keen vigour into the question of the suppression of the Jesuits, which began to be most openly mooted after the affair of Martinique; and as procureur général of the parliament of Brittany he submitted to the parliament in 1761 and 1762—the very heat of the conflict—two Comptes Rendus des Constitutions des Jésuites, which dealt the society some of the most powerful blows it had received since Pascal, and undoubtedly contributed largely to secure the edict of suppression in 1764. In the friends of the Jesuits La Chalotais had thus prepared for himself bitter enemies, and he was to feel their power in the events of the quarrel between the court and the parliaments. The breach between the estates of Brittany and the king, in which La Chalotais was more immediately concerned, originated in an order passed by Government that the voices of two of the three estates should bind the other, that is, that the clergy and citizens should control the landed proprietors. To this order, designed to secure the registration of certain fiscal edicts in spite of the proprietors, who formed a majority in the estates, and upon whom the taxes would fall most heavily, the opposition was marked by all the obstinacy of the Breton character. La Chalotais endeavoured to carry through a compromise, but at the same time animadverted somewhat acrimoniously upon the coercive efforts of the Duc d'Aiguillon, governor of Brittany, who already, as a supporter of the Jesuits, regarded the procureur with animosity. When the estates, therefore, absolutely refused to register the edicts, the court chose to regard La Chalotais as the moving spirit in the opposition; and in November 1765 he was arrested on a charge of having written certain anonymous and seditious letters to the king. No attention was paid to his protestations of innocence; and, when the parliament of Rennes tried to force matters to a crisis by resigning in a body, Louis merely appointed commissioners to sit as a new parliament and to try La Chalotais, with his son and some other magistrates who had been arrested at the same time. But the question had spread beyond Brittany; other provincial parliaments, and even the parliament of Paris, took it up; and the strife began to assume the ominous significance of one between the people and the crown. No lower tribunal ventured to pass sentence upon La Chalotais, and in 1769 the king, calling the case before himself in council, attempted to settle it in his own autocratic way: silence was imposed as to the future, oblivion as to the past; the innocence of the accused was acknowledged, but they were exiled from their province. Such a decision was no settlement. The parliament, now restored, accused the Duc d'Aiguillon of having suborned witnesses against La Chalotais, and, when he published memoirs retorting the charge, caused them to be burned by the hand of the common hangman. Maupeou, minister of the king, after vainly endeavouring to enforce the royal edict of silence, summoned the case before the parliament of Paris in 1770. That body, however, gave such unequivocal signs of favour to La Chalotais, that the king interfered and quashed the whole proceedings by a "bed of justice." The entire matter thus lay over so far as it affected the procureur, till the death of the king in 1774 allowed him to return to his official duties. La Chalotais died at Rennes, July 12, 1785.
Besides the Comptes Rendus and the Exposé Justificatif (three parts, 1766–67), written in prison, La Chalotais was the author of an Essai d'Éducation Nationale (1763), a work extravagantly praised by Voltaire. It was written in view of the disorganization in matters educational that would follow the expected expulsion of the Jesuits from France.
LACHISH ((
Hebrew characters)), a town in the low country of Judah
(Josh. xv. 39), and one of the strong fortresses that offered
an obstinate resistance to Nebuchadnezzar (Jer. xxxiv. 7).
It was to Lachish that Amaziah fled from the conspiracy
raised against him at Jerusalem, and there he was killed (2 Kings xiv. 19). From an obscure allusion in Micah i. 13 it would appear that the place was a chariot city. For this it was doubtless recommended by its position in the rich low country, and the same reason, together with the fact that it commanded the line of advance from Egypt, is sufficient to explain why it was the headquarters of Sennacherib during part of his Judæan campaign (2 Kings xviii. 14; Isa. xxxvii. 8). The name of Lachish occurs on the monuments of Sennacherib, and a bas-relief now in the British Museum, representing the king receiving its spoils, is given in G. Smith's History of Sennacherib (1878). Lachish was reoccupied by the Jews after the captivity (Neh. xi. 30), and the Onomastica place it 7 miles from Eleutheropolis on the southern road. The site has not been identified. Umm Láḳis does not agree with the statement of the Onomastica, and the name ("Mother of Itch") has no connexion with the Hebrew, while El Haṣy, suggested by Conder, has still less to recommend it. As the cities in this district were built of brick, the ruins may probably have all but disappeared.
LACHMANN, Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm (1793-1851), a highly distinguished philologist and critic, was born March 4, 1793, at Brunswick, where his father held an appointment as preacher in the Andreas Kirche. In his eighth year he entered the Katharineum of his native town, where the strong bent of his vigorous mind towards philology and literature soon made itself unmistak ably evident. In 1809 he passed to the university of Leipsic as a student of philology and theology; in the same year he transferred himself to Göttingen, where, under the influence of Heyne, his enthusiasm for philo logical pursuits almost completely extinguished his interest in theology; the pagan classics and particularly the Roman poets became his absorbing study. Stronger even than that of Heyne was the influence of Dissen over the young and rising scholar, who found additional intellectual stimulus in the companionship of such fellow students as C. K. J. Bunsen, Ernst Schulze, and C. A. Brandis. Under G. F. Benecke he also devoted himself to Italian and English, and ultimately to Old German. In 1815 he was led by the stirring political events of the day to interrupt his studious life and join the Prussian army as a volunteer chasseur; in this capacity he accompanied his detachment to Paris, but to his great regret never encountered the enemy. The regiment being disbanded he went to Berlin, where he became an assistant master in the Friedrich Werder gymnasium, and in the spring of 1816 he "habilitated" at the university. His thesis was published immediately afterwards, the subject being "The original form of the Nibelungennoth." Almost simultaneously appeared his edition of Propertius. The same summer he became one of the principal masters in the Fridericianum of Königs- berg, where he assisted his colleague Karl Köpke with his edition of Rudolf von Monfort's Barlaam und Josaphat (1818), and also took part in the researches of his friend towards an edition of the works of Walther von der Vogelweide. In January 1818 he became professor extra- ordinarius of classical philology in the university of Königsberg, where Lobeck also was; he at the same time began to lecture on Old German grammar and the Middle High German poets. In connexion with this task he devoted himself during the following seven years to an extraordinarily minute study of all that could be found, whether in print or in manuscript, relating to these subjects, and in the summer of 1824 he obtained leave of absence in order that he might search the libraries of Middle and South Germany for further materials. In February 1825 Lachmann was nominated extraordinary professor of classical and German philology in the university of Berlin;
