river, about 16 m. E. by S. of New Haven. Pop. of the township, including the borough (1900), 2785, of whom 387 were foreign-born; (1910) 3001; pop. of the borough (1910), 1608. The borough is served by the New York, New Haven & Hartford railroad. On a plain is the borough green of nearly 12 acres, which is shaded by some fine old elms and other trees, and in which there is a soldiers’ monument. About the green are several churches and some of the better residences. On an eminence commanding a fine view of the Sound is an old stone house, erected in 1639 for a parsonage, meeting-house and fortification; it was made a state museum in 1898, when extensive alterations were made to restore the interior to its original appearance. The Point of Rocks, in the harbour, is an attractive resort during the summer season. There are about 12 ft. of water on the harbour bar at high tide. The principal industries of Guilford are coastwise trade, the manufacture of iron castings, brass castings, wagon wheels and school furniture, and the canning of vegetables. Near the coast are quarries of fine granite; the stone for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island, in New York Harbour, was taken from them.
Guilford was founded in 1639 as an independent colony by a company of twenty-five or more families from Kent, Surrey and Sussex, England, under the leadership of Rev. Henry Whitfield (1597–1657). While still on shipboard twenty-five members of the company signed a plantation covenant whereby they agreed not to desert the plantation which they were about to establish. Arriving at New Haven early in July 1639, they soon began negotiations with the Indians for the purchase of land, and on the 29th of September a deed was signed by which the Indians conveyed to them the territory between East River and Stony Creek for “12 coates, 12 Fathoms of Wampam, 12 glasses (mirrors), 12 payer of shooes, 12 Hatchetts, 12 paire of Stockings, 12 Hooes, 4 kettles, 12 knives, 12 Hatts, 12 Porringers, 12 spoones, and 2 English coates.” Other purchases of land from the Indians were made later. Before the close of the year the company removed from New Haven and established the new colony; it was known by the Indian name Menuncatuck for about four years and the name Guilford (from Guildford, England) was then substituted. As a provisional arrangement, civil power for the administration of justice and the preservation of the peace was vested in four persons until such time as a church should be organized. This was postponed until 1643 when considerations of safety demanded that the colony should become a member of the New Haven Jurisdiction, and then only to meet the requirements for admission to this union were the church and church state modelled after those of New Haven. Even then, though suffrage was restricted to church members, Guilford planters who were not church members were required to attend town meetings and were allowed to offer objections to any proposed order or law. From 1661 until the absorption of the members of the New Haven Jurisdiction by Connecticut, in 1664, William Leete (1611–1683), one of the founders of Guilford, was governor of the Jurisdiction, and under his leadership Guilford took a prominent part in furthering the submission to Connecticut, which did away with the church state and the restriction of suffrage to freemen. Guilford was the birthplace of Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867), the poet; of Samuel Johnson (1696–1771), the first president of King’s College (now Columbia University); of Abraham Baldwin (1754–1807), prominent as a statesman and the founder of the University of Georgia; and of Thomas Chittenden, the first governor of Vermont. The borough was incorporated in 1815.
See B. C. Steiner, A History of the Plantation of Menunca-Tuck and of the Original Town of Guilford, Connecticut (Baltimore, 1897), and Proceedings at the Celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the Settlement of Guilford, Connecticut (New Haven, 1889).
GUILLAUME, JEAN BAPTISTE CLAUDE EUGÈNE (1822–1905), French sculptor, was born at Montbard on the 4th of July 1822, and studied under Cavelier, Millet, and Barrias, at the École des Beaux-Arts, which he entered in 1841, and where he gained the prix de Rome in 1845 with “Theseus finding on a rock his Father’s Sword.” He became director of the École des Beaux-Arts in 1864, and director-general of Fine Arts from 1878 to 1879, when the office was suppressed. Many of his works have been bought for public galleries, and his monuments are to be found in the public squares of the chief cities of France. At Rheims there is his bronze statue of “Colbert,” at Dijon his “Rameau” monument. The Luxembourg Museum has his “Anacreon” (1852), “Les Gracques” (1853), “Faucheur”
(1855), and the marble bust of “Mgr Darboy”; the Versailles
Museum the portrait of “Thiers”; the Sorbonne Library the
marble bust of “Victor le Clerc, doyen de la faculté des lettres.”
Other works of his are at Trinity Church, St Germain l’Auxerrois,
and the church of St Clotilde, Paris. Guillaume was a prolific
writer, principally on sculpture and architecture of the Classic
period and of the Italian Renaissance. He was elected member
of the Académie Française in 1862, and in 1891 was sent to
Rome as director of the Académie de France in that city. He
was also elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy,
London, 1869, on the institution of that class.
GUILLAUME DE LORRIS (fl. 1230), the author of the earlier
section of the Roman de la rose, derives his surname from a small town about equidistant from Montargis and Gien, in the present department of Loiret. This and the fact of his authorship may be said to be the only things positively known about him. The rubric of the poem, where his own part finishes, attributes Jean de Meun’s continuation to a period forty years later than William’s death and the consequent interruption of the romance. Arguing backwards, this death used to be put at about 1260; but Jean de Meun’s own work has recently been dated earlier, and so the composition of the first part has been thrown back to a period before 1240. The author represents himself as having dreamed the dream which furnished the substance of the poem in his twentieth year, and as having set to work to “rhyme it” five years later. The later and longer part of the Roman shows signs of greater intellectual vigour and wider knowledge than the earlier and shorter, but Guillaume de Lorris is to all appearance more original. The great features of his four or five thousand lines are, in the first place, the extraordinary vividness and beauty of his word-pictures, in which for colour, freshness and individuality he has not many rivals except in the greatest masters, and, secondly, the fashion of allegorical presentation, which, hackneyed and wearisome as it afterwards became, was evidently in his time new and striking. There are of course traces of it before, as in some romances, such as those of Raoul de Houdenc, in the troubadours, and in other writers; but it was unquestionably Guillaume de Lorris who fixed the style.
For an attempt to identify Guillaume de Lorris see L. Jarry, Guillaume de Lorris et le testament d’Alphonse de Poitiers (1881). Also Paulin Paris in the Hist. litt. de la France, vol. xxiii.
GUILLAUME DE PALERME (William of Palerne), hero of romance. The French verse romance was written at the desire of a Countess Yolande, generally identified with Yolande, daughter of Baldwin IV., count of Flanders. The English poem in alliterative verse was written about 1350 by a poet called William, at the desire of Humphrey Bohun, earl of Hereford, (d. 1361). Guillaume, a foundling supposed to be of low degree, is brought up at the court of the emperor of Rome, and loves his daughter Melior who is destined for a Greek prince. The lovers flee into the woods disguised in bear-skins. Alfonso, who is Guillaume’s cousin and a Spanish prince, has been changed into a wolf by his step-mother’s enchantments. He provides food and protection for the fugitives, and Guillaume eventually triumphs over Alfonso’s father, and wins back from him his kingdom. The benevolent werwolf is disenchanted, and marries Guillaume’s sister.
See Guillaume de Palerne, ed. H. Michelant (Soc. d. anc. textes fr., 1876); Hist. litt. de la France, xxii. 829; William of Palerme, ed. Sir F. Madden (Roxburghe Club, 1832), and W. W. Skeat (E. E. Text Soc., extra series No. 1, 1867); M. Kaluza, in Eng. Studien (Heilbronn, iv. 196). The prose version of the French romance, printed by N. Bonfons, passed through several editions.
GUILLAUME D’ORANGE (d. 812), also known as Guillaume Fierabrace, St Guillaume de Gellone, and the Marquis au court
