Vigevano—Vigilance commitee
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Marie Antoinette, of whom she painted over twenty portraits between 1779 and 1789. A portrait of the artist is in the hall of the painters at the Uffizi, and another at the National Gallery. The Louvre owns two portraits of Mme Lebrun and her daughter, besides five other portraits and an allegorical composition.
A full account of her eventful life is given in the artist's Souvenirs, and in C. Pillet's Mme Vigée-Le Brun (Paris, 1890). The artist's autobiography has been translated by Lionel Strachey, Memoirs of Mme Vigée-Lebrun (New York, 1903), fully illustrated.
Vigevano, a town and episcopal see of Lombardy, Italy, in the province of Pavia, on the right bank of the Ticino, 24 m. by rail S.W. from Milan on the line to Mortara, 381 ft. above sea-level. Pop. (1901) 18,043 (town); 23,560 (commune). It is a medieval walled town, with an arcaded market-place, a cathedral, the Gothic church of S. Francesco, and a castle of the Sforza family, dating from the 14th century and adorned with a loggia by Bramante and a tower imitating that of Filarete in the Castello Sforzesco at Milan. It is a place of some importance in the silk trade and also produces excellent macaroni. There is a steam tramway to Novara.
Vígfússon, Gúdbrandr (1828-1889), the foremost Scandinavian scholar of the 19th century, was born of a good and old Icelandic family in Breidafjord in 1828. He was brought up, till he went to a tutor's, by his kinswoman, Kristín Vígfussdottir, to whom, he records, he “owed not only that he became a man of letters, but almost everything.” He was sent to the old and famous school at Bessastad and (when it removed thither) at Reykjavik; and in 1849, already a fair scholar, he came to Copenhagen University as a bursarius in the Regense College. He was, after his student course, appointed stipendiarius by the Arna-Magnaean trustees, and worked for fourteen years in the Arna-Magnaean Library till, as he said, he knew every scrap of old vellum and of Icelandic written paper in that whole collection. During his Danish life he twice revisited Iceland (last in 1858), and made short tours in Norway and South Germany with friends. In 1866, after some months in London, he settled down in Oxford, which he made his home for the rest of his life, only quitting it for visits to the great Scandinavian libraries or to London (to work during two or three long vacations with his fellow labourer, F. Y. Powell), or for short trips to places such as the Isle of Man, the Orkneys and Shetlands, the old mootstead of the West Saxons at Downton, the Roman station at Pevensey, the burial-place of Bishop Brynjulf's ill-fated son at Yarmouth, and the like. He held the office of Reader in Scandinavian at the university of Oxford (a post created for him) from 1884 till his death. He was a Jubilee Doctor of Upsala, 1877, and received the Danish order of the Dannebrog in 1885. Vígfússon died of cancer on the 31st of January 1889, and was buried in St Sepulchre's Cemetery, Oxford, on the 3rd of February. He was an excellent judge of literature, reading most European languages well and being acquainted with their classics. His memory was remarkable, and if the whole of the Eddic poems had been lost, he could have written them down from memory. He spoke English well and idiomatically, but with a strong Icelandic accent. He wrote a beautiful, distinctive and clear hand, in spite of the thousands of lines of MS. copying he had done in his early life.
By his Túnatál (written between October 1854 and April 1855) he laid the foundations for the chronology of Icelandic history, in a series of conclusions that have not been displaced (save by his own additions and corrections), and that justly earned the praise of Jacob Grimm. His editions of Icelandic classics (1858-68), Biskopa Sögur, Bardar Saga, Forn Sögur (with Mobius), Eyrbyggia Saga and Flateyar bók (with Unger) opened a new era of Icelandic scholarship, and can only fitly be compared to the Rolls Series editions of chronicles by Dr Stubbs for the interest and value of their prefaces and texts. Seven years of constant and severe toil (1866-73) were given to the Oxford Icelandic-English Dictionary, incomparably the best guide to classic Icelandic, and a monumental example of single-handed work. His later series of editions (1874-85) included Orkneyinga and Haconar Saga, the great and complex mass of Icelandic historical sagas, known as Sturlunga, and the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, in which he edited the whole body of classic Scandinavian poetry. As an introduction to the Sturlunga, he wrote a complete though concise, history of the classic Northern literature and its sources. In the introduction to the Corpus, he laid the foundations of a critical history of the Eddic poetry and Court poetry of the North in a series of brilliant, original and well supported theories that are gradually being accepted even by those who were at first inclined to reject them. His little Icelandic Prose Reader (with F. York Powell) (1879) furnishes the English student with a pleasant and trustworthy path to a sound knowledge of Icelandic. The Grimm Centenary Papers (1886) give good examples of the range of his historic work, while his Appendix on Icelandic currency to Sir G. W. Dasent's Burnt Njal is a model of methodical investigation into an intricate and somewhat important subject. As a writer in his own tongue he at once gained a high position by his excellent and delightful Relations of Travel in Norway and South Germany. In English, as his “Visit to Grimm” and his powerful letters to The Times show, he had attained no mean skill. His life is mainly a record of well-directed and efficient labour in Denmark and Oxford. (F. Y. P.)
Vigil (Lat. vigilia, “watch”), in the Christian Church, the eve of a festival. The use of the word is, however, late, the vigiliae (pernoctationes, παννυχίδες) having originally been the services, consisting of prayers, hymns, processions and sometimes the eucharist, celebrated on the preceding night in preparation for the feast. The oldest of the vigils is that of Easter Eve, those of Pentecost and Christmas being instituted somewhat later. With the Easter vigil the eucharist was specially associated, and baptism with that of Pentecost (see Whitsunday). The abuses connected with nocturnal vigils[1] led to their being attacked, especially by Vigilentius of Barcelona (c. 400), against whom Jerome fulminated in this as in other matters. The custom, however, increased, vigils being instituted for the other festivals, including those of saints.
In the middle ages the nocturnal vigilia were, except in the monasteries, gradually discontinued, matins and vespers on the preceding day, with fasting, taking their place. In the Roman Catholic Church the vigil is now usually celebrated on the morning of the day preceding the festival, except at Christmas, when a midnight mass is celebrated, and on Easter Eve. These vigils are further distinguished as privileged and unprivileged. The former (except that of the Epiphany) have special offices; in the latter the vigil is merely commemorated.
The Church of England has reverted to early custom in so far as only “Easter Even” is distinguished by a special collect, gospel and epistle. The other vigils are recognized in the calendar (including those of the saints) and the rubric directs that “the collect appointed for any Holy-day that hath a Vigil or Eve, shall be said at the Evening Service next before.”
Vigilance Committee, in the United States, a self-constituted judicial body, occasionally organized in the western frontier districts for the protection of life and property. The first committee of prominence bearing the name was organized in San Francisco in June 1851, when the crimes of desperadoes who had immigrated to the gold-fields were rapidly increasing in numbers and it was said that there were venal judges, packed juries and false witnesses. At first this committee was composed of about 200 members, afterwards it was much larger. The general committee was governed by an executive committee and the city was policed by sub-committees. Within about thirty days four desperadoes were arrested, tried by the executive committee and hanged, and about thirty others were banished. Satisfied with the results, the committee then quietly adjourned, but it was revived five years later. Similar committees were common in other parts of California and in the mining districts of Idaho and Montana. That in Montana exterminated in 1863-64 a band of outlaws organized under Henry Plummer, the sheriff of Montana City; twenty-four of the outlaws were hanged within a few months. Committees or societies of somewhat the same nature were formed in the Southern states during the Reconstruction period (1865-72) to protect white families from negroes and “carpet-baggers,” and besides these there were the Ku Klux Klan (q.v.) and its branches, the Knights of the White Camelia, the Pale Faces, and the Invisible Empire of the South, the principal object of which was to control the negroes by striking them with terror.
- ↑ The 35th canon of the council of Elvira (305) forbids women to attend them.
