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GREENOUGH, G. B.—GREEN RIBBON CLUB

service of passenger steamers controlled by the company runs to Holyhead, Wales, 80 m. S.E. A steam ferry crosses the Lough to Greencastle, for Kilkeel, and the southern watering-places of county Down. The company also owns the hotel, and laid out the golf links. In the vicinity a good example of raised beach, some 10 ft. above present sea-level, is to be seen.


GREENOUGH, GEORGE BELLAS (1778–1855), English geologist, was born in London on the 18th of January 1778. He was educated at Eton, and afterwards (1795) entered Pembroke College, Oxford, but never graduated. In 1798 he proceeded to Göttingen to prosecute legal studies, but having attended the lectures of Blumenbach he was attracted to the study of natural history, and, coming into the possession of a fortune, he abandoned law and devoted his attention to science. He studied mineralogy at Freiburg under Werner, travelled in various parts of Europe and the British Isles, and worked at chemistry at the Royal Institution. A visit to Ireland aroused deep interest in political questions, and he was in 1807 elected member of parliament for the borough of Gatton, continuing to hold his seat until 1812. Meanwhile his interest in geology increased, he was elected F.R.S. in 1807, and he was the chief founder with others of the Geological Society of London in 1807. He was the first chairman of that Society, and in 1811, when it was more regularly constituted, he was the first president: and in this capacity he served on two subsequent occasions, and did much to promote the advancement of geology. In 1819 he published A Critical Examination of the First Principles of Geology, a work which was useful mainly in refuting erroneous theories. In the same year was published his famous Geological Map of England and Wales, in six sheets; of which a second edition was issued in 1839. This map was to a large extent based on the original map of William Smith; but much new information was embodied. In 1843 he commenced to prepare a geological map of India, which was published in 1854. He died at Naples on the 2nd of April 1855.


GREENOUGH, HORATIO (1805–1852), American sculptor, son of a merchant, was born at Boston, on the 6th of September 1805. At the age of sixteen he entered Harvard, but he devoted his principal attention to art, and in the autumn of 1825 he went to Rome, where he studied under Thorwaldsen. After a short visit in 1826 to Boston, where he executed busts of John Quincy Adams and other people of distinction, he returned to Italy and took up his residence at Florence. Here one of his first commissions was from James Fenimore Cooper for a group of Chanting Cherubs; and he was chosen by the American government to execute the colossal statue of Washington for the national capital. It was unveiled in 1843, and was really a fine piece of work for its day; but in modern times it has been sharply criticized as unworthy and incongruous. Shortly afterwards he received a second government commission for a colossal group, the “Rescue,” intended to represent the conflict between the Anglo-Saxon and Indian races. In 1851 he returned to Washington to superintend its erection, and in the autumn of 1852 he was attacked by brain fever, of which he died in Somerville near Boston on the 18th of December. Among other works of Greenough may be mentioned a bust of Lafayette, the Medora and the Venus Victrix in the gallery of the Boston Athenaeum. Greenough was a man of wide culture, and wrote well both in prose and verse.

See H. T. Tuckerman, Memoir of Horatio Greenough (New York, 1853).


GREENOUGH, JAMES BRADSTREET (1833–1901), American classical scholar, was born in Portland, Maine, on the 4th of May 1833. He graduated at Harvard in 1856, studied one year at the Harvard Law School, was admitted to the Michigan bar, and practised in Marshall, Michigan, until 1865, when he was appointed tutor in Latin at Harvard. In 1873 he became assistant professor, and in 1883 professor of Latin, a post which he resigned hardly six weeks before his death at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 11th of October 1901. Following the lead of Goodwin’s Moods and Tenses (1860), he set himself to study Latin historical syntax, and in 1870 published Analysis of the Latin Subjunctive, a brief treatise, privately printed, of much originality and value, and in many ways coinciding with Berthold Delbrück’s Gebrauch des Conjunctivs und Optativs in Sanskrit und Griechischen (1871), which, however, quite overshadowed the Analysis. In 1872 appeared A Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges, founded on Comparative Grammar, by Joseph A. Allen and James B. Greenough, a work of great critical carefulness. His theory of cum-constructions is that adopted and developed by William Gardner Hale. In 1872–1880 Greenough offered the first courses in Sanskrit and comparative philology given at Harvard. His fine abilities for advanced scholarship were used outside the classroom in editing the Allen and Greenough Latin Series of text-books, although he occasionally contributed to Harvard Studies in Classical Philology (founded in 1889 and endowed at his instance by his own class) papers on Latin syntax, prosody and etymology—a subject on which he planned a long work—on Roman archaeology and on Greek religion at the time of the New Comedy. He assisted largely in the founding of Radcliffe College. An able English scholar and an excellent etymologist, he collaborated with Professor George L. Kittredge on Words and their Ways in English Speech (1901), one of the best books on the subject in the language. He wrote clever light verse, including The Blackbirds, a comedietta, first published in The Atlantic Monthly (vol. xxxix. 1877); The Rose and the Ring (1880), a pantomime adapted from Thackeray; The Queen of Hearts (1885), a dramatic fantasia; and Old King Cole (1889), an operetta.

See the sketch by George L. Kittredge in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. xiv. (1903), pp. 1-17 (also printed in Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, vol. x., Dec. 1901, pp. 196-201).


GREEN RIBBON CLUB, one of the earliest of the loosely combined associations which met from time to time in London taverns or coffee-houses for political purposes in the 17th century. It had its meeting-place at the King’s Head tavern at Chancery Lane End, and was therefore known as the “King’s Head Club.” It seems to have been founded about the year 1675 as a resort for members of the political party hostile to the court, and as these associates were in the habit of wearing in their hats a bow, or “bob,” of green ribbon, as a distinguishing badge useful for the purpose of mutual recognition in street brawls, the name of the club became changed, about 1679, to the Green Ribbon Club. The frequenters of the club were the extreme faction of the country party, the men who supported Titus Oates, and who were concerned in the Rye House Plot and Monmouth’s rebellion. Roger North tells us that “they admitted all strangers that were confidingly introduced, for it was a main end of their institutions to make proselytes, especially of the raw estated youth newly come to town.” According to Dryden (Absalom and Achitophel) drinking was the chief attraction, and the members talked and organized sedition over their cups. Thomas Dangerfield supplied the court with a list of forty-eight members of the Green Ribbon Club in 1679; and although Dangerfield’s numerous perjuries make his unsupported evidence worthless, it receives confirmation as regards several names from a list given to James II. by Nathan Wade in 1885 (Harleian MSS. 6845), while a number of more eminent personages are mentioned in The Cabal, a satire published in 1680, as also frequenting the club. From these sources it would appear that the duke of Monmouth himself, and statesmen like Halifax, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, Macclesfield, Cavendish, Bedford, Grey of Warke, Herbert of Cherbury, were among those who fraternized at the King’s Head Tavern with third-rate writers such as Scroop, Mulgrave and Shadwell, with remnants of the Cromwellian régime like Falconbridge, Henry Ireton and Claypole, with such profligates as Lord Howard of Escrik and Sir Henry Blount, and with scoundrels of the type of Dangerfield and Oates. An allusion to Dangerfield, notorious among his other crimes and treacheries for a seditious paper found in a meal-tub, is found in connexion with the club in The Loyal Subjects’ Litany, one of the innumerable satires of the period, in which occur the lines:

“From the dark-lanthorn Plot, and the Green Ribbon Club
From brewing sedition in a sanctified Tub,
Libera nos, Domine.”