yet left him a shepherd....  His special character among the great painters of Italy was that he was a practical person; what others dreamt of he did; he could work in mosaic, could work in marble, and paint; could build ... built the Campanile of the Duomo, because he was then the best master of sculpture, painting, and architecture in Florence, and supposed in such business to be without a superior in the world....  Dante was his friend and Titian copied him....  His rules in art were:  You shall see things as they are; and the least with the greatest, because God made them; and the greatest with the least, because God made you, and gave you eyes and a heart; he threw aside all glitter and conventionality, and the most significant thing in all his work is his choice of moments.”  Cimabue still painted the Holy Family in the old conventional style, “but Giotto came into the field, and saw with his simple eyes a lowlier worth; and he painted the Madonna, St. Joseph, and the Christ,—­yes, by all means if you choose to call them so, but essentially—­Mamma, Papa, and the Baby; and all Italy threw up its cap” (1276-1336).  See Ruskin’s “Mornings in Florence.”

GIOTTO’S O, a perfectly round O, such as Giotto is said to have sent the Pope in evidence of his ability to do some decorative work for his Holiness.

GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS (i. e.  Giraldus of Cambria), ecclesiastic and author, born in Pembrokeshire, of Norman descent; studied with distinction in Paris; was a zealous churchman; obtained ecclesiastical preferment in England; was twice elected bishop of St. David’s, but both times set aside; travelled in Ireland as well as Wales, and left record of his impressions, which give an entertaining picture and a valuable account of the times, though disfigured by credulity and personal vanity (1147-1223).

GIRARD, STEPHEN, a philanthropist, born at Bordeaux; in early life followed the career of a seaman and rose to be captain of an American coast-trader; in 1769 set up as a trader in Philadelphia, and in course of time establishing a bank, accumulated an immense fortune; during his lifetime he exhibited a strange mixture of niggardliness, scepticism, public charitableness, and a philanthropy which moved him during a yellow-fever epidemic to labour as a nurse in the hospital; at his death he bequeathed $2,000,000 to found an orphanage for boys, attaching to the bequest the remarkable condition, that no clergyman should ever be on the board or ever be permitted to enter the building (1750-1831).

GIRARDIN, EMILE DE, journalist and politician, born in Switzerland, the natural son of General Alexandre de Girardin; took to stockbroking, but quitting it for journalism he soon established a reputation as a ready, vivacious writer, and in 1836 started La Presse, the first French penny paper; his rapid change of front in politics earned for him the nickname of “The Weathercock”; latterly he adhered to the Republican cause, and founded La France in its interest; he published many political brochures and a few plays, and was for some years editor of La Liberte (1806-1881).—­His wife, DELPHINE GAY, enjoyed a wide celebrity both as a beauty and authoress; her poems, plays, and novels fill six vols. (1806-1881).