"No, no, no, no, no! Nothing of the sort, I assure you!" said Lebedeff, hastily. "Oh dear no, not for the world! Totski's the only man with any chance there. Oh, no! He takes her to his box at the opera at the French theatre of an evening, and the officers and people all look at her and say, 'By Jove, there's the famous<b> Nastasia Philipovna!' but no one ever gets any further than that, for there is nothing more to say."
The history of court dancing in Great Britain is practically the same as that of France, and need not occupy much of our attention here. But there are strictly national dances still in existence which are quite peculiar to the country, and may be traced back to the dances and games of the Saxon gleemen. The Egg dance and the Carole were both Saxon dances, the Carole being a Yule-tide festivity, of which the present-day Christmas carol is a remnant. The oldest dances which remain unchanged in England are the Morris dances, which were introduced in the time of Edward III. The name Morris or Moorish refers to the origin of these dances, which are said to have been brought back by John of Gaunt from his travels in Spain. The Morris dances are associated with May-day, and are danced round a maypole to a lively and capering step, some of the performers having bells fastened to their knees in the Moorish manner. They are dressed as characters of old English tradition, such as Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, Little John and Tom the Piper. All the true country dances of Great Britain are of an active and lively measure; they may all, indeed, be said to be founded on the jig; and the hornpipe, which is a kind of jig, is the national dance of England. Captain Cook, on his voyages, made his sailors dance hornpipes in calm weather to keep them in good health. A characteristic of English dances was that they partook to a great extent of the nature of games; there was little variety in the steps, which were nearly all those of the jig or hornpipe, but these were incorporated into various games or plays, of which the Morris dances were the most elaborate. Richard Baxter wrote that "sometimes the Morris dancers would come into the church in all their linen and scarves and antic dresses, with Morris bells jingling at their legs; and as soon as Common Prayer was read, did haste and presently to their play again." May-day has always been celebrated in England with rustic dances and festivities. Before the Reformation there were no really national dances in use at court; but in the reign of Elizabeth the homely, domestic style of dancing reached the height of its popularity. Remnants of many of these dances remain to-day in the games played by children and country people; "Hunt the Slipper," "Kiss in the Ring," "Here we go round the Mulberry Bush," are examples. All the Tudor dances were kissing dances, and must have been the occasion of a great deal of merriment. Mrs Groves gives the following description of the Cushion dance:--"The dance is begun by a single person, man or woman, who, taking a cushion in hand, dances about the room, and at the end of a short time stops and sings: 'This dance it will no farther go,' to which the musician answers: 'I pray you, good sir, why say so?' 'Because Joan Sanderson will not come to.' 'She must come to whether she will or no,' returns the musician, and then the dancer lays the cushion before a woman; she kneels and he kisses her, singing 'Welcome, Joan Sanderson.' Then she rises, takes up the cushion, and both dance and sing 'Prinkum prankum is a fine dance, and shall we go dance it over again?' Afterwards the woman takes the cushion and does as the man did." Other popular dances--generally adapted to the tunes of popular songs, the nature of some of which may be guessed from their titles--were the Trenchmore, Omnium-gatherum, Tolly-polly, Hoite cum toite, Dull Sir John, Faine I would, Sillinger, All in a Garden Green, An Old Man's a Bed Full of Bones, If All the World were Paper, John, Come Kiss Me Now, Cuckholds All Awry, Green Sleeves and Pudding Pies, Lumps of Pudding, Under and Over, Up Tails All, The Slaughter House, Rub her Down with Straw, Have at thy Coat Old Woman, The Happy Marriage, Dissembling Love, Sweet Kate, Once I Loved a Maiden Fair. Dancing practically disappeared during the Puritan _régime_, but with the Restoration it again became popular. It underwent no considerable developments, however, until the reign of Queen Anne, when the glories of Bath were revived in the beginning of the 18th century, and Beau Nash drew up his famous codes of rules for the regulation of dress and manners, and founded the balls in which the polite French dances completely eclipsed the simpler English ones. An account of a dancing lesson witnessed by a fond parent at this time is worth quoting, as it shows how far the writer (but not his daughter) had departed from the jolly, romping traditions of the old English dances:--"As the best institutions are liable to corruption, so, sir, I must acquaint you that very great abuses are crept into this entertainment. I was amazed to see my girl handed by and handing young fellows with so much familiarity, and I could not have thought it had been my child. They very often made use of a most impudent and lascivious step called _setting_ to partners, which I know not how to describe to you but by telling you that it is the very reverse of _back_ to _back_. At last an impudent young dog bid the fiddlers play a dance called _Moll Patley_, and, after having made two or three capers, ran to his partner, locked his arms in hers, and whisked her round cleverly above ground in such a manner that I, who sat upon one of the lowest benches, saw farther above her shoe than I can think fit to acquaint you with. I could no longer endure these enormities, wherefore, just as my girl was going to be made a whirligig, I ran in, seized my child and carried her home." What we may call polite dancing, when it became fashionable, soon invaded London, its first home being Madame Cornely's famous Carlisle House in Soho Square. Ranelagh and Vauxhall and Almack's were all extensively patronized, and the rage for magnificent entertainment and dancing culminated in the erection of the palatial Pantheon in Oxford Street--a place so universally patronized that even Dr Johnson was to be found there. White's and Boodle's were also famous assembly rooms, but the most exclusive of all these establishments was Almack's, the original of Brooks's Club. Entry: M
Lyly was not the first to appropriate and develop the Guevaristic style. The earliest book in which it was fully adopted was _A petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure_, by George Pettie, which appeared in 1576, a production so closely akin to _Euphues_ in tone and style that it is difficult to believe it was not by Lyly. Lyly, however, carried the style to its highest point, and made it the dominant literary fashion. His principal followers in it were Greene, Lodge and Nash, his principal opponent Sir Philip Sidney; the _Arcadia_ in fact supplanted _Euphues_, and the Euphuistic taste proper may be said to have died out about 1590 after a reign of some twelve years. According to Landmann, Shakespeare's _Love's Labour Lost_ is a caricature of the Italianate and pedantic fashions of the day, not of the peculiar style of _Euphues_. The only certain allusion in Shakespeare to the characteristics of Lyly's famous book is to be found in _Henry IV._, where Falstaff, playing the part of the king, says to Prince Hal, "Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, but also how thou art accompanied; for, though the camomile the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted the sooner it wears." Here the pompous antithesis is evidently meant to caricature the peculiar Euphuistic sentence of court parlance. (M. A. W.) Entry: LYLY
The environs of Arnhem are much admired. Following either the Zutphen or the Utrecht road, numerous pleasing views of the Rhine valley present themselves, and country houses and villas appear among the woods on every side. At Bronbeek, a short distance east of the town, is a hospital endowed by King William III. for soldiers of the colonial army. Beyond is the popular summer resort of Velp, with the castle of Biljoen built by Charles, duke of Gelderland, in 1530, and the beautiful park of the ancient castle of Rozendaal in the vicinity. The origin of the castle of Rozendaal is unknown. The first account of it is in connexion with a tournament given there by Reinald I., count of Gelderland, in the beginning of the 14th century, and it ever after remained the favourite residence of the counts and dukes of Gelderland. About the beginning of the 18th century fountains and lanes in the style of those at Versailles were laid out in the park, and soon after the castle itself, of which only the round tower remained (and is still standing), was rebuilt. The park is open to the public, and is famous for the beauty of the beech avenues and fir woods. Beyond this is De Steeg, another popular resort, whence stretches the famous Middachten Allee of beech trees to Dieren. On the Apeldoorn road is Sonsbeek, with a wooded park and small lakes, formerly a private seat and now belonging to the municipality. On the west of Arnhem is another pleasure ground, called the Reeberg, with a casino, and the woods of Heienoord. Close by is the ancient and well-preserved castle of Doornwerth with its own chapel. It was the seat of an independent lordship until 1402, after which time it was held in fief from the dukes of Gelderland. Beyond Doornwerth, at Renkum, is the royal country seat called Oranje-Nassau's Oord, which was bought by the crown in 1881. Entry: ARNHEM
ATLANTA, the capital and the largest city of Georgia, U.S.A., and the county-seat of Fulton county, situated at an altitude of 1000-1175 ft., in the N.W. part of the state, near the Chattahoochee river. Pop. (1860) 9554; (1880) 37,409; (1890) 65,533; (1900) 89,872, of whom 35,727 were negroes and 2531 were foreign-born; (1910) 154,839. It is served by the Southern, the Central of Georgia, the Georgia, the Seaboard Air Line, the Nashville, Chattanooga & St Louis (which enters the city over the Western & Atlantic, one of its leased lines), the Louisville & Nashville, the Atlanta, Birmingham & Atlantic, and the Atlanta & West Point railways. These railway communications, and the situation of the city (on the Piedmont Plateau) on the water-parting between the streams flowing into the Atlantic Ocean and those flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, have given Atlanta its popular name, the "Gate City of the South." Atlanta was laid out in the form of a circle, the radius being 1¾ m. and the centre the old railway station, the Union Depot (the new station is called the Terminal); large additions have been made beyond this circle, including West End, Inman Park on the east, and North Atlanta. Among the best residence streets are Peachtree and West Peachtree streets to the north, and the older streets to the south of the business centre of the city--Washington Street, Whitehall, Pryor and Capitol Avenues. Among the principal office buildings are the Empire, the Equitable, the Prudential, the Fourth National, the Austell, the Peters, the Century, the English-American and the Candler buildings; and there are many fine residences, particularly in Peachtree and Washington streets, Inman Park and Ponce de Leon Circle. Among prominent public buildings are the State Capitol (completed 1889), containing a law library of about 65,000 volumes and a collection of portraits of famous Georgians, the north-west front of the Capitol grounds containing an equestrian statue (unveiled in 1907) of John Brown Gordon (1832-1904), a distinguished Confederate general in the American Civil War and governor of Georgia in 1887-1890; the court house; the Carnegie library, in which the young men's library, organized in 1867, was merged in 1902; the post office building; and the Federal prison (about 4 m. south of the city). The principal parks are: the Piedmont (189 acres), the site of the Piedmont Exposition of 1887 and of the Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895; the Grant, given to the city by L.P. Grant, an Atlanta railroad builder, in 1882, and subsequently enlarged by the city (in its south-east corner is Fort Walker); the Lakewood, 6 m. south of the city; and Ponce de Leon Park, owned by an electric railway company and having mineral springs and a fine baseball ground. Four miles south of the centre of Atlanta is Fort McPherson, an important United States military post, occupying a reservation of 40 acres and having barracks for the accommodation of 1000 men. In Oakland Cemetery is a large monument to Confederate soldiers; another monument in Oakland, "To the unknown Confederate Dead," is a reproduction of the Lion of Lucerne; in West View Cemetery (4 m. west of the city) is a memorial erected by the United Confederate Veterans. The city obtains its water-supply from the Chattahoochee river (above the mouth of Peachtree Creek), whence the water is pumped by four pumps, which have a daily capacity of 55,000,000 gallons. Atlanta is widely known for its public spirit and enterprise, to which the expositions of 1881, 1887 and 1895 bear witness. The air is bracing, largely because of the city's altitude; the mean annual temperature is 60.8° F. (winter 44.1°, spring 60.5°, summer 77°, autumn 61.5°). Entry: ATLANTA
Among Shakespeare's predecessors, John Lyly, whose plays were all written for the Children of the Chapel and the Children of St Paul's, holds a position apart in English dramatic literature. The euphuism, to which his famous romance gave its name, likewise distinguishes his mythological,[172] quasi-historical,[173] allegorical,[174] and satirical[175] comedies. But his real service to the progress of English drama is to be sought neither in his choice of subjects nor in his imagery--though to his fondness for fairylore and for the whole phantasmagoria of legend, classical as well as romantic, his contemporaries, and Shakespeare in particular, were indebted for a stimulative precedent, and though in his _Endimion_ at all events he excites curiosity by an allegorical treatment of contemporary characters and events. It does not even lie in the songs interspersed in his plays, though none of his predecessors had in the slightest degree anticipated the lyric grace which distinguishes some of these incidental efforts. It consists in his adoption of Gascoigne's innovation of writing plays in prose; and in his having, though under the fetters of an affected and pretentious style, given the first example of brisk and vivacious dialogue--an example to which even such successors as Shakespeare and Jonson were indebted. Thomas Kyd, the author of the _Spanish Tragedy_ (preceded or followed by the first part of _Jeronimo_), and probably of several plays whose author was unnamed, possesses some of the characteristics, but none of the genius, of the greatest tragic dramatist who preceded Shakespeare. No slighter tribute than this is assuredly the due of Christopher Marlowe, whose violent end prematurely closed a poetic career of dazzling brilliancy. His earliest play, _Tamburlaine the Great_, in which the use of blank verse was introduced upon the English public stage, while full of the "high astounding terms" of an extravagant and often bombastic diction, is already marked by the passion which was the poet's most characteristic feature, and which was to find expression so luxuriantly beautiful in his _Doctor Faustus,_ and so surpassingly violent in his _Jew of Malta_. His masterpiece, _Edward II._, is a tragedy of singular pathos and of a dramatic power unapproached by any of his contemporaries. George Peele was a far more versatile writer even as a dramatist; but, though his plays contain passages of exquisite beauty, not one of them is worthy to be ranked by the side of Marlowe's _Edward II._, compared with which, if indeed not absolutely, Peele's _Chronicle of Edward I._ still stands on the level of the species to which its title and character alike assign it. His finest play is undoubtedly _David and Bethsabe_, which resembles _Edward I._ in construction, but far surpasses it in beauty of language and versification, besides treating its subject with greatly superior dignity. If the difference between Peele and Shakespeare is still, in many respects besides that of genius, an immeasurable one, we seem to come into something like a Shakespearian atmosphere in more than one passage of the plays of the unfortunate Robert Greene--unfortunate perhaps in nothing more enduringly than in the proof which he left behind him of his supercilious jealousy of Shakespeare. Greene's genius, most conspicuous in plays treating English life and scenes, could, notwithstanding his academic self-sufficiency, at times free itself from the pedantry apt to beset the flight of Peele's and at times even of Marlowe's muse; and his most delightful work[176] seems to breathe something of the air, sweet and fresh like no other, which blows over an English countryside. Thomas Lodge, whose dramatic, and much less of course his literary activity, is measured by the only play that we know to have been wholly his;[177] Thomas Nashe, the redoubtable pamphleteer and the father of the English picaresque novel;[178] Henry Chettle, who worked the chords of both pity[179] and terror[180] with equal vigour, and Anthony Munday, better remembered for his city pageants than for his plays, are among the other more important writers of the early Elizabethan drama, though not all of them can strictly speaking be called predecessors of Shakespeare. It is not possible here to enumerate the more interesting of the anonymous plays which belong to this "pre-Shakespearian" period of the Elizabethan drama; but many of them are by intrinsic merit as well as for special causes deserving of the attention of the student. Entry: P
The next Mahommedan invasion of India is associated with the name of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni. Mahmud was the eldest son of Sabuktagin, surnamed Nasr-ud-din, in origin a Turkish slave, who had established his rule over the greater part of modern Afghanistan and Khorassan, with Ghazni as his capital. In 977 Sabuktagin is said to have defeated Jaipal, the Hindu raja of Lahore, and to have rendered the Punjab tributary. But his son Mahmud was the first of the great Mussulman conquerors whose names still ring through Asia. Mahmud succeeded to the throne in 997. During his reign of thirty-three years he extended the limits of his father's kingdom from Persia on the east to the Ganges on the west; and it is related that he led his armies into the plains of India no fewer than seventeen times. In 1001 he defeated Raja Jaipal a second time, and took him prisoner. But Anandpal, son of Jaipal, raised again the standard of national independence, and gathered an army of Rajput allies from the farthest corners of Hindustan. The decisive battle was fought in the valley of Peshawar. Mahmud won the day by the aid of his Turkish horsemen, and thenceforth the Punjab has been a Mahommedan province, except during the brief period of Sikh supremacy. The most famous of Mahmud's invasions of India was that undertaken in 1025-1026 against Gujarat. The goal of this expedition was the temple dedicated to Siva at Somnath, around which so many legends have gathered. It is reported that Mahmud marched through Ajmere to avoid the desert of Sind; that he found the Hindus gathered on the neck of the peninsula of Somnath in defence of their holy city; that the battle lasted for two days; that in the end the Rajput warriors fled to their boats, while the Brahman priests retired into the inmost shrine; that Mahmud, introduced into this shrine, rejected all entreaties by the Brahmans to spare their idol, and all offers of ransom; that he smote the image with his club, and forthwith a fountain of precious stones gushed out. Until the British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839, the club of Mahmud and the wood gates of Somnath were preserved at the tomb of the great conqueror near Ghazni. The club has now disappeared, and the gates brought back to India by Lord Ellenborough are recognized to be a clumsy forgery. To Mahommedans Mahmud is known, not only as a champion of the faith, but as a munificent patron of literature. The dynasty that he founded was not long-lived. Fourteen of his descendants occupied his throne within little more than a century, but none of them achieved greatness. A blood-feud arose between them and a line of Afghan princes who had established themselves among the mountains of Ghor. In 1155 Bahram, the last of the Ghaznivide Turks, was overthrown by Ala-ud-din of Ghor, and the wealthy and populous city of Ghazni was razed to the ground. But even the Ghoride conqueror spared the tomb of Mahmud. Entry: HISTORY
In the tragedy of _Dido Queen of Carthage_ (completed by Thomas Nash, produced and printed 1594), a servile fidelity to the text of Virgil's narrative has naturally resulted in the failure which might have been expected from an attempt at once to transcribe what is essentially inimitable and to reproduce it under the hopelessly alien conditions of dramatic adaptation. The one really noble passage in a generally feeble and incomposite piece of work is, however, uninspired by the unattainable model to which the dramatists have been only too obsequious in their subservience. It is as nearly certain as anything can be which depends chiefly upon cumulative and collateral evidence that the better part of what is best in the serious scenes of _King Henry VI._ is mainly the work of Marlowe. That he is at any rate the principal author of the second and third plays passing under that name among the works of Shakespeare, but first and imperfectly printed as _The Contention between the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster_, can hardly be now a matter of debate among competent judges. The crucial difficulty of criticism in this matter is to determine, if indeed we should not rather say to conjecture, the authorship of the humorous scenes in prose, showing as they generally do a power of comparatively high and pure comic realism to which nothing in the acknowledged works of any pre-Shakespearian dramatist is even remotely comparable. Yet, especially in the original text of these scenes as they stand unpurified by the ultimate revision of Shakespeare or his editors, there are tones and touches which recall rather the clownish horseplay and homely ribaldry of his predecessors than anything in the lighter interludes of his very earliest plays. We find the same sort of thing which we find in their writings, only better done than they usually do it, rather than such work as Shakespeare's a little worse done than usual. And even in the final text of the tragic or metrical scenes the highest note struck is always, with one magnificent and unquestionable exception, rather in the key of Marlowe at his best than of Shakespeare while yet in great measure his disciple. Entry: MARLOWE
FREDERICK HENRY (1584-1647), prince of Orange, the youngest child of William the Silent, was born at Delft about six months before his father's assassination on the 29th of January 1584. His mother, Louise de Coligny, was daughter of the famous Huguenot leader, Admiral de Coligny, and was the fourth wife of William the Silent. The boy was trained to arms by his elder brother, Maurice of Nassau, one of the first generals of his age. On the death of Maurice in 1625, Frederick Henry succeeded him in his paternal dignities and estates, and also in the stadtholderates of the five provinces of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overysel and Gelderland, and in the important posts of captain and admiral-general of the Union. Frederick Henry proved himself scarcely inferior to his brother as a general, and a far more capable statesman and politician. During twenty-two years he remained at the head of affairs in the United Provinces, and in his time the power of the stadtholderate reached its highest point. The "Period of Frederick Henry," as it is usually styled by Dutch writers, is generally accounted the golden age of the republic. It was marked by great military and naval triumphs, by world-wide maritime and commercial expansion, and by a wonderful outburst of activity in the domains of art and literature. The chief military exploits of Frederick Henry were the sieges and captures of Hertogenbosch in 1629, of Maastricht in 1632, of Breda in 1637, of Sas van Ghent in 1644, and of Hulst in 1645. During the greater part of his administration the alliance with France against Spain had been the pivot of Frederick Henry's foreign policy, but in his last years he sacrificed the French alliance for the sake of concluding a separate peace with Spain, by which the United Provinces obtained from that power all the advantages for which they had for eighty years been contending. Frederick Henry died on the 14th of March 1647, and was buried with great pomp beside his father and brother at Delft. The treaty of Münster, ending the long struggle between the Dutch and the Spaniards, was not actually signed until the 30th of January 1648, the illness and death of the stadtholder having caused a delay in the negotiations. Frederick Henry was married in 1625 to Amalia von Solms, and left one son, William II. of Orange, and four daughters. Entry: FREDERICK