Dictionary of English literature, being a comprehensive guide to English authors and their works / [William Davenport Adams].

  • William Davenport Adams
Date:
[1879?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dictionary of English literature, being a comprehensive guide to English authors and their works / [William Davenport Adams]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    668/720 (page 660)
    Usher’s Well, The Wife of. A ballad, printed in the Border Minstrelsy, and thought by some critics to be a fragment of a longer one called The Clerk's Two, Sons o’ Owsenford. The wife, “ hearing her three sons are lost at sea, passionately prays that the storm may never cease till they come back to her. One night, at Martinmas, they come home, but at cock-crow depart again.” Usimile a, in Barclay’s allegorical romance Argenis (q.v.), is intended for the French reformer, Calvin. Ussher, James, Archbishop of Armagh (b. 1586, d. 1656), wrote Annales V. et N. Testamenti, a primd Mimdi Origine deducta ad extremum Rei- publicce Judaicce Excidium Ecclesiarum; Gravissimce Questionis de Christianarum in Occidentis prceser- tim partibus (1613) ; Answer to a Challenge of a Jesuit in Ireland [William Malone] (1624); A Eis- course on the Religion anciently professed by the Irish and British (1622) ; Britannicarum Ecclesiarum Antiquitates et Primordia (1639); The Original of Bishops and Metropolitans (1641); Eirection con- cerning the Lyturgy and Episcopal Government (1642); Vox Hibernia : or, rather the Voyce of the Lord from Ireland (1642); Immanuel : or, the Mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God (1638); The Principles of the Christian Religion (1644) ; Chronologia Sacra et de Romance Ecclesicc Symbolo Apostolico Vetere (1660); Episcopal and Presbyterian Government conjoyned (1679); and many other Works, the whole of which were collected and published, with a Life of the author, by Dr. Ebrington, in 1847. See also the Life of Ussher by Bernard (1656), the Life by Dillingham (1700), Ee Vita Jac. Usserii, Archiep. Armachani (1704), The Life and Prophecies of Archbishop Ussher (1712), the Life by Aikin (1773), and the Life and Letters by Dr. Samuel Parr. Usurers, An Alarm against. See Alarm against Usurers, An. uther. The reputed father of King Arthur, in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Utopia. The title of a curious philosophical romance, written in Latin by Sir Thomas More (1478—1535), and said to have been first published at Louvain in 1516. The edition issued by Erasmus at Basle in 1518 is, however, the earliest that bears a date; and the first translation of the work that appeared in English was by “Raphe Robynson,” a London goldsmith (q.v.), published in 1551. The Utopia was afterwards translated by Bishop Burnet in 1684. It is a description of an imaginary island which the author represents as having been dis- covered by a companion of Amerigo Vespucci, and as enjoying the utmost perfection in laws, politics, customs, manners, and the like, as compared with the defects of those which then existed elsewhere. The fundamental principle of the republic is a community of wealth, and “the structure,” says Dunlop, “ is what might be expected from such a basis.” “ That the author meant this imaginary republic seriously to embody his notions of a sound system of government, can scarcely be believed,” says Burton, “by any one who reads it, and remembers that the entirely fanciful and abstract existence there depicted was the dream of one who thoroughly knew man in all his complicated re- lations, and was deeply conversant in practical government.” “The Republic of Plato,” says Hallam, “ no doubt furnished More with the germ of his perfect society; but it would be unreason- able to deny him the merit of having struck out the fiction of its real existence from his own fertile imagination; and it is manifest that some of his most distinguished successors in the same walk of romance, especially Swift, were largely indebted to his reasoning as well as inventive talents.” See the edition by J. A. St. John (1838). The follow- ing passage will give a notion of the style of Bishop Burnet’s translation:—“ There were,” he makes More say, “ several sorts of religions, not only in different parts of the island, but even in every town. . . . Every man might be of any religion he pleased, and might endeavour to draw others to it by the force of argument, or by amicable and modest ways, but without bitterness against those of other opinions, but that he ought to use no other force but that of persuasion, and was neither to mix reproaches nor violence with it; and such as did otherwise were to be condemned to banishment or slavery. This law was made by Utopus, not only for preserving the public peace, which he saw suffered much by daily contentions and irreconcilable heats in these matters, but be- cause he thought the interests of religion itself required it. He judged it was not fit to deter- mine anything rashly in that matter, and seemed to doubt whether those different forms of religion might not all come from God, who might inspire men differently, He being possibly pleased with every variety of it; and so he thought it was a very indecent thing for any man to frighten and threaten other men to believe anything because it seemed true to him; and in case that one religion was certainly true, and all the rest false, he reckoned that the native force of truth would break forth at last, and shine bright, if it were managed only by the strength of argument and with winning gentleness.” See Hythloday, Raehael. V “V.”, IX. Poems by. Written by Mrs. Archer Clive, authoress of Paul Ferroll (q.v.). Lockhart wrote of them in The Quarterly Review, vol. lxvi.:—“ We believe this is the first time the world has heard of ‘ V.’; we are persuaded that it will not, cannot, be the last.” The Collected Poems of “V.” were published in 1872. See Grave,The; Queen’s Ball, The. Vafrino is the squire of Tancred in Tasso’s Jerusalem Eclivercd.