having carried his art to the highest perfection. However varied his subjects, all were executed with a precision and taste seldom or ever excelled. The son, who died in 1831, carried off the second grand prize decreed by the National Institute.
AVRIL, Le Pere Philippe, jesuit and French missionary, seventeenth century. He was ordered to penetrate into China through Tartary, and he traversed Syria, Kurdistan, Armenia, and Persia, but was arrested by the governor of Astracan, and obliged to return. He published his travels under the title of "Voyage en divers états d'Europe et d'Asie," Paris, 1692.
AVRILLOT, Barbe, better known by her name of Acarie, founder of the order of the Carmelites in France; born at Paris, 1st July, 1565; died, 18th April, 1618. It is said that Barbe wished, at the age of five years, to take the veil, but that her parents, having little faith in her early asceticism, married her to an accountant called Peter Acarie. This man happened to be a warm friend to some of the League, and when Paris succumbed to Henry IV. in 1594, Peter was obliged to flee, leaving his wife and six children to be deprived by his creditors of all his means and effects. Then it was that Barbe showed a resignation and courage worthy of her early promise: the old call recurred, and having placed her infants in an asylum, she resolved on establishing an order of Carmelites in France. In this project she succeeded. She became directoress of the religious house she had founded, and engaged one of her friends, Madame Sainte-Beuve, to establish a convent of Ursulines in the same faubourg. She went under the name of Sister Mary of the Incarnation, and died in her retreat among the Carmelites of Pontoise. Several works are attributed to her.—A. L.
AVY, Antoine Sylvain, Baron, born at Cressier, 25th May, 1776; died, 13th January, 1814. This general of the French army served in Germany and Spain. He was killed at the siege of Anvers, at the age of thirty-eight, and has his name on the bronze tables of Versailles.
AWDELAY, AWDLAY, or AUDLEY, John, an English poet, about 1426. He was a canon in Shropshire, and chantry priest to Lord Strange. His poems are curious for their antiquity and county patois. His condition is told by himself:—
" Jon, the blynde, Awdelay,
The furst priest to the Lord Straunge he was,
Of this chauntre, here in this place,
That made this bok by Goddus grace,
Deef, sick, blynd, as he lay."—A. L.
AWHADI DI MARAGHA, a Persian poet of the thirteenth century, who developed the doctrines of Sufi.
AXAJACATL or AXAYACATZLIN, emperor of the ancient Mexicans or Azteques, died 1477. He was father of the celebrated Montezuma, who was one of nine sons. Following Humboldt through the obscurity of Mexican history, we learn that Axajacatl was the sixth king of Mexico, called in the language of the natives Tenochtitlan. He inaugurated his reign by an expedition against Tehuantepec to obtain human sacrifices, and afterwards, having repulsed the people who attempted to take possession of his kingdom, carried the war among his neighbours. It was under his reign that 50,000 Indians brought from the mountains of Cujoacan, the enormous rock which is covered with bas-reliefs, and served for the altar of the great temple called Teocalli. The ostentatious devotion roused the envy of the people of Tlatelolco, who, under the impression that their neighbour was getting into too much favour with the gods, erected a Teocalli of their own, and the rivalship ended in a war. The king of the Tlatelolcans was slain, and his body carried to Axajacatl, who tore out the heart, as a sacrifice to the Mexican deities. Afterwards, in 1475 and 1476, Axajacatl subdued several of the neighbouring nations, Tochpan, Tlaximalojan, and Michoacan, and proved himself the greatest of the kings who reigned before the celebrated Montezuma, his son; having added thirty-seven provinces to his kingdom. He was at once voluptuous in his pleasures, rigid in the execution of the laws, and devout in the religious culture of his subjects, who were noted for their sanguinary disposition.—A. L.
AXEL, a Swedish philosopher of the sixteenth century, secretary to Gustavus Adolphus, and author of a treatise in the Swedish tongue, on Morals, 1662.
AXELSEN or AXELSON TOTT, a powerful Danish family which flourished in the latter half of the fifteenth century, and the members of which figured in the wars between Christian I. and John IV. of Denmark, and Karl Knutsen and Eric the Pomeranian, kings of Sweden. Peter Axelsen was the head of the family. He had nine sons, of whom Olaf, Iver, Eric, and Aage acquired some reputation. The first, Olaf, made himself master of Gothland; the second, Iver, retained the possession, and became a corsair. The third, Eric, was governor of Stockholm; and the fourth, Aage, a Danish councillor of state.
AXEN, Petrus, a German jurisconsult and man of letters, was born at Husum in Holstein in 1635, settled as a lawyer in Schleswig in 1670, and died in 1707. Axen was a good philologist, and carried on a correspondence with some eminent classicists, such as Grævius and Gronovius. He has left a variety of works, printed and in manuscript, of a historical or philological nature, among the rest:—"Phædri Fabulæ Æsopicæ, cum prioribus ac posterioribus notis Rigaltii," Hamburg, 1671, 8vo. Axen's own very copious and diffuse notes to the first book, are to be found only in the first edition. In the university library at Kiel there is now a manuscript of Cornelius Nepos, which once belonged to King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, and which was one of the treasures of Axen's extensive library.—A. M.
AXIOTHEA. There were two persons of antiquity, celebrated under this name. One was a gentlewoman of Athens, who, attired as a man, regularly attended the lectures of Plato, and another, who became the wife of Nicocles, king of Cyprus.
AXPOELE, W. van, a Flemish historical and portrait painter, who, together with Johann Martins, executed in 1419 several paintings in oil colours for the municipal palace of Gand. These paintings chiefly consisted of portraits of the counts of Flanders.
AXT or AXTIUS, Johann Conrad, a German physician and botanist, lived at Arnstadt, a town of Thuringia, during the latter half of the seventeenth century. He studied at the university of Helmstaedt, and there received his degree of doctor of medicine. He wrote a treatise on "Coniferous Plants," which was published at Jena in 1679. He also published some medical treatises.—J. H. B.
AXTEL, Daniel, a colonel in the service of the parliament in the great civil war, who guarded the high court of justice during the trial of Charles I. He served in Ireland under Cromwell, and was appointed governor of Kilkenny. On the Restoration he was excepted from the act of amnesty, and suffered death amidst the grossest indignities.
AXTELMEYER, Stanislas Reinhard, a German philosopher, who flourished early in the eighteenth century, and wrote upon the adulteration of food, "Hokus Pokeria," Ulm, 1704. He wrote a variety of other works, scientific, political, and satirical, under very strange titles.
AXULAR, Pedro, a Basque author, a native of Sarra on the frontiers of Navarra, who lived about 1640, and wrote a work entitled "Geroko Guero," containing a singular mixture of Roman catholic and classical mythology.
AYALA, Barnabè d', a Spanish painter, a pupil of Francisco Zurbazan. He was successful in imitating the style of his master, especially in the treatment of drapery. Ayala was one of the founders of the Academy of Seville, his native town, in which he died in 1673.—R. M.
AYALA, Balthasar d', a lawyer of Antwerp, who flourished in the sixteenth century.
AYALA, Pedro Lopez de, a Spanish chronicler and translator, born in the kingdom of Murcia in 1332, was the son of the Adelantado, Fernando Perez de Ayala. He was taken prisoner by the Black Prince at the battle of Najera in 1367, and sent to England, where, according to the account of his captivity which he left in his poems, he was kept in chains in a dark dungeon. After his release he became councillor to Henry of Trastamarre, who had driven his brother, Peter the Cruel, from Castile. In the reign of Henry's son, John I., he fought at the battle of Aljubarotta, and was again taken prisoner. He died in 1407. His translations gave a marked impulse to Spanish literature, and his "History of Castile" is one of the most valuable records that have come down to us from the middle ages.
AYALA, Sebastiano, a Jesuit, born of a noble family at Castro-Giovanni in Sicily in 1744; died in 1817. He was professor of rhetoric at Malta, and after the suppression of his order, became, through the influence of Count Caunitz, minister of the republic of Ragusa, at the court of Vienna. He published a life of Metastasio, and some other valuable works.
AYBAR, Ximenes Perez, a Spanish historical painter, who studied his art under his relative Ximenes of Taragona. His
