OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Verböczy, Istvan

See also István Werbőczy on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​VERBÖCZY, ISTVAN [Stephen Werböcz] (1465?–1541), Hungarian jurist and statesman, first became known as a scholar and theologian of such eminence that he was appointed to accompany the emperor Charles V. to Worms, to take up the cudgels against Luther. He began his political career as the deputy of the county of Ugocsa to the diet of 1498, where his eloquence and scholarship had a great effect in procuring the extension of the privileges of the gentry and the exclusion of all foreign competitors for the Hungarian throne in future elections. He was the spokesman and leader of the gentry against the magnates and prelates at the diets of 1500, 1501 and 1505. At the last diet he insisted, in his petition to the king, that the law should be binding upon all the gentry alike, and firmly established in the minds of the people the principle of a national monarchy. The most striking proof of his popularity at this time is the fact that the diet voted him two denarii per hearth for his services in 1505, a circumstance unexampled in Hungarian history. In 1517 Verböczy was appointed the guardian of the infant Louis II., and was sent on a foreign mission to solicit the aid of Christendom against the Turks. On his return he found the strife of parties fiercer than ever and the whole country in a state of anarchy. At the diet of Hatvan, on the 25th of June 1525, he delivered a reconciliatory oration which so affected the assembly that it elected him palatine. During the brief time he held that high office he unselfishly and courageously endeavoured to serve both king and people by humbling the pride of the magnates who were primarily responsible for the dilapidation of the realm. But he was deposed at the following diet, and retired from public life till the election of Janos Zapolya, who realized his theory of a national king and from whom he accepted the chancellorship. He now devoted himself entirely to the study of jurisprudence, and the result of his labours was the famous Opus tripartitum juris consuetudinarii inclyti regni hungariae, which was the law-book of Hungary till 1848.
See Arpad Karolyi, Verböczy’s Mission to the Diet of Worms (Hung.; Budapest, 1880); Vilmor Fraknoi, Before and after the Catastrophe of Mohács (Hung.; Budapest, 1876); ibid., Stephen Werböczi (Hung. ; Budapest, 1899). (R. N. B.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Vercelli

See also Vercelli on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​VERCELLI (anc. Vercellae), a town and archiepiscopal see of Piedmont, Italy, in the province of Novara, 13 m. S.W. of that town by rail. Pop. (1901) 17,922 (town), 30,470 (commune). It is situated 430 ft. above sea-level on the river Sesia, at its junction with the Canterana. Vercelli is a point at which railways diverge for Novara, Mortara, Casale Monferrato and Santhia (for Turin). The walls by which Vercelli was formerly surrounded have been demolished, and their place is now occupied by boulevards, from which a fine view of the Alps (especially the Monte Rosa group) is obtained. The streets are for the most part tortuous and narrow; there is a large market-place (Piazza Cavour) with a statue of Cavour (1861), The cathedral is a large building dating from the 16th century; its library contains a number of rare ancient MSS., especially the Codex Vercellensis, one of the most important MSS. of the old Latin version of the Gospels, written in the 4th or 5th century by Eusebius, bishop of Vercelli. A museum close by contains Roman antiquities. The churches of S. Andrea (a large and fine Romanesque Gothic building dating from 1219–1224, with an interior in the French Gothic style), S. Paolo, S. Caterina and S. Cristoforo possess valuable examples of the work of Gaudenzio Ferrari (1471–1546) and of his follower Lanini. Silk-spinning is important, and Vercelli is one of the principal Italian centres of the exportation of cereals and especially of rice. There are corn and rice mills of large size, ​while cotton and woollen mills and factories of artificial manure, &c., have attained importance.
Vercellae was originally the chief city of the Libici (a Ligurian tribe) and afterwards became a Roman municipium of some importance. It stood at the junction of roads to Eporedia, Novaria and Mediolanum, Laumellum (for Ticinum) and perhaps Hasta. No ancient remains exist above ground, but many inscriptions, tombs and other antiquities have been found. Remains of the theatre and amphitheatre were seen in the 16th century, and remains of ancient streets have more recently been found during drainage operations. There were apparently four principal streets all leading to the centre of the town where the Forum must have been situated. Of the walls, however, nothing is known except from medieval documents (cf. L. Bruzza, Iscrizioni antiche Vercellesi, Rome, 1874). In the neighbourhood (near Rotto on the Sesia) are the Raudii Campi where Hannibal won his first victory on Italian soil (218 B.C.), and where in 101 B.C. Marius and Catulus routed the Cimbri. From about 1228 till 1372 Vercelli was the seat of a university. (T. As.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Vercelli Book

See also Vercelli Book on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​VERCELLI BOOK (Codex Vercellensis), an Early English MS. containing, besides homilies, a number of poetical and imaginative pieces: Andreas, The Fates of the Apostles, Address of the Soul to the Body, Falseness of Men, Dream of the Rood, Elene and a prose Life of Guthlac. It was found in the cathedral library of Vercelli, Piedmont, by a German jurist Friedrich Blume, in 1822, and was first described in his Iter Italicum (Berlin and Stettin, 4 vols., 1824–36). An untenable explanation of the presence of the MS. at Vercelli suggested that it had been brought there by Johannes Scotus Erigena. But the handwriting dates from the beginning of the 11th century, long after his death. According to Dr Wülker the MS. probably belonged to the hospice for English pilgrims, founded, together with the monastery of St Andrew, by Cardinal Jacopo Guala-Bicchieri (d. 1227), a native of Vercelli and bishop of the city, in 1219, on his return from England, where he had been papal legate from 1216 to 1218. The cardinal, a man of wide learning, possessed a large library, which he left to the monastery; and the Vercelli codex may well have been included in it.
Its contents were partially printed (by Benjamin Thorpe from Blume’s transcript) in Appendix B to C. P. Cooper’s Report of Rymeri Foeder a for 1836; by J. M. Kemble, The Poetry of the Codex Vercellensis, with an English translation (Aelfric Soc., 1843–56), and in a better text based directly on the MS. by Wülker in his edition of C. W. M. Grein’s Bibliothek der A.S. Poesie (Leipzig, 1894), vol. ii. Codex Vercellensis, by Dr Richard Wülker (Leipzig, 1894), is a facsimile of the MS.
For the description and history of the MS. see also Wülker’s Grundriss . . . der A.S. Litteratur (1885), pp. 237–42, and A. Napier in Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum (Berlin, 1889, vol. 21, new series; old series, vol. 33, p. 66), for a collation of Wülker’s text with the MS. For the individual poems see also Cynewulf.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Verderer

See also Verderer on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​VERDERER (O. Fr. verdier, Med. Lat. viridarius), a term used in English forest law for a judicial officer appointed to look after what was known as the "vert" (O. Fr. verd, green; Lat. viridis), i.e. the forest trees and underwood in the royal forests. It was the verderer’s duty to keep the assizes and attend to all matters relating to trespasses (see Forest Law).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Verden

See also Verden an der Aller on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​VERDEN, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of Hanover, on the navigable Aller, 3 m. above its confluence with the Weser, 22 m. S.E. of Bremen by the railway to Hanover. Pop. (1900) 9842. The most noticeable edifices are the beautiful Gothic cathedral, the churches of St Andrew and St John, a new Roman Catholic church (1894). and the celebrated cathedral school. Its industries embrace the manufacture of agricultural machinery, cigar-making, brewing and distilling. Verden was the see of a bishopric founded in the first quarter of the 9th century, or earlier, and secularized in 1648. The duchy of Verden was then ceded to Sweden, passed in 1719 to Hanover and in 1810 to the kingdom of Westphalia. It was restored to Hanover in 1814, and was, with Hanover, annexed by Prussia in 1866.
See Ostenberg, Aus Verden’s Vergangenheit (Stade, 1876).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Vaalpens

See also Vaalpens on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​Vaalpens (dusty-bellies), a little-known nomadic people of South Africa, who survive in small groups in the Zoutpansberg and Waterberg districts of the Transvaal, especially along the Magalakwane river. They are akin to the Bushmen (q.v.). In 1905 their total number was estimated by the Transvaal military authorities at “a few hundreds.” The Vaalpens were so called by the Boers from the dusty look of their bodies, due, it is said, to their habit of crawling along the ground when stalking game. But their true colour is black. In height the men average about 4 ft., i.e. somewhat less than the shortest Bushmen. Socially the Vaalpens occupy nearly as low a position as even the Fuegians or the extinct Tasmanians. They were nearly exterminated by the Aman'debele, a tribe of Zulu stock which entered the Transvaal about the beginning of the 19th century. The Vaalpens, who live entirely by hunting and trapping game, dwell in holes, caves or rock shelters. They wear capes of skins, and procure the few implements they need in exchange for skins, ivory or ostrich feathers. They form family groups of thirty or forty under a chief or patriarch, whose functions are purely domestic, as must be the case where there are no arts or industries, nothing but a knowledge of hunting and of fire with which to cook their meals. Their speech appears to be so full of clicks as to be incapable of expression by any clear phonetic system. Hence it is impossible to say whether the Vaalpens possess any folklore or other oral literature analogous to that of the Bushmen.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Vacquerie, Auguste

See also Vacquerie, Auguste on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​VACQUERIE, AUGUSTE (1819-1895), French journalist and man of letters, was born at Villequier (Seine Inférieure) on the 19th of November 1819. He was from his earliest days an admirer of Victor Hugo, with whom he was connected by the marriage of his brother Charles with Leopoldine Hugo. His earlier romantic productions include a volume of poems, L'Enfer de l'esprit (1840); a translation of the Antigone (1844) in collaboration with Paul Meurice; and Tragaldabas (1848), a melodrama. He was one of the principal contributors to the Événement and followed Hugo into his exile in Jersey. In 1869 he returned to Paris, and with Paul Meurice and others founded the anti-imperial Rappel. His articles in this paper were more than once the occasion of legal proceedings. After 1870 he became editor. Other of his works are Souvent homme varie (1859), a comedy in verse; Jean Baudry (1863), the most successful of his plays; Aujourd'hui et demain (1875); Futura (1900), poems on philosophical and humanitarian subjects. Vacquerie died in Paris on the 19th of February 1895. He published a collected edition of his plays in 1879.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Uzès

See also Uzès on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​UZÈS, a town of southern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Gard, finely situated on an eminence above the Alzon, 16 m. N. by E. of Nîmes by road. Pop. (1906) 4008. Uzès, the seat of an episcopal see from the 5th century to 1790, has a cathedral almost destroyed by the Protestants during the religious wars and rebuilt in the 17th and 18th centuries, but still flanked by a round tower of five storeys lighted by arched openings and dating from the 12th century. The Duché, a château of powerful lords, at first viscounts, and in 1565 dukes, of Uzès, preserves a donjon originally of the 12th century; the main building, flanked by a Gothic chapel, is Renaissance in style. The most ancient structure in the town is a crypt beneath a private house, attributed to the early centuries of the Christian era. The sub-prefecture and the tribunal of first instance occupy the old bishop's palace (17th century). There is a statue of Admiral Brueys (1753–1798), a native of the town. Uzès has a communal college for boys, and carries on the manufacture of silk, bricks and fireproof earthenware, and liquorice, and trade in the truffles for which the district is noted.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Vacarescu

See also Iancu Văcărescu on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​Vacarescu, the name, according to tradition, of one of the oldest noble families in Walachia. Its mythical founder is said to have been a certain Kukenus, of Spanish origin, settled in Transylvania as lord over Fogaras. Others connect the family with Ugrin, count of Fogaras. The first member of historical importance was Ianache (b. 1654), the grand treasurer of Walachia, who was killed with his master, Prince Brancovan, in Constantinople, 1714. His grandson through his son Stephan, also called Ianache (or “Enakitza the Ban,” 1730–1796), starts a line of Rumanian scholars and poets; he was the author of the first known Rumanian grammar in the vernacular, printed in 1787. While in exile in Nicopolis he wrote the contemporary history of the, Turkish empire in two volumes (1740–1799). He was also the first to attempt Rumanian versification. Greater as a poet is his son Alecu (Alexander), who died as a prisoner in Constantinople in 1798. In 1796 a collection of his poems appeared in Rumania. His brother Nikolaes (d. 1830) also wrote some poems, but they remained in MS. until 1861), when they were published. By ​far the greatest member of the Vacarescu family in the male line was Iancu (1786–1863), the son of Alexander. He received an excellent education not only in Greek but also in German and French, and was well versed in the literature of the West. An ardent patriot, he sided with the national movement in 1821, and assisted in establishing the Rumanian theatre, translating many books and plays from German and French into Rumanian, notably the Britannicus of Corneille, a literary event of no small importance at the time. He inaugurated modern Rumanian poetry. In 1830 appeared his first volume of verse. He died in 1863. A niece of Alexander is the gifted writer Elena Vacarescu (Helene Vacaresco), who inherited the poetical talent of her family and has enriched Rumanian literature with her Bard of the Dimbovitza, and other poems and novels in Rumanian and in French. (M. G.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Vacherot, Étienne

See also Étienne Vacherot on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​VACHEROT, ÉTIENNE (1800-1897), French philosophical writer, was born of peasant parentage at Torcenay, near Langres, on the 29th of July 1809. He was educated at the École Normale, and returned thither as director of studies in 1838, after some years spent in provincial schoolmasterships. In 1839 he succeeded his master Cousin as professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. His Histoire critique de l'école d'Alexandrie (3 vols. 1846-51), his first and best-known work, drew on him attacks from the Clerical party which led to his suspension in 1851. Shortly afterwards he refused to swear allegiance to the new imperial government, and was dismissed the service. His work Démocratie (1859) led to a political prosecution and imprisonment. In 1868 he was elected to the French Academy. On the fall of the Empire he took an active part in politics, was maire of a district of Paris during the siege, and in 1871 was in the National Assembly, voting as a Moderate Liberal. In 1873 he drew nearer the Conservatives, after which he was never again successful as a parliamentary candidate, though he maintained his principles vigorously in the press. He died on the 28th of July 1897. Vacherot was a man of high character and adhered strictly to his principles, which were generally opposed to those of the party in power. His chief philosophical importance consists in the fact that he was a leader in the attempt to revivify French philosophy by the new thought of Germany, to which he had been introduced by Cousin, but of which he never had more than a second-hand knowledge. Metaphysics he held to be based on psychology. He maintains the unity and freedom of the soul, and the absolute obligation of the moral law. In religion, which was his main interest, he was much influenced by Hegel, and appears somewhat in the ambiguous position of a sceptic anxious to believe. He sees insoluble contradictions in every mode of conceiving God as real, yet he advocates religious belief, though the object of that belief have but an abstract or imaginary existence.
His other works are: La Métaphysique et la science (1858), Essais de philosophie critique (1864), La Religion (1869), La Science et la conscience (1870), Le Nouveau Spiritualisme (1884), La Démocratie libérale (1892).
See Ollé Laprune, Étienne Vacherot (Paris, 1898).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/V

See also V on Wikipedia; v at Wiktionary; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​V This letter was originally, like Y, only one of the earlier forms of the letter U. According to Florio (1611) V is “sometimes a vowel, and sometimes a consonant.” In modern times attempts have been made to assign to it the consonantal value of U, but in English another symbol W is used for this, while V has received the value of the voiced form of F, which itself had originally a sound resembling the English W (see under F). V is therefore a voiced labio-dental spirant, the breath escaping through a very narrow slit between the lower lip and the upper teeth. In German, however, V is used with the same value as F, while W takes the value that V has in English. Apart from some southern dialect forms which have found their way into the literary language, as vat (for fat or wine-fat which still survives in the English Bible) and vixen the feminine of fox, all the words in English which begin with V are of foreign, and most of Latin origin. In the middle of words between vowels f was originally regularly voiced: life, lives; wife wives, &c. The Latin V, however, was not a labio-dental spirant like the English v, but a bi-labial semivowel like the English w, as is clear from the testimony of Quintilian and of later grammarians. This quality has remained to it in southern Italy, in Spain and Gascony. In Northern French and in Italian it has become the labio-dental v, and from French English has adopted this value for it. Early borrowings like wine (Latin vinum), wall (Latin vallum), retain the w sound and are therefore spelt with w. In the English dialects of Kent, Essex and Norfolk there is a common change of v to w, but Ellis says (English Pronunciation, V, pp. 132, 229) that though he has made diligent search he has never been able to hear the v for w which is so characteristic of Sam and Tony Weller in the Pickwick Papers. It is, however, illustrated in Pegge's Anecdotes of the English Language (1803) and confirmed by the editor of the 3rd edition (1844), pp. 65–66. The history of V as the Latin numeral for 5 is uncertain. An old theory is that it represents the hand, while X=10 is the two hands with the finger tips touching. This was adopted by Mommsen (Hermes, xxii. 598). The Etruscan used the same v-symbol inverted. V with a horizontal line above it was used for 5000. (P. Gi.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/V-shaped Depression

See also Low-pressure area on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​V-shaped Depression, in meteorology, a narrow area of low pressure usually occurring between two adjacent anticyclones, and taking the form of a V or tongue, as do the isobars representing it on a weather-chart. Such a depression may be regarded as a projection from a cyclonic system lying to one side of the two anticyclones. A similar depression, however, is frequently formed within a larger area of depression, i.e. an ordinary cyclone, and sometimes develops so far as to have a complete circulation of its own; it is then known as a “secondary.” The line of lowest depression following the axis of the V brings with it heavy squalls and a sudden change of wind from one direction almost to the opposite. It is preceded by signs of break in the weather such as usually herald the approach of an ordinary cyclone, and is followed by the usual signs of clearance. The occurrence of a V-depression or secondary within an ordinary cyclonic system intensifies, often to a dangerous degree, the usual disturbances in the weather accompanying that system. Conditions exactly opposite to those accompanying a V-shaped depression are provided by a “wedge.” (q.v.).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/North, Sir Thomas

See also Thomas North on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​NORTH, SIR THOMAS (1535?–1601?), English translator of Plutarch, second son of the 1st Baron North, was born about 1535. He is supposed to have been a student of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was entered at Lincoln’s Inn in 1557. In 1574 he accompanied his brother, Lord North, on a visit to the French court. He served as captain in the year of the Armada, and was knighted about three years later. His name is on the roll of justices of the peace for Cambridge in 1592 and again in 1597, and he received a small pension (£40 a year) from the queen in 1601. A third edition of his Plutarch was published, in 1603, with a supplement of other translated biographies. He translated, in 1557, Guevara’s Reloj de Principes (commonly known as Libro Aureo), a compendium of moral counsels chiefly compiled from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, under the title of Diall of Princes. The English of this work is one of the earliest specimens of the ornate, copious and pointed style for which educated young Englishmen had acquired a taste in their Continental travels and studies. North translated from a French copy of Guevara, but seems to have been well acquainted with the Spanish version. The book had already been translated by Lord Berners, but without reproducing the rhetorical artifices of the original. North’s version, with its mannerisms and its constant use of antithesis, set the fashion which was to culminate in Lyly’s Euphues. His next work was The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570), a translation of an Italian collection of eastern fables. The first edition of his translation of Plutarch, from the French of Jacques Amyot, appeared in 1579. The first edition was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, and was followed by other editions in 1595 and 1603, containing in each case fresh Lives. It is almost impossible to over-estimate the influence of North’s vigorous English on contemporary writers, and some critics have called him the first master of English prose. The book formed the source from which Shakespeare drew the materials for his Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. It is in the last-named play that he follows the Lives most closely, whole speeches being taken direct from North.
North’s Plutarch was reprinted for the “Tudor Translations” (1895), with an introduction by George Wyndham.