Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/870

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834 the Hampton Court of Seville. At the revolution of 1868 she removed to private apartments in the Calle de Burgos; and though with advancing years her pen became less busy, she continued with unimpaired faculties to take a keen and kindly, if somewhat needlessly anxious, interest in the important events that were revolutionizing the institutions of her country. Among the numerous schemes of beneficence that busied her, especially in later life, was the promotion of a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. She was engaged in correcting for the press the last sheets of a compilation of stories, nursery-rhymes, &c., for the use of children (Cuentos, Oraciones, Adivinas, y Rffranes popidares e infantiles) when she died in her eightieth year, on April 7, 1877. Her works, though numbering about fifty in all, are none of them very large, and she cannot be called a volu minous writer. They all belong to one comparatively brief period of her long and chequered life ; and, if classified at all, can be so only by the application of some comparatively artificial criterion. Some deal principally with the features of Andalusian life as it exists among the labourers and peasants ; some delineate the higher phases of society ; and in others " the interest lies, not in the characters of the persons and the description of scenery and manners, but in the selection of incidents which are intended to point a moral or adorn a proverb." While all are marked by deep and tender sympathy with nature, by subtle and unerring delineation of character, by a quaint humour that is never far removed from pathos, and by an exquisite power of expression, it may safely be said that, as " George Sand " is most delightful when she lovingly depicts the quiet scenes of Berri, the home of her youth, so Fernan Caballero excels in her descriptions of the peasant life of Andalucia. Foreign critics complain not unnaturally of the bitter ultramontane prejudice and the exaggerated fispanolismo which are so needlessly paraded in almost all her works ; yet even this peculiarity, as imparting to these productions of undoubted genius a unique couleur locale, may fairly enough be held to enhance rather than diminish their value in the eyes of the dispassionate student of the infinitely varied phases of human thought and feeling. Besides those already noted, the following stories may be men tioned : Cuentos y Pocstas popularcs Andaluccs, Un Verano en Bornos, Cosct cumplida solo en la otrd vida, La Estrclla de Vandalia, Pobre Dolores, &c. Her principal works may be found in the Colcccion de Autcres Esjmnolcs, published by Brockhaus, Leipsic. Most of them have been translated into French. La Gaviota and Elia have been translated into English, the former by the Honourable Augusta Bethell (1867) ; La Familia de Alvarcda, under the title of The Castle and the Cottage in Spain, by Lady Wallace, appeared in 1861, and a second translation, by the Vis count Pollington, was published in 1872. An appreciative and able estimate oi Fernan Caballero, with a full analysis of several of her best known works, appeared in the Edinburgh Review, July 1861. FABER, FREDERICK WILLIAM (1814-1863), a famous hymn writer and theologian, the son of Thomas Henry Faber, secretary to Dr Barrington, bishop of Durham, was born on the 28th of June 1814, at Calverley, Yorkshire, of which place his grandfather, Thomas Faber, was vicar. He attended tho grammar school of Bishop Auckland for a short time, but a large portion of his boyhood was spent in Westmoreland ; and the lake scenery left an indelible impression on his imagination. He afterwards went to Harrow, where he remained until he became a student of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1833. About the beginning of 1835 he began to reside at University College, in consequence of obtaining a scholarship there; and in 1836 he gained the Newdigate prize for a poem on the "The Knights of St John," which elicited special praise from Keble. Among his college friends were Dean Stanley and Sir Roundell Palmer. In January 1837 he was elected fellow of University College. Meanwhile he had given up the Calvinistic views of his youth, and had become an enthusiastic admirer and follower of John Henry Newman. In 1841 a travelling tutorship took him to the Continent; and, on his return, a book appeared called Sights and Thoughts in Foreign Churches and among Foreign Peoples, which he dedicated to his dear friend the poet Wordsworth. The journal of his travels is beauti fully written, and reveals an intense love of nature, and an almost southern susceptibility to her charms. There is none of the interjectional piety which so often disfigures books of travel written by religious men. He accepted the rectory of Elton in Huntingdonshire, but soon after pro ceeded again to the Continent, with the intention of study ing the methods followed by the Roman Catholic Church. Returning to Elton, he devoted himself, with great earnest ness, to the work of his parish, although the two years he spent there were marked by severe mental struggles, which issued in his conversion to the Roman faith in November 1845. On leaving Elton his parishioners sobbed out " God bless you, Mr Faber, wherever you go " (Life, p. 238). He founded a religious community at Birmingham, called Wilfridians, after the name Wilfred, which Faber assumed. The community was ultimately merged in the oratory of St Philip Neri, of which Father Newman was the head; and in 1849 a branch of the oratory subsequently considered independent was estab lished in London, first in King William Street, and after wards at Brompton over which Father Faber presided till his death on the 26th of September 18G3. In spite of his weak health, an almost incredible amount of work was crowded into those years. He published a number of theo logical works, and edited the Oratorian Lives of the Saints. He was an eloquent preacher, a brilliant talker, and had an unsurpassed power of gaining the love of all with whom he came in contact. It is mainly as a hymn writer, how ever, that he will be known in the future. There is a sweet saintliness, and at the same time a grandeur of thought and a simplicity of poetical expression in Faber s hymns, which we fail to find in much of the Protestant hymnoiogy. Among the finest are "The Greatness of God," " The Will of God," " The Eternal Father," The God of my Childhood," " Jesus is God," " The Pilgrims of the Night," "The Land beyond the Sea," "Sweet Saviour ! bless us ere we go," " I was wandering and weary," and "The Shadow of the Rock." The hymns are largely used in Protestant collections. The only complete edition of Faber s Hymns is the one published by Richardson and Son in 1861, of which a second issue appeared in, 1871. In addition to hymns, pamphlets, letters, and translations, he published the following works : Sights and Thoughts in Foreign Churches and among Foreign Pco2)lcs, All for Jesus, The Precious Blood, Bethlehem, The Blessed Sacrament, The Creator and the Creature, Growth in Holiness, Sinritual Conferences, The Foot of the Cross, Ethel s Book, Sir Lancelot, Poems, An Essay on Canonization and Beatification, Characteristics of the Lives cf the Saints, and Catholic Home Missions. Notes on Doctrinal and Spiritual Subjects were edited by Father Bowden, and issued after Faber s death. See his Life and Letters, by Father Bowden, and A Brief Sketch of the Early Life of the late F. W. Faber, D.D., by his only surviving brother. FABER, GEORGE STANLEY (1773-1854), an English clergyman, son of Thomas Faber, vicar of Calverley, York shire, was born October 25, 1773. He entered University College, Oxford, in 1789, graduated B.A. in 1792, and in 1794 was elected fellow and tutor of Lincoln College. He received his M.A. degree in 1796, and his B.D. degree in 1803. In 1801 he was appointed to the office of proctor, and the same year he delivered the Bampton lecture, which he afterwards published under the title of Horce Mosaicce. He was at this time one of the foremost preachers of the university, and his earnestness and eloquence secured for

his discourses an interested and eager audience. In his