OCHSENFURT, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Bavaria, situated on the left bank of the Main, here crossed by a stone bridge, 13 m. S. from Würzburg by the railway to Munich, and at the junction of a line to Röttingen. Pop. (1905) 3333. It contains an Evangelical and five Roman Catholic churches, among them that of St Michael, a line Gothic edifice. There is a considerable trade in wine and agricultural produce, other industries being brewing and malting.
OCHTERLONY, SIR DAVID, Bart. (1758–1825), British general, was born at Boston, Mass., U.S.A., on the 12th of February 1758, and went to India as a cadet in 1777. He served under Lord Lake in the battles of Koil, Aligarh and Delhi, and was appointed resident at Delhi in 1803. In 1804, having been promoted to the rank of major-general, he defended the city with a very inadequate force against an attack by Holkar. On the outbreak of the Nepal War (1814–15) he was given the command of one of four converging columns, and his services were rewarded with a baronetcy in 1815. Subsequently he was promoted to the command of the main force in its advance on Katmandu, and outmanoeuvring the Gurkhas by a flank march at the Kourea Ghat Pass, brought the war to a successful conclusion and obtained the signature of the treaty of Segauli (1816), which dictated the subsequent relations of the British with Nepal. For this success Ochterlony was created G.C.B., the first time that honour had been conferred on an officer of the Indian army. In the Pindari War (1817–18) he was in command of the Rajputana column, made a separate agreement with Amir Khan, detaching him from the Pindaris, and then, interposing his own force between the two main divisions of the enemy, brought the war to an end without an engagement. He was appointed resident in Rajputana in 1818, with which the residency at Delhi was subsequently combined. When Durjan Sal revolted in 1825 against Balwant Singh, the infant Raja of Bharatpur, Ochterlony acting on his own responsibility supported the raja by proclamation and ordered out a force to support him. Lord Amherst, however, repudiated these proceedings. Ochterlony, who was bitterly chagrined by this rebuff, resigned his office, and retired to Delhi. The feeling that the confidence which his length of service merited had not been given him by the governor-general is said to have accelerated his death, which occurred at Meerut on the 15th of July 1825. The Ochterlony column at Calcutta commemorates his name.
See Major Ross of Bladensburg, The Marquess of Hastings (“Rulers of India” series) (1893).
OCHTMAN, LEONARD (1854– ), American painter, was born in Zonnemaire, Zeeland, Holland, on the 21st of October 1854. His family removed to Albany, New York, in 1866. In 1882 he began to exhibit landscapes at the National Academy, and he became a National Academician in 1904. His most characteristic pictures, which recall the work of Inness, are scenes on Long Island Sound and on the Mianus river.
OCKLEY, SIMON (1678–1720), English orientalist, was born at Exeter in 1678. He was educated at Queen’s College, Cambridge, became fellow of Jesus College and vicar of Swavesey, and in 1711 was made professor of Arabic at Cambridge. He had a large family, and the pecuniary embarrassments of his later days form the subject of a chapter in D’Israeli’s Calamities of Authors. The preface to the second volume of his History of the Saracens is dated from Cambridge Castle, where he was imprisoned for debt. Ockley maintained that a knowledge of Oriental literature was essential to the proper study of theology, and in the preface to his first book, the Introductio ad linguas orientales (1706), he urges the importance of the study. In 1707 he published a translation of Leon Modena’s History of the Present Jews throughout the World; and in 1708 The Improvement of Human Reason, exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan. His chief work is The History of the Saracens (1708–1718), of which a third volume was published posthumously in 1757. Unfortunately Ockley took as his main authority a MS. in the Boclleian of the pseudo-Wakidi’s Futuh al-Sham, which is rather historical romance than history. He also translated from the Arabic the Second Book of Esdras and the Sentences of Ali. Ockley died at Swavesey on the 9th of August 1720.
O’CLERY, MICHAEL (1575–1643), Irish chronicler, grandson of a chief of the sept of O’Clery in Donegal, was born at Kilbarrow on Donegal Bay, and was baptized Tadhg (or “poet”), but took the name of Michael when he became a Franciscan friar. He was a cousin of Lughaidh O’Clery (fl. 1595–1630), who, with his son Cacrigcriche O’Clery (d. 1664)—one of Michael’s co-workers—is also famous as an Irish historian. He had already gained a reputation as an antiquary and student of Irish history and literature, when he entered the Irish College of St Anthony at Louvain. In 1620, through the initiative of Hugh Boy Macanward (1580–1635), warden of the college, and himself a famous Irish historian and poet, and one of an old family of hereditary bards in Tyrconnell, he began to collect Irish manuscripts and to transcribe everything he could find of historical importance; he was assisted by other Irish scholars, and the results were his Reim Rioghroidhe (Royal List) in 1630, Leabhar Gabhala (Book of Invasions) in 1631, and his most famous work, called by John Colgan (d. 1659), the Irish biographer, the “Annals of the Four Masters” (1636). Subsequently he produced his Martyrologium of Irish saints, based on various ancient manuscripts, an Irish glossary and other works. He lived in poverty, and died at Louvain.
O’CONNELL, DANIEL (1775–1847), Irish statesman, known as “the Liberator,” was born on the 6th of August 1775 near Cahirciveen, a small town in Kerry. He was sprung from a race the heads of which had been Celtic chiefs, had lost their lands in the wars of Ireland, and had felt the full weight of the harsh penal code which long held the Catholic Irish down. His ancestors in the 18th century had sent recruits to the famous brigade of Irish exiles in the service of France,[1] and those who remained at home either lived as tenants on the possessions of which they had once been lords, or gradually made money by smuggling, a very general calling in that wild region. Thus he inherited from his earliest years, with certain traditions of birth and high station, a strong dislike of British rule in Ireland and of the dominant owners of the soil, a firm attachment to his proscribed faith, and habitual skill in evading the law; and these influences may be traced in his subsequent career. While a boy he was adopted by his uncle, Maurice O’Connell of Derrynane, and sent to a school at Queenstown, one of the first which the state in those days allowed to be opened for Catholic teaching; and a few years afterwards he became a student, as was customary with Irish youths of his class, in the English colleges of St Omer and Douai in France. These years in France had a decided effect in forming his judgment on political questions of high moment. He was an eye-witness on more than one occasion of the folly and excesses of the French Revolution; and these scenes not only increased his love for his church, but strongly impressed him with that dread of anarchy, of popular movements ending in bloodshed, and of communistic and socialistic views which characterized him in after life. To these experiences, too, we may partly ascribe the reverence for law, for the rights of property, and for the monarchical form of government which he appears to have sincerely felt; and, demagogue as he became in a certain sense, they gave his mind a deep Conservative tinge. In 1798 he was called to the bar of Ireland, and rose before long to the very highest eminence among contemporary lawyers and advocates. This position was in the main due to a dexterity in conducting causes, and especially in examining witnesses, in which he had no rival at the Irish bar. He was, however, a thorough lawyer besides, inferior in scientific learning to two or three of his most conspicuous rivals, but well read in every department of law, and especially a master in all that relates to criminal and constitutional jurisprudence. As an advocate, too, he stood in the very highest rank; in mere oratory he was surpassed by Plunket, and in rhetorical gifts by Bushe, the only
- ↑ See the account of O’Connell’s uncle, Count Daniel O’Connell (1745–1833), to whose property he fell heir, in Mrs O’Connell’s Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade (1892), and O’Callaghan’s Irish Brigade in the Service of France (1870).
