on the scaffold.-The king of Prussia, who had joined the Russians, soon came to invest Warsaw; and to reduce it he neglected no method either of force or stratagem: he threatened the inhabitants with total destruction if they resisted, and promised the Polish officers to retain their grades among his troops if they would join him, but all swore to share the fate of Kosciusko, and conquer or die with him. At last, after two months of bloody and continual engagements, and a general assault, in which the firmness of the insurgents triumphed over the valour of the Russians and Prussians, the king of Prussia was obliged to raise the siege and hasten to Poland Proper, where a formidable insurrection had just broken out. Kosciusko sent reinforcements thither, as well as to Lithuania, and intended even to have gone to the latter province, but having been informed that Sterakowski, who commanded there, had just been defeated by Suworow at Brzesc; he returned to Warsaw in order to send off new reinforcements : and being informed that general Fersen was going with a numerous body to join Suworow, on the 29th of September, he hastily left Warsaw, resolved, notwithstanding the entreaties of a great number of his friends, to try the chance of a battle for preventing this junction; but Poninski, who was ordered to hinder the Russians from passing a river, gave it up to them, and disobeyed the command he had received to rejoin the army with his division, and Kosciusko, who wanted this succour, was attacked at Macieiowice on the 4th of October, by general Fersen. Though the Russians were three times as numerous as the Poles, the victory was hardly contended for the whole day; Kosciusko twice repulsed the enemy, and in this action displayed the talents of a leader, with the bravery of a soldier; he, by prodigies of valour, long rendered the matter doubtful, but, pierced with wounds, he at last fell senseless into the power of the conqueror, and the Cosaques were going to put an end to his life, when the Russian officers informed them who he was, and on hearing his name, they testified great admiration of his courage, and regret for his misfortune. The Russians shewed him the respect due to his character, and sent him to Petersburg, where the empress, too much irritated to be generous, shut him up in a dungeon, where he remained till after her death; but being set free by Paul I, in May, 1797, he went to the United States, where he received every mark of respect from the government and the citizens.In 1798 he returned to France, where he met with a reception no less flattering; at Bayonne, where he landed, military honours were paid him, and at Paris all parties courted the defender of Poland. About the end of 1799 his countrymen in the army of Italy offered him the sabre of John Sobieski, which was found at Our Lady of Loretto. Since that time he has resided in the French capital, and in 1806 was still there.

LAHARPE (JEAN FRANCOIS DE),

OF the French Academy, was born at Paris, on the 20th of November, 1733. His father was a native of Switzerland, but he served in the French army as a captain of artillery. Not having any fortune to expect he was indebted to G. T. Asselin, head of the college of Harcourt, for the first attention paid to his education in that university, where he gained all the prizes; for by him he was appointed bursar. Shortly after he left college, some satirical verses against the professors made their appearance, and being attributed to him, caused him to be for some time confined. He commenced his literary career by some heroic epistles printed in 1759, with an essay on this species of writing. He afterwards published several others, as that from Cato to Cæsar, from Hannibal to Flaminius, from Montezuma to Cortez, and from Elizabeth of France to Don Carlos. Laharpe was but 25 years of age when he brought forward his tragedy of Warwick, which had great success, and from the circumstance of his being still so young, a hope was entertained that the French theatre would have another great tragic writer to boast; but his other works have not fulfilled this expectation. The drama of Melania, which appeared in 1770, is written in a polished and elegant style, but the religious persons who are brought on the stage, long caused the representation to be prevented, and the author himself, towards the end of his life, acknowledged the justice of this prohibition, by withdrawing Melania from the stage, and enjoining, in his will, that it should be acted no more. His tragedies of Gustavus Vasa, Timoleon, Menzikoff, the Barmécides, Joan of Naples, and Coriolanus, are reckoned amongst his most feeble works; Philoctetes, in which he has preserved some ancient beauties, and his ingenious comedy of the Rival Muses, had more success. Laharpe every year assembled, at his plays, a great number of academical crowns, which he gained either for poems or for discourses. There is a translation by him of Camoens's Lusiad, and of Suetonius's Emperors; the latter is but little esteemed; his 20 volumes of the abridgement of Prévost's Voyages, are rather a bookselling speculation, than a literary monument; and his amatory poem of Tangu and Phelima, the works of his youth, was but ill suited to the severity of his later principles. He was for a long time editor of the literary part of the Mercure, and enriched it with many well chosen extracts: after having appeared a good poet and a good orator, he shewed himself a man of deep reading, and an ingenious but severe and ill-natured critic; he developed his principles of taste still better in his lessons at the Lyceum and in his Course of Literature, upon which work prin

cipally rests his real glory.-At the beginning of the revolution Laharpe adopted its principles, and went so far as to preach its maxims in his lessons at the Lyceum; where, at the close of 1792, at the time of the greatest revolutionary ferment, he declaimed a very vehement hymn to liberty, in which the following lines are particularly remarkable: The sword, my friends, the sword! it presses on carnage-The sword! it drinks blood, blood nourishes rage, and rage inflicts death.' Another day, Laharpe appearing in the same assembly with a red cap on his head, cried out, This cap penetrates and inflames my brain!' He also composed several other poems for the revolution; but when the reign of terror had opened his eyes, when he had been imprisoned as a suspected person, he came out of his confinement filled with indignation against tyranny, and with zeal for a religion which persecution vainly endeavoured to destroy. He had been a disciple and admirer of Voltaire, who had paid him by eulogiums for his devotion to the party of philosophers; he from that time declared himself their enemy, and when he had recovered his liberty, pronounced on the 31st of December, 1794, from the tribune of the Lyceum, an energetic and very eloquent discourse on the crimes which had just stained the French name; and he from that time attacked the principles of the revolution in all the writings which came from his pen, especially that entitled On the Fanaticism in the Revolutionary Tongue, which he published in 1797, and in the Memorial, a journal which he edited with Fontanes and de Vauxhelles, and which occasioned him to be included in the law of transportation of the 18th of Fructidor, year 5, (4th September, 1797,) from which he had the happiness to escape. The consular government put an end to his proscription in 1800; and two years afterwards he underwent a new banishment of several months, the reasons for which were not made public; it is only known that he wrote several books of a poem on religion and the revolution, the most energetic passages of which he often took pleasure in reciting before his friends. In 1801 he published his correspondence with Paul the First, a work in which has been found a great part of his ancient ideas and former enmities. A severe and implacable critic, he had made himself numerous enemies, and his variations in politics and religion often furnished them with arms against him. In the last years of his life few days passed without his going to mass, and performing all the other duties of religion. He left behind him many unfinished manuscripts, especially the poem which we have just mentioned, and some books of a translation into verse of the Jerusalem Delivered; four volumes by him, entitled Select Works, have been lately announced. Laharpe died on the 10th of February, 1803, at the age of 64; he ended his will with these VOL. VIJK

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words: I supplicate Divine Providence to grant the wishes that I make for the happiness of my native land. May my country long enjoy peace and quiet! May the holy maxims of the gospel be generally followed, for the happiness of society!' His coffin was accompanied to the burying-ground of Vaugirard, by the members of the Institute, and a great number of friends; M. de Fontanes, who was long his friend, and who appreciated him properly, then bestowed on him a short and brilliant panegyric: he had just entered into the Institute as a member of the ancient academy.

LALANDE (J. J. LE FRANCAIS),

Director of the observatory, inspector of the college of France, member of the Institute and of the principal learned societies of Europe, member of the legion of honour, &c. &c. born at Bourg in Bresse, July the 11th, 1732. He originally went to the bar, but his love of science soon made him leave it, and after having studied astronomy at Lyons under father Beraud, a Jesuit, he came to Paris to improve still more by the instructions of Delisle and Lemonnier. Having in 1751 been appointed by the king to observe the distance of the moon from the earth at Berlin, he was chosen a member of the academy in that city; and shortly after, on the 7th of February, 1753, he was elected one of the academy of sciences at Paris. In 1802 he presented the Institute with the sum of 10,000 livres to found a perpetual prize for the most important discovery in astronomy, or the most important work on this science that should appear in the course of cach year. In 1805 Alexander I. renewed the grant of a pension which Catharine II. had conferred on him, and of which Paul I. had deprived him. In 1805 Lalande owned himslf to be the author of the republican Calendar, but pleaded in his justification his not venturing to refuse Fabre d'Eglantine, who had required it of him in 1793. Before the revolution Lalande made a public profession of atheism; in 1793 he delivered a speech at the Pantheon, with the red cap on his head, against the existence of God: in 1805 he published a supplement to the Dictionary of Atheists, by Silvain Maréchal, in which he endeavours to prove there is no Deity, and in support of his opinion he cites not only the dead but even living persons, and such as are now holding the chief dignities of the French empire, and who, as for instance, Francois de Neufchâteau, president of the senate, strongly protested in the public prints against this injurious charge. The emperor, on being informed of Lalande's conduct, enjoined him

to publish nothing more with his name, in a letter dated from the palace at Schoenbrunn, January the 18th, 1806, which was read at a general meeting of the Institute, all the classes of which had been specially summoned. The substance of this letter is, that M. Lalande, whose name had hitherto been united with important labours in science, had lately fallen into a state of childhood, which appeared now in little articles unworthy his name, which he sent to the public prints: now in the public profession he made of atheism, a sad doctrine, which if it leave unimpaired the morals of a few individuals, operates fatally on those of society in general;' in consequence, his Majesty interdicts M. Lalande from printing any thing more with his name. M: Lalande, who was present, rose and said, 'I will conform to the orders of his Majesty.' Lalande's principal works are:-Hally's Astronomical Tables of Planets and Comets, augmented with several new tables, and the History of the Comet of 1759; Explanation of the Astronomical Calculations in 1762; Travels of a Frenchman in Italy in the years 1765 and 1766, reprinted in 1786; all the Astronomical articles in the Encyclopedia of Yverdun; in the supplements to that of Paris 1776 and 1777; and in the New Encyclopedia arranged according to the order of subjects, 1782; all the Mathematical articles, and several others in the Journals des Savans, from 1766 to 1792; sixteen volumes on the Knowledge of the Weather, and the Motions of the Celestial Bodies; the Arts of Manufacturers of Paper, Parchment, and Pasteboard, of Dressers of Chamois, Turkey, Kid, and Hungary Leathers; and of Tanners and Curriers, in the great collection of Arts and Trades by the Academy of Sciences; about 160 Astronomical Memoirs inserted in the volumes of the Academy from 1751 till 1790, and in the Memoirs of the Institute; a number of Memoirs in the Leipzig Transactions, in the Memoirs of the Academies of Berlin, of Dijon, and History of Astronomy, a complete work on that science; an Abridgment of Astronomy, translated into German and Italian, reprinted in 1795; Remarks on the Comets which may approach the earth, 1773. This work alarmed all Paris at the time; every one was apprehensive from the conjectures there stated, that the earth would be inundated or set on fire by the comet which then appeared in the heavens. Ephemeris of the Movements of the Celestial Bodies from 1775 to 1800; History of the Canals of Navigation, and particularly the Canal of Languedoc, 1778; Astronomy for Ladies, 1786; Abridgment of Navigation, printed at the cost of the republic, in 1793. He has now in the press a Celestial History, containing an immense body of observations; and an Astronomical Bibliog raphy, containing historical notes on the history of astronomy, particularly since the year 1782, where that of Bailly ends 32