removed to the rectory of Winterborne Came, to which he was presented by his old friend, Captain Seymour Dawson Damer. Here he worked continuously at verse and prose, contributing largely to the magazines. A new series of Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect appeared in 1862, and he was persuaded in 1868 to publish a series of Poems of Rural Life in Common English, which was less successful than his dialect poems. These latter were collected into a single volume in 1879, and on the 7th of October 1886 Barnes died at Winterborne Came. His poetry is essentially English in character; no other writer has given quite so simple and sincere a picture of the homely life and labour of rural England. His work is full of humour and the clean, manly joy of life; and its rusticity is singularly allied to a literary sense and to high technical finish. He is indeed the Victorian Theocritus; and, as English country life is slowly swept away before the advance of the railway and the telegraph, he will be more and more read for his warm-hearted and fragrant record of rustic love and piety. His original and suggestive books on the English language, which are valuable in spite of their eccentricities, include:—Se Gefylsta: an Anglo-Saxon Delectus (1849); A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect (1864); An Outline of English Speech-Craft (1878); and A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect (Dorchester, 1886).
See The Life of William Barnes, Poet and Philologist (1887), by his daughter, Lucy E. Baxter, who is known as a writer on art by the pseudonym of Leader Scott; and a notice by Thomas Hardy in the Athenaeum (16th of October 1886).
BARNET, a residential district in the mid or St Albans parliamentary division of Hertfordshire, England; 10 m. N. of London, served by the main line and branches of the Great Northern railway. The three chief divisions are as follows:—(1) Chipping or High Barnet, a market town and urban district (Barnet), pop. (1901) 7876. The second epithet designates its position on a hill, but the first is given it from the market granted to the abbots of St Albans to be kept there, by Henry II. Near the town, round a point marked by an obelisk, was fought in 1471 the decisive battle between the houses of York and Lancaster, in which the earl of Warwick fell and the Lancastrians were totally defeated. The town is on the Great North Road, on which it was formerly an important coaching station. A large annual horse and cattle fair is held. (2) East Barnet, 2 m. S.E. of Chipping Barnet, has an ancient parish church retaining Norman portions, though enlarged in modern times. Pop. of East Barnet Valley urban district, 10,094. (3) New Barnet lies 1 m. E. by S. from Chipping Barnet.
Friern Barnet, in the Enfield parliamentary division of Middlesex, lies 3 m. S. of Chipping Barnet. Pop. of urban district, 11,566. The prefix recalls the former lordship of the manor possessed by the friary of St John of Jerusalem in Clerkenwell, London. Friern Barnet adjoins Finchley on the north and Whetstone on the south, the whole district being residential.
BARNETT, JOHN (1802–1890), English musical composer, son of a Prussian named Bernhard Beer, who changed his name on settling in England as a jeweller, was born at Bedford, and at the age of eleven sang on the Lyceum stage in London. His good voice led to his being given a musical education, and he soon began writing songs and lighter pieces for the stage. In 1834 he published a collection of Lyrical Illustrations of the Modern Poets, His Mountain Sylph—with which his name is chiefly connected—received a warm welcome when produced at the Lyceum on August 25, 1834, as the first modern English opera: and it was followed by another opera Fair Rosamund in 1837, and by Farinelli in 1839. He had a large connexion as a singing-master at Cheltenham, and published Systems and Singing-masters (1842) and School for the Voice (1844). He died on the 16th of April 1890.
His nephew, John Francis Barnett (1837–), son of John’s brother, Joseph Alfred, also a professor of music, carried on the traditions of the family as a composer and teacher. He obtained a queen’s scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music, and developed into an accomplished pianist, visiting Germany to study in 1857 and playing at a Gewandhaus concert at Leipzig in 1860. He came into notice as a composer with his symphony in A minor (1864), and followed this with a number of compositions for orchestra, strings or pianoforte. His cantata The Ancient Mariner was brought out at Birmingham in 1867, and another, Paradise and the Peri, in 1870, both with great success. In 1873 his most important work, the oratorio The Raising of Lazarus, was written, and in 1876 produced at Hereford. Many other cantatas, pianoforte pieces, &c. were composed by him, and successfully brought out; and he took an active part as a professor in the work of the Guildhall School of Music and Royal College of Music.
BARNETT, SAMUEL AUGUSTUS (1844–), English clergyman and social reformer, was born at Bristol on the 8th of February 1844, the son of Francis Augustus Barnett, an iron manufacturer. After leaving Wadham College, Oxford, in 1866, he visited the United States. Next year he was ordained to the curacy of St Mary’s, Bryanston Square, and took priest’s orders in 1868. In 1872 he became vicar of St Jude’s, Commercial Street, Whitechapel, and in the next year married Henrietta Octavia Rowland, who had been a co-worker with Miss Octavia Hill and was no less ardent a philanthropist than her husband. Mr and Mrs Barnett worked hard for the poor of their parish, opening evening schools for adults, providing them with music and reasonable entertainment, and serving on the board of guardians and on the managing committees of schools. Mr Barnett did much to discourage outdoor relief, as tending to the pauperization of the neighbourhood. At the same time the conditions of indoor relief were improved, and the various charities were co-ordinated, by co-operation with the Charity Organization Society and the parish board of guardians. In 1875 Arnold Toynbee paid a visit, the first of many, to Whitechapel, and Mr Barnett, who kept in constant touch with Oxford, formed in 1877 a small committee, over which he presided himself, to consider the organization of university extension in London, his chief assistants being Leonard Montefiore, a young Oxford man, and Frederick Rogers, a member of the vellum binders’ trade union. The committee received influential support, and in October four courses of lectures, one by Dr S. R. Gardiner on English history, were given in Whitechapel. The Barnetts were also associated with the building of model dwellings, with the establishment of the children’s country holiday fund and the annual loan exhibitions of fine art at the Whitechapel gallery. In 1884 an article by Mr Barnett in the Nineteenth Century discussed the question of university settlements. This resulted in July in the formation of the University Settlements Association, and when Toynbee Hall was built shortly afterwards Mr Barnett became its warden. He was a select preacher at Oxford in 1895–1897, and at Cambridge in 1900; he received a canonry in Bristol cathedral in 1893, but retained his wardenship of Toynbee Hall, while relinquishing the living of St Jude’s. In June 1906 he was preferred to a canonry at Westminster, and when in December he resigned the wardenship of Toynbee Hall the position of president was created so that he might retain his connexion with the institution. Among Canon Barnett’s works is Practicable Socialism (1888, 2nd ed. 1894), written in conjunction with his wife.
BARNFIELD, RICHARD (1574–1627), English poet, was born at Norbury, Staffordshire, and baptized on the 13th of June 1574. His obscure though close relationship with Shakespeare has long made him interesting to students and has attracted of late years further attention from the circumstance that important discoveries regarding his life have been made. Until recently nothing whatever was known about the facts of Barnfield’s career, whose very existence had been doubted. It was, however, discovered by the late Dr A. B. Grosart that the poet was the son of Richard Barnfield (or Barnefield) and Maria Skrymsher, his wife, who were married in April 1572. They resided in the parish of Norbury, in Staffordshire, on the borders of Salop, where the poet was baptized on the 13th of June 1574. The mother died in giving birth to a daughter early in 1581, and her unmarried sister, Elizabeth Skrymsher, seems to have devoted herself to the care of the children. In November 1589 Barnfield matriculated at Brasenose College, Oxford, and took his degree in
