receipt of a pension of £20 solicited for her by Edmund Chaloner, a patron of Farquhar. She was then described as a maidservant and possessed of sentiments “fitted to her humble situation.”
The plots of Farquhar’s comedies are ingenious in conception and skilfully conducted. He has no pretensions to the brilliance of Congreve, but his amusing dialogue arises naturally out of the situation, and its wit is never strained. Sergeant Kite in the Recruiting Officer, Scrub, Archer and Boniface in The Beaux’ Stratagem are distinct, original characters which had a great success on the boards, and the unexpected incidents and adventures in which they are mixed up are represented in an irresistibly comic manner by a man who thoroughly understood the resources of the stage. The spontaneity and verve with which his adventurous heroes are drawn have suggested that in his favourite type he was describing himself. His own disposition seems to have been most lovable, and he was apparently a much gayer person than the reader might be led to suppose from the “Portrait of Himself” quoted by Leigh Hunt. The code of morals followed by these characters is open to criticism, but they are human and genial in their roguery, and compare far from unfavourably with the cynical creations of contemporary drama. The advance which he made on his immediate predecessors in dramatic construction and in general moral tone is more striking when it is remembered that he died before he was thirty.
Farquhar’s dramatic works were published in 1728, 1742 and 1772, and by Thomas Wilkes with a biography in 1775. They were included in the Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar (1849), with biographical and critical notices, by Leigh Hunt. See also The Dramatic Works of George Farquhar, with Life and Notes, by A. C. Ewald (2 vols., 1892); The Best Plays of George Farquhar (Mermaid series, 1906), with biographical and critical introductions, by William Archer; The Beaux’ Stratagem, edited (1898) by H. Macaulay Fitzgibbon for “The Temple Dramatists”; and D. Schmid, “George Farquhar, sein Leben und seine Original-Dramen” (1904) in Wiener Beiträge zur engl. Philol.
FARR, WILLIAM (1807–1883), English statistician, was born at Kenley, in Shropshire, on the 30th of November 1807. When nineteen he became the pupil of a doctor in Shrewsbury, also acting as dresser in the infirmary there. He then went to Paris to study medicine, but after two years returned to London, where, in 1832, he qualified as L.S.A. Next year he began to practise, but without very brilliant results, for five years later he definitely abandoned the exercise of his profession on accepting the post of compiler of abstracts in the registrar-general’s office. The commissioners for the 1841 census consulted him on several points, but did not in every case follow his advice. For the next two decennial censuses he acted as assistant-commissioner; for that of 1871 he was a commissioner, and he wrote the greater part of the reports of all. He had an ambition to become registrar-general; and when that post became vacant in 1879, he was so disappointed at the selection of Sir Brydges Henniker instead of himself, that he refused to stay any longer in the registrar’s office. He died of paralysis of the brain a year or two later, on the 14th of April 1883. A great part of Farr’s literary production is to be found in the papers which, from 1839 to 1880, he wrote for each annual report of the registrar-general on the cause of the year’s deaths in England. He was also the author of many papers on general statistics and on life-tables for insurance, some read before the Royal Statistical Society, of which he was president in 1871 and 1872, some contributed to the Lancet and other periodicals. A selection from his statistical writings was published in 1885 under the editorship of Mr Noël Humphreys.
FARRAGUT, DAVID GLASGOW (1801–1870), first admiral of the United States navy, was the son of Major George Farragut, a Catalan by descent, a Minorquin by birth, who had emigrated to America in 1776, and, after the peace, had married a lady of Scottish family and settled near Knoxville, in Tennessee; there Farragut was born on the 5th of July 1801. At the early age of nine he entered the navy, under the protection of his name-father, Captain David Porter, with whom he served in the “Essex” during her cruise in the Atlantic in 1812, and afterwards in the Pacific, until her capture by the “Phoebe,” in Valparaiso Bay, on the 28th of March 1814. He afterwards served on board the “Washington” (74) carrying the broad pennant of Commodore Chauncey in the Mediterranean, and pursued his professional and other studies under the instruction of the chaplain, Charles Folsom, with whom he contracted a lifelong friendship. Folsom was appointed from the “Washington” as U.S. consul at Tunis, and obtained leave for his pupil to pay him a lengthened visit, during which he studied not only mathematics, but also French and Italian, and acquired a familiar knowledge of Arabic and Turkish. He is said to have had a great natural aptitude for languages and in after years to have spoken several fluently.
After more than four years in the Mediterranean, Farragut returned to the States in November 1820. He then passed his examination, and in 1822 was appointed for service in what was called the “mosquito” fleet, against the pirates, who then infested the Caribbean Sea. The service was one of great exposure and privation; for two years and a half, Farragut wrote, he never owned a bed, but lay down to rest wherever he found the most comfortable berth. By the end of that time the joint action of the British and American navies had driven the pirates off the sea, and when they took to marauding on shore the Spanish governors did the rest. In 1825 he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant, whilst serving in the navy yard at Norfolk, where, with some breaks in sea-going ships, he continued till 1832; he then served for a commission on the coast of Brazil, and was again appointed to the yard at Norfolk.
It is needless to trace the ordinary routine of his service step by step. The officers of the U.S. navy have one great advantage which British officers are without; when on shore they are not necessarily parted from the service, but are employed in their several ranks in the different dockyards, escaping thus not only the private grievance and pecuniary difficulties of a very narrow half-pay, but also, what from a public point of view is much more important, the loss of professional aptitude, and of that skill which comes from unceasing practice. On the 8th of September 1841 Farragut was promoted to the rank of commander, and on the 14th of September 1855 to that of captain. At this time he was in charge of the navy yard, Mare Island, California, from which post he was recalled in 1858, and appointed to the “Brooklyn” frigate, the command of which he held for the next two years. When the war of secession broke out in 1861, he was “waiting orders” at Norfolk. By birth and marriage he was a Southerner, and the citizens of Norfolk counted on his throwing in his lot with them; but professional pride, and affection for the flag under which he had served for more than fifty years, held him true to his allegiance; he passionately rejected the proposals of his fellow-townsmen, and as it was more than hinted to him that his longer stay in Norfolk might be dangerous, he hastily quitted that place, and offered his services to the government at Washington. These were at once accepted; he was requested to sit on the Naval Retiring Board—a board then specially constituted for clearing the navy of unfit or disloyal officers—and a few months later was appointed to the command of the “Western Gulf Blockading Squadron,” with the rank of flag-officer, and ordered to proceed forthwith, in the “Hartford,” to the Gulf of Mexico, to collect such vessels as could be spared from the blockade, to proceed up the Mississippi, to reduce the defences which guarded the approaches to New Orleans, and to take and hold the city. All this Farragut executed to the letter, with a skill and caution that won for him the love of his followers, and with a dash and boldness that gained him the admiration of the public and the popular name of “Old Salamander.” The passage of the Mississippi was forced on the 24th of April 1862, and New Orleans surrendered on the 26th; this was immediately followed by the operations against Vicksburg, from which, however, Farragut was compelled to withdraw, having relearnt the old lesson that against heavy earthworks, crowning hills of sufficient height, a purely naval attack is unavailing; it was not till the following summer, and after a long siege, that Vicksburg surrendered to a land force under General Grant. During this time the service on the Mississippi continued both difficult and irksome; nor until the river was cleared could
