After several battles, in which the advantage was generally on the side of the French, a decisive engagement took place near Catania, on the 20th April 1676, when the Dutch fleet was totally routed and De Ruyter mortally wounded. The greater part of the defeated fleet was afterwards burned in the harbour of Palermo, where it had taken refuge, and the French thus secured the undisputed command of the Mediterranean. For this important service Duquesne received a letter of thanks from Louis XIV., together with the title of marquis and the estate of Bouchet. Owing to his being a Protestant, however, his professional renk was not advanced. His last achievements were the bombardment of Algiers (1682-3), in order to effect the deliverance of the Christian captives and the bombardment of Genoa in 1684. On the revocation of the Edict of Nantes Duquesne lost his commission, but he was specially excepted from banishment. He died at Paris on the 2d February 1688.

DURAN, AUGUSTIN (1789-1862), one of the leaders of the literary movement in Spain during the present century, was born at Madrid, where his father held the post of court physician. He lost his mother in childhood, and, instead of being educated in the capital, was sent to the seminary at Vergara, rather to gain strength and health than such mathematics and Latin as his clerical teachers could supply. Thence he returned a firm believer in ghosts, and erudite in the traditions of Spanish romance. In 1817 he joined the university of Seville for the study of philosophy and law, and in due course was admitted an advocate at Valladolid. From 1821 to 1823 he held a post in the direccion general de estudios at Madrid; but in the latter year he was discarded on account of his political opinions, and it was not till 1834 that he received a new appointment as secretary of the board for the censorship of the press, shortly afterwards supplemented by a post in the National Library at Madrid. The revolution of 1840 again led to his dismissal; but he recovered his position in 1843, and in 1854 attained the rank of director of the library. Next year, however, he retired, and the rest of his life was devoted to his literary work. He died in 1862. It was in 1828, shortly after his first discharge from office, that he published his discourse on the influence which modern criticism had exercised on the ancient Spanish theatre (Discorso sobre il influjo que ha tenido la critica moderna en la decadencia del teatro antiguo); and, though the work was anonymous, it produced a marvellous effect on the tendencies of the national drama. He next endeavoured to make better known to

his fellow-countrymen those half-forgotten treasures of their literature, in the collection of which he had spared neither money nor toil. Five volumes of a Romancero general appeared from 1828 to 1832 (republished, with considerable additions and improvements, in 2 vols. 1849-1851), and Talia española, or a collection of old Spanish comedies, in 3 vols., in 1834. As an original poet the author is best known by a poem in imitation of the style of the 15th century, entitled Las tres toronjas del vergel de amor, or The Three Citron Trees of the Orchard of Love." DURANDUS, WILHELMUS (1237-1296), otherwise DURANTIS OF DURANTI, was born at Puimisson, sometimes written Puimoisson, a small town in the diocese of Beziers, in Languedoc, whence he is sometimes described as a native of Provence. He studied law under Bernardus of Parma, in the university of Bologna, where he was promoted to the degree of doctor. He shortly afterwards migrated to the university of Modena, where he became so famous by his lectures on the canon law that he attracted the notice of Pope Clement IV., who appointed him auditor of the palace, and subsequently subdeacon and chaplain. In 1274 he accompanied Pope Gregory X. as his secretary to the Council of Lyons, which is reckoned as the fourteenth general council,

and under the pontificates of several subsequent popes filled many highly responsible offices. He was appointed in 1277 spiritual and temporal legate of the patrimony of St Peter under Pope Nicholas III., and in 1278 took possession, in the name of the same Pope, of the provinces of Bologna and Romagna. In 1281 Pope Martin IV. named him vicar spiritual, and in 1283 governor of the temporalities of the two provinces, in which office he had the direction of the war against the rebellious province of Romagna. The town of Castrum Riparum Urbanatium having been burnt down during the war, he rebuilt it, and renamed it Castrum Durantis. Pope Urban VIII. subsequently gave to this town the name of Urbania, which it bears in the present day. Pope Honorius IV. retained Durandus in the same offices until the end of 1286, when his election to the bishopric of Meude, in Languedoc, was the occasion of his retiring for a short time from the conduct of civil affairs. Durandus, however, appears to have remained in Italy, and to have revised at this time several of his works. He refused in 1295 the archbishopric of Ravenna, which was offered to him by Pope Boniface VIII., and accepted in preference the more arduous office of governor of the province of Romagna and of the march of Ancona. The party of the Ghibellines, however, carried on hostilities against the Holy See with so much vigour that he found his strength unequal to the exigencies of government; and, having resigned his office, he retired to Rome, where he died on 1st November 1296.

Durandus was the author of several very learned works. The most famous of them is his Speculum Judiciale. This work is entitled in the printed copies, the earliest of which was published at Rome in folio in 1474, as Speculum Juris; but all the MSS. have the title of Speculum Judiciale; and Durandus himself, in his epistle dedicatory to Cardinal Ottobonus Fiesco, afterwards Pope Adrian V., describes it under this latter title. It is a practical treatise on civil and canon law, and it earned for its author, when young, the surname of the Father of Practice. Durandus is said to have completed it in 1271, at the age of thirty-four, and he revised it some time between 1287 and 1291. It has since his death acquired much celebrity as one of the best sources of the dogmatic history of law, and the canonists are accustomed to cite Durandus enriched by additions from the pen of John Andree in 1346, and under the bye-name of "the Speculator." The original work has been by further additions from the pen of Baldus. An alphabetic table of its contents (Inventorium) was drawn up by Cardinal Beranger in 1306, and the Speculum passed through thirty-eight editions between 1474 and 1678. The next important work of Durandus is his Repertorium Aureum or Breviarium, which is dedicated to Cardinal Matthæus; Durandus himself in his preface designates this work by the name of Breviarium, but it is described by him in the Preface to the Speculum by the title of Repertorium Aureum, under which title it is more generally known. It is supposed to havə been composed by Durandus in the interval between the first completion and the revision of the Speculum. His Commentarius in Concilium Lugdunense is a work of much interest, as Durandus himself drew up the Decretals, which after his death were inserted in the Sextus. Durandus also wrote a commentary on the decretals of Pope Nicholas III., which is only known to us from the epitaph on his tomb, as preserved by Sarti, and which enumerates all his chief writings, amongst which may be mentioned his Speculum Legatorum, inserted in the Speculum Judiciale, his Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, which has passed through many editions, the earliest of which was printed at Mayence in 1459, and a copy of which is stated by the Abbé Pascal to have been sold for 2700 francs. A manuscript of his Pontificale Patrum, being a treatise on the duties of bisliops, is preserved in the National Library of Paris. Durandus Porciano, bishop of Meaux, who died in 1332. and was the author the Speculator is sometimes confounded with Durandus of Santo of two treatises, De Jurisdictioni and De Legebus, and with Wilhelmus Durandus, his own nephew, who was the author of a work entitled De modo celebrandi Consilii, and who died in Cyprus in 1328.

DURANGO, a town of Spain, in the province of Biscay 16 miles south-east of Bilbao, at the confluence of the Durango and the Mañaria. As a military position of some importance it is often mentioned in history; its church of San Pedro de Tavira is one of the earliest in the Biscayan district; and that of Santa Ana has some interesting altars constructed by Ventura Rodriguez in 1774. The inhabit

ants, who number about 2600, are partly engaged in the manufacture of iron and steel, and carry on a trade with Hamburg in chestnuts. The foundation of the town is ascribed to the early kings of Navarre, and in 1153 it obtained the rank of a countship. The decree by which Don Carlos in 1839 ordered all foreigners taken in arms against him to be shot was issued from Durango.

DURANGO, sometimes called CIUDAD DE VICTORIA, or GUADIANA, a city of Mexico, the capital of the state of Durango, lies near the foot of the south-eastern slope of the Sierra Madre, at a height of 6847 feet above the sea, in 24° 25′ N. lat. and 105° 55′ W. long. It is the centre of a Roman Catholic bishopric, and possesses a cathedral, ten parish churches, a hospital, Government-buildings, a penitentiary, a state prison, a bull-ring, and a large cock-pit. Formerly the seat of a Jesuit college, it still maintains an episcopal seminary, and an institute with literary, legal, and scientific departinents. It is well supplied with water by thermal and other springs, which not only satisfy the demands of nine public baths, but also fill considerable channels along the streets. Trade is carried on with the northern and northwestern states; and, besides a mint, a gold refinery, and other offices connected with the mining operations, there are glass works, printing-presses, and factories for cotton and woollen goods, leather, and tobacco. Durango was founded in 1559 or 1560 by Alonso Pacheco, an officer of the Viceroy Velasco, as a military post for the control of the Chichimecas. It was soon after made an episcopal see, but did not attain any great importance till the discovery of the rich deposits of Guarisamey; and most of its public buildings were erected at the expense of Zambrano, the owner of the mines. In 1783 it had no more than 8000 inhabitants; about 1850 they were estimated at 30,000 or 40,000; in 1868 they were reduced to 12,449.

DURANTE, FRANCESCO, a celebrated Italian composer, and one of the founders of the so-called Neapolitan school of music, was born at Frattamaggiore, in the kingdom of Naples, and not, as has been erroneously stated, in the city of that name. The date of his birth is generally given nine years too late. In reality he was born on March 15, 1684. At an early age he entered the Conservatorio dei poveri di Gesù Cristo, at Naples, where he received lessons from Gaetano Greco; but soon he attracted the attention of the celebrated Alessandro Scarlatti, at that time the head and ornament of another great music school of Naples, the Conservatory of St Onofrio. Under him Durante studied for a considerable time, and left him only to go to Rome, where, during further five years, he completed his vocal studies under Pitoni. On his return to Naples he obtained the position of chapel-master at the school of St Onofrio, which he occupied till 1742, when he succeeded Porpora as head of the Conservatorio Sante Maria di Loretto, also at Naples. This post he held for thirteen years, till his death in 1755. His fame as a teacher was all but unrivalled, and the most celebrated masters of the earlier school of Italian opera are amongst his pupils. Only Jomelli, Paesiello, Pergolesi, Piccini, and Vinci may be mentioned here. Under him the Neapolitan school of music reached its climax of celebrity, and it was in this school that the great traditions of Italian vocal art were established, the last remnants of which are rapidly disappearing from the modern stage. As a composer Durante adhered to the severe style of the early Italian masters. The structure of his choral pieces is surpassed by Handel alone amongst his contemporaries. His instrumentation also shows many new and beautiful effects. A complete collection of Durante's works, consisting all but exclusively of sacred compositions, was presented by Selvaggi, a Neapolitan lover of art, to the Paris library. A catalogue of it may be found in Fétis's Biographie Universelle. The

imperial library of Vienna also preserves a valuable collec tion of Durante's manuscripts. Two requiems, several masses (one of which, a most original work, is the Pastoral Mass for four voices), and the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah are amongst his most important settings.

DURÃO, JOSE DE SANTA RITTA, a Brazilian poet, was' born at Marianna, in the province of Minas Geraes, in 1737, and died at Lisbon in 1784. He studied at Coimbra, in Portugal, graduated as a doctor of divinity, became a member of the Augustinian order of friars, and obtained a great reputation as a preacher. Having irritated the minister Pombal by his defence of the Jesuits, he retired from Portugal; and, after being imprisoned in Spain as a spy, found his way to Italy, where he became acquainted with Alfieri, Pindemonte, Casti, and other literary men of the time. On his return to Portugal he delivered the opening address at the university of Coimbra for the year 1778; but soon after retired to the cloisters of a Gratian convent. At the time of his death he taught in the little college belonging to that order in Lisbon. His principal poem, entitled Caramuru, poema epico do descubrimento da Bahia, appeared at Lisbon in 1781, but proved at first a total failure. Its value has gradually been recognized, and it now ranks as one of the best poems in Brazilian literatureremarkable especially for its fine descriptions of scenery and native life in South America. The historic institute of Rio de Janeiro offered a prize to the author of the best essay on the legend of Caramuru; and the successful competitor published a new edition of Durão's poem. There are two French translations, one of which appeared in 1829 in 3 vols. 8vo.

See Adolfo de Varnhagen, Epicos Brazilieros, 1845; Pereira da Silva, Os Varocs illustres do Brasil, 1858; Wolf, Le Brésil littéraire, Berlin, 1863.

DURAZZO, the ancient Dyrrachium, or Epidamnus, in Turkish Dratsh, and in Slavonian Durtz, a seaport town of European Turkey, in Albania, about fifty miles south of Scutari, on the eastern shore of the Adriatic. It is the seat of a Roman Catholic bishop and a Greek archbishop, but in every respect has greatly declined from its former prosperity. The walls are dilapidated; plantain trees are growing on the gigantic ruins of its old Byzantine citadel; and its harbour, once equally commodious and safe, is gradually becoming silted up. The only features worthy of notice are the quay, with its rows of cannon, and the bridge, 750 feet long, which leads across the marshy stretch along the coast. Such trade as it still possesses is mainly carried on with Trieste, and consists in the export of grain, skins, wool, wood, and leeches. The population is estimated at 9000.

DURBAN, or more correctly D'URBAN, a town of South Africa, in Natal, in the county of Durban, situated on a sandflat about a mile to the north of the bay of Port Natal, in 29° 52′ S. lat. and 31° 2′ E. long. It is well laid out with wide tree-shaded streets, carries on a considerable export and import trade, and possesses an Episcopalian church, two Wesleyan chapels (one for natives and the other for Europeans), a Government school, a prison, a custom-house, a literary institution, and an agricultural and horticultural society. Durban was founded in 1834 as the capital of the republican colony of Victoria, and its name was bestowed in honour of Sir Benjamin D’Urban, the governor of the Cape. The population, mostly English, was in 1866, 4991.

DUREN, a town of Prussia, at the head of a circle in the province of the Rhine, on the right bank of the Roer, at a railway junction eighteen miles east of Aix-la-Chapelle. Besides two Roman Catholic and two Protestant churches, it possesses three nunneries, á gymnasium, a mining school, and a blind asylum-the Elizabeth Institution-which was VIL

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in the previous year 1493, and showing him in the first bloom of that admirable manly beauty for which he was afterwards renowned. may have been destined to recommend him to the good graces of the lady. Their marriage was childless. Agnes survived her husband. The petulance of an old friend of her husband's has unjustly blackened her reputation. Her name has for centuries been used to point a moral, and among the unworthy mates of great men the wife of Dürer was as notorious as the wife of Socrates. The origin of this tradition must be sought in a letter written a few years after Dürer's death by his close friend and lifelong companion, Willibald Pirkheimer, in which Pirkheimer accuses Agnes of having plagued her husband to death with her parsimonious ways, of having made him over-work himself for money's sake, of having given his latter days no peace. But a closer study of facts and documents shows that there is not a jot of evidence to support these splenetic charges. Pirkheimer, when he made them, was old, broken with gout, and disgusted with the world, and the immediate occasion of his outbreak was a fit of peevishness against the widow because she had not let him have a pair of antlers a household ornament much prized in those days-to which he fancied himself entitled out of the property left by Dürer. On the other hand, there is abundant evidence of the close confidence and companionship that subsisted between Dürer and his wife; she accompanied him on his journey to the Low Countries in 1521; after his death she behaved with peculiar generosity to his brothers; it is perfectly probable that Dürer had in her a kind and beloved as well as a careful partner; the old legend of his sufferings at her hands must be regarded as completely discredited. So far from being forced to toil for money to the end, he died well off, though he had in his latter years occupied himself more and more with unremunerative pursuits-with the theoretical studies of Perspective, Geometry, Fortification, Proportion, for which he shared the passion of Leonardo, and on which, like Leonardo, he has left written treatises.

For more than eleven years after his marriage, Dürer lived at Nuremberg the settled and industrious life of his profession. Within this period his masterly powers unfolded and matured themselves. Two important devotional pictures are attributed to his early practice; one a large triptych painted in tempera on linen, now in the gallery at Dresden, the other also an altar-piece with wings, now in the summer palace of the archbishop of Vienna at Ober St Veit; both probably painted for the Elector Frederick of Saxony. These pictures have been executed, like those of Wohlgemuth, hastily, and with the help of pupils. (Of painters trained in the school of Dürer, we know the names and characters of Schaufelein, Springinklee, Hans Baldung Grün, and Hans of Culmbach). A finer, and somewhat later, example of the master's work in this class is the altar-piece painted for the family of Baumgartner, having a Birth of Christ in the centre and the figure of a knight on either side; this is now at Munich. The best of Dürer's energies, both of mind and hand, must have been given in these days to the preparation of his sixteen great woodcut designs for the Apocalypse. The first edition illustrated with this series appeared in 1498. The Northern mind had long dwelt with eagerness on these mysteries of things to come, and among the earliest block-books printed in Germany is an edition of the Apocalypse with rude figures. But Dürer not only transcends all efforts made before him in the representation of these strange promises, terrors, and transformations, these thaumaturgic visions of doom and redemption; the passionate energy and undismayed simplicity of his imagination enable him, in this order of creations, to touch the highest point of human achievement. The four angels keeping back the winds that they blow not; the four riders; the loosing of the

angels of the Euphrates to slay the third part of men; these and others are conceptions of such force. such grave or tempestuous grandeur in the midst of grotesqueness, as the art of no other age or hand has produced. At the same time, Dürer was practising himself diligently in the laborious art of copper engraving. In the years immediately about or preceding 1500, he produced a number of plates of which the subjects are generally fanciful and allegorical, and the execution is more or less tentative and uncertain. Of several of these, other versions exist by contemporary masters, and it is disputed in most of such cases whether Dürer's version is the original, or whether, being at that time young and comparatively unknown, he did not rather begin by copying the work of older men ; in which case, the originals of such engravings would have to be sought in versions bearing other signatures than Dürer's. One signature of frequent occurrence on German engravings of this time, and among them, on several subjects which are also repeated by Dürer's hand, is the letter W. As to the identity of this W, criticism is much divided. He has been generally identified with one Wenzel of Olmütz, whom we know to have engraved copies after Martin Schongauer and other masters. Others, again, attribute some at least of the prints signed W to Dürer's teacher Wohlgemuth, and when the same composition is found engraved by each of the two masters, conclude that the younger has copied the work of the elder. Instances are the subjects of the Four Naked Women with Death and the Fiend; the Old Man's Dream of Love; the Virgin and Child with the Ape, &c. The question is difficult to decide. It seems certain that the work of several different hands is signed with this same initial W; and we are of those who hold that, of the engravers so signing, one, whether Wohlgemuth or not, is a very accomplished master, whose work Dürer, until near the age of thirty, was in the habit of occasionally copying. From another master, again, whose name we have already mentioned, the half Venetian half German Jacopo de' Barbari, Dürer learned much. The Italians had already begun to work out a science of the human structure and of ideal proportions; and from Jacopo de' Barbari, as Dürer himself tells us, he received in youth the first hints of this science; which he subsequently investigated for himself with his usual persistent industry. These early notious received from Jacopo de' Barbari led to one immediate result of value, the famous engraving of Adam and Eve published in 1504. The figures here, as we can see by many preparatory sketches, are planned on geometrical principles, not drawn-as was the common German custoin, and Dürer's own in a large majority of his works-direct from the model, with all the crudities of the original faithfully delineated. The background of foliage and animals is a miracle of rich invention and faithful and brilliant execution; the full powers of Dürer as an engraver on copper are here for the first time asserted. In another elaborate engraving which probably soon followed this-the Great Fortune or Nemesis-the opposite principle is observed; above a mountain valley, of which every detail is rendered in bird's eye view with amazing completeness, an allegorical figure of a woman rides upright upon the clouds, bearing a cup in one hand and a bridle in the other; in her countenance and proportions there is nothing ideal, there is the most literal and graceless commonness. In his own journals Dürer calls this plate Nemesis; it has been conjectured that the piece was composed in allusion to the unfortunate expedition sent by the emperor Maximilian to Switzerland, in which a number of Nuremberg citizens took part, with Pirkheimer at their head. In the meantime Dürer had been variously exercising his inexhaustible power of dramatic invention on the subjects of Christian story He had completed the set of drawings of the Passion