[419] James Franklin (1697-1735) was born in Boston, Mass., and was sent to London to learn the printer's trade. He returned in 1717 and started a printing house. Benjamin, his brother, was apprenticed to him but ran away (1723). James published the New England Courant (1721-1727), and Benjamin is said to have begun his literary career by writing for it.
[420] James Hodder was a writing master in Tokenhouse Yard, Lothbury, in 1661, and later kept a boarding school in Bromley-by-Bow. His famous arithmetic appeared at London in 1661 and went through many editions. It was the basis of Cocker's work. (See Vol. I, page 42, note 4 {24}.) It was long thought to have been the first arithmetic published in America, and it was the first English one. There was, however, an arithmetic published much earlier than this, in Mexico, the Sumario compendioso ... con algunas reglas tocantes al Aritmética, by "Juan Diaz Freyle," in 1556.
[421] Henry Mose, Hodder's successor, kept a school in Sherborne Lane, London.
[422] Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort (1774-1857), F.R.S., was hydrographer to the Navy from 1829 to 1855. He prepared an atlas that was printed by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
[423] Antoine Sabatier (1742-1817), born at Castres, was known as the Abbé but was really nothing more than a "clerc tonsuré." He lived at Court and was pensioned to write against the philosophers of the Voltaire group. He posed as the defender of morality, a commodity of which he seems to have possessed not the slightest trace.
[424] Maffeo Barberini was pope, as Urban VIII, from 1623 to 1644. It was during his ambitious reign that Galileo was summoned to Rome to make his recantation (1633), the exact nature of which is still a matter of dispute.
[425] This Baden Powell (1796-1860) was the Savilian professor of geometry (1827-1860) at Oxford.
[426] "Memoirs of the famous bishop of Chiapa, by which it appears that he had butchered or burned or drowned ten million infidels in America in order to convert them. I believe that this bishop exaggerated; but if we should reduce these sacrifices to five million victims, this would still be admirable."
[427] Alfonso X (1221-1284), known as El Sabio (the Wise), was interested in astronomy and caused the Alphonsine Tables to be prepared. These table were used by astronomers for a long time. It is said that when the Ptolemaic system of the universe was explained to him he remarked that if he had been present at the Creation he could have shown how to arrange things in a much simpler fashion.
[428] George Richards (c. 1767-1837), fellow of Oriel (1790-1796), Bampton lecturer (1800), Vicar of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, Westminster (1824), and a poet of no mean ability.