Chapter XI: Part 11

At the age of forty Ficino took orders, and was honoured with a canonry of S. Lorenzo. He was henceforth assiduous in the performance of his duties, preaching in his cure of Novoli, and also in the cathedral and the church of the Angeli at Florence. He used to say that no man was better than a good priest, and none worse than a bad one. His life corresponded in all points to his principles. It was the life of a sincere Christian and a real sage,--of one who found the best fruits of philosophy in the practice of the Christian virtues. A more amiable and a more harmless man never lived; and this was much in that age of discordant passions and lawless licence. In spite of his weak health, he was indefatigably industrious. His tastes were of the simplest; and while scholars like Filelfo were intent on extracting money from their patrons by flattery and threats, he remained so poor that he owed the publication of all his many works to private munificence. For his old patrons of the house of Medici Ficino always cherished sentiments of the liveliest gratitude. Cosimo he called his second father, saying that Ficino had given him life, but Cosimo new birth,--the one had devoted him to Galen, the other to the divine Plato,--the one was physician of the body, the other of the soul. With Lorenzo he lived on terms of familiar, affectionate, almost parental intimacy. He had seen the young prince grow up in the palace of the Via Larga, and had helped in the development of his rare intellect. In later years he did not shrink from uttering a word of warning and advice, when he thought that the master of the Florentine republic was too much inclined to yield to pleasure. A characteristic proof of his attachment to the house of Medici was furnished by a yearly custom which he practised at his farm at Montevecchio. He used to invite the contadini who had served Cosimo to a banquet on the day of Saints Cosimo and Damiano (the patron saints of the Medici), and entertained them with music and singing. This affection was amply returned. Cosimo employed almost the last hours of his life in listening to Ficino's reading of a treatise on the highest good; while Lorenzo, in a poem on true happiness, described him as the mirror of the world, the nursling of sacred muses, the harmonizer of wisdom and beauty in complete accord. Ficino died at Florence in 1499.

Besides the works already noticed, Ficino composed a treatise on the Christian religion, which was first given to the world in 1476, a translation into Italian of Dante's _De monarchia_, a life of Plato, and numerous essays on ethical and semi-philosophical subjects. Vigour of reasoning and originality of view were not his characteristics as a writer; nor will the student who has raked these dust-heaps of miscellaneous learning and old-fashioned mysticism discover more than a few sentences of genuine enthusiasm and simple-hearted aspiration to repay his trouble and reward his patience. Only in familiar letters, prolegomena, and prefaces do we find the man Ficino, and learn to know his thoughts and sentiments unclouded by a mist of citations; these minor compositions have therefore a certain permanent value, and will continually be studied for the light they throw upon the learned circle gathered round Lorenzo in the golden age of humanism.

The student may be referred for further information to the following
works:--_Marsilii Ficini opera_ (Basileae, 1576); _Marsilii Ficini
vita_, auctore Corsio (ed. Bandini, Pisa, 1771); Roscoe's _Life of
Lorenzo de' Medici_; Pasquale Villari, _La Storia di Girolamo
Savonarola_ (Firenze, Le Monnier, 1859); Von Reumont, _Lorenzo de'
Medici_ (Leipzig, 1874). (J. A. S.)

FICKSBURG, a town of Orange Free State 110 m. by rail E. by N. of Bloemfontein. Pop. (1904) 1954, of whom 1021 were whites. The town is situated near the north bank of the Caledon river and is the capital of one of the finest agricultural and stock-raising regions of the province. It has direct railway communication with Natal and an extensive trade. In the neighbourhood are petroleum wells and a diamond mine. In the fossilized ooze of the Wonderkop, a table mountain of the adjacent Wittebergen, are quantities of petrified fish.

FICTIONS, or legal fictions, in law, the term used for false averments, the truth of which is not permitted to be called in question. English law as well as Roman law abounds in fictions. Sometimes they are merely the condensed expression of a rule of law,--e.g., the fiction of English law that husband and wife were one person, and the fiction of Roman law that the wife was the daughter of the husband. Sometimes they must be regarded as reasons invented in order to justify a rule of law according to an implied ethical standard. Of this sort seems to be the fiction or presumption that every one knows the law, which reconciles the rule that ignorance is no excuse for crime with the moral commonplace that it is unfair to punish a man for violating a law of whose existence he was unaware. Again, some fictions are deliberate falsehoods, adopted as true for the purpose of establishing a remedy not otherwise attainable. Of this sort are the numerous fictions of English law by which the different courts obtained jurisdiction in private business, removed inconvenient restrictions in the law relating to land, &c.

What to the scientific jurist is a stumbling-block is to the older writers on English law a beautiful device for reconciling the strict letter of the law with common sense and justice. Blackstone, in noticing the well-known fiction by which the court of king's bench established its jurisdiction in common pleas (viz. that the defendant was in custody of the marshal of the court), says, "These fictions of law, though at first they may startle the student, he will find upon further consideration to be highly beneficial and useful; especially as this maxim is ever invariably observed, that no fiction shall extend to work an injury; its proper operation being to prevent a mischief or remedy an inconvenience that might result from the general rule of law. So true it is that _in fictione juris semper subsistit aequitas_." Austin, on the other hand, while correctly assigning as the cause of many fictions the desire to combine the necessary reform with some show of respect for the abrogated law, makes the following harsh criticism as to others:--"Why the plain meanings which I have now stated should be obscured by the fictions to which I have just adverted I cannot conjecture. A wish on the part of the authors of the fictions to render the law as _uncognoscible_ as may be is probably the cause which Mr Bentham would assign. I judge not, I confess, so uncharitably; I rather impute such fictions to the sheer imbecility (or, if you will, to the active and sportive fancies) of their grave and venerable authors, than to any deliberate design, good or evil." Bentham, of course, saw in fictions the instrument by which the great object of his abhorrence, _judiciary law_, was produced. It was the means by which judges usurped the functions of legislators. "A fiction of law." he says, "may be defined as a wilful falsehood, having for its object the stealing legislative powers by and for hands which could not or durst not openly claim it, and but for the delusion thus produced could not exercise it." A partnership, he says, was formed between the kings and the judges against the interests of the people. "Monarchs found force, lawyers fraud; thus was the capital found" (_Historical Preface to the second edition of the Fragment on Government_).[1]

Sir H. Maine (_Ancient Law_) supplies the historical element which is always lacking in the explanations of Austin and Bentham. Fictions form one of the agencies by which, in progressive societies, positive law is brought into harmony with public opinion. The others are equity and statutes. Fictions in this sense include, not merely the obvious falsities of the English and Roman systems, but any assumption which conceals a change of law by retaining the old formula after the change has been made. It thus includes both the case law of the English and the _Responsa Prudentum_ of the Romans. "At a particular stage of social progress they are invaluable expedients for overcoming the rigidity of law; and, indeed, without one of them, the fiction of adoption, which permits the family tie to be artificially created, it is difficult to understand how society would ever have escaped from its swaddling clothes, and taken its first steps towards civilization."

The bolder remedial fictions of English law have been to a large extent removed by legislation, and one great obstacle to any reconstruction of the legal system has thus been partially removed. Where the real remedy stood in glaring contrast to the nominal rule, it has been openly ratified by statute. In ejectment cases the mysterious sham litigants have disappeared. The bond of entail can be broken without having recourse to the collusive proceedings of fine and recovery. Fictions have been almost entirely banished from the procedure of the courts. The action for damages on account of seduction, which is still nominally an action by the father for loss of his daughter's services, is perhaps the only fictitious action now remaining.

Fictions which appear in the form of principles are not so easily dealt with by legislation. To expel them formally from the system would require the re-enactment of vast portions of law. A change in legal modes of speech and thought would be more effective. The legal mind instinctively seizes upon concrete aids to abstract reasoning. Many hard and revolting fictions must have begun their career as metaphors. In some cases the history of the change may still almost be traced. The conception that a man-of-war is a floating island, or that an ambassador's house is beyond the territorial limits of the country in which he resides, was originally a figure of speech designed to set a rule of law in a striking light. It is then gravely accepted as true in fact, and other rules of law are deduced from it. Its beginning is to be compared with such phrases as "an Englishman's house is his castle," which have had no legal offshoots and still remain mere figures of speech.

Constitutional law is of course honeycombed with fictions. Here there is hardly ever anything like direct legislative change, and yet real change is incessant. The rules defining the sovereign power and fixing the authority of its various members are in most points the same as they were at the last revolution,--in many points they have been the same since the beginning of parliamentary government. But they have long ceased to be true in fact; and it would hardly be too much to say that the entire series of formal propositions called the constitution is merely a series of fictions. The legal attributes of the king, and even of the House of Lords, are fictions. If we could suppose that the effects of the Reform Acts had been brought about, not by legislation, but by the decisions of law courts and the practice of House of Commons committees--by such assumptions as that freeholder includes lease-holder and that ten means twenty--we should have in the legal constitution of the House of Commons the same kind of fictions that we find in the legal statement of the attributes of the crown and the House of Lords. Here, too, fictions have been largely resorted to for the purpose of supporting particular theories,--popular or monarchical,--and such have flourished even more vigorously than purely legal fictions.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] In the same essay Bentham notices the comparative rarity of
fictions in Scots law. As to fiction in particular, compared with the
work done by it in English law, the use made of it by the Scottish
lawyers is next to nothing. No need have they had of any such clumsy
instrument. They have two others "of their own making, by which
things of the same sort have been done with much less trouble.
_Nobile officium_ gives them the creative power of legislation; this
and the word desuetude together the annihilative." And he notices
aptly enough that, while the English lawyers declared that James II.
had abdicated the throne (which everybody knew to be false), the
Scottish lawyers boldly said he had forfeited it.

FIDDES, RICHARD (1671-1725), English divine and historian, was born at Hunmanby and educated at Oxford. He took orders, and obtained the living of Halsham in Holderness in 1696. Owing to ill-health he applied for leave to reside at Wickham, and in 1712 he removed to London on the plea of poverty, intending to pursue a literary career. In London he met Swift, who procured him a chaplaincy at Hull. He also became chaplain to the earl of Oxford. After losing the Hull chaplaincy through a change of ministry in 1714, he devoted himself to writing. His best book is a _Life of Cardinal Wolsey_ (London, 1724), containing documents which are still valuable for reference; of his other writings the _Prefatory Epistle containing some remarks to be published on Homer's Iliad_ (London, 1714), was occasioned by Pope's proposed translation of the _Iliad_, and his _Theologia speculativa_ (London, 1718), earned him the degree of D.D. at Oxford. In his own day he had a considerable reputation as an author and man of learning.

FIDDLE (O. Eng. _fithele_, _fidel_, &c., Fr. _viele_, viole, _violon_; M. H. Ger. _videle_, mod. Ger. _Fiedel_), a popular term for the violin, derived from the names of certain of its ancestors. The word fiddle antedates the appearance of the violin by several centuries, and in England did not always represent an instrument of the same type. The word has first been traced in 1205 in Layamon's _Brut_ (7002), "of harpe, of salteriun, of fithele and of coriun." In Chaucer's time the fiddle was evidently a well-known instrument:

"For him was lever have at his beddes hed
A twenty bokes, clothed in black or red.
Of Aristotle and his Philosophie,
Than robes riche or fidel or sautrie."

(_Prologue_, v. 298.)

The origin of the fiddle is of the greatest interest; it will be found inseparable from that of the violin both as regards the instruments and the etymology of the words; the remote common ancestor is the _ketharah_ of the Assyrians, the parent of the Greek cithara. The Romans are responsible for the word fiddle, having bestowed upon a kind of cithara--probably then in its first transition--the name of _fidiculae_ (more rarely _fidicula_), a diminutive form of _fides_. In Alain de Lille's _De planctu naturae_ against the word _lira_ stands as equivalent _vioel_, with the definition "Lira est quoddam genue citharae vel fitola alioquin de reot. Hoc instrumentum est multum vulgare." This is a marginal note in writing of the 13th century.[1]

Some of the transitions from _fidicula_ to fiddle are made evident in the accompanying table:

Latin fidiculae
Medieval Latin vitula, fitola.
French viele, vielle, viole.
Provencal viula.
Spanish viguela, vihuela, vigolo.
Old High German fidula.
Middle High German videle.
German fiedel, violine.
Italian viola, violino.
Dutch vedel.
Danish fiddel.
Anglo-Saxon fithele.
Old English fithele, fythal, fithel, fythylle, fidel fidylle,
(south) vithele.

For the descent of the guitar-fiddle, the first bowed ancestor of the violin, through many transitions from the cithara, see CITHARA, GUITAR and GUITAR-FIDDLE.

In the minnesinger and troubadour fiddles, of which evidences abound during the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, are to be observed the structural characteristics of the violin and its ancestors in the course of evolution. The principal of these are first of all the shallow sound-chest, composed of belly and back, almost flat, connected by ribs (also present in the cithara), with incurvations more or less pronounced, an arched bridge, a finger-board and strings (varying in number), vibrated by means of a bow. The central rose sound-holes of stringed instruments whose strings are plucked by fingers, or plectrum have given place to smaller lateral sound-holes placed on each side of the strings. It is in Germany,[2] where contemporary drawings of fiddles of the 13th and 14th centuries furnish an authoritative clue, and in France, that the development may best be followed. The German minnesinger fiddle with sloping shoulders was the prototype of the viols, whereas the guitar-fiddle produced the violin through the intermediary of the Italian bowed _Lyra_.

Minnesinger Fiddle. Germany, 13th Century, from the Manesse MSS.]

The fiddle of the Carolingian epoch,--such, for instance, as that mentioned by Otfrid of Weissenburg[3] in his _Harmony of the Gospels_ (c. 868),

"Sih thar ouch al ruarit
This organo fuarit
Lira joh fidula," &c.,--

was in all probability still an instrument whose strings were plucked by the fingers, a cithara in transition. (K. S.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See C.E.H. de Coussemaker, Memoire sur Hucbald (Paris, 1841).

[2] See the Manesse MSS. reproduced in part by F.H. von der Hagen,
_Heldenbilder_ (Leipzig and Berlin, 1855) and _Bildersaal_. The
fiddles are reproduced in J. Ruhlmann's _Geschichte der
Bogeninstrumente_ (Brunswick, 1882), plates.

[3] See Schiller's _Thesaurus antiq. Teut._ vol. i. p. 379.

FIDENAE, an ancient town of Latium, situated about 5 m. N. of Rome on the Via Salaria, which ran between it and the Tiber. It was for some while the frontier of the Roman territory and was often in the hands of Veii. It appears to have fallen under the Roman sway after the capture of this town, and is spoken of by classical authors as a place almost deserted in their time. It seems, however, to have had some importance as a post station. The site of the _arx_ of the ancient town is probably to be sought on the hill on which lies the Villa Spada, though no traces of early buildings or defences are to be seen: pre-Roman tombs are to be found in the cliffs to the north. The later village lay at the foot of the hill on the eastern edge of the high-road, and its _curia_, with a dedicatory inscription to M. Aurelius by the _Senatus Fidenatium_, was excavated in 1889. Remains of other buildings may also be seen.

See T. Ashby in _Papers of the British School at Rome_, iii. 17.

FIDUCIARY (Lat. _fiduciaries_, one in whom trust, fiducia, is reposed), of or belonging to a position of trust, especially of one who stands in a particular relationship of confidence to another. Such relationships are, in law, those of parent and child, guardian and ward, trustee and _cestui que trust_, legal adviser and client, spiritual adviser, doctor and patient, &c. In many of these the law has attached special obligations in the case of gifts made to the "fiduciary," on whom is laid the onus of proving that no "undue influence" has been exercised. (See CONTRACT; CHILDREN, LAW RELATING TO; INFANT; TRUST.)

FIEF, a feudal estate in land, land held from a superior (see FEUDALISM). The word is the French form, which is represented in Medieval Latin as _feudum_ or _feodum_, and in English as "fee" or "feu" (see FEE). The A. Fr. _feoffer_, to invest with a fief or fee, has given the English law terms "feoffee" and "feoffment" (q.v.).

FIELD, CYRUS WEST (1819-1892), American capitalist, projector of the first Atlantic cable, was born at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on the 30th of November 1819. He was a brother of David Dudley Field. At fifteen he became a clerk in the store of A.T. Stewart & Co., of New York, and stayed there three years; then worked for two years with his brother, Matthew Dickinson Field, in a paper-mill at Lee, Massachusetts; and in 1840 went into the paper business for himself at Westfield, Massachusetts, but almost immediately became a partner in E. Root & Co., wholesale paper dealers in New York City, who failed in the following year. Field soon afterwards formed with a brother-in-law the firm of Cyrus W. Field & Co., and in 1853 had accumulated $250,000, paid off the debts of the Root company and retired from active business, leaving his name and $100,000 with the concern. In the same year he travelled with Frederick E. Church, the artist, through South America. In 1854 he became interested, through his brother Matthew, a civil engineer, in the project of Frederick Newton Gisborne (1824-1892) for a telegraph across Newfoundland; and he was attracted by the idea of a trans-Atlantic telegraphic cable, as to which he consulted S.F.B. Morse and Matthew F. Maury, head of the National Observatory at Washington. With Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor (1806-1882), Marshall Owen Roberts (1814-1880) and Chandler White, he formed the New York, Newfoundland & London Telegraph Company, which procured a more favourable charter than Gisborne's, and had a capital of $1,500,000. Having secured all the practicable landing rights on the American side of the ocean, he and John W. Brett, who was now his principal colleague, approached Sir Charles Bright (q.v.) in London, and in December 1556 the Atlantic Telegraph Company was organized by them in Great Britain, a government grant being secured of L14,000 annually for government messages, to be reduced to L10,000 annually when the cable should pay a 6% yearly dividend; similar grants were made by the United States government. Unsuccessful attempts to lay the cable were made in August 1857 and in June 1858, but the complete cable was laid between the 7th of July and the 5th of August 1858; for a time messages were transmitted, but in October the cable became useless, owing to the failure of its electrical insulation. Field, however, did not abandon the enterprise, and finally in July 1866, after a futile attempt in the previous year, a cable was laid and brought successfully into use. From the Congress of the United States he received a gold medal and a vote of thanks, and he received many other honours both at home and abroad. In 1877 he bought a controlling interest in the New York Elevated Railroad Company, controlling the Third and Ninth Avenue lines, of which he was president in 1877-1880. He worked with Jay Gould for the completion of the Wabash railway, and at the time of his greatest stock activity bought _The New York Evening Express_ and _The Mail_ and combined them as _The Mail and Express_, which he controlled for six years. In 1879 Field suffered financially by Samuel J. Tilden's heavy sales (during Field's absence in Europe) of "Elevated" stock, which forced the price down from 200 to 164; but Field lost much more in the great "Manhattan squeeze" of the 24th of June 1887, when Jay Gould and Russell Sage, who had been supposed to be his backers in an attempt to bring the Elevated stock to 200, forsook him, and the price fell from 156-1/2 to 114 in half an hour. Field died in New York on the 12th of July 1892.

See the biography by his daughter, Isabella (Field) Judson, _Cyrus W.
Field, His Life and Work_ (New York, 1896); H.M. Field, _History of
the Atlantic Telegraph_ (New York, 1866); and Charles Bright, _The
Story of the Atlantic Cable_ (New York, 1903).

FIELD, DAVID DUDLEY (1805-1894), American lawyer and law reformer, was born in Haddam, Connecticut, on the 13th of February 1805. He was the oldest of the four sons of the Rev. David Dudley Field (1781-1867), a well-known American clergyman and author. He graduated at Williams College in 1825, and settled in New York City, where he studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1828, and rapidly won a high position in his profession. Becoming convinced that the common law in America, and particularly in New York state, needed radical changes in respect to the unification and simplification of its procedure, he visited Europe in 1836 and thoroughly investigated the courts, procedure and codes of England, France and other countries, and then applied himself to the task of bringing about in the United States a codification of the common law procedure. For more than forty years every moment that he could spare from his extensive practice was devoted to this end. He entered upon his great work by a systematic publication of pamphlets and articles in journals and magazines in behalf of his reform, but for some years he met with a discouraging lack of interest. He appeared personally before successive legislative committees, and in 1846 published a pamphlet, "The Reorganization of the Judiciary," which had its influence in persuading the New York State Constitutional Convention of that year to report in favour of a codification of the laws. Finally in 1847 he was appointed as the head of a state commission to revise the practice and procedure. The first part of the commission's work, consisting of a code of civil procedure, was reported and enacted in 1848, and by the 1st of January 1850 the complete code of civil and criminal procedure was completed, and was subsequently enacted by the legislature. The basis of the new system, which was almost entirely Field's work, was the abolition of the existing distinction in forms of procedure between suits in law and equity requiring separate actions, and their unification and simplification in a single action. Eventually the civil code with some changes was adopted in twenty-four states, and the criminal code in eighteen, and the whole formed a basis of the reform in procedure in England and several of her colonies. In 1857 Field became chairman of a state commission for the reduction into a written and systematic code of the whole body of law of the state, excepting those portions already reported upon by the Commissioners of Practice and Pleadings. In this work he personally prepared almost the whole of the political and civil codes. The codification, which was completed in February 1865, was adopted only in small part by the state, but it has served as a model after which most of the law codes of the United States have been constructed. In 1866 he proposed to the British National Association for the Promotion of Social Science a revision and codification of the laws of all nations. For an international commission of lawyers he prepared _Draft Outlines of an International Code_ (1872), the submission of which resulted in the organization of the international Association for the Reform and Codification of the Laws of Nations, of which he became president. In politics Field was originally an anti-slavery Democrat, and he supported Van Buren in the Free Soil campaign of 1848. He gave his support to the Republican party in 1856 and to the Lincoln administration throughout the Civil War. After 1876, however, he returned to the Democratic party, and from January to March 1877 served out in Congress the unexpired term of Smith Ely, elected mayor of New York City. During his brief Congressional career he delivered six speeches, all of which attracted attention, introduced a bill in regard to the presidential succession, and appeared before the Electoral Commission in Tilden's interest. He died in New York City on the 13th of April 1894.

Part of his numerous pamphlets and addresses were collected in his
_Speeches, Arguments and Miscellaneous Papers_ (3 vols., 1884-1890).
See also the _Life of David Dudley Field_ (New York, 1898), by Rev.
Henry Martyn Field.

FIELD, EUGENE (1850-1895), American poet, was born at St Louis, Missouri, on the 2nd of September 1850. He spent his boyhood in Vermont and Massachusetts; studied for short periods at Williams and Knox Colleges and the University of Missouri, but without taking a degree; and worked as a journalist on various papers, finally becoming connected with the Chicago _News_. _A Little Book of Profitable Tales_ appeared in Chicago in 1889 and in New York the next year; but Field's place in later American literature chiefly depends upon his poems of Christmas-time and childhood (of which "Little Boy Blue" and "A Dutch Lullaby" are most widely known), because of their union of obvious sentiment with fluent lyrical form. His principal collections of poems are: _A Little Book of Western Verse_ (1889); _A Second Book of Verse_ (1892); _With Trumpet and Drum_ (1892); and _Love Songs of Childhood_ (1894). Field died at Chicago on the 4th of November 1895.

His works were collected in ten volumes (1896), at New York. His prose
_Love-affairs of a Bibliomaniac_ (1896) contains a Memoir by his
brother Roswell Martin Field (b. 1851). See also Slason Thompson,
_Eugene Field: a study in heredity and contradictions_ (2 vols., New
York, 1901).

FIELD, FREDERICK (1801-1885), English divine and biblical scholar, was born in London and educated at Christ's hospital and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship in 1824. He took orders in 1828, and began a close study of patristic theology. Eventually he published an emended and annotated text of Chrysostom's _Homiliae in Matthaeum_ (Cambridge, 1839), and some years later he contributed to Pusey's _Bibliotheca Patrum_ (Oxford, 1838-1870), a similarly treated text of Chrysostom's homilies on Paul's epistles. The scholarship displayed in both of these critical editions is of a very high order. In 1839 he had accepted the living of Great Saxham, in Suffolk, and in 1842 he was presented by his college to the rectory of Reepham in Norfolk. He resigned in 1863, and settled at Norwich, in order to devote his whole time to study. Twelve years later he completed the _Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt_ (Oxford, 1867-1875), now well known as _Field's Hexapla_, a text reconstructed from the extant fragments of Origen's work of that name, together with materials drawn from the _Syro-hexaplar_ version and the _Septuagint_ of Holmes and Parsons (Oxford, 1798-1827). Field was appointed a member of the Old Testament revision company in 1870.

FIELD, HENRY MARTYN (1822-1907), American author and clergyman, brother of Cyrus Field, was born at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on the 3rd of April 1822; he graduated at Williams College in 1838, and was pastor of a Presbyterian church in St Louis, Missouri, from 1842 to 1847, and of a Congregational church in West Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1850 to 1854. The interval between his two pastorates he spent in Europe. From 1854 to 1898 he was editor and for many years he was also sole proprietor of _The Evangelist_, a New York periodical devoted to the interests of the Presbyterian church. He spent the last years of his life in retirement at Stockbridge, Mass., where he died on the 26th of January 1907. He was the author of a series of books of travel, which achieved unusual popularity. His two volumes descriptive of a trip round the world in 1875-1876, entitled _From the Lakes of Killarney to the Golden Horn_ (1876) and _From Egypt to Japan_ (1877), are almost classic in their way, and have passed through more than twenty editions. Among his other publications are _The Irish Confederates and the Rebellion of 1798_ (1850), _The History of the Atlantic Telegraph_ (1866), _Faith or Agnosticism? the Field-Ingersoll Discussion_ (1888), _Old Spain and New Spain_ (1888), and _Life of David Dudley Field_ (1898).

He is not to be confused with another HENRY MARTYN FIELD, the gynaecologist, who was born in 1837 at Brighton, Mass., and graduated at Harvard in 1859 and at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City in 1862; he was professor of Materia Medica and therapeutics at Dartmouth from 1871 to 1887 and of therapeutics from 1887 to 1893.

FIELD, JOHN (1782-1837), English musical composer and pianist, was born at Dublin in 1782. He came of a musical family, his father being a violinist, and his grandfather the organist in one of the churches of Dublin. From the latter the boy received his first musical education. When a few years later the family settled in London, Field became the favourite pupil of the celebrated Clementi, whom he accompanied to Paris, and later, in 1802, on his great concert tour through France, Germany and Russia. Under the auspices of his master Field appeared in public in most of the great European capitals, especially in St Petersburg, and in that city he remained when Clementi returned to England. During his stay with the great pianist Field had to suffer many privations owing to Clementi's all but unexampled parsimony; but when the latter left Russia his splendid connexion amongst the highest circles of the capital became Field's inheritance. His marriage with a French lady of the name of Charpentier was anything but happy, and had soon to be dissolved. Field made frequent concert tours to the chief cities of Russia, and in 1820 settled permanently in Moscow. In 1831 he came to England for a short time, and for the next four years led a migratory life in France, Germany and Italy, exciting the admiration of amateurs wherever he appeared in public. In Naples he fell seriously ill, and lay several months in the hospital, till a Russian family discovered him and brought him back to Moscow. There he lingered for several years till his death on the 11th of January 1837. Field's training and the cast of his genius were not of a kind to enable him to excel in the larger forms of instrumental music, and his seven concerti for the pianoforte are now forgotten. Neither do his quartets for strings and pianoforte hold their own by the side of those of the great masters. But his "nocturnes," a form of music highly developed if not actually created by him, remain all but unrivalled for their tenderness and dreaminess of conception, combined with a continuous flow of beautiful melody. They were indeed Chopin's models. Field's execution on the pianoforte was nearly allied to the nature of his compositions, beauty and poetical charm of touch being one of the chief characteristics of his style. Moscheles, who heard Field in 1831, speaks of his "enchanting legato, his tenderness and elegance and his beautiful touch."

FIELD, MARSHALL (1835-1906), American merchant, was born at Conway, Massachusetts, on the 18th of August 1835. Reared on a farm, he obtained a common school and academy education, and at the age of seventeen became a clerk in a dry goods store at Pittsfield, Mass. In 1856 he removed to Chicago, where he became a clerk in the large mercantile establishment of Cooley, Wadsworth & Company. In 1860 the firm was reorganized as Cooley, Farwell & Company, and he was admitted to a junior partnership. In 1865, with Potter Palmer (1826-1902) and Levi Z. Leiter (1834-1904), he organized the firm of Field, Palmer & Leiter, which subsequently became Field, Leiter & Company, and in 1881 on the retirement of Leiter became Marshall Field & Company. Under Field's management the annual business of the firm increased from $12,000,000 in 1871 to more than $40,000,000 in 1895, when it ranked as one of the two or three largest mercantile establishments in the world. He died in New York city on the 16th of January 1906. He had married, for the second time, in the previous year. Field's public benefactions were numerous; notable among them being his gift of land valued at $300,000 and of $100,000 in cash to the University of Chicago, an endowment fund of $1,000,000 to support the Field Columbian Museum at Chicago, and a bequest of $8,000,000 to this museum.

FIELD, NATHAN (1587-1633), English dramatist and actor, was baptized on the 17th of October 1587. His father, the rector of Cripplegate, was a Puritan divine, author of a _Godly Exhortation_ directed against play-acting, and his brother Theophilus became bishop of Hereford. Nat. Field early became one of the children of Queen Elizabeth's chapel, and in that capacity he played leading parts in Ben Jonson's _Cynthia's Revels_ (in 1600), in the _Poetaster_ (in 1601), and in _Epicoene_ (in 1608), and the title role in Chapman's _Bussy d'Ambois_ (in 1606). Ben Jonson was his dramatic model, and may have helped his career. The two plays of which he was author were probably both written before 1611. They are boisterous, but well-constructed comedies of contemporary London life; the earlier one, _A Woman is a Weathercock_ (printed 1612), dealing with the inconstancy of woman, while the second, _Amends for Ladies_ (printed 1618), was written with the intention, as the title indicates, of retracting the charge. From Henslowe's papers it appears that Field collaborated with Robert Daborne and with Philip Massinger, one letter from all three authors being a joint appeal for money to free them from prison. In 1614 Field received L10 for playing before the king in _Bartholomew Fair_, a play in which Jonson records his reputation as an actor in the words "which is your Burbadge now?... Your best actor, your Field?" He joined the King's Players some time before 1619, and his name comes seventeenth on the list prefixed to the Shakespeare folio of 1623 of the "principal actors in all these plays." He retired from the stage before 1625, and died on the 20th of February 1633. Field was part author with Massinger in the _Fatal Dowry_ (printed 1632), and he prefixed commendatory verses to Fletcher's _Faithful Shepherdess_.

His two plays were reprinted in J.P. Collier's _Five Old Plays_
(1833), in Hazlitt's edition of _Dodsley's Old Plays_, and in _Nero
and other Plays_ (Mermaid series, 1888), with an introduction by Mr
A.W. Verity.

FIELD, STEPHEN JOHNSON (1816-1899), American jurist, was born at Haddam, Connecticut, on the 4th of November 1816. He was the brother of David Dudley Field, Cyrus W. Field and Henry M. Field. At the age of thirteen he accompanied his sister Emilia and her husband the Rev. Josiah Brewer (the parents of the distinguished judge of the Supreme Court, David J. Brewer) to Smyrna, Turkey, for the purpose of studying Oriental languages, but after three years he returned to the United States, and in 1837 graduated at Williams College at the head of his class. He then studied law in his elder brother's office, and in 1841 he was admitted to the New York bar. He was associated in practice there with his brother until 1848, and early in 1849 removed to California, settling soon afterward at Marysville, of which place, in 1850, he became the first alcalde or mayor. In the same year he was chosen a member of the first state legislature of California, in which he drew up and secured the enactment of two bodies of law known as the Civil and Criminal Practices Acts, based on the similar codes prepared by his brother David Dudley for New York. In the former act he embodied a provision regulating and giving authority to the peculiar customs, usages, and regulations voluntarily adopted by the miners in various districts of the state for the adjudication of disputed mining claims. This, as Judge Field truly says, "was the foundation of the jurisprudence respecting mines in the country," having greatly influenced legislation upon this subject in other states and in the Congress of the United States. He was elected, in 1857, a justice of the California Supreme Court, of which he became chief justice in 1859, on the resignation of Judge David S. Terry to fight the duel with the United States senator David C. Broderick which ended fatally for the latter. Field held this position until 1863, when he was appointed by President Lincoln a justice of the United States Supreme Court. In this capacity he was conspicuous for fearless independence of thought and action in his opinion in the test oath case, and in his dissenting opinions in the legal tender, conscription and "slaughter house" cases, which displayed unusual legal learning, and gave powerful expression to his strict constructionist theory of the implied powers of the Federal constitution. Originally a Democrat, and always a believer in states' rights, his strong Union sentiments caused him nevertheless to accept Lincoln's doctrine of coercion, and that, together with his anti-slavery sympathies, led him to act with the Republican party during the period of the Civil War. He was a member of the commission which revised the California code in 1873 and of the Electoral Commission in 1877, voting in favour of Tilden. In 1880 he received sixty-five votes on the first ballot for the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention at Cincinnati. In August 1889, as a result of a ruling in the course of the Sharon-Hill litigation, a notorious conspiracy case, he was assaulted in a California railway station by Judge David S. Terry, who in turn was shot and killed by a United States deputy marshall appointed to defend Justice Field against the carrying out of Terry's often-expressed threats. He retired from the Supreme Court on the 1st of December 1897 after a service of thirty-four years and six months, the longest in the court's history, and died in Washington on the 9th of April 1899.

His _Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California_, originally
privately printed in 1878, was republished in 1893 with George C.
Gorham's _Story of the Attempted Assassination of Justice Field_.

FIELD, WILLIAM VENTRIS FIELD, BARON (1813-1907), English judge, second son of Thomas Flint Field, of Fielden, Bedfordshire, was born on the 21st of August 1813. He was educated at King's school, Bruton, Somersetshire, and entered the legal profession as a solicitor. In 1843, however, he ceased to practise as such, and entered at the Inner Temple, being called to the bar in 1850, after having practised for some time as a special pleader. He joined the Western circuit, but soon exchanged it for the Midland. He obtained a large business as a junior, and became a queen's counsel and bencher of his inn in 1864. As a Q.C. he had a very extensive common law practice, and had for some time been the leader of the Midland circuit, when in February 1875, on the retirement of Mr Justice Keating, he was raised to the bench as a justice of the queen's bench. Mr Justice Field was an excellent puisne judge of the type that attracts but little public attention. He was a first-rate lawyer, had a good knowledge of commercial matters, great shrewdness and a quick intellect, while he was also painstaking and scrupulously fair. When the rules of the Supreme Court 1883 came into force in the autumn of that year, Mr Justice Field was so well recognized an authority upon all questions of practice that the lord chancellor selected him to sit continuously at Judges' Chambers, in order that a consistent practice under the new rules might as far as possible be established. This he did for nearly a year, and his name will always, to a large extent, be associated with the settling of the details of the new procedure, which finally did away with the former elaborate system of "special pleading." In 1890 he retired from the bench and was raised to the peerage as Baron Field of Bakeham, becoming at the same time a member of the privy council. In the House of Lords he at first took part, not infrequently, in the hearing of appeals, and notably delivered a carefully-reasoned judgment in the case of the _Bank of England_ v. _Vagliano Brothers_ (5th of March 1891), in which, with Lord Bramwell, he differed from the majority of his brother peers. Before long, however, deafness and advancing years rendered his attendances less frequent. Lord Field died at Bognor on the 23rd of January 1907, and as he left no issue the peerage became extinct.

FIELD (a word common to many West German languages, cf. Ger. _Feld_, Dutch _veld_, possibly cognate with O.E. _folde_, the earth, and ultimately with root of the Gr. [Greek: platos], broad), open country as opposed to woodland or to the town, and particularly land for cultivation divided up into separate portions by hedges, banks, stone walls, &c.; also used in combination with words denoting the crop grown on such a portion of land, such as corn-field, turnip-field, &c. The word is similarly applied to a region with particular reference to its products, as oil-field, gold-field, &c. For the "open" or "common field" system of agriculture in village communities see COMMONS. Generally with a reference to their "wild" as opposed to their "domestic" nature "field" is applied to many animals, such as the "field-mouse." There are many applications of the word; thus from the use of the term for the place where a battle is fought, and widely of the whole theatre of war, come such phrases as to "take the field" for the opening of a campaign, "in the field" of troops that are engaged in the operations of a campaign. It is frequently used figuratively in this sense, of the subject matter of a controversy, and also appears in military usage, in field-fortification, field-day and the like. A "field-officer" is one who ranks above a captain and below a general (see OFFICERS); a field marshal is the highest rank of general officer in the British and many European armies (see MARSHAL). "Field" is used in many games, partly with the idea of an enclosed space, partly with the idea of the ground of military operations, for the ground in which such games as cricket, football, baseball and the like are played. Hence it is applied to those players in cricket and baseball who are not "in," and "to field" is to perform the functions of such a player--to stop or catch the ball played by the "in" side. "The field" is used in hunting, &c., for those taking part in the sport, and in racing for all the horses entered for a race, and, in such expressions as "to back the field," is confined to all the horses with the exception of the "favourite." A common application of the word is to a surface, more or less wide, as of the sky or sea, or of such physical phenomena as ice or snow, and particularly of the ground, of a special "tincture," on which armorial bearings are displayed (see HERALDRY); it is thus used also of the "ground" of a flag, thus the white ensign of the British navy has a red St George's cross on a white "field." In scientific usage the word is also used of the sphere of observation or of operations, and has come to be almost equivalent to a department of knowledge. In physics, a particular application is that to the area which is influenced by some agent, as in the magnetic or electric field. The field of observation or view is the area within which objects can be seen through any optical instrument at any one position. A "field-glass" is the name given to a binocular glass used in the field (see BINOCULAR INSTRUMENT); the older form of field-glass was a small achromatic telescope with joints. This terms is also applied, in an astronomical telescope or compound microscope, to that one of the two lenses of the "eye-piece" which is next to the object-glass; the other is called the "eye-glass."

FIELDFARE (O.E. _fealo-for_ = fallow-farer), a large species of thrush, the _Turdus pilaris_ of Linnaeus--well known as a regular and common autumnal visitor throughout the British Islands and a great part of Europe, besides western Asia, and even reaching northern Africa. It is the _Veldjakker_ and _Veld-lyster_ of the Dutch, the _Wachholderdrossel_ and _Kramtsvogel_ of Germans, the _Litorne_ of the French, and the _Cesena_ of Italians. This bird is of all thrushes the most gregarious in. habit, not only migrating in large bands and keeping in flocks during the winter, but even commonly breeding in society--200 nests or more having been seen within a very small space. The birch-forests of Norway, Sweden and Russia are its chief resorts in summer, but it is known also to breed sparingly in some districts of Germany. Though its nest has been many times reported to have been found in Scotland, there is perhaps no record of such an incident that is not open to doubt; and unquestionably the missel-thrush (_T. viscivorus_) has been often mistaken for the fieldfare by indifferent observers. The head, neck, upper part of the back and the rump are grey; the wings, wing-coverts and middle of the back are rich hazel-brown; the throat is ochraceous; and the breast reddish-brown--both being streaked or spotted with black, while the belly and lower wing-coverts are white, and the legs and toes very dark-brown. The nest and eggs resemble those of the blackbird (_T. merula_), but the former is usually built high up in a tree. The fieldfare's call-note is harsh and loud, sounding like _t'chatt'chat_: its song is low, twittering and poor. It usually arrives in Britain about the middle or end of October, but sometimes earlier, and often remains till the middle of May before departing for its northern breeding-places. In hard weather it throngs to the berry-bearing bushes which then afford it sustenance, but in open winters the flocks spread over the fields in search of animal food--worms, slugs and the larvae of insects. In very severe seasons it will altogether leave the country, and then return for a shorter or longer time as spring approaches. From _William of Palerne_ (translated from the French c. 1350) to the writers of our own day the fieldfare has occasionally been noticed by British poets with varying propriety. Thus Chaucer's association Of its name with frost is as happy as true, while Scott was more than unlucky in his well-known reference to its "lowly nest" in the Highlands.

Structurally very like the fieldfare, but differing greatly in many other respects, is the bird known in North America as the "robin"--its ruddy breast and familiar habits reminding the early British settlers in the New World of the household favourite of their former homes. This bird, the _Turdus migratorius_ of Linnaeus, has a wide geographical range, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Greenland to Guatemala, and, except at its extreme limits, is almost everywhere a very abundant species. As its scientific name imports, it is essentially a migrant, and gathers in flocks to pass the winter in the south, though a few remain in New England throughout the year. Yet its social instincts point rather in the direction of man than of its own kind, and it is not known to breed in companies, while it affects the homesteads, villages and even the parks and gardens of the large cities, where its fine song, its attractive plumage, and its great services as a destroyer of noxious insects, combine to make it justly popular. (A. N.)

FIELDING, ANTHONY VANDYKE COPLEY (1787-1855), commonly called Copley Fielding, English landscape painter (son of a portrait painter), became at an early age a pupil of John Varley. He took to water-colour painting, and to this he confined himself almost exclusively. In 1810 he became an associate exhibitor in the Water-colour Society, in 1813 a full member, and in 1831 president of that body. He also engaged largely in teaching the art, and made ample profits. His death took place at Worthing in March 1855. Copley Fielding was a painter of much elegance, taste and accomplishment, and has always been highly popular with purchasers, without reaching very high in originality of purpose or of style: he painted in vast number all sorts of views (occasionally in oil-colour) including marine subjects in large proportion. Specimens of his work are to be seen in the water-colour gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum, of dates ranging from 1829 to 1850. Among the engraved specimens of his art is the _Annual of British Landscape Scenery_, published in 1839. (W. M. R.)

FIELDING, HENRY (1707-1754), English novelist and playwright, was born at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, Somerset, on the 22nd of April 1707. His father was Lieutenant Edmund Fielding, third son of John Fielding, who was canon of Salisbury and fifth son of the earl of Desmond. The earl of Desmond belonged to the younger branch of the Denbigh family, who, until lately, were supposed to be connected with the Habsburgs. To this claim, now discredited by the researches of Mr J. Horace Round (_Studies in Peerage_, 1901, pp. 216-249), is to be attributed the famous passage in Gibbon's _Autobiography_ which predicts for _Tom Jones_--"that exquisite picture of human manners"--a diuturnity exceeding that of the house of Austria. Henry Fielding's mother was Sarah Gould, daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a judge of the king's bench. It is probable that the marriage was not approved by her father, since, though she remained at Sharpham Park for some time after that event, his will provided that her husband should have nothing to do with a legacy of L3000 left her in 1710. About this date the Fieldings moved to East Stour in Dorset. Two girls, Catherine and Ursula, had apparently been born at Sharpham Park; and three more, together with a son, Edmund, followed at East Stour. Sarah, the third of the daughters, born November 1710, and afterwards the author of _David Simple_ and other works, survived her brother.

Fielding's education up to his mother's death, which took place in April 1718 at East Stour, seems to have been entrusted to a neighbouring clergyman, Mr Oliver of Motcombe, in whom tradition traces the uncouth lineaments of "Parson Trulliber" in _Joseph Andrews_. But he must have contrived, nevertheless, to prepare his pupil for Eton, to which place Fielding went about this date, probably as an oppidan. Little is known of his schooldays. There is no record of his name in the college lists; but, if we may believe his first biographer, Arthur Murphy, by no means an unimpeachable authority, he left "uncommonly versed in the Greek authors, and an early master of the Latin classics,"--a statement which should perhaps be qualified by his own words to Sir Robert Walpole in 1730:--

"Tuscan and French are in my head;
Latin I write, and Greek--I read."