Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/129

Rh L Y O L Y R 113 some authors, perished. After having been ravaged by the bar barians and abandoned by the empire, Lyons in 478 became capital of the kingdom of the Burgundians. It afterwards fell into the hands of the Franks, and suffered severely from the Saracens, but revived under Charlemagne, and after the death of Charles the Bald was made the capital of the kingdom of Provence. From 1024 it was a fief of the emperor of German}-. Subsequently the superiority over the town was a subject of dispute between the archbishops of Lyons and the counts of Fore/; but tiie royal supremacy was finally established under Louis IX. and Philip the Handsome. The citizens were constituted into a commune ruled by freely elected consuls (1 320). In the 13th century two ecclesiastical councils were held at Lyons one in 1245, presided over by Innocent IV., at which the emperor Frederick II. was deposed; the second, the oecumenical, under the presidency of Gregory X., in 1274, at which five hundred bishops met. Pope Clement V. was crowned here in 1305, and his successor John XXII. elected in 1316. The Protestants obtained possession of the place in 1562 ; their acts of violence were fiercely avenged in 1572 after the St Bartholomew massacre. Under Henry III. Lyons sided with the League ; but it pronounced in favour of Henry IV. In 1793 it rose against the Conventkm, but was com pelled to yield to the army of the republic after enduring a siege of seven weeks (October 10). Terrible chastisement ensued : the name of Lyons was changed to that of Ville-afFranchie ; the demoli tion of its buildings was set about on a wholesale scale ; and vast numbers of the proscribed, whom the scaffold had spared, were butchered with grape shot. The town resumed its old name after the fall of Robespierre, and the terrorists in their turn were drowned in large numbers in the Rhone. Napoleon rebuilt the Place Bellecour, reopened the churches, and made the bridge of Tilsitt over the Saone between Bellecour and the cathedral. In 1814-15 Lyons was occupied by the Austrians, under the government of Louis Philippe, and in 1870-71 there were several bloody emeutes ; in 185(5 a disastrous flood laid waste the Brotteaux and rendered 20,000 persons homeless. An international exhibition was held here in 1872. Among the many distinguished natives of Lyons may be mentioned Gernwnicus and the emperors Claudius, Marcus Aurelius, and Caracalla ; Ampere the physicist ; Richerand, Re- canker, and Bonnet ; I)e Jussieti the naturalist, J. B. Say the economist, Bareme the mathematician, Suchet the marshal, Roland the Girondin, and Jacquard the inventor. (G. ]IE. ) LYOXS, EDMUND LYONS, LORD (1790-1858), British admiral, was descended from a family connected with An tigua, and previously with Cork, and was born at Burton near Christchurch, Hampshire, 21st November 1790. He entered the navy at an early age, and served in the Mediter ranean, and afterwards in the East Indies, where in 1810 he won promotion by distinguished bravery. He became post-captain in 1814, and in 1828 commanded the &quot; Blonde&quot; frigate at the blockade of Navarino. He took part with the French in the capture of the castle of Morea, receiving for his conduct the orders of St Louis of France and of the Redeemer of Greece. Shortly before Ins ship was paid off in 1835 he was knighted. From 1840 till the out break of hostilities with Russia Lyons was employed on the diplomatic service, being minister plenipotentiary to the court of Greece until 1849, then until 1851 ambassador to the Swiss cantons, whence he was transferred to a similar position at Stockholm. On the outbreak of the war with Russia he was appointed second in command of the British fleet iu the Black Sea under Admiral Dundas, whom lie succeeded in the chief command in 1854. As admiral of the inshore squadron he had the direction of the landing of the troops in the Crimea, which he conducted with marvellous energy and despatch. According to Kinglake, Lyons shared the &quot; intimate counsels &quot; of Lord Raglan in regard to the most momentous questions of the war, and throughout the Crimean campaign he toiled, with a &quot; painful consuming passion,&quot; to guard against disaster, to clear away over powering difficulties and obstacles, and to win the final purpose of the expedition. His actual achievements in battle were principally two the support he rendered with his guns to the French at the Alma in attacking the left flank of the Russians, and the bold and brilliant part he took with his ship the &quot;Agamemnon&quot; in the first bombardment of the forts of Sebastopol ; but his constant vigilance, his multifarious activity, and his suggestions and counsels were much more advantageous to the allied cause than his specific exploits. In 1855 he was created vice-admiral, and at the conclusion of the war he was, in June 1856, raised to the peerage with the title of Lord Lyons of Christchurch. He died November 23, 1858. LYRA, NICOLAUS DE (c. 1270-1340), a well-known mediaeval commentator, was a native of Lyre, near Evreux, Normandy, and was born most probably about 1270; at least he was still young when in 1291 he entered the Franciscan order at Verneuil. He afterwards studied at Paris, and became doctor of theology and a successful teacher there. In 1325 he became provincial of his order for Burgundy; and on October 23, 1340, he died at Paris. Lyra (Lyranus) was the author of a controversial treatise against the Jews, entitled De Mcssia, fjtisque aducnlii prieterito, and of a T racial H.? dc. idcnieominislrantectsuscipicntcsaiidiallarissacramen- tnni, but by far his most important work is the FosliUie. perpduee, sire Irccin cor&amp;gt;iientoria in universa Biblia, first printed at Rome (5 vols. i ol., 1471-72), and often subsequently. It may be said to mark the first beginnings of a school of natural exegesis ; for, though recognizing the old doctrine of a fourfold sense &quot; LItcra gesla docet, quirt credits alieporia, Moralis quid agas, quo tendus auagogia &quot; Lyra explicitly maintained and sought to give effect to the prin ciple that the foundation of every mystical exposition must first be firmly laid by ascertaining the literal meaning. His qualities as an interpreter of Scripture included, besides comparative freedom from dogmatic prepossession, a good knowledge of Hebrew and a fair acquaintance with Greek. Luther was acquainted with his com mentaries, and it is through the influence of Rashi upon Lyra that so ninny traces of the exegesis of that rabbi are found in Luther s writings ; hence the oft-quoted saying, &quot; Si Lyra non lyrasset, Lutherus 11011 saltasset. &quot; See vol. xi. p. 601. LYRE. Of all musical instruments the lyre has been the most associated with poetry, the recitations of Greeks having been accompanied by it. Yet the lyre was not of Greek origin ; no root in the language has been discovered for Xvpa, although the special names bestowed upon varieties of the instrument are. Hellenic. We have to seek in Asia the birthplace of the genus, and to infer its introduction into Greece through Thrace or Lydia. The historic heroes and improvers of the lyre were of the ^Eolian or Ionian colonies, or the adjacent coast bordering on the Lydian empire, while the mythic masters, Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris, were Thracians. Notwithstanding the Hermes tradition of the invention of the lyre in Egypt, the Egyptians seem to have adopted it themselves from Assyria or Babylonia. To define the lyre, it is necessary clearly to separate it from the allied harp and guitar, both, as far as we have record, instruments of as great antiquity. In its primal form the lyre differs from the harp, of which the earliest, simplest notion is found in the bow and bowstring ; while the guitar (and lute) can be traced back to the typical &quot; nefer &quot; of the fourth Egyptian dynasty, the fretted finger-board of which, permitting the production of different notes by the shortening of the string, is as different in conception from the lyre and harp as the flute with holes to shorten the column of air is from the syrinx or Pandean pipes. The frame of a lyre consists of a hollow body or sound-chest (rhetor). From this sound-chest are raised two arms (Trr^eis), which are sometimes hollow, and are bent both outward and forward. They are bound near the top by a crossbar or yoke (t,vyov, ^vyw^a, or, from its having once been a reed, /caAa^os). Another crossbar (/j.dyas, viroXvpLov), fixed on the sound-chest, forms the bridge which transmits the vibrations of the strings. The deepest note was the farthest from the player ; but, as the strings did not differ much in length, more weight may have been gained for the deeper notes by thicker strings, as in the violin and similar modern instruments, or they were tuned with slacker tension. The strings were never of wire, the drawing of which was unknown to the nations of antiquity, but of gut (xP^ whence chord). They were XV. 15