Page:Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography Volume 1.pdf/1068

CHA to exaggerate the ridiculous side of circumstances than to enter into careful investigation, the painstaking benedictine frequently succeeded in exposing his errors and his bad faith, and restoring the truth of history. His works are valued on account of the impartiality of his judgments on historical personages. The severity of his studies affected his sight, which some time before his death left him entirely. After the suppression of monasteries at the Revolution he retired to Mezin, where his portrait may be seen in the town-hall, a testimony of the regard of his fellow-citizens. He died in 1817.—J. F. C.  CHAULIAC or CHAULIEU,, a celebrated writer on surgery, who lived in the latter half of the fourteenth century. He studied at Paris and Bologna; practised some years at Lyons, then went to Avignon, where he became physician to Popes Clement VI., Innocent VI., and Urban V. There he wrote his famous "Inventorium sive collectorium partis chirurgicalis medicinæ," a work which greatly contributed to the scientific study of surgery. It was used as a class-book for several centuries. Chauliac has left us a description of the plague, which, sweeping from the east, ravaged a great part of Europe in 1343. He was himself attacked by it, but recovered.—R. M., A.  CHAULIEU,, born at Fontenoy in 1639; died in 1720. He was sent early to Paris, where he was educated for the church. He was patronized by the grand prior of Vendôme, and given large benefices. The parties of the Abbé de Chaulien were among the pleasantest in Paris, and he himself, as men who give pleasant parties will often be regarded, was regarded as one of the wittiest men of his time. He suffered from gout, but amused himself during the fits in writing poems, which his friends praised, but which were too negligently written to have much chance of being remembered beyond the days which they enlivened. In this way he lived on till he attained the age of eighty-one. In the year before his death, he suffered from the two calamities of blindness and of love. He addressed with more than the fervour of youth the witty lady known under the names of Mademoiselle Launai and Madame de Staël. He was prevented from being named as a member of the academy by a successful cabal. He disregarded a slight, which, when others having similar claims suffered, excited them almost to madness.—J. A., D.  CHAUMEIX,, born at Chauteau, near Orleans, in 1730; died at Moscow in 1790. He was the son of a distinguished military engineer. His first work was, considering what France then was, a daring adventure. It was no less than an attack on the Encyclopedists—on their principles and on their book. Voltaire assailed him in stinging satire. Chaumeix could have weathered the storm, had his enemies confined themselves to fair warfare; but this was not the way in which controversy was then carried on. Chaumeix was described as a man of the lowest grade in society; he had, it was said, married his cook. A hundred idle stories of this kind were circulated. He was driven from Paris by these calumnies. He found a home in Russia. There he earned his support by assisting in the education of the sons of some of the families of the nobility. Chaumeix was a benevolent man; and from the time of his settling in Russia endeavoured, not altogether unsuccessfully, to ameliorate the condition of the serfs.—J. A., D.  CHAUMETON,, a French medical man, was born at Chouzé on the Loire in Touraine on 20th September, 1775, and died on 10th August, 1819. After officiating as military surgeon for many years in hospitals and in the field, he retired from the service and took up his residence in Paris, where he published various literary and scientific works. Along with Chamberet and Poiret he published a Medical Flora, illustrated by coloured drawings. He wrote an essay on medical entomology, and contributed articles to scientific periodicals.—J. H. B.  CHAUMETTE,, a French revolutionist, born in 1763; died in 1794. He was one of the most violent and brutal demagogues of the time. He heaped insults on the king when confined in the Temple, and, along with Hebert, concocted the foul accusation brought against Marie Antoinette on her trial. Chaumette was the originator of the Fétes de la Raison, and planned the procession of the goddess of Reason. He fell a sacrifice to the jealousy of Robespierre in 1794, and left to posterity an execrable name.—R. M., A.  CHAUNCEY,, D.D., an eminent nonconformist divine, born in Hertfordshire in 1592. After quitting the university of Cambridge, where he held a Greek professorship, he was presented to a living in Hertfordshire; but his puritanical principles soon brought him into difficulties. He was condemned by the court of high commission, and obliged to recant some charges he had made in a sermon. He afterwards went to New England, where he was for twelve years minister of the little town of Scituate. He was pressed to return to England during the Commonwealth; but the presidentship of Havard college having meanwhile been offered to him, he accepted it, and died in the new world in 1672. It was this Chauncey that wrote the prefixed to Leigh's Critica Sacra.—R. M., A.  CHAUNCEY,, D.D., the twelfth minister of the mother (first) church of Boston, New England, of which place he was a native. He was a graduate, at an age unusually early, of Harvard college in 1721, and six years after became the colleague of the Rev. S. Foxcroft, his complete ministry extending to sixty years; in the last nine of which he had himself the aid of a younger pastor—the Rev. John Clarke. This long career was signalized by his opposition to Whitfield, who once and again in his day visited the Massachusetts churches, and by his zeal against episcopacy; his "Complete View" of which appeared in 1771. Dr. Chauncey's belief was of the strongest Arminian type; but the distinctive feature of his theology arose from his coming forth as the earliest champion perhaps within his denomination of the "restoration" theory, so called, in relation to a future life. His great defensive work, "The Mystery hid from Ages, or the Salvation of all men," published in 1784, was replied to by the younger Edwards. His "Benevolence of the Deity considered," and "Five Dissertations on the Fall of Man," both issued in 1785, bear on the same topic. Beside the works now specified, Dr. Chauncey's fugitive productions, inclusive of more than thirty occasional discourses, amounted to little less than half an hundred. He died at the age of eighty-two in 1787.—F. B. <section end="1068H" /> <section begin="1068I" />CHAUNCY,, author of the "Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire," was born in 1632. He was educated at Cambridge, from whence he removed to the middle temple. He was called to the bar in 1656, made a member of the middle temple in 1675, knighted by Charles II. in 1681, and lastly made a Welsh judge in the year of the Revolution. His book was not published till 1700.—R. M., A. <section end="1068I" /> <section begin="1068J" />CHAUNCY,, a monk of the Charter-house, London, died in 1581. He was imprisoned by Henry VIII. for refusing to own his supremacy. After the dissolution of the monastery, he and a few of his brethren led an unsettled life, now in England and then abroad as the times permitted. He wrote an account of some of the catholic martyrs—now a rare book. It contains Sir Thomas More's epitaph by himself. <section end="1068J" /> <section begin="1068K" />CHAUSSARD,, born in Paris in 1766. His first work, which appeared in 1789, was on the subject of criminal law, in which he put himself forward as a reformer. As the Revolution advanced, he entered so warmly into its spirit, that he was deemed worthy of being despatched to Belgium as a commissioner for propagating the new spirit in that country. His zeal so far outstripped his discretion, that he excited the people of Antwerp to sedition by throwing their bishop into prison. In 1803, he was appointed professor of belles-lettres at the college of Rouen, from whence he was removed to Nismes, in the capacity of professor of Latin poetry. He wrote "L'Esprit de Mirabeau;" a translation of Arrien's Expeditions of Alexander; besides some poetical pieces and treatises not altogether free from objection, as he occasionally indulged in a tone of levity on sacred subjects unbecoming the position he held, and of which he was deprived by the Bourbons, although the reasons that prompted them to this were political. He died in 1823.—J. F. C. <section end="1068K" /> <section begin="1068Zcontin" />CHAUVEAU,, an engraver and painter, born in Paris about 1621. He studied under Laurent de la Hire, and painted cabinet pictures in the style of his master. His success as a painter was not great. He had a quick and lively fancy, and soon discovered that the etching needle was a more convenient instrument wherewith to develop his fertile imaginings than the more slowly-moving brush. Painters, sculptors, booksellers, carvers, goldsmiths, jewellers, embroiderers, and even joiners and smiths, alike came to him for aid. He engraved with his own hands upwards of four thousand plates, and about fourteen hundred were engraved by others from his designs. He occasionally resumed the painting brush, and many of his pictures were purchased by Le Brun. The great number of works <section end="1068Zcontin" />