Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 18.djvu/72

  Evans, D.D., Edinburgh, 1802; Wilson's Hist. of Dissenting Churches, ii. 212–21; Williams's Eminent Welshmen, p. 151; Neal's Hist. of the Puritans (ed. 1822), i. xxxi; Noble's Biog. Hist. of England, iii. 146.]  EVANS, JOHN (1693?–1734?), actor, confined his performances to Ireland. He seems to have had a share in the management of Smock Alley Theatre with Thomas Elrington [q. v.] and Griffith. The only characters associated with his name are Alcibiades in ‘Timon of Athens,’ Shadwell's alteration from Shakespeare; and Lieutenant Story in ‘The Committee, or the Faithful Irishman,’ of Sir Robert Howard. These were played about 1715. Evans had a good voice and just delivery, and was an actor in request. He was, however, corpulent and indolent. Playing at Cork ‘in the last year of the reign of Queen Anne,’ he was invited by some officers then on duty to a tavern, where he proposed the health of the queen. This involved him in a quarrel with an officer of Jacobite views. In a duel which followed Evans disarmed his adversary. Upon his return to Dublin Evans found that the quarrel had been misrepresented, and that he was held to have insulted the army. Permission to continue the play ‘The Rival Queens’ was refused until Evans had apologised. This he was very reluctantly compelled to do. One of the malcontents bidding him kneel, Evans retorted, ‘No, you rascal, I'll kneel to none but God and my queen.’ The affair was afterwards arranged. Hitchcock simply speaks of him as ‘a Mr. Evans.’ According to Chetwood, three years later than the above incident, Evans went to the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and on the journey back to Ireland was taken ill of a fever at Whitchurch, Shropshire, whence he was carried for better advice to Chester and there died, in the forty-first year of his life, and was privately buried in the cathedral without monument or inscription. These dates, no unusual thing with Chetwood, are irreconcilable with what is elsewhere said concerning Evans.

[Genest's Account of the English Stage; Chetwood's General Hist. of the Stage; Hitchcock's Irish Stage.] 

EVANS, JOHN (d. 1779), curate of Portsmouth, was born at Meini Gwynion, Llanarth, Cardiganshire, and was educated at Oxford. His first curacy was that of Llanarth, whence he removed to Portsmouth. The author of the ‘Welsh Bibliography’ supposed him to have been the Ioan Evans who translated Dr. Jabez Earle's ‘Meditations on the Sacraments,’ 1735; his ‘Harmony of the Four Gospels’ was published in 1765. This was the first work published in Welsh to expound any portion of the Bible, being fifteen years earlier than that of Peter Williams. He is supposed to have seen through the press the Welsh bible of 1769 (twenty thousand copies); he translated Bishop Gastrell's ‘Christian Institutes,’ 1773. A second edition of the ‘Harmony’ was published in 1804.

[Gwynionydd's Enwogion Ceredigion; Rowlands's Welsh Bibliography; Dr. Rees's Hist. of Nonconformity in Wales.] 

EVANS, JOHN (1767–1827), baptist minister, was born at Usk in Monmouthshire, 2 Oct. 1767. He traced his descent, through an almost unbroken line of baptist preachers, from Thomas Evans, who held the living of Maesmynis in Brecknockshire for a short time during the Commonwealth (, Brecknockshire, vol. ii. pt. i. p. 284). After some schooling at Bristol he became a student in November 1783 in the baptist academy in that town, over which his relative, Dr. Caleb Evans, then presided as theological tutor. During part of his stay Robert Hall [q. v.] was his classical tutor. In 1787 he was matriculated at King's College, Aberdeen, whence he proceeded in 1790 to the university of Edinburgh. Having taken the degree of M.A. he returned in June 1791 to England, and in the same year accepted an invitation from the morning congregation of general baptists in Worship Street, London, where, after officiating a few months, he was chosen pastor and ordained 31 May 1792. ‘This, his first, proved his only pastoral engagement,’ writes his biographer, ‘and after thirty-five years of uninterrupted harmony, terminated but with his existence.’ Immediately on his assuming this office Evans published ‘An Address humbly designed to promote the Revival of Religion, more especially among the General Baptists,’ 12mo, London, 1793. Two years later he opened a school, first at Hoxton Square and subsequently at 7 Pullin's Row, Islington, which he taught with success for about thirty years. In 1815 he was attacked with a complaint that deprived him of the use of his limbs during the remainder of his life. In 1819 he received the degree of LL.D. from Brown University in Rhode Island, and in the same year he issued his ‘Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Rev. William Richards, LL.D., of Lynn … with some account of the Rev. Roger Williams, founder of the State of Rhode Island,’ 12mo, London, 1819. In 1825 he resigned his school, having 6 Dec. 1821 lost his third son, Caleb, who had been his intended successor (Gent. Mag. vol. xci.