VOLUME XVI SLICE III Latin Language to Lefebvre, François-Joseph (continued 11)

See Druses. Also V. Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine (1896); N. Verney and G. Dambmann, Puissances étrangères en Syrie, &c. (1900); G. Young, Corps de droit ottoman, vol. i. (1905); G. E. Post, Flora of Syria, &c. (1896); M. von Oppenheim, Vom Mittelmeer, &c. (1899).

(A. So.; D. G. H.)

LEBANON, a city of Saint Clair county, Illinois, U.S.A., on Silver Creek, about 24 m. E. of Saint Louis, Missouri. Pop. (1910) 1907. It is served by the Baltimore & Ohio South-Western railroad and by the East Saint Louis & Suburban Electric line. It is situated on a high tableland. Lebanon is the seat of McKendree College, founded by Methodists in 1828 and one of the oldest colleges in the Mississippi valley. It was called Lebanon Seminary until 1830, when the present name was adopted in honour of William McKendree (1757-1835), known as the “Father of Western Methodism,” a great preacher, and a bishop of the Methodist Church in 1808-1835, who had endowed the college with 480 acres of land. In 1835 the college was chartered as the “McKendreean College,” but in 1839 the present name was again adopted. There are coal mines and excellent farming lands in the vicinity of Lebanon. Among the city’s manufactures are flour, planing-mill products, malt liquors, soda and farming implements. The municipality owns and operates its electric-lighting plant. Lebanon was chartered as a city in 1874.

LEBANON, a city and the county-seat of Lebanon county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., in the fertile Lebanon Valley, about 25 m. E. by N. of Harrisburg. Pop. (1900) 17,628, of whom 618 were foreign-born, (1910 census) 19,240. It is served by the Philadelphia & Reading, the Cornwall and the Cornwall & Lebanon railways. About 5 m. S. of the city are the Cornwall (magnetite) iron mines, from which about 18,000,000 tons of iron ore were taken between 1740 and 1902, and 804,848 tons in 1906. The ore yields about 46% of iron, and contains about 2.5% of sulphur, the roasting of the ores being necessary—ore-roasting kilns are more extensively used here than in any other place in the country. The area of ore exposed is about 4000 ft. long and 400 to 800 ft. wide, and includes three hills; it has been one of the most productive magnetite deposits in the world. Limestone, brownstone and brick-clay also abound in the vicinity; and besides mines and quarries, the city has extensive manufactories of iron, steel, chains, and nuts and bolts. In 1905 its factory products were valued at $6,978,458. The municipality owns and operates its water-works.

The first settlement in the locality was made about 1730, and twenty years later a town was laid out by one of the landowners, George Steitz, and named Steitztown in his honour. About 1760 the town became known as Lebanon, and under this name it was incorporated as a borough in 1821 and chartered as a city in 1885.

LE BARGY, CHARLES GUSTAVE AUGUSTE (1858- ), French actor, was born at La Chapelle (Seine). His talent both as a comedian and a serious actor was soon made evident, and he became a member of the Comédie Française, his chief successes being in such plays as Le Duel, L’Énigme, Le Marquis de Priola, L’Autre Danger and Le Dédale. His wife, Simone le Bargy née Benda, an accomplished actress, made her début at the Gymnase in 1902, and in later years had a great success in La Rafale and other plays. In 1910 he had differences with the authorities of the Comédie Française and ceased to be a sociétaire.

LE BEAU, CHARLES (1701-1778), French historical writer, was born at Paris on the 15th of October 1701, and was educated at the Collège de Sainte-Barbe and the Collège du Plessis; at the latter he remained as a teacher until he obtained the chair of rhetoric in the Collège des Grassins. In 1748 he was admitted a member of the Academy of Inscriptions, and in 1752 he was nominated professor of eloquence in the Collège de France. From 1755 he held the office of perpetual secretary to the Academy of Inscriptions, in which capacity he edited fifteen volumes (from the 25th to the 39th inclusive) of the Histoire of that institution. He died at Paris on the 13th of March 1778.

The only work with which the name of Le Beau continues to be associated is his Histoire du Bas-Empire, en commençant à Constantin le Grand, in 22 vols. 12mo (Paris, 1756-1779), being a continuation of C. Rollin’s Histoire Romaine and J. B. L. Crevier’s Histoire des empereurs. Its usefulness arises entirely from the fact of its being a faithful résumé of the Byzantine historians, for Le Beau had no originality or artistic power of his own. Five volumes were added by H. P. Ameilhon (1781-1811), which brought the work down to the fall of Constantinople. A later edition, under the care of M. de Saint-Martin and afterwards of Brosset, has had the benefit of careful revision throughout, and has received considerable additions from Oriental sources.

See his “Éloge” in vol. xlii. of the Histoire de l’Académie des Inscriptions (1786), pp. 190-207.

LEBEAU, JOSEPH (1794-1865), Belgian statesman, was born at Huy on the 3rd of January 1794. He received his early education from an uncle who was parish priest of Hannut, and became a clerk. By dint of economy he raised money to study law at Liége, and was called to the bar in 1819. At Liége he formed a fast friendship with Charles Rogier and Paul Devaux, in conjunction with whom he founded at Liége in 1824 the Mathieu Laensbergh, afterwards Le politique, a journal which helped to unite the Catholic party with the Liberals in their opposition to the ministry, without manifesting any open disaffection to the Dutch government. Lebeau had not contemplated the separation of Holland and Belgium, but his hand was forced by the revolution. He was sent by his native district to the National Congress, and became minister of foreign affairs in March 1831 during the interim regency of Surlet de Chokier. By proposing the election of Leopold of Saxe-Coburg as king of the Belgians he secured a benevolent attitude on the part of Great Britain, but the restoration to Holland of part of the duchies of Limburg and Luxemburg provoked a heated opposition to the treaty of London, and Lebeau was accused of treachery to Belgian interests. He resigned the direction of foreign affairs on the accession of King Leopold, but in the next year became minister of justice. He was elected deputy for Brussels in 1833, and retained his seat until 1848. Differences with the king led to his retirement in 1834. He was subsequently governor of the province of Namur (1838), ambassador to the Frankfort diet (1839), and in 1840 he formed a short-lived Liberal ministry. From this time he held no office of state, though he continued his energetic support of liberal and anti-clerical measures. He died at Huy on the 19th of March 1865.

Lebeau published La Belgique depuis 1847 (Brussels, 4 vols., 1852), Lettres aux électeurs belges (8 vols., Brussels, 1853-1856). His Souvenirs personnels et correspondance diplomatique 1824-1841 (Brussels, 1883) were edited by A. Fréson. See an article by A. Fréson in the Biographie nationale de Belgique; and T. Juste, Joseph Lebeau (Brussels, 1865).

LEBEL, JEAN (d. 1370), Belgian chronicler, was born near the end of the 13th century. His father, Gilles le Beal des Changes, was an alderman of Liége. Jean entered the church and became a canon of the cathedral church, but he and his brother Henri followed Jean de Beaumont to England in 1327, and took part in the border warfare against the Scots. His will is dated 1369, and his epitaph gives the date of his death as 1370. Nothing more is known of his life, but Jacques de Hemricourt, author of the Miroir des nobles de Hesbaye, has left a eulogy of his character, and a description of the magnificence of his attire, his retinue and his hospitality. Hemricourt asserts that he was eighty years old or more when he died. For a long time Jean Lebel (or le Bel) was only known as a chronicler through a reference by Froissart, who quotes him in the prologue of his first book as one of his authorities. A fragment of his work, in the MS. of Jean d’Outremeuse’s Mireur des istores, was discovered in 1847; and the whole of his chronicle, preserved in the library of Châlons-sur-Marne, was edited in 1863 by L. Polain. Jean Lebel gives as his reason for writing a desire to replace a certain misleading rhymed chronicle of the wars of Edward III. by a true relation of his enterprises down to the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War. In the matter of style Lebel has been placed by some critics on the level of Froissart. His chief merit is his refusal to narrate events unless either he himself or his informant had witnessed them. This scrupulousness in the acceptance of evidence must be set against his limitations. He takes on the whole a similar point of view to Froissart’s; he has no concern with national movements or politics; and, writing for the public of chivalry, he preserves no general notion of a campaign, which resolves itself in his narrative into a series of exploits on the part of his heroes. Froissart was considerably indebted to him, and seems to have borrowed from him some of his best-known episodes, such as the death of Robert the Bruce, Edward III. and the countess of Salisbury, and the devotion of the burghers of Calais. The songs and virelais, in the art of writing which he was, according to Hemricourt, an expert, have not come to light.

See L. Polain, Les Vraies Chroniques de messire Jehan le Bel (1863); Kervyn de Lettenhove, Bulletin de la société d’émulation de Bruges, series ii. vols. vii. and ix.; and H. Pirenne in Biographie nationale de Belgique.

LEBER, JEAN MICHEL CONSTANT (1780-1859), French historian and bibliophile, was born at Orléans on the 8th of May 1780. His first work was a poem on Joan of Arc (1804); but he wrote at the same time a Grammaire général synthétique, which attracted the attention of J. M. de Gérando, then secretary-general to the ministry of the interior. The latter found him a minor post in his department, which left him leisure for his historical work. He even took him to Italy when Napoleon was trying to organize, after French models, the Roman states which he had taken from the pope in 1809. Leber however did not stay there long, for he considered the attacks on the temporal property of the Holy See to be sacrilegious. On his return to Paris he resumed his administrative work, literary recreations and historical researches. While spending a part of his time writing vaudevilles and comic operas, he began to collect old essays and rare pamphlets by old French historians. His office was preserved to him by the Restoration, and Leber put his literary gifts at the service of the government. When the question of the coronation of Louis XVIII. arose, he wrote, as an answer to Volney, a minute treatise on the Cérémonies du sacre, which was published at the time of the coronation of Charles X. Towards the end of Villèle’s ministry, when there was a movement of public opinion in favour of extending municipal liberties, he undertook the defence of the threatened system of centralization, and composed, in answer to Raynouard, an Histoire critique du pouvoir municipal depuis l’origine de la monarchie jusqu’à nos jours (1828). He also wrote a treatise entitled De l’état réel de la presse et des pamphlets depuis François Ier jusqu’à Louis XIV., in which he refuted an empty paradox of Charles Nodier, who had tried to prove that the press had never been, and could never be, so free as under the Grand Monarch. A few years later, Leber retired (1839), and sold to the library of Rouen the rich collection of books which he had amassed during thirty years of research. The catalogue he made himself (4 vols., 1839 to 1852). In 1840 he read at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres two dissertations, an “Essai sur l’appréciation de la fortune privée au moyen âge,” followed by an “Examen critique des tables de prix du marc d’argent depuis l’époque de Saint Louis”; these essays were included by the Academy in its Recueil de mémoires présentés par divers savants (vol. i., 1844), and were also revised and published by Leber (1847). They form his most considerable work, and assure him a position of eminence in the economic history of France. He also rendered good service to historians by the publication of his Collection des meilleures dissertations, notices et traités relatifs à l’histoire de France (20 vols., 1826-1840); in the absence of an index, since Leber did not give one, an analytical table of contents is to be found in Alfred Franklin’s Sources de l’histoire de France (1876, pp. 342 sqq.). In consequence of the revolution of 1848, Leber decided to leave Paris. He retired to his native town, and spent his last years in collecting old engravings. He died at Orléans on the 22nd of December 1859.

In 1832 he had been elected as a member of the Société des Antiquaires de France, and in the Bulletin of this society (vol. i., 1860) is to be found the most correct and detailed account of his life’s works.

LEBEUF, JEAN (1687-1760), French historian, was born on the 7th of March 1687 at Auxerre, where his father, a councillor in the parlement, was receveur des consignations. He began his studies in his native town, and continued them in Paris at the Collège Ste Barbe. He soon became known as one of the most cultivated minds of his time. He made himself master of practically every branch of medieval learning, and had a thorough knowledge of the sources and the bibliography of his subject. His learning was not drawn from books only; he was also an archaeologist, and frequently went on expeditions in France, always on foot, in the course of which he examined the monuments of architecture and sculpture, as well as the libraries, and collected a number of notes and sketches. He was in correspondence with all the most learned men of the day. His correspondence with Président Bouhier was published in 1885 by Ernest Petit; his other letters have been edited by the Société des sciences historiques et naturelles de l’Yonne (2 vols., 1866-1867). He also wrote numerous articles, and, after his election as a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1740), a number of Mémoires which appeared in the Recueil of this society. He died at Paris on the 10th of April 1760. His most important researches had Paris as their subject.

He published first a collection of Dissertations sur l’histoire civile et ecclésiastique de Paris (3 vols., 1739-1743), then an Histoire de la ville et de tout le diocèse de Paris (15 vols., 1745-1760), which is a mine of information, mostly taken from the original sources. In view of the advance made by scholarship in the 19th century, it was found necessary to publish a second edition. The work of reprinting it was undertaken by H. Cocheris, but was interrupted (1863) before the completion of vol. iv. Adrien Augier resumed the work, giving Lebeuf’s text, though correcting the numerous typographical errors of the original edition (5 vols., 1883), and added a sixth volume containing an analytical table of contents. Finally, Fernand Bournon completed the work by a volume of Rectifications et additions (1890), worthy to appear side by side with the original work.

The bibliography of Lebeuf’s writings is, partly, in various numbers of the Bibliothèque des écrivains de Bourgogne (1716-1741). His biography is given by Lebeau in the Histoire de l’Académie royale des Inscriptions (xxix., 372, published 1764), and by H. Cocheris, in the preface to his edition.

LE BLANC, NICOLAS (1742-1806), French chemist, was born at Issoudun, Indre, in 1742. He made medicine his profession and in 1780 became surgeon to the duke of Orleans, but he also paid much attention to chemistry. About 1787 he was attracted to the urgent problem of manufacturing carbonate of soda from ordinary sea-salt. The suggestion made in 1789 by Jean Claude de la Métherie (1743-1817), the editor of the Journal de physique, that this might be done by calcining with charcoal the sulphate of soda formed from salt by the action of oil of vitriol, did not succeed in practice because the product was almost entirely sulphide of soda, but it gave Le Blanc, as he himself acknowledged, a basis upon which to work. He soon made the crucial discovery—which proved the foundation of the huge industry of artificial alkali manufacture—that the desired end was to be attained by adding a proportion of chalk to the mixture of charcoal and sulphate of soda. Having had the soundness of this method tested by Jean Darcet (1725-1801), the professor of chemistry at the Collège de France, the duke of Orleans in June 1791 agreed to furnish a sum of 200,000 francs for the purpose of exploiting it. In the following September Le Blanc was granted a patent for fifteen years, and shortly afterwards a factory was started at Saint-Denis, near Paris. But it had not long been in operation when the Revolution led to the confiscation of the duke’s property, including the factory, and about the same time the Committee of Public Safety called upon all citizens who possessed soda-factories to disclose their situation and capacity and the nature of the methods employed. Le Blanc had no choice but to reveal the secrets of his process, and he had the misfortune to see his factory dismantled and his stocks of raw and finished materials sold. By way of compensation for the loss of his rights, the works were handed back to him in 1800, but all his efforts to obtain money enough to restore them and resume manufacturing on a profitable scale were vain, and, worn out with disappointment, he died by his own hand at Saint-Denis on the 16th of January 1806.

Four years after his death, Michel Jean Jacques Dizê (1764-1852), who had been préparateur to Darcet at the time he examined the process and who was subsequently associated with Le Blanc in its exploitation, published in the Journal de physique a paper claiming that it was he himself who had first suggested the addition of chalk; but a committee of the French Academy, which reported fully on the question in 1856, came to the conclusion that the merit was entirely Le Blanc’s (Com. rend., 1856, p. 553).

LE BLANC, a town of central France, capital of an arrondissement, in the department of Indre, 44 m. W.S.W, of Châteauroux on the Orléans railway between Argenton and Poitiers. Pop. (1906) 4719. The Creuse divides it into a lower and an upper town. The church of St Génitour dates from the 12th, 13th and 15th centuries, and there is an old castle restored in modern times. It is the seat of a subprefect, and has a tribunal of first instance and a communal college. Wool-spinning, and the manufacture of linen goods and edge-tools are among the industries. There is trade in horses and in the agricultural and other products of the surrounding region.

Le Blanc, which is identified with the Roman Oblincum, was in the middle ages a lordship belonging to the house of Naillac and a frontier fortress of the province of Berry.

LEBŒUF, EDMOND (1809-1888), marshal of France, was born at Paris on the 5th of November 1809, passed through the École Polytechnique and the school of Metz, and distinguished himself as an artillery officer in Algerian warfare, becoming colonel in 1852. He commanded the artillery of the 1st French corps at the siege of Sebastopol, and was promoted in 1854 to the rank of general of brigade, and in 1857 to that of general of division. In the Italian War of 1859 he commanded the artillery, and by his action at Solferino materially assisted in achieving the victory. In September 1866, having in the meantime become aide-de-camp to Napoleon III., he was despatched to Venetia to hand over that province to Victor Emmanuel. In 1869, on the death of Marshal Niel, General Lebœuf became minister of war, and earned public approbation by his vigorous reorganization of the War Office and the civil departments of the service. In the spring of 1870 he received the marshal’s baton. On the declaration of war with Germany Marshal Lebœuf delivered himself in the Corps Législatif of the historic saying, “So ready are we, that if the war lasts two years, not a gaiter button would be found wanting.” It may be that he intended this to mean that, given time, the reorganization of the War Office would be perfected through experience, but the result inevitably caused it to be regarded as a mere boast, though it is now known that the administrative confusion on the frontier in July 1870 was far less serious than was supposed at the time. Lebœuf took part in the Lorraine campaign, at first as chief of staff (major-general) of the Army of the Rhine, and afterwards, when Bazaine became commander-in-chief, as chief of the III. corps, which he led in the battles around Metz. He distinguished himself, whenever engaged, by personal bravery and good leadership. Shut up with Bazaine in Metz, on its fall he was confined as a prisoner in Germany. On the conclusion of peace he returned to France and gave evidence before the commission of inquiry into the surrender of that stronghold, when he strongly denounced Bazaine. After this he retired into private life to the Château du Moncel near Argentan, where he died on the 7th of June 1888.

LE BON, JOSEPH (1765-1795), French politician, was born at Arras on the 29th of September 1765. He became a priest in the order of the Oratory, and professor of rhetoric at Beaune. He adopted revolutionary ideas, and became a curé of the Constitutional Church in the department of Pas-de-Calais, where he was later elected as a député suppléant to the Convention. He became maire of Arras and administrateur of Pas-de-Calais, and on the 2nd of July 1793 took his seat in the Convention. He was sent as a representative on missions into the departments of the Somme and Pas-de-Calais, where he showed great severity in dealing with offences against revolutionaries (8th Brumaire, year II. to 22nd Messidor, year II.; i.e. 29th October 1793 to 10th July 1794). In consequence, during the reaction which followed the 9th Thermidor (27th July 1794) he was arrested on the 22nd Messidor, year III. (10th July 1795). He was tried before the criminal tribunal of the Somme, condemned to death for abuse of his power during his mission, and executed at Amiens on the 24th Vendémiaire in the year IV. (10th October 1795). Whatever Le Bon’s offences, his condemnation was to a great extent due to the violent attacks of one of his political enemies, Armand Guffroy; and it is only just to remember that it was owing to his courage that Cambrai was saved from falling into the hands of the Austrians.

His son, Émile le Bon, published a Histoire de Joseph le Bon et des tribunaux révolutionnaires d’Arras et de Cambrai (2nd ed., 2 vols., Arras, 1864).

LEBRIJA, or Lebrixa, a town of southern Spain, in the province of Seville, near the left bank of the Guadalquivir, and on the eastern edge of the marshes known as Las Marismas. Pop. (1900) 10,997. Lebrija is 44 m. S. by W. of Seville, on the Seville-Cadiz railway. Its chief buildings are a ruined Moorish castle and the parish church, an imposing structure in a variety of styles—Moorish, Gothic, Romanesque—dating from the 14th century to the 16th, and containing some early specimens of the carving of Alonso Cano (1601-1667). There are manufactures of bricks, tiles and earthenware, for which clay is found in the neighbourhood; and some trade in grain, wine and oil.

Lebrija is the Nabrissa or Nebrissa, surnamed Veneria, of the Romans; by Silius Italicus (iii. 393), who connects it with the worship of Dionysus, the name is derived from the Greek νεβρίς (a “fawn-skin,” associated with Dionysiac ritual). Nebrishah was a strong and populous place during the period of Moorish domination (from 711); it was taken by St Ferdinand in 1249, but again lost, and became finally subject to the Castilian crown only under Alphonso the Wise in 1264. It was the birthplace of Elio Antonio de Lebrija or Nebrija (1444-1522), better known as Nebrissensis, one of the most important leaders in the revival of learning in Spain, the tutor of Queen Isabella, and a collaborator with Cardinal Jimenes in the preparation of the Complutensian Polyglot (see Alcala de Henares).

LE BRUN, CHARLES (1619-1690), French painter, was born at Paris on the 24th of February 1619, and attracted the notice of Chancellor Séguier, who placed him at the age of eleven in the studio of Vouet. At fifteen he received commissions from Cardinal Richelieu, in the execution of which he displayed an ability which obtained the generous commendations of Poussin, in whose company Le Brun started for Rome in 1642. In Rome he remained four years in the receipt of a pension due to the liberality of the chancellor. On his return to Paris Le Brun found numerous patrons, of whom Superintendent Fouquet was the most important. Employed at Vaux le Vicomte, Le Brun ingratiated himself with Mazarin, then secretly pitting Colbert against Fouquet. Colbert also promptly recognized Le Brun’s powers of organization, and attached him to his interests. Together they founded the Academy of Painting and Sculpture (1648), and the Academy of France at Rome (1666), and gave a new development to the industrial arts. In 1660 they established the Gobelins, which at first was a great school for the manufacture, not of tapestries only, but of every class of furniture required in the royal palaces. Commanding the industrial arts through the Gobelins—of which he was director—and the whole artist world through the Academy—in which he successively held every post—Le Brun imprinted his own character on all that was produced in France during his lifetime, and gave a direction to the national tendencies which endured after his death. The nature of his emphatic and pompous talent was in harmony with the taste of the king, who, full of admiration at the decorations designed by Le Brun for his triumphal entry into Paris (1660), commissioned him to execute a series of subjects from the history of Alexander. The first of these, “Alexander and the Family of Darius,” so delighted Louis XIV. that he at once ennobled Le Brun (December, 1662), who was also created first painter to his majesty with a pension of 12,000 livres, the same amount as he had yearly received in the service of the magnificent Fouquet. From this date all that was done in the royal palaces was directed by Le Brun. The works of the gallery of Apollo in the Louvre were interrupted in 1677 when he accompanied the king to Flanders (on his return from Lille he painted several compositions in the Château of St Germains), and finally—for they remained unfinished at his death—by the vast labours of Versailles, where he reserved for himself the Halls of War and Peace, the Ambassadors’ Staircase, and the Great Gallery, other artists being forced to accept the position of his assistants. At the death of Colbert, Louvois, who succeeded him in the department of public works, showed no favour to Le Brun, and in spite of the king’s continued support he felt a bitter change in his position. This contributed to the illness which on the 22nd of February 1690 ended in his death in the Gobelins. Besides his gigantic labours at Versailles and the Louvre, the number of his works for religious corporations and private patrons is enormous. He modelled and engraved with much facility, and, in spite of the heaviness and poverty of drawing and colour, his extraordinary activity and the vigour of his conceptions justify his claim to fame. Nearly all his compositions have been reproduced by celebrated engravers.

LEBRUN, CHARLES FRANÇOIS, duc de Plaisance (1739-1824), French statesman, was born at St-Sauveur-Lendelin (Manche) on the 19th of March 1739, and in 1762 made his first appearance as a lawyer at Paris. He filled the posts successively of censeur royale (1766) and of inspector general of the domains of the crown (1768); he was also one of the chief advisers of the chancellor Maupeou, took part in his struggle against the parlements, and shared in his downfall in 1774. He then devoted himself to literature, translating Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1774), and the Iliad (1776). At the outset of the Revolution he foresaw its importance, and in the Voix du citoyen, which he published in 1789, predicted the course which events would take. In the Constituent Assembly, where he sat as deputy for Dourdan, he professed liberal views, and was the proposer of various financial laws. He then became president of the directory of Seine-et-Oise, and in 1795 was elected as a deputy to the Council of Ancients. After the coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire in the year VIII. (9th November 1799), Lebrun was made third consul. In this capacity he took an active part in the reorganization of finance and of the administration of the departments of France. In 1804 he was appointed arch-treasurer of the empire, and in 1805-1806 as governor-general of Liguria effected its annexation to France. He opposed Napoleon’s restoration of the noblesse, and in 1808 only reluctantly accepted the title of duc de Plaisance (Piacenza). He was next employed in organizing the departments which were formed in Holland, of which he was governor-general from 1811 to 1813. Although to a certain extent opposed to the despotism of the emperor, he was not in favour of his deposition, though he accepted the fait accompli of the Restoration in April 1814. Louis XVIII. made him a peer of France; but during the Hundred Days he accepted from Napoleon the post of Grand Master of the university. On the return of the Bourbons in 1815 he was consequently suspended from the House of Peers, but was recalled in 1819. He died at St Mesmes (Seine-et-Oise) on the 16th of June 1824. He had been made a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1803.

See M. de Caumont la Force, L’Architrésorier Lebrun (Paris, 1907); M. Marie du Mesnil, Mémoire sur le prince Le Brun, duc de Plaisance (Paris, 1828); Opinions, rapports et choix d’écrits politiques de C. F. Lebrun (1829), edited, with a biographical notice, by his son Anne-Charles Lebrun.

LEBRUN, PIERRE ANTOINE (1785-1873), French poet, was born in Paris on the 29th of November 1785. An Ode à la grande armée, mistaken at the time for the work of Écouchard Lebrun, attracted Napoleon’s attention, and secured for the author a pension of 1200 francs. Lebrun’s plays, once famous, are now forgotten. They are: Ulysse (1814), Marie Stuart (1820), which obtained a great success, and Le Cid d’Andalousie (1825). Lebrun visited Greece in 1820, and on his return to Paris he published in 1822 an ode on the death of Napoleon which cost him his pension. In 1825 he was the guest of Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford. The coronation of Charles X. in that year inspired the verses entitled La Vallée de Champrosay, which have, perhaps, done more to secure his fame than his more ambitious attempts. In 1828 appeared his most important poem, La Grèce, and in the same year he was elected to the Academy. The revolution of 1830 opened up for him a public career; in 1831 he was made director of the Imprimerie Royale, and subsequently filled with distinction other public offices, becoming senator in 1853. He died on the 27th of May 1873.

See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits contemporains, vol. ii.

LEBRUN, PONCE DENIS ÉCOUCHARD (1729-1807), French lyric poet, was born in Paris on the 11th of August 1729, in the house of the prince de Conti, to whom his father was valet. Young Lebrun had among his schoolfellows a son of Louis Racine whose disciple he became. In 1755 he published an Ode sur les désastres de Lisbon. In 1759 he married Marie Anne de Surcourt, addressed in his Élégies as Fanny. To the early years of his marriage belongs his poem Nature. His wife suffered much from his violent temper, and when in 1774 she brought an action against him to obtain a separation, she was supported by Lebrun’s own mother and sister. He had been secrétaire des commandements to the prince de Conti, and on his patron’s death was deprived of his occupation. He suffered a further misfortune in the loss of his capital by the bankruptcy of the prince de Guémené. To this period belongs a long poem, the Veillées des Muses, which remained unfinished, and his ode to Buffon, which ranks among his best works. Dependent on government pensions he changed his politics with the times. Calonne he compared to the great Sully, and Louis XVI. to Henry IV., but the Terror nevertheless found in him its official poet. He occupied rooms in the Louvre, and fulfilled his obligations by shameless attacks on the unfortunate king and queen. His excellent ode on the Vengeur and the Ode nationale contre Angleterre on the occasion of the projected invasion of England are in honour of the power of Napoleon. This “versatility” has so much injured Lebrun’s reputation that it is difficult to appreciate his real merit. He had a genius for epigram, and the quatrains and dizaines directed against his many enemies have a verve generally lacking in his odes. The one directed against La Harpe is called by Sainte-Beuve the “queen of epigrams.” La Harpe has said that the poet, called by his friends, perhaps with a spice of irony, Lebrun-Pindare, had written many fine strophes but not one good ode. The critic exposed mercilessly the obscurities and unlucky images which occur even in the ode to Buffon, and advised the author to imitate the simplicity and energy that adorned Buffon’s prose. Lebrun died in Paris on the 31st of August 1807.

His works were published by his friend P. L. Ginguené in 1811. The best of them are included in Prosper Poitevin’s “Petits poètes français,” which forms part of the “Panthéon littéraire.”

LE CARON, HENRI (whose real name was Thomas Miller Beach) (1841-1894), British secret service agent, was born at Colchester, on the 26th of September 1841. He was of an adventurous character, and when nineteen years old went to Paris, where he found employment in business connected with America. Infected with the excitement of the American Civil War, he crossed the Atlantic in 1861 and enlisted in the Northern army, taking the name of Henri Le Caron. In 1864 he married a young lady who had helped him to escape from some Confederate marauders; and by the end of the war he rose to be major. In 1865, through a companion in arms named O’Neill, he was brought into contact with Fenianism, and having learnt of the Fenian plot against Canada, he mentioned the designs when writing home to his father. Mr Beach told his local M.P., who in turn told the Home Secretary, and the latter asked Mr Beach to arrange for further information. Le Caron, inspired (as all the evidence shows) by genuinely patriotic feeling, from that time till 1889 acted for the British government as a paid military spy. He was a proficient in medicine, among other qualifications for this post, and he remained for years on intimate terms with the most extreme men in the Fenian organization under all its forms. His services enabled the British government to take measures which led to the fiasco of the Canadian invasion of 1870 and Riel’s surrender in 1871, and he supplied full details concerning the various Irish-American associations, in which he himself was a prominent member. He was in the secrets of the “new departure” in 1879-1881, and in the latter year had an interview with Parnell at the House of Commons, when the Irish leader spoke sympathetically of an armed revolution in Ireland. For twenty-five years he lived at Detroit and other places in America, paying occasional visits to Europe, and all the time carrying his life in his hand. The Parnell Commission of 1889 put an end to this. Le Caron was subpoenaed by The Times, and in the witness-box the whole story came out, all the efforts of Sir Charles Russell in cross-examination failing to shake his testimony, or to impair the impression of iron tenacity and absolute truthfulness which his bearing conveyed. His career, however, for good or evil, was at an end. He published the story of his life, Twenty-five Years in the Secret Service, and it had an immense circulation. But he had to be constantly guarded, his acquaintances were hampered from seeing him, and he was the victim of a painful disease, of which he died on the 1st of April 1894. The report of the Parnell Commission is his monument.

LE CATEAU, or Cateau-Cambrésis, a town of northern France, in the department of Nord, on the Selle, 15 m. E.S.E. of Cambrai by road. Pop. (1906) 10,400. A church of the early 17th century and a town-hall in the Renaissance style are its chief buildings. Its institutions include a board of trade-arbitration and a communal college, and its most important industries are wool-spinning and weaving. Formed by the union of the two villages of Péronne and Vendelgies, under the protection of a castle built by the bishop of Cambrai, Le Cateau became the seat of an abbey in the 11th century. In the 15th it was frequently taken and retaken, and in 1556 it was burned by the French, who in 1559 signed a celebrated treaty with Spain in the town. It was finally ceded to France by the peace of Nijmwegen in 1678.

LECCE (anc. Lupiae), a town and archiepiscopal see of Apulia, Italy, capital of the province of Lecce, 24 m. S.E. of Brindisi by rail. Pop. (1906) 35,179. The town is remarkable for the number of buildings of the 17th century, in the rococo style, which it contains; among these are the cathedral of S. Oronzo, and the churches of S. Chiara, S. Croce, S. Domenico, &c., the Seminario, and the Prefettura (the latter contains a museum, with a collection of Greek vases, &c.). Buildings of an earlier period are not numerous, but the fine portal of the Romanesque church of SS. Nicola e Cataldo, built by Tancred in 1180, may be noted. Another old church is S. Maria di Cerrate, near the town. Lecce contains a large government tobacco factory, and is the centre of a fertile agricultural district. To the E. 7½ m. is the small harbour of S. Cataldo, reached by electric tramway. Lecce is quite close to the site of the ancient Lupiae, equidistant (25 m.) from Brundusium and Hydruntum, remains of which are mentioned as existing up to the 15th century. A colony was founded there in Roman times, and Hadrian made a harbour—no doubt at S. Cataldo. Hardly a mile west was Rudiae, the birthplace of the poet Ennius, spoken of by Silius Italicus as worthy of mention for that reason alone. Its site was marked by the now deserted village of Rugge. The name Lycea, or Lycia, begins to appear in the 6th century. The city was for some time held by counts of Norman blood, among whom the most noteworthy is Bohemond, son of Robert Guiscard. It afterwards passed to the Orsini. The rank of provincial capital was bestowed by Ferdinand of Aragon in acknowledgment of the fidelity of Lecce to his cause.

(T. As.)

See M. S. Briggs, In the Heel of Italy (1910).

LECCO, a town of Lombardy, in the province of Como, 32 m. by rail N. by E. of Milan, and reached by steamer from Como, 673 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1901) 10,352. It is situated near the southern extremity of the eastern branch of the Lake of Como, which is frequently distinguished as the Lake of Lecco. At Lecco begins the line (run by electricity) to Colico, whence there are branches to Chiavenna and Sondrio; and another line runs to Bergamo. To the south the Adda is crossed by a fine bridge originally constructed in 1335, and rebuilt in 1609 by Fuentes. Lecco, in spite of its antiquity, presents a modern appearance, almost the only old building being its castle, of which a part remains. Its schools are particularly good. Besides iron-works, there are copper-works, brass-foundries, olive-oil mills and a manufacture of wax candles; and silk-spinning, cotton-spinning and wood-carving. In the neighbourhood is the villa of Caleotto, the residence of Alessandro Manzoni, who in his Promessi Sposi, has left a full description of the district. A statue has been erected to him.

In the 11th century Lecco, previously the seat of a marquisate, was presented to the bishops of Como by Otto II.; but in the 12th century it passed to the archbishops of Milan, and in 1127 it assisted the Milanese in the destruction of Como. During the 13th century it was struggling for its existence with the metropolitan city; and its fate seemed to be sealed when the Visconti drove its inhabitants across the lake to Valmadrera, and forbade them to raise their town from its ashes. But in a few years the people returned; Azzone Visconti made Lecco a strong fortress, and in 1335 united it with the Milanese territory by a bridge across the Adda. During the 15th and 16th centuries the citadel of Lecco was an object of endless contention. In 1647 the town with its territory was made a countship. Morone, Charles V.’s Italian chancellor, was born in Lecco.

See A. L. Apostolo, Lecco ed il suo territorio (Lecco, 1855).

LECH (Licus), a river of Germany in the kingdom of Bavaria, 177 m. long, with a drainage basin of 2550 sq. m. It rises in the Vorarlberg Alps, at an altitude of 6120 ft. It winds out of the gloomy limestone mountains, flows in a north-north-easterly direction, and enters the plains at Füssen (2580 ft.), where it forms rapids and a fall, then pursues a northerly course past Augsburg, where it receives the Wertach, and joins the Danube from the right just below Donauwörth (1330 ft.). It is not navigable, owing to its torrential character and the gravel beds which choke its channel. More than once great historic events have been decided upon its banks. On the Lechfeld, a stony waste some miles long, between the Lech and the Wertach, the emperor Otto I. defeated the Hungarians in August 955. Tilly, in attempting to defend the passage of the stream at Rain against the forces of Gustavus Adolphus, was fatally wounded, on the 5th of April 1632. The river was formerly the boundary between Bavaria and Swabia.

LE CHAMBON, or Le Chambon-Feugerolles, a town of east-central France in the department of Loire, 7½ m. S.W. of St Étienne by rail, on the Ondaine, a tributary of the Loire. Pop. (1906) town, 7525; commune, 12,011. Coal is mined in the neighbourhood, and there are forges, steel works, manufactures of tools and other iron goods, and silk mills. The feudal castle of Feugerolles on a hill to the south-east dates in part from the 11th century.

Between Le Chambon and St Étienne is La Ricamarie (pop. of town 5289) also of importance for its coal-mines. Many of the galleries of a number of these mines are on fire, probably from spontaneous combustion. According to popular tradition these fires date from the time of the Saracens; more authentically from the 15th century.

LE CHAPELIER, ISAAC RENÉ GUY (1754-1794), French politician, was born at Rennes on the 12th of June 1754, his father being bâtonnier of the corporation of lawyers in that town. He entered his father’s profession, and had some success as an orator. In 1789 he was elected as a deputy to the States General by the Tiers-État of the sénéchaussée of Rennes. He adopted advanced opinions, and was one of the founders of the Breton Club (see Jacobin Club); his influence in the Constituent Assembly was considerable, and on the 3rd of August 1789 he was elected its president. Thus he presided over the Assembly during the important period following the 4th of August; he took an active part in the debates, and was a leading member of the committee which drew up the new constitution; he further presented a report on the liberty of theatres and on literary copyright. He was also conspicuous as opposing Robespierre when he proposed that members of the Constituent Assembly should not be eligible for election to the proposed new Assembly. After the flight of the king to Varennes (20th of June 1792), his opinions became more moderate, and on the 29th of September he brought forward a motion to restrict the action of the clubs. This, together with a visit which he paid to England in 1792 made him suspect, and he was denounced on his return for conspiring with foreign nations. He went into hiding, but was discovered in consequence of a pamphlet which he published to defend himself, arrested and condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal. He was executed at Paris on the 22nd of April 1794.

See A. Aulard, Les Orateurs de la constituante (2nd ed., Paris, 1905); R. Kerviler, Récherches et notices sur les députés de la Bretagne aux états généraux (2 vols., Rennes, 1888-1889); P. J. Levot, Biographie bretonne (2 vols., 1853-1857).

LECHLER, GOTTHARD VICTOR (1811-1888), German Lutheran theologian, was born on the 18th of April 1811 at Kloster Reichenbach in Württemberg. He studied at Tübingen under F. C. Baur, and became in 1858 pastor of the church of St Thomas, professor Ordinarius of historical theology and superintendent of the Lutheran church of Leipzig. He died on the 26th of December 1888. A disciple of Neander, he belonged to the extreme right of the school of mediating theologians. He is important as the historian of early Christianity and of the pre-Reformation period. Although F. C. Baur was his teacher, he did not attach himself to the Tübingen school; in reply to the contention that there are traces of a sharp conflict between two parties, Paulinists and Petrinists, he says that “we find variety coupled with agreement, and unity with difference, between Paul and the earlier apostles; we recognize the one spirit in the many gifts.” His Das apostolische und das nachapostolische Zeitalter (1851), which developed out of a prize essay (1849), passed through three editions in Germany (3rd ed., 1885), and was translated into English (2 vols., 1886). The work which in his own opinion was his greatest, Johann von Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der Reformation (2 vols., 1873), appeared in English with the title John Wiclif and his English Precursors (1878, new ed., 1884). An earlier work, Geschichte des engl. Deïsmus (1841), is still regarded as a valuable contribution to the study of religious thought in England.

Lechler’s other works include Geschichte der Presbyterial- und Synodal-verfassung (1854), Urkundenfunde zur Geschichte des christl. Altertums (1886), and biographies of Thomas Bradwardine (1862) and Robert Grosseteste (1867). He wrote part of the commentary on the Acts of the Apostles in J. P. Lange’s Bibelwerk. From 1882 he edited with F. W. Dibelius the Beiträge zur sächsischen Kirchengeschichte. Johannes Hus (1890) was published after his death.

LECKY, WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE (1838-1903), Irish historian and publicist, was born at Newtown Park, near Dublin, on the 26th of March 1838, being the eldest son of John Hartpole Lecky, whose family had for many generations been landowners in Ireland. He was educated at Kingstown, Armagh, and Cheltenham College, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated B.A. in 1859 and M.A. in 1863, and where, with a view to becoming a clergyman in the Irish Protestant Church, he went through a course of divinity. In 1860 he published anonymously a small book entitled The Religious Tendencies of the Age, but on leaving college he abandoned his first intention and turned to historical work. In 1861 he published Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, a brief sketch of the lives and work of Swift, Flood, Grattan and O’Connell, which gave decided promise of his later admirable work in the same field. This book, originally published anonymously, was republished in 1871; and the essay on Swift, rewritten and amplified, appeared again in 1897 as an introduction to a new edition of Swift’s works. Two learned surveys of certain aspects of history followed: A History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe (2 vols., 1865), and A History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (2 vols., 1869). Some criticism was aroused by these books, especially by the last named, with its opening dissertation on “the natural history of morals,” but both have been generally accepted as acute and suggestive commentaries upon a wide range of facts. Lecky then devoted himself to the chief work of his life, A History of England during the Eighteenth Century, vols. i. and ii. of which appeared in 1878, and vols. vii. and viii. (completing the work) in 1890. His object was “to disengage from the great mass of facts those which relate to the permanent forces of the nation, or which indicate some of the more enduring features of national life,” and in the carrying out of this task Lecky displays many of the qualities of a great historian. The work is distinguished by the lucidity of its style, but the fulness and extent of the authorities referred to, and, above all, by the judicial impartiality maintained by the author throughout. These qualities are perhaps most conspicuous and most valuable in the chapters which deal with the history of Ireland, and in the cabinet edition of 1892, in 12 vols. (frequently reprinted) this part of the work is separated from the rest, and occupies five volumes under the title of A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. A volume of Poems, published in 1891, was characterized by a certain frigidity and by occasional lapses into commonplace, objections which may also be fairly urged against much of Lecky’s prose-writing. In 1896 he published two volumes entitled Democracy and Liberty, in which he considered, with special reference to Great Britain, France and America, some of the tendencies of modern democracies. The somewhat gloomy conclusions at which he arrived provoked much criticism both in Great Britain and America, which was renewed when he published in a new edition (1899) an elaborate and very depreciatory estimate of Gladstone, then recently dead. This work, though essentially different from the author’s purely historical writings, has many of their merits, though it was inevitable that other minds should take a different view of the evidence. In The Map of Life (1900) he discussed in a popular style some of the ethical problems which arise in everyday life. In 1903 he published a revised and greatly enlarged edition of Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, in two volumes, from which the essay on Swift was omitted and that on O’Connell was expanded into a complete biography of the great advocate of repeal of the Union. Though always a keen sympathizer with the Irish people in their misfortunes and aspirations, and though he had criticized severely the methods by which the Act of Union was passed, Lecky, who grew up as a moderate Liberal, was from the first strenuously opposed to Gladstone’s policy of Home Rule, and in 1895 he was returned to parliament as Unionist member for Dublin University. In 1897 he was made a privy councillor, and among the coronation honours in 1902 he was nominated an original member of the new Order of Merit. His university honours included the degree of LL.D. from Dublin, St Andrews and Glasgow, the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford and the degree of Litt.D. from Cambridge. In 1894 he was elected corresponding member of the Institute of France. He contributed occasionally to periodical literature, and two of his addresses, The Political Value of History (1892) and The Empire, its Value and its Growth (1893), were published. He died in London on the 22nd of October 1903. He married in 1871 Elizabeth, baroness de Dedem, daughter of baron de Dedem, a general in the Dutch service, but had no children. Mrs Lecky contributed to various reviews a number of articles, chiefly on historical and political subjects. A volume of Lecky’s Historical and Political Essays was published posthumously (London, 1908).

LE CLERC [Clericus], JEAN (1657-1736), French Protestant theologian, was born on the 19th of March 1657 at Geneva, where his father, Stephen Le Clerc, was professor of Greek. The family originally belonged to the neighbourhood of Beauvais in France, and several of its members acquired some name in literature. Jean Le Clerc applied himself to the study of philosophy under J. R. Chouet (1642-1731) the Cartesian, and attended the theological lectures of P. Mestrezat, Franz Turretin and Louis Tronchin (1629-1705). In 1678-1679 he spent some time at Grenoble as tutor in a private family; on his return to Geneva he passed his examinations and received ordination. Soon afterwards he went to Saumur, where in 1679 were published Liberii de Sancto Amore Epistolae Theologicae (Irenopoli: Typis Philalethianis), usually attributed to him; they deal with the doctrine of the Trinity, the hypostatic union of the two natures in Jesus Christ, original sin, and the like, in a manner sufficiently far removed from that of the conventional orthodoxy of the period. In 1682 he went to London, where he remained six months, preaching on alternate Sundays in the Walloon church and in the Savoy chapel. Passing to Amsterdam he was introduced to John Locke and to Philip v. Limborch, professor at the Remonstrant college; the acquaintance with Limborch soon ripened into a close friendship, which strengthened his preference for the Remonstrant theology, already favourably known to him by the writings of his grand-uncle, Stephan Curcellaeus (d. 1645) and by those of Simon Episcopius. A last attempt to live at Geneva, made at the request of relatives there, satisfied him that the theological atmosphere was uncongenial, and in 1684 he finally settled at Amsterdam, first as a moderately successful preacher, until ecclesiastical jealousy shut him out from that career, and afterwards as professor of philosophy, belles-lettres and Hebrew in the Remonstrant seminary. This appointment, which he owed to Limborch, he held from 1684, and in 1712 on the death of his friend he was called to occupy the chair of church history also. His suspected Socinianism was the cause, it is said, of his exclusion from the chair of dogmatic theology. Apart from his literary labours, Le Clerc’s life at Amsterdam was uneventful. In 1691 he married a daughter of Gregorio Leti. From 1728 onward he was subject to repeated strokes of paralysis, and he died on the 8th of January 1736.

A full catalogue of the publications of Le Clerc will be found, with biographical material, in E. and E. Haag’s France Protestante (where seventy-three works are enumerated), or in J. G. de Chauffepié’s Dictionnaire. Only the most important of these can be mentioned here. In 1685 he published Sentimens de quelques théologiens de Hollande sur l’histoire critique du Vieux Testament composée par le P. Richard Simon, in which, while pointing out what he believed to be the faults of that author, he undertook to make some positive contributions towards a right understanding of the Bible. Among these last may be noted his argument against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, his views as to the manner in which the five books were composed, his opinions (singularly free for the time in which he lived) on the subject of inspiration in general, and particularly as to the inspiration of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles. Richard Simon’s Réponse (1686) elicited from Le Clerc a Défense des sentimens in the same year, which was followed by a new Réponse (1687). In 1692 appeared his Logica sive Ars Ratiocinandi, and also Ontologia et Pneumatologia; these, with the Physica (1695), are incorporated with the Opera Philosophica, which have passed through several editions. In 1693 his series of Biblical commentaries began with that on Genesis; the series was not completed until 1731. The portion relating to the New Testament books included the paraphrase and notes of Henry Hammond (1605-1660). Le Clerc’s commentary had a great influence in breaking up traditional prejudices and showing the necessity for a more scientific inquiry into the origin and meaning of the biblical books. It was on all sides hotly attacked. His Ars Critica appeared in 1696, and, in continuation, Epistolae Criticae et Ecclesiasticae in 1700. Le Clerc’s new edition of the Apostolic Fathers of Johann Cotelerius (1627-1686), published in 1698, marked an advance in the critical study of these documents. But the greatest literary influence of Le Clerc was probably that which he exercised over his contemporaries by means of the serials, or, if one may so call them, reviews, of which he was editor. These were the Bibliothèque universelle et historiqnijkue (Amsterdam, 25 vols. 12 mo., 1686-1693), begun with J. C. de la Croze; the Bibliothèque choisie (Amsterdam, 28 vols., 1703-1713); and the Bibliothèque ancienne et moderne, (29 vols., 1714-1726).

See Le Clerc’s Parrhasiana ou pensées sur des matières de critique, d’histoire, de morale, et de politique: avec la défense de divers ouvrages de M. L. C. par Théodore Parrhase (Amsterdam, 1699); and Vita et opera ad annum MDCCXI., amici ejus opusculum, philosophicis Clerici operibus subjiciendum, also attributed to himself. The supplement to Hammond’s notes was translated into English in 1699, Parrhasiana, or Thoughts on Several Subjects, in 1700, the Harmony of the Gospels in 1701, and Twelve Dissertations out of M. Le Clerc’s Genesis in 1696.

LECOCQ, ALEXANDRE CHARLES (1832- ), French musical composer, was born in Paris, on the 3rd of June 1832. He was admitted into the Conservatoire in 1849, being already an accomplished pianist. He studied under Bazin, Halévy and Benoist, winning the first prize for harmony in 1850, and the second prize for fugue in 1852. He first gained notice by dividing with Bizet the first prize for an operetta in a competition instituted by Offenbach. His operetta, Le Docteur miracle, was performed at the Bouffes Parisiens in 1857. After that he wrote constantly for theatres, but produced nothing worthy of mention until Fleur de thé (1868), which ran for more than a hundred nights. Les Cent vierges (1872) was favourably received also, but all his previous successes were cast into the shade by La Fille de Madame Angot (Paris, 1873; London, 1873), which was performed for 400 nights consecutively, and has since gained and retained enormous popularity. After 1873 Lecocq produced a large number of comic operas, though he never equalled his early triumph in La Fille de Madame Angot. Among the best of his pieces are Giroflé-Girofla (Paris and London, 1874); Les Prés Saint-Gervais (Paris and London, 1874); La Petite Mariée (Paris, 1875; London, 1876, revived as The Scarlet Feather, 1897); Le Petit Duc (Paris, 1878; London, as The Little Duke, 1878); La Petite Mademoiselle (Paris, 1879; London, 1880); Le Jour et la Nuit (Paris, 1881; London, as Manola, 1882); Le Cœur et la main (Paris, 1882; London, as Incognita, 1893); La Princesse des Canaries (Paris, 1883; London, as Pepita, 1888). In 1899 a ballet by Lecocq, entitled Le Cygne, was staged at the Opéra Comique, Paris; and in 1903 Yetta was produced at Brussels.

LECOINTE-PUYRAVEAU, MICHEL MATHIEU (1764-1827), French politician, was born at Saint-Maixent (Deux-Sèvres) on the 13th of December 1764. Deputy for his department to the Legislative Assembly in 1792, and to the Convention in the same year, he voted for “the death of the tyrant.” His association with the Girondins nearly involved him in their fall, in spite of his vigorous republicanism. He took part in the revolution of Thermidor, but protested against the establishment of the Directory, and continually pressed for severer measures against the émigrés, and even their relations who had remained in France. He was secretary and then president of the Council of Five Hundred, and under the Consulate a member of the Tribunate. He took no part in public affairs under the Empire, but was lieutenant-general of police for south-east France during the Hundred Days. After Waterloo he took ship from Toulon, but the ship was driven back by a storm and he narrowly escaped massacre at Marseilles. After six weeks’ imprisonment in the Château d’If he returned to Paris, escaping, after the proscription of the regicides, to Brussels, where he died on the 15th of January 1827.

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

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

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

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

“Tu te tairas, ô voix sinistre des vivants!”

His only prayer is to Death, “divine Death,” that it may gather its children to its breast:—

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

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

(A. Sy.)

See J. Dornis, Leconte de Lisle intime (1895); F. Calmette, Un Demi siècle littéraire, Leconte de Lisle et ses amis (1902); Paul Bourget, Nouveaux essais de psychologie contemporaine (1885); F. Brunetière, L’Évolution de la poésie lyrique en France au XIXe siècle (1894); Maurice Spronck, Les Artistes littéraires (1889); J. Lemaître, Les Contemporains (2nd series, 1886); F. Brunetière, Nouveaux essais sur la litt. contemp. (1895).

LE COQ, ROBERT (d. 1373), French bishop, was born at Montdidier, although he belonged to a bourgeois family of Orléans, where he first attended school before coming to Paris. In Paris he became advocate to the parlement (1347); then King John appointed him master of requests, and in 1351, a year during which he received many other honours, he became bishop of Laon. At the opening of 1354 he was sent with the cardinal of Boulogne, Pierre I., duke of Bourbon, and Jean VI., count of Vendome, to Mantes to treat with Charles the Bad, king of Navarre, who had caused the constable, Charles of Spain, to be assassinated, and from this time dates his connexion with this king. At the meeting of the estates which opened in Paris in October 1356 Le Coq played a leading rôle and was one of the most outspoken of the orators, especially when petitions were presented to the dauphin Charles, denouncing the bad government of the realm and demanding the banishment of the royal councillors. Soon, however, the credit of the estates having gone down, he withdrew to his diocese, but at the request of the bourgeois of Paris he speedily returned. The king of Navarre had succeeded in escaping from prison and had entered Paris, where his party was in the ascendant; and Robert le Coq became the most powerful person in his council. No one dared to contradict him, and he brought into it whom he pleased. He did not scruple to reveal to the king of Navarre secret deliberations, but his fortune soon turned. He ran great danger at the estates of Compiègne in May 1358, where his dismissal was demanded, and he had to flee to St Denis, where Charles the Bad and Étienne Marcel came to find him. After the death of Marcel, he tried, unsuccessfully, to deliver Laon, his episcopal town, to the king of Navarre, and he was excluded from the amnesty promised in the treaty of Calais (1360) by King John to the partisans of Charles the Bad. His temporalities had been seized, and he was obliged to flee from France. In 1363, thanks to the support of the king of Navarre, he was given the bishopric of Calahorra in the kingdom of Aragon, which he administered until his death in 1373.

See L. C. Douët d’Arcq, “Acte d’accusation contre Robert le Coq, évêque de Laon” in Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes, 1st series, t. ii., pp. 350-387; and R. Delachenal, “La Bibliothèque d’un avocat du XIVe siècle, inventaire estimatif des livres de Robert le Coq,” in Nouvelle revue historique de droit français et étranger (1887), pp. 524-537.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(F. E. W.)

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

See article by A. Bouché-Leclercq in Daremberg and Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquités; Marquardt, Römische Staatsverwaltung, iii. 45, 187 (1885); G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, p. 355 seq.; monograph by Wackermann (Hanau, 1888); C. Pascal, Studii di antichità e mitologia (1896).

LECTOR, or Reader, a minor office-bearer in the Christian Church. From an early period men have been set apart, under the title of anagnostae, lectores, or readers, for the purpose of reading Holy Scripture in church. We do not know what the custom of the Church was in the first two centuries, the earliest reference to readers, as an order, occurring in the writings of Tertullian (De praescript. haeret. cap. 41); there are frequent allusions to them in the writings of St Cyprian and afterwards. Cornelius, bishop of Rome in A.D. 251-252, in a well-known letter mentions readers among the various church orders then existing at Rome. In the Apostolic Church Order (canon 19), mention is made of the qualifications and duties of a reader, but no reference is made to their method of ordination. In the Apostolic Didascalia there is recognition of three minor orders of men, subdeacons, readers and singers, in addition to two orders of women, deaconesses and widows. A century later, in the Apostolic Constitutions, we find not only a recognition of readers, but also a form of admission provided for them, consisting of the imposition of hands and prayer (lib. viii. cap. 22). In Africa the imposition of hands was not in use, but a Bible was handed to the newly appointed reader with words of commission to read it, followed by a prayer and a benediction (Fourth Council of Carthage, can. 8). This is the ritual of the Roman Church of to-day. With regard to age, the novels of Justinian (No. 123) forbade any one to be admitted to the office of reader under the age of eighteen.

(F. E. W.)

LECTOURE, a town of south-western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Gers, 21 m. N. of Auch on the Southern railway between that city and Agen. Pop. (1906), town, 2426; commune, 4310. It stands on the right bank of the Gers, overlooking the river from the summit of a steep plateau. The church of St Gervais and St Protais was once a cathedral. The massive tower which flanks it on the north belongs to the 15th century; the rest of the church dates from the 13th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. The hôtel de ville, the sous-préfecture and the museum occupy the palace of the former bishops, which was once the property of Marshal Jean Lannes, a native of the town. A recess in the wall of an old house contains the Fontaine de Houndélie, a spring sheltered by a double archway of the 13th century. At the bottom of the hill a church of the 16th century marks the site of the monastery of St Gény. Lectoure has a tribunal of first instance and a communal college. Its industries include distilling, the manufacture of wooden shoes and biscuits, and market gardening; it has trade in grain, cattle, wine and brandy.

Lectoure, capital of the Iberian tribe of the Lactorates and for a short time of Novempopulania, became the seat of a bishopric in the 4th century. In the 11th century the counts of Lomagne made it their capital, and on the union of Lomagne with Armagnac, in 1325, it became the capital of the counts of Armagnac. In 1473 Cardinal Jean de Jouffroy besieged the town on behalf of Louis XI. and after its fall put the whole population to the sword. In 1562 it again suffered severely at the hands of the Catholics under Blaise de Montluc.

LEDA, in Greek mythology, daughter of Thestius, king of Aetolia, and Eurythemis (her parentage is variously given). She was the wife of Tyndareus and mother of Castor and Pollux, Clytaemnestra and Helen (see Castor and Pollux). In another account Nemesis was the mother of Helen (q.v.) whom Leda adopted as her daughter. This led to the identification of Leda and Nemesis. In the usual later form of the story, Leda herself, having been visited by Zeus in the form of a swan, produced two eggs, from one of which came Helen, from the other Castor and Pollux.

See Apollodorus iii. 10; Hyginus, Fab. 77; Homer, Iliad, iii. 426, Od. xi. 298; Euripides, Helena, 17; Isocrates, Helena, 59; Ovid, Heroides, xvii. 55; Horace, Ars poetica, 147; Stasinus in Athenaeus viii. 334 c.; for the representations of Leda and the swan in art, J. A. Overbeck, Kunstmythologie, i., and Atlas to the same; also article in Roscher’s Lexikon der Mythologie.

LE DAIM (or Le Dain), OLIVIER (d. 1484), favourite of Louis XI. of France, was born of humble parentage at Thielt near Courtrai in Flanders. Seeking his fortune at Paris, he became court barber and valet to Louis XI., and so ingratiated himself with the king that in 1474 he was ennobled under the title Le Daim and in 1477 made comte de Meulant. In the latter year he was sent to Burgundy to influence the young heiress of Charles the Bold, but he was ridiculed and compelled to leave Ghent. He thereupon seized and held Tournai for the French. Le Daim had considerable talent for intrigue, and, according to his enemies, could always be depended upon to execute the baser designs of the king. He amassed a large fortune, largely by oppression and violence, and was named gentleman-in-waiting, captain of Loches, and governor of Saint-Quentin. He remained in favour until the death of Louis XI., when the rebellious lords were able to avenge the slights and insults they had suffered at the hands of the royal barber. He was arrested on charges, the nature of which is uncertain, tried before the parlement of Paris, and on the 21st of May 1484 hanged at Montfaucon without the knowledge of Charles VIII., who might have heeded his father’s request and spared the favourite. Le Daim’s property was given to the duke of Orleans.

See the memoirs of the time, especially those of Ph. de Commines (ed. Mandrot, 1901-1903, Eng. trans. in Bohn Library); Robt. Gaguin, Compendium de origine et gestis Francorum (Paris, 1586)—it was Gaguin who made the celebrated epigram concerning Le Daim: “Eras judex, lector, et exitium”; De Reiffenberg, Olivier le Dain (Brussels, 1829); Delanone, Le Barbier de Louis XI. (Paris, 1832): G. Picot, “Procès d’Olivier le Dain,” in the Comptes rendus de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques, viii. (1877), 485-537. The memoirs of the time are uniformly hostile to Le Daim.

LEDBURY, a market town in the Ross parliamentary division of Herefordshire, England, 14½ m. E. of Hereford by the Great Western railway, pleasantly situated on the south-western slope of the Malvern Hills. Pop. of urban district (1901) 3259. Cider and agricultural produce are the chief articles of trade, and there are limestone quarries in the neighbouring hills. The town contains many picturesque examples of timbered houses, characteristic of the district, the principal being the Market House (1633) elevated on massive pillars of oak. The fine church of St Michael exhibits all the Gothic styles, the most noteworthy features being the Norman chancel and west door, and the remarkable series of ornate Decorated windows on the north side. Among several charities is the hospital of St Catherine, founded by Foliot, bishop of Hereford, in 1232. Hope End, 2 m. N.E. of Ledbury, was the residence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning during her early life. A clock-tower in the town commemorates her.

Wall Hills Camp, supposed to be of British origin, is the earliest evidence of a settlement near Ledbury (Liedeburge, Lidebury). The manor was given to the see of Hereford in the 11th century; but in 1561-1562 became crown property. As early as 1170-1171 an episcopal castle existed in Ledbury. The town was not incorporated, but was early called a borough; and in 1295 and 1304-1305 returned two members to parliament. A fair on the day of the decollation of John the Baptist was granted to the bishop in 1249. Of fairs which survived in 1792 those of the days of St Philip and St James and St Barnabas were granted in 1584-1585; those held on the Monday before Easter and St Thomas’s day were reputed ancient, but not those of the 12th of May, the 22nd of June, the 2nd of October and the 21st of December. Existing fairs are on the second Tuesday in every month and in October. A weekly market, granted to the bishop by Stephen, John and Henry III., was obsolete in 1584-1585, when the present market of Tuesday was authorized. The wool trade was considerable in the 14th century; later Ledbury was inhabited by glovers and clothiers. The town was deeply involved in the operations of the Civil Wars, being occupied both by the royalist leader Prince Rupert and by the Parliamentarian Colonel Birch.

LEDGER (from the English dialect forms liggen or leggen, to lie or lay; in sense adapted from the Dutch substantive legger), properly a book remaining regularly in one place, and so used of the copies of the Scriptures and service books kept in a church. The New English Dictionary quotes from Charles Wriothesley’s Chronicle, 1538 (ed. Camden Soc., 1875, by W. D. Hamilton), “the curates should provide a booke of the bible in Englishe, of the largest volume, to be a lidger in the same church for the parishioners to read on.” It is an application of this original meaning that is found in the commercial usage of the term for the principal book of account in a business house (see Book-Keeping). Apart from these applications to various forms of books, the word is used of the horizontal timbers in a scaffold (q.v.) lying parallel to the face of a building, which support the “put logs”; of a flat stone to cover a grave; and of a stationary form of tackle and bait in angling. In the form “lieger” the term was formerly frequently applied to a “resident,” as distinguished from an “extraordinary” ambassador.

LEDOCHOWSKI, MIECISLAUS JOHANN, Count (1822-1902), Polish cardinal, was born on the 29th of October 1822 in Gorki (Russian Poland), and received his early education at the gymnasium and seminary of Warsaw. After finishing his studies at the Jesuit Accademia dei Nobili Ecclesiastici in Rome, which strongly influenced his religious development and his attitude towards church affairs, he was ordained in 1845. From 1856 to 1858 he represented the Roman See in Columbia, but on the outbreak of the Columbian revolution had to return to Rome. In 1861 Pope Pius IX. made him his nuncio at Brussels, and in 1865 he was made archbishop of Gnesen-Posen. His preconization followed on the 8th of January 1866. This date marks the beginning of the second period in Ledochowski’s life; for during the Prussian and German Kulturkampf he was one of the most declared enemies of the state. It was only during the earliest years of his appointment as archbishop that he entertained a different view, invoking, for instance, an intervention of Prussia in favour of the Roman Church, when it was oppressed by the house of Savoy. On the 12th of December 1870 he presented an effective memorandum on the subject at the headquarters at Versailles. In 1872 the archbishop protested against the demand of the government that religious teaching should be given only in the German language, and in 1873 he addressed a circular letter on this subject to the clergy of his diocese. The government thereupon demanded a statement from the teachers of religion as to whether they intended to obey it or the archbishop, and on their declaring for the archbishop, dismissed them. The count himself was called upon at the end of 1873 to lay aside his office. On his refusing to do so, he was arrested between 3 and 4 o’clock in the morning on the 3rd of February 1874 by Staňdi the director of police, and taken to the military prison of Ostrowo. The pope made him a cardinal on the 13th of March, but it was not till the 3rd of February 1876 that he was released from prison. Having been expelled from the eastern provinces of Prussia, he betook himself to Cracow, where his presence was made the pretext for anti-Prussian demonstrations. Upon this he was also expelled from Austria, and went to Rome, whence, in spite of his removal from office, which was decreed on the 15th of April 1874, he continued to direct the affairs of his diocese, for which he was on several occasions from 1877 to 1879 condemned in absentia by the Prussian government for “usurpation of episcopal rights.” It was not till 1885 that Ledochowski resolved to resign his archbishopric, in which he was succeeded by Dinder at the end of the year. Ledochowski’s return in 1884 was forbidden by the Prussian government (although the Kulturkampf had now abated), on account of his having stirred up anew the Polish nationalist agitation. He passed the closing years of his life in Rome. In 1892 he became prefect of the Congregation of the Propaganda, and he died in Rome on the 22nd of July 1902.