Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/526

Rh 508 B H E R H E weaver of Charleville. The Canticles tapestries, four pieces repre- senting scenes in Louis XIV. 's youth, originally belonged to the castle of Hauteville. In the right transept are two great Gobelins tapestries executed after Raphael's designs, and dealing with the life of St Paul. The left transept contains a fine organ in flamboyant Gothic with 3516 pipes and 53 stops. The choir clock is ornamented with curious mechanical devices. Several paintings, by Titian, Tintoretto, Nicolas Poussin, and others, and the carved woodwork and the railings of the choir, also deserve to be mentioned; and among the numerous objects of antiquarian interest in the cathedral " treasury " is the reliquary of the sacred phial which contained the oil used in anointing the kings, but was broken during the devolution. The archiepiscopal palace, built between 1498 and 1509, and in part rebuilt in 1675, was occupied by the kings on the occasion of their coronation. The saloon chamber, where the royal banquet was held, has an immense stone chimney of the 15th century, medallions of the archbishops of Rheims, and portraits of fourteen kings crowned in the city. Among the other rooms of the royal suite, all of which are of great beauty and richness, is that now used for the meetings of the Rheiins Academy; the building also contains a library of 16,000 volumes. The chapel of the archiepiscopal palace consists of two stories, the upper of which still serves as a place of worship, while the lower is occupied by an antiquarian museum, in which is pre- served the marble cenotaph (almost entire) of the consul Jovinus, who in the 4th century led his fellow-townsmen at Rheims to embrace Christianity. After the cathedral the most celebrated church is that of St Remi, built in the llth and 12th centuries on the site of an older place of worship. The valuable monuments with which it was at one time iilled were pillaged during the Revolution, and even the tomb of the saint is a modern piece of work; but there still remain the 13th-century glass windows of the apse and tapestries representing the history of St Remigius. The churches of St Jacques, St Maurice (partly rebuilt in 1867), St Andre, and St Thomas (erected in 1847, under the patronage of Cardinal Gousset, now buried within its walls), as well as the chapels of the lycee and of several monasteries, are all more or less interesting. There are also in the city two Protestant churches and a synagogue. The town-house, erected in the 17th century and enlarged in 1880, has a pediment with an equestrian statue of Louis XV. and a tall and elegant campanile. It contains a picture gallery, a natural history museum, and a library of 60,000 volumes and 1500 MSS. Of the many curious old houses which still exist in the town it is enough to mention the House of the Musicians, so called from the seated figures of musicians which decorate the front. Rheiins is the seat of an academy of science, arts, and literature, founded in 1841 and composed of forty-five members, a preparatory school of medicine and pharmacy, several hospitals, and a modern theatre. It is the headquarters of one of the divisions of the 6th corps d'armee (Chalons). Colbert's statue adorns the Cours; Louis XV. 's (in bronze) stands in the centre of the handsome Place Royale; and Marshal Drouet d'Erlon's is in another of the public squares. History. Rheims (Durocortorum), an important town in the time of Ca;sar, made voluntary submission to the Romans and by its fidelity throughout the various Gallic insurrections secured the special favour of its conquerors. Christianity was introduced about the middle of the 4th century. Jovinus, already mentioned as an influential supporter of the new faith, repulsed the barbarians who invaded Champagne in 336; but the Vandals captured the town in 406 and slew St Nicasus, and Attila afterwards put everything to fire and sword. Clovis, after his victory at Soissons (486), was baptized at Rheims in 496 by St REMIGIUS (q.v.}. From this period the see acquired new lustre. The kings of the second and third dynasties desired to be consecrated at lihcims with the oil of the sacred phial which was believed to have been brought from heaven by a dove for the baptism of Clovis and was preserved in the abbey of St Remi. Historical meetings of Pope Stephen III. with Pippin the Short, and of Leo III. with Charlemagne, took place at Rheims; and there Louis the Debonnaire was crowned by Stephen IV. In the 10th century Rheims had become a centre of intellec- tual culture, Archbishop Adalberon, seconded by the monk Gerbert (Sylvester II.), having founded schools where the "liberal arts" were taught. Adalberon was also one of the prime authors of the revolu- tion which put the Capet house in the place of the Carlovingians. The archbisnops of Rheims held the temporal lordship of the city and coined money till the close of the 14th century. But their most important prerogative was the consecration of the king, a privilege which was regularly exercised from the time of Philip Augustus to that of Charles X. Louis VII. granted the town a communal charter in 1139. Councils met within its walls in 1119 and 1148. The treaty of Troyes (1420) ceded it to the English, who had made a futile attempt to take it by siege in 1360; but they were expelled on the approach of Joan of Arc, who in 1429 caused Charles VII. to bo duly consecrated in the cathedral. A revolt at Rheims caused by the Rait tax in 1461 was cruelly repressed by Louis XI. The town sided with the League (1585), but submitted to Henry IV. after the battle of Ivry. In the foreign invasions of 1814 it was captured and recaptured; in 1870-71 it was made by the Germans the seat of a governor-general and impoverished by heavy requisitions. KHEINGAU. See RHINE. RHENANUS, BEATUS (c. 1485-1547), German human- ist, was born about 1485 at Schlettstadt in Alsace, where his father, a native of Rheinau, was a prosperous butcher. He received his early education in Schlettstadt, and afterwards (1503) went to Paris, where he came under the influence of Faber Stapulensis; here, among his other learned pursuits, we must include that of correcting the press for Henry Estienne. In 1511 he removed to Basel, where he became intimate with Erasmus, and took an active share in the publishing enterprises of Frobenius. Some time after 1520 he became a comparatively wealthy man through the death of his father; returning to Schlettstadt he devoted himself to a life of learned leisure, enlivened with free epistolary and personal intercourse with Erasmus, Reuchlin, Pirckheimer, Lasky, and many other scholars of his time. He died at Strasburg, while returning from Baden in Switzerland, whither he had gone for his health, in 1547, leaving behind him a high reputa- tion not only for sound learning but also for singular gentleness, modesty, and simplicity. His earliest publication was a life of Geiler of Strasburg (1510). Of his subseqiient works the principal are llerum Germanicarum Libri III. (1531), and editions of Velleius Paterculus (ed. princeps, from a MS. discovered by himself, 1520); Tacitus (1533, exclusive of the Histories); Livy (1535); and Erasmus (with a life, 9 vols. fol., 1540-41). RHENISH PRUSSIA. See PRUSSIA, RHENISH. RHETICUS, or RH^TICUS, a surname given to GEORGE JOACHIM (1514-1576) from his birth at Feldkirch in that part of Tyrol which was anciently the territory of the Rhseti. Born in 1514, he was appointed professor of mathematics at Wittenberg in 1537. His first appearance before the public was in the character of an enthusiastic convert to the newly broached opinions of Copernicus. No sooner had he adopted these opinions than, resigning his chair, he repaired to Frauenberg to sit at the feet of their great promulgator. All his energy was forthwith devoted to the new system, and, as has been mentioned under COPER- NICUS, it was he who superintended the printing of the De Orbium Revolutione. Rheticus now commenced his great treatise, Opus Palatinum de Triangulis, and continued to work at it while he occupied his old chair at Wittenberg, while he taught mathematics at Leipsic, while he travelled over different parts of the Continent, and indeed up to his death in Hungary in 1576. The Opus Palatinum of Rheticus was published by Otho in 1596. It gives tables of sines and cosines, tangents, etc., for every 10 seconds, calculated to ten places. He had projected a table of the same kind to fifteen places, but did not live to complete it. The sine table, however, was afterwards published on this scale under the name of Thesaurus Matkematicus (Frankfort, 1613) by Pitiscus, who himself carried the calculation of a few of the earlier sines to twenty-two places. RHETORIC. A lost work of Aristotle is quoted by Diogenes Laertius (viii. 57) as saying that Empedocles " invented " (evpflv) rhetoric; Zeno, dialectic. This is cer- tainly not to be understood as meaning that Empedocles composed the first "art" of rhetoric. It is rather to be explained by Aristotle's own remark, cited by Laertius from another lost treatise, that Empedocles was " a master of expression and skilled in the use of metaphor " quali- ties which may have found scope in his political oratory, when, after the fall of Thrasydaeus in 472 B.C., he opposed the restoration of a tyranny at Agrigentum. The founder of rhetoric as an art was Corax of Syracuse (c. 466 B.C.). In 466 Thrasybulus the despot of Syracuse was