Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/503

 L E S L E T 483 spirit which might be expected from a zealous cavalier. He made himself notorious, not merely by the severity of his literary censorship, but by his vigilance in the suppres sion of clandestine printing. The inconsistency of this course with his actions and professions when himself opposed to the party in power naturally aggravated the unpopularity inevitably attaching to his office. Few men have been more heartily abused than L Estrange, and it is undoubtedly true that the rights of free speaking and printing, the indispensable conditions of civil and religious liberty, have seldom had a more determined or more dangerous opponent. At the same time there is no ground for questioning his integrity, and he was probably no more intolerant than any similar official of any Government in that day, inspired by an equal strength of conviction, would have been in his place. The representation of him in Grant s History of the Newspaper Press as a mere political hireling is entirely contrary to truth. He was a militant loyalist, who used the pen as he had been wont to use the sword, and proved his zeal for his party by the production of a mass of pamphlet literature, above the ordinary standard of the time in ability, and quite on a par with it in virulence and coarseness. These productions still possess an historical value, but their titles are not worth enumerating here. His memory is more honourably preserved by his con nexion as an author with the journalism which as a licenser he laboured to cripple and emasculate. In 1663 he com menced the publication of The Public Intelligencer and the Neu s, succeeded in February 1665 by The London Gazette, not to be confounded with the official journal still existing, which appeared for the first time at the close of that year, and was at first printed at Oxford. In 1679 he established The Observato) a journal specially designed to vindicate the court from the charge of a secret inclination to popery. This line of political controversy, and it may be hoped some natural humanity and good sense as well, obliged him to discredit the Popish Plot, and he manfully resisted the delusion by which many wiser and better men were carried away. The suspicion he thus incurred was increased by the conversion of his daughter to Romanism, but there seems no reason to question the sincerity of his own attachment to the Church of England. In 1687 he gave a further proof of independence by discontinuing The Observator from his unwillingness to advocate James II. s Edict of Toleration, although he had previously gone all lengths in support of the measures of the court. The Revolution cost him his office as licenser, and the remainder of his life was spent in obscurity. He died in 1704. L E*trange s place is rather in history than in literature. The importance of the part he played as licenser would be more exactly known if it could be more accurately ascertained how much literature he may have been the means of suppressing. The post he held so long was in itself an unmitigated mischief, but at the same time an evil which men of all parties, with the rare exception of men so far in advance of their time as Milton, then deemed necessary ; and no obloquy should attach to L Estrange for having discharged its functions with zeal and efficiency. As a pamphleteer he is but slightly above mediocrity, and he labours under a special imputation of having contributed to corrupt his native language. The same charge is brought against journalists in all ages, and there are obvious reasons why it should be true to a certain extent. The practice of daily writing for the press is undoubtedly- one of the numerous forces which tend to wear down and degrade a language, but it also keeps the diction of the cultivated classes in contact with the speech of the people, and prevents the absolute divorce between them which seems to have existed in ancient times. It is to L Estrange s credit that among the agitations of a busy political life he should have found time for much purely literary work as a translator of Josephus, Cicero, Seneca, Quevedo, and other standard authors. (R. o.) LESUEUR, JEAN FRANCOIS (1763-1837), was born near Abbeville in 1763, and studied music under Roze at the college of Amiens. Appointed choirmaster of a church in Paris in 1784, he completed his musical education under Sacchini. In 1786 Lesueur obtained by open competition the musical directorship of Notre-Dame, where he gave successful performances of sacred music with a full orchestra. This place he resigned in 1788; and, after a retirement of five years in a friend s country house, he produced La Caverne and two other operas at the theatre Feydeau in Paris. At the foundation of the Paris Con servatoire (1795) Lesueur was appointed one of its inspectors of studies, but was dismissed in 1802, owing to his disagreements with Mehul. On the recommendation of Paisiello, Lesueur succeeded this celebrated composer as Maestro di cappella to Napoleon, and produced (1804) his Ossian at the Opera. He also composed for the emperor s coronation a mass and a Te Deum. Louis XVIII., who had retained Lesueur in his court, appointed him (1818) professor of composition at the Conservatoire ; and at this institution he had, among many other pupils, Hector Berlioz, Ambroise Thomas, Besozzi, and Gounod. He died October 6, 1837. Lesueur composed eight operas and several masses, and other sacred music. All his works are written in a style of rigorous simplicity; and to this may be ascribed their want of popularity at the present time. LETHE (A.7?#?7, oblivion) is sometimes used as the name of a river in the infernal regions. It seems to have been an idea current in the religion of the mysteries that there were in the lower world two streams, one of memory and one of oblivion. The initiated were taught to distin guish between them, and directions for this purpose written on a gold plate have been found in a tomb at Petilia, buried doubtless with some initiated person. So beside Lebadea, at the oracle of Trophonius, which was counted an entrance to the lower world, the two springs Mnemosyne and Lethe were shown. This thought begins to appear in literature in the end of the 5th century B.C., when Aristophanes (Frogs, 186) speaks of the plain of Lethe. Plato (Rep., x.) embodies the idea in one of his finest myths of the future life. It is difficult to find any passage in the earlier writers showing acquaintance with this idea. Hesiod makes Lethe one of the children of Eris, along with Toil, Hunger, Pains, &c. ; but his meaning probably is that ingratitude and forgetfulness spring from strife. In the epitaph on Anacreon attributed to Simonides, but reckoned by Bergk spurious, the expression Ai^s So /xoi occurs ; but even if the epigram be an early one it is not certain that the words have any mythological se&quot;&amp;lt;^. LETROXNE, JEA&amp;gt;J AM VINE (1787-1848), French archaeologist, was born at Paris on January 2, 1787. His father, a poor engraver, having chosen the profession of an artist for him, sent him to the studio of David, but his own tastes drew him towards literature, and he became a student in the College de France, where it is said he used to exercise his already strongly developed faculty of critical divination by correcting for his own amusement old and bad texts of Greek authors, afterwards comparing the results he had thus obtained with the latest and most approved editions. From 1810 to 1812 he travelled in France, Switzerland, and Italy, and on his return to Paris published an Essai critique sur la topographic de Syracuse (1812), designed to elucidate Thucydides; two years later appeared his Eecherches geographiques et critiques on the De Mensura Orbis Terree, of Dicuil, along with a restored text. In 1815 he was appointed by Government to com-