Page:Imperialdictiona02eadi Brandeis.pdf/267

EME kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world. Starting from this duty of developing a free individuality, he seeks to be true to himself, let the world say what it will; nay, judging from the treatment given to the great and good, he decides that to be great is to be misunderstood. Believing every man to possess his own greatness, Emerson seeks to show the present age its own divinity. True genius will find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a religious heart it will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, our law, our commerce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist's retort, in which we now seek only an economical use. The end and aim of life is not to assert ourselves, but by individual faithfulness to become fit recipients for the surges of the universal mind, so as to live in thoughts and act with energies which are immortal. The greatest philosopher is but the listener of simplest faithfulness; and the loftiest wisdom is gained when self is forgotten in commune with the Universal Spirit. Such is, in brief, the general direction taken by the teachings of Emerson.

While leading a farmer's life of quiet simplicity and unostentatious purity, and following out the subtile and reverent speculations in which he most delights, Emerson preserves a noble interest in the practical affairs of the world. It is no slight sign of the greatness of the thinker, that he can leave the amenities of the study and the quietudes of the forest, to stand upon the antislavery platform. The subordination of the pursuit of a thought to the love of a duty, thus manifested, may be accepted as the crowning lesson from the life and works of Emerson—a lesson nobly stated in his own words: "Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, viz., that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty be there."—L. L. P.  EMERSON,, an eminent English mathematician, born at Hurworth, near Darlington, in 1701; died in 1782. He received his education entirely at home, acquiring early proficiency in mathematical studies under the care of his father, who was schoolmaster of Hurworth, and obtaining a respectable acquaintance with the Greek and Roman classics through the assistance of the curate of the place, who lodged in his father's house. Emerson, on the death of his father, attempted to continue the school, but it did not flourish under his management, and he soon reverted to an uninterrupted pursuit of his mathematical studies, contenting himself on the score of income with the small inheritance left him by his father. He went up to London at short intervals with a contribution to a mathematical journal, or a treatise on some branch of his favourite study, which he had most studiously elaborated in his retirement at Hurworth, and which, as the sheets came from the press, he most laboriously corrected in some obscure lodging in the metropolis. Though completely absorbed in the science of his predilection, however, he was not without certain traits of character and features of mind which marked him out in society as a sturdy eccentric Englishman. His manners were as gruff as his clothes were coarse, and yet in his better moods he was a delightful companion, racy in his talk, and of a speculative humour which seemed very foreign both to his character and pursuits. He was a keen angler, a good practical mechanic, and although an indifferent musician, boasted a most profound acquaintance with the construction and properties of musical instruments, ancient and modern. He is now best known by his "Mechanics," although this work by no means so well represents the range and accuracy of his attainments as his "Method of Increments," his "Doctrine of Fluxions," and some others of his numerous, valuable, but now neglected contributions to the mathematical sciences.—J. S., G.  EMERY,, a French jesuit, was born in 1732, and died in 1811. He lived through the stormy period of the Revolution, escaping with an imprisonment of eighteen months. He was a devoted abettor of the interests of his order. For some time after Napoleon came into power, he held aloof on account of the concordat; but, after suffering an arrest, he gave in, and was enrolled amongst the clergy of Paris. He was a voluminous writer, chiefly on subjects of a quasi-theological nature.—R. M., A.  EMILIUS, (in Italian, Paolo Emili), was born about the year 1460. He had embraced the clerical profession, and his living at Rome, engaged in classical pursuits, when he was invited to Paris by Bishop Etienne Poucher, and on the recommendation of that prelate, employed by Louis XII. to write the history of France. A canonry in the cathedral having been conferred upon him for his support, he took up his quarters in the college of Navarre, and commenced the task which, after the labour of thirty years, he was to leave unfinished. When he died in 1529, he had brought the history down from the earliest times to the fifth year of Charles VIII. (1488). The work was entitled "De Gestis Francorum," and consisted of ten books. It was continued by Arnoldus Feronius, who published nine supplementary books in 1650. Emilius, although a most accomplished scholar and a most fastidious writer, has not satisfied all critics in the matter of his style; but he is generally allowed the praise of careful research and studied impartiality.—J. S., G.  EMLYN,, an English presbyterian minister of the Arian persuasion, was born at Stamford in Lincolnshire in 1663. Having been educated for the ministry, partly at Emmanuel college, Cambridge, partly at the dissenting academies of Mr. Shuttleworth and Mr. Doolittle, he became a preacher in 1682, and soon after accepted the office of chaplain to the countess of Donegal, whom he followed to Belfast, and with whom he remained, after her marriage to Sir William Franklin, for several years. In 1688 he returned to London, and in the following year became pastor of a dissenting congregation at Lowestoft in Suffolk. Whilst there his mind became troubled about the doctrine of the Trinity, which he had hitherto held according to the orthodox formula; but as he had not resolved to abandon as yet his early views, he accepted an invitation to a charge in Dublin, on which he entered in 1691. Whilst there his views decidedly assumed the character of arianism, and, as he avowed them when challenged, he became the object of a persecution so violent, that in the present day it seems almost incredible. Not only was he summarily expelled from the society of his brethren and his charge, but on his return to Dublin, after a short absence in England, he was seized, imprisoned, tried on a charge of blasphemy, and sentenced to suffer a year's imprisonment; to pay a fine of one thousand pounds to the queen, and to lie in prison till it was paid; and to find security for his good behaviour during life. He remained in prison for two years, when his fine was reduced to seventy pounds, and twenty to the archbishop of Armagh, who, as queen's almoner, had a claim for fifty, being at the rate of a shilling in the pound on the original fine. On his escape Mr. Emlyn hastened to London, where he spent the remainder of his life, chiefly in literary pursuits, and occasionally in preaching to a few of like views with himself. He died on the 30th of July, 1743, in the seventy-ninth year of his age. His writings are chiefly controversial. The only one that has any beyond a mere historical interest now, is his "Inquiry into the original authority of the text 1 John v. 7," and the tracts which followed in defence of this.—W. L. A.  EMMA, who became queen of England by her marriage with Ethelred the Unready in 1002, belonged to the ducal house of Normandy, and at her husband's death took refuge with her brother, Duke Richard. She returned in 1017, to become the wife of Canute, to whom she bore Hardicanute, who ascended the throne after Harold I. Of her two sons by her union with Ethelred, the elder succeeded Hardicanute, and is known in history as Edward the Confessor. She has been accused, but without good grounds, of conniving at the death of her second son Alfred, who was cruelly murdered by Harold.—W. B.  EMMANUELE FILIBERTO, son of Charles III., duke of Savoy, and Beatrice of Portugal, born in 1528. He was so weak when a child, that he was considered unfit for manly exercises. But nature had gifted him with indomitable energies of mind, and his spirit, as he grew up into manhood, seemed to breathe a new life into his sickly frame. Eager to retrieve the fallen fortunes of his house, whose states north and south of the Alps had been laid waste by French invaders, he trained himself to military exploits, first in Germany in 1546-47, then in the wars of Charles V. and Philip II. against the house of Valois; till, at the head of the Spanish army, he broke the power of France in the celebrated battle of St. Quintin in 1557. There ended his military career; and when, through that great victory and the subsequent negotiations at Chateau-Cambresis, he had won back to Savoy the greater part of its domains, he reconciled himself with France, married Margaret of Valois, sister to King Henry II., and turned from a general into a legislator. His sojourn in the Netherlands—then the most flourishing country in Europe—had taught him the arts of civilization; 