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CLÉMENT, F.—CLEMENTINE LITERATURE

the study is not smoothed by simplicity of style. Clement professed to despise rhetoric, but was himself a rhetorician, and his style is turgid, involved and difficult. He is singularly simple in his character. In discussing marriage he refuses to use any but the plainest language. A euphemism is with him a falsehood. But he is temperate in his opinions; and the practical advices in the second and third books of the Paedagogue are remarkably sound and moderate. He is not always very critical, and he is passionately fond of allegorical interpretations, but these were the faults of his age.

All early writers speak of Clement in the highest terms of laudation, and he certainly ought to have been a saint in any Church that reveres saints. But Clement is not a saint in the Roman Church. He was a saint up till the time of Benedict XIV., who read Photius on Clement, believed him, and struck the Alexandrian’s name out of the calendar. But many Roman Catholic writers, though they yield a practical obedience to the papal decision, have adduced good reason why it should be reversed (Cognat, p. 451).

Editions.—The standard edition of the collected works will be that of O. Stählin (first vol. containing Protrepticus and Paedagogus, Leipzig, 1905). Separate editions of Strom. vii., Hort and Major (1902); Q.D.S., Barnard in Texts and Studies, v. 2 (1897); W. Dindorf’s edition in 4 vols. (Oxford, 1869) is little more than a reprint of the text of Bishop Potter, 1715. For the Fragments see Zahn, Forschungen zur Gesch. des neut. Kanons, part iii., or Harnack and Preuschen, Gesch. der altch. Litt., vol. i.

Literature.—A copious bibliography will be found in Harnack, Chronologie, vol. ii., or in Bardenhewer, Gesch. der altk. Lit. Either of these will supply the names of works upon Clement’s biblical text, his use of Stoic writers, his quotations from heathen writers, and his relation to heathen philosophy. A valuable book is de Faye, Clém. d’Alex. (1898). For his theological position see Harnack, Dogmengeschichte; Hort, Six Lectures on the Ante-Nicene Fathers; Westcott, “Clem, of Alex.” in Dict. Christ. Biog.; Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alex. (1886). A book on Clement’s relation to Mysticism is wanted.  (C. Bi.; J. D.) 

CLÉMENT, FRANÇOIS (1714–1793), French historian, was born at Bèze, near Dijon, and was educated at the Jesuit College at Dijon. At the age of seventeen he entered the society of the Benedictines of Saint Maur, and worked with such intense application that at the age of twenty-five he was obliged to take a protracted rest. He now resided in Paris, where he wrote the 11th and 12th vols. of the Histoire littéraire de la France, and edited (with Dom Brial) the 12th and 13th vols. of the Recueil des historiens des Gauls et de la France. The king appointed him on the committee which was engaged in publishing charters, diplomas and other documents connected with French history (see Xavier Charmes, Le Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, vol. i., 1886, passim); and the Academy of Inscriptions chose him as a member (1785). Dom Clément also revised the Art de vérifier les dates, edited in 1750 by Dom Clémencet. Three volumes with the Indexes appeared from 1783 to 1792. He was engaged in preparing another volume including the period before the Christian era, when he died suddenly of apoplexy, at the age of sixty-nine. The work was afterwards brought down from 1770 to 1827 by Julien de Courcelles and Fortia d’Urban.


CLEMENT, JACQUES (1567–1589), murderer of the French king Henry III., was born at Sorbon in the Ardennes, and became a Dominican friar. Civil war was raging in France, and Clément became an ardent partisan of the League; his mind appears to have become unhinged by religious fanaticism, and he talked of exterminating the heretics, and formed a plan to kill Henry III. His project was encouraged by some of the heads of the League; he was assured of temporal rewards if he succeeded, and of eternal bliss if he failed. Having obtained letters for the king, he left Paris on the 31st of July 1589, and reached St Cloud, the headquarters of Henry, who was besieging Paris. On the following day he was admitted to the royal presence, and presenting his letters he told the king that he had an important and confidential message to deliver. The attendants then withdrew, and while Henry was reading the letters Clément mortally wounded him with a dagger which had been concealed beneath his cloak. The assassin was at once killed by the attendants who rushed in, and Henry died early on the following day. Clément’s body was afterwards quartered and burned. This deed, however, was viewed with far different feelings in Paris and by the partisans of the League, the murderer being regarded as a martyr and extolled by Pope Sixtus V., while even his canonization was discussed.

See E. Lavisse, Histoire de France, tome vi. (Paris, 1904).


MUZIO CLEMENTI (c. 1751–1832), Italian pianist and composer, was born at Rome between 1750 and 1752. His father, a jeweller, encouraged his son’s early musical talent. Buroni and Cordicelli were his first masters, and at the age of nine Clementi’s theoretical and practical studies had advanced to such a degree that he was able to win the position of organist at a church. He continued his studies under Santarelli and Carpani, and at the age of fourteen wrote a mass which was performed in public. About 1766 Beckford, the author of Vathek, persuaded Clementi to follow him to England, where the young composer lived in retirement at one of the country seats of his protector in Dorsetshire until 1770. In that year he first appeared in London, where his success both as composer and pianist was rapid and brilliant. In 1777 he was for some time employed as conductor of the Italian opera, but he soon afterwards left London for Paris. Here also his concerts were crowded by enthusiastic audiences, and the same success accompanied Clementi on a tour about the year 1780 to southern Germany and Austria. At Vienna, which he visited between 1781 and 1782, he was received with high honour by the emperor Joseph II., in whose presence he met Mozart, and fought a kind of musical duel with him. His technical skill proved to be equal if not superior to that of his rival, who on the other hand infinitely surpassed him by the passionate beauty of his interpretation. It is worth noting that one of the finest of Clementi’s sonatas, that in B flat, shows an exactly identical opening theme with Mozart’s overture to the Flauto Magico.

In May 1782 Clementi returned to London, where for the next twelve years he continued his lucrative occupations of fashionable teacher and performer at the concerts of the aristocracy. He took shares in the pianoforte business of a firm which went bankrupt in 1800. He then established a pianoforte and music business of his own, under the name of Clementi & Co. Other members were added to the firm, including Collard and Davis, and the firm was ultimately taken over by Messrs Collard alone. Amongst his pupils on the pianoforte during this period may be mentioned John Field, the composer of the celebrated Nocturnes. In his company Clementi paid, in 1804, a visit to Paris, Vienna, St Petersburg, Berlin and other cities. While he was in Berlin, Meyerbeer became one of his pupils. He also revisited his own country after an absence of more than thirty years. In 1810 Clementi returned to London, but refused to play again in public, devoting the remainder of his life to composition. Several symphonies belong to this time, and were played with much success at contemporary concerts, but none of them seem to have been published. His intellectual and musical faculties remained unimpaired until his death, on the 9th of March 1832, at Evesham, Worcester.

Of Clementi’s playing in his youth, Moscheles wrote that it was “marked by a most beautiful legato, a supple touch in lively passages, and a most unfailing technique.” Mozart may be said to have closed the old and Clementi to have founded the newer school of technique on the piano. Amongst Clementi’s compositions the most remarkable are sixty sonatas for pianoforte, and the great collection of Études called Gradus ad Parnassum.


CLEMENTINE LITERATURE, the name generally given to the writings which at one time or another were fathered upon Pope Clement I. (q.v.), commonly called Clemens Romanus, who was early regarded as a disciple of St Peter. Thus they are for the most part a species of the larger pseudo-Petrine genus. Chief among them are: (1) The so-called Second Epistle; (2) two Epistles on Virginity; (3) the Homilies and Recognitions; (4) the Apostolical Constitutions (q.v.); and (5) five epistles forming part of the Forged Decretals (see Decretals). The present article deals mainly with the third group, to which the title “Clementine literature” is usually confined, owing to the stress