mouth, and in the intervals of his abstruser and professional studies, to have been distinguished by his love for, and cultivation of, the literature and language of Wales. It was on this account, presumably, that he received the literary commission which led to the composition of his "British History," as he himself has commemorated in it. His friend, Walter Calenius, archdeacon of Oxford, in the course of a visit to Brittany, had become possessor of a legendary history of Britain written in Armorican or Welsh (then probably identical); and on his return to England he requested Geoffrey of Monmouth to translate it into Latin for general edification. Geoffrey undertook the task, and was proceeding with it, when one of his patrons, Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, a notable encourager of literature, requested him to translate into Latin those prophecies of Merlin, which every way interesting, have played a distinguished part through the authority gratuitously assigned to them in the early history of Norman-England. Geoffrey suspended his prior task to comply with the request of Alexander of Lincoln, and intercalating the prophecies of Merlin as a seventh book of his "British History," proceeded successfully with the completion of the latter work. It was inscribed to another of his patrons, Robert, earl of Gloucester, the illegitimate son of Henry I., and also distinguished for his steady encouragement of learning and learned men. From circumstances connected with the biographies of these his two patrons, the earl of Gloucester and the bishop of Lincoln, the date of the publication, so to speak, of Geoffrey's "British History," can be fixed as having taken place in the autumn of 1151. One of its results is supposed to have been his subsequent elevation to the see of St. Asaph, of which he was consecrated bishop on the 23rd of February, 1151. He did not live long to enjoy his new honours, dying, according to the best authorities, in 1154. The appearance of Geoffrey's "British History" marks an era in the development of the imagination of Europe. It was at once enormously successful, and was translated not only into English, into Anglo-Norman, but back again into the Welsh, from which it was professedly derived. It incorporated the floating legends of contemporary Arthurian tradition; it gave them a local habitation, and a nucleus for expansion and assimilation. It was, in fact, to use the simile applied to it by Thomas Campbell, a grand "prose reservoir," receptive of Arthurian and early British legend, which "afterwards flowed out thence again in the shape of verse with a force renewed by accumulation." Ultimately, and through Geoffrey of Monmouth, the whole literature of Europe was inundated by the nursery tales of Wales and Brittany, as it had formerly been by the classical mythology. The traces of Geoffrey of Monmouth are abundant in Chaucer and Spenser. It was from him originally that Shakspeare, altering the finale of the old legend with exquisite taste, derived the story of King Lear, and Milton the Sabrina of Comus. The finest poetry of our own day bears the marks of the influence of the twelfth century bishop of St. Asaph; and those who turn over old Geoffrey's pages will recognize the names with which they have been familiarized by Mr. Tennyson's Idyls of the King. Three controversies connect themselves with Geoffrey of Monmouth's work—1. Are its historical facts authentic? 2. Had he really Welsh or Armorican originals before him when he composed it? 3. If so, are these originals now extant? To the first of these questions the general answer of scholars is decidedly in the negative. The affirmative, however, has been maintained with considerable skill as well as enthusiasm in the introduction to the first modern translation into English of Geoffrey's work, published by Mr. Aaron Thompson of Queen's college, Oxford, in 1718,—a version which, revised and corrected by Dr. J. A. Giles, the editor of an excellent edition of the Latin original, published at Oxford in 1848, figures among the Six Old English Chronicles, added by Mr. Bohn in 1848 to his antiquarian library. To the second question, the reply of those who have most closely studied the subject is decidedly in the affirmative, although they admit that Geoffrey added from contemporary tradition, and from his own invention, a great deal to the original submitted to him by his friend the archdeacon of Oxford. The third question is the most difficult of the three to be answered positively; but the weight of opinion seems to incline to the decision that any Welsh works now extant, which appear to be the originals of Geoffrey's work, are in reality retranslations from his Latin. To those of our readers who are desirous of prosecuting the interesting inquiries here hinted at, we can recommend the perusal of the lucid section, devoted to Geoffrey, of Mr. Thomas Wright's Biographia Britannica Litteraria (vol. ii., Anglo-Norman period), and the instructive essay on the influence of Welsh tradition upon European literature, which obtained the prize of an Abergavenny literary society in 1838, and was afterwards printed for private circulation and anonymously. The author is understood to be Sir J. D. Hardinge, queen's advocate-general, and a copy of the essay is in the library of the British museum. Some other works have been attributed to Geoffrey of Monmouth, but all of them on insufficient or disputable authority. The most striking of these is a "Vita Merlini" in rather superior Latin verse, which has been republished; in 1830 by the Roxburghe Club, and in 1837 by two well-known literary archæologists, French and English, M. Francisque Michel and Mr. Thomas Wright, the latter of whom has, in the section of the Biographia Britannica Litteraria already alluded to, demolished its claims to be considered the workmanship of Geoffrey of Monmouth. It is needless to catalogue the various editions of Geoffrey's "British History." Those, in Latin and in English by Dr. Giles, formerly mentioned, are at once the best and the most easily accessible.—F. E.
GEOFFREY GAIMAR. See Gaimarv.
GEOFFRIN, Marie Therese Rodet, was born at Paris in 1699, and died there in 1777. The daughter of a valet de chambre in the employment of the court, she married in her fourteenth year a rich merchant of the name of Geoffrin, whose wealth enabled her to attempt, and, in spite of impediments in her husband's manners and position, to achieve the creation of a salon, at that time the crowning ambition of a Parisian lady of fashion. With wonderful art and perseverance she strove to make her establishment the resort of eminent personages of all kinds, men of letters, savans, philosophers, wits, artists; and, as the memoirs of many of the illustrious men and women of her time testify, in this line of ambition she attained an almost unexampled success. Among the French habitués of her salon were Diderot, D'Alembert, Marmontel, Raynal, Mlle. Lespinasse; among the names of distinguished strangers who made her house their chief resort in Paris we meet with those of Walpole, Hume, and Gibbon. Her liberality was not confined to the rich; and the worst quality which even envy attributed to her—that of vanity—did not mar her benefactions to the poor. Madame Geoffrin, on a visit to Vienna, was received with great respect by the Empress Maria Theresa.—J. S., G.
GEOFFROI, Claude Joseph, was born August 8th, 1685, in Paris. He followed the business of an apothecary in that capital, at the same time cultivating the science of chemistry and also that of botany. He made investigations on alcohol, tartar emetic, borax, silica, prussian blue, alum, lime, &c. His publications comprise sixty-four papers in the Mém. de l'Acad. des Sciences, of which he became a member in 1705. His death occurred March 9, 1752, in Paris.—J. A. W.
GEOFFROY, Etienne François, born in Paris, 13th of February, 1672; died 5th January, 1731; was by profession a physician, but he distinguished himself also as a chemist. After a course of study commenced in his twentieth year at Montpellier, he went to England as physician to the French ambassador. He subsequently visited Holland and Italy in a professional capacity, but it was not till his final return to France in 1704 that he graduated as M.D. He was chosen about 1704 to fill the chair of chemistry at the jardin des plantes, and afterwards he was appointed professor of medicine at the university of France. In 1726 he was elected dean of the Faculty of Physicians in Paris, and some time afterwards he became a member of the French Academy. As a chemist his researches were productive of results of some value. He was the author of several treatises and of various papers published in the proceedings of the Academy of Sciences.—R. V. C.
GEOFFROY, Etienne Louis, a French naturalist, son of the preceding, born at Paris in 1725; died in 1820. On the outbreak of the Revolution he retired from Paris, where he had long occupied a distinguished place among medical practitioners, to the village of Chartreuve, near Soissons. He wrote "Histoire abrégée des insectes qui se trouvent aux environs de Paris," and "Traité sommaire des coquilles."—J. S., G.
GEOFFROY SAINT HILAIRE, Etienne, born at Étampes in 1772; died in 1844. This eminent naturalist belonged to an honourable but poor family which had already given three members to the Academy of Sciences. His father, who was
