Page:Imperialdictiona02eadi Brandeis.pdf/46

DAU  from drowning. He served with great distinction in the expedition to Egypt, and especially at the siege of St. Jean d'Acre. Daumesnil attained the rank of captain in 1801, and took part in the campaigns in Austria, Prussia, and Poland, from 1805 to 1807. He was nominated a general of brigade in 1812, and governor of Vincennes. He was deprived of his office after the Restoration, but was restored to it in 1830. Daumesnil died of cholera at Vincennes in 1832.—J. T.  DAUN,, Count von, like both his father and grandfather, an Austrian field-marshal, was born at Vienna on the 25th September, 1705. Educated in Italy, originally with a view to the church, he entered the semi-religious semi-military order of the knights of Malta. He served with distinction in the Austrian war against the Turks, and in that of the Spanish succession; and his rapid promotion was partly due to his marriage with the daughter of one of the favourite court ladies of Maria Theresa. He had distinguished himself as a military reformer when the Seven Years' war broke out, and had been appointed a field-marshal in 1754. His policy as a commander was marked by the extreme caution characteristic of Austrian generals; and it is recorded of him that in five campaigns he never attacked but once. His chief military achievement was his signal defeat of the great Frederick at the battle of Collin, 18th June, 1757. At Torgau, on 3rd November, 1760, he was on the point of gaining another victory; but being wounded, he feared to leave the disposition of his troops to subordinates, and commanded a retreat. After Collin, the empress had founded, in honour of the victory, the celebrated Maria Theresa order; and after Torgau she came in state to meet Daun without the walls of Vienna, and the capital bestowed on him a triumphant reception. This was his last success; and subsequently his inactivity in the field provoked the jeers of the Viennese. Daun died on the 5th of February, 1766, leaving behind him the reputation of a brave, loyal, and religious soldier, and of an unwearied and rigorous military reformer.—F. E.  DAUNOU,, born at Boulogne-sur-Mer, 1761; died at Paris, 1840. Surgery was first thought of as his profession, then the bar: but the boy was sent to the school of the Cordeliers at Boulogne, and to the oratory at Paris, and he became a monk. The oratory was the last in order of time of the monastic institutions. It asserted the independence of the Galilean church. Daunou became one of their professors; was first professor of Latin at Noyes, then of logic at Soissons, of philosophy at Boulogne, and finally, of theology at Montmorency. In 1787 he was ordained priest. The Revolution came, and Daunou who had obtained some literary prizes from the academies of Nismes and Berlin, pronounced in the church of the oratory a funeral oration on the patriots who fell at the taking of the Bastile. Daunou was now appointed vicar-diocesan of Arras, and soon after, vicar-metropolitan of Paris. While occupied in directing the education of the young, a task which his position rendered a duty, he was surprised to find himself returned to the national convention as one of their deputies by the Pas-de-Calais. He accepted the trust, and quitted the church for ever. The convention were now occupied with the question of the king's trial. The occasion inspired Daunou, whose ordinary manner was timid and formal, with words of burning eloquence, in which, with almost prophetic truth, he urged upon the astonished but unbelieving assembly the inevitable consequences of the act they were about to perpetrate. Daunou was classed by Robespierre's party, then in power, with the Girondists; was accused of federalism and thrown into prison, where he passed his time in reading Tacitus and Juvenal, working at geometry, and writing a grammar. Robespierre fell; Daunou again appeared at the convention; and for the next five years occupied himself in building up constitutions for Utopian republics on the shifting revolutionary sands. Whenever a report or a speech on any public occasion was required, Daunou was the man for the moment. At Hoche's funeral games, Daunou pronounced the national "eloge." He inaugurated the Institut, of which he was one of the founders, with an oration. In 1797 he prepared a constitution for the young Batavian republic; in the next year another for Italy; and then was busy at home in arranging for the French republic a consulate. He was for a moment thought of as third consul, but he preferred a place in the tribunate, from which he was soon eliminated as too honest or too crotchety. In 1804 he was made keeper of the archives. In 1807 he published, to aid the purposes of Bonaparte against Russia, Rulhière's History of the dismemberment of Poland, and in 1810 with a similar purpose, an essay on the pope's temporal power. In 1814 Daunou ceased to be archiviste, but became redacteur du Journal des Savans. In 1819 he was professor of history at the college of France. In 1830 he was reappointed archiviste; in 1838 perpetual secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions; in 1839 he was raised to the peerage. He wrote the greater part of the seven volumes of the Histoire Litteraire de la France, which relate to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in conjunction with Naudet edited the nineteenth and twentieth volumes of the great collection of the historians of France. He wrote numerous articles in the Geographie Universelle, and edited Boileau and La Harpe.—J. A., D.  DAURAT,. See.  DAVANZATI,, born in Florence, August 30th, 1529; died, 29th March, 1606. His family was noble; and showing great aptitude at learning, he received an education that fitted him as well for commerce as for taking a distinguished place in literature. These pursuits he combined, somewhat as Roscoe did in after times in our own country. His reading was extensive, especially in the Latin classics; and his habits of taciturnity procured him amongst his fellow-academicians of the "Alterati," the name of "Il Silente." He devoted himself to make the Tuscan tongue as perfect as possible. Just at the time the comparative excellence of the Latin and Italian tongues was a subject of keen discussion, Davanzati was master of both; and he insisted that the Italian was capable of being written with as much brevity and vigour as the Latin. It chanced that a Frenchman, in a translation of Tacitus, asserted that the French was superior to all tongues ancient and modern, especially to the Italian, which was weak and diffuse. Davanzati at once undertook a refutation, and published his celebrated translation of Tacitus. Nay, he went further, and proved that in brevity Italian was to the Latin as nine to ten, and to the French as nine to fifteen. It is to be regretted that in his zeal for condensation he sometimes made his original obscure, and often rejected the idioms which so much enrich the Tuscan dialect. Davanzati also published other works of great merit. We must accord to him the praise of having restored the Tuscan tongue to the purity and terseness of the best models of earlier times—a praise somewhat more just than the equivocal commendation of Ginguené, "Il vaut mieux imiter la concision de Davanzati, que la prolixité de Bembo."—J. F. W.  DAVENANT, —born in 1656; died in 1714—was the eldest son of Sir William Davenant, and first applied himself to dramatic literature. Notwithstanding the high auspices under which he produced his first attempt, it was not of sufficient merit to justify his prosecution of the muses, and he had the good sense to turn to graver studies. Civil law, politics, and political economy engaged his attention, and he produced several treatises on these subjects, which did what poetry would not have done for him—procured him some good public situations. He was a member of parliament from 1685 to 1700, representing, at different times, St. Ives and Bedwin. His reputation as a writer was, perhaps, beyond his merits, and his works are now of little value. A selection of them was published in 1771, in 5 vols., 8vo.—J. F. W.  DAVENANT,, Bishop of Salisbury, born in London on the 20th May, 1572, was sent at fifteen to Queen's college, Cambridge, of which he became president in 1614. Five years previously he had been appointed Lady Margaret's professor of divinity, and, by Archbishop Abbot, rector of Cottenham, Cambridgeshire. His theological eminence and tenets recommended him to King James I. as one of the three representatives of England at the synod of Dort in 1618, where he seems to have advocated a middle course between the two extreme parties. He was appointed to the see of Salisbury in 1621. In the course of years there grew up a divergency of views between the king and the bishop. It was Davenant who, when the king commanded his presence on a certain day, arrived a day too late, not choosing to travel on a Sunday. James forgave him on this occasion, but was not equally placable when, in a sermon preached before the king in the Lent of 1631, the bishop touched on the forbidden subject of predestination, on which his views were Calvinistic. He was brought before the privy council, and sharply reprimanded on his knees. "Good" Bishop Davenant, as his contemporaries delighted to call him, escaped the greater 