Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 45.djvu/398

 reprinted since. Several of them have become exceedingly rare. An anonymous tragedy, ‘The Czar of Muscovy,’ published in 1702, a week after her play of ‘The Double Distress,’ has found its way into lists of her writings, but there is no evidence identifying it with her in any way. She was, however, the author of ‘Violenta, or the Rewards of Virtue, turn'd from Bocacce into Verse,’ 1704.

 PLACE, FRANCIS (1647 – 1728), amateur artist, was fifth son of Rowland Place of Dinsdale, co. Durham, by Catherine, daughter and coheiress of Charles Wise of Copgrove, Yorkshire. His father had been admitted to Gray's Inn on 9 Oct. 1633 (see, Gray's Inn Registers), and Place was articled there to an attorney, a profession for which he had no inclination. Owing to the outbreak of the great plague in London in 1665, Place left London, and quitted the law for an artist's life, having great gifts for drawing and engraving. He was a personal friend of [q. v.], the engraver; but, though he modelled his style of drawing and engraving on that of Hollar, he said himself that he was not his pupil. Place took up his residence in the manor-house close to St. Mary's Abbey at York. He was an intimate friend of [q. v.], [q. v.], and other artists and antiquaries in or near York. With Lodge he went many drawing and angling excursions, and during the alarm of popery caused by Oates's plot the pair were on one occasion taken up and put into prison. Place had considerable merit as a painter of animals and still life, and also drew portraits in crayons; among his crayon portraits is one which is probably the only authentic likeness of the famous William Penn. He etched a number of landscapes, marine or topographical subjects, including a valuable set of views of the observatory at Greenwich, and a view of St. Winifred's Well. Some of his plates were done for the publications of his friends, such as Thoresby's ‘Ducatus Leodiensis’ and Drake's ‘Eboracum.’ Place also etched several sets of birds and animals after Francis Barlow, and the plates to Godartius's ‘Book of Insects.’ He was one of the first Englishmen, if not the very first, to practise the newly discovered art of mezzotint-engraving, and left several interesting examples, including portraits of Sir Ralph Cole, Nathaniel Crew (bishop of Durham), Archbishop Sterne, and his friends Henry Gyles, the glass-painter, William Lodge, John Moyser of Beverley, Yorkshire, Pierce Tempest and Richard Tompson the print-sellers, and Philip Woolrich. Most of these engravings are very rare. A good collection of Place's drawings (chiefly of Yorkshire topography) and engravings is in the print-room of the British Museum. Place lived for forty years at York, where he also made some experiments in the manufacture of pottery, producing a grey ware with black streaks of which a few specimens have been preserved. Place died on 21 Sept. 1728, in his eighty-second year, and was buried in St. Olave's Church Without at York. He married, on 5 Sept. 1693, Ann Wilkinson, by whom he had three daughters, one of whom, Frances, was married to Wadham Wyndham. Upon his death his widow left the manor-house at York, where Place had resided, and disposed of a number of his paintings. He drew his own portrait, and another was painted by Thomas Murray.

 PLACE, FRANCIS (1771–1854), radical reformer, was born on 3 Nov. 1771. His father, Simon Place, was an energetic but dissipated man who had begun life as a working baker, and was in 1771 a bailiff to the Marshalsea court and keeper of a ‘sponging house’ in Vinegar Yard, Drury Lane. Place was sent to various schools near Fleet Street and Drury Lane from his fifth till his fourteenth year. His father (who had meanwhile taken a public-house) desired to apprentice him to a conveyancer, but the boy preferred to learn a trade, and was accordingly bound, before he was fourteen years old, to a leather-breeches maker. In 1789 he became an independent journeyman, and in 1791 married Elizabeth Chadd (he being nineteen years old and she not quite seventeen), and set up house in one room in a court off the Strand. Hitherto Place had lived rather an irregular life, but now he became rigidly economical and industrious. Leather-breeches making, however, was a decaying trade, and he had great difficulty in obtaining work. In 1793 the London leather-breeches makers struck, and Place was chosen as organiser. The strike having failed, Place was refused work by the masters, and for eight months suffered extreme privation. It is a singular proof of his resolute character that during those