Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/443

Rh the constitution of his country the service of tacitly aban- doning a position which had been perhaps necessarily achieved by his father, but which it was not desirable that the sovereigns of England should permanently occupy. His only child by his wife Queen Caroline was the Princess Charlotte Augusta, married in 1816 to Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, afterwards king of the Belgians. She died in childbirth November 6, 1817.  GEORGE, who from to was Arian archbishop of Alexandria, was born about the. According to Ammianus (xxii. 11), he was a native of Epiphania, in Cilicia; but universal tradition makes him a Cappadocian. Gregory Nazianzen tells us that his father was a fuller, and that he himself soon became notorious as a parasite of so mean a type that he wouk “ sell himself for a cake.” By his powers of insinuation he succeeded in obtaininga lucrative contract for supplying bacon to the army, but fulﬁlled its terms so ill that he was soon compelled to abscond after he had with diﬂieulty escaped death at the hands of the indignant soldiers. After many wanderings, in the course of which he seems to have lived for some time at Constantinople, and to have amassed a considerable fortune as receiver of taxes, he ultimately reached Alexandria. It is not known how or when he obtained ecclesiastical orders ; but, after Athanasius had been banished in, George was promoted by the inﬂuence of the then prevalent Arian faction to the vacant see. His persecutions and oppressions of the orthodox ultimately raised a rebellion which coni- pelled him to ﬂee for his life; but his authority was restored, although with difﬁculty, by a military demonstration. Untaught by experience he resumed his course of selﬁsh tyranny over Christians and heathen alike, and raised the irritation of the populace to such a pitch that, within a few days after the accession of Julian, they rose en masse, dragged him out of prison, where he had been placed by the magistrates for safety, paraded him with every indignity through the streets on the back of a camel, burnt his dead body, and cast the ashes into the sea ( 24, ). with much that was sordid and brutal in his character George combined a highly cultivated literary taste, and in the course of his chequered career he had found the means of Collecting a splendid library, which J nlian ordered to be carefully preserved and conveyed to Antioch for his own use. The original sources for the facts of the life of George of Cappadocia are Ammianus, Gregory Naziauzen, Epipha- nius, and Athanasius. In modern times his character has been drawn with graphic fidelity by Gibbon in the 23d chapter of the Decline and Fall.  GEORGE,, according to Metaphiastes the Byzantine hagiologist, whose narrative is substantially repeated in the Roman .lcta Sanctorum and in the Spanish breviary, was born in Cappadocia of noble Christian parents, from whom he received a careful religious training. Having embraced the profession of a soldier, he rapidly rose under Diocletian to high military rank. \Vhen that emperor had begun to manifest a pronounced hostility towards Christi- anity George sought a personal interview with him, in which he made deliberate profession of his faith, and, earnestly remonstrating against the persecution which had begun, resigned his commission. He was immediately laid under arrest, and after various tortures, ﬁnally put to death at Nicomedia (or, according to other accounts, at Lydda) April 23, . His festival is observed on that anniversary by the entire Roman Church as a semi-duplex, and by the Spanish Catholics as a duplex of the ﬁrst class with an octave. The day is also celebrated as a principal feast in the Greek Church, where the saint is distinguished by the titles lieyahépap'rvp and rporratqudpoc. In the canon of Pope Gelasius George is mentioned among the martyrs whom the Roman Church venerates, but whose gesta it does not read. The language implies that even at that date much had been written concerning him, but little that the Catholic Church Could accept as trust- worthy. Numerous traits front the biography of the here- tical archbishop had already crept, it would seem,into the acta of the orthodox soldier ; and it was feared that any vigorous attempt to eliminate these would leave but a small residue of fact. Modern investigation has proved that apprehension to have been well-founded, for even on the Catholic side in the controversy regarding the existence and character of St George, the chief contention is simply the improbability that within the space of 150 a turbulent and unscrupulous Arian ecclesiastic should have come to be reputed a holy martyr for the Catholic faith. The caution displayed with regard to St George in the was not long preserved, Gregory of Tours, for example, asserts that his relics actually existed in the French village of Le Maine, where many miracles were wrought by means of them ; and the Venerable Bede, while still explaining that the gesta of St George are reckoned apocryphal, commits himself to the statement that the martyr was beheaded under Dacian,king of Persia, whose wifeAlexandra,however, adhered to the Catholic faith. The dragon was a still later introduction into the legend, which, as given by J acobus de Voragine and later writers, ceases to represent the here as in any sense a sufferer. In its current popular form the story of his successful conﬂict is probably a mere modiﬁcation of the old Aryan mythus, to which many inter- preters are now disposed to attach a solar interpretation. The popularity of the name of St George in England dates from the time of Richard Cu‘ur de Lion, who, it was said, had successfully invoked his aid during the ﬁrst crusade; but it was not till the time of Edward III. that he was made patron of the kingdom, although at the council of Oxford in it had already been ordered that his feast should be kept as a national festival. The republics of Genoa and Venice were also under his protection; and his name is much revered in all the Oriental churches.

1em  GEORGE, known as or, a  writer of the , was, as his  implies, a native of ; but of his personal  nothing is known except that he had been  a , and that he held either simultaneously or successively the s of “Chartophylax,” “Scenophylax,” and “Referendarius” in the “Great ” (that of ) at. He is also believed to have accompanied the ﬁrst expedition of the   against the ns; at all events his earliest work, consisting of 1098 ic  s under the title Ἐις τὸν κατά Περσῶν ἐκστρατείαν Ἡρακλείου τοῦ βασιλέως ἀκροάσεις τρεῖς, is devoted to such a description of that campaign as could hardly have come from any other than an eye-witness. This composition was followed by the Ἀβαρικά or Πόλεμος Ἀβαρικός in 541 s, containing the details of a futile on  made by the  in, while the  was absent and the n  in occupation of ; and by the Ἡρακλιάς, a general survey of the exploits both at home and abroad of  down to the ﬁnal overthrow of  in , which is believed to have been written before the end of. In addition to these three works, which have been edited by Bekker in the ''Corpus scriptorum histor. Byzant.'', we have from the of