LARKSPUR  , in

botany, the popular name for species of Delphinium, a genus of hardy herbaceous plants belonging to the natural order Ranunculaceae (q.v.) . They are of erect branching habit, with the flowers in terminal racemes, often of considerable length . Blue is the predominating colour, but purple, pink, yellow (D . Zalil or sulphureum), scarlet (D. cardinale) and white also occur; the " spur " is produced by the elongation of the upper sepal . The field or rocket larkspur (D . Ajacis), the branching larkspur (D. consolida), D. cardiopetalum and their varieties, are charming annuals; height about 18 in . The spotted larkspur (D. requienii) and a few others are biennials . The perennial larkspurs, however, are the most gorgeous of the family . There are numerous species of this group, natives of the old and new worlds, and a great number of varieties, raised chiefly from D. exaltatum, D. formosum and D. grandiflorum . Members of this group vary from 2 ft. to 6 ft. in height . The larkspurs are of easy cultivation, either in beds or herbaceous borders; the soil should be deeply dug and manured . The annual varieties are best sown early in April, where they are intended to flower, and suitably thinned out as growth is made .

The perennial kinds are increased by the

division of existing plants in spring, or by cuttings taken in spring or autumn and rooted in pots in cold frames . The varieties cannot be perpetuated with certainty by seed . Seed is the most popular means, however, of raising larkspurs in the majority of gardens, and is suitable for all ordinary purposes; it should be sown as soon as gathered, preferably in rows in nursery beds, and the young plants transplanted when ready . They should be fit for the borders in the spring of the following year, and if strong, should be planted in groups about 3 ft. apart . Delphiniums require exposure to light and air . Given plenty of space in a rich soil, the plants rarely require to be staked Tuzla), a town of the island of Cyprus, at the head of a bay on the south coast, 23 M . S.S.E. from Nicosia . Pop . (1901) 7964 . It is the principal port of the island, exporting barley, wheat, cotton, raisins, oranges, lemons and gypsum . There is an iron pier 450 ft. long, but vessels anchor in the bay in from 16 to 70 ft. of water . Larnaca occupies the site of the ancient Cilium, but the citadel of the ancient city was used to fill up the ancient harbour in 1879 .

The

modern and principal residential part of the town is called Scala . Mycenaean tombs and other antiquities have been found (see CYPRUS) . LA ROCHE, a small town in the Belgian Ardennes, notice-able for its antiquity and its picturesque situation . Pop . (1904) 2065 . Its name is derived from its position on a rock commanding the river Ourthe, which meanders round the little place, and skirts the rock on which are the interesting ruins of the old castle of the nth century . This is supposed to have been the site of a hunting box of Pippin, and certainly the counts of La Roche held it in fief from his descendants, the Carolingian rulers . In the 12th century they sold it to the counts of Luxemburg . In the 16th and 17th centuries the French and Imperialists frequently fought in its neighbourhood, and at Tenneville, not far distant, is shown the tomb of an English officer named Barnewall killed in one of these encounters in 1692 . La Roche is famous as a tourist centre on account of its fine sylvan scenery . Among the local curiosities is the Diable-Chateau, a freak of nature, being the apparent replica of a medieval castle . La Roche is connected by steam tramway with Melreux, a station on the main line from Marloie to Liege .

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, the name of an old French family which is derived from a castle' in the

province of Angoumois (department of Charente), which was in its possession in the rrth century . Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1494–1517), godson of King Francis I., was made count in 1515 . At the time of the wars of religion the family fought for the Protestant cause . Francois (1588–165o) was created duke and peer of France by Louis XIII. in 1622 . His son Francois was the author of the Maxims, and the son of the latter acquired for his house the estates of La Roche-Guyon and Liancourt by his marriage with Jeanne Charlotte du Plessis-Liancourt . Alexandre, duc de La Rochefoucauld (d . 1762), left two daughters, who married into the Roye branch of the family . Of the numerous branches of the family the most famous are those of Roucy, Roye, Bayers, Doudeauville, Randan and Estissac, which all furnished distinguished statesmen and soldiers . LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, FRANCOIS DE (1613-1680), the greatest maxim writer of France, one of her best memoir writers, and perhaps the most complete and accomplished representative of her ancient nobility, was born at Paris in the Rue des Petits Champs on the 15th of September 1613 . The author of the Maxims, who during the lifetime of his father (see above) and part of his own most stirring years bore the title of prince de Marcillac, was somewhat neglected in the matter of education, at least of the scholastic kind; but he joined the army before he was sixteen, and almost immediately began to make a figure in public life . He had been nominally married a year before to Andree de Vivonne, who seems to have been an affectionate wife, while not a breath of scandal touches her—two points in which La Rochefoucauld was perhaps more fortunate than he deserved . For some years Marcillac continued to take part in the annual campaigns, where he displayed the utmost bravery, though he never obtained credit for much military skill .

Then he passed under the spell of Madame de Chevreuse, the first of three celebrated

women who successively influenced his life . Through Madame de Chevreuse he became attached to the queen, Anne of Austria, and in one of her quarrels with Richelieu and her husband a wild scheme seems to have been formed, according to which Marcillac was to carry her off to Brussels on a pillion . These caballings against Richelieu, however, had no more serious results (an eight days' experience of the Bastille excepted) than occasional exiles, that is to say, orders to retire to his father's estates . After the death of the great minister (1642), opportunity seemed to be favourable to the vague ambition which then animated half the nobility of France . Marcillac became one of the so-called importancs, and took an active part in reconciling the queen and Conde in a league against Gaston of Orleans . But the growing credit of Mazarin came in his way, and the liaison in which about this time (1645) he became entangled with the beautiful duchess of Longueville made him irrevocably a Frondeur . He was a conspicuous figure in the siege of Paris, fought desperately in the desultory engagements which were constantly taking place, and was severely wounded at the siege of Mardyke . In the second Fronde Marcillac followed the fortunes of Conde, and the death of his father, which happened at the time (165o), gave rise to a characteristic incident . The nobility of the province gathered to the funeral, and the new duke de La Rochefoucauld took the opportunity of persuading them to follow him in an attempt on the royalist garrison of Saumur, which, however, was not successful . We have no space to follow La Rochefoucauld through the tortuous cabals and negotiations of the later Fronde; it is sufficient to say that he was always brave and generally unlucky . His run of bad fortune reached its climax in the battle of the Faubourg Saint Antoine (1652), where he was shot through the head, and it was thought that he would lose the sight of both eyes . It was nearly a year before he recovered, and then he found himself at his country seat of Verteuil, with no result of twenty years' ' The castle was largely rebuilt in the reign of Francis I., and is one of the finest specimens of the Renaissance architecture in France.fighting and intriguing except impaired health, a seriously embarrassed fortune, and some cause for bearing a grudge against almost every party and man of importance in the state .

He spent some years in this retirement, and he was fortunate enough (thanks chiefly to the fidelity of

Gourville, who had been in his service, and who, passing into the service of Mazarin and of Conde, had acquired both wealth and influence) to be able to repair in some measure the breaches in his fortune . He did not, however, return to court life much before Mazarin's death, when Louis XIV. was on the eve of assuming absolute power, and the turbulent aristocratic anarchy of the Fronde was a thing utterly of the past . Somewhat earlier, La Rochefoucauld had taken his place in the salon of Madame de Sable, a member of the old Rambouillet coterie, and the founder of a kind of successor to it . It was known that he, like almost all his more prominent contemporaries, had spent his solitude in writing memoirs, while the special literary employment of the Sable salon was the fabrication of Sentences and Maxims . In 1662, however, more trouble than reputation, and not a little of both, was given to him by a surreptitious publication of his memoirs, or what purported to be his memoirs, by the Elzevirs . Many of his old friends were deeply wounded, and he hastened to deny flatly the authenticity of the publication, a denial which (as it seems, without any reason) was not very generally accepted . Three years later (1665) he published, though without his name, the still more famous Maxims, which at once established him high among the men of letters of the time . - About the same date began the friendship with Madame de la Fayette, which lasted till the end of his life . The glimpses which we have of him henceforward are chiefly derived from the letters of Madame de Sevigne, and, though they show him suffering agonies from gout, are on the whole pleasant . He had a circle of devoted friends; he was recognized as a moralist and man of letters of the first rank; he might have entered the Academy for the asking; and in the altered measure of the times his son, the prince de Marcillac, to whom some time before his death he resigned his titles and honours, enjoyed a considerable position at court . Above all, La Rochefoucauld was generally recognized by his contemporaries from the king downward as a type of the older noblesse as it was before the sun of the great monarch dimmed its brilliant qualities . This position he has retained until the present day .

He died at Paris on the 17th of

March r68o, of the disease which had so long tormented him . La Rochefoucauld's character, if considered without the prejudice which a dislike to his ethical views has sometimes occasioned, is thoroughly respectable and even amiable . Like almost all his contemporaries, he saw in politics little more than a chessboard where the people at large were but pawns . The weight of testimony, however, inclines to the conclusion that he was unusually scrupulous in his conduct, and that his comparative ill-success in the struggle arose more from this scrupulousness than from anything else . He has been charged with irresolution, and there is some ground for admitting the charge so far as to pronounce him one of those the keenness of whose intellect, together with their apprehension of both sides of a question, interferes with their capacity as men of action . But there is no ground whatever for the view which represents the Maxims as the mere outcome of the spite of a disappointed intriguer, disappointed through his own want of skill rather than of fortune . His importance as a social and historical figure is, however, far inferior to his importance in literature . His work in this respect consists of three parts—letters, Memoirs and the Maxims . His letters exceed one hundred in number, and are biographically valuable, besides displaying not a few of his literary characteristics; but they need not further detain us . The Memoirs, when they are read in their proper form, yield in literary merit, in interest, and in value to no memoirs of the time, not even to those of Retz, between whom and La Rochefoucauld there was a strange mixture of enmity and esteem which resulted in a couple of most characteristic " portraits." But their history is unique in its strangeness . It has been said that a pirated edition appeared in Holland, and this, despite the author's protest, continued to be reprinted for some thirty years . It has been now proved to be a mere cento of the work of half a dozen different men, scarcely a third of which is La Rochefoucauld's, and which could only have been possible at a time when it was the habit of persons who frequented literary society to copy pell-mell in commonplace books the MS. compositions of their friends and others .

Some years after La Rochefoucauld's death a new recension appeared, somewhat less incorrect than the former, but still largely adulterated, and this held its ground for more than a century . Only in 1817 did anything like a genuine edition (even then by no means perfect) appear . The Maxims, however, had no such

fate . The author re-edited them frequently during his life, with alterations and additions; a few were added after his death, and it is usual now to print the whole of them, at what-ever time they appeared, together . Thus taken, they amount to about seven hundred in number, in hardly any case exceeding half a page in length, and more frequently confined to two or three lines . The view of conduct which they illustrate is usually and not quite incorrectly summed up in the words " everything is reducible to the motive of self-interest." But though not absolutely incorrect, the phrase is misleading . The Maxims are in no respect mere deductions from or applications of any such general theory . They are on the contrary independent judgments on different relations of life, different affections of the human mind, and so forth, from which, taken together, the general view may be deduced or rather composed . Sentimental moralists have protested loudly against this view, yet it is easier to declaim against it in general than to find a flaw in the several parts of which it is made up . With a few exceptions La Rochefoucauld's maxims represent the matured result of the reflection of a man deeply versed in the business and pleasures of the world, and possessed of an extraordinarily fine and acute intellect, on the conduct and motives which have guided himself and his fellows . There is as little trace in them of personal spite as of forfanterie de vice . But the astonishing excellence of the literary medium in which they are conveyed is even more remarkable than the general soundness of their ethical import .

In uniting the four qualities of brevity, clearness, fulness of meaning and point, La Rochefoucauld has no

rival . His Maxims are never mere epigrams; they are never platitudes; they are never dark sayings . He has packed them so full of meaning that it would be impossible to pack them closer, yet there is no undue compression; he has sharpened their point to the utmost, yet there is no loss of substance . The comparison which occurs most frequently, and which is perhaps on the whole the justest, is that of a bronze medallion, and it applies to the matter no less than to the form . Nothing is left unfnished, yet none of the workmanship is finical . The sentiment, far from being merely hard, as the sentimentalists pretend, has a vein of melancholy poetry running through it which calls to mind the traditions of La Rochefoucauld's devotion to the romances of chivalry . The maxims are never shallow; each is the text for a whole sermon of application and corollary which any one of thought and experience can write . Add to all this that the language in which they are written is French, still at almost its greatest strength, and chastened but as yet not emasculated by the reforming influence of the 17th century, and it is not necessary to say more . To the literary critic no less than to the man of the world La Rochefoucauld ranks among the scanty number of pocket-books to be read and re-read with ever new admiration, instruction and delight . The editions of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims (as the full title runs, Refiexions oa sentences et maximes morales) published in his lifetime bear the dates 1665 (editio princeps), 1666, 1671, 1675, 1678 . An important edition which appeared after his death in 1693 may rank almost with these . As long as the Memoirs remained in the state above described, no edition of them need be mentioned, and none of the complete works was possible .

The previous more or less complete editions are all superseded by that of MM

Gilbert and Gourdault (1865-1883), in the series of " Grands Ecrivains de la France," 3 vols . There are still some puzzles as to the text; but this edition supplies all available material in regard to them . The handsomest separateedition of the Maxims is the so-called Edition des bibliophiles (1870); but cheap and handy issues are plentiful . See the English version by G . H . Powell (1903) . Nearly all the great French critics of the 19th century have dealt more or less with La Rochefoucauld: the chief recent monograph on him is that of J . Bourdeau in the Grands ecrivains francais (1893) . (G . SA.) LA ROCHEFOUCAULD-LIANCOURT, FRANCOIS ALEXANDRE FREDERIC, Due DE (1747-1827), French social re-former, was born at La Roche Guyon on the 11th of January 1747, the son of Francois Armand de La Rochefoucauld, due d'Estissac, grand master of the royal wardrobe . The duc de Liancourt became an officer of carbineers, and married at seventeen . A visit to England seems to have suggested the establishment of a model farm at Liancourt, where he reared cattle imported from England and Switzerland .

He also set up

spinning machines on his estate, and founded a school of arts and crafts for the sons of soldiers, which became in 1788 the Ecole des Enfants de la Patrie under royal protection . Elected to the states-general of 1789 he sought in vain to support the cause of royalty while furthering the social reforms he had at heart . On the 12th of July, two days before the fall of the Bastille, he warned Louis XVI. of the state of affairs in Paris, and met his exclamation that there was a revolt with the answer, "Non, sire, c'est une revolution." On the 18th of July he became president of the Assembly . Established in command of a military division in Normandy, he offered Louis a refuge in Rouen, and, failing in this effort, assisted him with a large sum of money . After the events of the loth of August 1792 he fled to England, where he was the guest of Arthur Young, and thence passed to America . After the assassination of his cousin, Louis-Alexandre, duc de La Rochefoucauld d'Enville, at Gisors on the 14th of September 1792 he assumed the title of duc de La Rochefoucauld . He returned to Paris in 1799, but received small favour from Napoleon . At the Restoration he entered the House of Peers, but Louis XVIII. refused to reinstate him as master of the wardrobe, although his father had paid 400,000 francs for the honour . Successive governments, revolutionary and other-wise, recognized the value of his institutions at Liancourt, and he was for twenty-three years government inspector of his school of arts and crafts, which had been removed to Chalons . He was one of the first promoters of vaccination in France; he established a dispensary in Paris, and he was an active member of the central boards of administration for hospitals, prisons and agriculture . His opposition to the government in the House of Peers led to his removal in 1823 from the honorary positions he held, while the vaccination committee, of which he was president, was suppressed . The academies of science and of medicine admitted him to their membership by way of protest .

Official hostility pursued him even after his death (27th of March 1827), for the old pupils of his school were charged by the military at his funeral . His works, chiefly on economic. questions, include books on the English system of taxation, poor-relief and education . His eldest son, Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1765-1848), succeeded his father in the House of Peers . The second, Alexandre, comte de La Rochefoucauld (1767-1841), married a San Domingo heiress allied to the Beauharnais family . Mme de La Rochefoucauld became dame d'honneur to the empress Josephine, and their eldest daughter married a brother-in-law of Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese . La Rochefoucauld became ambassador successively to Vienna (1805) and to the Hague (18o8-181o), where he negotiated the union of Holland with France . During the " Hundred Days " he was made a peer of France . He subsequently devoted himself to philanthropic work, and in 1822 became deputy to the Chamber and sat with the constitutional royalists . He was again raised to the peerage in 1831 . The third son, Frederic Gaetan, marquis de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (1779-1863), was a zealous philanthropist and a partisan of constitutional monarchy . He took no part in politics after 1848 . The marquis wrote on social questions, notably on prison administration; he edited the works of La Rochefoucauld, and the memoirs of Condorcet ; and he was the author of some vaudevilles, tragedies and poems .

LA ROCHEJACQUELEIN, DE, the name of an ancient French family of La

Vendee, celebrated for its devotion to the throne during and after the Revolution . Its original name was Duverger, derived from a fief near Bressuire in Poitou, and its pedigree is traceable to the 13th century . In 1505 Gui Duverger married Renee, heiress of Jacques Lemartin, seigneur de La Rochejacquelein, whose name he assumed . His grandson, Louis Duverger,, seigneur de La Rochejacquelein, was a devoted adherent of Henry II., and was badly wounded at the battle of Arques; other members of the family were also distinguished soldiers, and the seigniory was raised to a countship and marquisate in reward for their services . At the outbreak of the Revolution the chief of the family was HENRI Louis AUGUSTE, marquis de La Rochejacquelein, marechal de camp in the royal army, who had three sons named after himself—Henri, Louis and Auguste . The marquis fled abroad with his second son Louis at the time of the emigration of the nobles . He entered the service of Great Britain, and died in San Domingo in 1802 .