943 



TEBALDEO, ANTONIO. 



TEGNER, ESAIAS. 



911 



for his sou Zachary as first-lieutenant in the 7th regiment of the United 

 State? Infantry. In 1810 Zachary Taylor married. On the breaking 

 out of the war in 1812, having then become Captain Taylor, he was 

 placed in command of Fort Harrison, a stockade on the river Wabash, 

 for his defence of which against the attacks of the hostile Indians he 

 received the brevet rank of major. He distinguished himself on seve- 

 ral other occasions during the war, but when it terminated he was 

 reduced from his brevet rank of major to his previous rank of captain, 

 a step backward which he refused to consent to, and resigned his com- 

 mission. He was however in the course of the year reinstated in his 

 rank of major by President Madison. In 1816 he was placed in com- 

 mand of the post at Green Bay, on Lake Michigan, aud on the 20th of 

 April 1819 received his commission as lieutenant-colonel. In 1832 he 

 received his commission as colonel from President Jackson, and in 

 that year served under General Scott in the Black Hawk war. He 

 subsequently held the commaud of Fort Crawford at Prairie du Chien, 

 where he remained till 1836, when the Seminole war in Florida called 

 for his services. The manner iu which he there performed his harass- 

 ing duties acquired for him great reputation among his countrymen, 

 and the battle of Okeechobee, fought Dec. 25, 1837, gained him the 

 rank of brigadier-general by brevet. In 1838 he was appointed to the 

 command of all the troops in Florida, where he remained till 1840, 

 when the command of the south-western division of the army was 

 assigned to him. 



In 1845, on the annexation of Texas, General Taylor was ordered to 

 place his troops in a suitable position for defending that country 

 against a threatened invasion from Mexico, and in August he concen- 

 trated his troops at Corpus Christi. There he remained till March 11, 

 1846, when he broke up his cantonments, and moved .westward with 

 a small army of occupation of about 4000 regular troops. He reached 

 the Rio Colorado on the 20th of March, crossed it without opposition, 

 and on the 29th of March arrived at the Rio Grande, opposite Mata- 

 moras. On the 8th of May he gained the victory of Palo Alto, and on 

 the 9th of May that of Resaco de la Palma. On the 21st, 22nd, and 

 23rd of September he attacked and captured the city of Monterey, 

 which was strongly fortified, aud defended by a superior force. On 

 the 22ud and 23rd of February he gained the victory of Bueua Vista, 

 in which the Mexican army of 20,000 men under General Santa Anna 

 was defeated with very great loss by the American army of about 

 6000 men. This victory led to uegociations for peace, and the treaty 

 was ratified in February 1848. Meantime General Taylor had returned 

 to his residence at Baton Rouge in Louisiana, where he had purchased 

 an estate, and on the 1st of Junexl848 the Whig Convention in Phila- 

 delphia put him in nomination for the presidency. On the 7th of 

 November 1848 he was elected President of the United States of 

 America, and on the 4th of March 1849 he was inaugurated, and 

 entered upon his term of office. He died July 9, 1850, at Washington, 

 and was forthwith succeeded as President by Millard Fillmore, the 

 Vice-President. [FILLMORE, MILLARD.] He left a widow, one son, 

 and two daughters. 



TEBALDE'O (or TIBALDE'O), ANTONIO, was born at Ferrara 

 about 1463. He studied medicine, but afterwards devoted himself 

 chiefly to literature and poetical composition, both Italian and Latin. 

 The first edition of his Italian poems appeared at Modena iu 1498, by 

 his cousin Jacopo Tebaldeo, appai'eutly unknown to the author, who 

 was vexed at it because he thought that his compositions required 

 some final touches*: ' Sonetti, Capitoli, e Rime, chiamate Opere 

 d'Amore,' 4to, Modena, 1498, afterwards reprinted several times at 

 Milan, Venice, arid other places. In 1519 appeared at Milan another 

 small poem of Tebaldeo, with the title, ' Stanze nuove ad un Vecchio 

 che non amando in gioveutu fu costretto ad amare in vecchiezza.' A 

 selection from his pastoral poems was inserted in the collection entitled 

 ' Poesie Pastorali e Rusticali, raccolte ed illustrate con note dal Dottore 

 Giulio Ferrario,' Milan, 1808. Bembo and Giraldi, contemporaries of 

 Tebaldeo, speak of his Italian poems with praise, but they regret that 

 they were too hastily published. Tebaldeo afterwards applied himself 

 to Latin poetry, in which he acquired great reputation. He was for a 

 time at the court of Mantua, and afterwards settled at Rome, where 

 he became a favourite of Leo X., who speaks very highly of him in 

 some of his epistles, and is said to have made him very liberal presents. 

 After Leo's death Tebaldeo fell into distress, and was obliged to borrow 

 money of Bembo and others. He died at Rome in 1537. A few of 

 his Latin epigrams and other small poems are in several collections. 



TEGNER, ESAIAS, universally acknowledged by the Swedes as 

 the greatest poet of Sweden, was born on the Ibth of November 1782, 

 at Kyrkerud in Wermland. His father, also named Esaias, the son of 

 a peasant, Lucas Esaison, of Teguaby in the diocese of Wexio, had a 

 turn for learning, became a student at the University of Lund, took 

 orders, and was the first of the family to assume the dignity of a 

 surname. He took that of Tegne"r from his birthplace of Tegnaby, a 

 village which is part of the estates of the diocese of Wexio. As a 

 parish-priest ho was highly respected for diligence and piety. His 

 wifo, whose maiden name was Ssidelius, was noted for her force of 

 character and her talents, which she sometimes exercised in writing 

 verses. The poet grew up till bis tenth year at Millesvik, on the Lake 

 Wener, where his father had been appointed pastor, and which it mny 

 be noticed is in a remarkably ugly pai't of- the country. It is in par- 

 ticular destitute of trees. " King Olof, the tree-feller, a name well 



known in Swedish history, took his pleasure there," it has been remarked, 

 " with axe and fire, and the trees have not grown again for a thousand 

 years." In February 1792, when Esaias was in his tenth year, his 

 father died, leaving a widow and six children, four sons and two 

 daughters, in whose circumstances this event produced a great change. 

 The four sons were all remarkable in their way. Lars Gustaf, the 

 eldest, was of a mild aud earnest character, strongly tinged with mys- 

 ticism ; Elof, the second, was full of wit and acuteuess ; the third, 

 Johannes, was silly from childhood, but had such powers of memory 

 that when he was desired to attend to what was going on in church, 

 he could on his return repeat every word he had heard in it, without 

 being able to draw any distinction between the lessons, the banns of 

 marriage, and the sermon. Esaias, the youngest, was of a remarkably 

 flexible character, aud at different times of his life exhibited a striking 

 resemblance to each of his brothers in their prominent characteristics. 



At the time of his father's death, the two elder brothers, who were 

 intended for the church, were already students at Lund; the expenses 

 of their education quite absorbed the resources of the family when 

 deprived of a head, and the widow was grateful to a friend of her 

 husband, Jakob Branting, a Kronofogde, or sort of tax-collector, for 

 offering to take the youngest off her hands and make use of him to 

 assist him in his business. Esaiaa soon made himself a most useful 

 assistant, and was to the end of his life remarkable for his quickness 

 with figures. He found among Branting's books, 'Bjorners Kampa- 

 dater,' a folio volume of the 17th century, containing a number of 

 Icelandic sagas, with, iu the same page, the Swedish translation ; and 

 almost his first attempt at composition seems to have been a poem 

 called ' Atle,' founded on one of these sagas. The poem of ' Frithiof,' 

 the great achievement of his riper years, was founded on another. His 

 only recorded attempt at poetry previous to ' Atle ' seems to have 

 been, when a child at Millesvik, an epitaph on a goose, a worthy com- 

 panion to Dr. Johnson's famous epitaph on a duck. Branting, who 

 noticed his young assistant's love of books and aptitude for learning, 

 was smitten with the thought that he was degrading him out of his 

 proper sphere ; and one starry night, when, as he was driving home 

 with him from a tax-collecting expedition, he turned the conversation 

 on the heavenly bodies, and the boy, then aged thirteen, who had just 

 been reading Bastholm's ' Philosophy for the Unlearned,' discoursed 

 with fluency of things which Branting had never heard of, this feeling 

 became too strong to be kept under. Lars Gustaf, the elder brother, 

 was then acting as private tutor in the family of Captain Lb'wenhjelm, 

 an officer with nine children. Brauting wrote ofT to the captain iu 

 March 179u', to say that he felt it a sin to keep such a boy as Esaias 

 from study, and to propose that he should be admitted to share, with 

 the captain's boy.s, the instructions of his elder brother. Lb'wenhjelm 

 at once consented, and the whole course of the young poet's life was 

 changed. " I now began,'* he says in an autobiographical notice, 

 written in after-life, " to study Latin ; the method adopted was the 

 old and sound and, in my opinion, the only right one, which may 

 indeed seem tedious and tiresome, but in the end, by the greater 

 certainty it gives, spares time instead of wasting it." He stated that 

 he began French and English at the same time French in Telemachus 

 and English in Ossian's poems; but his memory deceived him: a 

 letter written by him in 1793, which was afterwards found, showed 

 that at the age of ten he was already studying Latin and French at 

 Millesvik. Ossian's poems delighted him to such a degree that he 

 learned English without any assistance. A door is still shown at 

 Malwa, the residence of Captain Lowenhjelm, which beam the marks 

 of the iron rod with which Tegne'r used to thrust at it, when enthu- 

 siastically shouting out in English one of his favourite passages from 

 Ossian " The spear of Connell is keen ! " In the next year the 

 services of Lars were transferred to the family of Christopher 

 Myrhman, an iron-master at Riimen, near Filipstad, who made some 

 of the best iron in Sweden, and was a man of learning as well as a 

 man of business. Lars made a stipulation that his brother should 

 accompany him, and they both soon became almost members of the 

 family. Myrhman had eight sons aud four daughters : Lars was tutor 

 of the four eldest sons ; Esaias became at the age of fifteen tutor of 

 three of the others, and the lover of one of the daughters 1 , whom he 

 married some years later. 



At Riimen they found an excellent library in the classical lan- 

 guages, and a good collection of Swedish, French, and English books, 

 but not a single German book ; it was at the period before the intro- 

 duction of German literature into Sweden. Of Shakspcro however 

 there was only ' Hamlet,' " which, strange to say," remarks Teguer, 

 " interested me very little. It requires however a riper age than 1 

 had then reached." He threw himself with vehemence on Homer. 

 According to his own recollections afterwards, he in seven months 

 after commencing the study of Greek, had read the ' Iliad ' three 

 times through and the ' Odyssey ' twice, besides going through Virgil, 

 Horace, and Ovid in Latin. "It seemed to those around him," says 

 Bottiger, iu his biography, "as if he had been born with the foreign, 

 languages in his brain, and it only needed a gentle shake to wake the 

 slumbercrs into life." He made himself at the same time a proficient 

 in chess and skittles. Often when the girl came to light his fire in 

 the morning she found him still with his clothes on continuing the 

 studies he had pursued all night. In 1799, when he went with his 

 three pupils to the University of Lund, he passed such an examination 



