hands of Louis XVI. With the men and methods of the Terror, however, he was wholly out of sympathy. Suspected of throwing obstacles in the way of the expedition despatched in 1793 against Sardinia, he was summoned, with the procurator-general Pozzo di Borgo, to the bar of the Convention. Paoli now openly defied the Convention by summoning the representatives of the communes Revolt under Paoli. to meet in diet at Corte on the 27th of May. To the remonstrances of Saliceti, who attended the meeting, he replied that he was rebelling, not against France, but against the dominant faction of whose actions the majority of Frenchmen disapproved. Saliceti thereupon hurried to Paris, and on his motion Paoli and his sympathizers were declared by the Convention hors la loi (June 26).
Paoli had already made up his mind to raise the standard of revolt against France. But though the consulta at Corte elected him president, Corsican opinion was by no means united. Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Paoli had British occupation, 1794–1796. expected to win over to his views, indignantly rejected the idea of a breach with France, and the Bonapartes were henceforth ranked with his enemies. Paoli now appealed for assistance to the British government, which despatched a considerable force. By the summer of 1794, after hard fighting, the island was reduced, and in June the Corsican assembly formally offered the sovereignty to King George III. The British occupation lasted two years, the island being administered by Sir Gilbert Elliot. Paoli, whose presence was considered inexpedient, was invited to return to England, where he remained till his death. In 1796 Bonaparte, after his victorious Italian campaign, sent an expedition against Corsica. The British, weary of a somewhat thankless task, made no great resistance, and in October the island was once more in French hands. It was again occupied by Great Britain for a short time in 1814, but in the settlement of 1815 was restored to the French crown. Its history henceforth is part of that of France.
See F. Girolami-Cortona, Géographie générale de la Corse (Ajaccio, 1893); A. Andrei, À travers la Corse (Paris, 1893); Forcioli-Conti, Notre Corse (Ajaccio, 1897); R. Le Joindre, La Corse et les Corses (Paris, 1904); F. O. Renucci, Storia di Corsica (2 vols., Bastia, 1833), fervidly Corsican, but useful; Antonio Pietro Filippini, Istoria di Corsica (1st ed., 1594; 2nd ed., corrected and illustrated with unpublished documents by G. C. Gregori, 5 vols., Pisa, 1827–1832); J. M. Jacobi, Hist. gén. de la Corse, 2 vols., (Paris, 1833–1835), with many unpublished documents; L. H. Caird, History of Corsica (London, 1899). Further works and references to articles in reviews, &c., are given in Ulysse Chevalier’s Répertoire des sources, &c., Topo-bibliographie, t. ii. s.v.
CORSICANA, a city and the county-seat of Navarro county, Texas, U.S.A., situated in the N.E. part of the state, about 55 m. S. of Dallas. Pop. (1890) 6285; (1900) 9313, of whom 2399 were of negro descent; (1910 census) 9749. It is served by the Houston & Texas Central, the St Louis South
Western, and the Trinity & Brazos Valley railways. It is the
centre of a large and productive wheat- and cotton-growing
region, which has also numerous oil wells (with a total production
in 1907 of 226,311 barrels). The city has two oil refineries,
a large cotton gin and a cotton compress, and among its
manufactures are cotton-seed oil, cotton-cloth, flour and ice.
The total value of the factory product in 1905 was $1,796,805,
being an increase of 50.3% since 1900. Natural gas is extensively
used for fuel and for lighting. Corsicana is the seat
of the Texas state orphan home and of an Odd Fellows widows’
and orphans’ home, and has a Carnegie library. Corsicana was
named in honour of the wife of a Mexican, Navarro, who owned
a large tract of land in the county and from whom the county
was named. The first permanent settlement here was made
in 1848, and Corsicana was incorporated as a village in 1850
and chartered as a city in 1871.
CORSINI, the name of a Florentine princely family, of which
the founder is said to be Neri Corsini, who flourished about the
year 1170. Like other Florentine nobles the Corsini had at
first no titles, but in more recent times they received many from
foreign potentates and from the later grand dukes of Tuscany.
The emperor Charles IV. created the head of the house a count
palatine in 1371; the marquisate of Sismano was conferred on
them in 1620, those of Casigliano and Civitella in 1629, of
Lajatico and Orciatico in 1644, of Giovagallo and Tresana in
1652; in 1730 Lorenzo Corsini was elected pope as Clement
XII., and conferred the rank of Roman princes and the duchy
of Casigliano on his family, and in 1732 they were created
grandees of Spain. They own two palaces in Florence, one of
which on the Lung’ Arno Corsini contains the finest private
picture gallery in the city, and many villas and estates in
various parts of Italy.
See L. Passerini, Genealogia e storia della famiglia Corsini (Florence, 1858); A. von Reumont, Geschichte der Stadt Rom (Berlin, 1868); Almanach de Gotha. (L. V.*)
CORSON, HIRAM (1828– ), American scholar, was born
on the 6th of November 1828, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He held a position in the library of the Smithsonian Institution,
Washington D.C. (1849–1856), was a lecturer on English literature
in Philadelphia (1859–1865), and was professor of English at
Girard College, Philadelphia (1865–1866), and in St John’s College,
Annapolis, Maryland (1866–1870). In 1870–1871 he was
professor of rhetoric and oratory at Cornell University, where he
was professor of Anglo-Saxon and English literature (1872–1886),
of English literature and rhetoric (1886–1890), and from 1890
to 1903 (when he became professor emeritus) of English literature,
a chair formed for him. He edited Chaucer’s Legende of Goode
Women (1863) and Selections from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
(1896), and wrote a Hand-Book of Anglo-Saxon and Early English
(1871), and, among other text-books, An Elocutionary Manual
(1864), A Primer of English Verse (1892), and Introductions to
the study of Browning (1886, 1889), of Shakespeare (1889) and
of Milton (1899). The volume on Shakespeare and the Jottings on the Text of Macbeth (1874) contain some excellent Shakespearian criticism. He also published The University of the Future (1875), The Aims of Literary Study (1895), and The Voice and Spiritual Education (1896). He translated the Satires of Juvenal (1868) and edited a translation by his wife, Caroline Rollin (d. 1901), of Pierre Janet’s Mental State of Hystericals (1901).
CORSSEN, WILHELM PAUL (1820–1875), German philologist,
was born at Bremen on the 20th of January 1820, and received
his school education in the Prussian town of Schwedt, to which
his father, a merchant, had removed. After spending some
time at the Joachimsthal Gymnasium in Berlin, where his
interest in philological pursuits was awakened by the rector,
Meinike, he proceeded to the university, and there came especially
under the influence of Böckh and Lachmann. His first
important appearance in literature was as the author of Origines
poesis romanae, by which he had obtained the prize offered by
the “philosophical” or “arts” faculty of the university. In
1846 he was called from Stettin, where he had for nearly two
years held a post in the gymnasium, to occupy the position of
lecturer in the royal academy at Pforta (commonly called Schulpforta), and there he continued to labour for the next twenty years. In 1854 he won a prize offered by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences for the best work on the pronunciation and accent of Latin, a treatise which at once took rank, on its publication under the title of Über Aussprache, Vocalismus, und Betonung der lateinischen Sprache (1858–1859), as one of the most erudite and masterly works in its department. This was followed in 1863 by his Kritische Beiträge zur lat. Formenlehre, which were supplemented in 1866 by Kritische Nachträge zur lat. Formenlehre. In the discussion of the pronunciation of Latin he was naturally led to consider the various old Italian dialects, and the results of his investigations appeared in miscellaneous communications to Kuhn’s Zeitschrift für vergleichende Schriftforschung. Ill-health obliged him to give up his professorship at Pforta, and return to Berlin, in 1866; but it produced almost no diminution of his literary activity. In 1867 he published an elaborate archaeological study entitled the Alterthümer und Kunstdenkmale des Cistercienserklosters St Marien und der Landesschule Pforta, in which he gathers together all that can be discovered about the history of the Pforta academy, the German “Eton,” and in 1868–1869 he brought out a new edition of his
