Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 58.djvu/88

 Uxbridge and on the occasion of the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822 be executed two transparencies, one of which was twelve feet high. In 1824 he went to Italy, and during his absence of seven years he kept up a correspondence with his two brothers Zechariah and David, which was published with his memoir. In 1830 he exhibited 'Neapolitans dancing the Tarantula,' and in 1832 (the year after his return) 'The Saint-manufactory' (the interior of a shop in Naples). These and other works of the kind soon made him a reputation. He was elected an associate in 1833, a full academician in 1838. In 1839 he exhibited one of his best pictures, 'Le Chapeau de Brigand,' now in the National Gallery. The little girl depicted was a daughter of a friend named Joseph, with whom he lived for some time. In 1843 he painted a fresco of the lady in ' Comus ' for the Queen's Pavilion in Buckingham Palace Gardens. In 1844 he was made librarian of the Royal Academy, in 1845 surveyor of pictures to the queen, and in 1847 keeper of the National Gallery. In 1851, being then sixty-nine years of age, he married for the first time, and the union proved a very happy one. In 1854 he had a serious illness, and in 1855 he gave up his various offices and retired to Staines, a confirmed invalid. He went on painting, however, until his death on 26 Aug. 1857. There are several of his works in both oil and watercolour in the South Kensington Museum.

[Memoir of Thomas Uwins, R.A., by Mrs. Uwins; Roget's 'Old Watercolour ' Society.]  UXBRIDGE,. [See, first earl, d. 1743;, first marquis of Anglesey, 1768-1854.]

VACARIUS (1115?–1200?), civilian, doubtless of the school of Bologna, where he may even have listened to the teaching of Irnerius, was the first to introduce the study of the revived Roman law into England. It must have been early in life that he acquired a reputation which led to his being brought to England (perhaps by Becket on the occasion of his mission to Pope Celestine in 1143), together with a supply of books of the civil law, for the purpose of assisting Theobald [q. v.], archbishop of Canterbury, in his struggle to wrest the legateship from Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester. This was accomplished in 1146, and in 1149 we hear of Vacarius as lecturing on the laws of Justinian to crowds of rich and poor in the then rudimentary university of Oxford, and as composing, for the use especially of his poorer hearers , an abridgment, in nine books, of the Digest and Code of Justinian, not dissimilar in design to the ‘Summa Codicis’ attributed to Irnerius. The work, which seems to have been popularly known as the ‘Summa Pauperum de Legibus,’ or ‘Liber Pauperum’—whence the nickname ‘pauperistæ’ afterwards bestowed upon Oxford civilians—evidently became a leading text-book at Oxford, where in 1190 the Frisian student Emo, afterwards abbot of Bloomkap, and his brother Addo, spent sleepless nights in making a copy of it. Nearly complete manuscripts of this important work are preserved at Worcester, Bruges, Prague, and Avranches. There is an imperfect manuscript of it at Königsberg, and fragments are in the Bodleian and in several of the college libraries at Oxford. The manuscript used by Wenck in 1820 has unfortunately disappeared.

Towards the end of his reign Stephen destroyed all the books of ‘Italian laws’ upon which he could lay his hands, and silenced the teaching of Vacarius. There is ample evidence that the check thus given to the study of Roman law was of short duration (‘Deo faciente,’ says John of Salisbury, ‘eo magis virtus legis invaluit, quo eam amplius nitebatur impietas infirmare’); but Vacarius can hardly have resumed his lectures at Oxford, since from about this time his long life was devoted to the work of an ecclesiastical lawyer in the northern province, and more especially to the service of Roger of Pont l'Évêque (d. 1181) [q. v.], who, after having been previously archdeacon of Canterbury, became in 1154 archbishop of York. ‘Magister Vacarius,’ as he is always described, was rewarded some time before 1167 with the prebend of Northwell in the college of secular canons at Southwell. To this period of his life must doubtless be ascribed the composition of two tracts, the ‘De assumpto Homine’ and the ‘De Matrimonio,’ which are preserved in manuscript in the library of the university of Cambridge. The former is of a theological and metaphysical character; the latter is of a legal character, being written to maintain that the essential ele-