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 In the Roman Church there are a number of special litanies peculiar to particular localities or orders, such as the “Litanies of Mary” or the “Litanies of the Sacred Name of Jesus.”

There was originally a close connexion between the litany and the (q.v.). The ninefold Kyrie eleison at the beginning of the Roman Mass is a relic of a longer litany of which a specimen may still be seen in the Stowe missal. In the Ambrosian liturgy, the threefold Kyrie eleison or Lesser Litany occurs thrice, after the Gloria in excelsis, after the gospel and at the end of Mass; and on the first five Sundays in Lent a missal litany is placed before the Oratio super populum, and on the same five Sundays in the Mozarabic rite before the epistle. In Eastern liturgies litanies are a prominent feature, as in the case of the deacon’s litany at the beginning of the Missa fidelium in the Clementine liturgy, immediately before the Anaphora in the Greek liturgy of St James, &c.

LITCHFIELD, a township and the county-seat of Litchfield county, Connecticut, U.S.A., about 28 m. W. of Hartford, and including the borough of the same name. Pop. of the township (1890) 3304; (1900) 3214; (1910) 3005; of the borough (1890) 1058; (1900) 1120; (1910) 903. Area of the township, 48.6 sq. m. The borough is served by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railroad. It is situated on elevated land, and is one of the most attractive of southern New England summer resorts. The principal elevation in the township is Mt. Prospect, at the base of which there is a vein of pyrrhotite, with small quantities of nickel and copper. On the southern border of the borough is Lake Bantam (about 900 acres, the largest lake in the state) whose falls, at its outlet, provide water power for factories of carriages and electrical appliances. Dairying is the most important industry, and in 1899 the county ranked first among the counties of the state in the value of its dairy products—$1,373,957, from 3465 farms, the value of the product for the entire state being $7,090,188.

The lands included in the township of Litchfield (originally called Bantam) were bought from the Indians in 1715–1716 for £15, the Indians reserving a certain part for hunting. The township was incorporated in 1719, was named Litchfield, after Lichfield in England, and was settled by immigrants from Hartford, Windsor, Wethersfield, Farmington and Lebanon (all within the state) in 1720–1721. In 1751 it became the county-seat of Litchfield county, and at the same time the borough of Litchfield (incorporated in 1879) was laid out. From 1776 to 1780 two depôts for military stores and a workshop for the Continental army were maintained, and the leaden statue of George III., erected in Bowling Green, New York City, in 1770, and torn down by citizens on the 9th of July 1776, was cut up and taken to Litchfield, where, in the house (still standing) of Oliver Wolcott it was melted into bullets for the American army by Wolcott’s daughter and sister. Aaron Burr, whose only sister married Tapping Reeve (1744–1823), lived in Litchfield with Reeve in 1774–1775. In 1784 Reeve established here the Litchfield Law School, the first institution of its kind in America. In 1798 he associated with himself James Gould (1770–1838), who, after Reeve’s retirement in 1820, continued the work, with the assistance of Jabez W. Huntington (1788–1847), until 1833. The school was never incorporated, it had no buildings, and the lectures were delivered in the law offices of its instructors, but among its 1000 or more students were many who afterwards became famous, including John C. Calhoun; Levi Woodbury (1789–1851), United States senator from New Hampshire in 1825–1831 and in 1841–1845, secretary of the navy in 1831–1834 and of the treasury in 1834–1841, and a justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1845; John Y. Mason; John M. Clayton; and Henry Baldwin (1780–1844), a justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1830. In 1792 Mrs Sarah Pierce made one of the first efforts toward the higher education of women in the United States by opening in Litchfield her Female Seminary, which had an influential career of about forty years, and numbered among its alumnae Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs Marshall O. Roberts, Mrs Cyrus W. Field and Mrs Hugh McCulloch. Litchfield was the birthplace of Ethan Allen; of Henry Ward Beecher; of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel, Poganuc People, presents a picture of social conditions in Litchfield during her girlhood; of Oliver Wolcott, Jr. (1760–1833); of John Pierpont (1785–1866), the poet, preacher and lecturer; and of Charles Loring Brace, the philanthropist. It was also the home, during his last years, of Oliver Wolcott (1726–1797); of Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge (1774–1835), an officer on the American side in the War of Independence and later (from 1801 to 1817) a Federalist member of Congress; and of Lyman Beecher, who was pastor of the First Congregational church of Litchfield from 1810 to 1826.

See Payne K. Kilbourne, Sketches and Chronicles of the Town of Litchfield, Connecticut (Hartford, Conn., 1859); George C. Boswell, The Litchfield Book of Days (Litchfield, 1900); and for an account of the Litchfield Female Seminary, Emily N. Vanderpoel, Chronicles of a Pioneer School (Cambridge, Mass., 1903).

LITCHFIELD, a city of Montgomery county, Illinois, U. S. A., about 50 m. N.E. of St Louis, Missouri. Pop. (1900) 5918; (1910) 5971. Its principal importance is as a railway and manufacturing centre; it is served by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, the Chicago & Alton, the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St Louis, the Illinois Central, the Wabash, and the Litchfield & Madison railways, and by electric lines connecting with St Louis and the neighbouring towns. In the vicinity are deposits of bituminous coal, fire-clay and moulding sand. There are various manufactures in the city. Litchfield was incorporated as a town in 1856, and was first chartered as a city in 1859.

LITCHI, or, the fruit of Nephelium Litchi, a small tree, native of southern China and one of the most important indigenous fruits. It is also cultivated in India. The tree bears large compound leaves with two to four pairs of leathery lanceolate pointed leaflets about 3 in. long, and panicles of small flowers without petals. The fruits are commonly roundish, about 1 in. in diameter, with a thin, brittle, red shell which bears rough protuberances. In the fresh state they are filled with a sweet white pulp which envelops a large brown seed, but in the dried condition the pulp forms a blackish fleshy substance. The pulp is of the nature of an aril, that is, an additional seed-coat.

Nephelium Longana, the longan tree, also a native of southern China, is cultivated in that country, in the Malay Peninsula, India and Ceylon for its fruit, which is smaller than that of the litchi, being half an inch to an inch in diameter with a nearly smooth yellowish-brown brittle skin, and containing a pulpy aril resembling that of the litchi in flavour. Another species, N. lappaceum, a tall tree native of the Malay Peninsula, where it is known under the names Rambutan or Rambosteen, is also cultivated for its pleasantly acid pulpy aril. The fruit is oval, bright red in colour, about 2 in. long and covered with long fleshy hairs.

Nephelium belongs to the natural order Sapindaceae, and contains about twenty-two species.

LITERATURE, a general term which, in default of precise definition, may stand for the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing. Its various forms are the result of race peculiarities, or of diverse individual temperaments, or of political circumstances securing the predominance of one social class which is thus enabled to propagate its ideas and sentiments. In early stages of society, the classes which first attain a distinct literary utterance are priests who compile the chronicles of tribal religious development, or rhapsodes who celebrate the prowess of tribal chiefs. As man feels before he reasons, so poetry generally precedes prose. It embodies more poignantly the sentiment of unsophisticated man. Hence sacred books and war-songs are everywhere the earliest literary monuments, and both are essentially poetic compositions which have received a religious or quasi-religious sanction. The recitation of the Homeric poems at the Panathenaea corresponds to the recitation elsewhere of the sacred texts in the temple; the statement of Phemios (Odyssey, xxii. 347) that a god inspired his soul with all the varied ways of song expresses the ordinary belief of early historical times. Versicles of the sacred chronicles, or fragments of epic poems, were learned by heart and supplied a standard of popular literary taste. The public declamation of long chosen passages by priests, and still more by contending rhapsodes, served to evoke the