Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 45.djvu/148

 published ‘Flowers of the Night,’ later in the same year, but she survived Pfeiffer only a year and a day, dying at their house in Putney in January 1890. In accordance with her husband's wish, she had devoted a portion of their property to the establishment of an orphanage, and had designed the endowment of a school of dramatic art. By her will she left money to trustees to be applied to the promotion of women's higher education; 2,000l. from this fund was allotted towards erecting at Cardiff the Aberdare Hall for women-students of the university of South Wales, which was opened in 1895.

As a poetess, Mrs. Pfeiffer resembled Mrs. Browning. With incomparably less power, she was uplifted by the same moral ardour and guided by the same delicate sensitiveness. Her sentiment is always charming. Her defects are those of her predecessor—diffuseness and insufficient finish; nor had she sufficient strength for a long poem. She succeeds best in the sonnet, where the metrical form enforces compression. She was also accomplished in embroidery, and she left to a niece a fine collection of her paintings of flowers, which are executed with great taste and skill.

[A. H. Japp in Miles's Poets and Poetry of the Century; Athenæum and Academy, 1 Feb. 1890; Western Mail, 8 Oct. 1895; private information.]  PHAER or PHAYER, THOMAS (1510?–1560), lawyer, physician, and translator, is said to have been son of Thomas Phaer of Norwich (, Tour in Pembrokeshire, 1811, p. 505). The family appears to have been of Flemish origin. Phaer was educated at Oxford and at Lincoln's Inn, and was favourably noticed by William Paulet, first marquis of Winchester [q. v.] ‘As a lawyer he attained,’ says Wood, ‘to a considerable knowledge in the municipal laws,’ and he wrote two legal handbooks. The first Robert Redman published for him in 1535: it was entitled ‘Natura Brevium, newly corrected in Englishe with diuers addicions of statutes, book-cases, plees.’ … In 1543 Edward Whitchurch issued Phaer's ‘Newe Boke of Presidentes in maner of a register, wherein is comprehended the very trade of makyng all maner euydence and instrumentes of Practyse, ryght commodyous and necessary for euery man to knowe.’ He was rewarded for his endeavours to popularise legal methods by the appointment of ‘solicitor’ in the court of the Welsh marches, and settled at a house in Kilgerran or Cilgerran Forest, Pembrokeshire.

With his practice of law Phaer combined a study of medicine, which he began before 1539. In 1544, according to Herbert (although the earliest edition extant in the Bodleian Library is dated 1546), he published with Whitchurch a popular medical treatise, entitled ‘The Regiment of Life,’ a version through the French of ‘Regimen Sanitatis Salerni,’ of which a translation by Thomas Paynell [q. v.] had already been published in 1528 [see ]. Phaer appended to his rendering ‘A goodly Bryefe Treatise of the Pestylence, with the causes, signs, and cures of the same,’ ‘Declaration of the Veynes of Man's Body, and to what Dyseases and Infirmities the opening of every one of them doe serve,’ and ‘A Book of Children.’ Phaer claims in this volume to have first made medical science intelligible to Englishmen in their own language. An edition, ‘newly corrected and enlarged,’ appeared in 1553 (by John Kingston and Henry Sutton in some copies, and by William How for Abraham Veale in others). Other editions are dated 1560, 1565 (?), 1567, 1570 (?), and 1596. The ‘Treatise of the Plague’ was reprinted in 1772, ‘with a preface by a physician [W. T.],’ and some extracts figured in an appendix to ‘Spiritual Preseruatiues against the Pestilence,’ 1603, by Henry Holland (d. 1604) [q. v.], and in ‘Salomon's Pesthouse, by I. D.,’ 1630.

On 6 Feb. 1558–9 Phaer graduated M.B. at Oxford, with leave to practise, and proceeded M.D. on 21 March. He stated in his supplication for the first degree that he had practised medicine for twenty years, and had made experiments about poisons and antidotes.

Despite his twofold occupation as lawyer and doctor, Phaer found leisure for literary work. In 1544 he contributed a commendatory poem to Philip Betham's ‘Military Precepts.’ He supplied a poetical version of the legend of ‘Howe Owen Glendower, being seduced by false prophecies, toke upon him to be Prince of Wales,’ to the first edition of the ‘Mirror for Magistrates,’ 1559. Warton also says he had seen an old ballad called ‘Gads-hill by Faire.’ A ballad ‘on the robbery at Gaddes-hill’ was entered in the registers of the Stationers' Company in 1558–9. In 1566—after Phaer's death—Thomas Purfoot procured a license to publish ‘Certen Verses of Cupydo, by M. Fayre,’ who is identified with Phaer. The work is not known to be extant.

Meanwhile, on 9 May 1555, he began the translation of Virgil's ‘Æneid’ into English verse, by which he is best known. The first book was completed on 25 May, the third on