OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Farazdaq

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​FARAZDAQ [Hammām ibn Ghālib ibn Sa’sa’, known as al-Farazdaq] (ca. 641–ca. 728), Arabian poet, was born at Basra. He was of the Dārim, one of the most respected divisions of the bani Tamīm, and his mother was of the tribe of Ḍabba. His grandfather Sa’sa’ was a Bedouin of great repute, his father Ghālib followed the same manner of life until Basra was founded, and was famous for his generosity and hospitality. At the age of fifteen Farazdaq was known as a poet, and though checked for a short time by the advice of the caliph Ali to devote his attention to the study of the Koran, he soon returned to making verse. In the true Bedouin spirit he devoted his talent largely to satire and attacked the bani Nahshal and the bani Fuqaim. When Ziyād, a member of the latter tribe, became governor of Basra, the poet was compelled to flee, first to Kufa, and then, as he was still too near Ziyād, to Medina, where he was well received by Sa‛īd ibn ul-Āsī. Here he remained about ten years, writing satires on Bedouin tribes, but avoiding city politics. But he lived a prodigal life, and his amorous verses led to his expulsion by the caliph Merwan I. Just at that time he learned of the death of Ziyād and returned to Basra, where he secured the favour of Ziyād’s successor ‛Obaidallāh ibn Ziyād. Much of his poetry was now devoted to his matrimonial affairs. He had taken advantage of his position as guardian and married his cousin Nawār against her will. She sought help in vain from the court of Basra and from various tribes. All feared the poet’s satires. At last she fled to Mecca and appealed to the pretender ‛Abdallah ibn Zobair, who, however, succeeded in inducing her to consent to a confirmation of the marriage. Quarrels soon arose again. Farazdaq took a second wife, and after her death a third, to annoy Nawār. Finally he consented to a divorce pronounced by Hasan al-Baṣrī. Another subject occasioned a long series of verses, namely his feud with his rival Jarīr (q.v.) and his tribe the bani Kulaib. These poems are published as the Naka’id of Jarīr and al-Farazdaq (ed. A. A. Bevan, Leiden, 1906 ff.). In political life Farazdaq was prevented by fear from taking a large part. He seems, however, to have been attached to the house of Ali. During the reign of Moawiya I. he avoided politics, but later gave his allegiance to ‛Abdallah ibn Zobair.
The fullest account of his life is contained in J. Hell’s Das Leben Farazdaq nach seinen Gedichten (Leipzig, 1903); Arabian stories of him in the Kitab ul-Aghāni and in Ibn Khallikān. A portion of his poems was edited with French translation by R. Boucher (Paris, 1870); the remainder have been published by J. Hell (Munich, 1900). (G. W. T.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Farah (River)

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​FARAH, a river of Afghanistan. It rises in the southern slopes of Siah-Koh, which forms the southern wall of the valley of Herat, and after a south-westerly course of about 200 m. falls into the Seistan Hamun. At the town of Farah it has a width of 150 yds. in the dry season with 2 ft. of water and a clear swift stream. It is liable to floods, when it becomes impassable for weeks. The lower valley of the Farah Rud is fertile and well cultivated.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Farah (Town)

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​FARAH, a town of Afghanistan. It is situated on the river that bears its name on the main road between Herat and Kandahar, 160 m. S. of Herat and 225 m. W. of Kandahar. It is a place of some strategical importance, as it commands the approaches to India and Seistan from Herat. The town (2460 ft. above sea-level) is a square walled enclosure standing in the middle of the plain, surrounded with a walled rampart. Owing to its unhealthiness it is now almost deserted, being only occupied by the Afghan regiment quartered there. It is a place of great antiquity, being probably the Phra mentioned by Isidore of Charax in the 1st century A.D. It was sacked by the armies of Jenghiz Khan, and the survivors transported to a position farther north, where there are still great ruins. The population returned to the original site after the destruction of the medieval city by Shah Abbas, and the city prospered again until its bloody siege by Nadir Shah. Subsequently under constant attacks it declined, and in 1837 the population amounting to 6000 was carried off to Kandahar. The sole industry of the town at present is the manufacture of gunpowder. In the districts east of Farah are to be found the most fanatical of the Durani Afghan tribes.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Fareham

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​FAREHAM, a market town in the Fareham parliamentary division of Hampshire, England, 76 m. S.W. from London by the London & South Western railway. Pop. of urban district (1901) 8246. It lies at the head of a creek opening into the north-western corner of Portsmouth harbour. The principal industries are the manufacture of sackings, ropes, bricks, coarse earthenware, terra-cotta, tobacco-pipes and leather. Fareham has a considerable trade in corn, timber and coal; the creek being accessible to vessels of 300 tons. Three miles E. of Fareham, on Portsmouth harbour, are the interesting ruins of Porchester ​Castle, an extensive walled enclosure retaining its Norman keep, and exhibiting in its outer walls considerable evidence of Roman workmanship; Professor Haverfield, however, denies that it occupies the site of the Roman Portus Magnus. The church of St Mary has some fine Norman portions. It belonged to an Augustinian priory founded by Henry I. At Titchfield, 3 m. W. of Fareham, are ruins of the beautiful Tudor mansion, Place House, built on the site of a Premonstratensian abbey of the 13th century, of which there are also fragments.
The fact that Fareham (Fernham, Ferham) formed part of the original endowment of the see of Winchester fixes its existence certainly as early as the 9th century. It is mentioned in the Domesday Survey as subject to a reduced assessment on account of its exposed position and liability to Danish attacks. There is evidence to show that Fareham had become a borough before 1264, but no charter can be found. It was a mesne borough held of the bishop of Winchester, but it is probable that during the 18th century the privileges of the burgesses were allowed to lapse, as by 1835 it had ceased to be a borough. Fareham returned two members to the parliament of 1306, but two years later it petitioned against representation on the ground of expense. A fair on the 31st of October and the two following days was held under grant of Henry III. The day appears to have been afterwards changed to the 29th of June, and in the 18th century was mainly important for the sale of toys. It was abolished in 1871. Fareham owed its importance in medieval times to its facilities for commerce. It was a free port and had a considerable trade in wool and wine. Later its shipping declined and in the 16th century it was little more than a fishing village. Its commercial prosperity in modern times is due to its nearness to Portsmouth.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Farce

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​FARCE, a form of the comic in dramatic art, the object of which is to excite laughter by ridiculous situations and incidents rather than by imitation with intent to ridicule, which is the province of burlesque, or by the delineation of the play of character upon character, which is that of comedy. The history of the word is interesting. Its ultimate origin is the Latin farcire, to stuff, and with the meaning of “stuffing” or forcemeat it appears in old cookery books in English. In medieval Latin farsa and farsia were applied to the expansion of the Kyrie eleison in litanies, &c., by interpolating words and phrases between those two words; later, to words, phrases and rhymed verses, sometimes in the vernacular, also interpolated in various parts of the service. The French farce, the form to which we owe our word, was originally the “gag” that the actors in the medieval drama inserted into their parts, generally to meet the popular demand for a lightening of humour or buffoonery. It has thus been used for the lighter form of comic drama (see Drama), and also figuratively for a piece of idle buffoonery, sham, or mockery.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Farey, John

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​FAREY, JOHN (1766–1826), English geologist, was born at Woburn in Bedfordshire in 1766. He was educated at Halifax in Yorkshire, and showed such aptitude in mathematics, drawing and surveying, that he was brought under the notice of John Smeaton (1724–1792). In 1792 he was appointed agent to the duke of Bedford for his Woburn estates. After the decease of the duke, Farey in 1802 removed to London, and settled there as a consulting surveyor and geologist. That he was enabled to take this step was due largely to his acquaintance with William Smith (q.v.), who in 1801 had been employed by the duke of Bedford in works of draining and irrigation. The duke, appreciating Smith’s knowledge of the strata, commissioned him in 1802 to explore the margin of the chalk-hills south of Woburn in order to determine the true succession of the strata; and he instructed Farey to accompany him. Farey has remarked ​that Smith was his “Master and Instructor in Mineral Surveying,” and his subsequent publications show how well he had profited by the teachings he received. Farey prepared the General View of the Agriculture and Minerals of Derbyshire in two vols. (1811–1813) for the Board of Agriculture. In the first of these volumes (1811) he gave an able account of the upper part of the British series of strata, and a masterly exposition of the Carboniferous and other strata of Derbyshire. In this classic work, and in a paper published in the Phil. Mag. vol. li. 1818, p. 173, on “Mr Smith’s Geological Claims stated,” he zealously called attention to the importance of the discoveries of William Smith. Farey died in London on the 6th of January 1826.
See Biographical Notice, by W. S. Mitchell, in Geol. Mag. 1873, p. 25.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Fargo

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​FARGO, a city and the county-seat of Cass county, North Dakota, U.S.A., about 254 m. W. of Duluth, Minnesota. Pop. (1890) 5664; (1900) 9589, of whom 2564 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 14,331. It is served by the Northern Pacific, the Great Northern, and the Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul railways. The city is situated on the W. bank of the Red river of the North, which in 1909 had a navigable depth of only about 2 ft. from Fargo to Grank Forks, and the navigation of which was obstructed at various places by fixed bridges. In the city are Island and Oakgrove parks, the former of which contains a statue (erected by Norwegians in 1908) of Henrik Arnold Wergeland, the Norwegian poet. Fargo is the seat of the North Dakota agricultural college (coeducational), founded in 1890 under the provisions of the Federal “Morrill Act” of 1862; it receives both Federal and state support (the former under the Morrill Act of 1890), and in connexion with it a United States Agricultural Experiment Station is maintained. In 1907–1908 the college had 988 students in the regular courses (including the students in the Academy), 117 in the summer course in steam engineering, and 68 in correspondence courses. At Fargo, also, are Fargo College (non-sectarian, 1887; founded by Congregationalists), which has a college department, a preparatory department, and a conservatory of music, and in 1908 had 310 students, of whom 211 were in the conservatory of music; the Oak Grove Lutheran ladies’ seminary (1906) and the Sacred Heart Academy (Roman Catholic). The city is the see of both a Roman Catholic bishop and a Protestant Episcopal bishop; and it is the centre of masonic interests in the state, having a fine masonic temple. There are a public library and a large Y.M.C.A. building. St John’s hospital is controlled by Roman Catholic sisters, and St Luke’s hospital by the Lutheran Church. Fargo is in a rich agricultural (especially wheat) region, is a busy grain-trading and jobbing centre, is one of the most important wholesale distributing centres for agricultural implements and machinery in the United States, and has a number of manufactures, notably flour. The total value of the city’s factory products in 1905 was $1,160,832. Fargo, named in honour of W. G. Fargo of the Wells Fargo Express Company, was first settled as a tent city in 1871, when the Red river was crossed by the Northern Pacific, but was not permanently settled until after the extinction in 1873 of the Indian title to the reservation on which it was situated. It was chartered as a city in 1875. The Milwaukee railway was completed to Fargo in 1884. In June 1893 a large part of the city was destroyed by fire, the loss being more than $3,000,000.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Fargo, William George

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​FARGO, WILLIAM GEORGE (1818–1881), pioneer American expressman, was born in Pompey, New York, on the 20th of May 1818. From the age of thirteen he had to support himself, obtaining little schooling, and for several years he was a clerk in grocery stores in Syracuse. He became a freight agent for the Auburn & Syracuse railway company at Auburn in 1841, an express messenger between Albany and Buffalo a year later, and in 1843 a resident agent in Buffalo. In 1844 he organized, with Henry Wells (1805–1878) and Daniel Dunning, the first express company (Wells & Co.; after 1845 Livingston & Fargo) to engage in the carrying business west of Buffalo. The lines of this company (which first operated only to Detroit, via Cleveland) were rapidly extended to Chicago, St Louis, and other western points. In March 1850, when through a consolidation of competing lines the American Express Company was organized, Wells became president and Fargo secretary. In 1851, with Wells and others, he organized the firm of Wells, Fargo & Company to conduct an express business between New York and San Francisco by way of the Isthmus of Panama and on the Pacific coast, where it long had a virtual monopoly. In 1861 Wells, Fargo & Co. bought and reorganized the Overland Mail Co., which had been formed in 1857 to carry the United States mails, and of which Fargo had been one of the original promoters. From 1862 to 1866 he was mayor of Buffalo, and from 1868 to his death, in Buffalo, on the 3rd of August 1881, he was president of the American Express Company, with which in 1868 the Merchants Union Express Co. was consolidated. He was a director of the New York Central and of the Northern Pacific railways.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Green, Valentine

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​GREEN, VALENTINE (1739–1813), British engraver, was born at Halesowen. He was placed by his father in a solicitor’s office at Evesham, where he remained for two years; but ultimately he decided, on his own responsibility, to abandon the legal profession and became a pupil of a line engraver at Worcester. In 1765 he migrated to London and began work as a mezzotint engraver, having taught himself the technicalities of this art, and quickly rose to a position in absolutely the front rank of British engravers. He became a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists in 1767, an associate-engraver of the Royal Academy in 1775, and for some forty years he followed his profession with the greatest success. The exclusive right of engraving and publishing plates from the pictures in the Düsseldorf gallery was granted him by the duke of Bavaria in 1789, but, after he had issued more than twenty of these plates, the siege of that city by the French put an end to this undertaking and caused him serious financial loss. From this cause, and through the failure of certain other speculations, he was reduced to poverty; and in consequence he took the post of keeper of the British Institution in 1805, and continued in this office for the remainder of his life. During his career as an engraver he produced some four hundred plates after portraits by Reynolds, Romney, and other British artists, after the compositions of Benjamin West, and after pictures by Van Dyck, Rubens, Murillo, and other old masters. It is claimed for him that he was one of the first engravers to show how admirably mezzotint could be applied to the translation of pictorial compositions as well as portraits, but at the present time it is to his portraits that most attention is given by collectors. His engravings are distinguished by exceptional richness and subtlety of tone, and by very judicious management of relations of light and shade; and they have, almost without exception, notable freshness and grace of handling.
See Valentine Green, by Alfred Whitman (London, 1902).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Green, John Richard

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​GREEN, JOHN RICHARD (1837–1883), English historian, was born at Oxford on 12th December 1837, and educated at Magdalen College School and at Jesus College, where he obtained an open scholarship. On leaving Oxford he took orders and became the incumbent of St Philip’s, Stepney. His preaching was eloquent and able; he worked diligently among his poor parishioners and won their affection by his ready sympathy. Meanwhile he studied history in a scholarly fashion, and wrote much for the Saturday Review. Partly because his health was weak and partly because he ceased to agree with the teaching of the Church of England, he abandoned clerical life and devoted himself to history; in 1868 he took the post of librarian at Lambeth, but his health was already breaking down and he was attacked by consumption. His Short History of the English People (1874) at once attained extraordinary popularity, and was afterwards expanded in a work of four volumes (1877–1880). Green is pre-eminently a picturesque historian; he had a vivid imagination and a keen eye for colour. His chief aim was to depict the progressive life of the English people rather than to write a political history of the English state. In accomplishing this aim he worked up the results of wide reading into a series of brilliant pictures. While generally accurate in his statement of facts, and showing a firm grasp of the main tendency of a period, he often builds more on his authorities than is warranted by their words, and is apt to overlook points which would have forced him to modify his representations and lower the tone of his colours. From his animated pages thousands have learned to take pleasure in the history of their own people, but could scarcely learn to appreciate the complexity inherent in all historical movement. His style is extremely bright, but it lacks sobriety and presents some affectations. His later histories, The Making of England (1882) and The Conquest of England (1883), are more soberly written than his earlier books, and are valuable contributions to historical knowledge. Green died at Mentone on the 7th of March 1883. He was a singularly attractive man, of wide intellectual sympathies and an enthusiastic temperament; his good-humour was unfailing and he was a brilliant talker; and his work was done with admirable courage in spite of ill-health. It is said that Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere is largely a portrait of him. In 1877 Green married Miss Alice Stopford; and Mrs Green, besides writing a memoir of her husband, prefixed to the 1888 edition of his Short History, has herself done valuable work as an historian, particularly in her Henry II. in the “English Statesmen” series (1888), her Town Life in the 15th Century (1894), and The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1908).
See the Letters of J. R. Green (1901), edited by Leslie Stephen. (W. Hu.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Green, Matthew

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​GREEN, MATTHEW (1696–1737), English poet, was born of Nonconformist parents. He had a post in the custom house, and the few anecdotes that have been preserved of him show him to have been as witty as his poems would lead one to expect. He died unmarried at his lodging in Nag’s Head Court, Gracechurch Street, in 1737. His Grotto, a poem on Queen Caroline’s grotto at Richmond, was printed in 1732; and his chief poem, The Spleen, in 1737 with a preface by his friend Richard Glover. These and some other short poems were printed in Dodsley’s collection (1748), and subsequently in various editions of the British poets. They were edited in 1796 with a preface by Dr Aikin and in 1883 by R. E. A. Willmott with the poems of Gray and others. The Spleen is an epistle to Mr Cuthbert Jackson, ​advocating cheerfulness, exercise and a quiet content as remedies. It is full of witty sayings. Thomas Gray said of it: “There is a profusion of wit everywhere; reading would have formed his judgment, and harmonized his verse, for even his wood-notes often break out into strains of real poetry and music.”
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Green, Alexander Henry

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​GREEN, ALEXANDER HENRY (1832–1896), English geologist, son of the Rev. Thomas Sheldon Green, master of the Ashby Grammar School, was born at Maidstone on the 10th of October 1832. He was educated partly at his father’s school, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and afterwards at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated as sixth wrangler in 1855 and was elected a fellow of his college. In 1861 he joined the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and surveyed large areas of the midland counties, Derbyshire and Yorkshire. He wrote (wholly or in part) memoirs on the Geology of Banbury (1864), of Stockport (1866), of North Derbyshire (1869, 2nd ed. 1887), and of the Yorkshire Coal-field (1878). In 1874 he retired from the Geological Survey, having been appointed professor of geology in the Yorkshire College at Leeds; in 1885 he became also professor of mathematics, while for many years he held the lectureship on geology at the school of military engineering at Chatham. He was elected F.R.S. in 1886, and two years later was chosen professor of geology in the university of Oxford. His manual of Physical Geology (1876, 3rd ed. 1882) is an excellent book. He died at Boar’s Hill, Oxford, on the 19th of August 1896.
A portrait of him, with brief memoir, was published in Proc. Yorksh. Geol. and Polytechnic Soc. xiii. 232.