Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/42

Rh L V L O V lad was most unwilling to go out, but was compelled by his father to do so. Lovat s false professions of fidelity did not of course long deceive the Government, and after the battle of Culloden he was obliged to retreat to some of the wildest recesses of the Highlands, after seeing from a distant height his proud castle of Dounie delivered to the flames by the royal army. Even then, however, broken down by disease and old age, carried about on a litter and unable to move without assistance, his mental resources did not fail him ; and in a conference with several of the Jacobite leaders &quot;he proposed that they should raise a body of three thousand men, which would be enough to make their moun tains impregnable, and at length force the Government to give them advantageous terms. The project, though by no means a chimerical one, was not carried out, and Lovat, after enduring incredible hardships in his wanderings, was at last arrested on an island in Loch Morar close upon the west coast. He was conveyed in a litter to London, and after a trial of five days sentence of death in &quot; the ordinary brutal form peculiar to England &quot; was pronounced upon him on the 19th of March 1747. His execution took place on the 9th of April following. His conduct to the last was dignified and even cheerful, his humour, his power of s ircasm, and his calm defiance of fate never deserting him. Just before submitting his head to the block he repeated the line from Horace &quot; Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.&quot; LOVE-BIRD, a name somewhat indefinitely bestowed, chieHy by dealers in live animals and their customers, on some of the smaller short-tailed Parrots, from the remark able affection which examples of opposite sexes exhibit towards each other, an affection popularly believed to be so great that of a pair that have been kept together in captivity neither can long survive the loss of its partner. By many systematic ornithologists the little birds thus named, brought almost entirely from Africa and South America, have been retained in a single genus, Psittacula, though those belonging to the former country were by others separated as Agapomia, This separation, however, was by no means generally approved, and indeed it was not easily justified, until Garrod (Proc. Zool. Society, 1874, p. 593) assigned good anatomical ground, afforded by the structure of the carotid artery, for regarding the two groups as distinct, and thus removed what had seemed to be the almost unintelligible puzzle presented by the geographical distribution of the species of Psittacula in a large sense, though Professor Huxley (op. cit., 1868, p. 319) had indeed already suggested one way of meeting the difficulty. As the genus is now restricted, only one of the six species of Psittacula enumerated in the Nomendator Avium of Messrs Sclater and Salvin is known to be found outside of the Neotropical Region, the exceptional instance being the Mexican P. cyanopygia, and not one of the seven recognized by the same authors as forming the very nearly allied genus Urochroma. On the other hand, of Ayapornis, from which the so-called genus Poliopsitta can scarcely be separated, five if not six species are known, all belonging to the Ethiopian Region, and all but one, A. cana (which is indigenous to Madagascar, and thence has been widely disseminated), are natives of Africa. In this group probably comes also Psittinus, with a single species from the Malayan Subregion. These Old-World forms are the &quot;Love-birds&quot; proper; the others scarcely deserve that designation, and still less do certain even smaller Parrots, the very smallest indeed of the Order Psittaci, included in the genera Cydopsitta and Nasiterna, which are peculiar to the Australian Region, though on account of their diminutive size they may here be just mentioned by name, but their real affinity remains to be determined. (A. N.) LOVELACE, RICHARD (1618-1658), English poet, was born in 1618. On the father s side he was a scion of a Kentish family, and inherited a tradition of military distinction, maintained by successive generations from tbe time of Edward III. His mother s family was legal ; her grandfather had been chief baron of the exchequer. Lovelace s fame has been kept alive by a few songs and the romance of his career, and his poems are commonly spoken of as careless improvisations, and merely the amusements of an active soldier. But the unhappy course of his life gave him more leisure for verse-making than opportunity of soldiering. Before the outbreak of the civil war in 1642 his only active service was in the bloodless expedition which ended in the Pacification of Berwick in 1640. By that time he was one of the most distinguished of the company of courtly poets gathered round Queen Henrietta, and influenced as a school by contemporary French writers of vers de societe. Lovelace had probably a more serious and sustained poetical ambi tion than any of them. He wrote a comedy, The Scholar, when he was sixteen, and a tragedy, The Soldier, when he was one and twenty. From what he says of Fletcher, it would seem that this dramatist was his model, but only the spirited prologue and epilogue to his comedy have been preserved. When the rupture between king and parlia ment took place, Lovelace was committed to the Gatehouse at Westminster for presenting to the Commons a petition from Kentish royalists in the king s favour. It was then that he wrote his most famous song, &quot; To Althaea from Prison.&quot; He was liberated on bull of 40,000, a sign of his importance in the eyes of the parliament, and throughout the civil war was a prisoner on parole, with this security in the hands of his enemies. His only active service was after 1646, when he raised a regiment for the French king, and took part in the siege of Dunkirk. Returning to England in 1648, he was again thrown into prison. During this second imprisonment, he collected and revised for the press a volume of occasional poems, many if not most of which had previously appeared in various publications. The volume was published in 1649 under the title of Lucasta, his poetical name contracted from Lux Casta for Lucy Sacheverell, a lady who married another during his absence in France, on a report that he had died of his wounds at Dunkirk. The last ten years of Lovelace s life were passed in obscurity. His fortune had been exhausted in the king s interest, and he is said to have been supported by the generosity of more fortunate friends. He died, according to Aubrey, in a cellar in Longacre.&quot; A volume of Lovelace s Posthume Poems was published in 1659 by one of his brothers. They are of very inferior merit to his own collection. The world has done no injustice to Lovelace in neglecting all but a few of his modest offerings to literature. But critics often do him injustice in dismissing him as a gay cavalier, who dashed off his verses hastily and cared little what became of them. It is a mistake to class him with Suckling ; he has neither Suckling s easy grace nor his reckless spontaneity. We have only to compare the version of any of his poems in Lucasta with the form in which it originally appeared to see how fastidious was his revision. In many places it takes time to decipher his meaning. The expression is often elliptical, the syntax inverted and tortuous, the train of thought intricate and discontinuous. These faults they are not of course to be found in his two or three popular lyrics, &quot; Going to the Wars,&quot; &quot;To Althaea from Prison,&quot; &quot;The Scrutiny&quot; are, however, as in the case of his poetical master, Donne, the faults not of haste but of over-elaboration. His thoughts are not the first thoughts of an improvisatore, but thoughts ten or twenty stages removed from the first, and they are generally as closely packed as they are far-fetched. Lovelace is not named by Johnson among the &quot;metaphysical poets,&quot; but in elaboration of workman ship as well as in intellectual force he comes nearer than any other disciple to the founder of the school. His most far-fetched con ceits are worth the carriage, and there is genuine warmth in them. The wine of his poetry is a dry wine, but it is wine, and not an