made to the successful artist, one deserves particularly to be noticed—Louis XVI. requested a "Brutus," as a companion picture to the "Horatii." The mention of the unfortunate Louis recalls that dark period in the history of our artist which shadowed the rest of his life with regret and almost with remorse. Called upon in 1790 to record with his pencil the celebrated meeting of the Jeu-de-Paume, David found himself gradually entangled in the revolutionary element. Elected soon after to represent the city of Paris at the convention, he joined the party of the regicides, and concurred in all their excesses. His artistical talents were enthusiastically placed at their service, and their bloody work furnished him with only too many subjects for his pencil. In the convention he followed Robespierre, and occassionally outstripped him in denunciation of the enemies of the republic. His imagination was as active in the tribune as in the studio. Twice the vicissitudes of the time brought him acquainted with a prison; he was released the first time on the petition of his own pupils; the second, by the general amnesty of October, 1795. At length David came back to the exclusive exercise of his art, becoming the first painter of the empire, and the costumier of its pageants. He was kept incessantly at work. His fertile pencil could not keep pace with the demands made upon it by the most phantasmagoric period of history. He portrayed the new Cæsar under all manner of travesties, and in all positions and characters, and between whiles had to turn his hand to all kinds of decoration and blazonry. He sickened at length of labours, into which he could not put his soul, and he sought relief in the composition of the celebrated picture of the "Thermopyles." But this was to be the last great work he was ever to carry out in Paris. At the second restoration, the regicide David was banished from France; and his name was erased from the rolls of the too servile Institute. Having taken up his abode at Brussels, David, resisting all offers of patronage from foreign courts, tried to comfort the days of his exile, partly by completing many of his unfinished subjects, partly by producing a few new ones, and thus adding a few more laurels to the many he had gathered in life. During this time the greatest consolation he experienced was the receipt from France of a medal struck in his honour by his former pupils and admirers. Although far advanced in age, and secretly worried by many a grief, David bore up with uncommon activity and good health until the summer of 1825, when he was seized with a serious malady, to which, after a protracted lingering between recovery and relapse, he succumbed on the 29th of December. According to Miel (the best of his biographers) David's last moments were spent in examining and correcting a proof of the engraving of his celebrated picture of the "Thermopyles," when, with the conscious pride of so great an artist, pointing to the principal figure, he is said to have spoken these his last words—"No other but myself could have conceived and painted such a Leonidas!"—R. M.
DAVID, Pierre Jean, usually called from his birthplace, David d'Angers, one of the most eminent sculptors of our time, was born in 1789; died in 1856. He belongs especially to that school of modern sculpture that delights in blending the spirit of Greek art with the forms required to give historical accuracy to the impersonations of our period. His works for the Pantheon and the Hôtel-de-Ville in Paris; his monuments in the cemetery of Pére-la-Chaise; his tomb of Botzaris at Missolonghi, as well as the many portrait-statues he has executed—are works marked with all the features of a great and original talent. But his claims to celebrity are not limited to these. He has brought sculpture to be most useful to society at large, by modelling hundreds, if not thousands, of medallions of the most celebrated men of the age, in which he has not only attained a rare degree of external resemblance, but also succeeded in unmistakably fixing the most recondite features of character. The abstract or allegoric subjects which David d'Angers treated in his active career, are comparatively few. One of them, however, must not be passed in silence, viz., the "Statue of the Republic," a work in which all the features of that form of government are strikingly represented. David executed this work during the months that followed the revolution of February, 1848. At this period, being called to the assemblée constituante as a representative for the department of Maine-et-Loire, he displayed such a decided bias for ultra-democratic ideas, as to render, at the crisis of 1851, his departure from France a necessity. This temporary absence our sculptor eventually turned to profit by visiting Greece and Athens. David owed his artistical education partly to the Academy of Paris, and partly to his stay in Rome. He was highly thought of and sincerely loved by his brothers in art.—R. M.
DAVIDS, Arthur Lumley, a promising young orientalist, was born in Hampshire on the 28th of August, 1811, the only son of Jewish parents. He was a remarkably precocious boy, and early acquired a knowledge, singular for his age, of science and languages. He became a proficient not only in the languages of the continent, but in Arabic, Persian, and especially in Turkish. Removed at an early age to London, he was qualifying himself for the profession of the law, when, in his twenty-second year, he was cut off by cholera. Only a few weeks before his death he had seen through the press a Turkish grammar—preceded by a preliminary dissertation on the history of the Turkish language, and with valuable accompaniments—much the best that had yet appeared in England. In 1836 his mother published a French translation of it, dedicated by permission to Louis Philippe (the dedication of the original had been accepted by Sultan Mahmoud), and from the brief memoir of its author which she prefixed to it, these few facts have been transferred.—F. E.
DAVIDSON, John, a distinguished Scottish divine of the school of John Knox and Andrew Melville, was born about the year 1550, and in 1567 was enrolled as a student in St. Leonards college, St. Andrews. At an early period he displayed the fearless courage and zeal in behalf of the truth which characterized him through life. In 1573, when holding the office of regent in the college of St. Leonards, he was imprisoned and then banished for writing a poem against the avaricious policy of Regent Morton. He was a second time obliged to leave the country in consequence of his boldness in pronouncing sentence of excommunication against Robert Montgomery, minister of Stirling, for his simoniacal purchase of the archbishopric of Glasgow from the earl of Lennox. On his return home Davidson became minister of Prestonpans, and wrote an answer in 1590 to Dr. Bancroft's attack on the Church of Scotland, and in 1596 took an active part in the renewal of the national covenant. In consequence of his vehement opposition to the proposal made in 1598, that the clergy should vote in parliament in the name of the church, which he regarded as a step towards episcopacy, Davidson was committed prisoner to the castle of Edinburgh. This place of confinement was subsequently exchanged for his own parish. He died at Prestonpans in 1604. Davidson was a pious and benevolent, as well as an ardent and public-spirited man. At his own expense he built the church, manse, and school of Prestonpans, and bequeathed all his heritable property for the support of the school, which was erected for teaching the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages.—J. T.
DAVIDSON, John, a celebrated traveller, born about the beginning of the present century. He quitted his business of a chemist in 1826; after which he travelled on the continent of Europe, in Asia, and America. But his last and most famous expedition was into the interior of Africa. He was robbed and murdered within twenty-five days' journey of Timbuctoo, on the 18th December, 1836.—R. M., A.
DAVIDSON, Lucretia Maria, the elder of two remarkable sisters, American poetesses, both of whom died young, was born at Plattsburg, on Lake Champlain, New York, September 27, 1808. The impulse to versify seized upon her at almost the earliest age, though her modesty led her to burn her papers when she saw her propensity was known. The most juvenile that was saved, was an epitaph on a robin, written in her ninth year. The straitened circumstances of the family put her domestic services in requisition for most of the time; yet such was her craving for books, that she is said to have read more at the age of twelve than perhaps any among those whose condition of life gave them ampler leisure. It seems, too, that this ardour of mental effort was not indulged at the expense of her affections; in proof of which is related her surrender to her mother (who was then sick) of twenty dollars given her to buy books. Meanwhile, friends who discerned the risks of this earnest pursuit of culture, coupled as it was with diseased sensibility and uncommon fragility of structure, advised the withdrawing from her of the means of study. In 1824, a gentleman who had long known the family, but who had chanced not to see Lucretia since early childhood, was so impressed with her promise as to offer to adopt her, and did in fact assume the expense of sending her for
