records to write the introduction to Domesday Book, a task which he discharged with much learning, though several of his views have not stood the test of later criticism. His Original Letters Illustrative of English History (first series, 1824; second series, 1827; third series, 1846) are compiled chiefly from manuscripts in the British Museum and the State Paper Office, and have been of considerable service to historical writers. To the Library of Entertaining Knowledge he contributed four volumes on the Elgin and Townley Marbles. Sir Henry was for many years a director and joint-secretary of the Society of Antiquaries.
ELLIS, ROBINSON (1834– ), English classical scholar,
was born at Barming, near Maidstone, on the 5th of September
1834. He was educated at Elizabeth College, Guernsey, Rugby,
and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1858 he became fellow of Trinity
College, Oxford, and in 1870 professor of Latin at University
College, London. In 1876 he returned to Oxford, where from
1883 to 1893 he held the university readership in Latin. In
1893 he succeeded Henry Nettleship as professor. His chief work
has been on Catullus, whom he began to study in 1859. His
first Commentary on Catullus (1876) aroused great interest, and
called forth a flood of criticism. In 1889 appeared a second and
enlarged edition, which placed its author in the first rank of
authorities on Catullus. Professor Ellis quotes largely from the
early Italian commentators, maintaining that the land where
the Renaissance originated had done more for scholarship than is
commonly recognized. He has supplemented his critical work
by a translation (1871, dedicated to Tennyson) of the poems in
the metres of the originals. Another author to whom Professor
Ellis has devoted many years’ study is Manilius, the astrological
poet. In 1891 he published Noctes Manilianae, a series of dissertations
on the Astronomica, with emendations. He has also
treated Avianus, Velleius Paterculus and the Christian poet
Orientius, whom he edited for the Vienna Corpus Scriptorum
Ecclesiasticorum. He edited the Ibis of Ovid, the Aetna of the
younger Lucilius, and contributed to the Anecdota Oxoniensia
various unedited Bodleian and other manuscripts. In 1907 he
published Appendix Vergiliana (an edition of the minor poems);
in 1908 The Annalist Licinianus.
ELLIS, WILLIAM (1794–1872), English Nonconformist
missionary, was born in London on the 29th of August 1794.
His boyhood and youth were spent at Wisbeach, where he worked
as a market-gardener. In 1814 he offered himself to the London
Missionary Society, and was accepted. During a year’s training
he acquired some knowledge of theology and of various practical
arts, such as printing and bookbinding. He sailed for the South
Sea Islands in January 1816, and remained in Polynesia, occupying
various stations in succession, until 1824, when he was compelled
to return home on account of the state of his wife’s health.
Though the period of his residence in the islands was thus comparatively
short, his labours were very fruitful, contributing
perhaps as much as those of any other missionary to bring about
the extraordinary improvement in the religious, moral and
social condition of the Pacific Archipelago that took place during
the 19th century. Besides promoting the spiritual object of his
mission, he introduced many other aids to the improvement
of the condition of the people. His gardening experience enabled
him successfully to acclimatize many species of tropical
fruits and plants, and he set up and worked the first printing
press in the South Seas. Returning home by way of the United
States, where he advocated his work, Ellis was for some years
employed as a travelling agent of the London Missionary Society,
and in 1832 was appointed foreign secretary to the society, an
office which he held for seven years. In 1837 he married his
second wife, Sarah Stickney, a writer and teacher of some note
in her generation. In 1841 he went to live at Hoddesdon, Herts,
and ministered to a small Congregational church there. On
behalf of the London Missionary Society he paid three visits
to Madagascar (1853–1857), inquiring into the prospects for resuming
the work that had been suspended by Queen Ranavolona’s
hostility. A further visit was paid in 1863. Ellis wrote accounts
of all his travels, and Southey’s praise (in the Quarterly Review)
of his Polynesian Researches (2 vols., 1829) finds many echoes.
He was a fearless, upright and tactful man, and a keen observer
of nature. He died on the 25th of June 1872.
ELLISTON, ROBERT WILLIAM (1774–1831), English actor,
was born in London on the 7th of April 1774, the son of a watchmaker.
He was educated at St Paul’s school, but ran away from
home and made his first appearance on the stage as Tressel in
Richard III. at Bath in 1791. Here he was later seen as Romeo,
and in other leading parts, both comic and tragic, and he
repeated his successes in London from 1796. He acted at Drury
Lane from 1804 to 1809, and again from 1812; and from 1819
he was the lessee of the house, presenting Kean, Mme Vestris and
Macready. Ill-health and misfortune culminated in his bankruptcy
in 1826, when he made his last appearance at Drury Lane
as Falstaff. But as lessee of the Surrey theatre he acted almost
up to his death, which was hastened by intemperance. Leigh
Hunt compared him favourably with Garrick; Byron thought
him inimitable in high comedy; Macready praised his versatility.
Elliston was the author of The Venetian Outlaw (1805), and,
with Francis Godolphin Waldron, of No Prelude (1803), in both
of which plays he appeared.
ELLORA, a village of India in the native state of Hyderabad,
near the city of Daulatabad, famous for its rock temples, which
are among the finest in India. They are first mentioned by
Ma′sudi, the Arabic geographer of the 10th century, but merely
as a celebrated place of pilgrimage. The caves differ from those
of Ajanta in consequence of their being excavated in the sloping
sides of a hill and not in a nearly perpendicular cliff. They
extend along the face of the hill for a mile and a quarter, and are
divided into three distinct series, the Buddhist, the Brahmanical
and the Jain, and are arranged almost chronologically. The most
splendid of the whole series is the Kailas, a perfect Dravidian
temple, complete in all its parts, characterized by Fergusson
as one of the most wonderful and interesting monuments of architectural
art in India. It is not a mere interior chamber cut in
the rock, but is a model of a complete temple such as might
have been erected on the plain. In other words, the rock has been
cut away externally as well as internally. First the great sunken
court measuring 276 ft. by 154 ft. was hewn out of the solid
trap-rock of the hillside, leaving the rock mass of the temple
wholly detached in a cloistered court like a colossal boulder,
save that a rock bridge once connected the upper storey of the
temple with the upper row of galleried chambers surrounding
three sides of the court. Colossal elephants and obelisks stand
on either side of the open mandapam, or pavilion, containing
the sacred bull; and beyond rises the monolithic Dravidian
temple to Siva, 90 ft. in height, hollowed into vestibule, chamber
and image-cells, all lavishly carved. Time and earthquakes have
weathered and broken away bits of the great monument, and
Moslem zealots strove to destroy the carved figures, but these
defects are hardly noticed. The temple was built by Krishna I.,
Rashtrakuta, king of Malkhed in 760–783.
ELLORE, a town of British India, in the Kistna district of
Madras, on the East Coast railway, 303 m. from Madras. Pop.
(1901) 33,521. The two canal systems of the Godavari and the
Kistna deltas meet here. There are manufactures of cotton
and saltpetre, and an important Church of England high school.
Ellore was formerly a military station, and the capital of the
Northern Circars. At Pedda Vegi to the north of it are extensive
ruins, which are believed to be remains of the Buddhist kingdom
of Vengi. From these the Mahommedans, after their conquest of
the district in 1470, obtained material for building a fort at Ellore.
ELLSWORTH, OLIVER (1745–1807), American statesman
and jurist, was born at Windsor, Connecticut, on the 29th of
April 1745. He studied at Yale and Princeton, graduating
from the latter in 1766, studied theology for a year, then law,
and began to practise at Hartford in 1771. He was state’s
attorney for Hartford county from 1777 to 1785, and achieved
extraordinary success at the bar, amassing what was for his day
a large fortune. From 1773 to 1775 he represented the town of
Windsor in the general assembly of Connecticut, and in the latter
year became a member of the important commission known as
the “Pay Table,” which supervised the colony’s expenditures
