railway. The river Clady, running past the village from the Nacung Loughs, affords salmon and trout fishing. The fine surrounding scenery culminates to the east in the wild mountain Errigal (2466 ft.) at the upper end of the loughs. The place owes its popularity as a resort to Lord George Hill (d. 1879), who also laboured for the amelioration of the conditions of the peasantry on his estate, and combated the Rundale system of minute repartition of property. In 1889, during the troubles which arose out of evictions, Gweedore was the headquarters of the Irish constabulary, when District Inspector Martin was openly murdered on attempting to arrest a priest on his way to Mass.
GWILT, JOSEPH (1784–1863), English architect and writer,
was the younger son of George Gwilt, architect surveyor to the
county of Surrey, and was born at Southwark on the 11th of
January 1784. He was educated at St Paul’s school, and after a
short course of instruction in his father’s office was in 1801
admitted a student of the Royal Academy, where in the same
year he gained the silver medal for his drawing of the tower and
steeple of St Dunstan-in-the-East. In 1811 he published a
Treatise on the Equilibrium of Arches, and in 1815 he was elected
F.S.A. After a visit to Italy in 1816, he published in 1818
Notitia architectonica italiana, or Concise Notices of the Buildings
and Architects of Italy. In 1825 he published an edition of Sir
William Chambers’s Treatise on Civil Architecture; and among
his other principal contributions to the literature of his profession
are a translation of the Architecture of Vitruvius (1826), a Treatise
on the Rudiments of Architecture, Practical and Theoretical (1826),
and his valuable Encyclopaedia of Architecture (1842), which was
published with additions by Wyatt Papworth in 1867. In
recognition of Gwilt’s advocacy of the importance to architects of
a knowledge of mathematics, he was in 1833 elected a member of
the Royal Astronomical Society. He took a special interest in
philology and music, and was the author of Rudiments of the
Anglo-Saxon Tongue (1829), and of the article “Music” in the
Encyclopaedia metropolitana. His principal works as a practical
architect were Markree Castle near Sligo in Ireland, and St
Thomas’s church at Charlton in Kent. He died on the 14th of
September 1863.
GWYN, NELL [Eleanor] (1650–1687), English actress, and
mistress of Charles II., was born on the 2nd of February
1650/1, probably in an alley off Drury Lane, London, although
Hereford also claims to have been her birthplace. Her father,
Thomas Gwyn, appears to have been a broken-down soldier of a
family of Welsh origin. Of her mother little is known save that
she lived for some time with her daughter, and that in 1679 she
was drowned, apparently when intoxicated, in a pond at Chelsea.
Nell Gwyn, who sold oranges in the precincts of Drury Lane
Theatre, passed, at the age of fifteen, to the boards, through the
influence of the actor Charles Hart and of Robert Duncan or
Dungan, an officer of the guards who had interest with the
management. Her first recorded appearance on the stage was in
1665 as Cydaria, Montezuma’s daughter, in Dryden’s Indian
Emperor, a serious part ill-suited to her. In the following year
she was Lady Wealthy in the Hon. James Howard’s comedy The
English Monsieur. Pepys was delighted with the playing of
“pretty, witty Nell,” but when he saw her as Florimel in Dryden’s
Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen, he wrote “so great a performance
of a comical part was never, I believe, in the world
before” and, “so done by Nell her merry part as cannot be
better done in nature” (Diary, March 25, 1667). Her success
brought her other leading rôles—Bellario, in Beaumont and
Fletcher’s Philaster; Flora, in Rhodes’s Flora’s Vagaries;
Samira, in Sir Robert Howard’s Surprisal; and she remained
a member of the Drury Lane company until 1669, playing continuously
save for a brief absence in the summer of 1667 when she
lived at Epsom as the mistress of Lord Buckhurst, afterwards
6th earl of Dorset (q.v.). Her last appearance was as Almahide
to the Almanzor of Hart, in Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada
(1670), the production of which had been postponed some
months for her return to the stage after the birth of her first
son by the king.
As an actress Nell Gwyn was largely indebted to Dryden, who seems to have made a special study of her airy, irresponsible personality, and who kept her supplied with parts which suited her. She excelled in the delivery of the risky prologues and epilogues which were the fashion, and the poet wrote for her some specially daring examples. It was, however, as the mistress of Charles II. that she endeared herself to the public. Partly, no doubt, her popularity was due to the disgust inspired by her rival, Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, and to the fact that, while the Frenchwoman was a Catholic, she was a Protestant. But very largely it was the result of exactly those personal qualities that appealed to the monarch himself. She was piquante rather than pretty, short of stature, and her chief beauty was her reddish-brown hair. She was illiterate, and with difficulty scrawled an awkward E. G. at the bottom of her letters, written for her by others. But her frank recklessness, her generosity, her invariable good temper, her ready wit, her infectious high spirits and amazing indiscretions appealed irresistibly to a generation which welcomed in her the living antithesis of Puritanism. “A true child of the London streets,” she never pretended to be superior to what she was, nor to interfere in matters outside the special sphere assigned her; she made no ministers, she appointed to no bishoprics, and for the high issues of international politics she had no concern. She never forgot her old friends, and, as far as is known, remained faithful to her royal lover from the beginning of their intimacy to his death, and, after his death, to his memory.
Of her two sons by the king, the elder was created Baron Hedington and earl of Burford and subsequently duke of St Albans; the younger, James, Lord Beauclerk, died in 1680, while still a boy. The king’s death-bed request to his brother, “Let not poor Nelly starve,” was faithfully carried out by James II., who paid her debts from the Secret Service fund, provided her with other moneys, and settled on her an estate with reversion to the duke of St Albans. But she did not long survive her lover’s death. She died in November 1687, and was buried on the 17th, according to her own request, in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, her funeral sermon being preached by the vicar, Thomas Tenison, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, who said “much to her praise.” Tradition credits the foundation of Chelsea Hospital to her influence over the king.
See Peter Cunningham, The Story of Nell Gwyn, edited by Gordon Goodwin (1903); Waldron’s edition of John Downes’s Roscius Anglicanus (1789); Osmund Airy, Charles II. (1904); Pepys, Diary; Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence; Origin and Early History of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea, edited by Major-General G. Hutt (1872); Memoirs of the Life of Eleanor Gwinn (1752); Burnet, History of My Own Time, part i., edited by Osmund Airy (Oxford, 1897); Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, by H. Forneron, translated by Mrs Crawford (1887).
GWYNIAD, the name given to a fish of the genus Coregonus or
White fish (C. clupeoides), inhabiting the large lakes of North
Wales and the north of England. At Ullswater it is known by the
name of “schelly,” at Loch Lomond by that of “powen.” It is
tolerably abundant in Lake Bala, keeping to the deepest portion
of the lake for the greater part of the year, but appearing in
shoals near the shores at certain seasons. It is well flavoured,
like all the species of Coregonus, but scarcely attains to the
weight of a pound. The name gwyniad is a Welsh word, and
signifies “shining”; and it is singular that a similar fish in
British Columbia, also belonging to the family of Salmonoids, is
called by the natives “quinnat,” from the silvery lustre of its
scales, the word having in their language the same meaning as
the Welsh “gwyniad.”
GYANTSE, one of the large towns of Tibet. It lies S.E. of
Shigatse, 130 m. from the Indian frontier and 145 m. from Lhasa.
Its central position at the junction of the roads from India and
Bhutan with those from Ladakh and Central Asia leading to
Lhasa makes it a considerable distributing trade centre. Its
market is the third largest in Tibet, coming after Lhasa and
Shigatse, and is especially celebrated for its woollen cloth and
carpet manufactures. Here caravans come from Ladakh,
Nepal and upper Tibet, bringing gold, borax, salt, wool, musk
and furs, to exchange for tea, tobacco, sugar, cotton goods,
