Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/363

 P A S P A S 341 particularly by opposing, sometimes successfully, the mis chievous system of selling hereditary places and offices, which more perhaps than any single thing was the curse of the older French monarchy. He was present at the famous States of Blois, where Guise was assassinated, and he met Montaigne there. The civil wars brought him much personal sorrow. His wife and children had remained in Paris much harassed by the Leaguers ; Madame Pasquier was even imprisoned, and, though she regained her liberty, she died shortly afterwards, in 1590. Her youngest son was killed fighting on the royalist side the year before. For some years Pasquier lived at Tours, working steadily at his great book, but he returned to Paris in Henry IV. s train on the 22d March 1594. He continued until 1604 at his work in the Chambre des Comptes ; then he retired. He survived this retirement more than ten years, produc ing much literary work, and died after a few hours illness on September 1, 1615, at the age of at least eighty-six. In so long and so laborious a life Pasquier a work was naturally considerable, and it has never been fully collected or indeed printed. The standard edition is that of Amsterdam, 1723, 2 vols. folio. But for ordinary readers the selections of M. Leon Feugere, pub lished at Paris in 2 vols. 8vo, 1849, with an elaborate introduction, are most accessible. As a poet, though very far from contemptible, Pasquier is chiefly interesting as a minor member of the Pleiade movement. As a prose writer he is of much more account. The three chief divisions of his prose work are his Rcclierchcs, his letters, and his professional speeches. All are of much value us important documents in the history of the progress of French style. The Jlcchcrches and the letters have a value independent of this. The letters are of much biographical interest and historical importance, and the Retficrchcs contain in a somewhat miscellaneous fashion invaluable information on a Vast variety of subjects, literary, political, antiquarian, and other. PASQUINADE is a variety of libel or lampoon, of which it is not easy to give an exact definition, separating it from other kinds. It should, perhaps, more especially deal with public men and public things. The distinction, however, has been rarely observed in practice, and the chief interest in the word is in its curious and rather legendary origin. According to the received tradition, Pasquino was a tailor (others say a cobbler) who had a biting tongue, and lived in the 1 5th century at Rome. His name, at the end of that century or the beginning of the next, was transferred to a statue which had been dug up in a mutilated condition (some say near his shop) and was set xip at the corner of the Palazzo Orsini (al. Palazzo Braschi). To this statue it became the custom to affix squibs on the papal Government and on prominent persons. At the beginning of the 1 6th century Pasquin had a partner pro vided for him in the shape of another statue found in the Campus Martins, said to represent a river god, and dubbed Marforio, a faro Mctrtis. The regulation form of the pasquinade then became one of dialogue or rather question and answer, in which Marforio usually addressed leading inquiries to his friend. The proceeding soon attained a certain European notoriety, and a printed collection of the squibs due to it (they were long written in Latin verse, with an occasional excursion into Greek) appeared in 1510. In the first book of Pantac/ruel (1532 or there abouts) Rabelais introduces books by Pasquillus and Marphurius in the catalogue of the library of St Victor, and later he quotes some utterances of Pasquin s in his letters to the bishop of Maillezais. These, by the way, show that Pasquin was by no means always satirical, but dealt in grave advice and comment. The 1 Gth century was indeed Pasquin s palmy time, and in not a few of the rare printed collections of his utterances Protestant polemic (which was pretty certainly not attempted on the actual statue) is mingled. These utterances were not only called pasquinades but simply pasquils (Pasquilhis, Pas- quillo, Pasquille), and this form was sometimes used for the mythical personage himself. Under this title a con siderable satirical literature of quite a different kind from the original personal squibs and political comments grew up in England at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century under the titles of Pasquil s Ajwloyy, Pasquil s Nis/htcap, &amp;lt;tc. The chief writers were Thomas Nash and, after his death, Nicholas Breton. These pieces (of extreme rarity, but lately reissued by the Rev. A. B. Grosart, in private reprints of the works of their authors) were in prose. The French pasquils (examples of which may be found in Fournier s Varietes Historiques ei Littcraires) were more usually in verse. In Italy itself Pasquin is said not to have condescended to the vernacular till the 1 8th century. During the first two hundred years of his career few mornings, if any, found him unplacarded, and the institution supplied a kind of rough and scurrilous gazette of public opinion. But the proceeding gradually lost its actuality, and was, moreover, looked on with less and less favour by the authorities. Indeed a sentinel was latterly posted to prevent the placarding. It is said, how ever, that isolated pasquinades, having at least local ap propriateness, occurred not many years ago. Marforio, it should be added, was soon removed from his companion s neighbourhood to the Capitol. Contemporary comic peri odicals, especially in Italy, still occasionally use the Marforio-Pasquin dialogue form. But this survival is purely artificial and literary, and pasquinade has, as noted above, ceased to have any precise meaning. PASSAU, an ancient town and episcopal see of Bavaria, lies in the district of Lower Bavaria, and occupies a highly picturesque situation at the confluence of the Danube, the Inn, and the Ilz, 90 miles to the north-east of Munich, and close to the Axistrian frontier. It consists of the town proper, on the rocky tongue of land between the Danube and the Inn, and of the three suburbs of Innstadt, on the right bank of the Inn, Ilzstadt, on the left bank of the Ilz, and Anger, in the angle between the Ilz and the Danube. Passau is one of the most beautiful places on the Danube, a fine effect being produced by the way in which the houses are piled one above another on the heights rising from the river. The best general view is obtained from the Oberhaus, an old fortress now used as a prison, which crowns a hill 300 feet high on the left bank of the Danube. A detailed inspection of the buildings of the town, most of which date from the 17th and 18th centuries, scarcely fulfils the expectation aroused by their imposing appearance as a whole. The most noteworthy are the cathedral, a florid rococo structure on the site of an earlier church, which claims to have been founded in the 5th century ; the post-office, in which the treaty of Passau was signed ; the episcopal palace ; the old Jesuit college^ with a library of 30,000 volumes ; the arsenal ; the Romanesque church of the Holy Cross ; and the double church of St Salvator. The old forts and bastions have been demolished, but the Niederhaus, at the base of the Oberhaus, is still extant, though no longer maintained as a fortress. The chief products of the insignificant industry of the town are tobacco, leather, and paper. It also possesses iron and copper foundries and a few barge-building yards. The well-known Passau cru cibles are made at the neighbouring village of Obernzell. Trade is carried on in iron and timber, large quantities of the latter being floated down the Hz. The inhabitants (15,365 in 1880) are nearly all Roman Catholics. Passau is a town of very ancient origin. The first settlement here is believed to have been the Celtic Boiudurum, on the site of the present Innstadt ; and the Romans afterwards established a colony of Batavian veterans (Castra Batava) on the site of the town proper. The bishopric was founded in the 8th century, and most of the sub sequent history of Passau is made up of broils between the bishops and the townsmen. The fortress of Oberhaus was erected by the former in consequence of a revolt in the 13th century, andat a later