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CONSTABLE 



courts leet of the franchise or hundred over which 

 they preside ; or, in default of such appointment, 

 by the justices at their special sessions. An act of 

 1869 made provision for the abolition of the office 

 of high constable throughout England and Wales. 

 The appointment of petty constables is made by 

 the justices, who are directed annually to require 

 from the overseers of parishes a list of those within 

 the parish qualified and liable to serve as con- 

 stables. When not specially exempted, every able- 

 bodied man, between twenty-five and fifty-five 

 years of age, resident in the parish, arid rated to 

 the poor, or a tenant to the value of 4 per annum, 

 must be included in this list. SPECIAL CONSTABLES 

 are persons sworn in by the justices to preserve the 

 peace, or to execute warrants on special occasions, 

 as in 1848 on account of the Chartists, and in 1887 

 on account of the ' unemployed ' riots in Trafalgar 

 Square, London. Any two justices of the peace 

 who shall learn that a tumult, riot, or felony has 

 taken place, or is apprehended, may swear in as 

 many householders or others as they may think fit, 

 to act as special constables. The lord-lieutenant 

 may also, by direction of one of the principal secre- 

 taries of state, cause special constables to be 

 appointed for the whole county, or any part of it. 

 In Scotland, constables are the officers of the justices 

 of the peace charged with the execution of their 

 warrants and orders, and appointed at quarter- 

 sessions. In royal burghs they are appointed by 

 the magistrates. It is their duty, without warrant, 

 to apprehend rioters and breakers of the peace, and 

 bring them before the nearest justice. In the 

 United States they are generally elected by the 

 people, but special constables may be appointed by 

 the authorities in emergencies. The title of High 

 Constable is in some American cities given to the 

 principal police officers. For county constabulary, 

 see POLICE, and for the Irish constabulary, IRE- 

 LAND. 



Constable. ARCHIBALD, publisher, was born 

 at Carnbee, Fife, 24th February 1774, and became a 

 bookseller's apprentice in Edinburgh ( 1788-95 ). He 

 then started as a bookseller at the Cross of Edin- 

 burgh, and speedily gathered round him the chief 

 book-collectors of the time. He gradually drifted 

 into the publishing business, secured the copyright 

 of the Scots Magazine in 1801, and was chosen as 

 the publisher of the afterwards famous Edinburgh 

 Review. He published for all the leading men of 

 the time, and his quick appreciation of the merits of 

 the works of Sir Walter Scott became the envy and 

 wonder of the book-trade. There were several 

 business partners in the career of Constable & Co. , 

 but Archibald Constable was from first to last 

 the mainspring of the concern. Had painstaking 

 business qualities kept pace with his shrewdness 

 and large-minded literary transactions, business 

 calamities might have been averted. ' Among all 

 his myriad of undertakings, I question,' says 

 Lockhart, 'if any one that really originated with 

 himself, and continued to be superintended by 

 his own care, ever did fail.' In 1812 he purchased 

 for between 13,000 and 14,000 the copyright of 

 the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In the commercial 

 crisis of 1826 Constable & Co. failed, the liabilities 

 amounting to upwards of a quarter of a million. 

 The only noteworthy publishing scheme of Con- 

 stable after this failure was the issue of his cele- 

 brated Miscellany. He died July 21, 1827. See 

 Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspond- 

 ents, by his son, Thomas Constable (1873). 



Constable, HENRY, poet, was born in 1562, 

 son of Sir Robert Constable of Newark, a soldier 

 who was knighted by Essex in 1570. At sixteen 

 Henry entered St John's College, Cambridge, early 

 turned Roman Catholic, and betook himself to 



Paris. He was pensioned by the French king, and 

 seems to have been often employed in confidential 

 missions to England and to Scotland. He died at 

 Liege, 9th October 1613. In 1592 was published 

 his Diana, a collection of twenty-three sonnets ; 

 two years later, the second edition, containing 

 seventy -six, but some of these by his devoted 

 friend, Sir Philip Sidney, and other poets. Con- 

 stable's sonnets are quaint, and sometimes laboured, 

 but they are instinct with fancy and the tremor of 

 genuine poetic feeling. Constable contributed to 

 England's Helicon (1600), and sixteen 'spiritual 

 sonnets' to Park's Heliconia. See editions by W. C. 

 Hazlitt ( 1859 ) and John Gray ( 1897 ). 



Constable. JOHN, R.A., landscape-painter, was 

 born at East Bergholt, Suffolk, where his father was 

 a well-to-do landowner and miller, llth June 1776. 

 At the age of eighteen he assisted his father for 

 about a year in the mill ; but his love of art was 

 irrepressible, and it was encouraged by Sir George 

 Beaumont, who prevailed upon his family to send 

 him to London. Here he arrived in 1795 ; and,, 

 after an interval of a year spent in his old employ- 

 ment, he returned in 1799, and entered the schools- 

 of the Royal Academy, to whose exhibition he sent 

 a work in 1802. Hitherto he had been carefully 

 studying the methods of other painters, poring over 

 Sir George's great Claude, and copying Ruysdael, 

 seeking, as he says, 'truth at second-hand.' He 

 now turned exclusively to nature, resolving to free 

 himself from conventionality, to paint the very fact, 

 to ' adopt a pure and unaffected manner of repre- 

 senting the scenes that may employ me. ' But the 

 public, trained to admire an artificial and pseudo- 

 classical adaptation of nature, cared little for hi* 

 simple renderings of common subjects, and he was. 

 nearly forty before he sold a single landscape be- 

 yond the circle of his relatives and personal friends. 

 Meanwhile he supported himself by painting like- 

 nesses ; he copied portraits by Reynolds for the Earl 

 of Dysart, and executed altar-pieces for the churches 

 of Brantham and Nayland in Suffolk. 



In 1816 he married Mary Bicknell ; and in 1828,. 

 on the death of her father, solicitor to the Admi- 

 ralty, an inheritance of 20,000 placed the family 

 in easy circumstances, and enabled Constable t 

 devote himself quite exclusively to his beloved but 

 unremunerative landscape work. In 1821 he had 

 won the best artistic triumph of his life, in the 

 applause which greeted the appearance of his ' Hay- 

 wain ' ( then titled ' A Landscape Noon ' ), when 

 it was exhibited in the Paris Salon by a French 

 purchaser. Not less marked was the impression 

 produced by his ' White Horse,' at the Lille Exhi- 

 bition in 1825. Each work gained a gold medal, 

 and the former in particular won the warmest 

 enthusiasm of Delacroix and the other leaders of 

 the romantic school, and exercised a definite and 

 powerful influence upon the future of landscape art 

 in France. Appreciation of this sort was more 

 precious to a true artist than such formal academic 

 honours as Constable won in England, than his 

 election as Associate in 1819, and his tardy and un- 

 graciously awarded promotion to membership in 

 1829. His later years were saddened by the deaths 

 of his wife and his friend Archdeacon Fisher, by ill- 

 health, and by great depression of spirits ; but he 

 worked steadily at his art, though his landscapes 

 still were frequently unsold, producing ' Salisbury 

 Cathedral from the Meadows' (1831); 'Waterloo 

 Bridge,' then titled 'Whitehall Stairs' (1832); and 

 ' The Valley Farm ' ( 1835). He was engaged upon 

 ' Arundel Mill and Castle ' at the time of his death, 

 which occurred suddenly, on the 30th of March 

 1837. 



The art of Constable marks the first definite 

 departure in the history of English landscape from 

 the conventional treatment of our earlier painters,. 



