More; the later, to Count de Guibert. Both breathe an ardent though unmerited devotion, and are in their kind little classics of passion. They were published by Guibert's widow in 1800. Consult: Asse, Mlle. de Lespinasse et Mme. du Deffand (Paris, 1877); Bonnefon, in Revue d'Histoire Littéraire (Paris, 1897). The career of Mlle. de L'Espinasse serves as the groundwork for a novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Lady Rose's Daughter (1903). The Letters appeared in English dress at Boston in 1903.
LESQUEREUX, lā̇′ke-rẽ′, Leo (1806-89). An
American botanist, born at Fleurier, Switzerland,
of French Huguenot ancestry. After several years
at the academy of Neuchâtel, he went to Eisenach
as a teacher of French. Upon his return to
Switzerland he became principal in a school at La
Chaux de Fonds, but, owing to deafness, he had
to give up teaching. His old love of plants led
him to study botany as opportunity came, and
he published a catalogue of mosses, and later
won a prize for a treatise on peat-bogs. These
monographs won him the friendship of Louis
Agassiz, and enabled him to travel over Northern
Europe studying the formation of peat and of
coal. In 1848 he went to the United States,
lived with Agassiz at Cambridge for a time, and
then became the assistant of William S. Sullivant.
The two, after expeditions into the
mountains of the South, published Museci Americani
Exsiccati (1856) and Icones Muscarum (1864).
Afterwards Lesquereux again took up his study
of coal formation, traveled in Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Kentucky, Illinois, and Arkansas, and worked on
the geological surveys of these States. Among
his reports the “Catalogue of the Fossil Plants
which have been named or described from the
Coal Measures of North America,” the first and
the second reports of the Pennsylvania Geological
Survey (1880), is the most important work in this
field. He also wrote: Contributions to the Fossil
Flora of the Western Territories (1874-83);
The Flora of the Dakota Group, edited by V. H.
Knowlton (1891); and, with Thomas P. James,
the continuation of Sullivant's work, Manual of
the Mosses of North America (1884). He became
entirely deaf in middle life, but was an expert
lip-reader.
LES′SEPS, Fr. pron. lā̇′sĕps′, Ferdinand, Vicomte de (1805-94). A French diplomat, celebrated for the promotion and construction of the Suez Canal. He was born in Versailles; was early employed in the consular service, and served as consul at Cairo, Rotterdam, Malaga, and Barcelona. In 1848-49 he was Minister to Spain. In 1854 M. de Lesseps went to Egypt and, securing the concurrence of the Viceroy, Said-Pasha, projected the construction of the great interoceanic canal of Suez. In 1856 he published his plans and projects, under the title of Percement de l'Isthme de Suez. But the Turkish Government, at the instigation of England, refused its authorization. In spite of many obstructions, M. de Lesseps won the Government to his support, and secured $40,000,000 in subscription to the capital stock required for the construction of the canal. Work was actually begun in 1859. On November 20, 1869, the completion was celebrated with imposing ceremonies. See Suez Canal.
The success of the enterprise determined M. de Lesseps to undertake the cutting of an interoceanic canal across the Isthmus of Panama. A company was organized in Paris in 1876, which procured from the Government of the United States of Colombia a concession to construct a canal on its territory. M. de Lesseps secured to himself the privileges and assumed the conditions of that grant. In 1880 he came from Aspinwall to New York and submitted to American capitalists a matured and detailed plan, etc. He became the president of the company for the construction of the ship-canal, the capital stock of which was 600,000,000 francs. The work was begun in 1881 after a series of difficulties in administration and construction (described under Panama Canal). In December, 1888, De Lesseps and his colleagues resigned, and judicial liquidators were appointed by the Government. In 1893, after a judicial investigation, M. de Lesseps and his son Charles were convicted of misappropriation of the funds of the company, and sentenced to fine and imprisonment; the sentence, however, was never executed.
A record of De Lesseps's many activities will be found in the following published works: Lettres, journal et documents relatifs à l'histoire du canal de Suez (1875-81); Souvenirs de quarante ans (1887); Origines du Canal de Suez (1890). For biographies of De Lesseps consult: Bertrand and Ferrier, Ferdinand de Lesseps (Paris, 1887), and Smith, Life and Enterprises of Ferdinand de Lesseps (London, 2d ed., 1895). See Suez Canal; Panama Canal.
LESSER CEL′ANDINE. A plant related to buttercup. See Ranunculus.
LES′SING, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-81). A German critic and dramatist, born at Kamenz, January 22, 1729; the earliest of the great German classical writers. More than any other, Lessing reformed German literature. His father, pastor at Kamenz, gave him his early instruction, and sent him to a famous school at Meissen, where he learned so rapidly that by royal decree he was admitted at seventeen to the University of Leipzig. Here his sturdy nature almost immediately asserted itself against the smug platitudes of the Leipzig critics. “I realized,” he wrote at this time, “that books might make me learned, but would never make me a man. I sought society to learn life.” He took lessons in dancing, fencing, riding, translated French plays for free theatre tickets, and thus he learned stage technique. In 1747 he printed a little volume of anacreontic verse, and in 1748 produced a juvenile play, Der junge Gelehrte. Then, assuring his disappointed father that he ‘could become a preacher any day,’ he left the theological faculty and entered the school of medicine. Soon afterwards (1748) he left Leipzig for Wittenberg and Berlin, the latter then as now the centre of German free thought. He lived by his pen, writing keen literary criticism and hack translations, and venturing on original dramas and lyrics of no great value.
At Berlin Lessing met Voltaire. They soon quarreled and parted, for Voltaire asserted that Lessing had betrayed a literary confidence, an improbable insinuation often revived by Lessing's literary enemies. Critically Lessing profited greatly by Voltaire. He gained wider horizons and was one of the first among German scholars to address himself directly to the body of the nation. Under his impulse Berlin grew independent of the Swiss school (see Bodmer), and his
