Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/829

Rh Ahasuerus, as his finest works ; the former he refused to sell, although Clement IX. offered to cover its surface with gold pieces. He etched a series of twenty-eight landscapes, fine impressions of which are greatly prized. Full of amenity, and deeply sensitive to the graces of nature, Claude has long been deemed the prince of landscape painters, and indeed he must always be accounted a prime leader in that form of art, and in his day a great enlarger and refiner of its province. Within the last century, however, he has been vastly exceeded in grasp, power, knowledge, subtlety, variety, and general mastery of all kinds by many painters, one in one quality and another in another; in proof we need only name Turner, whose range, in comparison with Claude s, was as that of a continent to a canton, or a mountain to a hillock. Claude was a man of amiable and simple character, very kind to his pupils, a patient and unwearied worker; in his own sphere of study, his mind was stored (as we have seen) with observation and knowledge, but he continued an unlettered man till his death.  CLAUDET, (1797-1867), an eminent photographer, was born at Lyons. Shortly after the publication of Daguerre s results (1839), Claudet, by the addition of bromide and chloride of iodine to the iodide of silver employed by the former discoverer, greatly accelerated the process of production. This, with the use of iodide of gold in fixing the image, may be said to have completed the invention. In 1848 Claudet produced the photographometer, an instrument designed to measure the intensity of photogenic rays; and in 1849 he brought out the focimeter, for securing a perfect focus in photographic portraiture. In 1850 he received a medal from the Society of Arts and Manufactures for a machine to cut glass of any curvature of surface. This was followed in 1851, 1855, and 1862 by the medals awarded by the French and English universal exhibitions for eminence in and discoveries connected with his profession, and in 1853 by his election into the Royal Society. In 1858 he produced the stereo-monoscope, in reply to a challenge from Sir David Brewster. Claudet, who was photographer in ordinary to Her Majesty, was also a decore of the Legion of Honour, and had received tokens of admiration and regard from Louis Philippe and the Czar Nicholas.  CLAUDIANUS,, the gifted poet who shed lustre on the last decrepid era of Roman literature, was, as we learn from himself (Epist. 1), an Egyptian by birth, and probably a native of Alexandria. It may be con jectured from his name that he was of Roman extraction, and it is hardly possible that he should have acquired such mastery over the Latin language if it had not been familiar to him from his boyhood. We have, however, his own authority for the assertion that his first poetical compositions were in Greek, and that he had written nothing in Latin before 395 A.D. In that year he appears to have come to Rome, and made his debut as a Latin poet by a panegyric on the consulship of Olybrius and Probinus, the first brothers not belonging to the imperial family who had ever simultaneously filled the office of consul. This piece proved the precursor of the series of panegyrical poems which compose the bulk of his writings. In 396 appeared the encomium on the third consulship of the Emperor Honorius, and the epic on the downfall of Rufinus, the unworthy minister of Arcadius at Constantinople. This revolution was principally effected by the contrivance of Stilicho, the great general and minister of Honorius. Claudian s poem appears to have obtained his patronage, or rather perhaps that of his wife Serena, by whose in terposition the poet was within a year or two enabled to contract a wealthy marriage in Africa (Epist. 2). Pre vious to this event he had produced (398) his panegyric on the fourth consulship of Honorius, his epithalamium on the marriage of Honorius to Stilicho s daughter, Maria, and his poem on the Gildonic war, celebrating the repression of a revolt in Africa. To these succeeded his piece on the consulship of Mallius Theodorus (399), the unfinished or mutilated invective against the Byzantine prime minister Eutropius, in the same year, the epics on Stilicho s first consulship and on his repulse of Alaric (400 and 403), and the panegyric on the sixth consulship of Honorius (404). From this time all trace of Claudian is lost, and he is generally supposed to have perished with his patron Stilicho in 408. It may, how ever, be plausibly conjectured that he must have died in 404, as he could hardly otherwise have omitted to celebrate the greatest of Stilicho s achievements, the destruction of the barbarian host led by Radagaisus in the following year. Nor, on the other hand, is ground wanting for the surmise that he may have survived Stilicho, as in the dedication to the second book of his epic on the Rape of Proserpine, he speaks of his disuse of poetry in terms hardly reconcilable with the fertility which, as we have seen, he displayed during his patron s lifetime. From the manner in which Augustine alludes to him in his De Civitate Dei, it may be inferred that he was no longer living at the date of the composition of that work, between 415 and 428. We have already enumerated Claudian s chief poems, to which only remain to be added a number of short descriptive pieces and epigrams, his lively Fescennines on the emperor's marriage, his panegyric on Serena, and the Gigantomachia, a fragment of an unfinished epic. Several poems expressing Christian sentiments are undoubtedly spurious. There can be no question of his paganism, which, however, neither prevented his celebrating Christian rulers and magistrates nor his enjoying the distinction of a court laureate. &quot;We have his own authority for his having been honoured by a bronze statue in the forum, although the inscription on the pedestal which Pornponius Lsetus professed to have discovered in the 15th century is almost certainly spurious. Claudian s position in literature is unique. It is sufficiently remarkable that, after nearly three centuries of torpor, the Latin muse should have experienced any revival in the age of Honorius, nothing less than amazing that this revival should have been the work of a foreigner, most surprising of all that a just and enduring celebrity should have been gained by official panegyrics on the generally uninteresting transactions of an inglorious epoch. The first of these particulars bespeaks Claudian's taste, rising superior to the prevailing barbarism, the second his command of language, the third his rhetorical skill. As remarked by Gibbon, &quot;he was endowed with the rare and precious talent of raising the meanest, of adorning the most barren, and of diversifying the most similar topics.&quot; This gift is especially displayed in his poem on the down fall of Rufinus, where the punishment of a public male factor is exalted to the dignity of an epical subject by the magnificence of diction and the ostentation of supernatural machinery. The noble exordium, in which the fate of Rufinus is propounded as the vindication of divine justice, places the subject at once on a dignified level ; and the council of the infernal powers has afforded a hint to Tasso, and through him to Milton. The inevitable monotony of the panegyrics on Honorius is relieved by just and brilliant expatiation on the duties of a sovereign. In his celebration of Stilicho s victories Claudian found a subject more worthy of his powers, and some passages, such as the description of the flight of Alaric, and of Stilicho s arrival at Rome, and the felicitous parallel between his triumphs and those of Marius, rank among the brightest ornaments of Latin poetry. Claudian s panegyric, however lavish and re-