Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/381

 P A T P A T 359 he was rewarded with the quaestorship in 7, and, along with his brother, with the pnx-torship in 15. He was still alive in 30, for his history contains many references to the consulship of M. Vinicius in that year. The date and manner of his death are unknown. It has been con jectured that he was put to death in 31 as a friend of Sejanus, whose praises he celebrates. He wrote a compendium of Roman history in two books dedicated to M. Vinicius, from the dispersion of the Greeks after the siege of Troy down to the death of Livia in 29 A.D. The first book brings the history down to the destruction of Carthage, 146 B.C.; portions of it are want ing, including the beginning. The later history, especially the period from the death of Caesar, 44 B.C., to the death of Augustus, 14 A.D., is treated in much greater detail. Brief notices are given of Greek and Roman literature, but, strange to say, no mention is made of Plautus, Horace, and Propertius. The author is a vain and shallow courtier ; &quot; full of wise saws,&quot; he is nevertheless entirely destitute of true historical insight. His knowledge is superficial, his blunders numerous, his chronology inconsistent. He labours at portrait-painting, but his portraits are daubs. On Ciesar, Augustus, and above all on his patron Tiberius, he lavishes praise or flattery. The repetitions, redund ancies, and slovenliness of expression which disfigure the work may be partly due to the haste with which (as the author frequently reminds us) it was written. Some blemishes of style, particularly the clumsy and involved structure of his sentences, may perhaps be ascribed to insufficient literary training. The inflated rhetoric, the straining after effect by means of hyperbole, antithesis, and epigram, mark the degenerate taste of the Silver Age, of which Paterculus is the earliest example. He purposed to write a fuller history of the later period, which should include the civil war between Caesar and Pompey and the wars of Tiberius ; but there is no evidence that he carried out this intention. Paterculus was little known in antiquity. He seems to have been read by Lucan and imitated by Sulpicius Severus, but he is mentioned only by the scholiast on Lucan, and once by Priscian. All we know of his life is derived from his own statements. The text of his work, preserved in a single badly-written MS. (now lost), is very corrupt, and its restoration has tasked the ingenuity of many learned men. The editio princeps appeared at Basel in 1520 ; subsequent editors have been J. Lipsius, Leyden, 1591 ; J. Gruter, Frankfort, 1607 ; N. Heinsius, Amsterdam, 1678 ; P. Burmann, Leyden (2d ed.), 1744 ; L&amp;gt;. Rulmken, Leyden, 1779 ; J. C. Orelli, Leipsic, 1835; F. Kritz, Leipsic, 1840 and 1848; F. Haase, Leipsic (2d ed.) 1858 ; C. Halm, Leipsic, 1876. Besides the literary histories of Bernhardy and Teuffel, see the prolegomena to Kritz s edition ; H. Sauppe, in Schweiz. Museum, i. p. 133 ; A. Pernice, De Vellei fide historica, Leipsic, 18C2 ; contributions to the criticism of the text by J. C. M. Laurent, Loci Velleiani, Altona, 1836; J. Jeep, Emendationes Vellei- an/v, Wolfenbiittel, 1839; N. Madvig, Adversaria, ii. p. 297 sq. ; English trans lations by Newcomb, Paterson, and Watson ; German by Jacobs, Walther, and Eyssenhardt; French by Despres and Greard ; Italian by Manzi, Boccanera, and Spiridione Petrettini. PATERINES. See PATARENES. PATERNO, a town of Sicily, in the province of Catania, stands at the south-west foot of Mount ^Etna, 10 miles north-west of Catania near the railway from that city to Leonforte. It is a long straggling place with a mediaeval castle (1073) and several churches and suppressed convents. The surrounding country is fertile, producing corn, oil, wine, flax, hemp, and timber, in which articles an active trade is carried on. Patern6 gives the title of &quot; prince &quot; to a Sicilian family. In the neighbourhood the remains of ancient baths, tombs, and aqueduct, and a bridge across the Simcto have been discovered. The town is supposed to occupy the site of the ancient Hybla Major. Population 15,230. PATERSON, the &quot; Lyons of America,&quot; a city of the United States, capital of Passaic county, New Jersey, is situated on the Passaic river and the Morris Canal, 17 miles north-west of New York by the Erie and the Dela ware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroads. As the river, which forms the boundary of the city for a distance of 9 miles, has at one place a sheer fall of 50 feet, it is an unfailing source of abundant water-power ; and Paterson ranks second among the manufacturing cities of the State. Silk, iron, and cotton are the great industrial staples ; silk-dyeing is also practised. One of the chief industries is the making of locomotives. Further, fire-engines, &quot;Whitney&quot; sewing-machines, iron bridges, brass wares, flax, hemp, and jute goods, calico-prints, paper, and chemi cals are all manufactured. The population was 11,334 in 1850, 19,586 in 1860, 33,579 in 1870, and 51,031 in 1880. Founded in 1792 by a cotton company under the patronage of Alexander Hamilton and named after Gover nor William Paterson, who signed its town charter, Paterson obtained the rank of a city in 1851. PATERSON, WILLIAM (1658-1719), founder of the Bank of England, projector of the Darien scheme, and a voluminous writer on subjects connected Avith finance, was born in April 1658 at the farmhouse of Skipmyre, parish of Tinwald, Dumfriesshire. His parents occupied the farm there, and with them he resided till he was about seven teen. A desire to escape the religious persecution then raging in Scotland, and a wish to find a wider field for his energies than a poor district of a poor country afforded, led him southward. He went through England with a pedlar s pack (&quot;wherof the print may be seen, if he be alive,&quot; says a pamphleteer in 1700), settled for some time in Bristol, and then proceeded to America. There he lived chiefly in the Bahamas, and is said by some to have been a predicant or preacher, and by others to have been a buccaneer. The truth is that his intellectual and moral superiority to the majority of the British settlers naturally caused his selection as their spiritual guide, whilst his intense eagerness for information led to inter course with the buccaneers, from whom alone much of the information he wanted could be had. It was here he formed that vast design which is known in history as the Darien scheme. On his return to England he was unable to induce the Government of James II. to engage in his plan. He went to the Continent and pressed it in Ham burg, Amsterdam, and Berlin, but unsuccessfully. A countryman of his own talks of him as a well-known figure &quot;in the coffee-houses of Amsterdam&quot; in 1687, and gives us some idea of the strange impression that this thoughtful- looking foreigner produced, as with fluent speech he un folded to his astonished hearers a scheme which seemed wild and dazzling as a dream of Eastern romance. On his return to London he engaged in trade and rapidly amassed a considerable fortune. His activity was not confined to private business. About 1690 he was occupied in the formation of the Hampstead Water Company, and in 1694 he founded the Bank of England. The Government of the day required money, and the country, rapidly increasing in wealth, required a bank. The subscribers lent their money to the nation, and this debt became the bank stock. The credit of having formulated the scheme and persuaded the Government to adopt it is certainly due to Paterson. He was one of the original directors, but in less than a year, in consequence of some dispute with his colleagues, he withdrew from the management. He had already pro pounded a new plan for an orphan bank (so called because the debt due to the city orphans by the corporation of London was to form the stock). This, they feared, might prove a dangerous rival to their own undertaking, and be sides they looked with considerable suspicion and dislike on this Scotsman whose brain teemed with new plans in constant succession. At that time the people of the northern kingdom were engaged in considering how they might share in the bene-