Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/615

 S T R S T R 591 merely of his sincere interest in the welfare of Turkey, but of his sole ability to thwart the wiles of the Russian emperor. There is no doubt a certain degree of exaggera- tion in Kinglake's description of Canning as the " Great Elchi," at whose slightest frown the Turks were ready to quail, and by whose matchless skill and coolness the em- peror Nicholas was placed at his wits' end ; but the con- summate ability with which he managed the negotiations connected with the question of the Holy Places, so as to place the emperor as much as possible in the wrong, and to render his act of hostility on 3d July 1853 which led to the Crimean war unjustifiable, cannot be denied. During the war he retained his position at Constantinople, but at its conclusion he returned in 1858 to London. In 1852 he had been raised to the peerage with the title Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe. His later years were spent chiefly in retirement, and, except when the Eastern question came prominently into notice, he took little part in political dis- cussion. On Eastern politics he contributed several papers to the Times and the Nineteenth Century. He died with- out surviving male issue 14th August 1880. His essays were collected and published in 1SS1 under the title of the Eastern Question, with a memorial preface by Dean Stanley. A memoir by Stanley Lane Poole is in preparation. STRATO. See PERIPATETICS, vol. xviii. p. 545. STRAUBING, an ancient town in the most fertile part of Lower Bavaria, is situated on the right bank of the Danube, 25 miles to the south-east of Ratisbon. Its oldest and most characteristic building is the tall square tower of the town-hall, with its five pointed turrets, dating from 1208. The church of St James is a good Late Gothic edi- fice (1292-1512), with some paintings ascribed to Wohl- gemuth, and the old Carmelite church contains a handsome monument to Duke Albert II. of Bavaria. The industries of Straubing are tanning, brewing, and trade in grain and cattle. The population in 1880 was 12,625, nearly all Roman Catholics. Straubing is a town of remote origin, believed to be identical with the Roman station of Serviodurum. In definite history, however, it is known only as a Bavarian town, and from 1333 to 1425 it was the seat of the collateral ducal line of Baiern-Straubing. Its chief historical interest attaches to its connexion with the unfortunate Agnes Bernauer, who lived at the chateau here with her husband Duke Albert III. During the latter's absence his father, Duke Ernest, exasperated at the mesalliance, cruelly and unjustly con- demned his son's low-born wife to death, and caused her to be hurled into the Danube from the bridge (1435). A chapel in the church- yard of St Peter's is said to cover her remains. Fraunhofer the optician was born at Straubing in 1787. STRAUSS, DAVID FBIEDRICH (1808-1874), author of the Leben Jesu, was born at Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, January 27, 1808. He was the son of a small tradesman who loved literature and thought more than business, and his mother was a bright intelligent woman whose piety was practical rather than meditative, while she had an open eye for the beauties of art and nature. In his thirteenth year the boy was sent to the evangelical seminary at Blau- beuren, near Ulm, to be prepared for the study of theo- logy. Amongst his school-fellows were youths destined to become equally distinguished with himself, of whom he has given sketches in his Christian Mdrklin. Amongst the principal masters in the school were Professors Kern and F. C. Baur, who infused into their pupils above all a deep love of the ancient classics. In 1825 Strauss passed from school to the university of Tubingen. The course of study was two years of philosophy and history and three of theology. The professors of philosophy failed to interest him, and he accordingly followed pretty much his own devices in this field, devoting himself especially to Schelling, the writers of the romantic school, Jacob Bohme, and even to somnambulistic and other modern supersti- tions. In 1826 his previous teachers, Kern and Baur, removed to Tiibingen, and the latter introduced him to the writings of Schleiermacher, which awoke his keen dialectical faculty and delivered him from the vague- ness and exaggerations of romantic and somnambulistic mysticism, while for a time he found satisfaction for his religious nature in Schleiermacher's idea of religion. In the last year of his stay at Tubingen he read with Marklin Hegel's Phcinomenoloyie, which was the beginning of his abandonment of Schleiermacher for Hegel In 1830 he passed his examination brilliantly, and became assistant to a country clergyman, and was greatly beloved as preacher and pastor by the parishioners. After nine months in this position he accepted the post of professor in the high school at Maulbronn, having to teach Latin, history, and Hebrew. Here also he was most successful and highly valued. But in October 1831 he resigned his office in order to study under Schleiermacher and Hegel in Berlin. Hegel died just as he arrived, and, though he regularly attended Schleiermacher's lectures, it was only those on the life of Jesus which exercised a very powerful influence upon him. It was amongst the followers of Hegel that he found kindred spirits. Under the leading of Hegel's distinction between " Vorstellung " and " Begriff," he had already conceived the idea of his two principal theological works the Life of Jesus and the Christian Dogmatics. In 1832 he returned to Tubingen and became repetent in the university, lecturing on logic, history of philosophy, Plato, and history of ethics, with great success. But in the autumn of 1833 he resigned this position in order to devote all his time to the completion of his pro- jected Life of Jesus. In a year the manuscript was fin- ished, and in 1834 the first volume and in 1835 the second were given to the world. The work produced an immense sensation and created a new epoch in the treatment of the rise of Christianity. The chief replies to it were by Tholuck, Neander, A. Schweizer, Ullmann, and Bruno Bauer. In 1837 Strauss replied to his critics (Streitschriften zur Vertheidigung meiner Schrift iiber das Leben Jesu). In the third edition of the work (1839), and in Zwei friedliche Blatter, he made important concessions to his critics, which he withdrew, however, in the fourth edition (1840, translated into English by George Eliot, with Latin preface by Strauss, 1846). In 1840 and the following year he published his Christliche Glaubenslehre (2 vols.), the principle of which is that the history of Christian doctrines is their disintegration. Between the publication of this work and that of the Friedliche Blatter he had been elected to a chair of theology in the university of Zurich. But the appointment provoked such a storm of popular ill-will in the canton that the authorities considered it wise to pension him before he entered upon his duties, although this concession came too late to save the Govern- ment. With his Glaubenslehre he took leave of theology for upwards of twenty years. In August 1842 he married Agnes Schebest, a cultivated and beautiful opera singer of high repute, but not adapted to be the wife of a scholar and literary man like Strauss. Five years afterwards, when two children had been born, a separation by arrange- ment was made. Strauss resumed his literary activity by the publication of Der Romantiker auf dem Throne der Csesaren, in which he drew a satirical parallel between Julian the Apostate and Frederick William IV. of Prussia (1847). In 1848 he was nominated as member of the Frankfort parliament, but was defeated. He was elected for the Wiirtemberg chamber, but his action was so con- servative that his constituents requested him to resign his seat. He forgot his political disappointments in the pro- duction of a series of biographical works, which secured for him a permanent place in German literature (Schubarfs Leben, 2 vols., 1849; Christian Marklin, 1851; Frischlin,