buckeye. Ae. californica, when full-grown and in flower, is a beautiful tree, but its leaves often fall before midsummer.
(2) The Spanish or sweet chestnut, Castanea sativa (natural order, Fagaceae), is a stately and magnificent tree, native of the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, but also ripening its fruit in sheltered situations as far north as Scotland. It lives very long, and attains a large size, spreading its branches widely. It has large glossy lanceolate leaves with a toothed margin. The flowers, which appear in early summer, are in pendulous, slender yellowish catkins, which bear a number of staminate flowers with a few pistillate flowers at the base. The staminate contain 8 to 20 stamens which produce an enormous amount of dusty yellow pollen, some of which gets carried by wind to the protruding stigmas of the pistillate flowers. The latter are borne three together, invested by a cupule of four green bracts, which, as the fruit matures, grow to form the tough green prickly envelope surrounding the group of generally three nuts. The largest known chestnut tree is the famous Castagno di cento cavalli, or the chestnut of a hundred horses, on the slopes of Mount Etna, a tree which, when measured about 1780 by Count Borch, was found to have a circumference of 190 ft. The timber bears a striking resemblance to that of the oak, which has been mistaken for chestnut; but it may be distinguished by the numerous fine medullary rays. Unlike oak, the wood is more valuable while young than old. When not more than fifty years old it forms durable posts for fences and gates; but at that age it often begins to deteriorate, having ring-shakes and central hollows. In a young state, when the stems are not above 2 in. in diameter at the ground, the chestnut is found to make durable hoops for casks and props for vines; and of a larger size it makes good hop-poles.
Chestnuts (the fruit of the tree) are extensively imported into Great Britain, and are eaten roasted or boiled, and mashed or otherwise as a vegetable. In a raw state they have a sweet taste, but are difficult of digestion. The trees are very abundant in the south of Europe, and chestnuts bulk largely in the food resources of the poor in Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Germany. In Italy the kernels are ground into meal, and used for thickening soups, and even for bread-making. In North America the fruits of an allied species, C. americana, are eaten both raw and cooked.
CHETTLE, HENRY (1564?–1607?), English dramatist and miscellaneous writer, was the son of Robert Chettle, a London dyer. He was apprenticed in 1577 to a stationer, and in 1591 became a partner with William Hoskins and John Danter. In 1592 he published Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit. In the preface to his Kind Herts Dreame (end of 1592) he found it necessary to disavow any share in that pamphlet, and incidentally he apologized to three persons (one of them commonly identified with Shakespeare) who had been abused in it. Piers Plainnes Seaven Yeres Prentiship, the story of a fictitious apprenticeship in Crete and Thrace, appeared in 1595. As early as 1598 Francis Meres includes him in his Palladis Tamia as one of the “best for comedy,” and between that year and 1603 he wrote or collaborated in some forty-nine pieces. He seems to have been generally in debt, judging from numerous entries in Henslowe’s diary of advances for various purposes, on one occasion (17th of January 1599) to pay his expenses in the Marshalsea prison, on another (7th of March 1603) to get his play out of pawn. Of the thirteen plays usually attributed to Chettle’s sole authorship only one was printed. This was The Tragedy of Hoffmann: or a Revenge for a Father (played 1602; printed 1631), a share in which Mr Fleay assigns to Thomas Heywood. It has been suggested that this piece was put forward as a rival to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Among the plays in which Chettle had a share is catalogued The Danish Tragedy, which was probably either identical with Hoffmann or another version of the same story. The Pleasant Comedie of Patient Grissill (1599), in which he collaborated with Thomas Dekker and William Haughton, was reprinted by the Shakespeare Society in 1841. It contains the lyric “Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers,” which is probably Dekker’s. In November 1599 Chettle receives ten shillings for mending the first part of “Robin Hood,” i.e. The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, by Anthony Munday; and in the second part, which followed soon after and was printed in 1601, The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntingdon, he collaborated with Munday. Both plays are printed in Dodsley’s Select Collection of Old English Plays (ed. W. C. Hazlitt, vol. viii.). In 1603 Chettle published England’s Mourning Garment, in which are included some verses alluding to the chief poets of the time. His death took place before the appearance of Dekker’s Knight’s Conjurer in 1607, for he is there mentioned as a recent arrival in limbo.
Hoffmann was edited by H. B(arrett) L(ennard) (1852) and by Richard Ackermann (Bamberg, 1894).
CHEVALIER, ALBERT (1861– ), English comedian, began a connexion with the stage while still a child. In 1877 he was engaged as an actor under the Bancrofts in London, and for some years played “legitimate” parts at the Court theatre and elsewhere. In 1891, however, he began a successful music-hall career as a singer of coster songs of his own invention, a new type in which he had an immediate success, both in England and America. He subsequently organized an entertainment of his own, with sketches and songs, with which he went on tour, establishing a wide popularity as an original artist in his special line.
CHEVALIER, MICHEL (1806–1879), French economist, was born at Limoges on the 13th of January 1806. In his early manhood, while employed as an engineer, he became a convert to the theories of Saint Simon; these he ardently advocated in the Globe, the organ of the Saint Simonians, which he edited until his arrest in 1832 on a charge of outraging public morality by its publication. He was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, but was released in six months through the intervention of Thiers, who sent him on a special mission to the United States to study the question of land and water transport. In 1836 he published, in two volumes, the letters he wrote from America to the Journal des débats. These attracted so much attention that he was sent in the same year on an economic mission to England, which resulted in his publication (in 1838) of Des intérêts matériels de la France. The success of this made his position secure, and in 1840 he was appointed professor of political economy in the Collège de France. He sat for a short time (1845–1846) as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, but lost his seat owing to his enthusiastic adoption of the principles of free trade. Under Napoleon III. he was restored to the position of which the revolution of 1848 had temporarily deprived him. In 1850 he became a member of the Institute, and in the following year published an important work in favour of free trade, under the title of Examen du système commercial connu sous le nom de système protecteur. His chief public triumph was the important part he played in bringing about the conclusion of the commercial treaty between France and Great Britain in 1860. Previously to this he had served, in 1855, upon the commission for organizing the Exhibition of 1855, and his services there led to his forming one of the French jury of awards in the London Exhibition of 1862. He was created a member of the Senate in 1860, and continued for some years to take an active part in its discussions. He retired from public life in 1870, but was unceasingly industrious with his pen. He became grand officer of the Legion of Honour in 1861, and during the later years of his life received from many quarters public recognition of his eminence as a political economist. He died at his château near Montpellier (Hérault) on the 28th of November 1879. Many of his works have been translated into English and other languages. Besides those already mentioned the more important are: Cours d’économie politique (1842–1850); Essais de politique industrielle (1843); De la baisse probable d’or (1859, translated into English by Cobden, On the Probable Fall of the Value of Gold, Manchester, 1859); L’Expédition du Mexique (1862); Introduction aux rapports du jury international (1868).
CHEVALIER, ULYSSE (1841– ), French bibliographer, was born at Rambouillet on the 24th of February 1841. He published a great number of documents relating to the history of Dauphiné, e.g. the cartularies of the church and the town of Die (1868), of the abbey of St André le-Bas at Vienne (1869), of the abbey of Notre Dame at Bonnevaux in the diocese of Vienne (1889), of the abbey of St Chaffre at Le Monestier (1884), the
