Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VII.djvu/567

 GAINSBOROUGH GAIUS 555 court decided that the fact of the marriage and legitimacy was established. Mrs. Whitney sur- vived her husband, married Gen. Gaines in 1839, and survived him also. In 1856 she filed in the supreme court of the United States a bill in equity to recover valuable real estate then in the possession of the city of New Orleans, and a decision in her favor was rendered at the December term of 1867. This substantially concluded one of the most celebrated causes ever tried. The value of the property claimed was estimated in 1861 at $35,000,000, of which Mrs. Gaines had up to 1874 obtained possession of $6,000,000, and numerous actions for eject- ment were still in progress. The testimony, documents, and opinions in these suits cover 8,000 closely printed pages. A good history of the affair is contained in Wallace's "Cases argued and adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States," vol. vi., p. 642. GAINSBOROUGH, a town of Lincolnshire, England, on the right bank of the Trent, which is crossed here by an arched stone bridge, 16 m. N. N. W. of Lincoln; pop. in 1871, 7,564. It contains a fine parish and a new district church, a grammar school, and a literary in- stitute. The quaint old Elizabethan hall or manor house, supposed to have been partly built by John of Gaunt, and recently restored, contains the mechanics' institute and assembly rooms and the theatre. Gainsborough shares with Hull in the Baltic trade ; the river Trent is navigable for ships of 200 tons, and various canals afford communication with almost all important commercial centres; the outward and inward vessels number annually about 500, with an aggregate tonnage of upward of 25,000. The principal manufacture is that of linseed oil, and ship building, matting, rope making, and other industries are actively carried on. GAINSBOROUGH, Thomas, an English land- scape and portrait painter, born in Sudbury, Suffolk, early in 1727, died in London, Aug. 2, 1788. At a very early age he manifested a taste for drawing. About 1744 he was placed under the instruction of the engraver Gravelot and the painter Hayman, and soon began to paint landscapes and portraits. But his posi- tion did not improve until his marriage in 174G with a young lady named Burr, of striking beauty and considerable fortune. He then resided successively in Ipswich and Bath, and in 1774 returned to London, where some por- traits of members of the royal family at once gave him a name and ample employment. He passed the remainder of his life in London, where Sir Joshua Reynolds, his great rival and friend, had settled before him. In 1768 he was chosen one of the original 36 academi- cians, and from that time until 1784 he sent numerous pictures to the academy. As a landscape painter Gainsborough achieved the highest excellence, and was the first in Eng- land to show any real originality. The " Life of Thomas Gainsborough," by George William Fulcher, appeared in London in 1856. GAIRDNER, William, a British physician, born near Ayr, Scotland, Nov. 11, 1793, died in Avignon, France, in April, 1867. He gradu- ated in medicine at Edinburgh in 1813, and until 1822 spent most of his time on the con- tinent. He then settled in London and com- menced practice. He was distinguished for his observations on the medical uses of iodine, and published a treatise on this subject. His " Gout, its History, Cause, and Cure " (Lon- don, 1849) has long been a standard work. ' GAIUS, Gajns, or Cains, a Roman jurist, who flourished in the 2d century of our era, during the reigns of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. Of his personal history lit- tle or nothing is known, and even the spell- ing of his name has been the subject of con- troversy. From the references contained in the Digest it appears that he was the author of more than 15 works, of which the Institutes was by far the most important. This is supposed to have been the first work of the kind not compiled from previous sources, and to have afforded the first instance of a popular man- ual of Roman law in the sense of modern elementary text books. After a lapse of four centuries from its publication it was incorpo- rated almost bodily into the celebrated Insti- tutes prepared by the order of Justinian. In 1816 Niebuhr examined a palimpsest in the cathedral library at Verona, containing 251 pages, of which one detached and undefaced leaf of two pages had been described and partly published by Scipio Maffei 60 years before, with a conjecture that it was part of a compendium of Justinian's Institutes. With this exception the whole original manuscript had been washed and sometimes scratched out and overlaid with the epistles of St. Jerome, and 63 pages had been written over a second time ; yet Niebuhr succeeded in restoring and deciphering a por- tion of it. He communicated the results of his labors to Savigny, who published them, to- gether with a learned note suggesting that the ancient text of the parchment was the lost In- stitutes of Gaius. The royal academy of Berlin in 1817 sent two accomplished civilians, G6- schen and Bethmann-Hollweg, to Verona, who, after incredible labor in deciphering the char- acters on the parchment, succeeded in making a transcript of the original writing, with the exception of three leaves and a few scattered passages which were illegible. A comparison of the work with the quotations in the Digest, and its agreement with the Institutes of Jus- tinian, confirmed Savigny 's conjecture, and the discovery, by clearing up difficulties in the in- terpretation of ancient jurisprudence before re- garded as hopeless, formed an era in the study of Roman law. Several editions of the text have been published, that of Goschen (im- proved by Lachmann) of 1842 being consid- ered the best ; and commentaries on detached portions by Van Assen, Heffler, Klenze, Bock- ing, and others, have appeared. The text, with an English translation and commentary