with graceful apse-chapels of Renaissance architecture and remarkable windows of the same period; the remainder of the church is in the Flamboyant Gothic style. The town hall occupies the superstructure and flanking towers of a fortified gateway of the 15th century.

La Ferté-Bernard owes its origin and name to a stronghold (fermeté) built about the 11th century and afterwards held by the family of Bernard. In 1424 it did not succumb to the English troops till after a four months’ siege. It belonged in the 16th century to the family of Guise and supported the League, but was captured by the royal forces in 1590.

LA FERTÉ-MILON, a town of northern France in the department of Aisne on the Ourcq, 47 m. W. by S. of Reims by rail. Pop. (1906) 1563. The town has imposing remains comprising one side flanked by four towers of an unfinished castle built about the beginning of the 15th century by Louis of Orleans, brother of Charles VI. The churches of St Nicholas and Notre-Dame, chiefly of the 16th century, both contain fine old stained glass. Jean Racine, the poet, was born in the town, and a statue by David d’Augers has been erected to him.

LAFFITTE, JACQUES (1767-1844), French banker and politician, was born at Bayonne on the 24th of October 1767, one of the ten children of a carpenter. He became clerk in the banking house of Perregaux in Paris, was made a partner in the business in 1800, and in 1804 succeeded Perregaux as head of the firm. The house of Perregaux, Laffitte et Cie. became one of the greatest in Europe, and Laffitte became regent (1809), then governor (1814) of the Bank of France and president of the Chamber of Commerce (1814). He raised large sums of money for the provisional government in 1814 and for Louis XVIII. during the Hundred Days, and it was with him that Napoleon deposited five million francs in gold before leaving France for the last time. Rather than permit the government to appropriate the money from the Bank he supplied two million from his own pocket for the arrears of the imperial troops after Waterloo. He was returned by the department of the Seine to the Chamber of Deputies in 1816, and took his seat on the Left. He spoke chiefly on financial questions; his known Liberal views did not prevent Louis XVIII. from insisting on his inclusion on the commission on the public finances. In 1818 he saved Paris from a financial crisis by buying a large amount of stock, but next year, in consequence of his heated defence of the liberty of the press and the electoral law of 1867, the governorship of the Bank was taken from him. One of the earliest and most determined of the partisans of a constitutional monarchy under the duke of Orleans, he was deputy for Bayonne in July 1830, when his house in Paris became the headquarters of the revolutionary party. When Charles X., after retracting the hated ordinances, sent the comte d’Argout1 to Laffitte to negotiate a change of ministry, the banker replied, “It is too late. There is no longer a Charles X.,” and it was he who secured the nomination of Louis Philippe as lieutenant-general of the kingdom. On the 3rd of August he became president of the Chamber of Deputies, and on the 9th he received in this capacity Louis Philippe’s oath to the new constitution. The clamour of the Paris mob for the death of the imprisoned ministers of Charles X., which in October culminated in riots, induced the more moderate members of the government—including Guizot, the duc de Broglie and Casimir-Périer—to hand over the administration to a ministry which, possessing the confidence of the revolutionary Parisians, should be in a better position to save the ministers from their fury. On the 5th of November, accordingly, Laffitte became minister-president of a government pledged to progress (mouvement), holding at the same time the portfolio of finance. The government was torn between the necessity for preserving order and the no less pressing necessity (for the moment) of conciliating the Parisian populace; with the result that it succeeded in doing neither one nor the other. The impeached ministers were, indeed, saved by the courage of the Chamber of Peers and the attitude of the National Guard; but their safety was bought at the price of Laffitte’s popularity. His policy of a French intervention in favour of the Italian revolutionists, by which he might have regained his popularity, was thwarted by the diplomatic policy of Louis Philippe. The resignation of Lafayette and Dupont de l’Eure still further undermined the government, which, incapable even of keeping order in the streets of Paris, ended by being discredited with all parties. At length Louis Philippe, anxious to free himself from the hampering control of the agents of his fortune, thought it safe to parade his want of confidence in the man who had made him king. Thereupon, in March 1831, Laffitte resigned, begging pardon of God and man for the part he had played in raising Louis Philippe to the throne. He left office politically and financially a ruined man. His affairs were wound up in 1836, and next year he created a credit bank, which prospered as long as he lived, but failed in 1848. He died in Paris on the 26th of May 1844.

See P. Thureau-Dangin, La Monarchie de Juillet (vol. i. 1884).

1 Apollinaire Antoine Maurice, comte d’Argout (1782-1858), afterwards reconciled to the July monarchy, and a member of the Laffitte Casimir-Périer and Thiers cabinets.

LAFFITTE, PIERRE (1823-1903), French Positivist, was born on the 21st of February 1823 at Béguey (Gironde). Residing at Paris as a teacher of mathematics, he became a disciple of Comte, who appointed him his literary executor. On the schism of the Positivist body which followed Comte’s death, he was recognized as head of the section which accepted the full Comtian doctrine; the other section adhering to Littré, who rejected the religion of humanity as inconsistent with the materialism of Comte’s earlier period. From 1853 Laffitte delivered Positivist lectures in the room formerly occupied by Comte in the rue Monsieur le Prince. He published Les Grands Types de l’humanité (1875) and Cours de philosophie première (1889). In 1893 he was appointed to the new chair founded at the Collège de France for the exposition of the general history of science, and it was largely due to his inspiration that a statue to Comte was erected in the Place de la Sorbonne in 1902. He died on the 4th of January 1903.

LA FLÈCHE, a town of western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Sarthe on the Loire, 31 m. S.S.W. of Le Mans by rail. Pop. (1906) town 7800; commune 10,663. The chief interest of the town lies in the Prytanée, a famous school for the sons of officers, originally a college founded for the Jesuits in 1607 by Henry IV. The buildings, including a fine chapel, were erected from 1620 to 1653 and are surrounded by a park. A bronze statue of Henry IV. stands in the marketplace. La Flèche is the seat of a sub-prefect and of a tribunal of first instance, and carries on tanning, flour-milling, and the manufacture of paper, starch, wooden shoes and gloves. It is an agricultural market.

The lords of La Flèche became counts of Maine about 1100, but the lordship became separate from the county and passed in the 16th century to the family of Bourbon and thus to Henry IV.

LAFONT, PIERRE CHÉRI (1797-1873), French actor, was born at Bordeaux on the 15th of May 1797. Abandoning his profession as assistant ship’s doctor in the navy, he went to Paris to study singing and acting. He had some experience at a small theatre, and was preparing to appear at the Opéra Comique when the director of the Vaudeville offered him an engagement. Here he made his début in 1821 in La Somnambule, and his good looks and excellent voice soon brought him into public favour. After several years at the Nouveautés and the Vaudeville, on the burning of the latter in 1838 he went to England, and married, at Gretna Green, Jenny Colon, from whom he was soon divorced. On his return to Paris he joined the Variétés, where he acted for fifteen years in such plays as Le Chevalier de Saint Georges, Le Lion empaillé, Une dernière conquête, &c. Another engagement at the Vaudeville followed, and one at the Gaiété, and he ended his brilliant career at the Gymnase in the part of the noble father in such plays as Les Vieux Garçons and Nos bons villageois. He died in Paris on the 19th of April 1873.

LA FONTAINE, JEAN DE (1621-1695), French poet, was born at Château Thierry in Champagne, probably on the 8th of July 1621. His father was Charles de La Fontaine, “maître des eaux et forêts”—a kind of deputy-ranger—of the duchy of Château Thierry; his mother was Françoise Pidoux. On both sides his family was of the highest provincial middle class, but was not noble; his father was also fairly wealthy. Jean, the eldest child, was educated at the collège (grammar-school) of Reims, and at the end of his school days he entered the Oratory in May 1641, and the seminary of Saint-Magloire in October of the same year; but a very short sojourn proved to him that he had mistaken his vocation. He then apparently studied law, and is said to have been admitted as avocat, though there does not seem to be actual proof of this. He was, however, settled in life, or at least might have been so, somewhat early. In 1647 his father resigned his rangership in his favour, and arranged a marriage for him with Marie Héricart, a girl of sixteen, who brought him twenty thousand livres, and expectations. She seems to have been both handsome and intelligent, but the two did not get on well together. There appears to be absolutely no ground for the vague scandal as to her conduct, which was, for the most part long afterwards, raised by gossips or personal enemies of La Fontaine. All that is positively said against her is that she was a negligent housewife and an inveterate novel reader; La Fontaine himself was constantly away from home, was certainly not strict in point of conjugal fidelity, and was so bad a man of business that his affairs became involved in hopeless difficulty, and a séparation de biens had to take place in 1658. This was a perfectly amicable transaction for the benefit of the family; by degrees, however, the pair, still without any actual quarrel, ceased to live together, and for the greater part of the last forty years of La Fontaine’s life he lived in Paris while his wife dwelt at Château Thierry, which, however, he frequently visited. One son was born to them in 1653, and was educated and taken care of wholly by his mother.

Even in the earlier years of his marriage La Fontaine seems to have been much at Paris, but it was not till about 1656 that he became a regular visitor to the capital. The duties of his office, which were only occasional, were compatible with this non-residence. It was not till he was past thirty that his literary career began. The reading of Malherbe, it is said, first awoke poetical fancies in him, but for some time he attempted nothing but trifles in the fashion of the time—epigrams, ballades, rondeaux, &c. His first serious work was a translation or adaptation of the Eunuchus of Terence (1654). At this time the Maecenas of French letters was the Superintendant Fouquet, to whom La Fontaine was introduced by Jacques Jannart, a connexion of his wife’s. Few people who paid their court to Fouquet went away empty-handed, and La Fontaine soon received a pension of 1000 livres (1659), on the easy terms of a copy of verses for each quarter’s receipt. He began too a medley of prose and poetry, entitled Le Songe de Vaux, on Fouquet’s famous country house. It was about this time that his wife’s property had to be separately secured to her, and he seems by degrees to have had to sell everything of his own; but, as he never lacked powerful and generous patrons, this was of small importance to him. In the same year he wrote a ballad, Les Rieurs du Beau-Richard, and this was followed by many small pieces of occasional poetry addressed to various personages from the king downwards. Fouquet soon incurred the royal displeasure, but La Fontaine, like most of his literary protégés, was not unfaithful to him, the well-known elegy Pleurez, nymphes de Vaux, being by no means the only proof of his devotion. Indeed it is thought not improbable that a journey to Limoges in 1663 in company with Jannart, and of which we have an account written to his wife, was not wholly spontaneous, as it certainly was not on Jannart’s part. Just at this time his affairs did not look promising. His father and himself had assumed the title of esquire, to which they were not strictly entitled, and, some old edicts on the subject having been put in force, an informer procured a sentence against the poet fining him 2000 livres. He found, however, a new protector in the duke and still more in the duchess of Bouillon, his feudal superiors at Château Thierry, and nothing more is heard of the fine. Some of La Fontaine’s liveliest verses are addressed to the duchess, Anne Mancini, the youngest of Mazarin’s nieces, and it is even probable that the taste of the duke and duchess for Ariosto had something to do with the writing of his first work of real importance, the first book of the Contes, which appeared in 1664. He was then forty-three years old, and his previous printed productions had been comparatively trivial, though much of his work was handed about in manuscript long before it was regularly published. It was about this time that the quartette of the Rue du Vieux Colombier, so famous in French literary history, was formed. It consisted of La Fontaine, Racine, Boileau and Molière, the last of whom was almost of the same age as La Fontaine, the other two considerably younger. Chapelle was also a kind of outsider in the coterie. There are many anecdotes, some pretty obviously apocryphal, about these meetings. The most characteristic is perhaps that which asserts that a copy of Chapelain’s unlucky Pucelle always lay on the table, a certain number of lines of which was the appointed punishment for offences against the company. The coterie furnished under feigned names the personages of La Fontaine’s version of the Cupid and Psyche story, which, however, with Adonis, was not printed till 1669. Meanwhile the poet continued to find friends. In 1664 he was regularly commissioned and sworn in as gentleman to the duchess dowager of Orleans, and was installed in the Luxembourg. He still retained his rangership, and in 1666 we have something like a reprimand from Colbert suggesting that he should look into some malpractices at Château Thierry. In the same year appeared the second book of the Contes, and in 1668 the first six books of the Fables, with more of both kinds in 1671. In this latter year a curious instance of the docility with which the poet lent himself to any influence was afforded by his officiating, at the instance of the Port-Royalists, as editor of a volume of sacred poetry dedicated to the prince de Conti. A year afterwards his situation, which had for some time been decidedly flourishing, showed signs of changing very much for the worse. The duchess of Orleans died, and he apparently had to give up his rangership, probably selling it to pay debts. But there was always a providence for La Fontaine. Madame de la Sablière, a woman of great beauty, of considerable intellectual power and of high character, invited him to make his home in her house, where he lived for some twenty years. He seems to have had no trouble whatever about his affairs thenceforward; and could devote himself to his two different lines of poetry, as well as to that of theatrical composition.

In 1682 he was, at more than sixty years of age, recognized as one of the first men of letters of France. Madame de Sévigné, one of the soundest literary critics of the time, and by no means given to praise mere novelties, had spoken of his second collection of Fables published in the winter of 1678 as divine; and it is pretty certain that this was the general opinion. It was not unreasonable, therefore, that he should present himself to the Academy, and, though the subjects of his Contes were scarcely calculated to propitiate that decorous assembly, while his attachment to Fouquet and to more than one representative of the old Frondeur party made him suspect to Colbert and the king, most of the members were his personal friends. He was first proposed in 1682, but was rejected for Dangeau. The next year Colbert died and La Fontaine was again nominated. Boileau was also a candidate, but the first ballot gave the fabulist sixteen votes against seven only for the critic. The king, whose assent was necessary, not merely for election but for a second ballot in case of the failure of an absolute majority, was ill-pleased, and the election was left pending. Another vacancy occurred, however, some months later, and to this Boileau was elected. The king hastened to approve the choice effusively, adding, “Vous pouvez incessamment recevoir La Fontaine, il a promis d’être sage.” His admission was indirectly the cause of the only serious literary quarrel of his life. A dispute took place between the Academy and one of its members, Antoine Furetière, on the subject of the latter’s French dictionary, which was decided to be a breach of the Academy’s corporate privileges. Furetière, a man of no small ability, bitterly assailed those whom he considered to be his enemies, and among them La Fontaine, whose unlucky Contes made him peculiarly vulnerable, his second collection of these tales having been the subject of a police condemnation. The death of the author of the Roman Bourgeois, however, put an end to this quarrel. Shortly afterwards La Fontaine had a share in a still more famous affair, the celebrated Ancient-and-Modern squabble in which Boileau and Perrault were the chiefs, and in which La Fontaine (though he had been specially singled out by Perrault for favourable comparison with Aesop and Phaedrus) took the Ancient side. About the same time (1685-1687) he made the acquaintance of the last of his many hosts and protectors, Monsieur and Madame d’Hervart, and fell in love with a certain Madame Ulrich, a lady of some position but of doubtful character. This acquaintance was accompanied by a great familiarity with Vendôme, Chaulieu and the rest of the libertine coterie of the Temple; but, though Madame de la Sablière had long given herself up almost entirely to good works and religious exercises, La Fontaine continued an inmate of her house until her death in 1693. What followed is told in one of the best known of the many stories bearing on his childlike nature. Hervart on hearing of the death, had set out at once to find La Fontaine. He met him in the street in great sorrow, and begged him to make his home at his house. “J’y allais” was La Fontaine’s answer. He had already undergone the process of conversion during a severe illness the year before. An energetic young priest, M. Poucet, had brought him, not indeed to understand, but to acknowledge the impropriety of the Contes, and it is said that the destruction of a new play of some merit was demanded and submitted to as a proof of repentance. A pleasant story is told of the young duke of Burgundy, Fénelon’s pupil, who was then only eleven years old, sending 50 louis to La Fontaine as a present of his own motion. But, though La Fontaine recovered for the time, he was broken by age and infirmity, and his new hosts had to nurse rather than to entertain him, which they did very carefully and kindly. He did a little more work, completing his Fables among other things; but he did not survive Madame de la Sablière much more than two years, dying on the 13th of April 1695, at the age of seventy-three. He was buried in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents. His wife survived him nearly fifteen years.

The curious personal character of La Fontaine, like that of some other men of letters, has been enshrined in a kind of legend by literary tradition. At an early age his absence of mind and indifference to business gave a subject to Tallemant des Réaux. His later contemporaries helped to swell the tale, and the 18th century finally accepted it, including the anecdotes of his meeting his son, being told who he was, and remarking, “Ah, yes, I thought I had seen him somewhere!” of his insisting on fighting a duel with a supposed admirer of his wife, and then imploring him to visit at his house just as before; of his going into company with his stockings wrong side out, &c., with, for a contrast, those of his awkwardness and silence, if not positive rudeness, in company. It ought to be remembered, as a comment on the unfavourable description by La Bruyère, that La Fontaine was a special friend and ally of Benserade, La Bruyère’s chief literary enemy. But after all deductions much will remain, especially when it is remembered that one of the chief authorities for these anecdotes is Louis Racine, a man who possessed intelligence and moral worth, and who received them from his father, La Fontaine’s attached friend for more than thirty years. Perhaps the best worth recording of all these stories is one of the Vieux Colombier quartette, which tells how Molière, while Racine and Boileau were exercising their wits upon “le bonhomme” or “le bon” (by both which titles La Fontaine was familiarly known), remarked to a bystander, “Nos beaux esprits ont beau faire, ils n’effaceront pas le bonhomme.” They have not.

The works of La Fontaine, the total bulk of which is considerable, fall no less naturally than traditionally into three divisions, the Fables, the Contes and the miscellaneous works. Of these the first may be said to be known universally, the second to be known to all lovers of French literature, the third to be with a few exceptions practically forgotten. This distribution of the judgment of posterity is as usual just in the main, but not wholly. There are excellent things in the Œuvres Diverses, but their excellence is only occasional, and it is not at the best equal to that of the Fables or the Contes. It was thought by contemporary judges who were both competent and friendly that La Fontaine attempted too many styles, and there is something in the criticism. His dramatic efforts are especially weak. The best pieces usually published under his name—Ragotin, Le Florentin, La Coupe enchantée, were originally fathered not by him but by Champmeslé, the husband of the famous actress who captivated Racine and Charles de Sévigné. His avowed work was chiefly in the form of opera, a form of no great value at its best. Psyche has all the advantages of its charming story and of La Fontaine’s style, but it is perhaps principally interesting nowadays because of the framework of personal conversation already alluded to. The mingled prose and verse of the Songe de Vaux is not uninteresting, but its best things, such as the description of night—

“Laissant tomber les fleurs et ne les semant pas,”

which has enchanted French critics, are little more than conceits, though as in this case sometimes very beautiful conceits. The elegies, the epistles, the epigrams, the ballades, contain many things which would be very creditable to a minor poet or a writer of vers de société, but even if they be taken according to the wise rule of modern criticism, each in its kind, and judged simply according to their rank in that kind, they fall far below the merits of the two great collections of verse narratives which have assured La Fontaine’s immortality.

Between the actual literary merits of the two there is not much to choose, but the change of manners and the altered standard of literary decency have thrown the Contes into the shade. These tales are identical in general character with those which amused Europe from the days of the early fabliau writers. Light love, the misfortunes of husbands, the cunning of wives, the breach of their vows by ecclesiastics, constitute the staple of their subject. In some respects La Fontaine is the best of such tale-tellers, while he is certainly the latest who deserves such excuse as may be claimed by a writer who does not choose indecent subjects from a deliberate knowledge that they are considered indecent, and with a deliberate desire to pander to a vicious taste. No one who followed him in the style can claim this excuse; he can, and the way in which contemporaries of stainless virtue such as Madame de Sévigné speak of his work shows that, though the new public opinion was growing up, it was not finally accepted. In the Contes La Fontaine for the most part attempts little originality of theme. He takes his stories (varying them, it is true, in detail not a little) from Boccaccio, from Marguerite, from the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, &c. He applies to them his marvellous power of easy sparkling narration, and his hardly less marvellous faculty of saying more or less outrageous things in the most polite and gentlemanly manner. These Contes have indeed certain drawbacks. They are not penetrated by the half pagan ardour for physical beauty and the delights of sense which animates and excuses the early Italian Renaissance. They have not the subtle mixture of passion and sensuality, of poetry and appetite, which distinguishes the work of Marguerite and of the Pléiade. They are emphatically contes pour rire, a genuine expression of the esprit gaulois of the fabliau writers and of Rabelais, destitute of the grossness of envelope which had formerly covered that spirit. A comparison of “La Fiancée du roi de Garbe” with its original in Boccaccio (especially if the reader takes M. Émile Montégut’s admirable essay as a commentary) will illustrate better than anything else what they have and what they have not. Some writers have pleaded hard for the admission of actual passion of the poetical sort in such pieces as “La Courtisane amoureuse,” but as a whole it must be admitted to be absent.

The Fables, with hardly less animation and narrative art than the Contes, are free from disadvantages (according to modern notions) of subject, and exhibit the versatility and fecundity of the author’s talent perhaps even more fully. La Fontaine had many predecessors in the fable and especially in the beast fable. In his first issue, comprising what are now called the first six books, he adhered to the path of these predecessors with some closeness; but in the later collections he allowed himself far more liberty, and it is in these parts that his genius is most fully manifested. The boldness of the politics is as much to be considered as the ingenuity of the moralizing, as the intimate knowledge of human nature displayed in the substance of the narratives, or as the artistic mastery shown in their form. It has sometimes been objected that the view of human character which La Fontaine expresses is unduly dark, and resembles too much that of La Rochefoucauld, for whom the poet certainly had a profound admiration. The discussion of this point would lead us too far here. It may only be said that satire (and La Fontaine is eminently a satirist) necessarily concerns itself with the darker rather than with the lighter shades. Indeed the objection has become pretty nearly obsolete with the obsolescence of what may be called the sentimental-ethicalschool of criticism. Its last overt expression was made by Lamartine, excellently answered by Sainte-Beuve. Exception has also been taken to the Fables on more purely literary, but hardly less purely arbitrary grounds by Lessing. Perhaps the best criticism ever passed upon La Fontaine’s Fables is that of Silvestre de Sacy, to the effect that they supply three several delights to three several ages: the child rejoices in the freshness and vividness of the story, the eager student of literature in the consummate art with which it is told, the experienced man of the world in the subtle reflections on character and life which it conveys. Nor has any one, with the exception of a few paradoxers like Rousseau and a few sentimentalists like Lamartine, denied that the moral tone of the whole is as fresh and healthy as its literary interest is vivid. The book has therefore naturally become the standard reading book of French both at home and abroad, a position which it shares in verse with the Télémaque of Fénelon in prose. It is no small testimony to its merit that not even this use or misuse has interfered with its popularity.

The general literary character of La Fontaine is, with allowance made for the difference of subject, visible equally in the Fables and in the Contes. Perhaps one of the hardest sayings in French literature for an English student is the dictum of Joubert to the effect that “Il y a dans La Fontaine une plénitude de poésie qu’on ne trouve nulle part dans les autres auteurs français.” The difficulty arises from the ambiguity of the terms. For inventiveness of fancy and for diligent observation of the rules of art La Fontaine deserves, if not the first, almost the first place among French poets. In his hands the oldest story becomes novel, the most hackneyed moral piquant, the most commonplace details fresh and appropriate. As to the second point there has not been such unanimous agreement. It used to be considered that La Fontaine’s ceaseless diversity of metre, his archaisms, his licences in rhyme and orthography, were merely ingenious devices for the sake of easy writing, intended to evade the trammels of the stately couplet and rimes difficiles enjoined by Boileau. Lamartine in the attack already mentioned affects contempt of the “vers boiteux, disloqués, inégaux, sans symmétrie ni dans l’oreille ni sur la page.” This opinion may be said to have been finally exploded by the most accurate metrical critic and one of the most skilful metrical practitioners that France has ever had, Théodore de Banville; and it is only surprising that it should ever have been entertained by any professional maker of verse. La Fontaine’s irregularities are strictly regulated, his cadences carefully arranged, and the whole effect may be said to be (though, of course, in a light and tripping measure instead of a stately one) similar to that of the stanzas of the English pindaric ode in the hands of Dryden or Collins. There is therefore nothing against La Fontaine on the score of invention and nothing on the score of art. But something more, at least according to English standards, is wanted to make up a “plenitude of poesy,” and this something more La Fontaine seldom or never exhibits. In words used by Joubert himself elsewhere, he never “transports.” The faculty of transporting is possessed and used in very different manners by different poets. In some it takes the form of passion, in some of half mystical enthusiasm for nature, in some of commanding eloquence, in some of moral fervour. La Fontaine has none of these things: he is always amusing, always sensible, always clever, sometimes even affecting, but at the same time always more or less prosaic, were it not for his admirable versification. He is not a great poet, perhaps not even a great humorist; but he is the most admirable teller of light tales in verse that has ever existed in any time or country; and he has established in his verse-tale a model which is never likely to be surpassed.

La Fontaine did not during his life issue any complete edition of his works, nor even of the two greatest and most important divisions of them. The most remarkable of his separate publications have already been noticed. Others were the Poëme de la captivité de St Malc (1673), one of the pieces inspired by the Port-Royalists, the Poëme du Quinquina (1692), a piece of task work also, though of a very different kind, and a number of pieces published either in small pamphlets or with the works of other men. Among the latter may be singled out the pieces published by the poet with the works of his friend Maucroix (1685). The year after his death some posthumous works appeared, and some years after his son’s death the scattered poems, letters, &c., with the addition of some unpublished work bought from the family in manuscript, were carefully edited and published as Œuvres diverses (1729). During the 18th century two of the most magnificent illustrated editions ever published of any poet reproduced the two chief works of La Fontaine. The Fables were illustrated by Oudry (1755-1759), the Contes by Eisen (1762). This latter under the title of “Edition des Fermiers-Généraux” fetches a high price. During the first thirty years of the 19th century Walckenaer, a great student of French 17th-century classics, published for the house of Didot three successive editions of La Fontaine, the last (1826-1827) being perhaps entitled to the rank of the standard edition, as his Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de La Fontaine is the standard biography and bibliography. The later editions of M. Marty-Laveaux in the Bibliothèque elzévirienne, A. Pauly in the Collection des classiques françaises of M. Lemerre and L. Moland in that of M. Garnier supply in different forms all that can be wished. The second is the handsomest, the third, which is complete, perhaps the most generally useful. Editions, selections, translations, &c., of the Fables, especially for school use, are innumerable; but an illustrated edition published by the Librairie des Bibliophiles (1874) deserves to be mentioned as not unworthy of its 18th-century predecessors. The works of M. Grouchy, Documents inédits sur La Fontaine (1893); of G. Lafenestre, Jean de La Fontaine (1895); and of Émile Faguet, Jean de La Fontaine (1900), should be mentioned.

(G. Sa.)

LAFONTAINE, SIR LOUIS HIPPOLYTE, Bart. (1807-1864), Canadian statesman and judge, third son of Antoine Ménard LaFontaine (1772-1813) and Marie-J-Fontaine Bienvenue, was born at Boucherville in the province of Quebec on the 4th of October 1807. LaFontaine was educated at the Collège de Montréal under the direction of the Sulpicians, and was called to the bar of the province of Lower Canada on the 18th of August 1829. He married firstly Adèle, daughter of A. Berthelot of Quebec; and, secondly, Jane, daughter of Charles Morrison, of Berthier, by whom he had two sons. In 1830 he was elected a member of the House of Assembly for the county of Terrebonne, and became an ardent supporter of Louis Joseph Papineau in opposing the administration of the governor-in-chief, which led to the rebellion of 1837. LaFontaine, however, did not approve the violent methods of his leader, and after the hostilities at Saint Denis he presented a petition to Lord Gosford requesting him to summon the assembly and to adopt measures to stem the revolutionary course of events in Lower Canada. The rebellion broke out afresh in the autumn of 1838; the constitution of 1791 was suspended; LaFontaine was imprisoned for a brief period; and Papineau, who favoured annexation by the United States, was in exile. At this crisis in Lower Canada the French Canadians turned to LaFontaine as their leader, and under his direction maintained their opposition to the special council, composed of nominees of the crown. In 1839 Lord Sydenham, the governor-general, offered the solicitor generalship to LaFontaine, which he refused; and after the Union of 1841 LaFontaine was defeated in the county of Terrebonne through the governor’s influence. During the next year he obtained a seat in the assembly of the province of Canada, and on the death of Sydenham he was called by Sir Charles Bagot to form an administration with Robert Baldwin. The ministry resigned in November 1843, as a protest against the actions of Lord Metcalfe, who had succeeded Bagot. In 1848 LaFontaine formed a new administration with Baldwin, and remained in office until 1851, when he retired from public life. It was during the ministry of LaFontaine-Baldwin that the Amnesty Bill was passed, which occasioned grave riots in Montreal, personal violence to Lord Elgin and the destruction of the parliament buildings. After the death of Sir James Stuart in 1853 LaFontaine was appointed chief justice of Lower Canada and president of the seigneurial court, which settled the vexed question of land tenure in Canada; and in 1854 he was created a baronet. He died at Montreal on the 26th of February 1864.

LaFontaine was well versed in constitutional history and French law; he reasoned closely and presented his conclusions with directness. He was upright in his conduct, sincerely attached to the traditions of his race, and laboured conscientiously to establish responsible government in Canada. His principal works are: L’Analyse de l’ordonnance du conseil spécial sur les bureaux d’hypothèques (Montreal, 1842); Observations sur les questions seigneuriales (Montreal, 1854); see LaFontaine, by A. DeCelles (Toronto, 1906).

(A. G. D.)

LAFOSSE, CHARLES DE (1640-1716), French painter, was born in Paris. He was one of the most noted and least servile pupils of Le Brun, under whose direction he shared in the chief of the great decorative works undertaken in the reign of Louis XIV. Leaving France in 1662, he spent two years in Rome and three in Venice, and the influence of his prolonged studies of Veronese is evident in his “Finding of Moses” (Louvre), and in his “Rape of Proserpine” (Louvre), which he presented to the Royal Academy as his diploma picture in 1673. He was at once named assistant professor, and in 1674 the full responsibilities of the office devolved on him, but his engagements did not prevent his accepting in 1689 the invitation of Lord Montagu to decorate Montagu House. He visited London twice, remaining on the second occasion—together with Rousseau and Monnoyer—more than two years. William III. vainly strove to detain him in England by the proposal that he should decorate Hampton Court, for Le Brun was dead, and Mansart pressed Lafosse to return to Paris to take in hand the cupola of the Invalides. The decorations of Montagu House are destroyed, those of Versailles are restored, and the dome of the Invalides (engraved, Picart and Cochin) is now the only work existing which gives a full measure of his talent. During his latter years Lafosse executed many other important decorations in public buildings and private houses, notably in that of Crozat, under whose roof he died on the 13th of December 1716.

LAGARDE, PAUL ANTON DE (1827-1891), German biblical scholar and orientalist, was born at Berlin on the 2nd of November 1827. His real name was Bötticher, Lagarde being his mother’s name. At Berlin (1844-1846) and Halle (1846-1847) he studied theology, philosophy and oriental languages. In 1852 his studies took him to London and Paris. In 1854 he became a teacher at a Berlin public school, but this did not interrupt his biblical studies. He edited the Didascalia apostolorum syriace (1854), and other Syriac texts collected in the British Museum and in Paris. In 1866 he received three years’ leave of absence to collect fresh materials, and in 1869 succeeded Heinrich Ewald as professor of oriental languages at Göttingen. Like Ewald, Lagarde was an active worker in a variety of subjects and languages; but his chief aim, the elucidation of the Bible, was almost always kept in view. He edited the Aramaic translation (known as the Targum) of the Prophets according to the Codex Reuchlinianus preserved at Carlsruhe, Prophetae chaldaice (1872), the Hagiographa chaldaice (1874), an Arabic translation of the Gospels, Die vier Evangelien, arabisch aus der Wiener Handschrift herausgegeben (1864), a Syriac translation of the Old Testament Apocrypha, Libri V. T. apocryphi syriace (1861), a Coptic translation of the Pentateuch, Der Pentateuch koptisch (1867), and a part of the Lucianic text of the Septuagint, which he was able to reconstruct from manuscripts for nearly half the Old Testament. He devoted himself ardently to oriental scholarship, and published Zur Urgeschichte der Armenier (1854) and Armenische Studien (1877). He was also a student of Persian, publishing Isaias persice (1883) and Persische Studien (1884). He followed up his Coptic studies with Aegyptiaca (1883), and published many minor contributions to the study of oriental languages in Gesammelte Abhandlungen (1866), Symmicta (i. 1877, ii. 1880), Semitica (i. 1878, ii. 1879), Orientalia (1879-1880) and Mittheilungen (1884). Mention should also be made of the valuable Onomastica sacra (1870; 2nd ed., 1887). Lagarde also took some part in politics. He belonged to the Prussian Conservative party, and was a violent anti-Semite. The bitterness which he felt appeared in his writings. He died at Göttingen on the 22nd of December 1891.

See the article in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie; and cf. Anna de Lagarde, Paul de Lagarde (1894).

LAGASH, or Sirpurla, one of the oldest centres of Sumerian civilization in Babylonia. It is represented by a rather low, long line of ruin mounds, along the dry bed of an ancient canal, some 3 m. E. of the Shatt-el-Haī and a little less than 10 m. N. of the modern Turkish town of Shatra. These ruins were discovered in 1877 by Ernest de Sarzec, at that time French consul at Basra, who was allowed, by the Montefich chief, Nasir Pasha, the first Wali-Pasha, or governor-general, of Basra, to excavate at his pleasure in the territories subject to that official. At the outset on his own account, and later as a representative of the French government, under a Turkish firman, de Sarzec continued excavations at this site, with various intermissions, until his death in 1901, after which the work was continued under the supervision of the Commandant Cros. The principal excavations were made in two larger mounds, one of which proved to be the site of the temple, E-Ninnu, the shrine of the patron god of Lagash, Nin-girsu or Ninib. This temple had been razed and a fortress built upon its ruins, in the Greek or Seleucid period, some of the bricks found bearing the inscription in Aramaic and Greek of a certain Hadad-nadin-akhe, king of a small Babylonian kingdom. It was beneath this fortress that the numerous statues of Gudea were found, which constitute the gem of the Babylonian collections at the Louvre. These had been decapitated and otherwise mutilated, and thrown into the foundations of the new fortress. From this stratum came also various fragments of bas reliefs of high artistic excellence. The excavations in the other larger mound resulted in the discovery of the remains of buildings containing objects of all sorts in bronze and stone, dating from the earliest Sumerian period onward, and enabling us to trace the art history of Babylonia to a date some hundreds of years before the time of Gudea. Apparently this mound had been occupied largely by store houses, in which were stored not only grain, figs, &c., but also vessels, weapons, sculptures and every possible object connected with the use and administration of palace and temple. In a small outlying mound de Sarzec discovered the archives of the temple, about 30,000 inscribed clay tablets, containing the business records, and revealing with extraordinary minuteness the administration of an ancient Babylonian temple, the character of its property, the method of farming its lands, herding its flocks, and its commercial and industrial dealings and enterprises; for an ancient Babylonian temple was a great industrial, commercial, agricultural and stock-raising establishment. Unfortunately, before these archives could be removed, the galleries containing them were rifled by the Arabs, and large numbers of the tablets were sold to antiquity dealers, by whom they have been scattered all over Europe and America. From the inscriptions found at Tello, it appears that Lagash was a city of great importance in the Sumerian period, some time probably in the 4th millennium B.C. It was at that time ruled by independent kings, Ur-Nina and his successors, who were engaged in contests with the Elamites on the east and the kings of Kengi and Kish on the north. With the Semitic conquest it lost its independence, its rulers becoming patesis, dependent rulers, under Sargon and his successors; but it still remained Sumerian and continued to be a city of much importance, and, above all, a centre of artistic development. Indeed, it was in this period and under the immediately succeeding supremacy of the kings of Ur, Ur-Gur and Dungi, that it reached its highest artistic development. At this period, also, under its patesis, Ur-bau and Gudea, Lagash had extensive commercial communications with distant realms. According to his own records, Gudea brought cedars from the Amanus and Lebanon mountains in Syria, diorite or dolorite from eastern Arabia, copper and gold from central and southern Arabia and from Sinai, while his armies, presumably under his overlord, Ur-Gur, were engaged in battles in Elam on the east. His was especially the era of artistic development. Some of the earlier works of Ur-Nina, En-anna-tum, Entemena and others, before the Semitic conquest, are also extremely interesting, especially the famous stele of the vultures and a great silver vase ornamented with what may be called the coat of arms of Lagash, a lion-headed eagle with wings outspread, grasping a lion in each talon. After the time of Gudea, Lagash seems to have lost its importance; at least we know nothing more about it until the construction of the Seleucid fortress mentioned, when it seems to have become part of the Greek kingdom of Characene. The objects found at Tello are the most valuable art treasures up to this time discovered in Babylonia.

See E. de Sarzec, Découvertes en Chaldée (1887 foll.).

(J. P. Pe.)

LAGHMAN, a district of Afghanistan, in the province of Jalalabad, between Jalalabad and Kabul, on the northern side of the Peshawar road, one of the richest and most fertile tracts in Afghanistan. It is the valley of the Kabul river between the Tagao and the Kunar and merges on the north into Kafiristan. The inhabitants, Ghilzais and Tajiks, are supposed to be the cleverest business people in the country. Sugar, cotton and rice are exported to Kabul. The Laghman route between Kabul and India crossing the Kunar river into the Mohmand country is the route followed by Alexander the Great and Baber; but it has now been supplanted by the Khyber.

LAGOON (Fr. lagune, Lat. lacuna, a pool), a term applied to (1) a sheet of salt or brackish water near the sea, (2) a sheet of fresh water of no great depth or extent, (3) the expanse of smooth water enclosed by an atoll. Sea lagoons are formed only where the shores are low and protected from wave action. Under these conditions a bar may be raised above sea-level or a spit may grow until its end touches the land. The enclosed shallow water is then isolated in a wide stretch, the seaward banks broaden, and the lagoon becomes a permanent area of still shallow water with peculiar faunal features. In the old lake plains of Australia there are occasional wide and shallow depressions where water collects permanently. Large numbers of aquatic birds, black swans, wild duck, teal, migrant spoon-bills or pelicans, resort to these fresh-water lagoons.

LAGOS, the western province of Southern Nigeria, a British colony and protectorate in West Africa. The province consists of three divisions: (1) the coast region, including Lagos Island, being the former colony of Lagos; (2) small native states adjacent to the colony; and (3) the Yoruba country, farther inland. The total area is some 27,000 sq. m., or about the size of Scotland. The province is bounded S. by the Gulf of Guinea, (from 2° 46′ 55″ to 4° 30′ E.); W. by the French colony of Dahomey; N. and E. by other provinces of Nigeria.

Physical Features.—The coast is low, marshy and malarious, and all along the shore the great Atlantic billows cause a dangerous surf. Behind the coast-line stretches a series of lagoons, in which are small islands, that of Lagos having an area of 3¾ sq. m. Beyond the lagoons and mangrove swamps is a broad zone of dense primeval forest—“the bush”—which completely separates the arable lands from the coast lagoons. The water-parting of the streams flowing north to the Niger, and south to the Gulf of Guinea, is the main physical feature. The general level of Yorubaland is under 2000 ft. But towards the east, about the upper course of the river Oshun, the elevation is higher. Southward from the divide the land, which is intersected by the nearly parallel courses of the rivers Ogun, Omi, Oshun, Oni and Oluwa, falls in continuous undulations to the coast, the open cultivated ground gradually giving place to forest tracts, where the most characteristic tree is the oil-palm. Flowering trees, certain kinds of rubber vines, and shrubs are plentiful. In the northern regions the shea-butter tree is found. The fauna resembles that of the other regions of the Guinea coast, but large game is becoming scarce. Leopards, antelopes and monkeys are common, and alligators infest the rivers.

The lagoons, lying between the outer surf-beaten beach and the inner shore line, form a navigable highway of still waters, many miles in extent. They are almost entirely free from rock, though they are often shallow, with numerous mud banks. The most extensive are Lekki in the east, and Ikoradu (Lagos) in the west. At its N.W. extremity the Lagos lagoon receives the Ogun, the largest river in Yorubaland, whose current is strong enough to keep the seaward channel open throughout the year. Hence the importance of the port of Lagos, which lies in smooth water at the northern end of this channel. The outer entrance is obstructed by a dangerous sand bar.

Climate and Health.—The climate is unhealthy, especially for Europeans. The rainfall has not been ascertained in the interior. In the northern districts it is probably considerably less than at Lagos, where it is about 70 in. a year. The variation is, however, very great. In 1901 the rainfall was 112 in., in 1902 but 47, these figures being respectively the highest and lowest recorded in a period of seventeen years. The mean temperature at Lagos is 82.5° F., the range being from 68° to 91°. At certain seasons sudden heavy squalls of wind and rain that last for a few hours are common. The hurricane and typhoon are unknown. The principal diseases are malarial fever, smallpox, rheumatism, peripheral neuritis, dysentery, chest diseases and guinea-worm. Fever not unfrequently assumes the dangerous form known as “black-water fever.” The frequency of smallpox is being much diminished outside the larger towns in the interior, in which vaccination is neglected. The absence of plague, yellow fever, cholera, typhoid fever and scarlatina is noteworthy. A mild form of yaws is endemic.

Inhabitants.—The population is estimated at 1,750,000. The Yoruba people, a Negro race divided into many tribes, form the majority of the inhabitants. Notwithstanding their political feuds and their proved capacity as fighting men, the Yoruba are distinguished above all the surrounding races for their generally peaceful disposition, industry, friendliness, courtesy and hospitality towards strangers. They are also intensely patriotic. Physically they resemble closely their Ewe and Dahomey neighbours, but are of somewhat lighter complexion, taller and of less pronounced Negro features. They exhibit high administrative ability, possess a marked capacity for trade, and have made remarkable progress in the industrial arts. The different tribes are distinguished by tattoo markings, usually some simple pattern of two or more parallel lines, disposed horizontally or vertically on the cheeks or other parts of the face. The feeling for religion is deeply implanted among the Yoruba. The majority are pagans, or dominated by pagan beliefs, but Islam has made great progress since the cessation of the Fula wars, while Protestant and Roman Catholic missions have been at work since 1848 at Abeokuta, Oyo, Ibadan and other large towns. Samuel Crowther, the first Negro bishop in the Anglican church, who was distinguished as an explorer, geographer and linguist, was a native of Yorubaland, rescued (1822) by the English from slavery and educated at Sierra Leone (see Yorubas).

Towns.—Besides Lagos (q.v.), pop. about 50,000, the chief towns in the colony proper are Epe, pop. 16,000, on the northern side of the lagoons, and Badagry (a notorious place during the slave-trade period) and Lekki, both on the coast. Inland the chief towns are Abeokuta (q.v.), pop. about 60,000, and Ibadan (q.v.), pop. estimated at 150,000.

Agriculture and Trade.—The chief wealth of the country consists in forest produce, the staple industries being the collection of palm-kernels and palm oil. Besides the oil-palm forests large areas are covered with timber trees, the wood chiefly cut for commercial purposes being a kind of mahogany. The destruction of immature trees and the fluctuations in price render this a very uncertain trade. The rubber industry was started in 1894, and in 1896 the rubber exported was valued at £347,000. In 1899, owing to reckless methods of tapping the vines, 75% of the rubber plants died. Precautions were then taken to preserve the remainder and allow young plants to grow. The collection of rubber recommenced in 1904 and the industry again became one of importance. A considerable area is devoted to cocoa plantations, all owned by native cultivators. Coffee and tobacco of good quality are cultivated and shea-butter is largely used as an illuminant. The Yoruba country is the greatest agricultural centre in West Africa. For home consumption the Yoruba grow yams, maize and millet, the chief articles of food, cassava, sweet potatoes, sesame and beans. Model farms have been established for experimental culture and for the tuition of the natives. A palatable wine is obtained from the Raphia vinifera and native beers are also brewed. Imported spirits are largely consumed. There are no manufactures on a large scale save the making of “country cloths” (from cotton grown, spun and woven in the country) and mats. Pottery and agricultural implements are made, and tanning, dyeing and forging practised in the towns, and along the rivers and lagoons boats and canoes are built. Fishing is extensively engaged in, the fish being dried and sent up country. Except iron there are no valuable minerals in the country.

The cotton plant from which the “country cloths” are made is native to the country, the soil of which is capable of producing the very finest grades of cotton. The Egba branch of the Yoruba have always grown the plant. In 1869 the cotton exported was valued at £76,957, but owing to low prices the natives ceased to grow cotton for export, so that in 1879 the value of exported cotton was only £526. In 1902 planting for export was recommenced by the Egba on scientific lines, and was started in the Abeokuta district with encouraging results.

The Yoruba profess to be unable to alienate land in perpetuity, but native custom does not preclude leasing, and land concessions have been taken up by Europeans on long leases. Some concessions are only for cutting and removing timber; others permit of cultivation. The northern parts of the protectorate are specially suitable for stock raising and poultry culture.

The chief exports are palm-kernels, palm-oil, timber, rubber and cocoa. Palm-kernels alone constitute more than a half in value of the total exports, and with palm-oil over three-fourths. The trade in these products is practically confined to Great Britain and Germany, the share of the first-named being 25% to Germany’s 75%. Minor exports are coffee, “country cloths,” maize, shea-butter and ivory.

Cotton goods are the most important of the imports, spirits coming next, followed by building material, haberdashery and hardware and tobacco. Over 90% of the cotton goods are imported from Great Britain, whilst nearly the same proportion of the spirit imports come from Germany. Nearly all the liquors consist of “Trade Spirits,” chiefly gin, rum and a concoction called “alcohol,” introduced (1901) to meet the growing taste of the people for stronger liquor. This stuff contained 90% of pure alcohol and sometimes over 4% of fusel oil. To hinder the sale of this noxious compound legislation was passed in 1903 prohibiting the import of liquor containing more than ½% of fusel oil, whilst the states of Abeokuta and Ibadan prohibited the importation of liquor stronger than proof. The total trade of the country in 1905 was valued at £2,224,754, the imports slightly exceeding the exports. There is a large transit trade with Dahomey.

Communications.—Lagos is well supplied with means of communication. A 3 ft. 6 in. gauge railway starts from Iddo Island, and extends past Abeokuta, 64 m. from Lagos, Ibadan (123 m.), Oshogbo (175 m.), to Illorin (247 m.) in Northern Nigeria, whence the line is continued to Jebba and Zunguru (see Nigeria). Abeokuta is served by a branch line, 1½ m. long, from Aro on the main line. Railway bridges connect Iddo Island both with the mainland and with Lagos Island (see Lagos, town). This line was begun in 1896 and opened to Ibadan in 1901. In 1905 the building of the section Ibadan-Illorin was undertaken. The railway was built by the government and cost about £7000 per mile. The lagoons offer convenient channels for numerous small craft, which, with the exception of steam-launches, are almost entirely native-built canoes. Branch steamers run between the Forcados mouth of the Niger and Lagos, and also between Lagos and Porto Novo, in French territory, and do a large transit trade. Various roads through the bush have been made by the government. There is telegraphic communication with Europe, Northern Nigeria and South Africa, and steamships ply regularly between Lagos and Liverpool, and Lagos and Hamburg (see Lagos, town).

Administration, Justice, Education, &c.—The small part of the province which constitutes “the colony of Southern Nigeria” is governed as a crown colony. Elsewhere the native governments are retained, the chiefs and councils of elders receiving the advice and support of British commissioners. There is also an advisory native central council which meets at Lagos. The great majority of the civil servants are natives of the country, some of whom have been educated in England. The legal status of slavery is not recognized by the law courts and dealing in slaves is suppressed. As an institution slavery is dying out, and only exists in a domestic form.

The cost of administration is met, mainly, by customs, largely derived from the duties on imported spirits. From the railways, a government monopoly, a considerable net profit is earned. Expenditure is mainly under the heads of railway administration, other public works, military and police, health, and education. The revenue increased in the ten years 1895-1905 from £142,049 to £410,250. In the same period the expenditure rose from £144,484 to £354,254.

The defence of the province is entrusted to the Lagos battalion of the West African Frontier Force, a body under the control of the Colonial Office in London and composed of Hausa (four-fifths) and Yoruba. It is officered from the British army.

The judicial system in the colony proper is based on that of England. The colonial supreme court, by agreement with the rulers of Abeokuta, Ibadan and other states in the protectorate, tries, with the aid of native assessors, all cases of importance in those countries. Other cases are tried by mixed courts, or, where Yoruba alone are concerned, by native courts.

There is a government board of education which maintains a few schools and supervises those voluntarily established. These are chiefly those of various missionary societies, who, besides primary schools, have a few secondary schools. The Mahommedans have their own schools. Grants from public funds are made to the voluntary schools. Considerable attention is paid to manual training, the laws of health and the teaching of English, which is spoken by about one-fourth of the native population.

History.—Lagos Island was so named by the Portuguese explorers of the 15th century, because of the numerous lagoons or lakes on this part of the coast. The Portuguese, and after them the French, had settlements here at various points. In the 18th century Lagos Lagoon became the chief resort of slavers frequenting the Bight of Benin, this portion of the Gulf of Guinea becoming known pre-eminently as the Slave Coast. British traders established themselves at Badagry, 40 m. W. of Lagos, where in 1851 they were attacked by Kosoko, the Yoruba king of Lagos Island. As a result a British naval force seized Lagos after a sharp fight and deposed the king, placing his cousin, Akitoye, on the throne. A treaty was concluded under which Akitoye bound himself to put down the slave trade. This treaty was not adhered to, and in 1861 Akitoye’s son and successor, King Docemo, was induced to give up his territorial jurisdiction and accept a pension of 1200 bags of cowries, afterwards commuted to £1000 a year, which pension he drew until his death in 1885. Immediately after the proclamation of the British annexation, a steady current of immigration from the mainland set in, and a flourishing town arose on Lagos Island. Iddo Island was acquired at the same time as Lagos Island, and from 1862 to 1894 various additions by purchase or cession were made to the colony. In 1879 the small kingdom of Kotonu was placed under British protection. Kotonu lies south and east of the Denham Lagoon (see Dahomey). In 1889 it was exchanged with the French for the kingdom of Pokra which is to the north of Badagry. In the early years of the colony Sir John Glover, R.N., who was twice governor (1864-1866 and 1871-1872), did much pioneer work and earned the confidence of the natives to a remarkable degree. Later Sir C. A. Moloney (governor 1886-1890) opened up relations with the Yoruba and other tribes in the hinterland. He despatched two commissioners whose duty it was to conclude commercial treaties and use British influence to put a stop to inter-tribal fighting and the closing of the trade routes. In 1892 the Jebu, who acted as middlemen between the colony and the Yoruba, closed several trade routes. An expedition sent against them resulted in their subjugation and the annexation of part of their country. An order in council issued in 1899 extended the protectorate over Yorubaland. The tribes of the hinterland have largely welcomed the British protectorate and military expeditions have been few and unimportant. (For the history of the Yoruba states see Yorubas.)