Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/227

Rh P L A P L E which is put forward in the epitaph which in ancient times was attributed to himself : &quot; Fostquam est mortem aptus Plautus, comoedia luget, Scaana est deserta, dein risus, ludu jocusque, t numeri innumeri simul omnes conlacrurnarunt.&quot; 1 He has not the move subtle and penetrating irony which we recognize in Terence, in Horace, and in Petronius ; still less can we attribute to him the &quot; rigid! censura cachinni &quot; which accompanied and inspired the humorous fancies of Lucilius and Juvenal. But among all the ancient humorists, with the exception of Aristo phanes, ho must have had the power of immediately provoking the heartiest and broadest mirth and laughter. He was too careless in the construction of his plots to be a finished dramatic artist. He was apparently more popular among the mass of his countrymen than any Roman author of any age ; but to be thoroughly popular he had to satisfy the tastes of an audience accustomed to the indigenous farces of Italy. This is the defect, according to the judgment of educated critics in the Augustan age, which Horace indicates in the line &quot; Quanttis sit Dosscnnus edacibus in parasitis.&quot; But he had the most wonderful power of dramatic expression of feeling, fancy, and character by means of action, rhythm, and language. In the line in which Horace expresses the more favour able criticism of his time, &quot;Plautus ad exemplar Siculi properare Epicharmi,&quot; the term properare expresses the vivacity of gesture, dialogue, declamation, and recitative in which the plays of Plautus never fail, and which must have made them admirable vehicles for the art of the actor. The lyrical recitative occupies a much larger place in his comedies than in those of Terence, and in them lie shows the true poetical gift of adapting and varying his metres in accordance with the moods and fancies of his characters. But the gift for which he is pre-eminent above almost every other Roman author is the vigour and exuberant flow of his language. No other writer enables us to feel the life and force of the Latin idiom, un disguised by the mannerisms of a literary style, in the same degree. Among the masters of expression in which the prose and poetical literature of Rome abounds, none was more prodigally gifted than Plautus, and this gift of expression was the accompaniment of the exuberant creativeness of his fancy and of the strong vitality and lively social nature which was the endowment of the race to which he belonged. In the beginning of the 15th century only the first eight plays(from Amphitruo to Epidicus) were in circulation. The other twelve were recovered in the course of that century, and two new manuscripts, one of them containing the whole twenty, were discovered in the following century. The Ambrosian palimpsest, discovered in 1815, has been recognized iis the most trustworthy text for those plays which it preserves, and it is on this that the critical labours of Ritscbl have been based. His great critical edition is being continued by his pupils G. Loewe, G. Gb tz, Fr. Schoell. An edition of the plays with a commentary by Professor Ussing of Copenhagen is now nearly complete. The most useful editions or separate plays are those of Lorenz and Brix. (W. Y. S.) PLAYFAIR, JOHN (1748-1819), mathematician and physicist, was born at Benvie, Forfarshire, where his father was parish minister, on March 10, 1748. He was educated at home until the age of fourteen, when he entered the university of St Andrews. Ability for scien tific studies must have appeared very early with him, for while yet a student he was selected to teach natural philosophy during the occasional absence of the professor. In 1766, when only eighteen, he was candidate for the j chair of mathematics in Marischal College, Aberdeen, and, although he was unsuccessful, his claims were admitted to be high. Six years later he made application for the chair of natural philosophy in his own university, but again without success, and in 1773 he was offered and accepted the living of the united parishes of Liff and Benvie, vacant j by the death of his father. He continued, however, to j carry on his mathematical and physical studies, and in 1782 he resigned his charge in order to become the tutor of Ferguson of Raith. By this arrangement he was able to be frequently in Edinburgh, and to cultivate the literary and scientific society for which it was at that time specially distinguished; and through Maskelyne, whose acquaintance he had first made in the course of the cele brated Schiehallion experiments in 1774, he also gained access to the scientific circles of London. In 1785 when Dugald Stewart succeeded Ferguson in the Edinburgh chair &quot; After Plautus died, comedy mourns, the stage is deserted, then laughter, mirth, and jest, and his numberless numbers all wept in concert.&quot; of moral philosophy, Playfair succeeded the former in that of mathematics. In 1802 he published a volume entitled Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, and in 1805 he exchanged the chair of mathematics for that of natural philosophy in succession to Robison, whom also he succeeded as general secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He took a prominent part, on the liberal side, in the ecclesiastical controversy which arose in con nexion with Leslie s appointment to the post he had vacated, and published a satirical Letter (1806) which was greatly admired by his friends. His election as a fellow of the Royal Society took place in 1807. In 1815, after the establishment of a European peace, he made a journey through France and Switzerland to Italy, and remained abroad for nearly eighteen months, interesting himself chiefly in the geology and mineralogy of the districts he visited. After a few years of gradually failing health he died on July 19, 1819. A collected edition of Playfair s works, with a memoir by James G. Playfair, appeared at Edinburgh in 4 vols. 8vo. His writings include a number of essays contributed to the Edinburgh Review from 1804 onwards, various papers in the Phil. Trans, (including his earliest publication &quot; On the Arithmetic of Impossible Quantities, &quot; 1779, and an &quot;Account of the Lithological Survey of Schehallion &quot; 1811) and in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (&quot;On the Causes which affect the Accuracy of Barometrical Measurement,&quot; &c. ), also the articles &quot;jEpinus&quot; and &quot;Physical Astronomy,&quot; and a &quot;Dissertation on the Progress of Mathematical and Physical Science since the Revival of Learning in Europe,&quot; in the Encyclopedia, Britannica (Supplement to fourth, fifth, and sixth editions). His Elements of Geometry first appeared in 1795 and have passed through many editions ; his Outlines of Natural Philosophy (2 vols., 1812-16) consist of the propositions and formulae which were the basis of his class lectures. Playfair s con tributions to pure mathematics were not considerable, his paper &quot;On the Arithmetic of Impossible Quantities,&quot; that &quot; On the Causes which affect the Accuracy of Barometrical Measurements,&quot; and his Elements of Geometry, all already referred to, being the most im portant. As a mathematician simply he was far inferior to the first two Gregorys, to Colin Maclaurin, and even to Matthew Stewart. He was, however, a man of great general ability and was conspicuous for a calm intellect. His scientific style was a model of clearness, and his Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth attained great popularity through its literary merits. His lives of Matthew Stewart, Hutton, Robison, many of his reviews, and above all his &quot;Dissertation&quot; are of the utmost value. The English mathematicians of his day professed unlimited admiration of Nevton, but few of them were found able to wield his weapons, and the majority had come simply to rest under the shadow of that great man ; to Playfair belongs the credit of having been one of the first to diffuse among his countrymen a knowledge of the substantial progress which the infinitesimal calculus had been making in the hands of the Continental analysts. PLEADING, in law, denotes in civil procedure the statement in legal form of the grounds on which a party to an action claims the decision of the court in his favour, in criminal procedure the accusation of the prosecutor or the answer of the accused. The term &quot; pleadings &quot; is used for the collected whole of the statements of both parties, the term &quot; pleading &quot; for each separate part of the plead ings. . A pleading maybe the statement of either party; a &quot; plea &quot; is (except in Scots and ecclesiastical law) confined to the defence made by an accused person. To &quot; plead &quot; is to frame a pleading or plea, All systems of law agree in making it necessary to bring the grounds of a claim or defence before the court in a more or less technical form. In Roman law the action passed through three stages (see ACTION), and the manner of pleading changed with the action. In the earliest historical period, that of the legis actiones, the pleadings were verbal, and made in court by the parties themselves, the proceedings imitating as far as possible the natural conduct of persons who had been disputing, but who suffered their quarrel to be appeased (Maine, Ancient Law, ch. x.). Though pleadings were probably not couched in technical language originally, this soon became a necessity, XIX. 28