Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/356

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342 F L O F L O appeared his Second Fruits, to be gathered of Twelve Trees, of divers but delightsome Tastes to the Tongues of Italian and English men; to which was annexed the Garden of Recreation, yielding six thousand Italian Proverbs (4to). His Italian and English dictionary, entitled A World of Words, was published in folio in 1598. After the accession of James I, Florio was named French and Italian tutor to Prince Henry, and afterwards became a gentleman of the privy chamber and clerk of the closet to the queen, whom ho also instructed in languages. His last work, and that by which he has been most known, was his translation of Montaigne s Essays, published in folio in 1603, and dedicated to the queen. Special interest attaches to this translation from the circumstance that of the several copies of the first edition in the British Museum library one bears the autograph of Shakespeare and another that of Ben Jonson. It has been suggested that Florio is satirized by Shakespeare under the character of Holofernes, the pompous pedant of Love s Labour s Lost. He is characterized by Wood, in Athence Oxonienses, as a very useful man in his profession, zealous for his religion, and deeply attached to his adopted country. When the plague raged in London in 1625, Florio sought escape from it by retiring to Fulham; but ho was there seized and carried off by it in the autumn of the same year. FLORIS, FRANS, or more correctly Frans de Vriendt called Floris (1520-1570) was one of a large family trained to the study of art in Flanders. Son of a stone-cutter, Cornelis de Vriendt, who died at Antwerp in 1538, he began life as a student of sculpture, but afterwards gave up carving for painting. At the age of twenty he went to Lie"ge, and took lessons from Lambert Lombard, a pupil of Mabuse, whose travels in Italy had transformed a style truly Flemish into that of a mongrel Leonardesque. Following in the footsteps of Mabuse, Lambert Lombard had visited Florence, and caught the manner of Salviati and other pupils of Michelangelo and Del Sarto. It was about the time when Schoreel, Coxcie, and Heemskerk, after migrating to Rome and imitating the masterpieces of Raphael and Buonarroti, came homo to execute Dutch- Italian works beneath the level of those produced in the peninsula itself by Leonardo da Pistoia, Nanaccio, and Rinaldo of Mantua. Fired by these examples, Floris in his turn wandered across the Alps, and appropriated without assimilation the various mannerisms of the schools of Lombardy, Florence, and Rome. Bold, quick, and resolute, he saw how easy it would be to earn a livelihood and acquire a name by drawing for engravers and painting on a large scale after the fashion of Vasari. He came home, joined the guild of Antwerp in 1540, and quickly opened a school from which 120 disciples are stated to have issued. Floris painted strings of large pictures for the country houses of Spanish nobles and the villas of Antwerp patricians. He is known to have illustrated the fable of Hercules in ten compositions, and the liberal arts in seven, for does Jongeling, a merchant of Antwerp, and adorned the duke of Arschot s palace of Beaumont with fourteen colossal panels. Comparatively few of his works have descended to us, partly because they came to be contemned for their inherent defects, and so were suffered to perish, partly because they were soon judged by a different standard from that of the Flemings of the 16th century. The earliest extant canvas by Floris is the Mars and Venus ensnared by Vulcan in the Berlin Museum (1547), the latest a Last Judgment (1566) in the Brussels gallery. Neither these nor any of the intermediate works at Alost, Antwerp, Copenhagen, Dresden, Florence, Lean, Madrid, St Petersburg, and Vienna display any charm of originality in composition or in form. Whatever boldness and force they may possess, or whatever principles they may embody, they are mere appropriations of Italian models spoiled in translation or adaptation. Their technical execution reveals a rapid hand, but none of the lustre of bright colouring ; and it is not too much to say that whilst Floris failed to acquire absolute mastery over design as improved by the Italians, he was equally devoid of the gifts which distinguish the earlier colourists of Flanders. Vasari justly praises the plates engraved by contemporaries from the drawings of Floris, but he adds that these plates would have been better had the skill of the draughtsman been more ably seconded by that of the engraver. A more temperate judgment will probably be that Floris owed much of his repute to the cleverness with which his works were transferred to copper by Jerome Cock and Theodore de Galle. Whilst Floris was engaged on a Crucifixion of 27 feet, and a Resurrection of equal size, for the Grand Prior of Spain, he was seized with illness, and died on the 1st of October 1570 at Antwerp. His burial took place three days later in the cemetery of the Re"collets. FLORUS, a Roman historian, author of the Epitome de Gestis Romanorum, has by some writers been identified with the Lucius Julius Floras who lived in the time of Augustus, and to whom Horace addressed two of his epistles ; but this position is hardly tenable, as Florus in the introduction to his history writes of the emperor Trajan as then reigning. By others he is, on account of certain similarities in style, identified with the Publius Annius Florua who lived in the time of Hadrian, and wrote a dialogue on the question whether Virgil was an orator or a poet, and the Pervigilium Veneris, an imitation of Horace s Secular Hymn. In some MSS. of the Epitome, the name of the writer is mentioned as L. Annoeus Florus, in others as L. Julius Florus, in others L. Anna?us Seneca, and in the Bamberg codex Julius Florus. If the historian be the same person as the poet and rhetorician, Julius Annreus must be regarded as a corruption of Publius Annius. The Epitome of Florus is compiled chiefly from Livy, and gives a condensed view of Roman history from the foundation of the city to the closing of the temple of Janus by Augustus. The details of geography and chron ology are not always to be implicitly trusted ; and the style is declamatory, and rather that of a panegyrist than of a critical historian. The best editions of the work are that of Titze, Prague, 1819, and that of 0. Jahn, Leipsic, 1852. The latter has been revised by C. Halm, Leipsic, 1854. FLOTSAM, JETSAM, and LIGAN, in English law, are goods lost at sea, as distinguished from goods which come to land, which are technically designated wreck. " Jetsam is when goods are cast into the sea, and there sink and remain under water ; flotsam is where they continue swimming on the surface of the waves ; ligan is where they arc sunk in the sea, but tied to a cork or buoy in order to be found again." Flotsam, jetsam, and ligan belong to the king in the absence only of the true owner. Wreck, on the other hand (i.e., goods cast on shore), was by the common law adjudged to the king in any case, because it was said by the loss of the ship all property was gone out of the original owner. This singular distinction which treated goods washed ashore as lost, and goods on and in the sea as not lost, is no doubt to be explained by the primitive practice of plundering ship wrecks. See the article WRECK, for the law relating to that subject. FLOUNDER (Pleuroncctes flcsus) is one of the most common Flat-fishes along the coasts of northern Europe, from the British Channel to Iceland. It is more partial to fresh water than any other Flat-fish, ascending rivers far beyond the reach of the tide, as, for instance, the Rhine as far as Cologne. It very rarely exceeds the length of twelve inches, and a weight of H pounds.