Mainz. His grave is still marked by a copy made in 1783 of the original tombstone of 1318; and in 1842 a monument by Schwanthaler was erected in the cloisters. Frauenlob’s poems make a great display of learning; he delights in far-fetched metaphors, and his versification abounds in tricks of form and rhyme.
Frauenlob’s poetry was edited by L. Ettmüller in 1843; a selection will be found in K. Bartsch, Deutsche Liederdichter des 12. bis 14. Jahrhunderts (3rd ed., 1893). An English translation of Frauenlob’s Cantica canticorum, by A. E. Kroeger, with notes, appeared in 1877 at St Louis, U.S.A. See A. Boerkel, Frauenlob (2nd ed., 1881).
FRAUNCE, ABRAHAM (c. 1558–1633), English poet, a native
of Shropshire, was born between 1558 and 1560. His name was
registered as a pupil of Shrewsbury School in January 1571/2,
and he joined St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1576, becoming a
fellow in 1580/81. His Latin comedy of Victoria, dedicated to
Sidney, was probably written at Cambridge, where he remained
until he had taken his M.A. degree in 1583. He was called to the
bar at Gray’s Inn in 1588, and then apparently practised as a
barrister in the court of the Welsh marches. After the death of
his patron Sir Philip Sidney, Fraunce was protected by Sidney’s
sister Mary, countess of Pembroke. His last work was published
in 1592, and we have no further knowledge of him until 1633,
when he is said to have written an Epithalamium in honour
of the marriage of Lady Magdalen Egerton, 7th daughter of the
earl of Bridgwater, whose service he may possibly have entered.
His works are: The Lamentations of Amintas for the death of Phyllis (1587), a version in English hexameters of his friend’s, Thomas Watson’s, Latin Amyntas; The Lawiers Logike, exemplifying the praecepts of Logike by the practise of the common Lawe (1588); Arcadian Rhetorike (1588); Abrahami Fransi Insignium, Armorum ... explicatio (1588); The Countess of Pembroke’s Yvychurch (1591/2), containing a translation of Tasso’s Aminta, a reprint of his earlier version of Watson, “The Lamentation of Corydon for the love of Alexis” (Virgil, eclogue ii.), a short translation from Heliodorus, and, in the third part (1592) “Aminta’s Dale,” a collection of “conceited” tales supposed to be related by the nymphs of Ivychurch; The Countess of Pembroke’s Emanuell (1591); The Third Part of the Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch, entituled Aminta’s Dale (1592). His Arcadian Rhetorike owes much to earlier critical treatises, but has a special interest from its references to Spenser, and Fraunce quotes from the Faerie Queene a year before the publication of the first books. In “Colin Clout’s come home again,” Spenser speaks of Fraunce as Corydon, on account of his translations of Virgil’s second eclogue. His poems are written in classical metres, and he was regarded by his contemporaries as the best exponent of Gabriel Harvey’s theory. Even Thomas Nashe had a good word for “sweete Master France.”
The Countess of Pembroke’s Emanuell, hexameters on the nativity and passion of Christ, with versions of some psalms, were reprinted by Dr A. B. Grosart in the third volume of his Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies Library (1872). Joseph Hunter in his Chorus Vatum stated that five of Fraunce’s songs were included in Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, but it is probable that these should be attributed not to Fraunce, but to Thomas Campion. See a life prefixed to the transcription of a MS. Latin comedy by Fraunce, Victoria, by Professor G. C. Moore Smith, published in Bang’s Materialien zur Kunde des alteren englischen Dramas, vol. xiv., 1906.
FRAUNHOFER, JOSEPH VON (1787–1826), German optician
and physicist, was born at Straubing in Bavaria on the 6th of
March 1787, the son of a glazier who died in 1798. He was
apprenticed in 1799 to Weichselberger, a glass-polisher and looking-glass
maker. On the 21st of July 1801 he nearly lost his life
by the fall of the house in which he lodged, and the elector of
Bavaria, Maximilian Joseph, who was present at his extrication
from the ruins, gave him 18 ducats. With a portion of this sum
he obtained release from the last six months of his apprenticeship,
and with the rest he purchased a glass-polishing machine. He
now employed himself in making optical glasses, and in engraving
on metal, devoting his spare time to the perusal of works on
mathematics and optics. In 1806 he obtained the place of
optician in the mathematical institute which in 1804 had been
founded at Munich by Joseph von Utzschneider, G. Reichenbach
and J. Liebherr; and in 1807 arrangements were made by
Utzschneider for his instruction by Pierre Louis Guinand, a
skilled optician, in the fabrication of flint and crown glass, in
which he soon became an adept (see R. Wolf, Gesch. der Wissensch. in Deutschl.
bd. xvi. p. 586). With Reichenbach and Utzschneider,
Fraunhofer established in 1809 an optical institute
at Benedictbeuern, near Munich, of which he in 1818 became
sole manager. The institute was in 1819 removed to Munich,
and on Fraunhofer’s death came under the direction of G. Merz.
Amongst the earliest mechanical contrivances of Fraunhofer was a machine for polishing mathematically uniform spherical surfaces. He was the inventor of the stage-micrometer, and of a form of heliometer; and in 1816 he succeeded in constructing for the microscope achromatic glasses of long focus, consisting of a single lens, the constituent glasses of which were in juxtaposition, but not cemented together. The great reflecting telescope at Dorpat was manufactured by him, and so great was the skill he attained in the making of lenses for achromatic telescopes that, in a letter to Sir David Brewster, he expressed his willingness to furnish an achromatic glass of 18 in. diameter. Fraunhofer is especially known for the researches, published in the Denkschriften der Münchener Akademie for 1814–1815, by which he laid the foundation of solar and stellar chemistry. The dark lines of the spectrum of sunlight, earliest noted by Dr W. H. Wollaston (Phil. Trans., 1802, p. 378), were independently discovered, and, by means of the telescope of a theodolite, between which and a distant slit admitting the light a prism was interposed, were for the first time carefully observed by Fraunhofer, and have on that account been designated “Fraunhofer’s lines.” He constructed a map of as many as 576 of these lines, the principal of which he denoted by the letters of the alphabet from A to G; and by ascertaining their refractive indices he determined that their relative positions are constant, whether in spectra produced by the direct rays of the sun, or by the reflected light of the moon and planets. The spectra of the stars he obtained by using, outside the object-glass of his telescope, a large prism, through which the light passed to be brought to a focus in front of the eye-piece. He showed that in the spectra of the fixed stars many of the dark lines were different from those of the solar spectrum, whilst other well-known solar lines were wanting; and he concluded that it was not by any action of the terrestrial atmosphere upon the light passing through it that the lines were produced. He further expressed the belief that the dark lines D of the solar spectrum coincide with the bright lines of the sodium flame. He was also the inventor of the diffraction grating.
In 1823 he was appointed conservator of the physical cabinet at Munich, and in the following year he received from the king of Bavaria the civil order of merit. He died at Munich on the 7th of June 1826, and was buried near Reichenbach, whose decease had taken place eight years previously. On his tomb is the inscription “Approximavit sidera.”
See J. von Utzschneider, Kurzer Umriss der Lebensgeschichte des Herrn Dr J. von Fraunhofer (Munich, 1826); and G. Merz, Das Leben und Wirken Fraunhofers (Landshut, 1865).
FRAUSTADT (Polish, Wszowa), a town of Germany, in the
Prussian province of Posen, in a flat sandy country dotted with
windmills, 50 m. S.S.W. of Posen, on the railway Lissa-Sagan.
Pop. (including a garrison) 7500. It has three Evangelical
and two Roman Catholic churches, a classical school and a
teachers’ seminary; the manufactures include woollen and
cotton goods, hats, morocco leather and gloves, and there is a
considerable trade in corn, cattle and wool. Fraustadt was
founded by Silesians in 1348, and afterwards belonged to the
principality of Glogau. Near the town the Swedes under Charles
XII. defeated the Saxons on the 13th of February 1706.
FRAYSSINOUS, DENIS ANTOINE LUC, Comte de (1765–1841), French prelate and statesman, distinguished as an orator and as a controversial writer, was born of humble parentage at Curières, in the department of Aveyron, on the 9th of May 1765. He owes his reputation mainly to the lectures on dogmatic theology, known as the “conferences” of Saint Sulpice, delivered in the church of Saint Sulpice, Paris, from 1803 to
