Dr Mortimer as headmaster of the City of London school in 1865 at the unusually early age of twenty-six, and more
than maintained the high character which the school had obtained under his predecessor. He retired in 1889, and
has since devoted himself to literary and theological pursuits. Dr Abbott’s liberal inclinations in theology have
been prominent both in his educational views and in his books. He has written several works on grammar, both
English and Latin, and is the author of a life of Bacon (1885) and of an investigation of his relations with Essex (1877). Of his theological writings (which include some that have been published anonymously) the best known are his religious romances—Philochristus (1878) and Onesimus (1882), The Kernel and the Husk (1886), Philomythus (1891), his criticism on Cardinal Newman as an Anglican (1892), and his article on “The Gospels” in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Abbott, Jacob (1803-1879), a popular American writer of books for the young, was born in Hallowell, Maine, on the 14th of November 1803. He graduated at Bowdoin College at the age of seventeen; studied at Andover Theological Seminary; became a congregational minister; was for a brief period professor of mathematics and physics in Amherst College ; and afterwards taught in schools at New York and Farmington, Maine, though devoting himself chiefly to the writing of juvenile stories, brief histories and biographies, or religious books for the general reader, together with a few works in popular science. His “Rollo Books”—Rollo at Work, Rollo at Play, Rollo in Europe, &c.—are the best known of his writings, having as their chief characters a representative boy and his associates. In them Abbott did for one or two generations of young American readers a service not unlike that performed earlier, in England and America, by the authors of Evenings at Rome, Sandford and Merton, and the Parent’s Assistant. Of his other writings—he produced more than two hundred volumes in all—the best are the Franconia Stories, a long series of biographical histories (with his brother John S. C. Abbott), and The Young Christian. Their merits are interestingness and clearness of statement; their faults a prevalent didacticism, and, in the histories, a superficial treatment of authorities, perhaps necessitated by the great range of ground covered by the author. He died at Farmington on the 31st of October 1879.
Abbott, John Stevens Cabot (1805 1877), American writer, was born in Brunswick, Maine, 18th September 1805. He was a brother of Jacob Abbott, and was associated with him in the preparation of his series of brief historical biographies, but is best known as the author of a partisan and unscholarly, but widely popular and very readable, History of Napoleon Bonaparte (1855), in which the various elements and episodes in Napoleon’s career are treated with some skill in arrangement, but with unfailing adulation. Like his brother, Dr Abbott was a graduate of Bowdoin College, a congregational minister, a teacher, and a voluminous writer of books on Christian ethics, Ac., though he never attempted the fictitious story for children. He died at Fair Haven, Conn., on the 17th of June 1877.
Abbottabad, a town of British India, 4166 feet above sea-level, 63 miles from Rawal Pindi, the headquarters of the Hazara district in the Punjab, called after its founder, Sir James Abbott, who settled this wild district after the annexation of the Punjab. It is an important military cantonment, with two native infantry regiments and a mountain battery; and the headquarters of the Punjab frontier force. Nearest ; railway station, Hasan Abdul (44 miles). Population, about 10,000. Municipal income (1896-97) Rs.13,588.
Abd-el-Kader (1807-1883), Emir of Mascara, the most prominent representative of Mussulman resistance to French conquest in Algeria, was born at Mascara, an Arab town between 40 and 50 miles south-east of Oran, in 1807. His family was of princely rank, and he received the best education attainable, especially in Mahommedan divinity and philosophy. Two incidents of his youth had great influence upon his career,—his pilgrimage to Mecca, which stimulated his natural tendency to religious enthusiasm, and a visit to Egypt, where the reforms of Mehemet Ali opened his eyes to the importance of European culture. He was thus doubly prepared for the part he was called upon to perform on the French conquest of Algiers in 1830. Becoming emir of Mascara by the renunciation of his father, he carried on war with the French until 1834, when peace was concluded; but Abd-el-Kader’s endeavours to reorganize his principality on a European model excited the jealousy of the French, and war again broke out in the following year. Mascara was taken in October 1835, but the contest on the whole was unfavourable to the French, and peace was eventually made in 1837, on terms highly honourable to Abd-elKader. He nevertheless imprudently recommenced the struggle in 1839, and although his capital was again taken in 1841, protracted it until 1844, when he was compelled to seek refuge in Morocco. The French under Marshal Bugeaud crossed the frontier, and in June entirely defeated the Moorish army at Isly, thus virtually ending the Arab revolt. The sultan, though compelled to make peace, continued to give Abd-el-Kader an asylum as long as possible; but early in 1847 the latter re-entered Algeria, and was made prisoner. In violation, as alleged, of the terms of surrender, he was detained a captive in France until 1852, when he was released by Louis Napoleon. He resided successively at Broussa and at Damascus, where in 1860 he rendered such service in repressing an outbreak against the Christians that he received the insignia of the Legion of Honour. In his latter years he devoted himself anew to theology and philosophy, and composed a philosophical treatise which has been translated into French. He died at Damascus 26th May 1883. Abd-el-Kader was an example of all the bright, and few or none of the less prepossessing, traits of the Arab national character.
Abdul-Aziz, Sultan of Turkey (1830-1876), the second son of the great Turkish reformer Sultan Mahmoud, was born 9th February 1830. During the reign of his brother Abdul-Medjid he lived in complete retirement, but upon his accession to the throne (25th June 1861) he manifested a reforming spirit and a disposition to economize in personal expenses, and to bring the administration into harmony with the ideas of European culture. Unfortunately, his extravagant outlay on the army greatly overbalanced the economies effected elsewhere, and years of ruinous loan-raising culminated in national bankruptcy in 1875. Before this event, the sultan’s mind had been almost entirely given to a project for securing the succession to his son Izeddin, to the prejudice of his nephew Murad, and in pursuit of this object he had thrown himself into the arms of Russia. Financial disaster combined with Russian preponderance rendered his government intolerable; a movement instigated by the principal pashas compelled his abdication on 30th May 1876, and on 4th June he was stated to have committed suicide. Abdul-Aziz was a violent and obstinate man, of great and not always ill-directed energy.
