Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/831

Rh A N A AN A 787 Haarlem, and Johann Bockhold, a tailor of Leyden, had little difficulty in obtaining possession of the town and deposing the magistrates. Vigorous preparations were at once made, not only to hold what had been gained, but to proceed from Minister as a centre to the conquest of the world. The town being besieged by Count Waldeck, its ex pelled bishop (April 1534),Matthiesen, who was first in com mand, made a sally with only thirty followers, under the fanatical idea that he was a second Gideon, and was cut off with his entire band. Bockhold, better known in history as John of Leyden, was now supreme. Giving himself out as the successor of David, he claimed royal honours and absolute power in the new &quot;Zion.&quot; He justified the most arbitrary and extravagant measures by the authority of visions from heaven, as others have done in similar circumstances. With this pretended sanction he legalised polygamy, and himself took four wives, one of whom he beheaded with his own hand in the market-place in a fit of frenzy. As a natural consequence of such licence, Miinster was for twelve months a scene of unbridled pro fligacy. After an obstinate resistance the town was taken by the besiegers on the 24th June 1535, and in January of the following year Bockhold and some of his more pro minent followers, after being cruelly tortured, were executed in the market-place. The outbreak at Miinster was the crisis of the Anabaptist movement. It never again had the opportunity of assuming political importance, the civil powers naturally adopting the most stringent measures to suppress an agitation whose avowed object was to suppress them. It is difficult to trace the subsequent history of the sect as a religious body. The fact that, after the Miinster insurrection, the very name Anabaptist was proscribed in Europe, is a source of twofold confusion. The enforced adoption of new names makes it easy to lose the historical identity of many who really .belonged to the Miinster Ana baptists, and, on the other hand; has led to the classifica tion of many with the Miinster sect who had no real connection with it. The latter mistake, it is to be noted, has been much more common than the former. The Men- nonites, for example, have been identified with the earlier Anabaptists, on the ground that they included among their number many of the fanatics of Miinster. But the con tinuity of a sect is to be traced in its principles and not in its adherents, and it must be remembered that Menno and his followers expressly repudiated the distinctive doctrines of the Miinster Anabaptists. They have never aimed at any social or political revolution, and have been as remark able for sobriety of conduct as the Miinster sect was for its fanaticism. (See MENNONITES.) In English history frequent reference is made to the Anabaptists during the 16th and 17th centuries, but there is no evidence that any considerable number of native Englishmen ever adopted the principles of the Miinster sect. Many of the followers of Miinzer and Bockhold seem to have fled from persecution in Germany and the Netherlands to be sub jected to a persecution scarcely less severe in England. The mildest measure adopted towards these refugees was banishment from the kingdom, and a large number suffered at the stake. It has already been explained that the appli cation of the term Anabaptist to those English sects that had nothing in common with the German Anabaptists except the practice of adult baptism, is unjustifiable. (See BAPTISTS.) ANABASIS (dvd/3ao-i?, a march into the interior ; from dvajSatvco, to ascend), the title given by Xenophon to his narrative of the expedition of Cyrus the younger against his brother, Artaxerxes of Persia, 401 B.C., and adopted by Arrian for his history of the expedition of Alexander the Great. (See Ainsworth s Trav. in Track of Ten, Thousand Greeks: Journal of Roy. Geoff. Soc. 1870, p. 463.) ANACHARSIS, a Scythian philosopher, who lived about 600 B.C. His father was one of the chiefs of his nation, and married a woman of Greece. Instructed in the Greek language by his mother, he prevailed upon the king to intrust him with an embassy to Athens. On his arrival in that renowned city he became acquainted with Solon, from whom he rapidly acquired a knowledge of the wisdom and learning of Greece. By the influence of Solon he was introduced to the principal persons in Athens, and was the first stranger who received the privileges of citizen ship. After he had resided several years at Athens, he travelled through different countries in quest of knowledge, and then returned home rilled with the desire of instruct ing his countrymen in the laws and the religion of the Greeks. According to Herodotus, he was killed by his brother Saulius while he was performing sacrifice to the goddess Cybele. His simple and forcible mode of expressing himself gave birth to the proverbial expression, &quot; Scythian eloquence.&quot; (Herodot. iv. 76 ; Lucian, Scytha.} ANACHRONISM, a neglect or falsification, whether wilful or undesigned, of chronological relation. Its com monest use restricts it (agreeably to its etymology, di/a, back, and xpovos, time) to the ante-dating of events, cir cumstances, or customs; in other words, to the introduction, especially in works of imagination that rest on a historical basis, of details borrowed from a later age. Anachronisms may be committed in many ways, originating, for instance, in disregard of the different modes of life and thought that characterise different periods, or in ignorance of the progress, of the arts and sciences and the other ascertained facts of history, and may vary from glaring inconsistency to scarcely perceptible misrepresentation. Much of the thought entertained about the past is so deficient in his torical perspective as to be little better than a continuous anachronism. It is only since the close of the 18th cen tury that this kind of un truthfulness has jarred on the general intelligence. Anachronisms abound in the works of Raphael and Shakespeare, as well as in those of the meanest daubers and playwrights of earlier times. In par ticular, the artists, on the stage and on the canvas, in story and in song, assimilated their dramatis personal to their own nationality and their own time. The Virgin was represented here as an Italian contadina, and there as a Flemish f row ; Alexander the Great appeared on the French stage in the full costume of Louis Quatorze down to the time of Voltaire ; and in our own country the con temporaries of Addison could behold, without any suspicion of burlesque, &quot; Cato s long wig, flower d gown, and lacquer d chair.&quot; Considerable difference of opinion has been expressed regarding the legitimacy of anachronism, especially when it is introduced designedly into historical novels. The safe and the just course here appears to be to &quot; regard the writer s end,&quot; and not to hold an author responsible for historical accuracy or verisimilitude who does not profess to write history. ANACOLUTHON is the lack of grammatical symmetry in a sentence, either through the consequent taking an un expected form or being altogether suppressed, the writer or speaker desiring to present his thought in another aspect, or feeling that he has already made his meaning sufficiently plain. In the case of a man who is full of his subject, or who is carried along by the passion of the moment, such inconsequents are very apt to occur. Of Niebuhr it is told that his oral lectures consisted almost entirely of anacoluthic constructions. To this kind of licence some languages, as Greek and English, readily lend themselves ; while the grammatical rigidity of others, aa Latin and French admits of it but sparingly. In Hero-