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 (afterwards named Huntlyburn), purchased in 1817. The new house was then begun and completed in 1824. The general ground-plan is a parallelogram, with irregular outlines, one side overlooking the Tweed; and the style is mainly the Scottish Baronial. Into various parts of the fabric were built relics and curiosities from historical structures, such as the doorway of the old Tolbooth in Edinburgh. Scott had only enjoyed his residence one year when (1825) he met with that reverse of fortune which involved the estate in debt. In 1830 the library and museum were presented to him as a free gift by the creditors. The property was wholly disencumbered in 1847 by Robert Cadell, the publisher, who cancelled the bond upon it in exchange for the family’s share in the copyright of Sir Walter’s works. Scott’s only son Walter did not live to enjoy the property, having died on his way from India in 1847. Among subsequent possessors were Scott’s son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart, J. R. Hope Scott, Q.C., and his daughter (Scott’s great-granddaughter), the Hon. Mrs Maxwell Scott. Abbotsford gave its name to the “Abbotsford Club,” a successor of the Bannatyne and Maitland clubs, founded by W. B. D. D. Turnbull in 1834 in Scott’s honour, for printing and publishing historical works connected with his writings. Its publications extended from 1835 to 1864.

ABBOTT, EDWIN ABBOTT (1838– ), English schoolmaster and theologian, was born on the 20th of December 1838. He was educated at the City of London school and at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he took the highest honours in the classical, mathematical and theological triposes, and became fellow of his college. In 1862 he took orders. After holding masterships at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and at Clifton College, he succeeded G. F. Mortimer as headmaster of the City of London school in 1865 at the early age of twenty-six. He was Hulsean lecturer in 1876. He retired in 1889, and devoted himself to literary and theological pursuits. Dr Abbott’s liberal inclinations in theology were prominent both in his educational views and in his books. His Shakespearian Grammar (1870) is a permanent contribution to English philology. In 1885 he published a life of Francis Bacon. His theological writings include three anonymously published religious romances—Philochristus (1878), Onesimus (1882), Silanus (1906). More weighty contributions are the anonymous theological discussion The Kernel and the Husk (1886), Philomythus (1891), his book on Cardinal Newman as an Anglican (1892), and his article “The ” in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, embodying a critical view which caused considerable stir in the English theological world; he also wrote St Thomas of Canterbury, his Death and Miracles (1898), Johannine Vocabulary (1905), Johannine Grammar (1906).

His brother, Evelyn Abbott (1843–1901), was a well-known tutor of Balliol, Oxford, and author of a scholarly History of Greece. ABBOTT, EMMA (1849–1891), American singer, was born at Chicago and studied in Milan and Paris. She had a fine soprano voice, and appeared first in opera in London under Colonel Mapleson’s direction at Covent Garden, also singing at important concerts. She organized an opera company known by her name, and toured extensively in the United States, where she had a great reputation. In 1873 she married E. J. Wetherell. She died at Salt Lake City on the 5th of January 1891. ABBOTT, JACOB (1803–1879), American writer of books for the young, was born at Hallowell, Maine, on the 14th of November 1803. He graduated at Bowdoin College in 1820; studied at Andover Theological Seminary in 1821, 1822, and 1824; was tutor in 1824–1825, and from 1825 to 1829 was professor of mathematics and natural philosophy in Amherst College; was licensed to preach by the Hampshire Association in 1826; founded the Mount Vernon School for young ladies in Boston in 1829, and was principal of it in 1829–1833; was pastor of Eliot Congregational Church (which he founded), at Roxbury, Mass., in 1834–1835; and was, with his brothers, a founder, and in 1843–1851 a principal of Abbott’s Institute, and in 1845–1848 of the Mount Vernon School for boys, in New York City. He was a prolific author, writing juvenile stories, brief histories and biographies, and religious books for the general reader, and a few works in popular science. He died on the 31st of October 1879 at Farmington, Maine, where he had spent part of his time since 1839, and where his brother Samuel Phillips Abbott founded in 1844 the Abbott School, popularly called “Little Blue.” Jacob Abbott’s “Rollo Books”—Rollo at Work, Rollo at Play, Rollo in Europe, &c. (28 vols.)—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 Home, 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 (10 vols.), twenty-two volumes of biographical histories in a series of thirty-two volumes (with his brother John S. C. Abbott), and the Young Christian,—all of which had enormous circulations.

His sons, Benjamin Vaughan Abbott (1830–1890), Austin Abbott (1831–1896), both eminent lawyers, (q.v.), and Edward Abbott (1841–1908), a clergyman, were also well-known authors.

ABBOTT, JOHN STEVENS CABOT (1805–1877), American writer, was born in Brunswick, Maine, on the 18th of September 1805. He was a brother of Jacob Abbott, and was associated with him in the management of Abbott’s Institute, New York City, and in the preparation of his series of brief historical biographies. He is best known, however, 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. Dr Abbott graduated at Bowdoin College in 1825, prepared for the ministry at Andover Theological Seminary, and between 1830 and 1844, when he retired from the ministry, preached successively at Worcester, Roxbury and Nantucket, Massachusetts. He died at Fair Haven, Connecticut, on the 17th of June 1877. He was a voluminous writer of books on Christian ethics, and of histories, which now seem unscholarly and untrustworthy, but were valuable in their time in cultivating a popular interest in history. In general, except that he did not write juvenile fiction, his work in subject and style closely resembles that of his brother, Jacob Abbott. ABBOTT, LYMAN (1835– ), American divine and author, was born at Roxbury, Massachusetts, on the 18th of December 1835, the son of Jacob Abbott. He graduated at the University of New York in 1853, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1856; but soon abandoned the legal profession, and, after studying theology with his uncle, J. S. C. Abbott, was ordained a minister of the Congregational Church in 1860. He was pastor of a church in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1860–1865, and of the New England Church in New York City in 1865–1869. From 1865 to 1868 he was secretary of the American Union (Freedman’s) Commission. In 1869 he resigned his pastorate to devote himself to literature. He was an associate editor of Harper’s Magazine, was editor of the Illustrated Christian Weekly, and was co-editor (1876–1881) of The Christian Union with Henry Ward Beecher, whom he succeeded in 1888 as pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn. From this pastorate he resigned ten years later. From 1881 he was editor-in-chief of The Christian Union, renamed The Outlook in 1893; this periodical reflected his efforts toward social reform, and, in theology, a liberality, humanitarian and nearly unitarian. The latter characteristics marked his published works also.

His works include Jesus of Nazareth (1869); Illustrated Commentary on the New Testament (4 vols., 1875); A Study in Human Nature (1885); Life of Christ (1894); Evolution of Christianity (Lowell Lectures, 1896); The Theology of an Evolutionist (1897); Christianity and Social Problems (1897); Life and Letters of Paul (1898);