CHUNEE (A la), very huge and bulky.  Chunee was the largest elephant ever brought to England.  Henry Harris, manager of Covent Garden, bought it for L900 to appear in the pantomime of Harlequin Padmenaba, in 1810.  It was subsequently sold to Cross, the proprietor of Exeter ’Change.  Chunee at length became mad, and was shot by a detachment of the Guards, receiving 152 wounds.  The skeleton is preserved in the museum of the College of Surgeons.  It is 12 feet 4 inches high.

CHURCH BUILT BY VOLTAIRE.  Voltaire, the atheist, built, at Ferney, a Christian church, and had this inscription affixed to it “Deo erexit Voltaire.”  Campbell, in the Life of Cowper (vol. vii., 358) says, “he knows not to whom Cowper alludes in these lines:” 

  Nor his who for the bane of thousands born,
  Built God a church, and laughed His word to scorn.

Cowper, Retirement (1782).

CHURM.  Guide, philosopher, and friend of Robert Byng, in Cecil
Dreeme.  A noted philanthropist, the fame of whose benevolence is the
Open Sesame to an insane asylum in which his child is incarcerated. 
—­Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme (1861).

CHUZZLEWIT (Anthony), cousin of Martin Chuzzlewit, the grandfather.  Anthony is an avaricious old hunks, proud of having brought up his son, Jonas, to be as mean and grasping as himself.  His two redeeming points are his affection for his old old servant, Chuffey, and his forgiveness of Jonas after his attempt to poison him.

The old established firm of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son, Manchester warehousemen ... had its place of business in a very narrow street somewhere behind the Post Office....  A dim, dirty, smoky, tumble-down, rotten old house it was ... but here the firm ... transacted their business ... and neither the young man nor the old one had any other residence.—­Chap. xi.

Jonas Chuzzlewit, son of Anthony, of the “firm of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son, Manchester warehousemen.”  A consummate villain of mean brutality and small tyranny.  He attempts to poison his old father, and murders Montague Tigg, who knows his secret.  Jonas marries Mercy Pecksniff, his cousin, and leads her a life of utter misery.  His education had been conducted on money-grubbing principles; the first word he was taught to spell was gain, and the second, money.  He poisons himself to save his neck from the gallows.

This fine young man had all the inclination of a profligate of the first water, and only lacked the one good trait in the common catalogue of debauched vices—­open-handedness—­to be a notable vagabond.  But there his griping and penurious habits stepped in.—­Chap. xi.

Martin Chuzzlewit, sen., grandfather to the hero of the same name.  A stern old man, whose kind heart has been turned to gall by the dire selfishness of his relations.  Being resolved to expose Pecksniff, he goes to live in his house, and pretends to be weak in intellect, but keeps his eyes sharp open, and is able to expose the canting scoundrel in all his deformity.