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ALLEMANDE—ALLEN
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Godly Fear, in 1664, and other less noticeable devotional compilations.

See Calamy, s.v.; Palmer’s Nonconf. Mem. iii. 167-168; C. Stanford’s Joseph Alleine; Researches at Batcomb and Frome Selwood; Wood’s Athenae (Bliss), iv. 13.

ALLEMANDE (Fr. for danse allemande, or German dance), a name for two kinds of dance, one a German national dance, in 2-4 time, the other somewhat resembling a waltz. The movement in a suite following the prelude, and preceding the courante (q.v.), with which it is contrasted in rhythm, is also called an allemande, but has no connexion with the dance. The name, however, is given to pieces of music based on the dance movement, examples of which are found in Beethoven’s German dances for the orchestra.


ALLEN, ETHAN (1730–1789), American soldier, was born at Litchfield, Connecticut, on the 10th of January 1739. He removed, probably in 1769, to the “New Hampshire Grants,” where he took up lands, and eventually became a leader of those who refused to recognize the jurisdiction of New York, and contended for the organization of the “Grants” into a separate province. About 1771 he was placed at the head of the “Green Mountain Boys,” an irregular force organized for resistance to the “Yorkers.” On the 10th of May 1775, soon after the outbreak of the War of American Independence, in command of a force, which he had assisted some members of the Connecticut assembly to raise for the purpose, he captured Ticonderoga from its British garrison, calling upon its commanding officer—according to the unverified account of Allen himself—to surrender “in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.” Seth Warner being elected colonel of the “Green Mountain Boys” in July 1775, Allen, piqued, joined General Philip Schuyler, and later with a small command, but without rank, accompanied General Richard Montgomery’s expedition against Canada. On the 25th of September 1775 near Montreal he was captured by the British, and until exchanged on the 6th of May 1778 remained a prisoner at Falmouth, England, at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in New York. Upon his release he was brevetted colonel by the Continental Congress. He then, as brigadier-general of the militia of Vermont, resumed his opposition to New York, and from 1779 to 1783, acting with his brother, Ira Allen, and several others, carried on negotiations, indirectly, with Governor Frederick Haldimand of Canada, who hoped to win the Vermonters over to the British cause. He seems to have assured Haldimand’s agent that “I shall do everything in my power to make this state a British province.” In March 1781 he wrote to Congress, with characteristic bluster, “I am as resolutely determined to defend the independence of Vermont as congress that of the United States, and rather than fail will retire with the hardy Green Mountain Boys into the desolate caverns of the mountains and wage war with human nature at large.” He removed to Burlington, Vermont, in 1787, and died there on the 11th of February 1789. He was, says Tyler, “blustering frontier hero—an able-minded ignoramus of rough and ready humour, of boundless self-confidence, and of a shrewdness in thought and action equal to almost any emergency.” Allen wrote a Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity (1779), the most celebrated book in the “prison literature” of the American revolution; A Vindication of the Inhabitants of Vermont to the Government of New York and their Right to form an Independent State (1779); and Reason, the Only Oracle of Man; or A Compendious System of Natural Religion, Alternately adorned with Confutations of a Variety of Doctrines incompatible with it (1784).

Ethan’s youngest brother, Ira Allen (1751–1814), born on the 21st of April 1751 at Cornwall, Connecticut, also removed to the New Hampshire Grants, where he became one of the most influential political leaders. In 1775 he took part in the capture of Ticonderoga and the invasion of Canada. He was a member of the convention which met at Winchester, Vermont, and in January 1777 declared the independence of the New Hampshire Grants; served (1776–1786) as a member of the Vermont council of safety; conducted negotiations, on behalf of Vermont, for a truce with the British and for an exchange of prisoners, in 1781; served for eight terms in the general assembly, and was state treasurer from 1778 to 1786 and surveyor-general from 1778 to 1787. In 1789, by a gift of £4000, he made possible the establishment of the university of Vermont, of which institution, chartered in 1791 and built at Burlington in deference to his wishes, he was thus virtually the founder. In 1795, on behalf of the state, he purchased from the French government arms for the Vermont militia, of which he was then the ranking major-general, but he was captured by a British cruiser west of Ireland on his return journey, was charged with attempting to furnish insurrectionary Irish with arms, and after prolonged litigation in the British courts, the case not being finally decided until 1804, returned to Vermont in 1801. During his absence he had been dispossessed of his large holdings of land through the operation of tax laws, and to escape imprisonment for debt, he removed to Philadelphia, where on the 4th of January 1814 he died. He published a dull and biassed, but useful Natural and Political History of Vermont (1798), reissued (1870) in vol. i. of the Collections of the Vermont Historical Society.

There is no adequate biography of Ethan Allen, but Henry Hall’s Ethan Allen (New York, 1892) may be consulted. The best literary estimate may be found in M. C. Tyler’s Literary History of the American Revolution (2 vols., New York, 1897).


ALLEN, GRANT [Charles Grant Blairfindie], (1848–1899), English author, son of a clergyman of Irish descent, was born at Kingston, Ontario, Canada, on the 24th of February 1848. He was educated partly in America and France, and in England at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and afterwards at Merton, Oxford. He was for a few years a schoolmaster in Jamaica, but then made his home in England, where he became prominent as a writer. He died at his house on Hindhead, Haslemere, on the 24th of October 1899. Grant Allen was a voluminous author. He was full of interesting scientific knowledge and had a gift for expression both in biological exposition and in fiction. His more purely scientific books (such as Physiological Aesthetics, 1877; The Evolutionist at Large, 1881; The Evolution of the Idea of God, 1897) contain much original matter, popularly expressed, and he was a cultured exponent of the evolutionary idea in various aspects of biology and anthropology. He first attracted attention as a novelist with a sensational story, The Devil’s Die (1888), though this was by no means his first attempt at fiction; and The Woman who Did (1895), which had a succès de scandale on account of its treatment of the sexual problem, had for the moment a number of cheap imitators. Other volumes flowed from his pen, and his name became well known in contemporary literature. But his reputation was essentially contemporary and characteristic of the vogue peculiar to the journalistic type.


ALLEN, JAMES LANE (1850–  ), American novelist, was born near Lexington, Kentucky, on the 21st of December 1850. He graduated at Kentucky University, Lexington, in 1872, taught at Fort Spring, Kentucky, at Richmond and at Lexington, Missouri, and from 1877 to 1879 at the academy of Kentucky University, where he was principal and taught modern languages; in 1880 he was professor of Latin and English at Bethany College, Bethany, West Virginia; and then became head of a private school at Lexington, Kentucky. Subsequently he gave up teaching, went to New York City, where he secured commissions for sketches of the Blue Grass region, and thereafter devoted himself to literature. His Choir Invisible, coming after other successful stories, made his name well known in England as well as America. His published works include: With Flute and Violin (1891), The Blue Grass Region (1892), John Gray (1893), A Kentucky Cardinal (1894), Aftermath (1895), A Summer in Arcady (1896), The Choir Invisible (1897), The Reign of Law (1900), The Mettle of the Pasture (1903), and The Bride of the Mistletoe (1909.)


ALLEN, JOHN (1476–1534), English divine, after studying at both Oxford and Cambridge, was sent by Archbishop Warham on an ecclesiastical mission to Rome. On his return he held a number of livings in succession, and in 1516 was rector of South Ockenden, Essex, and prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral. In the suppression of the minor monasteries in 1524–1525 he gave Wolsey much assistance, and became prebendary of Nottingham in 1526 and of St Paul’s, London, in 1527. These prebends he resigned in 1528 on his election as archbishop of Dublin. For