Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 4.djvu/778

 DELFINO

698

DE LISLE

1770); ZlEGELBAUER, Hist.

Ill, 395 sq.


 * lit O. S. B. (Augsburg, 17541,

Thomas Oestreich.

Delfino, PiETRO, theologian, b. at Venice in 1444; d. 16 Jan., 152.5. He entereil the Camaldolese Mon- astery of San Michele at Miirano, and in 1479 was elected abbot of the same community. The following year he was made general of the order and held that office until the year 1513 when he resigned in favour of his fellow-countryman Blessed Paul Giustiniani, whom he had invested with the Camaldolese habit in 1510. Delfino was the forty-sixth general from St. Romuald, the founder of the Camaldolese, and the last elected for life, the office after him being held for three years only. In 1488 he received the votes of his countrymen in Venice for the cardinalate, but refused to accept this dignity from Innocent VIII. The letters of Delfino, which number more than four thousand, addressed to different religious of his own and other orders and to various secular dignitaries, are valuable not only on account of the trustworthiness of their author, but more especially because of the accounts they contain of contemporary events in his own order and the Church in general. A collection of his Latin letters was published at Venice in 1524. Several others that had been omitted in the Venetian editions were in- cluded later in Martene's "Veterum Scriptorum am- plissima coUectio". The "Apothegmata Patrum" and the " Dialogues " on Savonarola are still unedited.

Martene, Veterum ScriptoruTn et monum^ntorum ecdesiasli- corum et dogmaticorum amplissima collectio. III. 915.

Stephen M. Donovan.

Delille, Jacques, French abb6 and litterateur, b. at Aigueperse, 22 June, 1738; d. at Paris, 1 May, 1813. He received his education at the College de Lisieux in Paris and became an instructor at the College de la Marche in the same city. His translation into verse of Virgil's "Georgics", which appeared in 1770, had very great success and eventually won for him a seat in the French Academy. He was afterwards ap- pointed to the chair of poetry in the College de France and through the patronage of the Count d' Artois he received as a benefice the Abbey of Saint^-Severin, but took only minor orders. In 1781) he accompanied the Count de Choiseul to Constantinople and visited Greece; his stay in the East does not seem, however, to have much influenced his literary career. The French Revolution deprived him of his position and benefice, and in 1794 he had to leave France ; his exile was spent in Switzerland, Germany, and England. He returned to France in 1802 and again took his seat in the French Academy. For some years Delille was con- sidered a great poet, Voltaire at one time even going so far as to call him the French Virgil ; but he did not en- joy very long this unwarranted reputation. All agree to-day that he was a wonderful versifier, having at his command all the secrets of his art, but it is also recog- nized that his long descriptive poems betray a com- plete lack of poetic feeling and inspiration. They are a striking illustration of the difference between versi- fication and poetry. His best known works are: "Traduction des g^orgiques de Virgile" (Paris, 1770); "Dithyrambe sur I'immortalit^ de I'^me" (Paris, 1793); "L'Iraagination" (Paris, 1806); " Les Trois Rc'gnes de la nature" (Paris, 1806); "La Conversa- tion" (Paris, 1812).

Kaintk-Beuve, Portraits Litteraires (Paris, 1846); Lingat, Etoge de Delille (Paris 1814); LiANfON, Histoirede la littirature Jranfaise (Paris, 1895).

Pierre Marique.

De Lisle, Ambrose Lisle March Phillipps, b. 17 March, 1809; d. 5 March, 1878. He was the son of Charles March Phillipps of Garendon Park, Leicester- shire, and Harriet Ducarel, a lady of Huguenot de- scent. He a,ssunied the name of de Lisle in 1862,

wlien on the death of his father he inherited the estates of the ancient family of de Lisle.

He spent his earliest years at his birthplace and was brought up as a member of the Church of Eng- land, receiving his first religious instruction from his uncle, William March Phillipps, a high-church clergy- man. In 1818 Ambrose was sent to a private school at South Croxton, whence he w.as removed in 1820 to Maizemore Court School, near Gloucester, kept by the Rev. George Hodson. The Bishop of Gloucester, having married Sophia March Phillipps, was his uncle by marriage, and so the boy had the advantage of spending Sundays and holidays at the bishop's palace. At school he met for the first time a Catholic, the Abb^ Giraud, a French emigre priest, whose holy life struck the boy as inconsistent with what he had al- ways heard of Catholics. On one of his journeys to Gloucester he took the opportunity of questioning the priest as to the real belief of Catholics. The answers he received so excited his interest that he began to read all the books on the subject he could find in his father's library. A visit to Paris in 1823 gave him his first acquaintance with Catholic liturgy. The effect on his mind was shown on his return home when he persuaded the Anglican rector to place a cross on the communion table, but this first effort to restore the cross to English churches was promptly suppressed by the Bishop of Peterborough as savouring of Popery. At this time an incident occurred which left an in- delible impression on his mind, and which he thus related to his subsequent biographer: "One day in the year 1823, as I was rambling along the foot of the hills in the neighbourhood of the school, and medi- tating, as was my wont in those boyish days, over the strange Protestant theory that the Pope of Rome is the Anti-Christ of Prophecy, all of a sudden I saw a bright light in the heavens, and I heard a voice which said : ' Mahomet is the Anti-Christ, for he denieth the Father and the Son.' On my return home in the next holidays I looked for a Koran and there I found those remarkable words, 'God neither begetteth nor is be- gotten.'"

About this time Mr. Hodson's school was removed to Edgbaston, near Birmingham, and here it was that the boy, now sixteen years old, had a remarkable dream "in which Our Lord seemed to reproach him with not having fully complied with tlie light he had received." Moved by this, he wrote to a Catholic priest, the Rev. Thomas Macdonnell, asking him to meet him at Loughborough and receive him into the Catholic Church. Mr. Macdonnell met him and was surprised to find him so thoroughly instructed in Catholic doctrine, and after a few days he considered him sufficiently prepared to be received into the Church. Ambrose informed both his father and his schoolmaster, with the result that he was immediately removed from Mr. Hodson's school, at that gentle- man's desire, and returned home with his father, who arranged for him to continue his preparation for the university under the private tuition of the Rev. Wil- liam Wilkinson. He was obliged every Sunday to at- tend the Protestant church, but did not join in the service. His own account of his conversion will be found in Appendix I, in the first chapter of his biog- raphy below.

Ambrose Phillipps went into residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, 16 October, 1826. He found at the university a congenial friend in Kenelm Digby (q.v.), author of "Mores Catholiei " and "The Broad- stone of Honour", and, like himself, a recent convert. There was no Catholic chapel then at Cambridge, and every Sunday for two years these two young Catho- lics used to ride over, fasting, to St. Edmund's College, Old Hall, a distance of twenty-five miles, for Mass and (^ommunion. It was on one of these visits to St. Ed- mund's, in April, 1828, that Phillipps was seized with a serious illness, having broken a blood-vessel on the