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Sir Thomas Clanvowe

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The name of an English poet first mentioned in the history of English literature by F. S. Ellis in 1896, when, in editing the text of The Book of Cupid, God of Love, or The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, for the Kelmscott Press, he stated that Professor Skeat had discovered that at the end of the best of the MSS. the author was called Clanvowe. In 1897 this information was confirmed and expanded by Professor Skeat in the supplementary volume of his Clarendon Press Chaucer (1894-1897). The beautiful romance of The Cuckoo and the Nightingale was published by Thynne in 153 2, and was attributed by him, and by successive editors down to the days of Henry Bradshaw, to Chaucer. It was due to this error that for three centuries Chaucer was supposed to be identified with the manor of Woodstock, and even painted, in fanciful pictures, as lying "Under a maple that is fair and green, Before the chamber-window of the Queen At Wodestock, upon the greene lea." But this queen could only be Joan of Navarre, who arrived in 1403, three years after Chaucer's death, and it is to the spring of that year that Professor Skeat attributes the composition of the poem. Sir Thomas Clanvowe was of a Herefordshire family, settled near Wigmore. He was a prominent figure in the courts of Richard II. and Henry IV., and is said to have been a friend of Prince Hal. He was one of those who "had begun to mell of Lollardy, and drink the gall of heresy." He was one of the twenty-five knights who accompanied John Beaufort (son of John of Gaunt) to Barbary in 1390.

The date of his birth is unknown, and his name is last mentioned in 1 4 04. The historic and literary importance of The Cuckoo and the Nightingale is great. It is the work of a poet who had studied the prosody of Chaucer with more intelligent care than either Occleve or Lydgate, and who therefore forms an important link between the 14th and i 5th centuries in English poetry. Clanvowe writes with a surprising delicacy and sweetness, in a five-line measure almost peculiar to himself. Professor Skeat points out a unique characteristic of Clanvowe's versification, namely, the unprecedented freedom with which he employs the suffix of the final -e, and rather avoids than seeks elision. The Cuckoo and the Nightingale was imitated by Milton in his sonnet to the Nightingale, and was rewritten in modern English by Wordsworth. It is a poem of so much individual beauty, that we must regret the apparent loss of everything else written by a poet of such unusual talent.

See also a critical edition of the Boke of Cupide by Dr Erich Vollmer (Berlin, 1898). (E. G.) Claparede, Jean Louis Rene Antoine Edouard (1832-1870), Swiss naturalist, was born at Geneva on the 24th of April 1832. He belonged to a French family, some members of which had taken refuge in that city after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In 1852 he began to study medicine and natural science at Berlin, where he was greatly influenced by J. Muller and C. G. Ehrenberg, the former being at that period engaged in his important researches on the Echinoderms. In 1855 he accompanied Muller to Norway, and there spent two months on a desolate reef that he might obtain satisfactory observations. The latter part of his stay at Berlin he devoted, along with J. Lachmann, to the study of the Infusoria and Rhizopods. In 1857 he obtained the degree of doctor, and in 1862 he was chosen professor of comparative anatomy at Geneva. In 1859 he visited England, and in company with W. B. Carpenter made a voyage to the Hebrides; and in 1863 he spent some months in the Bay of Biscay. On the appearance of Darwin's work on the Origin of Species, he adopted his theories and published a valuable series of articles on the subject in the Revue Germanique (1861). During 1865 and 1866 ill-health rendered him incapable of work, and he determined to pass the winter of1866-1867in Naples. The change of climate produced some amelioration, and his energy was attested by two elaborate volumes on the Annelidae of the gulf. He again visited Naples with advantage in 1868; but in 1870, instead of recovering as before, he grew worse, and on the 31st of May he'died at Siena on his way home. His Recherches sur la structure des annelides sedentaires were published posthumously in 1873.