COXWELL, a celebrated English aeronaut; bred a dentist; took to ballooning; made 700 ascents; reached with Glaisher an elevation of 7 m.; b. 1819.
COZENS, JOHN ROBERT, a landscape painter, a natural son of Peter the Great; pronounced by Constable the greatest genius that ever touched landscape, and from him Turner confessed he had learned more than from any other landscapist; his mind gave way at last, and he died insane (1752-1801).
CRABBE, GEORGE, an English poet, born at Aldborough, in Suffolk; began life as apprentice to an apothecary with a view to the practice of medicine, but having poetic tastes, he gave up medicine for literature, and started for London with a capital of three pounds; his first productions in this line not meeting with acceptance, he was plunged in want; appealing in vain for assistance in his distress, he fell in with Burke, who liberally helped him and procured him high patronage, under which he took orders and obtained the living of Trowbridge, which he held for life, and he was now in circumstances to pursue his bent; his principal poems are “The Library,” “The Village,” “The Parish Register,” “The Borough,” and the “Tales of the Hall,” all, particularly the earlier ones, instinct with interest in the lives of the poor, “the sacrifices, temptations, loves, and crimes of humble life,” described with the most “unrelenting” realism; the author in Byron’s esteem, “though Nature’s sternest painter, yet the best” (1754-1832).
CRACOW (75), a city in Galicia, the old capital of Poland; where the old Polish kings were buried, and the cathedral of which contains the graves of the most illustrious of the heroes of the country and Thorwaldsen’s statue of Christ; a large proportion of the inhabitants are Jews.
CRADLE MOUNTAIN, a mountain in the W. of Tasmania.
CRAIG, JOHN, a Scottish Reformer, educated at St. Andrews, and originally a Dominican monk; had been converted to Protestantism by study of Calvin’s “Institutes,” been doomed to the stake by the Inquisition, but had escaped; the coadjutor in Edinburgh of Knox, and his successor in his work, and left a confession and catechism (1512-1580).
CRAIG, SIR THOMAS, an eminent Scottish lawyer, author of a treatise on the “Jus Feudale,” which has often been reprinted, as well as three others in Latin of less note; wrote in Latin verse a poem on Queen Mary’s marriage to Darnley (1538-1608).
CRAIGENPUTTOCK, a craig or whinstone hill of the puttocks (small hawks), “a high moorland farm on the watershed between Dumfriesshire and Galloway, 10 m. from Dumfries,” the property for generations of a family of Welshes, and eventually that of their heiress, Jane Welsh Carlyle, “the loneliest spot in all the British dominions,” which the Carlyles made their dwelling-house in 1828, where they remained for seven years, and where “Sartor” was written. “It is certain,” Carlyle says of it long after, “that for living and thinking in I have never since found in the world a place so favourable.... How blessed,” he exclaims, “might poor mortals be in the straitest circumstances if their wisdom and fidelity to heaven and to one another were adequately great!”


