Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 25.djvu/330

 the Administrations of Great Britain.’ In 1836 he was appointed an assistant poor-law commissioner; Lord Normanby was urged to promote him to be a full commissioner, but shrank from doing so for party reasons. At length, in November 1841, Sir James Graham, having satisfied himself of Head's fitness, disregarded party considerations and gave him the appointment (Greville Memoirs, 2nd ser. ii. 60). An article of his on ‘The Law of Settlement’ was printed in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ lxxxvii. 451, and when the law of assessment was amended in 1865 was reprinted and circulated by the government. In October 1847 Lord Grey offered him the governorship of New Brunswick, worth 3,000l. a year, which Head accepted, and, having filled the post with much success, was appointed, in September 1854, to the highest office in the colonial service, the governor-generalship of Canada. He visited England in 1857, and was sworn in a privy councillor on 28 Aug., returning to Canada at the end of the year. In 1861 he retired, returned home in November, and in the following year was appointed a civil service commissioner. He died suddenly of heart disease at his house in Eaton Square on 28 Jan. 1868. The baronetcy became extinct at his death. Ticknor says of him: ‘He was one of the most accurate and accomplished scholars I have ever known. … He had been a good deal in Spain and could repeat more poetry, Greek, Latin, German, and Spanish than any person I ever knew.’ He was a K.C.B. and a F.R.S., and was made a D.C.L. of Oxford 2 July 1862. He succeeded his father as eighth baronet 4 Jan. 1838, and married, in November of the same year, Anna Maria, daughter of the Rev. John Yorke, by whom he had one son (1842–1859) and two daughters.

Head edited a translation of Kugler's ‘Handbook of Painting of the German, Dutch, Spanish, and French Schools,’ and thinking the work meagrely done, he wrote a separate handbook of those schools, published in London, 1848, 12mo, and subsequently republished as an additional volume to Kugler's handbook. He published in 1856 a grammatical essay called ‘Shall and Will,’ and annexed to the second edition in 1858 two additional essays from the ‘Philological Museum,’ 1833, and the ‘Classical Museum,’ 1840. He was the author of the review of Cornewall Lewis's ‘Dialogue on the best form of Government’ in the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ No. 241, of ‘The Story of Viga Glum,’ translated from the Icelandic, 1866, 8vo, and of a volume of ballads and poems collected from ‘Fraser's Magazine,’ and published in 1868 after his death. 

HEAD, FRANCIS BOND (1793–1875), colonial governor and author, was son of James Roper Head of the Hermitage, Higham, Kent, by his wife, the daughter of George Burgess, and was younger brother of Sir  [q. v.] The family originally were Portuguese Jews named Mendez, one of whom, Dr. Ferdinando Mendez, came to England as physician to Catherine of Braganza. His grandson, Moses Mendez, took the surname of Head on marrying the coheiress of the Rev. Sir Francis Head, bart., of the Hermitage, Higham, and was grandfather of Francis Bond Head and George Head [q. v.] Francis was born at the Hermitage in 1793, educated at Rochester grammar school and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and appointed second lieutenant, royal engineers, on 1 May and first lieutenant on 13 May 1811. He served in the Mediterranean, during which time he appears to have been quartered in Malta, made a survey of the island of Lanzerote, suffered shipwreck off Tripoli, and visited Athens and Rome. He was in Belgium and France in 1815; was employed in surveying the ground about Charleroi during the French advance on the evening of 15 June (Quart. Rev. lxxii. 291 et seq.); was present at Waterloo; and commanded a division of the pontoon-train in the march to Paris. He was afterwards stationed in Edinburgh, and was engaged in hauling down the dangerous ruins, some of the walls 130 feet high, left in Parliament Square after the great fires of 1824 (Papers connected with Roy. Engineers, new ser. iv. 58). In 1825 he retired on half-pay to accept the post of manager of the Rio Plata Mining Association, formed in London in December 1824 to work the gold and silver mines of that region on the faith of a supposed concession from the government of the United Provinces of La Plata. Head, who was to have 1,200l. a year for four years certain, arrived with a staff of Cornish miners and others, crossed the pampas, and visited the gold mines of St. Luis and the silver mines of Uspallata, a thousand miles from Buenos Ayres, to find that they had been disposed of to rival companies, and that the government and the provincial authorities were powerless to enforce the original concession. Leaving his people at Mendoza, he returned to Buenos Ayres, where he received instructions from home to proceed to Chili. Rejoining his party at Mendoza, he crossed the Andes with them to Santiago, and traversed about twelve hundred miles in dif-