beautiful old age in his Concord home, the Orchard House, where every comfort was provided by his daughter Louisa (q.v.), Alcott was gratified at being able to become the nominal, and at times the actual, head of a Concord “Summer School of Philosophy and Literature,” which had its first session in 1879, and in which—in a rudely fashioned building next his house—thoughtful listeners were addressed during a part of several successive summer seasons on many themes in philosophy, religion and letters. Of Alcott’s published works the most important is Tablets (1868); next in order of merit is Concord Days (1872). His Sonnets and Canzonets (1882) are chiefly interesting as an old man’s experiments in verse. He left a large collection of personal jottings and memorabilia, most of which remain unpublished. He died in Boston on the 4th of March 1888. Alcott was a Garrisonian abolitionist.
See A. Bronson Alcott, His Life and Philosophy (2 vols., Boston, 1893), by F. B. Sanborn and William T. Harris; New Connecticut: an Autobiographical Poem (Boston, 1887), edited by F. B. Sanborn; and Lowell’s criticism in his Fable for Critics. (C. F. R.)
ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY (1832–1888), American author, was the daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, and though of New England parentage and residence, was born in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on the 29th of November 1832. She began work at an early age as an occasional teacher and as a writer—her first book was Flower Fables (1854), tales originally written for Ellen, daughter of R. W. Emerson. In 1860 she began writing for the Atlantic Monthly, and she was nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C., for six weeks in 1862–1863. Her home letters, revised and published in the Commonwealth and collected as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with additions in 1869), displayed some power of observation and record; and Moods, a novel (1864), despite its uncertainty of method and of touch, gave considerable promise. She soon turned, however, to the rapid production of stories for girls, and, with the exception of the cheery tale entitled Work (1873), and the anonymous novelette A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), which attracted little notice, she did not return to the more ambitious fields of the novelist. Her success dated from the appearance of the first series of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868), in which, with unfailing humour, freshness and lifelikeness, she put into story form many of the sayings and doings of herself and sisters. Little Men (1871) similarly treated the character and ways of her nephews in the Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, in which Miss Alcott’s industry had now established her parents and other members of the Alcott family; but most of her later volumes, An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag (6 vols., 1871–1879), Rose in Bloom (1876), &c., followed in the line of Little Women, of which the author’s large and loyal public never wearied. Her natural love of labour, her wide-reaching generosity, her quick perception and her fondness for sharing with her many readers that cheery humour which radiated from her personality and her books, led her to produce stories of a diminishing value, and at last she succumbed to overwork, dying in Boston on the 6th of March 1888, two days after the death of her father in the same city. Miss Alcott’s early education had partly been given by the naturalist Thoreau, but had chiefly been in the hands of her father; and in her girlhood and early womanhood she had fully shared the trials and poverty incident to the life of a peripatetic idealist. In a newspaper sketch entitled “Transcendental Wild Oats,” afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), she narrated, with a delicate humour, which showed what her literary powers might have been if freed from drudgery, the experiences of her family during an experiment towards communistic “plain living and high thinking” at “Fruitlands,” in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843.
The story of her career has been fully and frankly told in Mrs Ednah D. Cheney’s Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals (Boston, 1889). (C. F. R.)
ALCOVE (through the Span. alcova, from the Arab. al-, the, and quobbah, a vault), an architectural term for a recess in a room usually screened off by pillars, balustrade or drapery.
ALCOY, a town of south-eastern Spain, in the province of Alicante, on the small river Sérpis, and at the terminus of a branch railway connected with the Barcelona-Valencia-Alicante line. Pop. (1900) 32,053. Alcoy is built on high ground at the entrance to a gorge in the Moncabrer range (4547 ft.). It is a thriving industrial town, devoid of any great antiquarian or architectural interest, though founded by the Moors. It owes its prosperity to its manufacture of linen, woolen goods and paper, especially cigarette paper. Many of the factories derive their motive power from the falls of a mountain torrent known as the Salto de las Aguas. Labour disturbances are frequent, for, like Barcelona, Alcoy has become one of the centres of socialistic and revolutionary agitation, while preserving many old-fashioned customs and traditions, such as the curious festival held annually in April in honour of St George, the patron saint of the town.
Cocentaina (pop. 1900, 7093) is a picturesque and ancient town, 4 m. N.E. by rail. It is surrounded by Roman walls, which were partly rebuilt by the Moors, and it contains an interesting fortified palace, owned by the dukes of Medinaceli.
For an account of the festival of St George of Alcoy, see Apuntes historicos acerca de las fiestas que celebra cada año la ciudad de Alcoy a su patron San Jorge, by J. A. Llobet y Vallosera (Alcoy, 1853).
ALCUIN (Alchuine), a celebrated ecclesiastic and man of learning in the 8th century, who liked to be called by the Latin name of Albinus, and at the Academy of the palace took the surname of Flaccus, was born at Eboracum (York) in 735. He was related to Willibrord, the first bishop of Utrecht, whose biography he afterwards wrote. He was educated at the cathedral school of York, under the celebrated master Ælbert, with whom he also went to Rome in search of manuscripts. When Ælbert was appointed archbishop of York in 766, Alcuin succeeded him in the headship of the episcopal school. He again went to Rome in 780, to fetch the pallium for Archbishop Eanbald, and at Parma met Charlemagne, who persuaded him to come to his court, and gave him the possession of the great abbeys of Ferrières and of Saint-Loup at Troyes. The king counted on him to accomplish the great work which was his dream, namely, to make the Franks familiar with the rules of the Latin language, to create schools and to revive learning. From 781 to 790 Alcuin was his sovereign’s principal helper in this enterprise. He had as pupils the king of the Franks, the members of his family and the young clerics attached to the palace chapel; he was the life and soul of the Academy of the palace, and we have still, in the Dialogue of Pepin (son of Charlemagne) and Alcuin, a sample of the intellectual exercises in which they indulged. It was under his inspiration that Charles wrote his famous letter de litteris colendis (Boretius, Capitularia, i. p. 78), and it was he who founded a fine library in the palace. In 790 Alcuin returned to his own country, to which he had always been greatly attached, and stayed there some time; but Charlemagne needed him to combat the Adoptianist heresy, which was at that time making great progress in the marches of Spain. At the council of Frankfort in 794 Alcuin upheld the orthodox doctrine, and obtained the condemnation of the heresiarch Felix of Urgel. After this victory he again returned to his own land, but on account of the disturbances which broke out there, and which led to the death of King Æthelred (796), he bade farewell to it for ever. Charlemagne had just given him the great abbey of St Martin at Tours, and there, far from the disturbed life of the court, he passed his last years. He made the abbey school into a model of excellence, and many students flocked to it; he had numerous manuscripts copied, the calligraphy of which is of extraordinary beauty (v. Léopold Delisle in the Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions, vol. xxxii., 1st part, 1885). He wrote numerous letters to his friends in England, to Arno, bishop of Salzburg, and above all to Charlemagne. These letters, of which 311 are extant, are filled chiefly with pious meditations, but they further form a mine of information as to the literary and social conditions of the time, and are the most reliable authority for the history of humanism in the Carolingian age. He also trained the numerous monks of the
