Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/121

Rh L Y M L Y N 105 of Athens was of course entirely in place. The &quot; cooling card for all fond lovers &quot; and the address to the ladies and gentlemen of Italy have their counterparts among the miscellaneous letters by Guevara affixed by North to the Dial for Princes ; and other instances of Lyly s use of these letters, and of two other treatises by Guevara on court .and country life, could be pointed out. &quot; Lyly was not the first to appropriate and develop the Guevaristic style. The earliest book in which it was fully adopted was A petite Pallacc of Pcttie his Pleasure, by George Pettie,_ which appeared in 1576, a production so closely akin to Euphues in tone and style that it is difficult to believe it was not by Lyly. Lyly, however, carried the style to its highest point, and made it the dominant literary fashion. His principal followers in it were Greene, Lodge, and Nash, his principal opponent Sir Philip Sidney; the Arcadia in fact supplanted Euphues, and the Euphuistic taste proper may be said to have died out about 1590 after a reign of some twelve years. According to Dray ton it was Sidney s chief merit that &quot; He did first reduce Our tongue from Lillie s writing then in use, Talking of Stones, Stars, Plants, of Fishes, Klyes, Playing with words and idle similies, As th English Apes and very Zanies be Of everything that they doe heare and see, So imitating his rediculous tricks They spake and writ all like meere lunatiques.&quot; Shakespeare, Dr Landmann maintains, can not strictly speaking be said to have ridiculed Euphuism. Love s Labour Lost is a cari cature of the Italianate and pedantic fashions of the day, not of the peculiar style of Euphues. The only certain allusion in Shakespeare to the characteristics of Lyly s famous book is to be found in Henry iy., where Falstatf, playing the part of the king, says to Prince Hal, &quot;Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, but also how thou art accompanied ; for, though the camomile the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.&quot; Here the pompous antithesis is evidently meant to caricature the peculiar Euphuistic sentence of court par lance. That Shakespeare indeed was well acquainted with what was the court manual of his youth, and at times reproduces both ideas and phrases from it, has been amply proved by Mr Rushton, the German critic Hense, and others, but there is no evidence of antagonism between the two writers. It might have been otherwise had Lyly s Euphuism affected his plays. But these show little or no trace of Guevara s influence ; their faults are the common faults of Elizabethan writing, from many of which Shakespeare himself was not free. See Euphues, from early editions, by I d ward Arber, 1868 ; Pro fessor Ad. Ward s Eaglish Dramatic Literature, i. 151 ; Collier s History of Dramatic Poetry, iii. 172 ; John Lilly and Shakespeare, by C. C. Hense in the Jahrbuch dcr deutschen Shakesp. Gescllschaft, vols. vii. andviii. (1872, 1873); F. W. Fail-holt s Dramatic Works of John Lilly, 2 vols., 1858 ; Shakespeare s Euphuism, by W. L. Itushton ; &quot;Euphuism&quot; in the Quarterly Review, 1861. (M. A. W.) LYMINGTON, a municipal and parliamentary borough and seaport town of Hampshire, England, is situated on the Lym at its entrance to the Solent opposite the Isle of Wight, 94 miles south-west of London and 15 south of Southampton. The parish church, dedicated to St Thomas a Becket, is an irregular structure, dating from the reign of Henry VI, but frequently restored. There are two grammar schools and several charities. The manufacture of salt and of Epsom salts has been declining for some years. A building yard here has turned out some of the most famous racing yachts. In summer the town is much frequented for sea-bathing. Lymington in Domesday is called Lentune, changed afterwards to Limentum. It was a borough by prescription, and received a grant of incor poration from James I. From the 27th of Elizabeth till 1867 it returned two members to parliament, and it still returns one. The population of the municipal borough (141 acres) was 2431 in 1881, and that of the parliamentary borough (4769 acres) 5462. LYNCHBURG, a city in Campbell county, Virginia, U.S., is finely situated on the rising ground to the south of the James river 144 miles by rail, west by south of Richmond. Having excellent facilities of communication by the Richmond and Allegheny, the Norfolk and Western, and the Virginia Midland Railways, together with the James River canal, and possessing abundant water -power and immediate access to coal and iron, Lynchburg has become the seat of no small commercial and industrial activity. The tobacco trade, which formerly rendered it the wealthiest city of its size in the United States, except New Bedford, Mass., is still the staple ; there are about eighty factories in the town, and the amount of tobacco sold in 1870-71 was 17,425,439 R&amp;gt;, while in 1880-81 it was 26,000,000 Ib. Most of the operatives are negroes men, women, and children all being employed. The local iron-works and flour-mills are of some importance, and large machine-shops are maintained at Lynchburg by the Norfolk and Western Railway. Two reservoirs, constructed in 1828 and 1878, supply the town with water. The population was 8067 in 1850, 6853 in 1860, 6825 (3353 coloured) in 1870, and 15,959 in 1880. The town dates from 1786, and derives its name from a Mr Lynch who served in the war of independence and is erroneously credited by some with the origination of the term Lynch law. It was incor porated as a city in 1805. During the civil war it was a point of great importance to the Confederates as a base of supplies. LYNCH LAW, a term used in the United States to characterize the action of private individuals, organized bodies of men, or disorderly mobs, who, without legal authority, proceed to punish by hanging or otherwise real or suspected criminals, without a trial according to the ordinary forms of law. The origin of the term is doubt ful. American lexicographers generally refer it to the practice of a Virginia farmer of the 17th century, named Lynch, who, when he caught a wrongdoer, was wont to tie him to a tree and flog him, without waiting to summon the officers of the law. He is also said to have acted, by request of his neighbours, though without any legal authority, as a judge in the summary trial of persons accused of crime. Others trace the origin of the name to the act of James Fitzstephen Lynch, mayor and warden of Galway, Ireland, in 1493, who is said to have &quot;hanged his own son out of the window for defrauding and killing strangers, without martial or common law, to show a good example to posterity.&quot; Others trace it still further to the old Anglo-Saxon verb linch, meaning to beat with a club, to chastise, &amp;lt;fcc., which they assert has survived in this cognate meaning in America, as have many other words and expressions long obsolete in Great Britain. While lynch law does not prevail in the old and well-settled States of the Union, and is almost universally deprecated, it is sometimes resorted to even in these States, in times of great popular excitement, or when the legal penalty seems disproportionecl to the enormity of the offence. For example, the practice of lynching is said to have increased in Wisconsin since the abolition of the death penalty by law. Lynch law prevailed to a large extent in the early history of California, Oregon, Nevada, Kansas, Colorado, and other western States and Territories, and during the border troubles attending the outbreak of the civil war. Bodies of citizens, organized secretly or openly under the well-known names of &quot; vigilance committees,&quot; &quot; vigilantes,&quot; &quot;regulators,&quot; &quot; law-and-order-men,&quot; &c., punished with summary severity, and generally with wise discretion, horse thieves, highway robbers, burglars and swindlers, as well as murderers. Certain rude forms of trial were generally observed, but acquittals were rare, and the punishment was usually death by hanging. The practice, however barbarous under the conditions of well-settled government and society, has its justification in necessity in the newly-settled districts, frontier towns, and mining camps, where a rapid and extraordinary influx of popula tion has preceded the establishment of civil government, or where the assembling of a large number of bold and hardened desperadoes has enabled them to defy the legally constituted authorities, and to commit crime at will, until suppressed by the voluntary and concerted action of the order-loving portion of the community. XV. 14