Francesco.—The Iago of Massinger’s Duke of Milan.
Francesca da Rimini (frȧn-ches´kȧ dȧ rē´mē-nē).—A dramatic poem by James Henry Leigh Hunt published in 1816. Francesca was the daughter of Guido da Polenta, Lord of Ravenna, in the latter part of the thirteenth century, and was married to Lanciotto, son of Malatesta da Rimini, who, discovering her criminal intercourse with his brother, revenged himself by putting them both to death. Her story forms an episode in Dante’s Inferno.
Frankenstein (fräng´ken-stīn) (or, the Modern Prometheus).—A novel by Mrs. Shelley, published in 1818. It was commenced in the summer of 1816, when Byron and the Shelleys were residing on the banks of the Lake of Geneva, and when, “during a week of rain, having amused themselves with reading German ghost stories, they agreed at last to write something in imitation of them. ‘You and I,’ said Lord Byron to Mrs. Shelley, ‘will publish ours together.’ He then began his tale of the Vampire;” but “the most memorable result,” writes Moore, “of their storytelling compact, was Mrs. Shelley’s wild and powerful romance of Frankenstein, one of those original conceptions that take hold of the public mind at once and forever.”
The hero of the book, a native of Geneva, and a student, constructs a monster of grewsome human remains and gives it life by galvanism. The monster feels that he is unlike all other human beings, and in revenge for the injury inflicted upon him by his creator, murders his friend, his brother, and his bride, and finally seeks out Frankenstein himself, with a view to wreaking a similar revenge on him. The hero, however, happily escapes his enemy, who retires to the utmost extremity of the globe, in order to put an end to his miserable life; and Frankenstein himself falls ill and dies on his way home after his last final flight from the monstrosity whom he has himself brought into the world.
Freeport, Sir Andrew.—The name of one of the members of the imaginary club under whose direction the Spectator was professedly published. He is represented as a London merchant of great eminence and experience, industrious, sensible and generous.
French Revolution, The.—A history, in three parts, by Thomas Carlyle, published in 1837, and described by Lowell as “a series of word-pictures, unmatched for vehement power, in which the figures of such sons of earth as Mirabeau and Danton loom gigantic and terrible as in the glare of an eruption; their shadows swaying far and wide, grotesquely awful. But all is painted by eruptive flashes in violent light and shade. There are no half tints, no gradations, and we find it impossible to account for the continuance in power of less Titanic actors in the tragedy, like Robespierre, on any theory, whether of human nature or of individual character, supplied by Mr. Carlyle.”
Friar Lawrence.—The Franciscan monk who attempted to befriend the lovers in Romeo and Juliet.
Friar Tuck.—Chaplain and steward of Robin Hood. Introduced by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe. He is a self-indulgent, combative Falstaff, a jolly companion to the outlaws in Sherwood forest.
Friday.—Robinson Crusoe’s faithful man Friday pictured by Defoe.