but repulsive and unwomanly in its physical horror. She accompanied her father to England, but did not remain there long; the best picture which she produced for Charles I. was "David with the head of Goliath." Artemisia refused an offer of marriage from Agostino Tasi, and bestowed her hand on Pier Antonio Schiattesi, continuing, however, to use her own surname. She settled in Naples, whither she returned after her English sojourn; she lived there in no little splendour, and there she died in 1642. She had a daughter and perhaps other children. GENTILI, ALBERICO (1552–1608), Italian jurist, who has great claims to be considered the founder of the science of international law, second son of Matteo Gentili, a physician of noble family and scientific eminence, was born on the 14th of January 1552 at Sanginesio, a small town of the march of Ancona which looks down from the slopes of the Apennines upon the distant Adriatic. After taking the degree of doctor of civil law at the university of Perugia, and holding a judicial office at Ascoli, he returned to his native city, and was entrusted with the task of recasting its statutes, but, sharing the Protestant opinions of his father, shared also, together with a brother, Scipio, afterwards a famous professor at Altdorf, his flight to Carniola, where in 1579 Matteo was appointed physician to the duchy. The Inquisition condemned the fugitives as contumacious, and they soon received orders to quit the dominions of Austria. Alberico set out for England, travelling by way of Tübingen and Heidelberg, and everywhere meeting with the reception to which his already high reputation entitled him. He arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1580, with a commendatory letter from the earl❘ of Leicester, at that time chancellor of the university, and was shortly afterwards qualified to teach by being admitted to the same degree which he had taken at Perugia. His lectures on Roman law soon became famous, and the dialogues, disputations and commentaries, which he published henceforth in rapid succession, established his position as an accomplished civilian, of the older and severer type, and secured his appointment in 1587 to the regius professorship of civil law. It was, however, rather by an application of the old learning to the new questions suggested by the modern relations of states that his labours have produced their most lasting result. In 1584 he was consulted by government as to the proper course to be pursued with Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, who had been detected in plotting against Elizabeth. He chose the topic to which his attention had thus been directed as a subject for a disputation when Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney visited the schools at Oxford in the same year; and this was six months later expanded into a book, the De legationibus libri tres. In 1588 Alberico selected the law of war as the subject of the law disputations at the annual Act which took place in July; and in the autumn published in London the De Jure Belli commentatio prima. A second and a third Commentatio followed, and the whole matter, with large additions and improvements, appeared at Hanau, in 1598, as the De Jure Belli libri tres. It was doubtless in consequence of the reputation gained by these works that Gentili became henceforth more and more engaged in forensic practice, and resided chiefly in London, leaving his Oxford work to be partly discharged by a deputy. In 1600 he was admitted to be a member of Gray's Inn, and in 1605 was appointed standing counsel to the king of Spain. He died on the 19th of June 1608, and was buried, by the side of Dr Matteo Gentili, who had followed his son to England, in the churchyard of St Helen's, Bishopsgate. By his wife, Hester de Peigni, he left two sons, Robert and Matthew, and a daughter, Anna, who married Sir John Colt. His notes of the cases in which he was engaged for the Spaniards were posthumously published in 1613 at Hanau, as Hispanicae advocationis libri duo. This was in accordance with his last wishes; but his direction that the remainder of his MSS. should be burnt was not complied with, since fifteen volumes of them found their way, at the beginning of the 19th century, from Amsterdam to the Bodleian library. The true history of Gentili and of his principal writings has only been ascertained in recent years, in consequence of a revived appreciation of the services which he rendered to international law. The movement to do him honour originated in 1875 in England, as the result of the inaugural lecture of Prof. T. E. Holland, and was warmly taken up in Italy. In spreading through Europe it encountered two curious cross-currents of opinion, one the ultra-Catholic, which three centuries before had ordered his name to be erased from all public documents and placed his works in the Index; another the narrowly-Dutch, which is, it seems, needlessly careful of the supremacy of Grotius. These two currents resulted respectively in a bust of Garcia Moreno being placed in the Vatican, and in the unveiling in 1886, with much international oratory, of a fine statue of Grotius at Delft. The English committee, under the honorary presidency of Prince Leopold, in 1877 erected a monument to the memory of Gentili in St Helen's church, and saw to the publication of a new edition of the De Jure Belli. The Italian committee, of which Prince (after. wards King) Humbert was honorary president, was less successful. It was only in 1908, the tercentenary of the death of Alberico, that the statue of the great heretic was at length unveiled in his native city by the minister of public instruction, in the presence of numerous deputations from Italian cities and universities. Preceding writers had dealt with various international questions, but they dealt with them singly, and with a servile submission to the decisions of the church. It was left to Gentili to grasp as a whole the relations of states one to another, to distinguish international questions from questions with which they are more or less intimately connected, and to attempt their solution by principles entirely independent of the authority of Rome. He uses the reasonings of the civil and even the canon law, but he proclaims as his real guide the Jus Naturae, the highest common sense of mankind, by which historical precedents are to be criticized and, if necessary, set aside. His faults are not few. His style is prolix, obscure, and to the modern reader pedantic enough; but a comparison of his greatest work with what had been written upon the same subject by, for instance, Belli, or Soto, or even Ayala, will show that he greatly improved upon his predecessors, not only by the fulness with which he has worked out points of detail, but also by clearly separating the law of war from martial law, and by placing the subject once for all upon a non-theological basis. If, on the other hand, the same work be compared with the De Jure Belli et Pacis of Grotius, it is at once evident that the later writer is indebted to the earlier, not only for a large portion of his illustrative erudition, but also for all that is commendable in the method and arrangement of the treatise. with the places and dates of their first publication: De juris interpreti The following is probably a complete list of the writings of Gentili, bus dialogi sex (London, 1582); Lectionum et epist. quae ad jus civile pertinent libri tres (London, 1583-1584); De legationibus libri tres (London, 1585); Legal. comitiorum Oxon. actio (London, 1585-1586); disputatio (Witteb., 1586); Disputationum decas prima (London, 1587); De divers. temp. appellationibus (Hanau, 1586); De nascendi tempore Conditionum liber singularis (London, 1587); De jure belli comm. prima (London, 1588); secunda, ib. (1588-1589); tertia (1589); De de Prof. et Med. (Hanau, 1593); De jure belli libri tres (Hanau, 1598); injustitia bellica Romanorum (Oxon, 1590); Ad tit. de Malef. et Math. De armis Romanis, &c. (Hanau, 1599); De actoribus et de abusu mendacii (Hanau, 1599); De ludis scenicis epist. duae (Middleburg, 1600); Ad I. Maccabaeorum et de linguarum mistura disp. (Frankfurt, (1601); In tit. si quis principi, et ad leg. Jul. maiest. (Hanau, 1604): 1600); Lectiones Virgilianae (Hanau, 1600); De nuptiis libri septem De latin. vet. Bibl. (Hanau, 1604); De libro Pyano (Oxon, 1604); Laudes Acad. Perus. et Oxon. (Hanau, 1605); De unione Angliae et Scotiae (London, 1605); Disputationes tres, de libris jur. can., de tres, de pot. regis absoluta, de unione regnorum, de vi civium (London, libris jur. civ., de latinitate vet. vers. (Hanau, 1605); Regales disput. 1605); Hispanicae advocationis libri duo (Hanau, 1613); In til. de verb. signif. (Hanau, 1614); De legatis in test. (Amsterdam, 1661) An edition of the Opera omnia, commenced at Naples in 1770, was cut short by the death of the publisher, Gravier, after the second volume. Of his numerous unpublished writings, Gentili complained that four volumes were lost pessimo pontificiorum facinore," meaning probably that they were left behind in his flight to Carniola. AUTHORITIES.-Several tracts by the Abate Benigni in Colucci, Antichità Picene (1790); a dissertation by W. Reiger annexed to the Program of the Groningen Gymnasium for 1867; an inaugural lecture delivered in 1874 by T. E. Holland, translated into Italian, with additions by the author, by A. Saff (1884); the preface to a new With a the commonwealth he medleth little) what soever it cost him, he will both array and arm himself accordingly, and show the more manly courage, and all the tokens of the person which he representeth. No man hath hurt by it but himself, who peradventure will go in wider buskins than his legs will bear, or as our proverb saith, now and then bear a bigger sail than his boat is able to sustain." In this way Shakespeare himself was turned, by the grant of his coat of arms, from a "vagabond " into a gentleman. The fundamental idea of "gentry," symbolized in this grant of coat-armour, had come to be that of the essential superiority of the fighting man; and, as Selden points out (p. 707), the ennobled person though of the long Robe wherein he hath little fiction was usually maintained in the granting of arms to an GENTLE (through the Fr. gentil, from Lat. gentilis, belonging to the same gens, or family), properly an epithet of one born of a "good family "; the Latin generosus, "well born" (see GENTLEuse of them as they mean a shield." At the last the wearing MAN), contrasted with "noble "on the one side and "simple" on of a sword on all occasions was the outward and visible sign of a the other. The word followed the wider application of the word gentleman "; and the custom survives in the sword worn with "gentleman "; implying the manners, character and breeding court dress." This idea that a gentleman must have a coat of arms, and that no one is a proper to one to whom that name could be applied, courteous, gentleman" without one is, polite; hence, with no reference to its original meaning, free from however, of comparatively late growth, the outcome of the natural violence or roughness, mild, soft, kind or tender. desire of the heralds to magnify their office and collect fees for physical meaning of soft to the touch, the word is used sub-registering coats; and the same is true of the conception of stantively of the maggot of the bluebottle fly, used as a bait by "gentlemen" as a separate class. That a distinct order of fishermen. At the end of the 16th century the French gentil was gentry" existed in England very early has, indeed, been again adapted into English in the form "gentile," later changed often assumed, and is supported by weighty authorities. Thus, the late Professor Freeman (Ency. Brit. xvii. p. 540 b, 9th ed.) to "genteel." The word was common in the 17th and 18th centuries as applied to behaviour, manner of living, dress, &c., said: "Early in the 11th century the order of gentlemen' suitable or proper to persons living in a position in society as a separate class seems to be forming as something new. By above the ordinary, hence polite, elegant. From the early part the time of the conquest of England the distinction seems to of the 19th century it has also been used in an ironical sense, have been fully established." Stubbs (Const. Hist., ed. 1878, and applied chiefly to those who pay an excessive and absurd iii. 544, 548) takes the same view. Sir George Sitwell, however, importance to the outward marks of respectability as evidence of has conclusively proved that this opinion is based on a wrong being in a higher rank in society than that to which they properly conception of the conditions of medieval society, and that it is belong. wholly opposed to the documentary evidence. The fundamental social cleavage in the middle ages was between the nobiles, i.e. the tenants in chivalry, whether earls, barons, knights, esquires or franklins, and the ignobiles, i.e. the villeins, citizens and burgesses; and between the most powerful noble and the humblest franklin there was, until the 15th century, no" separate class of gentlemen." Even so late as 1400 the word " gentleman still only had the sense of generosus, and could not be used as a personal description denoting rank or quality, or as the title of a class. Yet after 1413 we find it increasingly so used; and the list of landowners in 1431, printed in Feudal Aids, contains besides knights, esquires, yeomen and husbandmen (i.e. householders), a fair number who are classed as "gentilman." GENTLEMAN (from Lat. gentilis, "belonging to a race or gens," and "man"; Fr. gentilhomme, Span. gentil hombre, Ital. gentil huomo, in its original and strict signification, a term denoting a man of good family, the Lat. generosus (its invariable translation in English-Latin documents). In this sense it is the equivalent of the Fr. gentilhomme, "nobleman," which latter term has in Great Britain been long confined to the peerage (see NOBILITY); and the term "gentry" (" gentrice" from O. Fr. genterise for gentelise) has much of the significance of the Fr. noblesse or the Ger. Adel. This was what was meant by the rebels under John Ball in the 14th century when they repeated: "When Adam delved and Eve Who was then the gentleman Selden (Titles of Honor, 1672), discussing the title "gentleman," speaks of "our English use of it " as "convertible with nobilis," and describes in connexion with it the forms of ennobling in various European countries. William Harrison, writing a century earlier, says" gentlemen be those whom their race and blood, or at the least their virtues, do make noble and known." But for the complete gentleman the possession of a coat of arms was in his time considered necessary; and Harrison gives the following account of how gentlemen were made in Shakespeare's day: gentlemen whose ancestors are not known to come in with William duke of Normandy (for of the Saxon races yet remaining we now make none accompt, much less of the British issue) do take their beginning in England after this manner in our times. Who soever studieth the laws of the realm, who so abideth in the university, giving his mind to his book, or professeth physic and the liberal sciences, or beside his service in the room of a captain in the wars, or good counsel given at home, whereby his commonwealth is benefited, can live without manual labour, and thereto is able and will bear the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman, he shall for money have a coat and arms bestowed upon him by heralds (who in the charter of the same do of custom pretend antiquity and service, and many gay things) and thereunto being made so good cheap be called master, which is the title that men give to esquires and gentlemen, and reputed for a gentleman ever after. Which is so much the less to be disallowed of, for that the prince doth lose nothing by it, the gentleman being so much subject| to taxes and public payments as is the yeoman or husbandman, which he likewise doth bear the gladlier for the saving of his reputation. Being called also to the wars (for with the government of Sir George Sitwell gives a lucid explanation of this development, the incidents of which are instructive and occasionally amusing. The immediate cause was the statute 1 Henry V. cap. v. of 1413, which laid down that in all original writs of action, personal appeals and indictments, in which process of outlawry lies, the estate degree or mystery" of the defendant must be stated, as well as his present or former domicile. Now the Black Death (1349) had put the traditional social organization out of gear. Before that the younger sons of the nobiles had received their share of the farm stock, bought or hired land, and settled down as agriculturists in their native villages. Under the new conditions Description of England, bk. ii. ch. v. p. 128. Henry Peacham, in his Compleat Gentleman (1634), takes this matter more seriously. "Neither must we honour or esteem," he writes, "those ennobled, or made gentle in blood, who by mechanic and base means have raked up a mass of wealth or have purchased an ill coat (of arms) at a good rate; no more than a player upon the stage, for wearing a lord's cast suit: since nobility hangeth not upon the airy esteem of vulgar opinion, but is indeed of itself essential and absolute" (Reprint, p. 3). Elsewhere (p. 161) he deplores the abuse of heraldry, which had even in his day produced "all the world over such a medley of coats" that, but for the commendable activity of the earls marshals, he feared that yeomen would soon be rare in England as they are in France." See also an amusing instance from the time of Henry VIII., given in "The Gentility of Richard Barker," by Oswald Barron, in the Ancestor, vol. ii. (July 1902). as Even this classification would seem to need modifying. For certain of the great patrician families of the cities were certainly nobiles. 2 46 this became increasingly impossible, and they were forced to seek their fortunes abroad in the French wars, or at home as hangers-on of the great nobles. These men, under the old system, had no definite status; but they were generosi, men of birth, and, being now forced to describe themselves, they disdained to be classed with franklins (now sinking in the social scale), still more with yeomen or husbandmen; they chose, therefore, to be described as 'gentlemen." On the character of these earliest "gentlemen" the records throw a lurid light. According to Sir George Sitwell (p. 76)," the premier gentleman of England, as the matter now stands, is 'Robert Erdeswyke of Stafford, gentilman,' who had served among the men-at-arms of Lord Talbot at Agincourt (ib. note) He is typical of his class. "Fortunately-for the gentle reader will no doubt be anxious to follow in his footsteps-some particulars of his life may be gleaned from the public records. He was charged at the Staffordshire Assizes with housebreaking, wounding with intent to kill, and procuring the murder of one Thomas Page, who was cut to pieces while on his knees begging for his life." If any earlier claimant to the title of 'gentleman " be discovered, Sir George Sitwell predicts that it will be within the same year (1414) and in connexion with some similar disreputable proceedings.1 From these unpromising beginnings the separate order of "gentlemen" was very slowly evolved. The first "gentleman" commemorated on an existing monument was John Daundelyon of Margate (d. c. 1445); the first gentleman to enter the House of Commons, hitherto composed mainly of "valets," was "William Weston, gentylman "; but even in the latter half of the 15th century the order was not clearly established. As to the connexion of "gentilesse" with the official grant or recognition of coat-armour, that is a profitable fiction invented and upheld by the heralds; for coat-armour was but the badge assumed by gentlemen to distinguish them in battle, and many gentlemen of long descent never had occasion to assume it, and never did. This fiction, however, had its effect; and by the 16th century, as has been already pointed out, the official view had become clearly established that "gentlemen" constituted a distinct order, and that the badge of this distinction was the heralds' recognition of the right to bear arms. It is unfortunate that this view, which is quite unhistorical and contradicted by the present practice of many undoubtedly "gentie " families of long descent, has of late years been given a wide currency in popular manuals of heraldry. has In this narrow sense, however, the word "gentleman long since become obsolete. The idea of "gentry " in the continental sense of noblesse is extinct in England, and is likely to remain so, in spite of the efforts of certain enthusiasts to revive it (see A. C. Fox-Davies, Armorial Families, Edinburgh, 1895). That it once existed has been sufficiently shown; but the whole spirit and tendency of English constitutional and social development tended to its early destruction. The comparative good order of England was not favourable to the continuance of a class, developed during the foreign and civil wars of the 14th and 15th centuries, for whom fighting was the sole honourable occupation. The younger sons of noble families became apprentices in the cities, and there grew up a new aristocracy of trade. Merchants are still "citizens" to William Harrison; but he adds" they often change estate with gentlemen, as gentlemen do with them, by a mutual conversion of the one into the other." A frontier line between classes so indefinite could not be maintained, especially as in England there was never a nobiliary prefix " to stamp a person as a gentleman by his The designation "gentilman is, indeed, found some two centuries earlier. In the Inquisitio maneriorum Ecclesiae S. Pauli Londin. of A.D. 1222 (W. A. Hale, Domesday of St Paul's, Camden Soc., 1858, p. 80) occurs the entry: Adam gentilmâ dim acră, p' iii. d. This is probably the earliest record of the "grand old name of gentleman "; but Adam, who held half an acre at a rent of three pence-less by half than that held by Ralph the bondsman' (Rad' le bunde) in the same list-was certainly not a gentleman.' "Gentilman" here was a nickname, perhaps suggested by Adam's name, and thus in some sort anticipating the wit of the famous couplet repeated by John Ball's rebels. " surname, as in France or Germany The process was hastened, moreover, by the corruption of the Heralds' College and by the case with which coats of arms could be assumed without a shadow of claim; which tended to bring the "science of armory into contempt. The word "gentleman" as an index of rank had already become of doubtful value before the great political and social changes of the 19th century gave to it a wider and essentially higher significance. The change is well illustrated in the definitions given in the successive editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In the 5th edition (1815) " a gentleman is one, who without any title, bears a coat of arms, or whose ancestors have been freemen." In the 7th edition (1845) it still implies a definite social status: "All above the rank of yeomen." In the 8th edition (1856) this is still its "most extended sense "; in a more limited sense" it is defined in the same words as those quoted above from the 5th edition; but the writer adds, "By courtesy this title is generally accorded to all persons above the rank of common tradesmen when their manners are indicative of a certain amount of refinement and intelligence." The Reform Bill of 1832 has done its work; the "middle classes" have come into their own; and the word gentleman "has come in common use to signify not a distinction of blood, but a distinction of position, education and manners. The test is no longer good birth, or the right to bear arms, but the capacity to mingle on equal terms in good society. In its best use, moreover, "gentleman" involves a certain superior standard of conduct, due, to quote the 8th edition once more, to "that self-respect and intellectual refinement which manifest themselves in unrestrained yet delicate manners." The word gentle," originally implying a certain social status, had very early come to be associated with the standard of manners expected from that status. Thus by a sort of punning process the "gentleman becomes a "gentle-man." Chaucer in the Melibocus (c. 1386) says: "Certes he sholde not be called a gentil man, that ne dooth his diligence and bisynesse, to kepen his good name "; and in the Wife of Bath's Tale: "Loke who that is most vertuous alway Prive and apert, and most entendeth ay To do the gentil dedes that he can 66 And take him for the gretest gentilman," and in the Romance of the Rose (c. 1400) we find "he is gentil bycause he doth as longeth to a gentilman." This use develops through the centuries, until in 1714 we have Steele, in the Tatler (No. 207), laying down that "the appellation of Gentleman is never to be affixed to a man's circumstances, but to his Behaviour in them," a limitation over-narrow even for the present day. In this connexion, too, may be quoted the old story, told by some-very improbably-of James II., of the monarch who could make him a nobleman, but God Almighty could not make replied to a lady petitioning him to make her son a gentleman, "I him a gentleman." Selden, however, in referring to similar Stories" that no Charter can make a Gentleman, which is cited as out of the mouth of some great Princes that have said it," adds that" they without question understood Gentleman for Generosus in the antient sense, or as if it came from Gentilis in that sense, as Gentilis denotes one of a noble Family, or indeed for a Gentleman blood than he is." The word "gentleman," used in the wide by birth." For "no creation could make a man of another sense with which birth and circumstances have nothing to do, is For "to behave like a necessarily incapable of strict definition. gentleman "may mean little or much, according to the person by whom the phrase is used; "to spend money like a gentleman may even be no great praise; but "to conduct a business like a gentleman " implies a standard at least as high as that involved 2 The prefix "de" attached to some English names is in no sense" nobiliary." In Latin documents de was the equivalent of the English" of," as de la of "at" (so de la Pole for Atte Poole, cf. such names as Attwood, Attwater). In English this "of " was in the 15th century dropped; e.g. the grandson of Johannes de Stoke (John of Stoke) in a 14th-century document becomes John Stoke. In modern times, under the influence of romanticism, the prefix "de" has been in some cases" revived" under a misconception, e.g. de Trafford," "de Hoghton." Very rarely it is correctly retained as derived from a foreign place-name, e.g. de Grey. in the phrase "noblesse oblige." In this sense of a person of | des finances de la Grande-Bretagne, London, 1800). Especially culture, character and good manners the word "gentleman " has supplied a gap in more than one foreign language. The evolution of this meaning of "gentleman" reflects very accurately that of English society; and there are not wanting signs that the process of evolution, in the one as in the other, is not complete. The indefinableness of the word mirrors the indefinite character of "society" in England; and the use by "the masses " of "gentleman as a mere synonym for "man has spread pari passu with the growth of democracy. It is a protest against implied inferiority, and is cherished as the modern French bourgeois cherishes his right of duelling with swords, under the ancien régime a prerogative of the noblesse. Nor is there much justification for the denunciation by purists of the "vulgarization" and "abuse " of the "grand old name of gentleman." Its strict meaning has now fallen completely obsolete. Its current meaning varies with every class of society that uses it. But it always implies some sort of excellency of manners or morals. It may by courtesy be over-loosely applied by one common man to another; but the common man would understand the reproach conveyed in "You're no gentleman." AUTHORITIES. Selden, Titles of Honor (London, 1672); William Harrison, Description of England, ed. G. F. J. Furnivall for the New Shakspere Soc. (London, 1877-1878); Sir George Sitwell, "The English Gentleman," in the Ancestor, No. 1 (Westminster, April 1902); Peacham's Compleat Gentleman (1634), with an introduction by G. S. Gordon (Oxford, 1906); A. Smythe-Palmer, D.D., The Ideal of a Gentleman, or a Mirror for Gentlefolk: A Portrayal in Literature from the Earliest Times (London, 1908), a very exhaustive collection of extracts from authors so wide apart as Ptah-note (3300 B.C.) and William Watson, arranged under headings: Historical Idea of a Gentleman," "The Herald's Gentleman,' "The Poet's Gentleman," &c. (W. A. P.) GENTZ, FRIEDRICH VON (1764-1832), German publicist and statesman, was born at Breslau on the 2nd of May 1764. His father was an official, his mother an Ancillon, distantly related to the Prussian minister of that name. On his father's transference to Berlin, as director of the mint, the boy was sent to the Joachimsthal gymnasium there; his brilliant talents, however, did not develop until later, when at the university of Königsberg he fell under the influence of Kant. But though his intellect was sharpened and his zeal for learning quickened by the great thinker's influence, Kant's "categorical imperative " did not prevent him from yielding to the taste for wine, women and high play which pursued him through life. When in 1785 he returned to Berlin, he received the appointment of secret secretary to the royal Generaldirectorium, his talents soon gaining him promotion to the rank of councillor for war (Kriegsrath). During an illness, which kept him virtuous by confining him to his room, he studied French and English, gaining a mastery of these languages which, at that time exceedingly rare, opened up for him opportunities for a diplomatic career. His interest in public affairs was, however, first aroused by the outbreak of the French Revolution. Like most quick-witted young men, he greeted this at first with enthusiasm; but its subsequent developments cooled his ardour and he was converted to more conservative counsels by Burke's Essay on the French Revolution, a translation of which into German (1794) was his first literary venture. This was followed, next year, by translations of works on the Revolution by Mallet du Pan and Mounier, and at this time he also founded and edited a monthly journal, the Neue deutsche Monatsschrift, in which for five years he wrote, mainly on historical and political questions, maintaining the principles of British constitutionalism against those of revolutionary France. The knowledge he displayed of the principles and practice of finance was especially remarkable. In 1797, at the instance of English statesmen, he published a translation of a history of French finance by François d'Ivernois (1757-1842), an eminent Genevese exile naturalized and knighted in England, extracts from which he had previously given in his journal. His literary output at this time, all inspired by a moderate Liberalism, was astounding, and included an essay on the results of the discovery of America, and another, written in French, on the English financial system (Essai sur l'état de l'administration | noteworthy, however, was the Denkschrift or Missive addressed by him to King Frederick William III. on his accession (1797), in which, inter alia, he urged upon the king the necessity for granting freedom to the press and to commerce. For a Prussian official to venture to give uncalled-for advice to his sovereign was a breach of propriety not calculated to increase his chances of favour; but it gave Gentz a conspicuous position in the public eye, which his brilliant talents and literary style enabled him to maintain. Moreover, he was from the first aware of the probable developments of the Revolution and of the consequences to Prussia of the weakness and vacillations of her policy. Opposition to France was the inspiring principle of the Historisches Journal founded by him in 1799-1800, which once more held up English institutions as the model, and became in Germany the mouthpiece of British policy towards the revolutionary aggressions of the French republic. In 1801 he ceased the publication of the Journal, because he disliked the regularity of journalism, and issued instead, under the title Beiträge zur Geschichte, &c., a series of essays on contemporary politics. The first of these was Über den Ursprung und Charakter des Krieges gegen die französische Revolution (1801), by many regarded as Gentz's masterpiece; another important brochure, Von dem politischen Zustande von Europa vor und nach der Revolution, a criticism of Hauterive's De l'état de la France à la fin de l'an VIII, appeared the same year. This activity gained him recognition abroad and gifts of money from the British and Austrian governments; but it made his position as an official in Berlin impossible, for the Prussian government had no mind to abandon its attitude of cautious neutrality. Private affairs also combined to urge Gentz to leave the Prussian service; for, mainly through his own fault, a separation with his wife was arranged. In May 1802, accordingly, he took leave of his wife and left with his friend Adam Müller for Vienna. In Berlin he had been intimate with the Austrian ambassador, Count Stadion, whose good offices procured him an introduction to the emperor Francis. The immediate result was the title of imperial councillor, with a yearly salary of 4000 gulden (December 6th, 1802); but it was not till 1809 that he was actively employed. Before returning to Berlin to make arrangements for transferring himself finally to Vienna, Gentz paid a visit to London, where he made the acquaintance of Pitt and Granville, who were so impressed with his talents that, in addition to large money presents, he was guaranteed an annual pension by the British government in recognition of the value of the services of his pen against Bonaparte. From this time forward he was engaged in a ceaseless polemic against every fresh advance of the Napoleonic power and pretensions; with matchless sarcasm he lashed " the nerveless policy of the courts, which suffer indignity with resignation"; he denounced the recognition of Napoleon's imperial title, and drew up a manifesto of Louis XVIII. against it. The formation of the coalition and the outbreak of war for a while raised his hopes, in spite of his lively distrust of the competence of Austrian ministers; but the hopes were speedily dashed by Austerlitz and its results. Gentz used his enforced leisure to write a brilliant essay on "The relations between England and Spain before the outbreak of war between the two powers" (Leipzig, 1806); and shortly afterwards appeared Fragmente aus der neuesten Geschichte des politischen Gleichgewichts in Europa (translated s.t. Fragments on the Balance of Power in Europe, London, 1806). This latter, the last of Gentz's works as an independent publicist, was a masterly exposé of the actual political situation, and at the same time prophetic in its suggestions as to how this should be retrieved: "Through Germany Europe has perished, through Germany it must rise again." He realized that the dominance of France could only be broken by the union of Austria and Prussia, acting in concert with Great Britain. He watched with interest the Prussian military preparations, and, at the invitation of Count Haugwitz, he went at the outset of the campaign to the Prussian headquarters at Erfurt, where he drafted the king's proclamation and his letter to Napoleon. The writer was known, and it was in this connexion that Napoleon referred to him as "a wretched | seen again since their parting at Berlin, and his relations with scribe named Gentz, one of those men without honour who sell themselves for money." In this mission Gentz had no official mandate from the Austrian government, and whatever hopes he may have cherished of privately influencing the situation in the direction of an alliance between the two German powers were speedily dashed by the campaign of Jena. The downfall of Prussia left Austria the sole hope of Germany and of Europe. Gentz, who from the winter of 1806 onwards divided his time between Prague and the Bohemian wateringplaces, seemed to devote himself wholly to the pleasures of society, his fascinating personality gaining him a ready reception in those exalted circles which were to prove of use to him later on in Vienna. But, though he published nothing, his pen was not idle, and he was occupied with a series of essays on the future of Austria and the best means of liberating Germany and redressing the balance of Europe; though he himself confessed to his friend Adam Müller (August 4th, 1806) that, in the miserable circumstances of the time, his essay on "the principles of a general pacification "must be taken as a "political poem." In 1809, on the outbreak of war between Austria and France, Gentz was for the first time actively employed by the Austrian government under Stadion; he drafted the proclamation announcing the declaration of war (15th of April), and during the continuance of hostilities his pen was ceaselessly employed. But the peace of 1810 and the fall of Stadion once more dashed his hopes, and, disillusioned and "hellishly blasé," he once more retired to comparative inactivity at Prague. Of Metternich, Stadion's successor, he had at the outset no high opinion, and it was not till 1812 that there sprang up between the two men the close relations that were to ripen into life-long friendship. But when Gentz returned to Vienna as Metternich's adviser and henchman, he was no longer the fiery patriot who had sympathized and corresponded with Stein in the darkest days of German depression and in fiery periods called upon all Europe to free itself from foreign rule. Disillusioned and cynical, though clear-sighted as ever, he was henceforth before all things an Austrian, more Austrian on occasion even than Metternich; as, e.g., when, during the final stages of the campaign of 1814, he expressed the hope that Metternich would substitute "Austria " for "Europe" in his diplomacy and--strange advice from the old hater of Napoleon and of France-secure an AustroFrench alliance by maintaining the husband of Marie Louise on the throne of France. For ten years, from 1812 onward, Gentz was in closest touch with all the great affairs of European history, the assistant, confidant, and adviser of Metternich. He accompanied the chancellor on all his journeys; was present at all the conferences that preceded and followed the war; no political secrets were hidden from him; and his hand drafted all important diplomatic documents. He was secretary to the congress of Vienna (18141815) and to all the congresses and conferences that followed, up to that of Verona (1822), and in all his vast knowledge of men and affairs made him a power. He was under no illusion as to their achievements; his memoir on the work of the congress of Vienna is at once an incisive piece of criticism and a monument of his own disillusionment. But the Liberalism of his early years was gone for ever, and he had become reconciled to Metternich's view that, in an age of decay, the sole function of a statesman was to prop up mouldering institutions." It was the hand of the author of that offensive Missive to Frederick William III., on the liberty of the press, that drafted the Carlsbad decrees; it was he who inspired the policy of repressing the freedom of the universities; and he noted in his diary as "a day more important than that of Leipzig" the session of the Vienna conference of 1819, in which it was decided to make the convocation of representative assemblies in the German states impossible, by enforcing the letter of Article XIII. of the Act of Confederation. As to Gentz's private life there is not much to be said. He remained to the last a man of the world, though tormented with an exaggerated terror of death. His wife he had never | other women, mostly of the highest rank, were too numerous to record. But passion tormented him to the end, and his infatuation for Fanny Elssler, the celebrated danseuse, forms the subject of some remarkable letters to his friend Rahel, the wife of Varnhagen von Ense (1830-1831). He died on the 9th of June 1832. Gentz has been very aptly described as a mercenary of the pen, and assuredly no other such mercenary has ever carved out for himself a more remarkable career. To have done so would have been impossible, in spite of his brilliant gifts, had he been no more than the "wretched scribe" sneered at by Napoleon. Though by birth belonging to the middle class in a country of hide-bound aristocracy, he lived to move on equal terms in the society of princes and statesmen; which would never have been the case had he been notoriously "bought and sold." Yet that he was in the habit of receiving gifts from all and sundry who hoped for his backing is beyond dispute. He notes that at the congress of Vienna he received 22,000 florins through Talleyrand from Louis XVIII., while Castlereagh gave him £600, accompanied by les plus folles promesses; and his diary is full of such entries. Yet he never made any secret of these gifts; Metternich was aware of them, and he never suspected Gentz of writing or acting in consequence against his convictions. As a matter of fact, no man was more free or outspoken in his criticism of the policy of his employers than this apparently venal writer. These gifts and pensions were rather in the nature of subsidies than bribes; they were the recognition by various powers of the value of an ally whose pen had proved itself so potent a weapon in their cause. It is, indeed, the very impartiality and objectivity of his attitude that make the writings of Gentz such illuminating documents for the period of history which they cover. Allowance must of course be made for his point of view, but less so perhaps than in the case of any other writer so intimately concerned with the policies which he criticizes. And, apart from their value as historical documents, Gentz's writings are literary monuments, classical examples of nervous and luminous German prose, or of French which is a model for diplomatic style. A selection of Gentz's works (Ausgewählte Schriften) was published by Weick in 5 vols. (1836-1838); his lesser works (Mannheim, 1838-1840) in 5 vols. and Mémoires et lettres inédites (Stuttgart, 1841) were edited by G. Schlesier. Subsequently there have appeared Briefe an Chr. Garve (Breslau, 1857); correspondence (Briefwechsel) with Adam Müller (Stuttgart, 1857); Briefe an Pilat (2 vols., Leipzig, 1868); Aus dem Nachlass Friedrichs von Gents (2 vols.), edited by Count Anton Prokesch-Osten (Vienna, 1867): Aus der alten Registratur der Staats-Kanzlei: Briefe politischen Inhalts von und an Friedrich von Gents, edited by C. von Klinkowström (Vienna, 1870); Dépêches inédites du chev. de Gentz aux Hospodars de Valachie 1813-1828 (a correspondence on current affairs commissioned by the Austrian government), edited by Count Anton von Prokesch Osten the younger (3 vols., Paris, 1876), incomplete, but partly supplemented in Oesterreichs Teilnahme an den Befreiungskriegen (Vienna, 1887), a collection of documents of the greatest value; Zur Geschichte der orientalischen Frage: Briefe aus dem Nachlass Friedrichs von Gentz (Vienna, 1877), edited by Count ProkeschOsten the younger. Finally Gentz's diaries, from 1800 to 1828, an invaluable mine of authentic material, were edited by Varnhagen von Ense and published after his death under the title Tagebücher, &c. (Leipzig, 1861; new ed., 4 vols., ib. 1873). Several lives of Gentz exist. The latest is by E. Guglia, Friedrich von Gents (Vienna, (W. A. P.) 1901). GEOCENTRIC, referred to the centre of the earth (Gr. y) as an origin; a term designating especially the co-ordinates of a heavenly body referred to this origin. GEODESY (from the Gr. y, the earth, and daiew, to divide), the science of surveying (q.v.) extended to large tracts of country, having in view not only the production of a system of maps of very great accuracy, but the determination of the curvature of the surface of the earth, and eventually of the figure and dimensions of the earth. This last, indeed, may be the sole object in view, as was the case in the operations conducted in Peru and in Lapland by the celebrated French astronomers P. Bouguer, C. M. de la Condamine, P. L. M. de Maupertuis, A. C. Clairault and others; and the measurement of the meridian |