“Celimene” in Moliere’s Les Precieuses Ridicules is a mere dummy.  She is brought on the stage occasionally towards the end of the play, but never utters one word, and seems a supernumerary of no importance at all.

CELIN’DA, the victim of count Fathom’s seduction.—­Smollett, Count Fathom (1754).

CEL’LIDE (2 syl.), beloved by Valentine and his son Francisco.  The lady naturally prefers the younger man.—­Beaumont and Fletcher, Mons. Thomas (1619).

CELTIC HOMER (The), Ossian, said to be of the third century.

If Ossian lived at the introduction of Christianity, as by all appearances he did, his epoch will be the latter end of the third and beginning of the fourth century.

The “Caracul” of Fingal, who is no other than Caracalla (son of Seve’rus emperor of Rome), and the battle fought against Caros or Carausius ... fix the epoch of Fingal to the third century, and Irish historians place his death in the year 283.  Ossian was Fingal’s son.—­Era of Ossian.

CENCI.  Francesco Cenci was a most profligate Roman noble, who had four sons and one daughter, all of whom he treated with abominable cruelty.  It is said that he assassinated his two elder sons and debauched his daughter Beatrice.  Beatrice and her two surviving brothers, with Lucretia (their mother), conspired against Francesco and accomplished his death, but all except the youngest brother perished on the scaffold, September 11, 1501.

It has been doubted whether the famous portrait in the Barberini palace at Rome is really of Beatrice Cenci, and even whether Guido Eeni was the painter.

Percy B. Shelley wrote a tragedy called The Cenci (1819).

CENIMAG’NI, the inhabitants of Norfolk, Suffolk, and
Cambridge.—­Caesar, Commentaries.

CENTAUR (The Blue), a human form from the waist upwards, and a goat covered with blue shag from the waist downwards.  Like the Ogri, he fed on human flesh.

“Shepherds,” said he, “I am the Blue Centaur.  If you will give me every third year a young child, I promise to bring a hundred of my kinsmen and drive the Ogri away.” ...  He [the Blue Centaur] used to appear on the top of a rock, with his club in one hand ... and with a terrible voice cry out to the shepherds, “Leave me my prey, and be off with you!”—­Comtesse d’Aunoy, Fairy Tales ("Princess Carpillona,” 1682).

CEN’TURY WHITE, John White, the nonconformist lawyer.  So called from his chief work, entitled The First Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests, etc. (1590-1645).

CE’PHAL (Greek, Kephale), the Head personified, the “acropolis” of The Purple Island, fully described in canto v. of that poem, by Phineas Fletcher (1633).