for a distance of 2200 yards under the sea. The similar work on the French side seaward, from Sangatte, near Calais, is of about the same length. Thus, about a tenth of the whole distance has been successfully experimented; and the opinion

CHANSONS DE GESTES

Harvard in 1798, and in 1803 was ordained minister of a Congregational church in Boston, where his sermons soon became famous for their fervour, solemnity, and beauty.' Though never a Trinitarian, at first he had Calvinistic leanings, but

gradually drifted towards what is now known as Unitarianism, although the name itself was repugnant to him, and he would gladly have seen liberal theology growing naturally outwards from within the church herself. His famous sermon, preached at the ordination of the Rev. Jared Sparks in 1819, was a fearless and plain definition of the Unitarian position. It involved him in controversy, a thing which he natu rally loathed. To the end of his life he preserved a devoutly Christian heart, shrinking with the delicate instinct of a pious nature from everything cold, one-sided, and dogmatic, whether Unitarian or Trinitarian. As late as 1841 of the engineers engaged is that the work presents | he wrote, I am little of a Unitarian, have little exceptionally favourable features for cheap and sympathy with the system of Priestley and Belrapid accomplishment. The original estimate, sham, and stand aloof from all but those who before experiment showed the way through this strive and pray for clearer light.' He had symfavourable stratum of gray chalk,' was about pathy for social and political as well as purely £10,000,000; now that estimate is only £4,000,000. religious progress, advocated temperance and eduThe proposal is to have two single-line tunnels- cation, and denounced war and slavery with more which can be multiplied to any extent side by than his accustomed eloquence. In 1821 he reside as traffic might demand-one tunnel ventilat-ceived the title of D.D. from Harvard University, ing the other, and to work the lines by engines and next year he visited Europe, and made the which have been successfully designed and worked acquaintance of several great English authors, such experimentally, charged with highly compressed as Wordsworth and Coleridge, both of whom were air. In the construction hardly any pumping and strongly impressed in his favour. Coleridge said no timbering' would be required. The machine of him, 'He has the love of wisdom and the which bores takes up any modicum of water wisdom of love.' Among his most popular works with the debris it excavates; and every turn of it were his Essay on National Literature, Remarks on gives out a portion of the air, which, at a pressure the Character and Writings of John Milton, the of about 25 lb. to the inch, is its motive force (see Character and Writings of Fénelon, his essay on the article BORING). Negro Slavery, and that on Self-culture. Besides these, he wrote a variety of other essays and treatises, all characterised by vigour, eloquence, pure taste, and a lofty tone of moral earnestness. He died October 2, 1842, at Bennington, Vermont. His works were collected before his death in 5 vols. (Boston, 1841), to which a sixth volume was afterwards added. The American Unitarian Association (Boston) has reprinted the whole in a single cheap volume. An interesting memoir of him has been published by his nephew, William Henry Channing (3 vols. Boston, 1848; new ed. 1880). There is also a short Life by Frothingham (1887).

The instruction to the engineers by Sir Edward Watkin, the chairman of the English Tunnel Company, to find the " gray chalk" at its outcrop, and never leave it,' would seem to have reduced a work which at one time appeared all but impracticable to the utmost simplicity and ease of completion. The scheme for a railway tunnel was discussed in 1867 and succeeding years. In 1876 a convention for carrying it out was concluded between the British and French governments, and in the same year boring was begun on the French side; but the excavations on the English side were stopped by order of the British government, mainly for military reasons.

Amongst the supporters of such a submarine means of intercourse between England and France have been the late Prince Consort, Mr Cobden, the late and present Lords Derby, the late Lords Beaconsfield and Clarendon, and Mr Gladstone.

The engineers whose names have been associated with various schemes for a Channel Tunnel have been those of Thomè de Gamond and Raoul-duval in France; and William Low, Frederick Bramwell, Francis Brady, John Hawkshaw, and Brunlees in England.

The experiments near Dover have led to the belief that there is a coal-bed under the Channel. The English Channel Tunnel Company had in 1888 already bored to a depth of 950 feet, and proposed going down to 12,000 feet with the view of finding this mineral.

Channing, WILLIAM ELLERY, a great American preacher and writer, was born 7th April 1780, at Newport, Rhode Island. He graduated at

Chansons de Gestes, long narrative poems, dealing with warfare and adventure, which were popular in France during the middle ages. Gestes, from the Latin gesta, signified, first, the deeds of a hero, and secondly, the account of these deeds; the family to which the hero belonged being spoken of as gens de geste. One of these poems, and that the greatest of all, was composed in the 11th century-namely, the Chanson de Roland, which is treated of in the article ROLAND. Most of the others were produced in the 12th and 13th cen turies, only a few poems to which the name is strictly applicable having been written after the year 1300 A.D. They were mainly the work of trouvères, and were carried by wandering minstrels, jongleurs and jongleresses, from castle to castle, and from town to town. They are distin guished from the later Arthurian romances and from the Romans d'Aventures both by their matter and their form. Their subjects are invariably taken from French history, or from what passed as such, and they are written in verses of ten or

CHANSONS DE GESTES

twelve syllables, arranged in laisses, or stanzas of irregular length, throughout each of which the same rhyme or assonance is repeated. In his introduction to the Song of Roland, M. Génin points out that it is the decasyllabic verse of the Chansons and not the Alexandrine (a form introduced in the 13th century) which is the true epic verse in French literature. A large number of these poems celebrate the exploits of the peers of Charlemagne, and form what is termed the Carlovingian cycle, which includes the Song of Roland. But while the author of that poem depicts Charlemagne as on the whole a worthy and venerated sovereign, the aim of the later writers is to exalt the vassal nobles at the expense of the emperor, who is invariably presented in an odious or ridiculous light. The great emperor,' says M. Géruzez, pays for the misdeeds of his feeble successors; the monarchy of which he remains the representative has been degraded; consequently he is degraded along with it, to the profit of the feudal hero who is opposed to him.' The principal poems of the Carlovingian cycle (setting aside the Song of Roland) are Ogier le Danois, Renaut de Montauban, Raoul de Cambrai, Huon de Bordeaux, Les Saisnes, Doon de Mayence, Gérard de Viane, and Hugues Capet. Ogier is a typical chanson containing more than 13,000 lines, written by Raimbert of Paris in the first half of the 12th century. It tells how the vassal noble Ogier, after vainly seeking reparation for the death of his son, who has been slain by a son of Charlemagne, is pursued by the emperor into Italy and captured after a heroic resistance; how, saved from death by the intervention of Archbishop Turpin, he lives in concealment until the Saracens invade France, and the emperor is forced to implore his aid; how he yields at fast to repeated entreaties, frees the land from the heathen, marries a princess,.and lives happily to the end of his days. The style of the poem is clear and vigorous, the characters stand out vividly, the narrative interest is considerable, and the hero rivets the sympathy of the reader. The Voyage du Charlemagne à Constantinople, which belongs to the same cycle, offers a strong contrast to Ogier. It is a mock-heroic piece, full of broad and extravagant pleasantries, and is rather a long fabliau than a true Chanson de Gestes. Among the other chansons which have come to light, the most remarkable are Garin le Loherain (ascribed to Jean de Flagy), which takes us back to the times of Charles Martel and Pepin, and describes the feud between the Counts of Metz and the Counts of Boulogne; Amis et Amiles, and its sequel Jourdains de Blairies; Berte aus grans Piés, one of the most graceful of all; Gérard de Roussillon; Fierabras; Aliscans, which relates the wars of William

spirited battle-pieces, and contain not a few passages marked by deep and simple pathos. Their plots are somewhat monotonously alike. The strength of their writers does not lie in invention, but in fresh and vivid and sometimes (as in the picture of the sack of the abbey in Raoul de Cambrai) terribly realistic descriptions. Their verse is by no means unmelodious, and their style is rich in picturesque and poetical epithets.

After lying in neglect for centuries, the Chansons de Gestes have for the last fifty years been assiduously studied and brought into notice by a band of French and German scholars. Some fifty of them are now in print, a number of these having been edited by the late M. Paulin Paris, a scholar who did more than any one else to promote the study of this department of literature.

See Léon Gautier's Les Epopées Françaises (2d ed. 1878); the Histoire Poétique de Charlemagne, by G. Paris (1866); C. d'Héricault's Essai sur l'Origine de l'Epopée Française (Frankfort, 1860); Génin's introduction to the Chanson de Roland (1850); the series, Les Anciens began to issue in 1858; and Fauriel's Epopée ChevalerPoëtes de la France, which MM. Guessard and Michelant

esque au Moyen Age.

short tunes used in the English Church since the
Chant, in Music, is the name applied to the
Reformation for the psalms and, less properly, the
canticles. The adaptation of the form to the
Its distin-
structure of the psalms is obvious.
guishing point is that each section is composed
of a reciting note of indefinite length, according
to the number of words sung to it, followed by a
few notes in regular time, called the Mediation
or Termination. The tunes were originally de-
rived, as the name indicates, from the Canto
Fermo, or Plain Song of the Roman Church, also
called Gregorian Tones. These Gregorian tones
were preceded by a still earlier form, the Ambrosian
Chant, which was the first attempt to systematise
the traditional music of the Christian church,
carried out by Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, in the
4th century. Of this, next to nothing is now
known, the statements of musical historians being
founded on slender authority, and curiously at
variance.

If any fragments still remain in the services of the Roman Church, they cannot be distinguished from the later Gregorian music (see PLAIN-SONG, INTONING). There has been a revival in the present day of the old Gregorian chants, which are all single,' that is, composed of only two sections, and adapted to a single verse, and have the additional feature of an introductory 'intonation' of two notes before the first reciting note; but many consider these of mainly The double chant, adapted antiquarian interest. to a couple of verses, and hence more suitable for of Orange with the Saracens; and Antioche, which antiphonal singing, dates from the time of the gives a singularly animated account of the siege Restoration; and in later days there have been of Antioch by the crusaders, one of whom is sup-enriched by almost every English composer of the added quadruple chants. The repertory has been posed to have written the original version of the last three centuries, famous or obscure. The objecpoem. The last forms one of the series known as Le Chevalier au Cygne, which is concluded with tionable florid' style has now happily gone out. On Baudouin de Seboure. the subject of pointing' the psalms-i.e. indicatThe Chansons de Gestes are not, strictly speaking the division of the verses to accord with the ing, epics, though they are frequently described chant, there is great diversity of usage, and no as such. They are rather the material out of authoritative system. which a genuine epic, such as the Iliad or the Nibelungenlied, might have been wrought had a great poet appeared to extract the gold from the dross and mould-a work of art out of this rich mass of national legend. There has been a natural tendency to overestimate their worth on the part of those by whom they have been exhumed and edited. Their literary merit, however, is incon-commercial port of Siam, near the mouth of the testable, and their historical interest is very great. They faithfully reflect the beliefs and customs of the ages in which they were written; they abound in

The best treatment of

the subject, theoretic and practical, will be found
in Helmore's Psalter Noted and Plain Song, the
Cathedral Psalter, and Ouseley and Monk's and
Oakeley's Psalters. Chanting is gaining ground
in the Presbyterian and other churches.

Chantenay, a western suburb of Nantes (q.v.).
Chantibun, or CHANTABON, an important

Chantibun River, in the Gulf of Siam, occupied by
the French as security for the fulfilment of the
treaty of 1893. Pop. 30,000.

CHAP-BOOKS

Chap-books are little stitched tracts written for the people, and sold by chapmen, or travelling pedlars, whose representative Autolycus is SO vividly brought before our eyes by Shakespeare in Winter's Tale. The literary wares of the chapman were mostly ballads or other broadsides, but he also dealt in these stitched booklets. Popular literature has naturally become scarce on account of the vicissitudes to which it is subject, and few of the older chap-books exist at the present day. Samuel Pepys collected some of considerable interest which he bound in small quarto volumes and lettered Vulgaria. Besides these he left four volumes of chap-books of a smaller size which he lettered Penny Merriments, Penny Witticisms, Penny Compliments and Penny Godlinesses. The small quarto chap-books are the descendants of the black-letter tracts of Wynkyn de Worde, Copland, and other famous printers, and were probably bought from booksellers as well as from chapmen. With the 18th century came in a much inferior class of literature, which was printed in a smaller size, and forms the bulk of what is known to us now in collections of chap-books. These tracts were printed largely in Aldermary Churchyard, and afterwords in Bow Churchyard, as well as at Northampton, York, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Stokesley, Warrington, Liverpool, Banbury, Aylesbury, Durham, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Whitehaven, Carlisle, Worcester, Penrith, Cirencester, &c., in England; at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Falkirk, Paisley, Dumfries, Kilmarnock, Stirling, &c., in Scotland; and at Dublin. As ballads are frequently reduced versions of romances, so chap-books usually contain vulgarised versions of popular stories. The subjects of the chap-books are very various; first and foremost are the popular tales, such as Valentine and Orson, Fortunatus, Reynard the Fox, Jack and the Giants, Patient Grissel, Tom Thumb, and Tom Hickathrift; then come the lives of heroes, historical abridgments, travels, religious treatises, and abstracts of popular books like Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote. Besides these

there are the more modern inventions of hack writers. Dougal Graham (1724-1779), bellman to the city of Glasgow, was a popular writer who is supposed to have done much to give a special character to Scottish chap-book literature. Motherwell has styled him the vulgar Juvenal of his age. His works were reprinted at Glasgow in

2 vols. in 1883.

that Whittington set out before daybreak on AllHallows' Day, and before he got as far as Bunhill he heard Bow Bells ring out. Holloway replaced Bunhill in the later versions, and hence arose the myth connected with Whittington Stone on Highgate Hill.

Hannah More's Repository Tracts, and afterwards the publications of the Useful Knowledge Society, Chambers's Miscellany of Tracts, and the growth of cheap magazines, greatly reduced the popularity of chap-books; but Catnach, a London printer, kept up the supply in the early portion of the 19th century, and even now chap-books are still produced in England and elsewhere.

The influence of chap-books can never have been very great in Britain from the inferiority of their literary character. This has not been the case in other countries, and Mr Wentworth Webster has discovered the curious fact that the Pastorales or Basque dramas owe their origin to the chap-books hawked about the country (see article BASQUES). A valuable and standard work on the chap-books of France was published in 1854, entitled Histoire des Livres Populaires, ou de la Littérature du Colportage, by M. Ch. Nisard; but little has been done in England for this class of literature. Mr J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps printed in 1849 Notices of Fugitive Tracts and Chap Books and Descriptive Notices of Popular English Histories; Mr John Ashton published in 1882 a useful work on Chapbooks of the Eighteenth Century; and five of the most interesting of the old chap-books have been reprinted (1885) by the Villon Society, with introductions by Mr Gomme and Mr H. B. Wheatley. For German chap-books, the reader should consult Karl Simrock, Die deutschen Volksbücher (55 parts, Berlin and Frankfort, 1839-67), and Gotthard Oswald Marbach, Altdeutsche Volksbücher (44 vols. Leip. 1838–47).

Chapel (through Fr. from a late Latin capella, which, according to Brachet, already in the 7th century had the sense of a chapel, but earlier meant the sanctuary in which was preserved the cappa or cope of St Martin, and was next expanded to mean any sanctuary containing relics). The term now signifies a building erected for the purposes of public worship, but not possessing the full privileges and characteristics of a church. In this sense all places of worship erected by dissenters are now called chapels in England, and the term is also applied to supplementary places of worship, even though in connection with the established churchsuch as parochial chapels, chapels of ease, free In former times it was chapels, and the like. An instance

The chap-books of the 17th century are valuable as illustrations of manners; but little is to be learned from those of the 18th century, which are altogether of an inferior character. of this may be taken from the story of Dick Whittington. which has come down to us is a small quarto tract entitled The Famous and Remarkable History of Sir Richard Whittington, three times Lord Mayor of London, who lived in the time of King Henry the Fifth in the year 1419, with all the remarkable passages, and things of note, which happened in his time with his Life and Death.' It is without a date, but was probably published about 1670. In this the historical character of the subject is fairly

The earliest version of this tale

kept up, although the dates are somewhat mixed, and to this the widespread folk-tale of the cat is added. In the later chap-book versions the historical incidents are ruthlessly cut down, and the fictitious ones amplified. The three chief points of the story are (1) the poor parentage of the hero, (2) his change of mind at Highgate Hill by reason of hearing Bow Bells, and (3) his good fortune arising from the sale of his cat. Now these are all equally untrue as referring to the historical Whittington, and the second is apparently an invention of the 18th century. In the 17th-century story we learn

applied either to a domestic oratory, or to a place
of worship erected by a private individual or a
body corporate. In the latter sense we speak of
But its earliest significa-
chapels in colleges.
tion was that of a separate erection, either within
ately dedicated, and devoted to special services
or attached to a large church or cathedral, separ-
attached to them, and the sacrament of baptism
(see CHANTRY). Chapels had no burying-ground
was not usually administered in them.-The name
is also given to a printer's workshop, hence to a
be so applied because Caxton set up his press in a
union of the workmen in a printing-office-said to
chapel at Westminster.

Chapelain, JEAN, a somewhat curious figure in the gallery of French authors, was born in 1595, and died in 1674. He was a learned, industrious writer, who passed for a time as a poet, and was accepted as the dominant authority in the world of French letters between the literary dictatorships of Malherbe and of Boileau. He produced one of the abortive epics which it was the fashion to write during the regency of Mazarin. This work, the