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TOURNEFORT—TOURNEUR
  

and the Lady Pallas came forward, embowered in moving castles, to present the champions. Such costly shows fell out of fashion after the death of Henry VIII.; and in England the tournament remained, until the end, a martial sport. Sir Henry Lee rode as Queen Elizabeth’s champion in the tilt-yard of Whitehall until his years forced him to surrender the gallant office to that earl of Cumberland who wore the Queen’s glove pinned to the flap of his hat. But in France the tournament lingered on until it degenerated to the carousel, which, originally a horseman’s game in which cavaliers pelted each other with balls, became an unmartial display when the French king and his courtiers pranced in such array as the wardrobe-master of the court ballets would devise for the lords of Ind and Africk.

The tournament was, from the first, held to be a sport for men of noble birth, and on the Continent, where nobility was more exactly defined than in England, the lists were jealously closed to all combatants but those of the privileged class. In the German lands, questions as to the purity of the strain of a candidate for admission to a noble chapter are often settled by appeal to the fact that this or that ancestor had taken part in a tournament. Konrad Grünenberg’s famous heraldic manuscript shows us the Helmschau that came before the German tournament of the 15th century—the squires carrying each his master’s crested helm, and a little scutcheon of arms hanging from it, to the hall where the king of arms stands among the ladies and, wand in hand, judges each blazon. In England several of those few rolls of arms which have come down to us from the middle ages record the shields displayed at certain tournaments. Among the illustrations of the article Heraldry will be seen a leaf of a roll of arms of French and English jousters at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and this leaf is remarkable as illustrating also the system of “checques” for noting the points scored by the champions.  (O. Ba.) 


TOURNEFORT, JOSEPH PITTON DE (1656–1708), French botanist, was born at Aix, in Provence, on the 5th of June 1656. He studied in the convent of the Jesuits at Aix, and was destined for the Church, but the death of his father left him free to follow his botanical inclinations. After two years' collecting, he studied medicine at Montpellier, but was appointed professor of botany at the Jardin des Plantes in 1683. By the king’s order he travelled through western Europe, where he made extensive collections, and subsequently spent three years in Greece and Asia Minor (1700–1702). Of this journey a description in a series of letters was posthumously published in 3 vols. (Relation d’un voyage du Levant, Lyons, 1717). His principal work is entitled Institutiones rei herbariae (3 vols. Paris, 1700), and upon this rests chiefly his claims to remembrance as one of the most eminent of the systematic botanists who prepared the way for Linnaeus. He died on the 28th of December 1708.


TOURNEUR, CYRIL (c. 1575–1626), English dramatist, was perhaps the son of Captain Richard Turner, water-bailiff and subsequently lieutenant-governor of Brill in the Netherlands. Cyril Tourneur also served in the Low Countries, for in 1613 there is a record made of payment to him for carrying letters to Brussels. He enjoyed a pension from the government of the United Provinces, possibly by way of compensation for a post held before Brill was handed over to the Dutch in 1616. In 1625 he was appointed by Sir Edward Cecil, whose father had been a former governor of Brill, to be secretary to the council of war. This appointment was cancelled by Buckingham, but Tourneur sailed in Cecil’s company to Cadiz. On the return voyage from the disastrous expedition he was put ashore at Kinsale with other sick men, and died in Ireland on the 28th of February 1626.  (M. Br.) 

An allegorical poem, worthless as art and incomprehensible as allegory, is his earliest extant work; an elegy on the death of Prince Henry, son of James I., is the latest. The two plays on which his fame rests, and on which it will rest for ever, were published respectively in 1607 and 1611, but all students have agreed to accept the internal evidence which assures us that the later in date of publication must be the earlier in date of composition. His only other known work is an epicede on Sir Francis Vere, of no great merit as poetry, but of some value as conveying in a straightforward and masculine style the poet’s ideal conception of a perfect knight or “happy warrior,” comparable by those who may think fit to compare it with the more nobly realized ideals of Chaucer and of Wordsworth. But if Tourneur had left on record no more memorable evidence of his powers than might be supplied by the survival of his elegies, he could certainly have claimed no higher place among English writers than is now occupied by the Rev. Charles Fitzgeoffrey, whose voluminous and fervent elegy on Sir Francis Drake is indeed of more actual value, historic or poetic, than either or than both of Tourneur’s elegiac rhapsodies. The singular power, the singular originality and the singular limitation of his genius are all equally obvious in The Atheist’s Tragedy, a dramatic poem no less crude and puerile and violent in action and evolution than simple and noble and natural in expression and in style. The executive faculty of the author is in the metrical parts of his first play so imperfect as to suggest either incompetence or perversity in the workman; in The Revenger’s Tragedy it is so magnificent, so simple, impeccable and sublime that the finest passages of this play can be compared only with the noblest examples of tragic dialogue or monologue now extant in English or in Greek. There is no trace of imitation or derivation from an alien source in the genius of this poet. The first editor of Webster has observed how often he imitates Shakespeare; and, in fact, essentially and radically independent as is Webster’s genius also, the sovereign influence of his master may be traced not only in the general tone of his style, the general scheme of his composition, but now and then in a direct and never an unworthy or imperfect echo of Shakespeare’s very phrase and accent. But the resemblance between the tragic verse of Tourneur and the tragic verse of Shakespeare is simply such as proves the natural affinity between two great dramatic poets, whose inspiration partakes now and then of the quality more proper to epic or to lyric poetry. The fiery impulse, the rolling music, the vivid illustration of thought by jets of insuppressible passion, the perpetual sustenance of passion by the implacable persistency of thought, which we recognise as the dominant and distinctive qualities of such poetry as finds vent in the utterances of Hamlet or of Timon, we recognise also in the scarcely less magnificent poetry, the scarcely less fiery sarcasm, with which Tourneur has informed the part of Vindice—a harder-headed Hamlet, a saner and more practically savage and serious Timon. He was a satirist as passionate as Juvenal or Swift, but with a finer faith in goodness, a purer hope in its ultimate security of triumph. This fervent constancy of spirit relieves the lurid gloom and widens the limited range of a tragic imagination which otherwise might be felt as oppressive rather than inspiriting. His grim and trenchant humour is as peculiar in its sardonic passion as his eloquence is original in the strenuous music of its cadences, in the roll of its rhythmic thunder. As a playwright, his method was almost crude and rude in the headlong straightforwardness of its energetic simplicity; as an artist in character, his interest was intense but narrow, his power magnificent but confined; as a dramatic poet, the force of his genius is great enough to ensure him an enduring place among the foremost of the followers of Shakespeare.  (A. C. S.) 

Bibliography.—The complete list of his extant works runs: The Atheists Tragedie; or, The Honest Man’s Revenge (1611); A Funerall Poeme Upon the Death of the Most Worthie and True Soldier, Sir Francis Vere, Knight . . . (1609); “A Griefe on the Death of Prince Henrie, Expressed in a Broken Elegie . . .,” printed with two other poems by John Webster and Thomas Haywood as Three Elegies on the most lamented Death of Prince Henry (1613); The Revengers Tragaedie (1607 and 1608); and an obscure satire, The Transformed Metamorphosis (1600). The only other play of Tourneur’s of which we have any record is The Nobleman, the MS. of which was destroyed by John Warburton’s cook. This was entered on the Stationers’ Register (Feb. 15, 1612) as a “Tragecomedye called The Nobleman written by Cyrill Tourneur.” In 1613 a letter from Robert Daborne to Henslowe states that he has commissioned Cyril Tourneur to write one act of the promised Arraignment of