most interesting and most recent is "On the constitution of sea water at different depths and in different latitudes," in the Proceedings of the Roy. Soc., xii., 1862-1863.
FORCHHEIM, a fortified town of Bavaria, circle of Upper Franconia, is situated near the junction of the Wiesent with the Regnitz, 16 miles S.S.E. of Bamberg. It has a castle, a collegiate and two other churches, a synagogue, a monastery, and a hospital. Its industries include brewing, tanning, soap-boiling, and glass manufacture. Forchheim is of very early origin. Charlemagne transplanted thither in 804 a number of Saxons from the Elbe, and made it an important commercial entrepôt. In the 9th and 10th centuries many assemblies, both of the princes and the kingdom, were held at Forchheim, and in 890 a council of the church. In 1007 it was presented by the emperor Henry II. to the newly founded bishopric of Bemberg, but in 1040 Henry III. united it again to the kingdom. Henry IV., however, again presented it to the bishopric of Bemberg, with which it remained till 1802, when it came into the possession of Bavaria. In 1552 it was captured by the Margrave Albert of Brandenburg, and in 1634 besieged by Bernhard of Wiemar. Its fortifications were restored in 1791. On the 6th and 7th August 1796 a battle took place near it between the French and Austrians, when the French held possession of the field. Forchheim ceased to occupy the position of a fortified town after 1838. The population in 1875 numbered 3847.
FORD, John (1586-c.1640), one of the most noteworthy writers of the English old drama in the period of its first decline, was born in 1586 at Ilsington in North Devon. He came of a good family; his father was in the commission of the peace, and his maternal grandfather, Sir John Popham, was successively attorney-general and lord chief justice. John Ford, like his cousin and namesake (to whom, with other members of the society of Gray's Inn, he dedicated his play of The Lover's Melancholy), entered the profession of the law, being admitted of the Middle Temple in 1602; but he seems never to have been called to the bar. Four years afterwards he made his first appearance as an author with an elegiac effusion called Fame's Memorial, or the Earl of Devonshire deceased, and dedicated to the widow of the earl (Charles Blount Lord Mountjoy, "coronized," to use Ford's expression, by King James in 1603 for his services in Ireland, which the elegy celebrates)—a lady who would have been no unfitting heroine for one of Ford's tragedies of lawless passion, the famous Penelope formerly Lady Rich. This panegyric, which is accompanied by a series of epitaphs, and is composed in a strain of fearless extravagance, was, as the author declares, written "unfee'd"; it shows Ford to have sympathized, as Shakespeare himself is supposed to have done, with the "awkward fate" of the countess's brother, the earl of Essex. Who the "flint-hearted Lycia" may be, to whom the poet seems to allude as his own disdainful mistress, is unknown; indeed, the record of Ford's private life is, like that of the lives of so many of our old dramatists, little better than a blank. To judge, however, from the dedications, prologues, and epilogues of his various plays, he seems to have enjoyed the patronage or goodwill of several men of rank—among them the excellent earl (afterwards duke) of Newcastle, "himself a muse" after a fashion, and the gallant Lord Craven, supposed to have been the husband of the ex-queen of Bohemia. Ford's tract of Honor Triumphant, or the Peeres Challenge (printed 1606), and the simultaneously published verses The Monarches Meeting, or the King of Denmarkes welcome into England, exhibit him as an occasional contributor to the festive demands of court and nobility; and a kind of moral essay by him, entitled A Line of Life (printed 1620), which contains a few not uninteresting references to Raleigh, ends with a climax of praise to the address of "a good man, of whom it may be verified that he is bonorum maximus and magnorum optimus"—viz., King James I. Yet it may be noted in passing that one of Ford's plays contains an implied protest against the absolute system of government which usually found ready acceptance with the dramatists of the early Stuart reigns.[1] Of our poet's relations with his brother-authors little is known; it was natural that he should exchange complimentary verses with Shirley, a more various though less intense dramatic poet of his own age and school, and that he should join in the chorus of laments with which the poets of the time mourned the decease of their acknowledged veteran chief, Ben Jonson. It is more interesting to notice an epigram in honour of the author of Love's Sacrifice and The Broken Heart by a poet of a very different kind, but in whose genius it is not paradoxical to assert that there were points of contact with Ford's—Richard Crashaw, morbidly passionate in one direction as Ford was in another. Towards the public Ford seems, by reason either of his social position or of his personal character, to have assumed an attitude of independence; but for an assailant of the theatre, such as the author of Histriomastix, he displays, like his friend Shirley, a dramatist's inevitable scorn.
It has been concluded, from evidence of a rather vague description, that in the latter part of his life he gratified the tendency to seclusion for which he has been thought to be ridiculed in a contemporary poem, by withdrawing from business (it had probably been legal business of one kind or another), and from literary life in London, to his native place; but nothing is known as to the date of his death. His career as a dramatist very probably began with some plays in which he assisted, or was assisted by, other authors. The titles of these (all we possess of them) are not without significance. With Dekker he wrote The Fairy Knight and The Bristowe Merchant; with Webster A late Murther of the Sonne upon the Mother. A play attributed to Ford alone, and entitled An ill Beginning has a good End, was brought on the stage as early as 1613; and in 1615 followed Sir Thomas Overbury's Life and untimely Death—a subject to which the poet devoted some lines, which are preserved, of indignant regret. He also wrote, at dates unknown, The London Merchant and The Royal Combat; a tragedy by him, Beauty in a Trance, was entered in the Stationer's Register in 1653, but never printed. Of the plays by Ford preserved to us the dates span little more than a decade—the earliest, The Lover's Melancholy, having been acted in 1628 and printed in 1629, the latest, The Lady's Trial, acted in 1638 and printed in 1639.
When writing The Lover's Melancholy, it would seem that Ford had not yet become fully aware of the bent of his own dramatic genius, although he was already master of his powers of poetic expression. We may suppose him, when he first became a dramatic author, to have been attracted towards both domestic tragedy and romantic comedy—to the former by an irresistible desire to sound the depths of abnormal conflicts between passion and circumstances, to the latter by a strong though not widely varied imaginative faculty, and by a self-delusion (such as will alone account for his repeated—and nearly always unsuccessful—efforts in this direction) that he was possessed of abundant comic humour. In his next two works, un-
- ↑ Crot.—"The king hath spoke his mind.
Org.—"His will he hath;
But were it lawful to hold plea against
The power of greatness, not the reason, haply
Such undershrubs as subjects sometimes might
Borrow of nature justice, to inform
That licence sovereignty holds without check
Over a meek obedience."
The Broken Heart, act iii. sc. 4.
