Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/121

 E R F E 11 111 was begun iu concert with a friend, Miss Claveriug, grand-daughter of the duke of Argyll ; but this lady soon relinquished her share in the work, and Marriage, com pleted by Miss Ferrier alone, appeared in 1818, when its authoress was between five and six and thirty. It was followed in 1821 by The Inheritance, a better constructed and more mature work ; and the last and perhaps best of her novels, Destiny, dedicated to Sir Walter Scott (who himself undertook to strike the bargain with the publisher Cadcll), appeared in 1831. All these novels were published anonymously ; but, with their clever portraiture of contem porary Scottish life and manners, and even recognizable caricatures of some social celebrities of the day, they could not fail to become popular north of the Tweed, and many were the conjectures as to their authorship, which was by some attributed to Scott himself. Thus, in the A r octes Ambrosiame (November 1826), the Shepherd mentions The Jnlieritance, and adds, &quot; which I aye thought was written by Sir Walter, as weel s Marriage, till it spunked out that it was written by a leddy.&quot; Scott himself gave Miss Ferrier a very high place indeed among the novelists of the day. In his diary (March 27, 1826), criticizing a new work which he had been reading, he says, &quot; The women do this better. Edgeworth, Ferrier, Austen, have all given portraits of real society far superior to anything man, vain man, has produced of the like nature.&quot; Another friendly recognition of Miss Ferrier is to be found at the conclusion of his Tales of my Landlord, where Scott calls her his &quot; sister shadow,&quot; the still anonymous author of &quot;the very lively work entitled Marriage.&quot; Lively, indeed, all Miss Ferrier s works are, written in a clear, brisk English, and with an inexhaustible fund of humour. It is true her books portray the eccentricities, the follies, and foibles of the society in which she lived, carica turing with terrible exactness its hypocrisy, boastfulness, greed, affectation, and undue subservience to public opinion. Yet Miss Ferrier wrote less to reform than to amuse. With an honest aversion to these things herself, she wished, not to lecture her readers, but to laugh with them. In this she is less like Miss Edgeworth than Miss Austen. Miss Edgeworth was more of a moralist ; her wit is not so in voluntary, her caricatures not always so good-natured. But Miss Austen and Miss Ferrier were genuine humorists, and with Miss Ferrier especially a keen sense of the ludicrous was always dominant. She could be serious, she could be pathetic, she could even touch some of the finest chords iu human nature ; but she never interfered with the depths of human wickedness and misery. She liked best to laugh; she turned naturally to the humorous, and her humorous characters are always her best. It was no doubt because she felt this that in the last year of her life she regretted not having devoted her talents mere exclusively to the ser vice of religion, not taking into account then how much good she had involuntarily done, and how much harmless pleasure she had distributed about her ; for, if she was not a moralist, neither was she a cynic ; and her wit, even where it is most caustic, is never uncharitable. Miss Ferrier lived till 1854, more than twenty years after the publication of her last work. The most pleasant picture that we have of her is in Lockhart s description of her visit to Scott in May 1831. She was asked there to help to amuse the dying master of Abbotsford, who, when he was not writing Count Robert of Paris, would talk as brilliantly as ever. Only sometimes, before he had reached the point in a narrative, &quot; it would seem as if some internal spring had given way.&quot; He would pause, and gaze blankly and anxiously round him. &quot;I noticed,&quot; says Lockhart, &quot; the delicacy of Miss Ferrier on such occasions. Her sight was bad, and she took care not to use her glasses when he was speaking ; and she affected to be also troubled with deafness, and would say, Well, I am getting as dull as a post ; I have not heard a word since you said so-and- so, being sure to mention a circumstance behind that at which he had really halted. He then took up the thread with his habitual smile of courtesy as if forgetting his case entirely in the consideration of the lady s infirmity.&quot; Miss Ferrier died, November 5, 1854, at her house No. 38 Albany Street, Edinburgh. She left among her papers a short unpublished article, entitled &quot; Recollections of Visits to Ashestiel and Abbotsford.&quot; This is her own very inte resting account of her long friendship with Sir Walter Scott, from the date of her first visit to him and Lady Scott at Ashestiel, where she went with her father in the autumn of 1811, to her last sad visit to Abbotsford in 1831. It con tains some impromptu verses written by Scott in her album at Ashestiel. FERRO, or HIEERO. See CANARY ISLANDS, vol. iv. p. 800. FERROL, a seaport town of Spain, province of Corufia, is situated on the northern arm of the bay of Relanzos, 12 miles N.E. of Coruna. The town is divided into three parts, the old,- the new, and the &quot;esteiro.&quot; The old town is very irregular, but the new town is a parallelogram of seven streets in width, by nine in length, intersecting each other at right angles. It has two squares, in one of which is a fountain, erected in 1812 in honour of Cosme Churruca, a naval officer killed at Trafalgar. Ferrol is invisible from the sea, and is so strongly fortified that it is considered im pregnable. Its arsenal is one of the three largest in the kingdom, and along with the wharves and dockyards ex ceeds 23 acres in extent. The dockyard is divided into a smaller outward and a larger inward portion. Behind the inner dock are the dwellings of the operatives, and in the north angle are the foundries, ropeworks, and magazines. On the dockyard 15 ships of the line can be built at one time. Connected with the arsenal is a school for engineer ing, and also a marine observatory. The harbour, which is one of the best in Europe, is deep, capacious, and secure; but the entrance, which is a strait about two miles in length, admits at the narrowest part only one ship at a time, and is commanded by forts Palma and San Felipe on opposite sides. The chief industries of the town are rope- making, sail-making, and the manufacture of leather. It contains two hospitals, three large churches, a monastery, a consistory, a prison, and a naval barracks with accom modation for GOOO men. The population in 1860 was 21,120. Until 1752 Ferrol was a mere fishing village, but in that yenr Ferdinand VI. began to fit it for becoming an arsenal. In 1799 the English made a fruitless attempt to capture it, but on the 4th November 1805 they defeated the French ileet in front of it and compelled its surrender. On the 27th January 1809 it was through treachery delivered over to the French, but it was vacated by them on the 22d July of the same year. On the 15th July 1823 another blockade was begun by the French, and it surrendered to them on the 27th August. FERRY, in the law of England, is the right of carrying by boat across a river or arm of the sea, and of exacting a reasonable toll for such carriage. It belongs, like the right of fair and market, to the class of rights called in English law franchises. Its origin must be by statute, royal grant, or prescription. It is wholly unconnected with the ownership or occupation of land, so that the owner of the ferry need not be proprietor of the soil on either side of the water over which the right is exercised. He is bound to maintain safe and suitable boats ready for the use of the public, and to employ fit persons as ferry men. As a correlative of this duty he lias a right of actior, not only against those who evade or refuse payment of toll when it is due, but against those also who disturb bis franchise by setting up a new ferry, so as to diminish his