Lavinia his fortune. Acasto, dying, leaves Lavinia and her mother destitute; she comes among the gleaners in Acasto's fields, he sees her and falls in love with her, but fights against the prospect of a mesalliance, until he discovers that she is the daughter of his old friend and patron, when he proposes and is accepted. The story is evidently inspired by the old Testament story of Ruth. Lavinia, in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, daughter of Titus, becomes the wife of Bassanius, is dishonored and mutilated by the Goths (ii, 3, 5) and is killed by her father (v, 3). Lawrence, Lazy, hero of one of Miss Edgeworth's stories in Parent's Assistant who is adequately described by this nickname. Probably the author had in mind a popular chapbook entitled The Infamous History of Sir Lawrence Lazie, the hero of which was arraigned under the laws of Lubberland for having served the Schoolmaster, his Wife, the Squire's Cook and the Farmer. Sir Lawrence successfully explained away the treasons laid to his charge. Lawson, Sam, a shrewd, illiterate, shiftless, humorous Yankee villager, the supposed narrator of the stories collected in Old Town Folks (1869) by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. With all his worthlessness he has amusing streaks of God-fearing piety and lawabiding reverence for magistrates and dignities. 227 Leandre. Three of Molière's characters bear this name-the rival of Lélie in L' Etourdi, the son of Geronte in Les Fourberies de Scapin, and the lover of Lucinde in Le Médecin Malgré Lui. Lear, Lir, or Lier, a mythical king of Britain, especially notable in literature as the hero of Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear (written 1605, printed 1608). The success of Shakespeare's play prompted the publication of the older play on which it was founded, doubtless with the hope that it might be passed off for Shakespeare's. The title page ran: True Chronicle History of King Leatherstocking and his three Daughters, etc., as it has been divers and sundry times lately acted. Its last appearance on the stage had been in 1594. This play is not a tragedy; it ends happily in accordance with the original legend wherein Cornelia defeats her sisters and reinstates her father on the throne. The germ of the story appears in the Gesta Romanorum, the hero being a Roman emperor. It was first transferred to the mythical British king by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Chronicle. Thence it passed into various lamentable_ballads describing the death of King Leyr and his Three Daughters of which the catastrophe probably suggested to Shakespeare his own tragic conclusion. Learoyd, a Yorkshire private in an Indian regiment, the companion of Mulvaney and Ortheris, in Soldiers Three and other tales and sketches by Rudyard Kipling. Of these three strongly contrasted types the first and the third live in Mr. Kipling's pages with absolute reality. I must confess that Learoyd is to me a little shadowy. It seems as though Mr. Kipling required, for the artistic balance of his cycle of stories, a third figure, and had evolved Mulvaney and Ortheris, nor am I sure that Learoyd while he observed and created places could not be pointed out where Learoyd, save for the dialect, melts undistinguishably into an incarnation of Mulvaney.-EDMUND GOSSE: The Century. under which Natty Bumppo (q.v.) Leatherstocking is indeed a most memorable and heroic yet pathetic figure, as living and impressive almost as any we know, and we should be sorry to believe that the world will ever willingly let die the delightful books which tell of his battles, his friendships, his unhappy love, his integrity and grand simplicity of character, his ungrudging sacrifices for others, his touching isolation and his death on the lonely prairie. American fiction has no other such characLeirter.-London Spectator. The Lecks, Mrs., one of the heroines of Frank R. Stockton's mock serious extravaganza, The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine (1886). Two elderly New England ladies, in a wreck which they had discounted in advance, are thrown into the sea and floated there for some days on lifepreservers. Their housewifely prescience had provided them with all the necessaries and some of the luxuries suitable for the emergency. From their pockets they produced Westphalian sausages, carefully canned and bread hermetically sealed and ship biscuit and a bottle of whiskey, without which Mrs. Lecks declared that she never travelled not to mention the fact that both ladies had put on black stockings having heard that sharks never snapped at colored people. Lecoq, Monsieur, a detective who figures brilliantly in Gaboriau's novel of that name and its sequel, The Honor of the Name. Sherlock Holmes might have taught Lecoq many little dodges, but Lecoq was by far the greater intellect an intellect that moved in larger curves on a higher plane, for in the sequel especially he had to unravel the threads of a vast and complicated politico-social intrigue rooted in the national life of France.-Saturday Review. Lecouvreur, Adrienne, a famous French actress (1690-1760), whose house in Paris became the resort of the best society including the ladies of the court. She not only succeeded in raising her profession, hitherto scorned, to something like esteem, but she revolutionized the mannerism and artificiality of the contemporaneous stage and introduced the natural and unaffected delivery ever since cultivated by her successors. Eugene Scribe and Legouvé made her the heroine of a tragedy, Adrienne Lecouvrier (1849), which was adapted by Fanny Davenport in Adrienne the Actress (1853). The story turns upon the love of Maurice de Saxe for Adrienne, who at first knows him only as an officer without fame or rank, whom she loves for himself alone. She has a terrible rival in the Princesse de Bouillon, a woman who stops Legeia at nothing to gain her own ends, and who finally poisons Adrienne by means of a bouquet, which is made to appear a present from Maurice de Saxe. The dramatists make her a passionate, loving, worthy woman, on whom the artificial life of the stage has exercised no perceptible influence, capable under the influence of jealousy of forgetting for a while most self-imposed restraints, but incapable of any action that is not defensible from the code of feminine morality which is accepted by the majority of women, or that springs from any degrading motive. Lee, Annabel, subject of a lyric of that name by E. A. Poe, in which he celebrates his love for his childwife Virginia Clemm and his despair over her early death. The poem originally appeared in the New York Tribune on October 9, 1849, two days after Poe's death. In 1851 Poe's friend, Thomas H. Chivers of Georgia (1807-1858), published a collection of poems, Eonchs of Ruby, in which appears a poem called Rosalie Lee, that has a far-off resemblance to Poe's lyric. It is impossible to say which was written first. Lee, Simon, hero and title of a poem by Wordsworth. The poet sees old Simon Lee at work on the root of an old tree, and helps him to get over a difficulty. The old man thanks him. The incident suggests nearly a hundred lines, the whole history of Simon being sketched, and the sorrow of bleak age shown stealing over the brightness of youth and the power of manhood. Le Fevre, a poor lieutenant whose death is related in The Story of Le Fevre, an episode in Sterne's novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Legeia, heroine and title of a short story by E. A. Poe. Legeia, the devoted wife of the narrator of the story, holds the theory which was a favorite with Bulwer, that will ought to be able to conquer death. She, however, dies of consumption but apparently haunts her successor, the second wife, till the Legend latter dies of the mere oppression on her spirits. Then by a vast spiritual effort, the tentatives of which are attended with ghastly physical effects, Legeia enters the dead body of her rival and for one brief moment brings back the exhausted organism to life in her own person. Legeia was a favorite name with Poe. He had already used it in his juvenile poem, Al Aaraf: Legeia, Legeia, My beautiful one, Elizabeth by his marriage to Amy Leigh, Sir Amyas, hero of Charles Kingsley's historical romance, Westward Ho! or the Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1855). He is a trifle over-muscular but he is also a man endowed with strong poetic feelings, a keen sensibility to all beauty of art and nature and an amiability that is only disturbed when he meets or when he merely thinks of the Spaniards whom it is his object in life to drive off the face of the See LIGEA. Legend, Benjamin, known famil-earth-and the sea. iarly as Ben without prefix or affix, in Congreve's Love for Love (1695), the prodigal son of Sir Sampson Legend, who runs away to sea and becomes a common sailor, kindly at heart but rough in exterior, full of picturesque sea-slang and harmless oaths like "Mess!" This was Bannister's favorite character. become a considerable nuisance in these What is Ben-the pleasant sailor which Bannister gives us-but a piece of satire a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's character, his contempt of money, his credulity to women, with that necessary estrangement from home? We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character.-C. LAMB. Legend, Valentine, hero of Congreve's comedy Love for Love (1695), a young Cambridge man, a lover of the classics and eke of pleasure, who, partly out of pique because Angelica, the beautiful heiress, will not marry him, has wasted all his fortune and is reduced to the husks of the prodigal The gigantic Amyas Leigh was the legitimate parent of a lusty progeny, which has latter days. He was, for example, the undoubted ancestor of Guy Livingstone and a host of huge blundering male animals of the heavy dragoon specics, with a "most plentiful lack of discretion," and a terrible superfluity of muscular development. And thus Mr. Kingsley's dislike for the excesses of asceticism or sentimentalism, and generally for a stunted and one-sided development of human nature, was easily pressed into the service of people who were anxious to develop the inferior instincts at the expense of the superior. Moreover, there is no more annoying form of affectation than the affectation of simplicity; and Mr. Kingsley's frequent denunciations of morbid self-consciousness made some of his disciples too obtrusively and demonstratively unconscious of themselves. It is hard to be fair to him when we are suffering from the excess of the qualities which he admired. And yet we must admit that, when the bal- merely physical excellence.-Saturday Re- Leigh, Aurora, heroine of a narrative poem of that name (1856) by Mrs. E. B. Browning. The brilliant daughter of an Englishman by an Italian mother, she is orphaned at an early age, is disinherited by her father's will and after many vicissitudes marries Romney Leigh, the high-minded cousin who had involuntarily supplanted her in the possession of the family estate. Leila, in Byron's narrative poem, The Giaour (1813), the beautiful slave of the Caliph Hassan, who falls in love with the titular hero, escapes from the seraglio, is overtaken and cast into the sea. Another Leila appears in Byron's Don Juan (Canto viii). A Turkish child, Juan rescues her at the siege of Ismail and takes her first to St. Petersburg and then to London, where the adventures of both come to an abrupt close. Leporello night in ghostly form, places her behind him on his spectral steed and rides madly to the graveyard where their marriage is celebrated by a crew of howling goblins. In one form or other the story is common to most European nations. Burger confesses his obligations to an old Dutch ballad. See also ALONZO THE BRAVE. Leonato, in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing (1600), governor of Messina and father of Hero. Merry, light-hearted and indulgent, he is weakly credulous when scandal assails his daughter. Leoni, Leone, the titular hero of a romance by George Sand (1835), an infamous young seigneur, a swindler and a libertine, with a special penchant for the women of the pavement. He yet succeeds in inspiring Juliette, who tells the story, with a passion that sweeps away all scruples and triumphs over all revolts of conscience. Lelia, heroine of a romance, Lelia (1833), by George Sand, a beautiful woman who having been once deceived has foresworn love and laughs at men. She plays a cruel joke upon Stenio (q.v.) by substituting for herself in a pretended assignation her own sister Pulcherie (q.v.), a courtesan who is her physical double. She turns a deaf ear to all the advances of Magnus, a priest whose faith cannot cure him of his passion for her. Stenio ends by committing suicide. Magnus, driven mad by the austerities he has imposed upon himself, slays Lelia. Lelie, the titular blunderer The subject of the story is the sufferings of an infatuated young girl who follows over Molière's comedy L'Etourdi, which Europe the most faithless, unscrupulous is imitated from Nicolo Barbieri's and ignoble, but also the most irresistible L'Inavvertito and has in turn been inconceivable fickleness of Manon attributed of charmers. It is Manon Lescaut with the imitated by Dryden in Sir Martin to a man, and as in the Abbé Prévost's story Marall, by Mrs. Centlivre in Marplot, the touching element is the devotion and and others. Lelie is a conceited and constancy of the injured and deluded Desgrieux, so in Leone Leoni we are invited to scatterbrained youngster whose capa-feel for the too closely-clinging Juliette who "in city for blundering confounds all the schemes devised by his ingenious and unscrupulous valet to secure the person of the slave girl Clélie. Mascarille (q.v.) cajoles, lies, and thieves with indefatigable perseverance and marvellous adroitness; but each new plan is foiled, almost in its inception, by the stupidity of the marplot in whose behalf he labors. Lenore, heroine of a lyric poem of that name by Edgar A. Poe, and, in the same poet's Raven, the name of the rare and radiant maiden " whose death has plunged the hero into gloom. Lenore, heroine of a German ballad of that name by Gottfried August Burger, which has been translated by Sir Walter Scott, D. G. Rosetti and many others of less note. Her lover dies and she blasphemously cries for him to come to her, he appears at is dragged through the mire of a passion which she curses and yet which survives unnamable outrage.-H. JAMES. Leontes, King of Sicilia in Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, the husband of Hermione, whom he unjustly suspects of infidelity and casts away from him. there Besides the ripe comedy, characteristic of Shakespeare at his latest is also a harsh exhibition in Leontes of the meanest of the passions, an insane jealousy, petty and violent as the man who nurses it. For sheer realism, for absolute insight into the most cobwebbed corners of our nature, Shakespeare has rarely surpassed this brief study which in its total effect does but throw out in brighter relief the noble qualities of the other actors beside him, the pleasant qualities of the play they make by their acting.speare, vol. II, p. 320. ARTHUR SYMONS: Henry Irving Shake Leporello, in Mozart's opera of Don Giovanni (1787), usurps the place of Sganarelle as valet to Don Juan. The Lerouge name is first heard of on the mimic stage in Shadwell's drama of The Libertine (1676). 231 Lerouge, Claudine, the corpus delicti in Émile Gaboriau's detective novel L'Affaire Lerouge. A woman of worthless character, she has been the nurse of an illegitimate son of the Count of Commarin by a mistress whom he adored. The Count bribes her to substitute the infant for his legitimate heir by a wife he dislikes. She was baffled by her husband, an honest suitor, but the Count thinks the substitution has been effected. The bastard, when he grows up, plots to assert his pretended rights and first finds it necessary to rid himself of the former nurse. Hence the murder of Claudine Lerouge, which needs all the detective skill of Lecoq to unravel. Lescaut, Manon, titular heroine of a novel by the Abbé Antoine Prévost, a female profligate of winning grace and beauty and perennial gayety and good humor. Des Grieux, a youngster at college, sacrifices brilliant prospects to elope with her. Although strongly attached to him she is vain, reckless, luxurious. To provide for her wants she descends to the most disgraceful expedients, while he becomes a gamester and a cheat and assists Manon in extorting money from her base admirers. Finally an ill-concerted fraud throws Manon into the clutches of the law. She is convicted and transported to New Orleans. Her lover follows her despite all the efforts of his family and friends. In the new world they reform and give a striking example of constancy and devotion until Manon's death. See DEs Grieux, CHEVALIER. The amiable chevalier Des Grieux and the seductive Manon meet by accident, fall mutually in love and abandon their families to elope together, never thinking, there is ought else but love. Falling soon into poverty, one makes a commerce of her charms, the other learns to cheat at cards. How do these two characters inspire such lively interest, carried at last to the highest degree? It is because there is, here, passion and truth; because this woman, always faithful to Des Grieux even in betraying him, who loves nothing better than him, who mingles so great a charm with her infidelities, whose Lesurques voluptuous imagination, whose graces, whose gaiety have taken so strong a hold upon her lover-because such a woman is as seductive in fiction as in fact. The enchant ment that surrounds her by the author's art never leaves her even in the cart that carries her to the hospital.-LA ROUSSE: Grand Dictionaire Universelle. Lesley, Bonnie, in Robert Burns's song of that name, was in real life Miss Leslie Baillie, one of the two daughters of an Ayrshire gentleman. Father and daughters called upon the poet at Dumfries when on their way to England. Burns mounted his horse, rode with the travellers for fifteen miles and composed the song on his return home. William Black, in his novel Kilmeny, makes Bonnie Leslie the pet name of his heroine. Lestrange, Nelly, the autobiographical heroine of Rhoda Broughton's novel, Cometh up as a Flower (1868). She smells neither of bread and butter nor of the stables, two almost equally odorous extremes between which the heroines of most English novels vibrate, and is at the widest removed from the metaphysical and strong-minded nondescripts affected by our girl, innocent, passionate and with a genius writers. She is merely a very genuine little for loving, the story of whose love and troubles is told with a simplicity and truth to nature which we think quite exceptional. -N. Y. Nation. Lesurques, Joseph, the hero of a drama, Le Courrier de Lyon, 1850 (The Lyons Mail incorrectly translated by Charles Reade, 1854, as The Courier of Lyons) founded on fact by Eugene Moreau, in collaboration with Sirandan and Delacour. Even the real names of the leading characters are retained. On April 27, 1796, the Lyons mail coach was attacked between Melun and Lieussant by robbers who shot postilion and courier. Five years later, Dubosc, the leader of the gang, was guillotined. In the interim the innocent Lesurques had been convicted and executed on circumstantial evidence, which included an extraordinary resemblance to the murderer. The French drama inexorably follows every tragic detail. The English version alters the catastrophe; Lesurques is saved at the last moment and Dubosc is sent to the |