very large. In 1827 a public examination of the children was held, and the king rewarded the most deserving. Shortly after, 1,500 catechisms, 800 hymn-books, and 2,200 books for spelling and reading were published; and in the following year the printing of a translation of the gospel of Luke into Malagasy was begun. About this time King Radama died, and soon afterwards more than twenty-five members of his family were assassinated. A long period of mourning followed, and all missionary work was stopped.
Jones and his friends now busied themselves in translating the scriptures. The queen sent orders that the Bible was not to be taught at the schools; but the missionaries, by patience and a conciliatory manner, secured a revocation of this order, and the work proceeded. In June 1830 Jones and his family visited Great Britain, there to further the interests of the mission. But when Jones returned to Madagascar, he found the work of the mission impeded by the authorities, and persecution was rampant in all directions. In June 1840 Captain Campbell and himself visited Ambatomanga to seek redress from the queen and her advisers. They were allowed a house each, but soon understood they were prisoners. The following day an inquisition was held, and many of the converts were put to death. Jones met with an accident, but managed to return to the Mauritius. He died there on 1 May 1841. His widow and children returned to London.
[Eglwysi Annybynol Cymru, iv. 105; Gwynionydd's Enwogion Ceredigion; Jones's Enwogion Sir Aberteifi; Jones's Geiriadur Bywgraffyddol.]
JONES, EBENEZER (1820–1860), poet, was born in Canonbury Square, Islington, 20 Jan. 1820. His father was of Welsh extraction; his mother, Hannah Sumner, was of an Essex family. They were in comfortable circumstances, and professed the strictest form of Calvinism. Ebenezer's education at a dreary middle-class school was as unsuitable to a young poet as can be conceived; nor were his external circumstances more congenial to his aspirations when, after the family had become impoverished by the death of his father, he found himself, at seventeen, a clerk in a city firm connected with the tea-trade, working twelve hours a day, and obliged to witness grossly dishonest practices, a position from which he freed himself as soon as possible. He was, however, free to choose his own intellectual guides, and under the influence of Shelley and Carlyle rapidly developed the strenuous, but violently exaggerated, style of thinking and writing which long characterised his productions. He was for a short time a follower of Robert Owen; a chartist, in the strict sense of the term, he never was, and the assertion probably arises from a confusion between him and his namesake, Ernest Charles Jones [q. v.] While spending every leisure moment in study and composition, and saving every shilling to enable him to publish the poems which he fondly hoped were to emancipate him from the circumstances of his daily life, his existence was blighted by a domestic sorrow, delicately alluded to in Mr. Theodore Watts's mention of ‘one who did not requite his passion, but who passionately loved another man—a man to whom Ebenezer was very dear—and who soon afterwards died.’ The circumstances led Ebenezer in his despair ‘to throw,’ as his brother Sumner expresses it, ‘the medley of his poems into the caldron of his ill-fated book.’ ‘Studies of Sensation and Event’ were published in 1843, and met with the fate to be expected for anything so crude, so eccentric, and on a cursory inspection so ridiculous as a considerable portion of the book. The faults were patent to all, and blinded even the few who might otherwise have recognised the author's fire, passion, and picturesqueness. ‘When Jones writes a bad line,’ remarks Lord de Tabley, ‘he writes a bad one with a vengeance. It is hardly possible to say how excruciatingly bad he is now and then. And yet at his best, in organic rightness, beauty, and, above all, spontaneity, we must go among the very highest poetic names to match him.’ If any man of acknowledged literary standing had thus written in 1843, Ebenezer Jones would probably have been preserved to English literature; but he felt utterly crushed as a poet, not so much by the indifference of the public as by the slighting, or even unkindly, reception of his book by the eminent authors to whom he had offered copies. Procter and Horne, however, were exceptions. His distress was further augmented by an unhappy marriage contracted in the following year with Caroline Atherstone, niece of Edwin Atherstone [q. v.], author of the ‘Fall of Nineveh,’ which continued to harass him long after his separation from his wife. He destroyed his unpublished poems, and, while earning his living as an accountant, assisted his fast friend Mr. W. J. Linton in his political journalism, worked for the radical publishers Cleave and Hetherington, and published a tract on land reform, which passed unnoticed. Eventually he fell into a consumption, and as his health failed the old poetic
