ENNIUS, an early Roman poet, the father of Roman epic poetry, born in Rudiae, Calabria; promoted the study of Greek literature in Rome; of his poems, dramatic and epic, only a few fragments are extant (239-169 B.C.).

ENOCH, a godly man, who lived in antediluvian times among a race gone godless, and whom the Lord in judgment removed from the earth to return Himself by-and-by with a flood in order to clear the world of the ungodly.

ENOCH, THE BOOK OF, an apocryphal book, quoted from by Jude, discovered over a century ago, composed presumably about the 2nd century, though subsequently enlarged and ascribed to Enoch; it professes to be a series of revelations made to the patriarch bearing upon the secrets of the material and spiritual universe and the course of Providence, and written down by him for the benefit of posterity.

ENOCH ARDEN, a poem of Tennyson, and one of his happiest efforts to translate an incident of common life into the domain of poetry; the story is:  A sailor, presumed to be lost, and whose wife marries another, returns, finds her happily wedded, and bears the sorrow rather than disturb her felicity by revealing himself.

ENTABLATURE, a term in classic architecture applied to the ornamented portion of a building which rests in horizontal position upon supporting columns; is subdivided into three parts, the lower portion being called the architrave, the middle portion the frieze, and the uppermost the cornice; the depth assigned to these parts varies in the different schools, but the whole entablature generally measures twice the diameter of the column.

ENTAIL, a term in law which came to be used in connection with the practice of limiting the inheritance of estates to a certain restricted line of heirs.  Attempts of the kind, which arise naturally out of the deeply-seated desire which men have to preserve property—­especially landed estates—­in their own families, are of ancient date; but the system as understood now, involving the principle of primogeniture, owes its origin to the feudal system.  Sometimes the succession was limited to the male issue, but this was by no means an invariable practice; in modern times the system has been, by a succession of Acts of Parliaments (notably the Cairns Act of 1882), greatly modified, and greater powers given to the actual owner of alienating the estates to which he has succeeded, a process which is called “breaking the entail.”

ENTSAGEN, the renunciation with which, according to Goethe, life, strictly speaking, begins, briefly explained by Froude as “a resolution, fixedly and clearly made, to do without pleasant things—­wealth, promotion, fame, honour, and the other rewards with which the world recompenses the services it appreciates,” or, still more briefly, the renunciation of the flesh symbolised in the Christian baptism by water.

ENVIRONMENT, a term of extensive use in biological science, especially employed to denote the external conditions which go to determine modifications in the development of organic life to the extent often of producing new species.