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 episodical Alexandrines with the vers communs of his tragedies and so introduced them into drama. It was Ronsard, however, who made the verse popular, and gave it vogue in France. From his time it became the recognized vehicle for all great poetry, and the regulation of its pauses became more and more strict. The following is an example of the verse as used by Racine—

Two inexorable laws came to be established with regard to the pauses. The first is, that each line should be divided into two equal parts, the sixth syllable always ending with a word. In the earlier use of this metre, on the contrary, it frequently happened that the sixth and seventh syllables belonged to the same word. The other is that, except under the most stringent conditions, there should be none of what the French critics call enjambement, that is, the overlapping of the sense from one line on to the next. Ronsard completely ignored this rule, which was after his time settled by the authority of Malherbe. The latest school of French prosody has given great attention to the breaking up of the Alexandrine, which no longer possesses the rigidity of authoritative form which it held until about 1880, but is often used with a licence no less than when Ronsard wrote.

Michael Drayton, who was twenty-two years of age when Ronsard died, seemed to think that the Alexandrine might be as pleasing to English as it was to French ears, and in this metre he wrote a long poem in twenty-four books called the Polyolbion. The metre, however, failed to catch the English ear. The principal English measure is a line of ten syllables, and the Alexandrine is used only occasionally to give it variety and weight. In ordinary English heroic verse it is but rarely introduced; but in the favourite narrative metre, known as the Spenserian, it comes in regularly as the concluding line of each stanza. In English usage, moreover, it is to be observed that there is no fixed rule as to the position of the pause, though it is true that most commonly the pause occurs at the end of the sixth syllable. Spenser is very free in shifting the pause about; and though the later poets who have used this stanza are not so free, yet, with the exception of Shenstone and of Byron, they do not scruple to obliterate all pause between the sixth and seventh syllables. Thus Thomson (Castle of Indolence, i. 42):—

The danger in the use of the Alexandrine is that, in attempting to give dignity to his line, the poet may only produce heaviness, incurring the sneer of Pope—

The Alexandrine was the dominant metre in Dutch poetry from the 16th to the middle of the 19th century, and about the time of its introduction to Holland it was accepted in Germany by the school of Opitz. In the course of the 17th century, after being used without rhyme by Seckendorf and others, it formed a transitional station on the route to German blank verse, and has since then been rarely employed, except occasionally in rhymed comedy.

ALEXANDRISTS, the name given to those philosophers of the Renaissance, who, in the great controversy on the subject of personal immortality, adopted the explanation of the De Anima given by Alexander of Aphrodisias. According to the orthodox Thomism of the Roman Catholic Church, Aristotle rightly regarded reason as a faculty of the individual soul. Against this, the Averroists, led by (q.v.), introduced the modifying theory that universal reason in a sense individualizes itself in each soul and then absorbs the active reason into itself again. These two theories respectively evolved the doctrine of individual and universal immortality, or the absorption of the individual into the eternal One. The Alexandrists, led by Pietro Pomponazzi, boldly assailed these beliefs and denied that either was rightly attributed to Aristotle. They held that Aristotle considered the soul as a material and therefore a mortal entity which operates during life only under the authority of universal reason. Hence the Alexandrists denied the possibility of immortality in every shape or form. Since the soul is organically connected with the body, the dissolution of the latter involves the extinction of the former.

ALEXANDRITE, a variety of (q.v.) discovered in the Urals in 1833, on the day set apart for celebrating the majority of the cesarevich, afterwards the tsar, Alexander II., in whose honour the stone was named by Nils Gustaf Nordenskiöld, of Helsingfors. It is remarkable for being strongly dichroic, generally appearing dark green by daylight and raspberry-red by candle-light, or by daylight transmitted through the stone. As red and green are the military colours of Russia, the mineral became highly popular as a gem-stone. The dark green crystals are usually cloudy and cracked, and grouped in triplets presenting a pseudo-hexagonal form. Alexandrite was found originally in the emerald-mine of Takovaya, east of Ekaterinburg in the Urals, and afterwards in the gold-bearing sands of the Sanarka in the southern Urals. Subsequently it was discovered in greater abundance in the gem-gravels of Ceylon. It has been found also in Tasmania. Some of the Ceylon alexandrite exhibits, when suitably cut, the Cat’s-eye chatoyance, whence it has been called alexandrite cat’s-eye.

ALEXANDROPOL, or (Turk. Gumri), a Russian town and fortified camp in Transcaucasia, government of Erivan, near the junction of the Arpa-chai with the Aras, 48 m. by rail E.N.E. of Kars. Altitude 5080 ft. It has a trade in silk. Here the Russians defeated the Turks in 1853. Pop. (1885) 22,670; (1897) 32,735.

ALEXANDROVSK. (1) A town of N. Russia, in the government of Archangel, on the harbour of Catherine (Ekaterininsk), on the Murman coast, 5 m. from the mouth of Kola Bay. It was opened in 1899 and is a naval station, being free from ice all the year round. It is also called Port Catherine. Pop. (1901) 300. (2) A town of S. Russia, 83 m. S. of Ekaterinoslav, on the railway to the Crimea, near the left bank of the Dnieper, below its rapids. Pop. (1897) 16,393. Opposite it is the island of Khortitsa, upon which was the sich (or syech) or camp of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. All its neighbourhood is strewn with kurgans (tumuli).

ALEXIS, Greek comic poet of the Middle Comedy, was born about 394 at Thurii and taken early to Athens, where he became a citizen. Plutarch says that he lived to the age of 106, and that he died on the stage while being crowned. According to Suidas, who calls him Menander’s uncle, he wrote 245 comedies, of which some 130 titles are preserved. The fragments (about 1000 lines) attest the wit and refinement of the author (Koch, Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta).

ALEXIS, WILLIBALD, the pseudonym of (1798–1871), German historical novelist. He was born on the 29th of June 1798 at Breslau, where his father, who came of a French refugee family, named Hareng, held a high position in the war department. He attended the Werdersche Gymnasium in Berlin, and then, serving as a volunteer in the campaign of 1815, took part in the siege of the Ardenne fortresses. On his return he studied law at the universities of Berlin and Breslau and entered the legal profession, but he soon abandoned this career and devoted himself to literature. Settling in Berlin he edited, 1827–1835, the Berliner Konversationsblatt, in which for the first two years he was assisted by Friedrich Christoph Förster (1791–1868): and in 1828 was created a doctor of philosophy by the university of Halle. In 1852 he retired to Arnstadt in Thuringia, where after many years of broken health he died on the 16th of December 1871.

Häring made his name first known as a writer by an idyll in hexameters, Die Treibjagd (1820), and several short stories in which the influence of Tieck is observable; but his literary reputation was first established by the historical romance Walladmor (1823), which, published as being “freely translated from the English of Sir Walter Scott, with a preface by Willibald Alexis,” so closely imitated the style of the famous Scotsman as really to deceive even Scott’s admirers. The work became