EDDIUS (Aeddi), a Kentish choirmaster, summoned by Wilfrid (c. 634–709), bishop of York, to help in organizing church services in Northumbria. He wrote the Life of his patron, and this biography of St Wilfrid is the earliest extant historical work compiled by an Anglo-Saxon author. He is a strong partisan and very credulous, but the Vita Wilfridi is nevertheless invaluable for the period it treats. Its date is little after the first decade of the 8th century, and it was used by Bede in compiling his Historia.
See Eddius, Vita Wilfridi (Raine, Historians of Church of York, London, 1879–1894), 14; Bede, Hist. Eccl. (Plummer, Oxford, 1896), iii. 2.
EDELINCK, GERARD (1649–1707), Flemish copper-plate engraver, was born at Antwerp. The rudiments of the art, which he was to carry to a higher pitch of excellence than it had previously reached, he acquired in his native town under the engraver Cornelisz Galle. But he was not long in reaching the limits of his master’s attainments; and then he went to Paris to improve himself under the teaching of De Poilly. This master likewise had soon done all he could to help him onwards, and Edelinck ultimately took the first rank among line engravers. His excellence was generally acknowledged; and having become known to Louis XIV. he was appointed, on the recommendation of Le Brun, teacher at the academy established at the Gobelins for the training of workers in tapestry. He was also entrusted with the execution of several important works. In 1677 he was admitted member of the Paris Academy of Painting and Sculpture. The work of this great engraver constitutes an epoch in the art. His prints number more than four hundred.
Edelinck stands above and apart from his predecessors and contemporaries in that he excelled, not in some one respect, but in all respects,—that while one engraver attained excellence in correct form, and another in rendering light and shade, and others in giving colour to their prints and the texture of surfaces, he, as supreme master of the burin, possessed and displayed all these separate qualities, in so complete a harmony that the eye is not attracted by any one of them in particular, but rests in the satisfying whole. Edelinck was the first to break through the custom of making prints square, and to execute them in the lozenge shape. Among his most famous works are a “Holy Family,” after Raphael; a “Penitent Magdalene,” after Charles le Brun; “Alexander at the Tent of Darius,” after Le Brun; a “Combat of Four Knights,” after Leonardo da Vinci; “Christ surrounded with Angels”; “St Louis praying”; and “St Charles Borromeo before a crucifix,”—the last three after Le Brun. Edelinck was especially good as an engraver of portraits, and executed prints of many of the most eminent persons of his time. Among these are those of Le Brun, Rigaud, Philippe de Champagne (which the engraver thought his best), Santeuil, La Fontaine, Colbert, John Dryden, Descartes, &c. He died at Paris in 1707. His younger brother John, and his son Nicholas, were also engravers, but did not attain to his excellence.
EDELWEISS, known botanically as Leontopodium alpinum, a member of the family Compositae, a native of the Alps of Central Europe. It is a small herb reaching about 6 in. high, with narrow white woolly leaves, and terminal flower-heads enveloped in woolly bracts. The woolly covering enables the plant to thrive in the exposed situations in which it is found, by protecting it from cold and from drying up through excessive loss of moisture. It is grown in Britain as a rock-plant.
EDEN, SIR ASHLEY (1831–1887), Anglo-Indian official and diplomatist, third son of Robert John Eden, third Lord Auckland and bishop of Bath and Wells, was born on the 13th of November 1831, and was educated at Rugby, Winchester and the East India Company’s college at Haileybury, entering the Indian civil service in 1852. In 1855 he gained distinction as assistant to the special commissioner for the suppression of the Santal rising, and in 1860 was appointed secretary to the Bengal government with an ex officio seat on the legislative council, a position he held for eleven years. In 1861 he negotiated, as political agent, a treaty with the raja of Sikkim. His success led to his being sent on a similar mission to Bhutan in 1863; but, being unaccompanied by any armed force, his demands were rejected and he was forced under circumstances of personal insult to come to an arrangement highly favourable to the Bhutias. The result was the repudiation of the treaty by the Indian government and the declaration of war against Bhutan. In 1871 Eden became the first civilian governor of British Burma, which post he held until his appointment in 1877 as lieutenant-governor of Bengal. In 1878 he was made a K.C.S.I., and in 1882 resigned the lieutenant-governorship and returned to England on his appointment to the council of the secretary of state for India, of which he remained a member till his death on the 8th of July 1887. The success of his administration of Bengal was attested by the statue erected in his honour at Calcutta after his retirement.
EDEN, the name of the region in which, according to the Hebrew paradise-tradition in its present form, God planted a garden (or park), wherein he put the man whom he had formed (Gen. ii. 8). Research into primitive beliefs, guided by the comparative method, leads to the view that the “garden” was originally a celestial locality (see Paradise), and we cannot therefore be surprised if, now that paradise has been brought down to earth, the geographical details given in the Bible are rather difficult to work into a consistent picture. The fantastic geography of the (Indian) Vishnu Purana and the (Iranian) Bundahish will, in this case, be a striking parallel.
Let us now take the details of Eden as they occur. In Gen. ii. 8 we read that the garden lay “in Eden eastward,” where “eastward” is generally taken to mean “in the east of the earth.” This, however, seems inconsistent with Isa. xiv. 13, where the “mountain of God,” which corresponds (see Ezek. xxviii. 13, 14 and the article Adam) to the “garden in Eden,” is said to have been “in the uttermost parts of the north” (so R.V.). The former statement (“eastward”) suits Babylonia, where Friedrich Delitzsch[1] places Eden; the latter does not. We are further told (v. 10) that “a river went out from Eden to water the garden,” and that “from thence it parted itself (?), and became four heads (?),” which is commonly understood to mean that the river was so large that, soon after leaving the garden (“from thence” is all that the text says), it could still supply four considerable streams (the text says, not “streams,” but “heads,” i.e. perhaps “beginnings” or “starting-points”). In vv. 11-14 the names of four rivers are given, but in spite of the descriptive supplements attached to three of them, only that one which has no supplement can be identified with much probability. In fact, Pĕrāth may without any obvious difficulty be “Euphrates,” except in Jer. xiii., where a more southerly stream seems indicated, but to the identification of “Hiddekel” with “Tigris” (Babylonian Diglat) the presence of the initial Hi in the Hebrew is an objection. Now as to “Pishon” and “Gihon.” If a moderately early tradition may be trusted, the “Gihon” is another name for the “Shihor,” which was either in or beside “Mizraim” (= Egypt) or Mizrim (= the North Arabian Muṣri), and indeed according to most scholars means the Nile in Jer. ii. 18, where the Septuagint substitutes for it Gēōn, i.e. Gihon. For “Pishon” few plausible suggestions have been made; it is not, however, a hopeless problem from the point of view which recognizes Eden in Arabia.
For details of the interesting descriptive supplements of the names Pishon, Giḥon, and Ḥiddeḳel, on which there is much difference of opinion, it must suffice to refer to the Encyclopaedia Biblica and Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible. We must, however, mention a widely held explanation of the name Eden. Plausible as it is to interpret this name as “delight”—indeed, the Septuagint translates in Gen. iii. 23 f. ὁ παράδεισος τῆς τρυφῆς—this cannot have been the original meaning. Hence Delitzsch (Wo lag das Paradies? p. 79) suggested that “Eden” might be a Hebraized form of the Babylonian ēdinu, “field, plain, desert.” But whereas Delitzsch takes “Eden” to be the entire plain of
- ↑ Wo lag das Paradies? p. 66. A Sumerian name of Babylon was Tin-ter, “dwelling of life.” Cf. Bābīlu, Bābīli, “gate of God.”
