Part 190 (2/2)
eTRE SUPReME, the Supreme Being agreeably to the hollow and vacant conception of the boasted, beggarly 18th-century Enlightenment of Revolutionary France.
ETRURIA, the ancient Roman name of a region in Italy, W. of the Apennines from the Tiber to the Macra in the N.; inhabited by the Etruscans, a primitive people of Italy; at one time united in a confederation of twelve States; gradually absorbed by the growing Roman power, and who were famous for their artistic work in iron and bronze.
Many of the Etruscan cities contain interesting remains of their early civilised state; but their entire literature, supposed to have been extensive, has perished, and their language is only known through monumental inscriptions. Their religion was polytheistic, but embraced a belief in a future life. There is abundant evidence that they had attained to a high degree of civilisation; the status of women was high, the wife ranking with the husband; their buildings still extant attest their skill as engineers and builders; vases, mirrors, and coins of fine workmans.h.i.+p have been found in their tombs, and jewellery which is scarcely rivalled; while the tombs themselves are remarkable for their furnis.h.i.+ngs of chairs, ornaments, decorations, &c., showing that they regarded these sanctuaries more as dwellings of departed spirits than as sepulchres of the dead.
ETTMuLLER, ERNST MORITZ LUDWIG, a German philologist, born at Gerfsdorf, Saxony, professor of German literature in Zurich in 1863; did notable work in connection with Anglo-Saxon and in Middle German dialects (1802-1877).
ETTRICK, a Scottish river that rises in Selkirks.h.i.+re and joins the Tweed, 3 m. below Selkirk; the Yarrow is its chief tributary; a forest of the same name once spread over all Selkirks.h.i.+re and into the adjoining counties; the district is a.s.sociated with some of the finest ballad and pastoral poetry of Scotland.
ETTRICK SHEPHERD, JAMES HOGG (q. v.).
ETTY, WILLIAM, a celebrated painter, born at York; rose from being a printer's apprentice to the position of a Royal Academician; considered by Ruskin to have wasted his great powers as a colourist on inadequate and hackneyed subjects (1787-1849).
EUBOEA (82), the largest of the Grecian Isles, skirts the mainland on the SE., to which it is connected by a bridge spanning the Talanta Channel, 40 yards broad; it is about 100 m. in length; has fine quarries of marble, and mines of iron and copper are found in the mountains; Chalcis is the chief town.
EUCLID OF ALEXANDRIA, a famous geometrican, whose book of ”Elements,” revised and improved, still holds its place as an English school-book, although superseded as such in America and the Continent; founded a school of Mathematics in Alexandria; flourished about 300 B.C.
EUCLID OF MEGARA, a Greek philosopher, a disciple of Socrates, was influenced by the ELEATICS (q. v.); founded the Megaric school of Philosophy, whose chief tenet is that the ”good,” or that which is one with itself, alone is the only real existence.
EUDaeMONISM, the doctrine that the production of happiness is the aim and measure of virtue.
EUDOCIA, the ill-fated daughter of an Athenian Sophist, wife of Theodosius II., embraced Christianity, her name Athenais previously; was banished by her husband on an ill-founded charge of infidelity, and spent the closing years of her life in Jerusalem, where she became a convert to the views of EUTYCHES (q. v.) (394-400).
EUDOXUS OF CNIDUS, a Grecian astronomer, was a pupil of Plato, and afterwards studied in Egypt; said to have introduced a 365 day year into Greece; flourished in the 4th century B.C.
EUGENE, FRANcOIS, PRINCE OF SAVOY, a renowned general, born at Paris, and related by his mother to Cardinal Mazarin; he renounced his native land, and entered the service of the Austrian Emperor Leopold; first gained distinction against the Turks, whose power in Hungary he crushed in the great victory of Pieterwardein (1697); co-operated with Marlborough in the war of the Spanish Succession, and shared the glories of his great victories, and again opposed the French in the cause of Poland (1663-1736).
EUGeNIE, EX-EMPRESS OF THE FRENCH, born at Granada, second daughter of Count Manuel Fernandez of Montigos and Marie Manuela Kirkpatrick of Closeburn, Dumfriess.h.i.+re; married to Napoleon III. in 1853; had to leave France in 1870, and has since January 1873 lived as his widow at Chiselhurst, Kent; _b_. 1826.
EUGENIUS, the name of four Popes. E., St., I., Pope from 654 to 658 (festival, August 27); E. II., Pope from 824 to 827; E. III., Pope from 1145 to 1153; E. IV., Pope from 1431 to 1447.
EUGENIUS IV., Pope, born at Venice; his pontificate was marked by a schism created by proceedings in the Council of Basel towards the reform of the Church and the limitation of the papal authority, the issue of which was that he excommunicated the Council and the Council deposed him; he had an unhappy time of it, and in his old age regretted he had ever left his monastery to a.s.sume the papal crown.
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