LAYARD, SIR AUSTEN HENRY (1817–1894), British author and diplomatist, the excavator of Nineveh, was born in Paris on the 5th of March 1817. The Layards were of Huguenot descent. His father, Henry P. J. Layard, of the Ceylon Civil Service, was the son of Charles Peter Layard, dean of Bristol, and grandson of Daniel Peter Layard, the physician. Through his mother, a daughter of Nathaniel Austen, banker, of Ramsgate, he inherited Spanish blood. This strain of cosmopolitanism must have been greatly strengthened by the circumstances of his education. Much of his boyhood was spent in Italy, where he received part of his schooling, and acquired a taste for the fine arts and a love of travel; but he was at school also in England, France and Switzerland. After spending nearly six years in the office of his uncle, Benjamin Austen, a solicitor, he was tempted to leave England for Ceylon by the prospect of obtaining an appointment in the civil service, and he started in 1839 with the intention of making an overland journey across Asia. After wandering for many months, chiefly in Persia, and having abandoned his intention of proceeding to Ceylon, he returned in 1842 to Constantinople, where he made the acquaintance of Sir Stratford Canning, the British ambassador, who employed him in various unofficial diplomatic missions in European Turkey. In 1845, encouraged and assisted by Canning, Layard left Constantinople to make those explorations among the ruins of Assyria with which his name is chiefly associated. This expedition was in fulfilment of a design which he had formed, when, during his former travels in the East, his curiosity had been greatly excited by the ruins of Nimrud on the Tigris, and by the great mound of Kuyunjik, near Mosul, already partly excavated by Botta. Layard remained in the neighbourhood of Mosul, carrying on excavations at Kuyunjik and Nimrud, and investigating the condition of various tribes, until 1847; and, returning to England in 1848, published Nineveh and its Remains: with an Account of a Visit to the Chaldaean Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-worshippers; and an Inquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians (2 vols., 1848–1849). To illustrate the antiquities described in this work he published a large folio volume of Illustrations of the Monuments of Nineveh (1849). After spending a few months in England, and receiving the degree of D.C.L. from the university of Oxford, Layard returned to Constantinople as attaché to the British embassy, and, in August 1849, started on a second expedition, in the course of which he extended his investigations to the ruins of Babylon and the mounds of southern Mesopotamia. His record of this expedition, Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, which was illustrated by another folio volume, called A Second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh, was published in 1853. During these expeditions, often in circumstances of great difficulty, Layard despatched to England the splendid specimens which now form the greater part of the collection of Assyrian antiquities in the British Museum. Apart from the archaeological value of his work in identifying Kuyunjik as the site of Nineveh, and in providing a great mass of materials for scholars to work upon, these two books of Layard’s are among the best-written books of travel in the language.
Layard now turned to politics. Elected as a Liberal member for Aylesbury in 1852, he was for a few weeks under-secretary for foreign affairs, but afterwards freely criticized the government, especially in connexion with army administration. He was present in the Crimea during the war, and was a member of the committee appointed to inquire into the conduct of the expedition. In 1855 he refused from Lord Palmerston an office not connected with foreign affairs, was elected lord rector of Aberdeen university, and on 15th June moved a resolution in the House of Commons (defeated by a large majority) declaring that in public appointments merit had been sacrificed to private influence and an adherence to routine. After being defeated at Aylesbury in 1857, he visited India to investigate the causes of the Mutiny. He unsuccessfully contested York in 1859, but was elected for Southwark in 1860, and from 1861 to 1866 was under-secretary for foreign affairs in the successive administrations of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell. In 1866 he was appointed a trustee of the British Museum, and in 1868 chief commissioner of works in W. E. Gladstone’s government and a member of the Privy Council. He retired from parliament in 1869, on being sent as envoy extraordinary to Madrid. In 1877 he was appointed by Lord Beaconsfield ambassador at Constantinople, where he remained until Gladstone’s return to power in 1880, when he finally retired from public life. In 1878, on the occasion of the Berlin conference, he received the grand cross of the Bath. Layard’s political life was somewhat stormy. His manner was brusque, and his advocacy of the causes which he had at heart, though always perfectly sincere, was vehement to the point sometimes of recklessness. Layard retired to Venice, where he devoted much of his time to collecting pictures of the Venetian school, and to writing on Italian art. On this subject he was a disciple of his friend G. Morelli, whose views he embodied in his revision of F. Kugler’s Handbook of Painting, Italian Schools (1887). He wrote also an introduction to Miss Ffoulkes’s translation of Morelli’s Italian Painters (1892–1893), and edited that part of Murray’s Handbook of Rome (1894) which deals with pictures. In 1887 he published, from notes taken at the time, a record of his first journey to the East, entitled Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia. An abbreviation of this work, which as a book of travel is even more delightful than its predecessors, was published in 1894, shortly after the author’s death, with a brief introductory notice by Lord Aberdare. Layard also from time to time contributed papers to various learned societies, including the Huguenot Society, of which he was first president. He died in London on the 5th of July 1894. (A. Gl.)
LAYMEN, HOUSES OF, deliberative assemblies of the laity of
the Church of England, one for the province of Canterbury,
and the other for the province of York. That of Canterbury
was formed in 1886, and that of York shortly afterwards. They
are merely consultative bodies, and the primary intention of
their foundation was to associate the laity in the deliberations
of convocation. They have no legal status. The members
are elected by the various diocesan conferences, which are
in turn elected by the laity of their respective parishes or rural
deaneries. Ten members are appointed for the diocese of London,
six for each of the dioceses of Winchester, Rochester, Lichfield and
Worcester; and four for each of the remaining dioceses. The
president of each house has the discretionary power of appointing
additional laymen, not exceeding ten in number.
LAYNEZ (or Lainez), DIEGO (1512–1565), the second general of the Society of Jesus, was born in Castile, and after studying at Alcala joined Ignatius of Loyola in Paris, being one of the six who with Loyola in August 1534 took the vow of missionary work in Palestine in the Montmartre church. This plan fell through, and Laynez became professor of scholastic theology at Sapienza. After the order had been definitely established (1540) Laynez was sent to Germany. He was one of the pope’s theologians at the council of Trent (q.v.), where he played a weighty and decisive part. When Loyola died in 1556 Laynez acted as vicar of the society, and two years later became general. Before his death at Rome, on the 19th of January 1565, he had immensely strengthened the despotic constitution of the order and developed its educational activities (see Jesuits).
His Disputationes Tridentinae were published in 2 volumes in 1886. Lives by Michel d’Esne (Douai, 1597) and Pet. Ribadeneira (Madrid, 1592; Lat. trans. by A. Schott, Antwerp, 1598). See also H. Müller, Les Origines de la Compagnie de Jésus: Ignace et Lainez (1898).
LAZAR, one afflicted with the disease of leprosy (q.v.). The term is an adaptation in medieval Latin of the name of Lazarus (q.v.), in Luke xvi. 20, who was supposed to be a leper. The word was not confined to persons suffering from leprosy; thus Caxton (The Life of Charles the Great, 37), “there atte laste were guarysshed and heled viij lazars of the palesey.”
Lazaretto or Lazar-House is a hospital for the reception of poor persons suffering from the plague, leprosy or other infectious or contagious diseases. A peculiar use of “lazaretto” is found in the application of the term, now obsolete, to a place in the after-part of a merchant vessel for the storage of provisions, &c.
