of the 'orang-outang' and the boa, and his B. D. J. ABEL, JOHN (1577-1674), was a distinguished architect of timber houses. He built the old town halls of Hereford and Leominster; the former destroyed in 1861, the latter in 1858. Both are illustrated by John Clayton in his' Ancient Timber Edifices of England,' fol. 1846. The Hereford building was finished in the time of James I; that of Leominster in 1633. The following account of Abel is given by Price (Historical Account of Leominster, 1795): The most noted architect in this country of his time; he built the market houses of Hereford, Brecknock, and Kington, and did the timher work of the new church at Abbey Dore. The said John Abel being in Hereford city at the time when the Scots besieged it, in the year 1645, made a sort of mills to grind corn, which were of great use to the besieged; for which contrivance and service King Charles the 1st did afterwards honor him with the title of one of his majesty's carpenters. This architect, after he was ninety years of age, made his own monument, which is in Sarnesfield churchyard, and engraved his own effigy, kneeling with his two wives, and the emblems of his occupation, the rule, compass, and square, and he made the following epitaph: This craggy stone or covering is for an architect's bed, That lofty buildings raised high; yet now lyes down his head: His line and rule, so death concludes, are locked up in store, Build they who list, or they who wist, for he can build no more. His house of clay could hold no longer: ABEL, KARL FRIEDRICH (17251787), a celebrated player on the viol-digamba, was the son of a musician, Christian Ferdinand Abel. He was born at Cöthen in 1725, received his first musical education from his father, and subsequently entered the Thomas Schule at Leipzig, where he was probably a pupil of J. S. Bach. In 1748 he entered the court band at Dresden, remaining there until 1758. He left Dresden with three thalers in his pocket and six symphonies in his bag,' and his talent as a performer maintained him during his wanderings until he reached England in 1759. Here he found a patron in the Duke of York, and on the establishment of the queen's private band was appointed one of her chamber musicians, with a salary of 2007. a year. At his first concert Abel was announced to play his own compositions on the viol-di-gamba, the harpsichord, and an instrument of his own invention, which he called the Pentachord; but after 1765 he only performed on the viol-di-gamba. On the arrival in 1762 of John Christian Bach the two musicians joined forces, and in 1765 started their celebrated concerts. Abel was in Paris in 1772 and also in 1783, in which year he returned to Germany to visit his brother Leopold August, who was also a musician of eminence. He returned to London in 1785, and occasionally played at concerts until his death, which took place, hastened by his habits of intemperance, June 20, 1787. Abel's compositions chiefly consist of instrumental music. As a player he was remarkable for the beauty of his execution on an instrument which was even in his days almost obsolete, but to which he was nevertheless devoted. It is said that he declared the viol-di-gamba to be the king of instruments;' and when challenged to play by Richards, the leader of Drury Lane orchestra, exclaimed, 'What, challenge Abel! No, no, there is but one God and one Abel!' He was a great admirer of the fine arts, and completely covered the walls of his rooms with drawings by Gainsborough, which the painter used to give him in exchange for his music. In person he was big and portly. He was twice painted by Gainsborough; a portrait of him by Robineau is at Hampton Court Palace, and another by an anonymous artist in the Music School at Oxford. [Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, i. 4; Mendel's Musikalisches ConversatiousLexicon, i. 5; Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, i. 13; P. Spitta's J. S. Bach, i. 616, 985; Bur[Price's Historical Account of Leominster, ney's History of Music, iv. 678; Busby's History He died in 1674, aged 97. VOL. I. D possessed some secret by which he preserved his pure alto voice unimpaired until old age; his extreme carefulness in matters of diet is recorded by the same author. [Grove's Dict. of Music, i. 5; Cheque Book of the Chapel Royal (Camden Society's Publications, 1872), pp. 17, 129; Evelyn's Diary (ed. 1850), ii. 725; Congreve's Literary Relics, p. 322; Tom ABELL, JOHN (1660?-1716?), a celebrated lutenist and alto singer, was sworn a gentleman of his majesty's chapel extraor-ii. 163; Hawkins's History of Music (ed. 1853), dinary' 1 May 1679. He was sent to Italy by Charles II to cultivate his voice, and returned to England in 1681-2, when John Evelyn recorded of him in his Diary (27 Jan.): "I never heard a more excellent voice; one would have sworn it had been a woman's, it was so high, and so well and skilfully managed.' Between 1679 and 1688 he received from the crown large sums of 'bounty money; but at the Revolution he was discharged from the Chapel Royal as a papist, and went to Holland and Germany, where he supported himself by his talents as a singer and player on the lute. In the course of his travels he went so far as Warsaw, where it is said that he refused a request of the King of Poland to sing before the court. The day after this refusal he was ordered to appear at the palace. On his arrival, Abell sat on a chair in the middle of a large hall. No sooner was he seated than the chair was drawn up into the air until it faced a gallery in which were the king and his courtiers. At the same time a number of bears were turned into the hall, and Abell was given the alternative of singing or being lowered to the wild beasts. The terrified singer promptly chose the former course, and afterwards said that he had never sung better in his life. In 1696 overtures were made to him through Daniel Purcell to return to England and sing on the stage at a salary of 500l. a year; but in 1698 he was still abroad (at Aix-la-Chapelle), though he offered to return and sing at the opera in English, Italian, Spanish, or Latin, for 4007. per annum, provided his debts were paid. In 1698 and 1699 he occupied the post of intendant at Cassel; but he seems soon after to have returned to England, for Congreve heard him sing in 1700, and in 1701 he published two collections of songs, prefixed to one of which is a poem in which he states that After a twelve years' industry and toil, Abell, at last, has reach'd his native soil. He published a song on Queen Anne's coronation, and a few manuscript compositions by him are to be found in contemporary collections. The date of his death is unknown; but in his later years he is said to have been at Cambridge, and in 1716 he gave a concert at Stationers' Hall. Mattheson says that Abell ABELL, THOMAS (d. 1540), catholic martyr, studied at Oxford and took the degree of M.A. in 1516. Nothing else is known of his early life, nor when it was that he entered the service of Katharine of Aragon; but it was certainly before the year 1528, when he received a new year's gift from the king as her chaplain. A year later Katharine sent him into Spain on a delicate and rather perilous mission to the emperor, Charles V. Henry VIII had then instituted his suit for a divorce before the legatine court in England, and had discovered to his surprise that his case was very seriously weakened by the fact that besides the original bull of dispensation for the marriage a brief had been also granted by Julius II, which completely met. some objections he had taken to the sufficiency of the other document. This brief was in Spain, and he determined, if possible, to get it into his hands by artifice. Pressure was put upon Katharine's legal advisers, and through them she was induced to write to the emperor, earnestly requesting him to send it to England, as its production was of the most vital importance to her cause, and she was informed no transcript could be received in evidence. Abell was commissioned to carry this letter to Spain; but along with it he delivered one of his own to the emperor, stating that he had been expressly desired by the queen to explain that she had written under compulsion, and that she particularly begged he would by no means give up the brief as in her letter she requested him to do. Thus the emperor was made fully aware of the queen's position, and carefully avoided doing anything to prejudice her real interests even at her written request. After his return from this mission, Abell was presented by the queen to the rectory of Bradwell-by-the-Sea, in Essex, to which he was instituted on 23 June 1530 (Newcourt, Repertorium, ii. 84). By this time the legatine court in England had been dissolved, and Henry was seeking the opinions of universities in his favour, which being obtained, books were published by the king's authority to show that marriage with a deceased brother's wife could not be legalised by papal dispensation. To one of these publications Abell wrote an answer, entitled 'Invicta Veritas,' which was printed in 1532 with the fictitious date 'Luneberge' on the titlepage, to put inquirers off the scent. He also preached boldly to the same effect, and, as a natural consequence, was committed to the Tower, where, as we find stated in a contemporary letter, he and his fellow prisoner, Dr. Cook, parson of Honey Lane, were permitted, by some extraordinary oversight, to say mass before the lieutenant (Calendar of State Papers, Henry VIII, vol. v., Nos. 1256, 1432). During his imprisonment replies to his book were published, which he in vain asked permission to see. He was, however, liberated at Christmas, with an injunction not to preach again till after Easter; and for a few months he was again at liberty. But in July 1533 we find search made for him again by order of Lord Chancellor Audeley; yet it appears he was soon afterwards, if not at that very time, attendant upon Katharine in her household. By this time the marriage with Anne Boleyn had taken place, and in December of the same year a deputation from the king's council, headed by the Duke of Suffolk, waited on Katharine at Bugden, to induce her to renounce her title of queen and accept the name of Princess Dowager. This she steadily refused to do; and the deputation endeavoured at first, with equally little success, to impose an oath upon her servants inconsistent with that which they had already sworn to her as queen. Suffolk and his colleagues found upon inquiry that the servants had been instructed how to reply by Katharine's two chaplains, Abell and Barker. They dismissed a portion of the household, put the rest in confinement, and carried the two priests up to London, where they were lodged together in the same grim fortress, from which Abell had been released only twelve months before. At this time Elizabeth Barton, popularly known as the Nun of Kent, had recently been arrested for her denunciation of the king's second marriage, and she had already made open confession at St. Paul's that she had practised imposture in her prophecies, ravings, and trances. The opportunity was unscrupulously used to make her implicate as many as possible of those who had notoriously disliked the king's divorce and second marriage as confederates with herself in a disloyal conspiracy; and an act of attainder was procured against them in parliament early in the following year. In that act Abell was named, not as one of her active accomplices, but as having been guilty of misprision by concealing her treasons; and it was also charged against him that he had encouraged the lady Katharine' after her divorce still to claim the title of queen, and her servants to call her so against the king's express commands. At this time he had, as a fellow-prisoner in the Tower, one Friar Forest, who, like himself, suffered martyrdom some years later; and it would appear that though both were for the moment spared, they both at this time expected to die together. This we know from the letters they wrote to each other in prison, which were printed nearly fifty years later in Bourchier's Historia Ecclesiastica de Martyrio Fratrum' (Ingolstadt, 1583). Abell was of course deprived of his benefice of Bradwell; but as the offence charged against him in the act was only misprision, he seems to have remained in the Tower for six years longer. On 30 July 1540 he was one of a company of six prisoners who were dragged out of the Tower on hurdles and suffered at Smithfield. Three of them were protestant heretics, and were burned at the stake; the other three, of whom Abell was one, were hanged, beheaded, and quartered for treason, the specific charges against them being denial of the king's supremacy, and affirming the validity of his marriage with Katharine of Aragon. On the wall of his prison in the Tower, during his confinement, Abell carved the device of a bell with the letter A on it to represent his surname, surmounted by his christian name Thomas.' This memorial of his captivity remains, and is continually shown to visitors along with the other inscriptions in the Beauchamp Tower. [Wood's Athenæ Oxonienses; Calendar of State Papers of Henry VIII, vols. iv.-vii.; Statute 25 Henry VIII, c. 12; Bourchier's Historia Ecclesiastica, and Newcourt, cited above.] J. G. ABELL, WILLIAM (f. 1640), alderman of London, was elected alderman of Bread Street ward in 1636. He was a vintner by trade, and in 1637 became sheriff of London and master of the Vintners' Company. The guild was engaged at the time in a financial dispute with the king. Charles I had made heavy and illegal demands upon the vintners' resources, and on their resisting his proposals his ministers had threatened proceedings against them in the Star Chamber. Abell undertook, at the instigation of the Marquis of Hamilton, and with the aid of Richard Kilvert, a liveryman, stated to be But the alderman's cousin, to bring the vintners to terms. With some trouble he obtained from them a promise to pay to the king 40s. per tun on all wine sold by them, on the understanding that they might charge their customers an additional penny per quart. Abell was nominated one of the farmers of the new duty; but many merchants refused to pay it, and Abell petitioned for means to coerce them. In 1639 Abell, whose name had become a byword in the city as a venal supporter of the government and as a placehunter, became the licenser of tavern-keepers, and in that office did not diminish his unpopularity. Barely a month elapsed after the first meeting of the Long Parliament before Abell was summoned to answer the committee of grievances for his part in the imposition of the arbitrary duty of 408. per tun on wine. On 27 Nov. 1640 he was committed to the custody of the sergeant-at-arms by order of the Commons. Bail was refused, and on 26 May 1641 it was resolved to bring in a bill against Abell and Kilvert as 'projectors of the 408. duty, to the end to make them exemplary.' On 1 Sept. following Abell was released on bail in 20,000l., and on 9 April 1642, having been declared a 'delinquent,' he offered to make his submission to the house; on payment of 2,000l. his request was granted, and pardon promised him. Ten years later Abell was again imprisoned, but in the interval he had resigned his office of alderman. On 12 March 1652 he was given into the custody of Sir John Lenthall on the petition of certain persons to whom he owed money, borrowed in behalf of the Vintners' Company several years previously. He was not, however, kept in close confinement, but allowed to reside with his son at Hatfield, Herts. On 5 May 1652 it was reported to the council of state that he had spoken 'dangerous words' against the existing government, and measures were devised to keep him under closer surveillance. On 25 Feb. 1653-4 he petitioned the judges sitting at Salters' Hall for the payment of 1,3331. 138. 4d. owing to him from persons concerned with him in farming the wine duty. On 7 June 1655 a passport to Holland was given to him, but nothing seems ascertainable of his subsequent career. taining the whole life of Alderman Abel, the maine Proiector and Patentee for the raising of Wines.' He is here described as springing from the lowest class of society, and thriving through his extreme parsimony. His wealth is computed at from ten to twelve thousand pounds.' He is denounced as having 'broken" both merchants and retailors,' and the city is described as rejoicing in his removal from his shop in Aldermanbury to a 'stronger house.' Other tracts relating to Abell, all of which appeared in 1641, bear the titles: 'The Copie of a Letter sent from the Roaring Boyes in Elizium, to two errant Knights of the Grape in Limbo, Alderman Abel and Mr. Kilvert;' 'Time's Alteration;' and 'The Last Discourse betwixt Master Abel and Master Richard Kilvert.' An attempt to defend Abell from the charge of obtaining by undue influence the consent of the Vintners' Company to the wine duty was printed under the title of A True Discovery of the Proiectors of the Wine Proiect,' and a reply to this defence appeared in 'A true Relation of the Proposing, Threatening, and Perswading of the Vintners to yeeld to the Imposition upon Wines.' An engraved portrait of the alderman by Hollar was issued in 1641. Above it is written 'Good wine needs not A-Bush nor A-Bell.' Abell is often referred to in hostile broadsides as 'Cain's brother,' and as 'Alderman Medium.' [Gardiner's Hist. of England, viii. 286-7; Commons' Journal, vol. ii.; Calendars of State Papers, 1638-41, 1652-3, 1655; Remembrancia, 14 n. ; Rushworth's Collections, iv. 277-8; Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British MuseumPolitical and Personal-vol. i., where full accounts of the broadsides relating to Abell may be found.] S. L. L. ABERCORN, EARL OF. [See HAMILTON.] ABERCROMBIE, JOHN (1726-1806), a writer on horticulture, was the son of a market gardener at Prestonpans, near Edinburgh. Having received some education, he began at an early age to work under his father; and when about twenty-five, he found employment in the Royal Gardens at Kew, and Leicester House, and in the service of several noblemen and gentlemen. After a marriage which brought him a numerous family, he A number of pamphlets and broadsides began business on his own account as a condemning Abell's action in the matter of market gardener at Hackney. While he the wine duty appeared in 1640 and 1641. was thus occupied, his biographer Mean asSoon after his first imprisonment by the Com-serts that he was asked, about 1770, by mons Thomas Heywood published (18 Dec. 1640) a tract dealing with a priest, a judge, and a patentee,' in which Abell was severely attacked as the patentee. In 1641 appeared 'An Exact Legendary, compendiously con Lockyer Davis, a well-known publisher, to write a work on practical gardening; he consented only on condition that his manuscript should be revised by Oliver Goldsmith; and it is said that the manuscript was sent back by Goldsmith unaltered, with the remark that Abercrombie's own style was that best suited to the subject. The story can hardly be true in relation to the first edition of Abercrombie's earliest work, since that was not published by Lockyer Davis, who was the publisher of some of his subsequent productions. It appeared in 1767, and was entitled 'Every Man his own Gardener, being a new and more complete Gardener's Kalendar than any one hitherto published.' From a diffidence in the writer' (this is Abercrombie's own statement), the volume was represented in the title-page as written by Mr. Maw, gardener to the Duke of Leeds,' who had not seen a line of it before publication, and who is said to have received 201. for this use of his name. 'Every Man his own Gardener' soon attained a popularity which it has never wholly lost, a new edition of it having appeared in 1879. It supplied a want scarcely met by the chief work of the kind in vogue at the time of its publication, the 'Gardener's Kalendar' of Philip Miller, and gave for the first time detailed instructions which his practical experience enabled him to furnish. Every Man his own Gardener' had gone through seven editions, said to be of 2,000 each, when, in 1779, Ábercrombie published under his own name, now well known, 'The British Fruit Gardener and Art of Pruning.' Abercrombie was then in business at Tottenham as a market-gardener and nurseryman. He afterwards seems to have devoted himself to the production of books on horticulture and to the revision and republication of his earlier works. A systematic work on general horticulture, in which the calendar form was discarded, with the title of The Practical Gardener,' appeared after his death. In spite of his industry and the great success of some of his manuals, he had, during his last years, to depend for support on the bounty of a friend. He died at or about the age of 80, in the spring of 1806, and left behind him the reputation of an upright man and a cheerful companion. A competent authority among his later editors or annotators, Mr. George Glenny, has called Abercrombie the great teacher of gardening.' Next to Every Man his own Gardener,' the most popular of his works has been the 'Gardener's Pocket Journal and Daily Assistant,' which in 1857 had reached a thirty-fifth edition. Among his treatises on special departments of horti culture are 'The Complete Forcing Gardener' (1781); The Complete Wall Tree Pruner' (1783); The Propagation and Botanical Arrangement of Plants and Trees, useful and ornamental' (1784); and The Hot House Gardener on the general culture of the pine apple and method of pruning early grapes,' &c. (1789); of which last work a German translation appeared at Vienna in 1792. tical Gardener (1817); Biographical Sketch pre[Mean's Memoir in second edition of the Pracfixed to the 35th edition of the Gardener's Pocket Journal (1857); Preface to Philip Miller's Gardener's Kalendar; Catalogue of the British Museum Library.] F. E. 6 ABERCROMBIE, JOHN, M.D. (1780– 1844), physician, was the only son of the Rev. George Abercrombie, one of the parish ministers of Aberdeen. He was born on 10 Oct. 1780, in Aberdeen, where, at the grammar school and at Marischal College, he received his early education. In 1800 he went to Edinburgh to study medicine, and took his degree there in 1803. The mental aspects of medical science seem already to have attracted him, his inaugural address being De Fatuitate Alpinâ,' a subject to which he recurred in his work on the intellectual powers. He spent about a year in London in further study at St. George's Hospital, and soon after his return to Edinburgh in 1804 began to practise. From the outset of his career his fellow-citizens recognised in him a man of boundless energy and of generous public spirit. Becoming connected with the public dispensary, he gradually gained an intimate knowledge of the moral and physical condition of the poor, and found opportunities for the exercise of those habits of close and accurate observation which were already formed in himself, and which throughout his life he strove to teach to others. He did much to train the medical students of his time. It is recorded as part of his system that he divided the poorer quarters of Edinburgh into districts, and allotted them to different students, himself maintaining a supervision of the whole. Meanwhile he kept with scrupulous care a record of every case of scientific interest that came before him. The results of his observations appeared in a series of papers on pathological subjects, contributed chiefly to the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal' from 1816 to 1824. From these papers were elaborated his two chief works on pathology, published in 1828, in which his aim was rather to group together well-tested facts than to theorise. On the death of Dr. James Gregory in 1821, Abercrombie, whose professional reputation stood very high, immediately became one of the chief consulting physicians in Scotland. He failed, however, in his application for Dr. Gregory's chair of the practice of medicine. In 1823 he was made a licentiate, and in 1824 a fellow, of the Col |