are thoroughly national in spirit and local colouring.
William Allingham: a Diary (1907), edited by Mrs Allingham
and D. Radford, contains many interesting reminiscences
of Tennyson, Carlyle and other famous contemporaries.
ALLISON, WILLIAM BOYD (1829-1908), American legislator, was
born at Perry, Ohio, on the 2nd of March 1829. Educated at
Allegheny and Western Reserve Colleges, he studied law, and
practised in Ohio until 1857. In that year he settled in
Dubuque, Iowa, where he took a prominent part in Republican
politics; and in 1860 he was a delegate to the national
convention at Chicago which nominated Abraham Lincoln for the
presidency. In 1861 he was appointed a member of the staff
of Governor Samuel J. Kirkwood (1813-1894), and was of great
service in the work of equipping and organizing the Iowa
volunteers. From 1863 until 1871 he served with distinction
in the House of Representatives; in 1873 he was elected to the
United States Senate, and re-elected in 1878, 1884, 1890, 1896 and
1902. Here he became one of the highest authorities on questions
connected with finance, and from 1877 he was a member of the
Senate committee on finance. In 1881-1893, and again from
1895, he was chairman of the committee on appropriations, in
which position he had great influence. He declined offers of
the secretaryship of the treasury made to him by Presidents
Garfield and Harrison. He was a prominent candidate for the
presidential nomination in the Republican national conventions
of 1888 and 1896. In 1892 he was chairman of the American
delegation to the International Monetary Conference at
Brussels. He died at Dubuque, Iowa, on the 4th of August 1908.
ALLITERATION (from Lat. ad, to, and littera, letter), the
commencing of two or more words, in close juxtaposition, with
the same sound. As Milton defined rhyme to be ``the jingling
sound of like endings,'' so alliteration is the jingle of like
beginnings. All language has a tendency to jingle in both
ways, even in prose. Thus in prose we speak of ``near and
dear,'' ``high and dry,'' ``health and wealth.'' But the
initial form of jingle is much more common--``safe and sound,''
``thick and thin,'' ``weal or woe,'' ``fair or foul,'' ``spick
and span,'' ``fish, flesh, or fowl,'' ``kith and kin.'' The
poets of nearly all times and tongues have not been slow
to seize upon the emphasis which could thus be produced.
Although mainly Germanic in its character, alliteration
was known to the Latins, especially in early times, and
Cicero blames Ennius for writing ``O Tite tute, Tati,
tibi tanta, tyranne, tulisti.'' Lucretius did not disdain
to employ it as an ornament. We read in Shakespeare:--
``Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are corals made.''
In Pope:--
``Here files of pins extend their shining rows,
Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux.',
In Gray:--
``Weave the warp and weave the woof,
The winding-sheet of Edward's race.''
In Coleridge:-
``The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.''
Churchill describes himself, in his Prophecy of Famine, as one
``Who often, but without success, had prayed
For apt alliteration's artful aid,''--
an example which is itself a proof of his failure; for
alliteration is never effective unless it runs upon consonants.
As thus far considered, alliteration is a device wholly
dependent on the poet's fancy. He may use it or not, or
use it much or little, at his pleasure. But there is an
extensive range of Teutonic poetry whose metrical laws
are entirely based on alliteration. This, for example, is
the principle on which Icelandic verse is founded; and we
have a yet nearer interest in it, because it furnishes the
key to Anglo-Saxon and a large portion of early English
verse. For a specimen take the following lines, the spelling
modernized, from the beginning of Piers the Plowman:--
``But in a May morning | on Malvern hills,
Me befel a ferly | of fairy methought;
I was weary of wandering | and went me to rest
Under a broad bank | by a burn-side;
And as I lay and leaned | and looked on the waters,
I slumbered in a sleeping | it sounded so merry.''
The rule of this verse is indifferent as to the number of
syllables it may contain, but imperative as to the number of
accented ones. The line is divided in the middle by a pause,
and each half ought to contain two accented syllables. Of
the four accented syllables, the first three should begin with
the same letter; the fourth is free and may start with any
letter. Those who wish for a more minute analysis of the
laws of alliterative verse, as practised by the Anglo-Saxon
and early English poets, may consult an exhaustive essay
on the subject by Professor W. W. Skeat, prefixed to vol.
iii. of Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript; only the reader
must be on his guard against an error which pervades it,
and which this able writer seems to have derived from Rask.
The question arises--What is the nature of the cadence in
alliterative verse? Now all metrical movement is of two kinds,
according as the beat or emphasis begins the movement or ends
it. If the beat is initial, we say in classical language that
the movement is trochaic or dactylic, according to the number
of its syllables; and if the beat is final, we in like manner
say that the movement is iambic or anapaestic. Skeat and many
others object with some reason to use the classical terms,
and therefore brushing them aside, let us put the question
in the simplest form--Has the movement of alliterative verse
got the initial or the final beat? In the middle of the 18th
century Bishop Percy decided this question with sufficient
accuracy, though he mixed up his statement with a blunder
which it is not easy to account for. He points out how the
poets began to introduce rhyme into alliterative verse, until
at length rhyme came to predominate over alliteration, and
``thus was this kind of metre at length swallowed up and lost
in the common burlesque Alexandrine or anapaestic verse, as
``A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall.''
Percy made a serious mistake when he gave the name of Alexandrine
to anapaestic verse; but he is quite right in his general
statement that alliterative verse became lost in a measure
the movement of which had the final beat. Conybeare has
stated the fact still more accurately. ``In the Saxon poetry
a trochaic character is predominant. In Piers the Plowman
there is a prevailing tendency to an anapaestic cadence.''
It is the result of a change in the language--the loss of
inflexion. Take the word man. The genitive in Saxon would
be mannes, a trochee; in English, of man, an iambus.
The tendency of the language was thus to pass from a metrical
movement, in which the beat was initial, to one in which it was
final. It may therefore be quite right to speak of Anglo-Saxon
alliterative poetry as trochaic or dactylic, and quite wrong to
apply the same terms to the cadence of our later alliterative
verse. And this is precisely the error into which Skeat has
fallen. He says--``Lines do not always begin with a loud
syllable, but often one or two and sometimes (in early English
especially) even three soft syllables precede it. These
syllables are necessary to the sense, but not to the scanision
of the line.'' That is just the point at issue. By leaving
out of account the light syllable or syllables at the beginning
of a line, and taking his start from the first syllable that
has the alliterative beat, Skeat may certainly prove that
all the later alliterative poetry has a movement of initial
beat. But English ears will not submit to this rule. It is
those light syllables of no account which have altered the rhythm
of English descant from one of initial to one of final beat.
ALLIUM (Lat. for ``garlic''), a genus of plants, natural order
Liliaceae, with about 250 species (seven of which occur in
Britain), found in Central and South Europe, North Africa, the
dry country of West and Central Asia, and North and Central
America. The plants are bulbous herbs, with flat or rounded
radical leaves, and a central naked or leafy stem, bearing a
head or umbel of small flowers, with a spreading or bell-shaped
white, pink, red, yellow or blue perianth. Several species
afford useful foods, such as onion (Allium Cepa), leek (A.
Porrum), shallot or eschallot (A. ascalonicum), garlic (A.
sativum), and chives (A. schoenoprasum.) A few species are
cultivated as border plants; such are A. Moly, an old garden
plant with bright yellow flowers, and A. neapolitanum, the
well-known white-flowered species, both natives of southern Europe.
ALLIX, PIERRE (1641-1717), French Protestant divine, was born at
Alencon. He was pastor first at St Agobile in Champagne, and
then at Charenton, near Paris. The revocation of the edict of
Nantes in 1685 compelled him to take refuge in London, where,
under the sanction of James II., he opened a church for the French
exiles. His reputation for learning was such as to obtain for
him, soon after his arrival, the degree of doctor of divinity
from both universities, and in 1690 he received from Bishop
Burnet the more substantial honour of the treasurership and
a canonry in Salisbury Cathedral. He died at London in March
1717. The works of Allix, which are numerous, are chiefly of
a controversial and apologetic character, and must be used with
caution. In opposition to Bossuet he published Some Remarks
upon the Ecclesiastical History of the Ancient Churches
of Piedmont (1690), and Remarks upon the Ecclesiastical
History of the Ancient Churches of the Albigenses (1692),
with the idea of showing that the Albigenses were not
Manichaeans, but historically identical with the Waldenses.
ALLMAN, GEORGE JAMES (1812-!898), British biologist, was born
in Cork, Ireland, in 1812, and received his early education at
the Royal Academical Institution, Belfast. For some time he
studied for the Irish bar, but ultimately gave up law in favour
of natural science. In 1843 he graduated in medicine at Dublin,
and in the following year was appointed professor of botany
in that university, succeeding his namesake, William Allman
(1776-1846). This position he held for about twelve years
until he removed to Edinburgh as regius professor of natural
history. There he remained till 1870, when considerations of
health induced him to resign his professorship and retire to
Dorsetshire, where he devoted himself to his favourite pastime of
horticulture. The scientific papers which came from his pen are
very numerous. His most important work was upon the gymnoblastic
hydrozoa, on which he published in 1871-1872, through the Ray
Society, an exhaustive monograph, based largely on his own
researches and illustrated with drawings of remarkable excellence
from his own hand. Biological science is also indebted to
him for several convenient terms which have come into daily
use, e.g. endoderm and ectoderm for the two cellular
layers of the body-wall in Coelenterata. He became a fellow
of the Royal Society in 1854, and received a Royal medal in
1873. For several years he occupied the presidential chair
of the Linnaean society, and in 1879 he presided over the
Sheffield meeting of the British Association. He died
on the 24th of November 1898 at Parkstone, Dorsetshire.
ALLOA, a municipal and police burgh and seaport of
Clackmannanshire, Scotland. It is situated on the north
bank of the Forth, 32 m. from Edinburgh by the North British
