Page:Imperialdictiona03eadi Brandeis Vol3a.pdf/239

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
LON
213
LON

rest are copies. The great excellence of this work is universally recognized. It shows Longinus in a most favourable light as a critic of a very high order. His remarks on oratory, poetry, and good taste are finely conceived and admirably expressed. The best editions are those of Weiske, Leipsic, 1809, 8vo; and Egger, Paris, 1837, 16mo. It has been translated into German by Schlosser; French by Boileau; and English by Smith.—S. D.

LONGLAND or LANGLAND, John, Bishop of Lincoln, was born in 1473 at Henley in Oxfordshire, and educated at Magdalen college, Oxford, of which he became principal in 1505. Consecrated a priest in 1500, he received various ecclesiastical preferments. In 1514 he was made dean of Salisbury; in 1519 canon of Windsor; and his sermons being much liked by Henry VIII., the king appointed him his confessor and bishop of Lincoln in 1520. He is said as royal confessor to have been "the first man of account" who recommended to Henry a divorce from Catherine, and to have been instigated in the recommendation by Wolsey. He certainly was active in procuring the divorce, and was employed by the king to obtain the assent of Oxford to the principle involved in that measure. In his diocese he was a cruel persecutor of so-called heresy, and he is represented by Burnet as one of the court party opposed to the Reformation. His persecutions are recorded in Fox, who probably on account of his supposed tendencies the other way, has printed a portion of his Good-Friday sermon (1538) against the papal supremacy. He was appointed chancellor of the university of Oxford in 1532, and there is a sketch of him with a list of his sermons in Wood's Athenæ Oxonienses. He died on the 7th of May, 1547, at Wooburn in Bedfordshire.—F. E.

LONGLANDE or LANGLANDE, Robert, is the person to whom is generally assigned the authorship of that early specimen of English poetry, the "Visions of Piers Plowman." According to a tradition of the sixteenth century, he was born at Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire, and after receiving his education at Oxford, became a monk of Malvern. From historical and other allusions contained in the "Visions of Piers Plowman," Mr. Thomas Wright assigns the date of its composition to the later section of the year 1362. The poem depicts in alliterative rhymeless metre a series of "visions," seen by the author after falling asleep on the Malvern hills. They are chiefly allegorical, and describe the vices of the age, political, social, and especially ecclesiastical. Viewed both under its poetical and its satirical aspects, this work is one of great vigour and frequent merit. For more important reasons than its allegorical form, it has been compared to the Pilgrim's Progress. It is one of the earliest literary protests against the corruptions of the English Church, although not the composition of a Wyckliffite, as was undoubtedly the writer of the later "Creed of Piers Plowman," which generally accompanies the "Visions." In its rhymeless alliteration it is also a curious echo of the species of versification in vogue among our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The language is very Saxon, without the classical and continental admixtures rife even in Chaucer and Gower. It had long been popular, and contributed effectively to the English Reformation, when it was first printed in 1550 by Robert Crowley. Three impressions were called for in one year. Of modern editions the first was that of Dr. Whitaker, 4to, London, 1813, who followed a set of manuscripts of the poem in which many passages are softened, and the language is full of northern peculiarities. One of the manuscripts of the other class, adopted by the earliest printers of the poem, was followed by Mr. Thomas Wright in his excellent Vision and Creed of Piers Plowman, edited from a contemporary manuscript, with historical introductions, notes, and a glossary, London, 1842, of which a second and revised edition appeared in 1856.—F. E.

LONGMAN, the eminent metropolitan publishing house of, was founded in 1724. Thomas Longman, the founder, born at Bristol in 1699, was the son of a gentleman of that city, and left heir to some property. Bound apprentice to a London bookseller, he married his master's daughter, and in 1724 purchased the bookselling and publishing business carried on at the Ship and Black Swan, Paternoster Row (the site of the premises now in the occupation of the firm of Longman), by Mr. William Taylor, the original publisher of Robinson Crusoe. He became the principal proprietor of Chambers' Cyclopædia of Arts and Sciences, and was one of the original proprietors of Johnson's Dictionary. He died in June, 1755, and was succeeded by his nephew, Thomas, whom he had previously taken into partnership. The business was much extended by the second Thomas Longman, especially in the colonies and in America. He died in 1797.—Thomas Norton Longman, the father of the two principal partners in the present firm, was born in 1771, and to his energy and sagacity may be attributed much of the eminence which the house has attained. He was the publisher of some of the earliest works of Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as of the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and gave the poet Moore £3000 for Lalla Rookh—the largest sum then known to have been received for a single poetical work. In 1826 the Edinburgh Review became the property of the firm of Longman. Mr. Thomas Norton Longman died in 1842, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Mr. Thomas Longman, with whom is associated his brother, Mr. William Longman.—F. E.

LONGOMONTANUS or LANGBORG, Christian, a Danish astronomer, was born at Langborg in Jutland, on the 4th of October, 1564, and died at Copenhagen on the 8th of October, 1647. He was the son of poor parents, and in his youth obtained scientific instruction in the midst of hard struggles for a livelihood. In 1589 he was engaged as an assistant by Tycho Brahe, in whose employment he continued for about thirteen years. In 1603 he was appointed rector of the academy of Viborg in Jutland, and in 1605 professor of mathematics in the university of Copenhagen, which appointment he held for the remaining forty-two years of his life. He was an industrious, careful, and accurate observer, but prejudiced in favour of old astronomical hypotheses; he laboured besides, during his whole life, under a delusion that he had discovered the exact ratio of the area of a circle to the square of its diameter. The inaccuracy of his supposed quadrature was demonstrated by many mathematicians; but he upheld it to the last. In judging, however, of this fallacy it must be borne in mind that the incommensurability of the two areas in question was not completely demonstrated until long afterwards, by John Henry Lambert.—W. J. M. R.

LONGUEVAL, Jacques, a French jesuit, scholar, and historian, was born near Peronne in 1680, studied at Amiens and Paris, and became professor at the jesuit college of La Fleche. He died at Paris in 1735. He wrote on schism, on miracles, &c.; but his great work is a "History of the Gallican Church," of which he produced eight volumes, and left materials for more.

LONGUEVILLE, Anne Geneviève de Bourbon, Duchess of, a French princess, sister of the great Condé, was born on the 29th of August, 1619, at the chateau of Vincennes, where her father was a prisoner; and died on the 15th of April, 1679. An intriguer from her youth upwards, she occupies, by the talent and energy with which she played her part, a place of note in French history. She was to have been married to the prince de Joinville; but his death transferred her hand to the duc de Longueville, who with her also acquired the usual troubles that follow an irate and unsettled wife. She first engaged in intrigues of passion, one of which was with La Rochefoucauld; then in intrigues of politics, where she did more mischief than enough; then threw herself into devotion as the last resource when the others failed. She was little less than the chief of the Fronde party, and into the wretched war she enticed Turenne. With great beauty, high birth, and an unusual power of conversation, she carried men off their feet to do evil. But she was also traitor to her country, and accepted large moneys from the king of Spain. It is but just, however, to note that "the mother of the church," as she was called in later days, threw her mantle of protection over the jansenists, and, like a woman, protected the persecuted.—P. E. D.

LONGUS, a Greek sophist belonging to the fourth or fifth century. Nothing is known of his life or death, but it is thought he lived after Heliodorus of Emesa. He is the author of a pastoral romance with the title, "Ποιμενικῶν τῶν κατὰ Δαφνῖν καὶ Χλόην," in four books, written in pretty good prose. The first edition appeared at Florence in 1598. The best modern one is that of Courier, 1830, Paris, second edition, in which a gap in the first book was supplied from a Greek MS. The work was translated into German by Passow and by Jacobs; into English by Thornley.—S. D.

LONICER, Johann, a German scholar, was born at Artern, near Eisleben, in 1499, and died 20th July, 1569, at Marburg, where he had filled the chairs of the Greek and Hebrew languages. He was a friend of Luther (some of whose writings he translated into Latin) of Melancthon, and Camerarius. He has left a number of learned editions, translations, and commentaries.—K. E.