OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ainsworth, William Harrison

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​AINSWORTH, WILLIAM HARRISON (1805–1882), English novelist, son of Thomas Ainsworth, solicitor, was born at Manchester on the 4th of February 1805. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and articled to the firm of which his father was a member, proceeding to London in 1824 to complete his legal training at the Inner Temple. At the age of twenty-one he married a daughter of John Ebers the publisher, and started in his father-in-law’s line of business. This, however, soon proved unprofitable and he decided to attempt literary work. A novel called Sir John Chiverton, in which he appears to have had a share, had attracted the praise of Sir Walter Scott, and this encouragement decided him to take up fiction as a career. In 1834 he published Rookwood, which had an immediate success, and thenceforth he was always occupied with the compilation of “historical” novels. He published about forty such stories, of which the best-known are Jack Sheppard (1839), The Tower of London (1840), Guy Fawkes (1841), Old St Paul’s (1841) and Windsor Castle (1843). He edited Bentley’s Miscellany, in which Jack Sheppard was published as a serial, and in 1842 he became proprietor of Ainsworth’s Magazine. In 1853 it ceased to appear, and Ainsworth bought the New Monthly Magazine. He continued his literary activity until his death, but his later stories were less striking than the earlier ones. He died at Reigate on the 3rd of January 1882 and was buried at Kensal Green. Ainsworth had a lively talent for plot, and his books have many attractive qualities. The glorification of Dick Turpin in Rookwood, and of Jack Sheppard in the novel that bears his name, caused considerable outcry among straitlaced elders. In his later novels Ainsworth confined himself to heroes less open to criticism. His style was not without archaic affectation and awkwardness, but when his energies were aroused by a striking situation he could be brisk, vigorous and impressive. He did a great deal to interest the less educated classes in the historical romances of their country, and his tales were invariably instructive, clean and manly.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ainmuller, Maximilian Emmanuel

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​AINMULLER, MAXIMILIAN EMMANUEL (1807–1870), German artist and glass-painter, was born at Munich on the 14th of February 1807. By the advice of Gartner, director of the royal porcelain manufactory, he devoted himself to the study of glass-painting, both as a mechanical process and as an art, and in 1828 he was appointed director of the newly-founded royal painted-glass manufactory at Munich. The method which he gradually perfected there was a development of the enamel process adopted in the Renaissance, and consisted in actually painting the design upon the glass, which was subjected, as each colour was laid on, to carefully-adjusted heating. The earliest specimens of Ainmuller’s work are to be found in the cathedral of Regensburg. With a few exceptions, all the windows in Glasgow cathedral are from his hand. Specimens may also be seen in St Paul’s cathedral, and Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Cologne cathedral contains some of his finest productions. Ainmuller had considerable skill as an oil-painter, especially in interiors, his pictures of the Chapel Royal at Windsor and of Westminster Abbey being much admired. He died on the 9th of December 1870.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ainsworth, Robert

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​AINSWORTH, ROBERT (1660–1743), English schoolmaster and author, was born at Eccles, near Manchester, in September 1660. After teaching for some time at Lever’s Grammar School in Bolton, he removed to London, where he conducted a boarding-school, first at Bethnal Green and then at Hackney. He soon made a moderate fortune which gave him leisure to pursue his classical studies. Ainsworth’s name is associated with his Latin-English Dictionary, begun in 1714, and published in 1736 as Thesaurus linguae Latinae compendiarius. It was long extensively used in schools, and often reprinted, the later editions being revised and enlarged by other hands, but it is now superseded. Ainsworth was also the author of some useful works on classical antiquities, and a sensible treatise on education, entitled The most Natural and Easy Way of Institution (1698), in which he advocates the teaching of Latin by conversational methods and deprecates punishment of any sort. He died in London on the 4th of April 1743.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Aintab

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​AINTAB (anc. Doliché), a town in the vilayet of Aleppo and ancient Cyrrhestica district of N. Syria. Pop. 45,000, two-thirds Moslem. The site of Doliche, famous for its worship of Baal (Zeus Dolichenus), adopted by the Seleucids and eventually spread all over the Roman empire, lies at Duluk, two hours N.W.; but nothing is to be seen there except a mound. The place was probably of Hittite origin and does not appear to have been settled by Greeks. The bazaars of Aintab are a great centre for “Hittite” antiquities, found at various sites from Sakchegözu on the west to Jerablus on the east. The modern town lies in the open treeless valley of the Sajur, a tributary of the Euphrates, and on the right bank, 65 m. north-east of Aleppo, with which it is connected by a chaussée, passing through Killis. This road proceeds east to the great crossing of Euphrates at Birejik, and thus Aintab lies on the highway between N. Syria and Urfa-Mosul and has much transit trade and numerous khans. In the middle ages its strong castle (Hamtab) was an important strategic point, taken by Saladin about A.D. 1183; and it supplied the last base from which Ibrahim Pasha marched in 1839 to win his decisive victory over the Turksat Nezib, about 25 m. distant north-east. Lying high (3500 ft.) and swept by purifying winds, Aintab is a comparatively clean and healthy spot, though not free from ophthalmia and the “Aleppo button,” and it has been selected by the American Mission Board as its centre for N. Syria “Central Turkey College,” educational and medical, lies on high ground west. It was burnt down in 1891, but rebuilt; it has a dependency for girls within the town. Thanks to its presence the Armenian protestants are a large and rich community, which suffered less in the massacre of 1895 than the Gregorians. There is a small Episcopalian body, which has a large unfinished church, and a schismatic “catholicos,” who has vainly tried to gain acceptance into the Anglican communion. There is also a flourishing Franciscan mission. Striped cloths and pekmez, a sweet paste made from grapes, are the principal manufactures; and tobacco and cereals the principal cultures. The town is unusually well and solidly built, good stone being obtained near at hand. The Moslem inhabitants are mainly of Turkoman origin, and used to owe fealty to chieftains of the family of Chapan Oglu, whose headquarters were at Yuzgat in Cappadocia.  (D. G. H.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Aimard, Gustave

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​AIMARD, GUSTAVE, the pen-name of Olivier Gloux (1818–1883), French novelist, who was born in Paris on the 13th of September 1818. He made use of the materials collected in a roving and adventurous youth and early manhood in numerous romances in the style of J. Fenimore Cooper. Among the best of them are: Les Trappeurs de l’Arkansas (1858); La Grande flibuste (1860); Nuits mexicaines (1863); La Forêt vierge (1870). He died in Paris on the 20th of June 1883. Many of his novels have been translated into English.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Aimoin

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​AIMOIN (c. 960–c. 1010), French chronicler, was born at Villefranche de Longchapt about 960, and in early life entered the monastery of Fleury, where he became a monk and passed the greater part of his life. His chief work is a Historia Francorum, or Libri V. de Gestis Francorum, which deals with the history of the Franks from the earliest times to 653, and was continued by other writers until the middle of the 12th century. It was much in vogue during the middle ages, but its historical value is now regarded as slight. It has been edited by G. Waitz and published in the Monumenta Germaniae historica: Scriptores, Band xxvi. (Hanover and Berlin, 1826–1892). He also wrote a Vita Abbonis, abbatis Floriacensis, the last of a series of lives of the abbots of Fleury, all of which, except the life of Abbo, have been lost. This has been published by J. Mabillon in the Acta sanctorum ordinis sancti Benedicti (Paris, 1668–1701). Aimoin’s third work was the composition of books ii. and iii. of the Miracula sancti Benedicti, the first book of which was written by another monk of Fleury named Adrevald. This also appears in the Acta sanctorum ordinis sancti Benedicti.
Aimoin, who died about 1010, must be distinguished from Aimoin, a monk of St Germain-des-Prés, who wrote De miraculis sancti Germani, and a fragment De Normanorum gestis circa Parisiacam urbem et de divina in eos ultione tempore Caroli calvi. Both of these are published in the Historiae Francorum Scriptores, Tome ii. (Paris, 1639–1649).
See Histoire littéraire de la France, tome vii. (Paris, 1865–1869).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ainger, Alfred

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​AINGER, ALFRED (1837–1904), English divine and man of letters, was born in London on the 9th of February 1837, the son of an architect. He was educated at King’s College, London, and at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was ordained in 1860 to a curacy at Alrewas, near Rugeley. There he remained until 1864, when he became an assistant master at the Sheffield Collegiate School. His connexion with the Temple church, in London, began in 1866, when he was appointed reader; and in 1894 he succeeded Dr Vaughan as master. In 1887 he was presented to a canonry in Bristol cathedral, and he was chaplain-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria and King Edward VII. He died on the 8th of February 1904. Canon Ainger’s gentle wit and humour, his generosity and lovable disposition, endeared him to a wide circle. In literature his name is chiefly associated with his sympathetic appreciation of Charles Lamb and Thomas Hood. His works include: Charles Lamb (1882) and Crabbe (1903) in the “English Men of Letters” series; editions of Lamb’s Essays of Elia (1883) and of his Letters (1888; 2nd ed., 1904), of the Poems (1897) of Thomas Hood, with a biographical introduction; The Life and Works of Charles Lamb (12 vols., 1899–1900); articles on Tennyson and Du Maurier in the Dictionary of National Biography; The Gospel and Human Life (1904), sermons; Lectures and Essays (2 vols., 1905), edited by the Rev. H. C. Beeching.
See also Edith Sichel, The Life and Letters of Canon Ainger (1906).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Blaenavon

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​BLAENAVON, or Blaenafon, an urban district in the northern parliamentary division of Monmouthshire, England, 15 m. N. by W. of Newport, on the Great Western, London & North Western and Rhymney railways. Pop. (1901) 10,869. It lies in the uppermost part of the Afon Lwyd valley, at an elevation exceeding 1000 ft., in a wild and mountainous district, on the eastern ​edge of the great coal and iron mining region of Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire. There are very extensive iron and steel works, with blast furnaces and rolling mills in the district, which employ the large industrial population.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Blagovyeshchensk

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​BLAGOVYESHCHENSK, a town of East Siberia, chief town of the Amur government, on the left bank of the Amur, near its confluence with the Zeya in 50° 15′ N. lat. and 127° 38′ E. long., 610 m. by river above Khabarovsk. Founded in 1856, the town had, in 1900, 37,368 inhabitants, and is the seat of the bishop of Amur and Kamchatka. There are steam flour-mills and ironworks. It is a centre for tea exported to Russia, cattle brought from Transbaikalia and Mongolia for the Amur, and for grain.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Blair, Hugh

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​BLAIR, HUGH (1718–1800), Scottish Presbyterian divine, was born on the 7th of April 1718, at Edinburgh, where his father was a merchant. Entering the university in 1730 he graduated M.A. in 1739; his thesis, De Fundamentis et Obligations Legis Naturae, contains an outline of the moral principles afterwards unfolded in his sermons. He was licensed to preach in 1741, and a few months later the earl of Leven, hearing of his eloquence, presented him to the parish of Collessie in Fife. In 1743 he was elected to the second charge of the Canongate church, Edinburgh, where he ministered until removed to Lady Yester’s, one of the city churches, in 1754. In 1757 the university of St Andrews conferred on him the degree of D.D., and in the following year he was promoted to the High Church, Edinburgh, the most important charge in Scotland. In 1759 he began, under the patronage of Lord Kames, to deliver a course of lectures on composition, the success of which led to the foundation of a chair of rhetoric and belles lettres in the Edinburgh University. To this chair he was appointed in 1762, with a salary of £70 a year. Having long taken interest in the Celtic poetry of the Highlands, he published in 1763 a laudatory Dissertation on Macpherson’s Ossian, the authenticity of which he maintained. In 1777 the first volume of his Sermons appeared. It was succeeded by four other volumes, all of which met with the greatest success. Samuel Johnson praised them warmly, and they were translated into almost every language of Europe. In 1780 George III. conferred upon Blair a pension of £200 a year. In 1783 he retired from his professorship and published his Lectures on Rhetoric, which have been frequently reprinted. He died on the 27th of December 1800. Blair belonged to the “moderate” or latitudinarian party, and his Sermons have been criticized as wanting in doctrinal definiteness. His works display little originality, but are written in a flowing and elaborate style. He is remembered chiefly by the place he fills in the literature of his time. Blair’s Sermons is a typical religious book of the period that preceded the Anglican revival.
See J. Hall, Account of Life and Writings of Hugh Blair (1807).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Blair, James

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​BLAIR, JAMES (1656–1743), American divine and educationalist, was born in Scotland, probably at Edinburgh, in 1656. He graduated M.A. at Edinburgh University in 1673, was beneficed in the Episcopal Church in Scotland, and for a time was rector of Cranston Parish in the diocese of Edinburgh. In 1682 he left Scotland for England, and three years later was sent by the bishop of London, Henry Compton, as a missionary to Virginia. He soon gained great influence over the colonists both in ecclesiastical and in civil affairs, and, according to Prof. Moses Coit Tyler, “probably no other man in the colonial time did so much for the intellectual life of Virginia.” He was the minister of Henrico parish from 1685 until 1694, of the Jamestown church from 1694 until 1710, and of Bruton church at Williamsburg from 1710 until his death. From 1689 until his death he was the commissary of the bishop of London for Virginia, the highest ecclesiastical position in the colony, his duties consisting “in visiting the parishes, correcting the lives of the clergy, and keeping them orderly.” In 1693, by the appointment of King William III., he became a member of the council of Virginia, of which he was for many years the president. Largely because of charges brought against them by Blair, Governor Sir Edmund Andros, Lieutenant-governor Francis Nicholson, and Lieutenant-governor Alexander Spotswood were removed in 1698, 1705 and 1722 respectively. Blair’s greatest service to the colony was rendered as the founder, and the president from 1693 until his death, of the College of William and Mary, for which he himself secured a charter in England. “Thus, James Blair may be called,” says Tyler, “the creator of the healthiest and most extensive intellectual influence that was felt in the Southern group of colonies before the Revolution.” He died on the 18th of April 1743, and was buried at Jamestown, Va. He published a collection of 117 discourses under the title Our Saviour’s Divine Sermon on the Mount (4 vols., 1722; second edition, 1732), and, in collaboration with Henry Hartwell and Edward Chilton, a work entitled The Present State of Virginia and the College (1727; written in 1693), probably the best account of the Virginia of that time.
See Daniel E. Motley’s Life of Commissary James Blair (Baltimore, 1901; series xix. No. 10, of the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science), and, for a short sketch and an estimate, M. C. Tyler’s A History of American Literature, 1607–1765 (New York, 1878).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Blair, Robert

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​BLAIR, ROBERT (1699–1746), Scottish poet, eldest son of the Rev. Robert Blair, one of the king’s chaplains, was born at Edinburgh in 1699. He was educated at Edinburgh University and in Holland, and in 1731 was appointed to the living of Athelstaneford in East Lothian. He married in 1738 Isabella, daughter of Professor William Law. The possession of a small fortune gave him leisure for his favourite pursuits, gardening and the study of English poets. He died at Athelstaneford on the 4th of February 1746. His only considerable work, The Grave (1743), is a poem written in blank verse of great vigour and freshness, and is much less conventional than its gloomy subject might lead one to expect. Its religious subject no doubt contributed to its great popularity, especially in Scotland; but the vogue it attained was justified by its picturesque imagery and occasional felicity of expression. It inspired William Blake to undertake a series of twelve illustrative designs, which were engraved by Louis Schiavonetti, and published in 1808.
See the biographical introduction prefixed to his Poetical Works, by Dr Robert Anderson, in his Poets of Great Britain, vol. viii. (1794.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Blair Atholl

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​BLAIR ATHOLL (Gaelic blair, “a plain”), a village and parish of Perthshire, Scotland, 351/4 m. N.W. of Perth by the Highland railway. Pop. (1901) 367; of parish, 1722. It is situated at the confluence of the Tilt and the Garry. The oldest part of Blair Castle, a seat of the duke of Atholl, dates from 1269; as restored and enlarged in 1869–1872 from the plans of David Bryce, R.S.A., it is a magnificent example of the Scottish baronial style. It was occupied by the marquess of Montrose prior to the battle of Tippermuir in 1644, stormed by the Cromwellians in 1653, and garrisoned on behalf of James II. in 1689. The Young Pretender stayed in it in 1745, and the duke of ​Cumberland in 1746. The body of Viscount Dundee, conveyed hither from the battlefield of Killiecrankie, was buried in the church of Old Blair, in which a monument was erected to his memory in 1889 by the 7th duke of Atholl. The grounds surrounding the castle are among the most beautiful in the Highlands. A golf course has been laid down south-east of the village, between the railway and the Garry, and every September a great display of Highland games is held. Ben-y-gloe (3671 ft. high), the scene of the hunt given in 1529 by the earl of Atholl in honour of James V. and the queen dowager, may be climbed by way of Fender Burn, a left-hand tributary of the Tilt. The falls of Fender, near the old bridge of Tilt, are eclipsed by the falls of Bruar, 4 m. west of Blair Atholl, formed by the Bruar, which, rising in Ben Dearg (3304 ft.), flows into the Garry after an impetuous course of 10 m.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Blainville, Henri Marie Ducrotay de

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​BLAINVILLE, HENRI MARIE DUCROTAY DE (1777–1850), French naturalist, was born at Arques, near Dieppe, on the 12th of September 1777. About 1796 he went to Paris to study painting, but he ultimately devoted himself to natural history, and attracted the attention of Baron Cuvier, for whom he occasionally lectured at the Collège de France and at the Athenaeum. In 1812 he was aided by Cuvier to obtain the chair of anatomy and zoology in the Faculty of Sciences at Paris, but subsequently an estrangement grew up between the two men and ended in open enmity. In 1825 Blainville was admitted a member of the Academy of Sciences; and in 1830 he was appointed to succeed J. B. Lamarck in the chair of natural history at the museum. Two years later, on the death of Cuvier, he obtained the chair of comparative anatomy, which he continued to occupy for the space of eighteen years, proving himself no unworthy successor to his great teacher. He died at Paris on the 1st of May 1850. Besides many separate memoirs, he was the author of Prodrome d’une nouvelle distribution méthodique du règne animal (1816); Ostéographie ou description iconographique comparée du squelette, &c. (1839–1864); Faune française (1821–1830); Cours de physiologie générale et comparée (1833); Manuel de malacologie et de conchyliologie (1825–1827); Histoire des sciences de l’organisme (1845).