The Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography

Bramah, Joseph

BRAMAH, Joseph, whose name is known in connection with numerous mechanical improvements, was born at Stainborough, Yorkshire, in 1749. He was apprenticed to a carpenter in his native place, and having served his apprenticeship, he removed to London, and ere long began business as a cabinetmaker. Having shown great aptitude for mechanical invention, by some improvements which he effected in the construction of water-closets, he devoted himself to that branch of labour. His next invention, which he patented in 1784, was an improvement on the construction of the lock, rendering it more inviolable. Perhaps his most important achievement was the construction of a hydraulic press, acting on the principle of the hydrostatic paradox, which produced great force, and could be conveniently applied to many useful purposes. Its power was tested in Holt Forest, Hampshire, where 300 of the largest trees were raised from the ground by its means, managed by only two men. Bramah erected at Woolwich arsenal a machine for planing timber, moved by this power, which acted with great rapidity and exactness. In 1807 he invented, for the bank of England, a machine for numbering and dating their notes, which effected a great saving of time and labour. He died in 1814, in consequence of cold caught in Holt Forest, while superintending his experiments there. Mr. Bramah left "A Dissertation on the Construction of Locks," and "A Letter on the subject of an alleged Violation of Patents."—J. B.

Congreve, William (1669-1728)

CONGREVE, William, born 1669; died 1728; a gentleman of old and good family. He was educated at Trinity college, Dublin, and on leaving it, entered of the middle temple. At twenty-one he published a novel, which neither enjoyed nor deserved success. In 1693 his first play, "The Old Bachelor," was acted under the patronage of Dryden with universal applause. Although the weakest in style and plot of his four comedies, it has some brilliant and facile writing to allay its vulgarities of conception and commonplaces of execution. Next year appeared "The Double Dealer," a better play which was less successful. All the humour and spirit of a matchless comic style could neither redeem nor conceal the defects of a machinery at once violent and intricate. Nevertheless, in this unfortunate comedy, there are scenes of such wit and power as to eclipse Sheridan at his strongest, and Molière at his weakest; no slight praise for any dramatist. "Love for Love" was brought out on the opening of a theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields; it was the most successful of Congreve's comedies, and is all but the most perfect. In 1697 came out "The Mourning Bride," a patched and padded tragedy, rouged to the eyes, and as violent as Lady Willfort, the memorable heroine of his last and greatest work. "The Way of the World" appeared in 1700, and failed: we have had no such comedy since. Congreve, according to Swift, was rescued from early and degrading poverty by the gift of two sinecures from the political party which enjoyed and appreciated his adherence; on these and his flirtations, he lived a refined and inactive life, cut short by gout and the overturn of a carriage. At his death he left a fortune of £10,000 to the duchess of Marlborough—a legacy which might have been better employed either as a gift to Mrs. Bracegirdle the actress, or as a prop to the fortunes of his family: the former had enjoyed his friendship for years; the latter was reduced to all but destitution. The duchess expressed her regret by lavishing upon a was figure of her deceased friend, all the attentions which he had required when alive. The minor works of Congreve are dull and empty, but for one or two songs which read like fragments of a comedy patched with metre. All that is worthy of notice in the man he has put into four plays; and his main title to our admiration is the union in these works of broad and refined humour. His intellect is clear, cold, and narrow; it has the force and brightness of steel; the edges of it, so to speak, are cut out hard and sharp. There is more weight and matter in Congreve than in any English dramatist since the restoration; and at worst he is no coarser than his time. In Congreve all is plain and clear, if hard and limited; he makes no effort to escape into the region of moral sentiment; if his world is not healthy, neither is it hollow;. and whatever he had of noble humour and feeling was genuine and genial. His style is a model of grace and accurate vigour, and his verbal wit the most brilliant and forcible in English literature. We do not say that it was pure and exalted; such properties belong to other times and other minds. But, as a comic writer, he stands above the best who came after him, and beside the best who went before.—A. C. S.

Falconer, Hugh

FALCONER, Hugh, M.D., a distinguished naturalist. He was educated for the medical profession at the university of Edinburgh, where he took the degree of M.D. He went out as assistant-surgeon in the service of the East India Company, and whilst in India became distinguished for his researches in geology and botany. His geological researches were made in company with Sir Thomas Proby Cautley; and the papers containing the results of their discoveries have been written conjointly. These researches are principally confined to the discovery of an immense number of fossil remains in the Sivalik hills of the Sub-Himalayan mountains. Separate papers on the Sivatherium Hippopotamus, Camel Tiger, Anoplotherium, and Colossochelys (a gigantic tortoise) were published in the proceedings of the geological and other societies. A resumé of these researches, with much additional matter, was published in the Fauna Antiqua Sivalensis, or fossil zoology of the Sivalik hills. In 1845 Dr. Falconer was appointed superintendent of the East India Company's botanical gardens at Calcutta. In this position he remained for a few years, and then returned to England to cultivate the science of palæontology, which he much enriched by his contributions. He died January 31, 1865.—E. L.

Falconer, William

FALCONER, William, a British poet, was born in the Netherbow, Edinburgh, in the year 1730. The lowliness and obscurity of his origin, and the occupation in which his life was spent, have conspired to render the memorials of him but scanty for the biographer. The son of a poor barber who had several other children to maintain, two of whom were deaf and dumb, William, left early an orphan, had little of regular education. He stated himself in after life, that his education had been confined merely to English reading, writing, and a little arithmetic. The neighbouring port of Leith was often visited by him, and chance, or necessity, or it may be a natural taste, directed him to a sea-life. There is no reason to suppose that he had any strong indisposition to seafaring, as has been alleged, except the lines in the "Shipwreck" may be applied to himself and taken to be more than a poetic colouring; and we think no one "condemned reluctant to the faithless sea," would ever have turned out so thorough a sailor, and have spent nearly his whole life afloat. Be this as it may, while yet a boy he was apprenticed on board a merchantman at Leith. Subsequently he went into a ship in which Campbell, the author of Lexiphanes, was purser, who observing his quickness took him as his servant, encouraged and assisted him in studying, and used to boast of having been his teacher. Before Falconer had reached the age of eighteen he obtained the post of second mate in the Britannia, a merchant vessel engaged in the Levantine trade. This vessel was shipwrecked on her voyage from Alexandria to Venice, off Cape Colonna; he and two others of the crew only being saved. The terrible incidents of that scene were deeply impressed on the mind and imagination of the young man, and his marvellous and vivid descriptions of them have conferred on him an enduring fame. Returning to his native city, he made his first essays in authorship. In 1751 he published an elegy on the death of the prince of Wales, and some small pieces, in the Gentleman's Magazine. Other pieces are attributed to him, but without any sufficient warrant. It is stated that Falconer again went to sea in the interval between this and 1760, in the spring of which year he published his poem, the "Shipwreck," and dedicated it to the duke of York, then rear-admiral of the blue. Such a poem from such a man turned the eyes of the literary world upon the author, and the Monthly Review, then the leading exponent of literary criticism, spoke of it in terms of high eulogy. The duke became his patron, and obtained for him in the ensuing summer the post of midshipman in the royal navy, on board the Royal George commanded by Sir Edward George Hawke. Even here the muse found a place. Withdrawing himself at times from the ruder scenes around him, he would sit between the cable-trees and the ship's side and indulge in poetic composition. Thus it was he wrote his "Ode on the Duke of York's second departure from England." In 1763 peace was proclaimed, and Falconer's ship was paid off; but he quickly obtained the post of purser to the Glory, and about the same time married a young lady of the name of Hicks, the daughter of a surgeon at Sheerness. The marriage was a happy one. She was a woman of good sense and strong affection; she soothed and sustained her husband during many a struggle with the trials that beset a poor author, and had the reward in her widowed old age, of deriving a competency from one of her husband's publications. After a time the Glory was laid up in Chatham, but Falconer did not even then leave her. By the kindness of Commissioner Hanway, the captain's cabin was fitted up for the poet, and here he lived and studied, working assiduously at his "Marine Dictionary," a book of great merit and value, which he published in 1769. In the interval, Falconer wrote the "Demagogue," published in 1765, and went to try his fortune in London. He does not appear to have been successful, though in 1768 he received a proposal from Mr. Murray, who was then about to establish the business which in his son's day became so eminent, to join him as a partner. Why this offer was declined is unknown—possibly his appointment to the pursership of the Aurora may account for it. At all events on the 20th September, 1769, he sailed from England—never more to return. The Aurora was never heard of afterwards; whether she foundered in the Mozambique channel, was burned, or cast away on a reef of rocks near Macao—for all these fatalities were conjectured—none can say. No one escaped to tell in verse or prose the horrors of that shipwreck. The fame of Falconer rests on the "Shipwreck," and rests on it securely. While we dissent from the extravagant praise lavished upon it in his own day, we think that it is undervalued in ours. As the production of a half-taught sailor, its diction is surprisingly good, inflated no doubt occasionally, and disfigured with the conventional vice of mythology then prevalent, but now happily extinct; but the wonderful adaptation of naval phraseology to poetic uses, the harmony of its rhythm, and above all, the terrible and minute fidelity of its vivid pictures, entitle the "Shipwreck" to a high place as a poetic composition. A singular commendation is given of it by Clarke. "It is," he says, "of inestimable value to this country, since it contains within itself the rudiments of navigation; if not sufficient to form a complete seaman, it may certainly be considered as the grammar of his professional science. I have heard many experienced officers declare, that the rules and maxims delivered in this poem for the conduct of a ship in the most perilous emergency, form the best, indeed the only opinions which a skilful mariner should adopt." In appearance, Falconer was hard-featured, awkward, and blunt in manners, but his speech was singularly fluent, simple, and impressive; and though educated only in English, he was never at a loss to understand French, Spanish, Italian, or German.—J. F. W.

Ferrier, James F.

FERRIER, James F., LL.D., professor of moral philosophy in the university of St. Andrews, nephew and son-in-law of the late Professor John Wilson of Edinburgh university and of Blackwood's Magazine. Dr. Ferrier was educated (partly at Oxford, where he graduated B.A.) for the Scottish bar, but is known as a writer on philosophy. Some metaphysical essays from his pen, which were published in Blackwood, attracted attention to the writer; and the chair of moral philosophy in the university of St. Andrews becoming vacant, he was appointed to it in 1845. On the death of his distinguished relative in 1852, Professor Ferrier became a candidate for the chair of moral philosophy in the university of Edinburgh, but was unsuccessful. He was also an unsuccessful candidate for the chair of logic and metaphysics in the same university, vacant by the death of Sir William Hamilton. The reputation of Ferrier as a philosopher rests chiefly on his "Institutes of Metaphysics, the theory of Knowing and Being," published in 1854—a work which is characterized by much acuteness of thought and no little learning. The avowed aim of the author was to shake to the foundation the distinctive principles of the Scottish philosophy, and to prove that the common dicta of consciousness are to be repudiated as false, instead of being accepted as the source and groundwork of all true mental science. How far this object has been gained, readers will judge differently; but there can be no doubt in regard to the vigour and elegance of the work. Dr. Ferrier died 11th June, 1864.—J. B. J.

PLOTINUS

PLOTINUS, the chief of the Alexandrian Platonists, is said to have always refused to divulge the names of his parents, and the time and place of his birth, so little reason did he think he had to congratulate himself on having been born. The secret, however, seems to have transpired, for it is related that he first saw the light at Lycopolis in Egypt in 205. At the age of twenty he went to study in Alexandria, which for long had been celebrated for its commercial prosperity, and for the variety and activity of its literary institutions. In the first centuries of the christian era, this city was the gathering-point of the learning of the East and of the West. Here were collected together, as in a vast reservoir, the Greek philosophy, the oriental mysticism, the ancient superstitions of heathendom, the rising power of christianity, the heresies of gnosticism, and the doctrines of the Jewish kabala; and in the midst of the fermentation of these elements the Alexandrian philosophy arose. Although not set up in express rivalry or antagonism to the new religion, it was no doubt inspired, in part at least, by the desire to question and reduce its pretensions. It was an effort on the part of expiring paganism to rally and organize her forces, in order to show the world that the heathen sages had not preached, and that the heathen devotees had not practised, in vain; that there was still some fire in the ancient ashes, still some life and health in the old philosophical and mythological traditions; and that they did not merit the hatred and contempt with which they were now frequently assailed. When Plotinus came to Alexandria, Ammonius Saccas was at the head of this philosophy—was, indeed, its reputed founder—although it is possible that the system had been set on foot, and had begun to take shape before his time. Some years elapsed before Plotinus made the acquaintance of this philosopher, and during that time his soul was disquieted by the thirst of knowledge unappeased. He found peace so soon as he was introduced to Ammonius, whose devoted disciple he became, and to whose instructions he listened assiduously for eleven years. In his thirty-ninth year Plotinus, being anxious to extend his knowledge by a more intimate acquaintance with the philosophy of the East, joined an expedition which the Roman Emperor Gordian had equipped for the invasion of Persia. The issue of the expedition was disastrous. Gordian was assassinated in Mesopotamia, and Plotinus with difficulty escaped with his life. This expedition having brought him into close relations with the Romans, he betook himself to Rome in the fortieth year of his age. Here he resided until his death, expounding the Alexandrian philosophy, of which he has a better title than Ammonius to be regarded as the originator. At any rate he amplified it greatly, and by him it has been handed down to posterity. He had a project of founding a city in Campania on the model of Plato's republic; but the ministers of the emperor wisely refused to give any encouragement to the scheme. He died at Rome in his sixty-sixth year, in 270.

Plotinus had many pupils and admirers. Of these the most faithful and intelligent was Porphyry, and to him he intrusted the arrangement and publication of his writings. They consisted of fifty-four books, which Porphyry divided, according to their subjects, into six parts. Each of these parts contained nine books, which he called "Enneads," from the Greek word signifying nine. The philosophy of Plotinus is styled Neoplatonism, because it is a revival of the Platonic doctrines; and also Eclecticism, because it aimed at combining with Platonism whatever was worthy of adoption in the tenets of other philosophers. Its prevailing tone, however, is derived from the element which it borrowed from the East—a mysticism which blends the Creator with the creation, and confounds the human with the divine.

The philosophy of Plotinus, divested of its mystical complexion, presents to us the following principal points, which may be shortly exhibited in the form of (question and answer:—First, What does philosophy aim at? At absolute truth. Secondly, What kind of truth is that? Truth for all intelligence; a truth which any intellect is necessarily shut out from knowing, is not an absolute truth. Thirdly, What is the truth for all intelligence? Unity—the oneness of all things. Fourthly, How so? Because while the diversity of things is addressed to what is peculiar to each order of intellect, their unity can be taken up only by what is common to all orders of intellect. Unity is thus the object of philosophical pursuit, inasmuch as it is the truth for all; in other words, the absolutely true. Fifthly, But what is this unity? The Alexandrian philosophy is driven in upon the answer that thought is the unity of the universe. Hence the knowledge of self, the thought of thought, the reflection of reason upon itself, is inculcated by Plotinus as the highest duty, and as the noblest source of purification and enlightenment. This is the sum and substance of his teaching, in so far as it can be intelligibly reported.

To the system thus concisely exhibited, some explanation must be appended, showing, first, the grounds on which Plotinus and the ancient philosophers generally refused to acknowledge the material world as the absolutely real; secondly, in what respect the Alexandrian philosophy differs from antecedent systems; and, thirdly, how Plotinus was led to lay down thought as the absolutely real, and as constituting the unity in all things. First, The consideration that the truth which philosophy aims at is truth for all, disposed at once of the claim of the material world to be regarded as absolutely true; for matter is not a truth for all intellect, but only for intellect furnished with such senses as ours. Matter was thus put out of court, as being not the absolutely true. Secondly, The absolute had now to be looked for elsewhere, and, accordingly, philosophers proceeded to search for it, not in the region of sense, but in that of intellect. Pythagoras proclaimed Number as the truth for all. The Eleatics took their stand upon Being, Heraclitus contended for Becoming, or change. Plato advanced his theory of Ideas—resemblance, difference, the good, &c. It is obvious, however, that these are rather the objects of thought, than thought itself. There is some distinction between Number and the thought of Number, between Being and the thought of Being; and on this ground it might be argued that Number, Being, and the others, might, perhaps, not be absolute truths. Whatever is different from thought is not necessarily true for all thought. This position was the stronghold of scepticism, the fortress from which it strove to break down the strength of Platonism, and to strip all philosophy of its assured conviction that it had reached the ultimately real. It was necessary, therefore, to shift the ground of the absolutely true from the thing thought of to the thought itself of the thing. This was what Plotinus did; and it is in this respect that the Alexandrian scheme differs from all the systems which preceded it. They placed the absolute truth in something which thought embraced; this system placed it in the thought itself by which this something is taken hold of. Thirdly, Such appears to be the leading position occupied by Plotinus when the mists of his system are blown aside. He was led to it by the inconsequence of which scepticism had convicted all antecedent systems. A paralogism might be involved in the assertion, that the contents of any thought is a truth for all intellect; but no paralogism could be involved in the assertion that thought itself is the truth for all intellect, because thought and intellect are one. Here, to speak the language of modern philosophy, the object thought of and the thinking subject are the same, and that interval between the two does not exist which scepticism represents as an impassable gulf, separating reason from the truth. Thought, then, is the unity in all things, the only absolute and assured reality in the universe; because it is a truth, and the only truth which every intellect must entertain, and which no scepticism can invalidate. So reasoned Plotinus. In recommending self-reflection, or the study of thought, as the noblest of all pursuits, Plotinus intended that men should habituate themselves to the contemplation of thought in its universality, that they should see and understand that it is not properly their own. The passions and desires of men are subjective and their own; but thought is objective still more than it is subjective; it is the common medium which brings the human mind into relation with an intelligence infinitely higher, from which all things are emanations, just as the infinite intelligence itself is an emanation from a unity still more inconceivable and ineffable. But here the system loses itself in mysticism, and we shall not attempt to follow it through its fantastic and unintelligible processions of spiritual and material creation. The works of Plotinus, edited by Creuzer, were published at Oxford in 1835. An edition has been recently

published at Leipsic (Teubner), under the editorship of Adolphus Kirchhoff, in which the arrangement of Porphyry is departed from, and a chronological order of the "Enneads" attempted in its room. Of translations, an excellent French one, by M. N. Bouillet, with ample commentaries, has been recently published at Paris. The English version, by Taylor, of several of the "Enneads" is utterly execrable. For the history generally of the Alexandrian philosophy, Matter, Simon, and Vacherot (Histoire Critique de l'Ecole d'Alexandrie), may be referred to.—J. F. F.

Granville, George

GRANVILLE, George, Viscount Lansdowne, figures in the collections as one of the English poets, but is chiefly remembered as a friend and patron of poets. He was born in 1667, of a high family noted for its loyalty to the family of Stewart. Receiving his earlier education in France, he was sent at the precocious age of ten to Trinity college, Cambridge, and was known as a university poet before he was twelve. With hereditary loyalty, he offered his services in behalf of James when William of Orange meditated his expedition. His father restrained his ardour, and nothing was left him when the crown changed wearers but to devote himself to literature under a government which he could not serve. He wrote plays and poems, one of the former, the “Heroic Lover,” was praised by Dryden, whose later politics were his own, and who, in his commendatory verses, calls him “friend.” His poems were a mere faint echo of Waller. On the accession of Anne he appeared at court, and was received with great favour; but on the fall of his political friends from power he retired into private life to court the company of the muse and her cultivators. It was he who introduced Wycherley and the youthful Pope to Bolingbroke. Pope dedicated to him Windsor Forest, and has recorded his sense of the early encouragement which he received, and of the courtly manners of his noble patron, in the well-known passage—

“Granville the polite, And knowing Walsh would tell me I could write.”

After the trial of Sacheverell Granville’s friends returned to power, and he was not forgotten. He succeeded Walpole as secretary at war, was raised to the peerage, and step by step advanced to the dignity of treasurer of Queen Anne’s household, from which he was naturally removed on the accession of George I. His old loyalty to the Stewarts breaking out anew, he was appre on suspicion and committed to the Tower, from which, after an imprisonment of some duration, he was discharged without a trial. Forewarned by this experience, he removed to France at the time of Bishop Atterbury’s affair, and amused himself in his self-exile revising his works and writing in prose a vindication of General Monk and his own kinsman, Sir Richard Greenville, from the reflections of Burnet, Clarendon, and Echard. His prose has been more highly praised than his poetry. He published a handsome edition of his collected writings on his return to England in 1732, and died in the January of 1735.—F. E.

Granville, Granville George Leveson-Gower

GRANVILLE, Granville George Leveson-Gower, second earl, eldest son of the first earl by the second daughter of the fifth duke of Devonshire, was born in 1815, and was educated at Eton and at Christ church, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1834. He was for a few months attaché to the British embassy in Paris under his father. In 1836 he was returned to parliament as member for Morpeth, and was re-elected in 1837. But, on being shortly after appointed undersecretary for foreign affairs, he retired from parliament. In 1840 he was for a short time attached to the Russian embassy. At the general election in 1841 he was returned for Lichfield, and retained his seat until 1846, when he succeeded to the peerage on the death of his father. He seldom took part in the debates in the lower house; but he was known and respected as an able and consistent advocate of a liberal policy. He held the offices of master of the buckhounds and vice-president of the board of trade under Lord John Russell, and, by diligent application to the business of his department, soon became distinguished for practical knowledge, no less than for his courtesy and kindness. On the dismissal of Lord Palmerston in December, 1851, Lord Granville became his successor in the foreign office; but he held the seals only for a brief space, as the Russell ministry was soon after broken up. His lordship acted as vice-president of the royal commission for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and was also chairman of the executive committee. He accompanied the commissioners in their subsequent visit to Paris. Lord Granville was subsequently president of the board of trade under Lord Aberdeen in 1852, and president of the council and leader of the house of lords, when Lord Palmerston became prime minister in 1855. On the termination of the Russian war his lordship was sent upon an extraordinary mission to St. Petersburg, to attend the coronation of the young czar. Besides the offices mentioned, Lord Granville has held that of paymaster of the forces, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, and treasurer of the navy. He is also chancellor of the university of London, and a knight of the garter. He was again appointed, in 1859, to the office of president of the council, with which he combines that of leading the house of lords a task for which he is well fitted by his graceful manners, as well as by his excellent business habits.—J. T.

HEGEL, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

HEGEL, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, the profoundest of German metaphysicians, was born at Stuttgart on the 27th August, 1770. He could trace his descent through a long line of Carinthian and Swabian ancestors who had filled respectable places in the middle ranks of society, and some of whom, in the time of the Thirty Years' war, had suffered persecution and expatriation on account of their attachment to the protestant cause. His father was superintendent of the ducal finances—a post, it may be supposed, of much trust and responsibility. The Swabian temperament—its gravity, straightforwardness, and perseverance—is said to have declared itself at an early period in the life and conversation of the future philosopher. While still in his teens he went by the nickname of "the old man." His school and college diaries, extracts from which have been published by his biographer Rosenkranz, attest the extent and variety of his studies. They afford evidence of indefatigable industry, of pains and thoroughness, rather than of precocity of genius. Method and persistency were the characteristics of the youthful scholar, as they were of the mature metaphysician. At the university of Tübingen, to which he proceeded in 1788, he was a fellow-student with Schelling—a kindred spirit, who presented, too, some very decided points of contrast. For a time