Costigan, Captain J. Chesterfield, familiarly known as Cos. in Thackeray's Pendennis, an ex-army officer; Irish, jovial; humorous in himself and exciting the humor of others; drunken and disreputable, but careful of the good repute of his daughter Emily. He encourages her to accept the respectful advances of Arthur Pendennis until he is convinced by Major Pendennis that the boy has no pros Corombona, Vittoria, heroine of Webster's tragedy, The White Devil (1612). She fascinates the Duke of Bracchiano and spurs him on to the murder of his duchess and her own husband. Accused of these crimes, she conducts her own defence so as to baffle the judges, retires to a convent, from which Bracchiano releases her in order to marry her, and after Bracchiano's death by poison is her-pects, then he cheerfully breaks the self stabbed by her brother Flaminio because she had not procured his advancement by Bracchiano. Webster has departed from the facts of history as related by French and Italian authors, who are in substantial accord with one another. See ACCORANBONI, VITTORIA. Correze, hero of Ouida's Moths, an operatic tenor who captures the world by the charms of his voice which are equalled only by the chivalry of his conduct. He is in love with Vere and she with him, but he respects her and plays Mentor to her, warns her against wicked mamma, advises her to keep herself unspotted from the world, fights her husband because he neglects her and makes love to her only after she has been unrighteously divorced. Correze is not an ordinary tenor, he sustains with perfect ease what would generally be regarded as the enormous strain of conducting himself when off the stage with the same lofty ideality that characterizes his behavior in tights and before the footlights. After he meets Vere, grand duchesses throw themselves at his feet in vain; he oozes exalted didacticism in the intervals of singing the highest order of music, and if it were not for his almost holy devotion we feel, instinctively, Vere would be in great peril among the gins and pitfalls of the world. As it is, she comes out unscathed, though divorced, and safe in his arms though bereft of public respect.N. Y. Nation, March 25, 1880. Corsican Brothers. See FRANCHI. Costard, in Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost (1594), a clown who apes the stilted language of the Eliza this character have been suggested, engagement. Several prototypes for the most likely being the father of Miss Eliza O'Neill, the actress, concerning whom some stories are told in Moore's Diary that must at least have proved suggestive to Thackeray. But he insisted that he never met Costigan in the flesh until long after the publication of Pendennis. In the novel of Pendennis, written ten years ago, there is an account of a certain Costigan, whom I had invented (as I sup- may," says he, "and I'll sing ye a song tu." Costigan, Emily, in Thackeray's Who is there that can forget, or be insensible to, the inimitable, nameless graces, and various traits of nature and of Courtenay, Miles, in King Noanett, are so fond of him because we laugh at him F. J. Stimson's romance of colonial so."-THACKERAY: The English Humorists. America (1896), a dashing and chivalrous young Irishman of the royalist party, who, with Blampfylde Moore Carew, is captured by Cromwell's soldiers and shipped off to the colonies. Each, unknown to the other, is in love with Mistress St. Aubyn. The character of Courtenay is said to have been modelled upon that of John Boyle O'Reilly, with whom the author had often talked over the plan of the work. Courtly, Sir Hartley, in Dion Boucicault's comedy, London Assurance, an elderly fop devoted to fashion and engaged to a young heiress, Grace Harkaway. She ends by rejecting him for his son Charles, a typical specimen of metropolitan coolness, cheek, and assurance "whom Sir Harcourt blindly imagines to be a shy, studious and retiring boy. Coverley, Sir Roger de, in the Spectator, by Steele and Addison, a member of the imaginary club under whose directions it was feigned that the paper was issued. He is a country gentleman of kindly heart, whimsical ways, and exquisite courtesy, who is adored by his family, worshipped by his servants, and beloved by all his acquaintances. The first sketch of this character, as of all the other members of the pretended club, was by Sir Richard Steele, but the details were filled out by Addison and it was Addison who finally killed him off in No. 517, because he thought that Steele had slurred the good knight's dignity by making him converse too familiarly with a street walker. What would Sir Roger de Coverley be without his follies and his charming little brain-cracks? If the good knight did not call out to the people sleeping in church, and say "Amen with such a delightful pomposity; if he did not make a speech in the assize court apropos des bottes, and merely to show his dignity to Mr. Spectator; if he did not mistake Madam Doll Tearsheet for a lady of quality in Temple Garden; if he were wiser than he is; if he had not his humour to salt his life, and were but a mere English gentleman and game-preserver,of what worth were he to us? We love him for his vanities as much as his virtues. What is ridiculous is delightful in him; we old English character in it,-to his unpretending virtues and amiable weaknesses, to his modesty, generosity, hospitality, and eccentric whims,-to the respect of his neighbors and the affection of his domestics, -to his wayward, hopeless, secret passion there is more of real romance and true for his fair enemy, the widow, in which delicacy than in a thousand tales of knighterrantry (we perceive the hectic flush of his cheek, the faltering of his tongue in speaking of her bewitching airs and the "whiteness of her hand")-to the havoc he makes among the game in his neighborhood,-to his speech from the bench, to show the Spectator what is thought of him in the country,-to his unwillingness to be put up as a sign-post, and his having his own likeness gentle reproof of the baggage of a gypsy turned into the Saracen's head,-to his that tells him "he has a widow in his line of life," to his doubts as to the existence of witchcraft, and protection of reputed witches, to his account of the family pictures, and his choice of a chaplain,-to his falling asleep at church, and his reproof of John Williams, as soon as he recovered from his nap, for talking in sermon-time?— HAZLITT. Crabshaw, Timothy, in Smollett's Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, the servant of Sir Launcelot's squire. Crane, Ichabod, in Washington Irving's short story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, in The Sketchbook, an credulous country awkward and schoolmaster, rival of a Dutch farmer, a "burly, roaring, roystering blade" named Brom Van Brunt, for the hand of Katherina Van Tassel, but put out of the running by a practical joke. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceed ingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large, green, glassy eyes, and a long, snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a corn-field.-W. IRVING. There is a story in the Legends of Rubezahl by Musaeus, wherein a headless horseman is introduced similar to the one de Cratchit, Bob, in Dickens's extravaganza, A Christmas Carol, the ill-paid clerk of Scrooge, unselfish, kindly, living cheerfully in a fourroom house with a large family on fifteen bob a week-" he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name." His youngest child, known as Tiny Tim, is a cripple whose favorite phrase is, "God bless us all of us!" Crawley, Rev. Josiah, Vicar of Hogglestock in Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), a poor country clergyman, scholarly, upright and fiercely pious, but unpleasantly strict and stern and driven almost insane from wounded pride and the pressure of biting ills which come from household want. He is accused of having stolen a check; the facts tell against him; even his best friends fear that, maddened by debts and duns, he may have committed the crime; and his wife, heroically patient and loving, half thinks he must be mad when he cannot tell even her how he got it. a Crawley, Sir Pitt, “ of Great Gaunt Street and Queen's Crawley, Hants," a vulgar, miserly, ill-bred and illeducated gentleman and an M.P. in Thackeray's novel, Vanity Fair. Though an aristocrat by birth, all his tastes are for low life. He is introduced in Chapter vii as man in drab breeches and gaiters, with a dirty old coat, a foul old neckcloth lashed round his bristly neck, a shining bald head, a leering red face, a pair of twinkling grey eyes, and a mouth perpetually on the grin." We are further told (Chap. ix) that the whole baronetage, peerage, commonage of England did not contain a more cunning, mean, selfish, foolish, and disreputable old man-a man who could not spell and did not care to read-who had the habits and the cunning of a boar; whose aim in life was pettifogging; who never had a Crayon taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet, he had rank, and honors and power somehow; and was a dignitary of the land and a pillar of the state." Charles Kingsley used to tell a good story of a lady who confided to Thackeray that she liked Vanity Fair exceedingly. "The characters are so natural," she said, "all but the baronet, Sir Pitt Crawley, and surely he is overdrawn; it is impossible to find such coarseness in his rank of life." "That character," the author smilingly replied, "is almost the only exact portrait in the book." The identity of the prototype was not revealed for many years, but it has recently been asserted that the character was sketched from a former Lord Rolle. 'Sir Pitt's letters to Becky were very badly spelt and written," remarks the gentleman who puts forward this theory, and I may say that I have in my possession a letter written by Sir Robert Brownrigg to His Royal Highness the Duke of York when Commander-in-Chief of the British army, complaining that a report received from Lord Rolle, as Lord-Lieutenant of his county, was so badly written that he could not decipher it."-LEWIS Melville. Crawley, Pitt, in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, eldest son of Sir Pitt (see above) and brother to Rawdon, but widely differentiated from either. He is neat, prim, precise and proper; and of pronounced evangelical views until it no longer pays him to profess them. At Eton he was called "Miss Crawley." He inherited money, married money, and was careful in hoarding it. Crawley, Captain Rawdon, in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, is the son of Sir Pitt Crawley and the husband of Rebecca Sharp, a dragoon of good height and good looks with a great voice and meagre brains, a haw-haw manner, a hectoring yet not unamiable disposition, prodigal in giving but too improvident to be honest with his tradespeople. Becky for a period showed him how to live on nothing a year, but he detected her in an intrigue with Lord Steyne, thrashed that nobleman, and left his wife. Crayon, Geoffrey, Esq. The pseudonym under which Washington Irving published The Sketchbook, and which he occasionally returned to in his miscellaneous sketches. Cressid, Creseide, or Cressida, in | wife of the earl and entitled to the mediæval and modern literature the privileges of her rank. Abandoning fickle flame of Troilus whose infidelity England for the continent she conhas kinned her to Faustina and tinued her brilliant but scandalous Messalina and made her name a career at many royal courts, finally byword. She is unknown to Grecian opening a salon in Paris which was myth, but may plausibly be identi- frequented by persons of rank and fied with Briseis of the Iliad, the talent. Thackeray is thought to more so that like Briseis she was said have had her career in mind when to be the daughter of a Trojan priest he drew his Beatrix Esmond, espeCalchas. Under the cognate name cially in her final avatar as Baroness of Briseida she made her first appear- Bernstein. ance in medieval poetry as the heroine of a tale by Benoist de St. Maure, a trouvère of the twelfth century, and her second in Guido delle Colonne's Historia Trojana. From Guido, the story passed to Boccaccio, who substituted the modern name, and thence was adopted into English literature in the Troilus and Creseide of Chaucer (1380) and the Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare (1609). See TROILUS. Shakespeare's treatment of Chaucer's heroine Cressida is a shock to any lover of the early poet's work. To have the beautiful Cressida. hesitating, palpitating like the nightingale before her sin, driven by force Croftangry, Chrystal, the feigned editor of Scott's Chronicles of the Canongate. According to Lockhart he was drawn from Sir Walter's father, the fretful patient at the deathbed" being a living picture. Crowe, Captain, in Smollett's novel, Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760), the attendant squire upon the Quixotic hero when he starts out to reform the world. The former commander of a merchant ship in the Mediterranean trade, innocently ignorant of life ashore, he was admirably fitted to play the part of a modern Sancho Panza. Smollett thus describes him: He was an excellent seaman-brave, active, friendly in his way, and scrupulously honest, but as little acquainted with the world as a sucking child; whimsical, impa of hard circumstances which she could not control into unfaithfulness to her love,to have this Cressida whom Chaucer spared for very ruth, set before us as a mere shameless wanton, making eyes at all the men she sees and showing her looseness in the movement of every limb, is a terrible blow.tient, and so impetuous that he could not F. J. FURNIVALL: The Leopold Shakespeare (1877). Crochet, Squire, in Peacock's satirical novel, Crotchet Castle, a retired man of business who withdraws into the country and gathers around him a company of eccentrics-all caricatures of famous men of the day. Crocodile, Lady Kitty, in Samuel Foote's comedy A Trip to Calais (1777), a caricature of Elizabeth Chudleigh, so-called Duchess of Kingston, who after the Duke's death was tried for bigamy. The House of Lords found her guilty of having inveigled the Duke into a marriage while she was lawfully the wife of the Earl of Bristol, but she succeeded in escaping punishment by pleading the benefit of the peerage. Her entirely logical argument was that if she were not the wife of the Duke she was the whatever it might be, with repeated interhelp breaking in upon the conversation ruptions that seemed to burst upon him by When he himself involuntary impulse. attempted to speak, he never finished his period, but made such a number of abrupt transitions that his discourse seemed to be an unconnected series of unfinished sentences. Croye, Isabelle, Countess de, in Scott's historical romance, Quentin Durward (1823), a ward of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, who fled to the court of Louis XI in France to escape from a distasteful marriage. See DURWARD, QUENTIN. Crummles, Mr. Vincent, in Dickens's novel, Nicholas Nickleby, actormanager of a company of strolling players which is joined by Nicholas and Smike. He is an eccentric but not unkindly gentleman, humorously discoursing the jargon of his trade. His family consists of a wife, a Cruncher tragedy queen full of benevolence, a son Percy and two daughters, the younger of whom, Ninetta, is known on the playbills as the Infant Phenomenon (q.v.). 111 Mr. Crummies and the whole of his theatrical business is an admirable case of that first and most splendid quality in Dickens-I mean the art of making something which we call pompous and dull, becoming in literature pompous and delightful.-G. K. CHESTERTON: Appreciations of Dickens. Cruncher, Jerry, in Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, an odd-job man at Telson's bank in London and also a resurrection man. His wife, a pious woman, is distressed at the nature of his nocturnal occupation, and, remonstrance being useless, falls to prayers and supplications to heaven on bended knee. Cruncher, though no believer, has a vague alarm at her "flopping against him" and resorts to curses and even violence in selfdefence. Cunizza ready for any master genius who could profit by it. Defoe himself, in his Serious Reflections during the Life of Robinson Crusoe (1720), assures us that the book had an allegorical meaning-" a kind of type of what the dangers and vicissitudes and surprising escapes of his own life had been." matter-of-fact man, and he tells his story [Defoe] was essentially a bluff, masculine, in a matter-of-fact way. Prosaic accuracy of detail serves him perhaps better than heroics. The man he paints is a sturdy, plain-minded seaman, who sets himself to solve the problem of how to live under conditions which would have overwhelmed a more sensitive mind. It is the indomitable courage of Crusoe which charms us. He is typically Anglo-Saxon in his stolid endurance of fate, his practical grasp of circumstances, his ingenuity, his fertility of resource, his determination to make the best of his unfortunate situation. He behaves after the manner of his race. Having by island, he sets himself to govern it to the best of his ability, and to arrange his life with decent orderliness.-W. J. DAWSON: Makers of English Fiction. chance become the monarch of a desert Crusoe's Island. Until recently it has been imagined that because Daniel Defoe owed the idea of his Robinson Crusoe to conversations held with Alexander Selkirk, who had been shipwrecked on the island of Juan Fernandez, therefore that was the island on which his own hero repeated the experiences of Selkirk. But Juan Fernandez is located in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chili. All Crusoe's statements show that he was wrecked in the Atlantic Ocean Crusoe, Robinson, hero of a novel by Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719), and of its sequel, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Robinson runs away to sea in his boyhood; is captured by the corsairs; lives for a period in Brazil; sets sail from San Salvador for the coast of Africa, is shipwrecked and washed ashore (the only survivor) on an uninhabited island in the Caribbean Sea near the mouth of the Orinoco River. There he lives for twenty-on an island near the mouth of the eight years in a solitude that was broken only toward the last by the presence of a fugitive savage whom he named Friday (q.v.). Finally, both he and Friday were rescued by savages. In theme rather than in incident the story bears some resemblance to that of Alexander Selkirk (q.v.), whose narrative of an enforced stay upon Juan Fernandez had appeared in 1712 and whom Defoe had seen and conversed with. Selkirk, however, was only one of many instances of mariners being wrecked or purposely abandoned in an uninhabited island, and the situation was Orinoco River. This island is now positively identified as Tobago, which is situated off the coast of Venezuela, a few miles from Trinidad. Cunegonde, heroine of Voltaire's satirical tale, Candide. See also KUNIGUNDE. Cunizza, heroine of Robert Browning's poem, Sordello, who is called Palma until her true name is revealed at the close of the poem. She was a historical character, sister of Ezzelino III. Dante places her in Paradise, ix, 32. Sordello had an intrigue with her while she was married to her first husband (DANTE: Purgatory, vi). |