NAQUET
NEGEI-GAELANDA
on Napier in the Diet. Nat. Biog., Col.
Vetch, says : " His journals testify to his
religious convictions, while his life was one
long protest against oppression, injustice,
and wrong-doing." His journals are repro
duced in The Life and Opinions of Gen.
Sir C. J. Napier (4 vols., 1857) by Lt.-Gen.
Sir W. Napier, and they show that he was
merely a Deist, with doubts about a future
life and no doubt whatever about the false
ness of Christianity. " Jesus of Nazareth !
the thing is impossible," he writes (i, 385),
summing up his rejection of Christianity.
As to the future life, he says : " Tis an idle
waste of thought thus to dwell on what no
thought can tell us " (iv, 325). Napier
was much maligned even called " bloody
Napier " by his enemies, yet we find him
writing, for no eye but his own, in his
journal : " I would rather have finished
the roads of Cephalonia than have fought
Austerlitz or Waterloo " (iv, 96). He was
a high-minded man as well as a great
soldier. D. Aug. 29, 1853.
NAQUET, Professor Alfred Joseph,
M.D., French politician. B. Oct. 6, 1834. Ed. Paris. After graduating in medicine, Naquet devoted himself to chemistry, and in 1863 he became associate professor at Paris. From 1863 to 1866 he was pro fessor of chemistry at Palermo. He returned to Paris, and expressed so openly the advanced views he had cultivated among the Garibaldians that in 1867 he got fifteen months in prison. In 1869 he courageously returned to the attack with his book, Religion, Propriete, Famille, and was fined five hundred francs and sentenced to four months imprisonment and the loss of civil rights for life. He went to Spain, but the Eevolution of 1870 reopened Paris to him. From 1871 to 1882 he was in the Chambre, and he fought with great energy and perseverance for a rational law of divorce. He passed to the Senate in 1882, and two years later he secured the passing of the present liberal divorce law. In 1898 he retired from politics, but continued to devote his time to advanced causes. M.
547
Naquet was one of the leading champions-
at Paris of the innocence of F. Ferrer, and
is a thorough Agnostic.
NASCIMENTO, Francisco Manuel do,
Portuguese poet. B. Dec. 23, 1734. Nascimento was a priest who accepted the- Deistic ideas which reached Portugal from France, and translated Moliere s anti clerical Tartuffe (1778). The Portuguese Inquisition issued an order for his arrest, and he was compelled to leave the country. His poems and satires were generally written under the pseudonym of " Filinto- Elysio." D. Feb. 25, 1819.
NEGRI, Gaetano, Italian historian. B* July 11, 1838. After a brilliant career in the army of liberation, which he quitted in 1862, Negri settled at Milan and became the leader of the Conservatives there. He was elected to the Municipal Council in 1873, was later Mayor of the city, and then Senator of the Kingdom of Italy. Among his numerous historical and literary works (4 vols., 1905-1909) there are several which deal with religion. He is tender to Christianity, though his Giuseppe Garibaldi (1883) and George Eliot (2 vols., 1891) already showed how far he was from retracting his early ardour against the Papacy. In his best known work, Julian the Apostate (Eng. trans., 1905), he still shows the leniency towards Christianity which some have misunderstood. But he speaks of it as an " irrational illusion," and was to the end, as Villari says in the Preface, " a confirmed Rationalist. " D. July 31, 1902.
NEGRI-GARLANDA, Ada, Italian poet. B. Feb. 8, 1870. Ed. Lodi. Signorina, Negri began to teach in a school at Motta- Visconti at the age of eighteen. She came of working-class parents, and her recollec tion of the sufferings of the poor inspired her to write verse which is regarded as of high quality. Her poems are collected in Fatalita (1892), Tempeste (1895), and Maternitd (1896). She was appointed. 548
