Page:EB1911 - Volume 07.djvu/434

Rh Ireland, and canon of Windsor. He also acted as chaplain to Lord Wentworth, afterwards the celebrated earl of Strafford. For some time he travelled abroad as tutor to Lord Falmouth, and in 1646, during a visit to Rome, joined the Roman Catholic Church. In the following year he published his Exomologesis (Paris, 1647), or account of his conversion, which was highly valued by Roman Catholics as an answer to William Chillingworth’s attacks. Cressy entered the Benedictine Order in 1649, and for four years resided at Somerset House as chaplain to Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II. He died at West Grinstead on the 10th of August 1674. Cressy’s chief work, The Church History of Brittanny or England, from the beginning of Christianity to the Norman Conquest (1st vol. only published, Rouen, 1668), gives an exhaustive account of the foundation of monasteries during the Saxon heptarchy, and asserts that they followed the Benedictine rule, differing in this respect from many historians. The work was much criticized by Lord Clarendon, but defended by Antony à Wood in his Athenae Oxoniensis, who supports Cressy’s statement that it was compiled from original MSS. and from the Annales Ecclesiae Britannicae of Michael Alford, Dugdale’s Monasticon, and the Decem Scriptores Historiae Anglicanae. The second part of the history, which has never been printed, was discovered at Douai in 1856. To Roman Catholics Cressy’s name is familiar as the editor of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (London, 1659); of Father A. Baker’s Sancta Sophia (2 vols., Douai, 1657); and of Juliana of Norwich’s Sixteen Revelations on the Love of God (1670). These books, which would have been lost but for Cressy’s zeal, have been frequently reprinted, and have been favourably regarded by a section of the Anglican Church.

For a complete list of Cressy’s works see J. Gillow’s ''Bibl. Dict. of Eng. Catholics'', vol. i.

CREST, a town of south-eastern France, in the department of Drôme, on the right bank of the Drôme, 20 m. S.S.E. of Valence by rail. Pop. (1906) town, 3971; commune, 5660. It carries on silk-worm breeding, silk-spinning, and the manufacture of woollens, paper, leather and cement. There is trade in truffles. On the rock which commands the town stands a huge keep, the sole survival of a castle (12th century) to which Crest was indebted for its importance in the middle ages and the Religious Wars. The rest of the castle was destroyed in the first half of the 17th century, after which the keep was used as a state prison. Crest ranked for a time as the capital of the duchy of Valentinois, and in that capacity belonged before the Revolution to the prince of Monaco. The communal charter, graven on stone and dating from the 12th century, is preserved in the public archives. Ten miles south-east of Crest lies the picturesque Forest of Saon.

 CREST (Lat. crista, a plume or tuft), the “comb” on an animal’s head, and so any feathery tuft or excrescence, the “cone” of a helmet (by transference, the helmet itself), and the top or summit of anything. In heraldry (q.v.) a crest is a device, originally borne as a cognizance on a knight’s helmet, placed on a wreath above helmet and shield in armorial bearings, and used separately on a seal or on articles of property.

Cresting, in architecture, is an ornamental finish in the wall or ridge of a building, which is common on the continent of Europe. An example occurs at Exeter cathedral, the ridge of which is ornamented with a range of small fleurs-de-lis in lead.

 CRESTON, a city and the county-seat of Union county, Iowa, U.S.A., about 60 m. S.W. of Des Moines, at the crossing of the main line and two branches of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railway. Pop. (1890) 7200; (1900) 7752; (1905, state census) 8382 (753 foreign-born); (1910) 6924. The city is on the crest of the divide between the Mississippi and the Missouri basins at an altitude of about 1310 ft.—whence its name. It is situated in a fine farming and stock-raising region, for which it is a shipping point. The site was chosen in 1869 by the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad Company (subsequently merged in the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company) for the location of its shops. Creston was incorporated as a town in 1869, and was chartered as a city in 1871.

 CRESWICK, THOMAS (1811–1869), English landscape-painter, was born at Sheffield, and educated at Hazelwood, near Birmingham. At Birmingham he first began to paint. His earliest appearance as an exhibitor was in 1827, at the Society of British Artists in London; in the ensuing year he sent to the Royal Academy the two pictures named “Llyn Gwynant, Morning,” and “Carnarvon Castle.” About the same time he settled in London; and in 1836 he took a house in Bayswater. He soon attracted some attention as a landscape-painter, and had a career of uniform and encouraging, though not signal success. In 1842 he was elected an associate, and in 1850 a full member of the Royal Academy, which, for several years before his death, numbered hardly any other full members representing this branch of art. In his early practice he set an example, then too much needed, of diligent study of nature out of doors, painting on the spot all the substantial part of several of his pictures. English and Welsh streams may be said to have formed his favourite subjects, and generally British rural scenery, mostly under its cheerful, calm and pleasurable aspects, in open daylight. This he rendered with elegant and equable skill, colour rather grey in tint, especially in his later years, and more than average technical accomplishment; his works have little to excite, but would, in most conditions of public taste, retain their power to attract. Creswick was industrious and extremely prolific; he produced, besides a steady outpouring of paintings, numerous illustrations for books. He was personally genial—a dark, bulky man, somewhat heavy and graceless in aspect in his later years. He died at his house in Bayswater, Linden Grove, on the 28th of December 1869, after a few years of declining health. Among his principal works may be named “England” (1847); “Home by the Sands, and a Squally Day” (1848); “Passing Showers” (1849); “The Wind on Shore, a First Glimpse of the Sea, and Old Trees” (1850); “A Mountain Lake, Moonrise” (1852); “Changeable Weather” (1865); also the “London Road, a Hundred Years ago”; “The Weald of Kent”; the “Valley Mill” (a Cornish subject); a “Shady Glen”; the “Windings of a River”; the “Shade of the Beech Trees”; the “Course of the Greta”; the “Wharfe”; “Glendalough,” and other Irish subjects, 1836 to 1840; the “Forest Farm.” Frith for figures, and Ansdell for animals, occasionally worked in collaboration with Creswick.

In 1873 T. O. Barlow, the engraver, published a catalogue of Creswick’s works.

 CRESWICK, a borough of Talbot county, Victoria, Australia. 85½ m. by rail N.W. of Melbourne. Pop. (1901) 3060. It is the centre of a mining, pastoral and agricultural district. Gold is found both in alluvial and quartz formations, the quartz being especially rich. The surrounding country is fertile and well-timbered, and there is a government plantation and nursery in connexion with the forests department.

 CRETACEOUS SYSTEM, in geology, the group of stratified rocks which normally occupy a position above the Jurassic system and below the oldest Tertiary deposits; therefore it is in this system that the closing records of the great Mesozoic era are to be found. The name furnishes an excellent illustration of the inconvenience of employing a local lithological feature in the descriptive title of a wide-ranging rock-system. The white chalk (Lat. creta), which gives its name to the system, was first studied in the Anglo-Parisian basin, where it takes a prominent place; but even in this limited area there is a considerable thickness and variety of rocks which are not chalky, and the Cretaceous system as a whole contains a remarkable diversity of types of sediment.

Classification.—The earlier subdivisions of the Cretaceous rocks were founded upon the uncertain ground of similarity in lithological characters, assisted by observed stratigraphical sequence. This method yielded poor results even in a circumscribed area like Great Britain, and it breaks down utterly when applied to the correlation of rocks of similar age in Europe and elsewhere. Study of the fossils, however, has elicited the fact that certain forms characterize certain “zones,” which are preceded and succeeded by other zones each bearing a peculiar species or