Delacour. Others were A Village Priest (Haymarket, 1890) from Le Secret de la terreuse, a melodrama by MM. Busnach and Cauvin; A Marriage of Convenience (Haymarket, 1897) from Un Mariage de Louis XV, by Alex. Dumas, père, The Silver Key (Her Majesty’s, 1897) from his Mlle de Belle-isle, and The Musqueteers (1899) from the same author’s novel; Frocks and Frills (Haymarket, 1902) from the Doigts de fées of MM. Scribe and Legouvé; The Garden of Lies (St James’s Theatre, 1904) from Mr Justus Miles Forman’s novel; Business is Business (His Majesty’s Theatre, 1905), a rather free adaptation from Octave Mirbeau’s Les Affaires sont les affaires; and The Diplomatists (Royalty Theatre, 1905) from La Poudre aux yeux, by Labiche.
GRUNDY, MRS, the name of an imaginary English character,
who typifies the disciplinary control of the conventional “proprieties”
of society over conduct, the tyrannical pressure of
the opinion of neighbours on the acts of others. The name
appears in a play of Thomas Morton, Speed the Plough (1798),
in which one of the characters, Dame Ashfield, continually refers
to what her neighbour Mrs Grundy will say as the criterion
of respectability. Mrs Grundy is not a character in the play,
but is a kind of “Mrs Harris” to Dame Ashfield.
GRUNER, GOTTLIEB SIGMUND (1717–1778), the author of
the first connected attempt to describe in detail the snowy
mountains of Switzerland. His father, Johann Rudolf Gruner
(1680–1761), was pastor of Trachselwald, in the Bernese
Emmenthal (1705), and later (1725) of Burgdorf, and a great
collector of information relating to historical and scientific
matters; his great Thesaurus topographico-historicus totius
ditionis Bernensis (4 vols. folio, 1729–1730) still remains in MS.,
but in 1732 he published a small work entitled Deliciae urbis
Bernae, while he possessed an extensive cabinet of natural
history objects. Naturally such tastes had a great influence
on the mind of his son, who was born at Trachselwald, and
educated by his father and at the Latin school at Burgdorf, not
going to Berne much before 1736, when he published a dissertation
on the use of fire by the heathen. In 1739 he qualified as a
notary, in 1741 became the archivist of Hesse-Homburg, and in
1743 accompanied Prince Christian of Anhalt-Schaumburg to
Silesia and the university of Halle. He returned to his native
land before 1749, when he obtained a post at Thorberg, being
transferred in 1764 to Landshut and Fraubrunnen. It was in
1760 that he published in 3 vols. at Berne his chief work, Die
Eisgebirge des Schweizerlandes (bad French translation by M.
de Kéralio, Paris, 1770). The first two volumes are filled by
a detailed description of the snowy Swiss mountains, based not
so much on personal experience as on older works, and a very
large number of communications received by Gruner from
numerous friends; the third volume deals with glaciers in
general, and their various properties. Though in many respects
imperfect, Gruner’s book sums up all that was known on the
subject in his day, and forms the starting-point for later writers.
The illustrations are very curious and interesting. In 1778 he
republished (nominally in London, really at Berne) much of
the information contained in his larger work, but thrown into
the form of letters, supposed to be written in 1776 from various
spots, under the title of Reisen durch die merkwürdigsten Gegenden
Helvetiens (2 vols.). (W. A. B. C.)
GRÜNEWALD, MATHIAS. The accounts which are given of
this German painter, a native of Aschaffenburg, are curiously
contradictory. Between 1518 and 1530, according to statements
adopted by Waagen and Passavant, he was commissioned by
Albert of Brandenburg, elector and archbishop of Mainz, to
produce an altarpiece for the collegiate church of St Maurice
and Mary Magdalen at Halle on the Saale; and he acquitted
himself of this duty with such cleverness that the prelate in
after years caused the picture to be rescued from the Reformers
and brought back to Aschaffenburg. From one of the churches
of that city it was taken to the Pinakothek of Munich in 1836.
It represents St Maurice and Mary Magdalen between four
saints, and displays a style so markedly characteristic, and so
like that of Lucas Cranach, that Waagen was induced to call
Grünewald Cranach’s master. He also traced the same hand
and technical execution in the great altarpieces of Annaberg
and Heilbronn, and in various panels exhibited in the museums
of Mainz, Darmstadt, Aschaffenburg, Vienna and Berlin. A
later race of critics, declining to accept the statements of Waagen
and Passavant, affirm that there is no documentary evidence to
connect Grünewald with the pictures of Halle and Annaberg,
and they quote Sandrart and Bernhard Jobin of Strassburg
to show that Grünewald is the painter of pictures of a different
class. They prove that he finished before 1516 the large altarpiece
of Issenheim, at present in the museum of Colmar, and
starting from these premises they connect the artist with Altdorfer
and Dürer to the exclusion of Cranach. That a native of the
Palatinate should have been asked to execute pictures for a
church in Saxony can scarcely be accounted strange, since we
observe that Hans Baldung (Grün) was entrusted with a commission
of this kind. But that a painter of Aschaffenburg should
display the style of Cranach is strange and indeed incredible,
unless vouched for by first-class evidence. In this case documents
are altogether wanting, whilst on the other hand it is beyond
the possibility of doubt, even according to Waagen, that the
altarpiece of Issenheim is the creation of a man whose teaching
was altogether different from that of the painter of the pictures
of Halle and Annaberg. The altarpiece of Issenheim is a fine
and powerful work, completed as local records show before
1516 by a Swabian, whose distinguishing mark is that he followed
the traditions of Martin Schongauer, and came under the influence
of Altdorfer and Dürer. As a work of art the altarpiece
is important, being a poliptych of eleven panels, a carved central
shrine covered with a double set of wings, and two side pieces
containing the Temptation of St Anthony, the hermits Anthony
and Paul in converse, the Virgin adored by Angels, the Resurrection,
the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, St Sebastian, St Anthony,
and the Marys wailing over the dead body of Christ. The author
of these compositions is also the painter of a series of monochromes
described by Sandrart in the Dominican convent, and
now in part in the Saalhof at Frankfort, and a Resurrection in
the museum of Basel, registered in Amerbach’s inventory as
the work of Grünewald.
GRUTER (or Gruytère), JAN (1560–1627), a critic and
scholar of Dutch parentage by his father’s side and English by
his mother’s, was born at Antwerp on the 3rd of December
1560. To avoid religious persecution his parents while he was
still young came to England; and for some years he prosecuted
his studies at Cambridge, after which he went to Leiden, where
he graduated M. A. In 1586 he was appointed professor of history
at Wittenberg, but as he refused to subscribe the formula concordiae
he was unable to retain his office. From 1589 to 1592
he taught at Rostock, after which he went to Heidelberg, where
in 1602 he was appointed librarian to the university. He died
at Heidelberg on the 20th of September 1627.
Gruter’s chief works were his Inscriptiones antiquae totius orbis Romani (2 vols., Heidelberg, 1603), and Lampas, sive fax artium liberalium (7 vols., Frankfort, 1602–1634).
GRUYÈRE (Ger. Greyerz), a district in the south-eastern
portion of the Swiss canton of Fribourg, famed for its cattle
and its cheese, and the original home of the “Ranz des Vaches,”
the melody by which the herdsmen call their cows home at
milking time. It is composed of the middle reach (from Montbovon
to beyond Bulle) of the Sarine or Saane valley, with its
tributary glens of the Hongrin (left), the Jogne (right) and the
Trême (left), and is a delightful pastoral region (in 1901 it
contained 17,364 cattle). It forms an administrative district
of the canton of Fribourg, its population in 1900 being 23,111,
mainly French-speaking and Romanists. From Montbovon
(11 m. by rail from Bulle) there are mountain railways leading
S.W. past Les Avants to Montreux (14 m.), and E. up the
Sarine valley past Château d’Oex to Saanen or Gessenay (14 m.),
and by a tunnel below a low pass to the Simme valley and Spiez
on the Lake of Thun. The modern capital of the district is the
small town of Bulle [Ger. Boll], with a 13th-century castle and in
1900 3330 inhabitants, French-speaking and Romanists. But
