Chapter VI: The 19th Century (2)

After some preliminary ironic sparring Newman was stung into writing what he deliberately called _Apologia pro vita sua_. In this, apart from the masterly dialectic and exposition in which he had already shown himself an adept, a volume of autobiography is made a chapter of general history, unsurpassed in its kind since the _Confessions_ of St Augustine, combined with a perfection of form, a precision of phrasing and a charm of style peculiar to the genius of the author, rendering it one of the masterpieces of English prose. But while Newman was thus sounding a retreat, louder and more urgent voices were signalling the advance in a totally opposite direction. The _Apologia_ fell in point of time between _The Origin of Species_ and _Descent of Man_, in which Charles Darwin was laying the corner stones of the new science of which Thomas Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace were to be among the first apostles, and almost coincided with the _First Principles_ of a synthetic philosophy, in which Herbert Spencer was formulating a set of probabilities wholly destructive to the acceptance of positive truth in any one religion. The typical historian of the 'fifties, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and the seminal thinker of the 'sixties, John Stuart Mill, had as determinedly averted their faces from the old conception of revealed religion. Nourished in the school of the great Whig pamphleteer historians, George Grote and Henry Hallam, Macaulay combined gifts of memory, enthusiastic conviction, portraiture and literary expression, which gave to his historical writing a resonance unequalled (even by Michelet) in modern literature. In spite of faults of taste and fairness, Macaulay's resplendent gifts enabled him to achieve for the period from Charles II. to the peace of Ryswick what Thucydides had done for the Peloponnesian War. The pictures that he drew with such exultant force are stamped ineffaceably upon the popular mind. His chief faults are not of detail, but rather a lack of subtlety as regards characterization and motive, a disposition to envisage history too exclusively as a politician, and the sequence of historical events as a kind of ordered progress towards the material ideals of universal trade and Whig optimism as revealed in the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Carlyle.

Macaulay's tendency to disparage the past brought his whole vision of the Cosmos into sharp collision with that of his rival appellant to the historical conscience, Thomas Carlyle, a man whose despair of the present easily exceeded Newman's. But Carlyle's despondency was totally irrespective of the attitude preserved by England towards the Holy Father, whom he seldom referred to save as "the three-hatted Papa" and "servant of the devil." It may be in fact almost regarded as the reverse or complement to the excess of self-complacency in Macaulay. We may correct the excess of one by the opposite excess of the other. Macaulay was an optimist in ecstasy with the material advance of his time in knowledge and power; the growth of national wealth, machinery and means of lighting and locomotion caused him to glow with satisfaction. Carlyle, the pessimist, regards all such symptoms of mechanical development as contemptible. Far from panegyrizing his own time, he criticizes it without mercy. Macaulay had great faith in rules and regulations, reform bills and parliamentary machinery. Carlyle regards them as wiles of the devil. Frederick William of Prussia, according to Macaulay, was the most execrable of fiends, a cross between Moloch and Puck, his palace was hell, and Oliver Twist and Smike were petted children compared with his son the crown prince. In the same bluff and honest father Carlyle recognized the realized ideal of his fancy and hugged the just man made perfect to his heart of hearts. Such men as Bentham and Cobden, Mill and Macaulay, had in Carlyle's opinion spared themselves no mistaken exertion to exalt the prosperity and happiness of their own day. The time had come to react at all hazards against the prevalent surfeit of civilization. Henceforth his literary activity was to take two main directions. First, tracts for the times against modern tendencies, especially against the demoralizing modern talk about progress by means of money and machinery which emanated like a miasma from the writings of such men as Mill, Macaulay, Brougham, Buckle and from the Quarterlies. Secondly, a cyclopean exhibition of Caesarism, discipline, the regimentation of workers, and the convertibility of the Big Stick and the Bible, with a preference to the Big Stick as a panacea. The snowball was to grow rapidly among such writers as Kingsley, Ruskin, George Borrow, unencumbered by reasoning or deductive processes which they despised. Carlyle himself felt that the condition of England was one for anger rather than discussion. He detested the rationalism and symmetry of such methodists of thought as Mill, Buckle, Darwin, Spencer, Lecky, Ricardo and other demonstrations of the dismal science--mere chatter he called it. The palliative philanthropy of the day had become his aversion even more than the inroads of Rome under cover of the Oxford movement which Froude, Borrow and Kingsley set themselves to correct. As an historian of a formal order Carlyle's historical portraits cannot bear a strict comparison with the published work of Gibbon and Macaulay, or even of Maine and Froude in this period, but as a biographer and autobiographer Carlyle's caustic insight has enabled him to produce much which is of the very stuff of human nature. Surrounded by philomaths and savants who wrote smoothly about the perfectibility of man and his institutions, Carlyle almost alone refused to distil his angry eloquence and went on railing against the passive growth of civilization at the heart of which he declared that he had discovered a cancer. This uncouth Titan worship and prostration before brute force, this constant ranting about jarls and vikings trembles often on the verge of cant and comedy, and his fiddling on the one string of human pretension and bankruptcy became discordant almost to the point of chaos. Instinctively destructive, he resents the apostleship of teachers like Mill, or the pioneer discoveries of men like Herbert Spencer and Darwin. He remains, nevertheless, a great incalculable figure, the cross grandfather of a school of thought which is largely unconscious of its debt and which so far as it recognizes it takes Carlyle in a manner wholly different from that of his contemporaries.

New schools.

History.

The deaths of Carlyle and George Eliot (and also of George Borrow) in 1881 make a starting-point for the new schools of historians, novelists, critics and biographers, and those new nature students who claim to cure those evil effects of civilization which Carlyle and his disciples had discovered. History in the hands of Macaulay, Buckle and Carlyle had been occupied mainly with the bias and tendency of change, the results obtained by those who consulted the oracle being more often than not diametrically opposite. With Froude still on the one hand as the champion of Protestantism, and with E.A. Freeman and J.R. Green on the other as nationalist historians, the school of applied history was fully represented in the next generation, but as the records grew and multiplied in print in accordance with the wise provisions made in 1857 by the commencement of the Rolls Series of medieval historians, and the Calendars of State Papers, to be followed shortly by the rapidly growing volumes of Calendars of Historical Manuscripts, historians began to concentrate their attention more upon the process of change as their right subject matter and to rely more and more upon documents, statistics and other impersonal and disinterested forms of material. Such historical writers as Lecky, Lord Acton, Creighton, Morley and Bryce contributed to the process of transition mainly as essayists, but the new doctrines were tested and to a certain extent put into action by such writers as Thorold Rogers, Stubbs, Gardiner and Maitland. The theory that History is a science, no less and no more, was propounded in so many words by Professor Bury in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1903, and this view and the corresponding divergence of history from the traditional pathway of Belles Lettres has become steadily more dominant in the world of historical research and historical writing since 1881. The bulk of quite modern historical writing can certainly be justified from no other point of view.

The novel.

The novel since 1881 has pursued a course curiously analogous to that of historical writing. Supported as it was by masters of the old regime such as Meredith and Hardy, and by those who then ranked even higher in popular esteem such as Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Besant and Rice, Blackmore, William Black and a monstrous rising regiment of lady novelists--Mrs Lynn Linton, Rhoda Broughton, Mrs Henry Wood, Miss Braddon, Mrs Humphry Ward, the type seemed securely anchored to the old formulas and the old ways. In reality, however, many of these popular workers were already moribund and the novel was being honeycombed by French influence.

This is perceptible in Hardy, but may be traced with greater distinctness in the best work of George Gissing, George Moore, Mark Rutherford, and later on of H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. The old novelists had left behind them a giant's robe. Intellectually giants, Dickens and Thackeray were equally gigantic spendthrifts. They worked in a state of fervent heat above a glowing furnace, into which they flung lavish masses of unshaped metal, caring little for immediate effect or minute dexterity of stroke, but knowing full well that the emotional energy of their temperaments was capable of fusing the most intractable material, and that in the end they would produce their great downright effect. Their spirits rose and fell, but the case was desperate; copy had to be despatched at once or the current serial would collapse. Good and bad had to make up the tale against time, and revelling in the very exuberance and excess of their humour, the novelists invariably triumphed. It was incumbent on the new school of novelists to economize their work with more skill, to relieve their composition of irrelevancies, to keep the writing in one key, and to direct it consistently to one end--in brief, to unify the novel as a work of art and to simplify its ordonnance.

The novel, thus lightened and sharpened, was conquering new fields. The novel of the 'sixties remained not, perhaps, to win many new triumphs, but a very popular instrument in the hands of those who performed variations on the old masters, and much later in the hands of Mr William de Morgan, showing a new force and quiet power of its own. The novel, however, was ramifying in other directions in a way full of promise for the future. A young Edinburgh student, Robert Louis Stevenson, had inherited much of the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelitic virtuosos, and combined with their passion for the romance of the historic past a curiosity fully as strong about the secrets of romantic technique. A coterie which he formed with W.E. Henley and his cousin R.A.M. Stevenson studied words as a young art student studies paints, and made studies for portraits of buccaneers with the same minute drudgery that Rossetti had studied a wall or Morris a piece of figured tapestry. While thus forming a new romantic school whose work when wrought by his methods should be fit to be grafted upon the picturesque historic fiction of Scott and Dumas, Stevenson was also naturalizing the short story of the modern French type upon English ground. In this particular field he was eclipsed by Rudyard Kipling, who, though less original as a man of letters, had a technical vocabulary and descriptive power far in advance of Stevenson's, and was able in addition to give his writing an exotic quality derived from Oriental colouring. This regional type of writing has since been widely imitated, and the novel has simultaneously developed in many other ways, of which perhaps the most significant is the psychological study as manipulated severally by Shorthouse, Mallock and Henry James.

Criticism.

The expansion of criticism in the same thirty years was not a whit less marked than the vast divagation of the novel. In the early 'eighties it was still tongue-bound by the hypnotic influence of one or two copy-book formulae--Arnold's "criticism of life" as a definition of poetry, and Walter Pater's implied doctrine of art for art's sake. That two dicta so manifestly absurd should have cast such an augur-like spell upon the free expression of opinion, though it may of course, like all such instances, be easily exaggerated, is nevertheless a curious example of the enslavement of ideas by a confident claptrap. A few representatives of the old schools of motived or scientific criticism, deduced from the literatures of past time, survived the new century in Leslie Stephen, Saintsbury, Stopford Brooke, Austin Dobson, Courthope, Sidney Colvin, Watts-Dunton; but their agreement is certainly not greater than among the large class of emancipated who endeavour to concentrate the attention of others without further ado upon those branches of literature which they find most nutritive. Among the finest appreciators of this period have been Pattison and Jebb, Myers, Hutton, Dowden, A.C. Bradley, William Archer, Richard Garnett, E. Gosse and Andrew Lang. Birrell, Walkley and Max Beerbohm have followed rather in the wake of the Stephens and Bagehot, who have criticized the sufficiency of the titles made out by the more enthusiastic and lyrical eulogists. In Arthur Symons, Walter Raleigh and G.K. Chesterton the new age possessed critics of great originality and power, the work of the last two of whom is concentrated upon the application of ideas about life at large to the conceptions of literature. In exposing palpable nonsense as such, no one perhaps did better service in criticism than the veteran Frederic Harrison.

In the cognate work of memoir and essay, the way for which has been greatly smoothed by co-operative lexicographical efforts such as the _Dictionary of National Biography_, the _New English Dictionary_, the _Victoria County History_ and the like, some of the most dexterous and permeating work of the transition from the old century to the new was done by H.D. Traill, Gosse, Lang, Mackail, E.V. Lucas, Lowes Dickinson, Richard le Gallienne, A.C. Benson, Hilaire Belloc, while the open-air relief work for dwellers pent in great cities, pioneered by Gilbert White, has been expanded with all the zest and charm that a novel pursuit can endow by such writers as Richard Jefferies, an open-air and nature mystic of extraordinary power at his best, Selous, Seton Thompson, W.H. Hudson.

Poetry.

The age has not been particularly well attuned to the efforts of the newer poets since Coventry Patmore in the _Angel in the House_ achieved embroidery, often extremely beautiful, upon the Tennysonian pattern, and since Edward FitzGerald, the first of all letter-writing commentators on life and letters since Lamb, gave a new cult to the decadent century in his version of the Persian centoist Omar Khayyam. The prizes which in Moore's day were all for verse have now been transferred to the prose novel and the play, and the poets themselves have played into the hands of the Philistines by disdaining popularity in a fond preference for virtuosity and obscurity. Most kinds of the older verse, however, have been well represented, descriptive and elegiac poetry in particular by Robert Bridges and William Watson; the music of the waters of the western sea and its isles by W.B. Yeats, Synge, Moira O'Neill, "Fiona Macleod" and an increasing group of Celtic bards; the highly wrought verse of the 17th-century lyrists by Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson; the simplicity of a more popular strain by W.H. Davies, of a brilliant rhetoric by John Davidson, and of a more intimate romance by Sturge Moore and Walter de la Mare. Light verse has never, perhaps, been represented more effectively since Praed and Calverley and Lewis Carroll than by Austin Dobson, Locker Lampson, W.S. Gilbert and Owen Seaman. The names of C.M. Doughty, Alfred Noyes, Herbert Trench and Laurence Binyon were also becoming prominent at the opening of the 20th century. For originality in form and substance the palm rests in all probability with A.E. Housman, whose _Shropshire Lad_ opens new avenues and issues, and with W.E. Henley, whose town and hospital poems had a poignant as well as an ennobling strain. The work of Henry Newbolt, Mrs. Meynell and Stephen Phillips showed a real poetic gift. Above all these, however, in the esteem of many reign the verses of George Meredith and of Thomas Hardy, whose _Dynasts_ was widely regarded by the best judges as the most remarkable literary production of the new century.

Drama.

The new printed and acted drama dates almost entirely from the late 'eighties. Tom Robertson in the 'seventies printed nothing, and his plays were at most a timid recognition of the claims of the drama to represent reality and truth. The enormous superiority of the French drama as represented by Augier, Dumas _fils_ and Sardou began to dawn slowly upon the English consciousness. Then in the 'eighties came Ibsen, whose daring in handling actuality was only equalled by his intrepid stage-craft. Oscar Wilde and A.W. Pinero were the first to discover how the spirit of these new discoveries might be adapted to the English stage. Gilbert Murray, with his fascinating and tantalizing versions from Euripides, gave a new flexibility to the expansion that was going on in English dramatic ideas. Bernard Shaw and his disciples, conspicuous among them Granville Barker, gave a new seasoning of wit to the absolute novelties of subject, treatment and application with which they transfixed the public which had so long abandoned thought upon entering the theatre. This new adventure enjoyed a _succes de stupeur_, the precise range of which can hardly be estimated, and the force of which is clearly by no means spent.

20th-century changes.

English literature in the 20th century still preserves some of the old arrangements and some of the consecrated phrases of patronage and aristocracy; but the circumstances of its production were profoundly changed during the 19th century. By 1895 English literature had become a subject of regular instruction for a special degree at most of the universities, both in England and America. This has begun to lead to research embodied in investigations which show that what were regarded as facts in connexion with the earlier literature can be regarded so no longer. It has also brought comparative and historical treatment of a closer kind and on a larger scale to bear upon the evolution of literary types. On the other hand it has concentrated an excessive attention perhaps upon the grammar and prosody and etymology of literature, it has stereotyped the admiration of lifeless and obsolete forms, and has substituted antiquarian notes and ready-made commentary for that live enjoyment, which is essentially individual and which tends insensibly to evaporate from all literature as soon as the circumstance of it changes. It is prone, moreover, to force upon the immature mind a rapt admiration for the mirror before ever it has scanned the face of the original. A result due rather to the general educational agencies of the time is that, while in the middle of the 19th century one man could be found to write competently on a given subject, in 1910 there were fifty. Books and apparatus for reading have multiplied in proportion. The fact of a book having been done quite well in a certain way is no longer any bar whatever to its being done again without hesitation in the same way. This continual pouring of ink from one bottle into another is calculated gradually to raise the standard of all subaltern writing and compiling, and to leave fewer and fewer books securely rooted in a universal recognition of their intrinsic excellence, power and idiosyncrasy or personal charm. Even then, of what we consider first-rate in the 19th century, for instance, but a very small residuum can possibly survive. The one characteristic that seems likely to cling and to differentiate this voluble century is its curious reticence, of which the 20th century has already made uncommonly short work. The new playwrights have untaught England a shyness which came in about the time of Southey, Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott. That the best literature has survived hitherto is at best a pious opinion. As the area of experience grows it is more and more difficult to circumscribe or even to describe the supreme best, and such attempts have always been responsible for base superstition. It is clear that some limitation of the literary stock-in-trade will become increasingly urgent as time goes on, and the question may well occur as to whether we are insuring the right baggage. The enormous apparatus of literature at the present time is suitable only to a peculiar phasis and manner of existence. Some hold to the innate and essential aristocracy of literature; others that it is bound to develop on the popular and communistic side, for that at present, like machinery and other deceptive benefits, it is a luxury almost exclusively advantageous to the rich. But to predict the direction of change in literature is even more futile than to predict the direction of change in human history, for of all factors of history, literature, if one of the most permanent, is also one of the least calculable.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--_The Age of Wordsworth_ and _The Age of
Tennyson_ in Bell's "Handbooks of English Literature" are of special
value for this period. Prof. Dowden's and Prof. Saintsbury's
19th-century studies fill in interstices; and of the "Periods of
European Literature," the _Romantic Revolt_ and _Romantic Triumph_ are
pertinent, as are the literary chapters in vols. x. and xi. of the
_Cambridge Modern History_. Of more specific books George Brandes's
_Literary Currents of the Nineteenth Century_, Stedman's _Victorian
Poets_, Holman Hunt's _Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood_, R.H. Hutton's
_Contemporary Thought_ (and companion volumes), Sir Leslie Stephen's
_The Utilitarians_, Buxton Forman's _Our Living Poets_, Dawson's
_Victorian Novelists_, Thureau-Dangin's _Renaissance des idees
catholiques en Angleterre_, A. Chevrillon's _Sydney Smith et la
renaissance des idees liberales en Angleterre_, A.W. Benn's _History
of English Thought in the Nineteenth Century_, the publishing
histories of Murray, Blackwood, Macvey Napier, Lockhart, &c., J.M.
Robertson's _Modern Humanists_, and the critical miscellanies of Lord
Morley, Frederic Harrison, W. Bagehot, A. Birrell, Andrew Lang and E.
Gosse, will be found, in their several degrees, illuminating. The
chief literary lives are those of Scott by Lockhart, Carlyle by
Froude, Macaulay by Trevelyan, Dickens by Forster and Charlotte Bronte
by Mrs Gaskell. (T. Se.)

FOOTNOTE:

[1] _Piers Plowman_ has been so long attributed as a whole to
Langland (q.v.), that in spite of modern analytical criticism it is
most conveniently discussed under that name.

ENGLISHRY (_Englescherie_), a legal name given, in the reign of William the Conqueror, to the presentment of the fact that a person slain was an Englishman. If an unknown man was found slain, he was presumed to be a Norman, and the hundred was fined accordingly, unless it could be proved that he was English. Englishry, if established, excused the hundred. Dr W. Stubbs (_Constitutional History_, i. 196) says that possibly similar measures were taken by King Canute. Englishry was abolished in 1340.

See _Select Cases from the Coroners' Rolls, 1265-1413_, ed. C. Gross,
Selden Society (London, 1896).

ENGRAVING, the process or result of the action implied by the verb "to engrave" or mark by incision, the marks (whether for inscriptive, pictorial or decorative purposes) being produced, not by simply staining or discolouring the material (as with paint, pen or pencil), but by cutting into or otherwise removing a portion of the substance. In the case of pictures, the engraved surface is reproduced by printing; but this is only one restricted sense of "engraving," since the term includes seal-engraving (where a cast is taken), and also the chased ornamentation of plate or gems, &c.

The word itself is derived from an O. Fr. _engraver_ (not to be confused with the same modern French word used for the running of a boat's keel into the beach, or for the sticking of a cart's wheels in the mud,--from _greve_, Provencal _grava_, sands of the sea or river shore; cf. Eng. "gravel"); it was at one time supposed that the Gr. _[Greek: graphein]_, to write, was etymologically connected, but this view is not now accepted, and (together with "grave," meaning either to engrave, or the place where the dead are buried) the derivation is referred to a common Teutonic form signifying "to dig" (O. Eng. _grafan_, Ger. _graben_). The modern French _graver_, to engrave, is a later adoption. The idea of a furrow, by digging or cutting, is thus historically associated with an engraving, which may properly include the rudest marks cut into any substance. In old English literature it included carving and sculpture, from which it has become convenient to differentiate the terminology; and the ancients who chiselled their writing on slabs of stone were really "engraving." The word is not applicable, therefore, either strictly to lithography (q.v.), nor to any of the photographic processes (see PROCESS), except those in which the surface of the plate is actually eaten into or lowered. In the latter case, too, it is convenient to mark a distinction and to ignore the strict analogy. In modern times the term is, therefore, practically restricted--outside the spheres of gem-engraving and seal-engraving (see GEM), or the inscribing or ornamenting of stone, plate, glass, &c.--to the art of making original pictures (i.e. by the draughtsman himself, whether copies of an original painting or not), either by incised lines on metal plates (see LINE-ENGRAVING), or by the corrosion of the lines with acid (see ETCHING), or by the roughening of a metal surface without actual lines (see MEZZOTINT), or by cutting a wood surface away so as to leave lines in relief (see WOOD-ENGRAVING); the result in each case may be called generically an engraving, and in common parlance the term is applied, though incorrectly, to the printed reproduction or "print."

Of these four varieties of engraving--line-engraving, etching, mezzotint or wood-engraving--the woodcut is historically the earliest. Line-engraving is now practically obsolete, while etching and mezzotint have recently come more and more to the front. To the draughtsman the difference in technical handling in each case has in most cases some relation to his own artistic impulse, and to his own feeling for beauty. A line engraver, as P.G. Hamerton said, will not see or think like an etcher, nor an etcher like an engraver in mezzotint. Each kind, with its own sub-varieties, has its peculiar effect and attraction. A real knowledge of engraving can only be attained by a careful study and comparison of the prints themselves, or of accurate facsimiles, so that books are of little use except as guides to prints when the reader happens to be unaware of their existence, or else for their explanation of technical processes. The value of the prints varies not only according to the artist, but also according to the fineness of the impression, and the "state" (or stage) in the making of the plate, which may be altered from time to time. "Proofs" may also be taken from the plate, and even touched up by the artist, in various stages and various degrees of fineness of impression.

The department of art-literature which classifies prints is called _Iconography_, and the classifications adopted by iconographers are of the most various kinds. For example, if a complete book were written on Shakespearian iconography it would contain full information about all prints illustrating the life and works of Shakespeare, and in the same way there may be the iconography of a locality or of a single event.

The history of engraving is a part of iconography, and various
histories of the art exist in different languages. In England W.Y.
Ottley wrote an _Early History of Engraving_, published in two volumes
4to (1816), and began what was intended to be a series of notices on
engravers and their works. The facilities for the reproduction of
engravings by the photographic processes have of late years given an
impetus to iconography. One of the best modern writers on the subject
was Georges Duplessis, the keeper of prints in the national library of
France. He wrote a _History of Engraving in France_ (1888), and
published many notices of engravers to accompany the reproductions by
M. Amand Durand. He is also the author of a useful little manual
entitled _Les Merveilles de la gravure_ (1871). Jansen's work on the
origin of wood and plate engraving, and on the knowledge of prints of
the 15th and 16th centuries, was published at Paris in two volumes 8vo
in 1808. Among general works see Adam Bartsch, _Le Peintre-graveur_
(1803-1843); J.D. Passavant, _Le Peintre-graveur_ (1860-1864); P.G.
Hamerton, _Graphic Arts_ (1882); William Gilpin, _Essay on Prints_
(1781); J. Maberly, _The Print Collector_ (1844); W.H. Wiltshire,
_Introduction to the Study and Collection of Ancient Prints_ (1874);
F. Wedmore, _Fine Prints_ (1897). See also the lists of works given
under the separate headings for LINE-ENGRAVING, ETCHING, MEZZOTINT and
WOOD-ENGRAVING.

ENGROSSING, a term used in two legal senses: (1) the writing or copying of a legal or other document in a fair large hand (_en gros_), and (2) the buying up of goods wholesale in order to sell at a higher price so as to establish a monopoly. The word "engross" has come into English ultimately from the Late Lat. _grossus_, thick, stout, large, through the A. Fr. _engrosser_, Med. Lat. _ingrossare_, to write in a large hand, and the French phrase _en gros_, in gross, wholesale. Engrossing and the kindred practices of forestalling and regrating were early regarded as serious offences in restraint of trade, and were punishable both at common law and by statute. They were of more particular importance in relation to the distribution of corn supplies. The statute of 1552 defines engrossing as "buying corn growing, or any other corn, grain, butter, cheese, fish or other dead victual, with _intent to sell the same again_." The law forbade all dealing in corn as an article of ordinary merchandise, apart from questions of foreign import or export. The theory was that when corn was plentiful in any district it should be consumed at what it would bring, without much respect to whether the next harvest might be equally abundant, or to what the immediate wants of an adjoining province of the same country might be. The first statute on the subject appears to have been passed in the reign of Henry III., though the general policy had prevailed before that time both in popular prejudice and in the feudal custom. The statute of Edward VI. (1552) was the most important, and in it the offences were elaborately defined; by this statute any one who bought corn to sell it again was made liable to two months' imprisonment with forfeit of the corn. A second offence was punished by six months' imprisonment and forfeit of double the value of the corn, and a third by the pillory and utter ruin. Severe as this statute was, liberty was given by it to transport corn from one part of the country under licence to men of approved probity, which implied that there was to be some buying of corn to sell it again and elsewhere. Practically "engrossing" came to be considered buying wholesale to sell again wholesale. "Forestalling" was different, and the statutes were directed against a class of dealers who went forward and bought or contracted for corn and other provisions, and spread false rumours in derogation of the public and open markets appointed by law, to which our ancestors appear to have attached much importance, and probably in these times not without reason. The statute of Edward VI. was modified by many subsequent enactments, particularly by the statute of 1663, by which it was declared that there could be no "engrossing" of corn when the price did not exceed 48s. per quarter, and which Adam Smith recognized, though it adhered to the variable and unsatisfactory element of price, as having contributed more to the progress of agriculture than any previous law in the statute book. In 1773 these injurious statutes were abolished, but the penal character of "engrossing" and "forestalling" had a root in the common law of England, as well as in the popular prejudice, which kept the evil alive to a later period. As the public enlightenment increased the judges were at no loss to give interpretations of the common law consistent with public policy. Subsequent to the act of 1773, for example, there was a case of conviction and punishment for engrossing hops, _R._ v. _Waddington_, 1800, 1 East, 143, but though this was deemed a sound and proper judgment at the time, yet it was soon afterwards overthrown in other cases, on the ground that buying wholesale to sell wholesale was not in "restraint of trade" as the former judges had assumed.

In 1800, one John Rusby was indicted for having bought ninety quarters of oats at 41s. per quarter and selling thirty of them at 43s. the same day. Lord Kenyon, the presiding judge, animadverted strongly against the repealing act of 1773, and addressed the jury strongly against the accused. Rusby was heavily fined, but, on appeal, the court was equally divided as to whether engrossing, forestalling and regrating were still offences at common law. In 1844, all the statutes, English, Irish and Scottish, defining the offences, were repealed and with them the supposed common law foundation. In the United States there have been strong endeavours by the government to suppress trusts and combinations for engrossing. (See also TRUSTS; MONOPOLY.)

AUTHORITIES.--D. Macpherson, _Annals of Commerce_ (1805); J.S.
Girdler, _Observations on Forestalling, Regrating and Ingrossing_
(1800); W. Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_; W.J.
Ashley, _Economic History_; Sir J. Stephen, _History of Criminal Law_;
Murray, _New English Dictionary_.

ENGYON, an ancient town of the interior of Sicily, a Cretan colony, according to legend, and famous for an ancient temple of the Matres which aroused the greed of Verres. Its site is uncertain; some topographers have identified it with Gangi, a town 20 m. S.S.E. of Cefalu, but only on the ground of the similarity of the two names.

See C. Hulsen in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopadie_, v. 2568.

ENID, a city and the county-seat of Garfield county, Oklahoma, U.S.A., about 55 m. N.W. of Guthrie. Pop. (1900) 3444; (1907) 10,087 (355 of negro descent); (1910) 13,799. Enid is served by the St Louis & San Francisco, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, and the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific railways, and by several branch lines, and is an important railway centre. It is the seat of the Oklahoma Christian University (1907; co-educational). Enid is situated in a flourishing agricultural and stock-raising region, of which it is the commercial centre, and has various manufactures, including lumber, brick, tile and flour. Natural gas was discovered near the city in 1907. Enid was founded in 1893 and was chartered as a city in the same year.

ENIGMA (Gr. [Greek: ainigma]), a riddle or puzzle, especially a form of verse or prose composition in which the answer is concealed by means of metaphors. Such were the famous riddle of the Sphinx and the riddling answers of the ancient oracles. The composition of enigmas was a favourite amusement in Greece and prizes were often given at banquets for the best solution of them (Athen. x. 457). In France during the 17th century enigma-making became fashionable. Boileau, Charles Riviere Dufresny and J.J. Rousseau did not consider it beneath their literary dignity. In 1646 the abbe Charles Cotier (1604-1682) published a _Recueil des enigmes de ce temps_. The word is applied figuratively to anything inexplicable or difficult of understanding.

ENKHUIZEN, a seaport of Holland in the province of North Holland, on the Zuider Zee, and a railway terminus, 11-1/2 m. N.E. by E. of Hoorn, with which it is also connected by steam tramway. In conjunction with the railway service there is a steamboat ferry to Stavoren in Friesland. Pop. (1900) 6865. Enkhuizen, like its neighbour Hoorn, exhibits many interesting examples of domestic architecture dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, when it was an important and flourishing city. The facades of the houses are usually built in courses of brick and stone, and adorned with carvings, sculptures and inscriptions. Some ruined gateways belonging to the old city walls are still standing; among them being the tower-gateway called the Dromedary (1540), which overlooks the harbour. The tower contains several rooms, one of which was formerly used as a prison. Among the churches mention must be made of the Zuiderkerk, or South church, with a conspicuous tower (1450-1525); and the Westerkerk, or West church, which possesses a beautifully carved Renaissance screen and pulpit of the middle of the 16th century, and a quaint wooden bell-house (1519) built for use before the completion of the bell-tower. There are also a Roman Catholic church and a synagogue. The picturesque town hall (1688) contains some finely decorated rooms with paintings by Johan van Neck, a collection of local antiquities and the archives. Other interesting buildings are the orphanage (1616), containing some 17th and 18th century portraits and ancient leather hangings; the weigh-house (1559), the upper story of which was once used by the Surgeons' Gild, several of the window-panes (dating chiefly from about 1640), being decorated with the arms of various members; the former mint (1611); and the ancient assembly-house of the dike-reeves of Holland and West Friesland. Enkhuizen possesses a considerable fishing fleet and has some shipbuilding and rope-making, as well as market traffic.

ENNEKING, JOHN JOSEPH (1841- ), American landscape painter, was born, of German ancestry, in Minster, Ohio, on the 4th of October 1841. He was educated at Mount St Mary's College, Cincinnati, served in the American Civil War in 1861-1862, studied art in New York and Boston, and gave it up because his eyes were weak, only to return to it after failing in the manufacture of tinware. In 1873-1876 he studied in Munich under Schleich and Leier, and in Paris under Daubigny and Bonnat; and in 1878-1879 he studied in Paris again and sketched in Holland. Enneking is a "plein-airist," and his favourite subject is the "November twilight" of New England, and more generally the half lights of early spring, late autumn, and winter dawn and evening.

ENNIS (Gaelic, _Innis_, an island; Irish, _Ennis_ and _Inish_), the county town of Co. Clare, Ireland, in the east parliamentary division, on the river Fergus, 25 m. W.N.W. from Limerick by the Great Southern & Western railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 5093. It is the junction for the West Clare line. Ennis has breweries, distilleries and extensive flour-mills; and in the neighbourhood limestone is quarried. The principal buildings are the Roman Catholic church, which is the pro-cathedral of the diocese of Killaloe; the parish church formed out of the ruins of the Franciscan Abbey, founded in 1240 by Donough Carbrac O'Brien; a school on the foundation of Erasmus Smith, and various county buildings. The abbey, though greatly mutilated, is full of interesting details, and includes a lofty tower, a marble screen, a chapter-house, a notable east window, several fine tombs and an altar of St Francis. On the site of the old court-house a colossal statue in white limestone of Daniel O'Connell was erected in 1865. The interesting ruins of Clare Abbey, founded in 1194 by Donnell O'Brien, king of Munster, are half-way between Ennis and the village of Clare Castle. O'Brien also founded Killone Abbey, beautifully situated on the lough of the same name, 3 m. S. of the town, possessing the unusual feature of a crypt and a holy well. Five miles N.W. of Ennis is Dysert O'Dea, with interesting ecclesiastical remains, a cross, a round tower and a castle. Ennis was incorporated in 1612, and returned two members to the Irish parliament until the Union, and thereafter one to the Imperial parliament until 1885.

ENNISCORTHY, a market town of Co. Wexford, Ireland, in the north parliamentary division, on the side of a steep hill above the Slaney, which here becomes navigable for barges of large size. Pop. of urban district (1901) 5458. It is 77-1/2 m. S. by W. from Dublin by the Dublin & South-Eastern railway. There are breweries and flour-mills; tanning, distilling and woollen manufactures are also prosecuted to some extent, and the town is the centre of the agricultural trade for the district, which is aided by the water communication with Wexford. There are important fowl markets and horse-fairs. Enniscorthy was taken by Cromwell in 1649, and in 1798 was stormed and burned by the rebels, whose main forces encamped on an eminence called Vinegar Hill, which overlooks the town from the east. The old castle of Enniscorthy, a massive square pile with a round tower at each corner, is one of the earliest military structures of the Anglo-Norman invaders, founded by Raymond le Gros (1176). Ferns, the next station to Enniscorthy on the railway towards Dublin, was the seat of a former bishopric, and the modernized cathedral, and ruins of a church, an Augustinian monastery founded by Dermod Mac-Morrough about 1160, and a castle of the Norman period, are still to be seen. Enniscorthy was incorporated by James I., and sent two members to the Irish parliament until the Union.

ENNISKILLEN, WILLIAM WILLOUGHBY COLE, 3RD EARL OF (1807-1886), British palaeontologist, was born on the 25th of January 1807, and educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford. As Lord Cole he early began to devote his leisure to the study and collection of fossil fishes, with his friend Sir Philip de M.G. Egerton, and he amassed a fine collection at Florence Court, Enniskillen--including many specimens that were described and figured by Agassiz and Egerton. This collection was subsequently acquired by the British Museum. He died on the 21st of November 1886, being succeeded by his son (b. 1845) as 4th earl.

The first of the Coles (an old Devonshire and Cornwall family) to settle in Ireland was Sir William Cole (d. 1653), who was "undertaker" of the northern plantation and received a grant of a large property in Fermanagh in 1611, and became provost and later governor of Enniskillen. In 1760 his descendant John Cole (d. 1767) was created Baron Mountflorence, and the latter's son, William Willoughby Cole (1736-1803), was in 1776 created Viscount Enniskillen and in 1789 earl. The 1st earl's second son, Sir Galbraith Lowry Cole (1772-1842), was a prominent general in the Peninsular War, and colonel of the 27th Inniskillings, the Irish regiment with whose name the family was associated.

ENNISKILLEN [INNISKILLING], a market town and the county town of county Fermanagh, Ireland, in the north parliamentary division, picturesquely situated on an island in the river connecting the upper and lower loughs Erne, 116 m. N.W. from Dublin by the Great Northern railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 5412. The town occupies the whole island, and is connected with two suburbs on the mainland on each side by two bridges. It has a brewery, tanneries and a small manufactory of cutlery, and a considerable trade in corn, pork and flax. In 1689 Enniskillen defeated a superior force sent against it by James II. at the battle of Crom; and part of the defenders of the town were subsequently formed into a regiment of cavalry, which still retains the name of the Inniskilling Dragoons. The town was incorporated by James I., and returned two members to the Irish parliament until the Union; thereafter it returned one to the Imperial parliament until 1885. There are wide communications by water by the river and the upper and lower loughs Erne, and by the Ulster canal to Belfast. The loughs contain trout, large pike and other coarse fish. Two miles from Enniskillen in the lower lough is Devenish Island, with its celebrated monastic remains. The abbey of St Mary here was founded by St Molaise (Laserian) in the 6th century; here too are a fine round tower 85 ft. high, remains of domestic buildings, a holed stone and a tall well-preserved cross. The whole is carefully preserved by the commissioners of public works under the Irish Church Act of 1869. Steamers ply between Enniskillen and Belleek on the lower lake, and between Enniskillen and Knockninny on the upper lake.

ENNIUS, QUINTUS (239-170 B.C.), ancient Latin poet, was born at Rudiae in Calabria. Familiar with Greek as the language in common use among the cultivated classes of his district, and with Oscan, the prevailing dialect of lower Italy, he further acquired a knowledge of Latin; to use his own expression (Gellius xvii. 17), he had three "hearts" (_corda_), the Latin word being used to signify the seat of intelligence. He is said (Servius on _Aen._ vii. 691) to have claimed descent from one of the legendary kings of his native district, Messapus the eponymous hero of Messapia, and this consciousness of ancient lineage is in accordance with the high self-confident tone of his mind, with his sympathy with the dominant genius of the Roman republic, and with his personal relations to the members of her great families. Of his early years nothing is directly known, and we first hear of him in middle life as serving during the Second Punic War, with the rank of centurion, in Sardinia, in the year 204, where he attracted the attention of Cato the elder, and was taken by him to Rome in the same year. Here he taught Greek and adapted Greek plays for a livelihood, and by his poetical compositions gained the friendship of the greatest men in Rome. Amongst these were the elder Scipio and Fulvius Nobilior, whom he accompanied on his Aetolian campaign (189). Through the influence of Nobilior's son, Ennius subsequently obtained the privilege of Roman citizenship (Cicero, _Brutus_, 20. 79). He lived plainly and simply on the Aventine with the poet Caecilius Statius. He died at the age of 70, immediately after producing his tragedy _Thyestes_. In the last book of his epic poem, in which he seems to have given various details of his personal history, he mentions that he was in his 67th year at the date of its composition. He compared himself, in contemplation of the close of the great work of his life, to a gallant horse which, after having often won the prize at the Olympic games, obtained his rest when weary with age. A similar feeling of pride at the completion of a great career is expressed in the memorial lines which he composed to be placed under his bust after death,--"Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men." From the impression stamped on his remains, and from the testimony of his countrymen, we think of him as a man of a robust, sagacious and cheerful nature (Hor. _Epp._ ii. 1. 50; Cic. _De sen._ 5); of great industry and versatility; combining imaginative enthusiasm and a vein of religious mysticism with a sceptical indifference to popular beliefs and a scorn of religious imposture; and tempering the grave seriousness of a Roman with a genial capacity for enjoyment (Hor. _Epp._ i. 19. 7).

Till the appearance of Ennius, Roman literature, although it had produced the epic poem of Naevius and some adaptations of Greek tragedy, had been most successful in comedy. Naevius and Plautus were men of thoroughly popular fibre. Naevius suffered for his attacks on members of the aristocracy, and, although Plautus carefully avoids any direct notice of public matters, yet the bias of his sympathies is indicated in several passages of his extant plays. Ennius, on the other hand, was by temperament in thorough sympathy with the dominant aristocratic element in Roman life and institutions. Under his influence literature became less suited to the popular taste, more especially addressed to a limited and cultivated class, but at the same time more truly expressive of what was greatest and most worthy to endure in the national sentiment and traditions. He was a man of many-sided activity. He devoted attention to questions of Latin orthography, and is said to have been the first to introduce shorthand writing in Latin. He attempted comedy, but with so little success that in the canon of Volcacius Sedigitus he is mentioned, solely as a mark of respect "for his antiquity," tenth and last in the list of comic poets. He may be regarded also as the inventor of Roman satire, in its original sense of a "medley" or "miscellany," although it was by Lucilius that the character of aggressive and censorious criticism of men and manners was first imparted to that form of literature. The word _satura_ was originally applied to a rude scenic and musical performance, exhibited at Rome before the introduction of the regular drama. The _saturae_ of Ennius were collections of writings on various subjects, written in various metres and contained in four (or six) books. Among these were included metrical versions of the physical speculations of Epicharmus, of the gastronomic researches of Archestratus of Gela (_Hedyphagetica_), and, probably, of the rationalistic doctrines of Euhemerus. It may be noticed that all these writers whose works were thus introduced to the Romans were Sicilian Greeks. Original compositions were also contained in these _saturae_, and among them the panegyric on Scipio, unless this was a drama. The satire of Ennius seems to have resembled the more artistic satire of Horace in its record of personal experiences, in the occasional introduction of dialogue, in the use made of fables with a moral application, and in the didactic office which it assumed.

But the chief distinction of Ennius was gained in tragic and narrative poetry. He was the first to impart to the Roman adaptations of Greek tragedy the masculine dignity, pathos and oratorical fervour which continued to animate them in the hands of Pacuvius and Accius, and, when set off by the acting of Aesopus, called forth vehement applause in the age of Cicero. The titles of about twenty-five of his tragedies are known to us, and a considerable number of fragments, varying in length from a few words to about fifteen lines, have been preserved. These tragedies were for the most part adaptations and, in some cases, translations from Euripides. One or two were original dramas, of the class called _praetextae_, i.e. dramas founded on Roman history or legend; thus, the _Ambracia_ treated of the capture of that city by his patron Nobilior, the _Sabinae_ of the rape of the Sabine women. The heroes and heroines of the Trojan cycle, such as Achilles, Ajax, Telamon, Cassandra, Andromache, were prominent figures in some of the dramas adapted from the Greek. Several of the more important fragments are found in Cicero, who expresses a great admiration for their manly fortitude and dignified pathos. In these remains of the tragedies of Ennius we can trace indications of strong sympathy with the nobler and bolder elements of character, of vivid realization of impassioned situations, and of sagacious observation of life. The frank bearing, fortitude and self-sacrificing heroism of the best type of the soldierly character find expression in the persons of Achilles, Telamon and Eurypylus; and a dignified and passionate tenderness of feeling makes itself heard in the lyrical utterances of Cassandra and Andromache. The language is generally nervous and vigorous, occasionally vivified with imaginative energy. But it flows less smoothly and easily than that of the dialogue of Latin comedy. It shows the same tendency to aim at effect by alliterations, assonances and plays on words. The rudeness of early art is most apparent in the inequality of the metres in which both the dialogue and the "recitative" are composed.

But the work which gained him his reputation as the Homer of Rome, and which called forth the admiration of Cicero and Lucretius and frequent imitation from Virgil, was the _Annales_, a long narrative poem in eighteen books, containing the record of the national story from mythical times to his own. Although the whole conception of the work implies that confusion of the provinces of poetry and history which was perpetuated by later writers, and especially by Lucan and Silius Italicus, yet it was a true instinct of genius to discern in the idea of the national destiny the only possible motive of a Roman epic. The execution of the poem (to judge from the fragments, amounting to about six hundred lines), although rough, unequal and often prosaic, seems to have combined the realistic fidelity and freshness of feeling of a contemporary chronicle with the vivifying and idealizing power of genius. Ennius prided himself especially on being the first to form the strong speech of Latium into the mould of the Homeric hexameter in place of the old Saturnian metre. And although it took several generations of poets to beat their music out to the perfection of the Virgilian cadences, yet in the rude adaptation of Ennius the secret of what ultimately became one of the grandest organs of literary expression was first discovered and revealed. The inspiring idea of the poem was accepted, purified of all alien material, and realized in artistic shape by Virgil in his national epic. He deliberately imparted to that poem the charm of antique associations by incorporating with it much of the phraseology and sentiment of Ennius. The occasional references to Roman history in Lucretius are evidently reminiscences of the _Annales_. He as well as Cicero speaks of him with pride and affection as "Ennius noster." Of the great Roman writers Horace had least sympathy with him; yet he testifies to the high esteem in which he was held during the Augustan age. Ovid expresses the grounds of that esteem when he characterizes him as

"Ingenio maximus, arte rudis."