EVELYN, JOHN, author of the Sylea, Memoirs, &c., was born in 1620 at his father's seat of Wotton in Surrey. He was educated at the free school of Southover, near Lewes, whence he removed in 1637 to Balliol College, Ox-
ford; on leaving which he began the study of law in the Middle Temple. In 1641 he went to Flanders, where he served for a short time as a volunteer; but soon returning home, he joined the king's army in the struggle now begun with the parliament. The following year saw him once more bent on foreign travel, and he accordingly set out with an old college companion on a tour through France, Italy, and Switzerland, in which countries he spent the next seven years of his life, studying men and manners, statistics and science, polite literature and the fine arts. In 1647 he married a daughter of Sir Richard Browne, the English ambassador at the French court; and when that gentleman's estate of Sayes Court was sequestered by parliament, Evelyn was allowed to become the purchaser of it. Here he lived in strict retirement during the period of the Protectorate, engaged in laying out the grounds and gardens, and turning to profitable account the results of his continental studies. During this period also he published a translation of the first book of Lucretius; Chrysostom's Golden Book for the education of Children; and the French Gardener and English Vineyard. At the Restoration, however, he began to take an honourable though not conspicuous part in public affairs; was appointed one of the commissioners for taking care of the sick, wounded, and prisoners, during the Dutch war; commissioner for the rebuilding of St Paul's after the great fire (of which an admirable account will be found in his Journal); and a member of the Board of Trade. He was also made a member of the Council of the Royal Society, to whose Transactions he continued all his life to contribute papers on the subjects towards which his early studies had been directed. His favourite pursuits were gardening and planting, upon which he wrote a number of treatises, appended to the fifth edition of the Sylea, or a Discourse on Forest Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty's Dominions, published in 1644 by order of the Royal Society. The object of this treatise was to encourage planting throughout Great Britain, and it produced the desired effect in a manner very gratifying to the author. In 1699, on the death of his elder brother without children, Evelyn succeeded to the family estate of Wotton, to which he removed from Sayes Court, where he had lived happy and respected for upwards of forty years. He was succeeded in the occupancy of that house by the Czar Peter, who with his suite made sad havoc among Evelyn's well-trimmed yew-hedges and elaborate parterres. Evelyn did not live very long to enjoy his new position as head of his family; he died February 27, 1705, in the eighty-sixth year of his age. In the humbler walks of science Evelyn was a successful and persevering inquirer; a valuable pioneer, as he himself used to say, in the service of the Royal Society. His moral character was irremediable, though he lived at a time when vice was an almost indispensable passport to favour and promotion; and the purity of his morals, his piety, his schemes of active benevolence, and the intellectual nature of his pursuits, were all such as to earn for him the respect even of the court-professors, to whom his example was a standing rebuke. Altogether our history affords few better specimens of the accomplished and well-principled English gentleman. The most valuable of Evelyn's works (leaving out of account the Sylea already mentioned), is his Diary and Correspondence, and the Memoirs of his Life and Writings, which are valuable not only on account of their literary merits, but also as throwing much light on the times in which their author lived. His other works, which have long since been for the most part superseded, embrace treatises on Sculpture, Architecture, Painting, Numismatics, and certain social questions. A very detailed list of them will be found in Watt's Bibliotheca.
EVEMERUS or EHEMERUS, a Sicilian mythographer, who flourished in the latter half of the fourth century B.C.
He is noted chiefly for his Sacred History, the materials of which, he said, were derived from inscriptions on the walls and columns of temples in various parts of Greece. In this work he introduced a new method of interpreting the popular myths, asserting that the gods who formed the chief objects of popular worship had been originally heroes and conquerors, who had thus earned a claim to the veneration of their subjects. Till the end of the last century there were many who accepted this system of Evemerus, and the early Christians in especial appealed to it as a confirmation of their belief that the ancient mythology was merely an aggregate of fables of human invention. Evemerus, who was a firm upholder of the Cyrenaic philosophy, was violently attacked by some of the ancient authors, and even accused of atheism; not so much, however, on account of his mythology, as because he declared that he had visited Panchaea, a sort of southern Thule, and there picked up much of the information which he embodied in his work.