annotated text of Chrysostom’s Homiliae in Matthaeum (Cambridge, 1839), and some years later he contributed to Pusey’s Bibliotheca Patrum (Oxford, 1838–1870), a similarly treated text of Chrysostom’s homilies on Paul’s epistles. The scholarship displayed in both of these critical editions is of a very high order. In 1839 he had accepted the living of Great Saxham, in Suffolk, and in 1842 he was presented by his college to the rectory of Reepham in Norfolk. He resigned in 1863, and settled at Norwich, in order to devote his whole time to study. Twelve years later he completed the Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt (Oxford, 1867–1875), now well known as Field’s Hexapla, a text reconstructed from the extant fragments of Origen’s work of that name, together with materials drawn from the Syro-hexaplar version and the Septuagint of Holmes and Parsons (Oxford, 1798–1827). Field was appointed a member of the Old Testament revision company in 1870.
FIELD, HENRY MARTYN (1822–1907), American author
and clergyman, brother of Cyrus Field, was born at Stockbridge,
Massachusetts, on the 3rd of April 1822; he graduated at
Williams College in 1838, and was pastor of a Presbyterian
church in St Louis, Missouri, from 1842 to 1847, and of a Congregational
church in West Springfield, Massachusetts, from
1850 to 1854. The interval between his two pastorates he spent
in Europe. From 1854 to 1898 he was editor and for many years
he was also sole proprietor of The Evangelist, a New York
periodical devoted to the interests of the Presbyterian church.
He spent the last years of his life in retirement at Stockbridge,
Mass., where he died on the 26th of January 1907.
He was the author of a series of books of travel, which achieved
unusual popularity. His two volumes descriptive of a trip
round the world in 1875–1876, entitled From the Lakes of Killarney
to the Golden Horn (1876) and From Egypt to Japan (1877),
are almost classic in their way, and have passed through more
than twenty editions. Among his other publications are The
Irish Confederates and the Rebellion of 1798 (1850), The
History of the Atlantic Telegraph (1866), Faith or Agnosticism?
the Field-Ingersoll Discussion (1888), Old Spain and New Spain
(1888), and Life of David Dudley Field (1898).
He is not to be confused with another Henry Martyn Field, the gynaecologist, who was born in 1837 at Brighton, Mass., and graduated at Harvard in 1859 and at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City in 1862; he was professor of Materia Medica and therapeutics at Dartmouth from 1871 to 1887 and of therapeutics from 1887 to 1893.
FIELD, JOHN (1782–1837), English musical composer and
pianist, was born at Dublin in 1782. He came of a musical
family, his father being a violinist, and his grandfather the
organist in one of the churches of Dublin. From the latter the
boy received his first musical education. When a few years
later the family settled in London, Field became the favourite
pupil of the celebrated Clementi, whom he accompanied to
Paris, and later, in 1802, on his great concert tour through France,
Germany and Russia. Under the auspices of his master Field
appeared in public in most of the great European capitals,
especially in St Petersburg, and in that city he remained when
Clementi returned to England. During his stay with the great
pianist Field had to suffer many privations owing to Clementi’s
all but unexampled parsimony; but when the latter left Russia
his splendid connexion amongst the highest circles of the capital
became Field’s inheritance. His marriage with a French lady
of the name of Charpentier was anything but happy, and had
soon to be dissolved. Field made frequent concert tours to the
chief cities of Russia, and in 1820 settled permanently in Moscow.
In 1831 he came to England for a short time, and for the next
four years led a migratory life in France, Germany and Italy,
exciting the admiration of amateurs wherever he appeared in
public. In Naples he fell seriously ill, and lay several months in
the hospital, till a Russian family discovered him and brought
him back to Moscow. There he lingered for several years till
his death on the 11th of January 1837. Field’s training and the
cast of his genius were not of a kind to enable him to excel in
the larger forms of instrumental music, and his seven concerti
for the pianoforte are now forgotten. Neither do his quartets
for strings and pianoforte hold their own by the side of those
of the great masters. But his “nocturnes,” a form of music
highly developed if not actually created by him, remain all but
unrivalled for their tenderness and dreaminess of conception,
combined with a continuous flow of beautiful melody. They
were indeed Chopin’s models. Field’s execution on the pianoforte
was nearly allied to the nature of his compositions, beauty and
poetical charm of touch being one of the chief characteristics
of his style. Moscheles, who heard Field in 1831, speaks of his
“enchanting legato, his tenderness and elegance and his beautiful
touch.”
FIELD, MARSHALL (1835–1906), American merchant, was
born at Conway, Massachusetts, on the 18th of August 1835.
Reared on a farm, he obtained a common school and academy
education, and at the age of seventeen became a clerk in a dry
goods store at Pittsfield, Mass. In 1856 he removed to Chicago,
where he became a clerk in the large mercantile establishment
of Cooley, Wadsworth & Company. In 1860 the firm was reorganized
as Cooley, Farwell & Company, and he was admitted
to a junior partnership. In 1865, with Potter Palmer (1826–1902)
and Levi Z. Leiter (1834–1904), he organized the firm of
Field, Palmer & Leiter, which subsequently became Field,
Leiter & Company, and in 1881 on the retirement of Leiter
became Marshall Field & Company. Under Field’s management
the annual business of the firm increased from $12,000,000 in
1871 to more than $40,000,000 in 1895, when it ranked as one of
the two or three largest mercantile establishments in the world.
He died in New York city on the 16th of January 1906. He had
married, for the second time, in the previous year. Field’s
public benefactions were numerous; notable among them being
his gift of land valued at $300,000 and of $100,000 in cash to the
University of Chicago, an endowment fund of $1,000,000 to
support the Field Columbian Museum at Chicago, and a bequest
of $8,000,000 to this museum.
FIELD, NATHAN (1587–1633), English dramatist and actor,
was baptized on the 17th of October 1587. His father, the
rector of Cripplegate, was a Puritan divine, author of a Godly
Exhortation directed against play-acting, and his brother
Theophilus became bishop of Hereford. Nat. Field early
became one of the children of Queen Elizabeth’s chapel, and in
that capacity he played leading parts in Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s
Revels (in 1600), in the Poetaster (in 1601), and in Epicoene (in
1608), and the title rôle in Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois (in 1606).
Ben Jonson was his dramatic model, and may have helped his
career. The two plays of which he was author were probably
both written before 1611. They are boisterous, but well-constructed
comedies of contemporary London life; the earlier
one, A Woman is a Weathercock (printed 1612), dealing with the
inconstancy of woman, while the second, Amends for Ladies
(printed 1618), was written with the intention, as the title
indicates, of retracting the charge. From Henslowe’s papers
it appears that Field collaborated with Robert Daborne and
with Philip Massinger, one letter from all three authors being a
joint appeal for money to free them from prison. In 1614
Field received £10 for playing before the king in Bartholomew
Fair, a play in which Jonson records his reputation as an actor
in the words “which is your Burbadge now?... Your best
actor, your Field?” He joined the King’s Players some time
before 1619, and his name comes seventeenth on the list prefixed
to the Shakespeare folio of 1623 of the “principal actors in all
these plays.” He retired from the stage before 1625, and died
on the 20th of February 1633. Field was part author with
Massinger in the Fatal Dowry (printed 1632), and he prefixed
commendatory verses to Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess.
His two plays were reprinted in J. P. Collier’s Five Old Plays (1833), in Hazlitt’s edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays, and in Nero and other Plays (Mermaid series, 1888), with an introduction by Mr A. W. Verity.
FIELD, STEPHEN JOHNSON (1816–1899), American jurist,
was born at Haddam, Connecticut, on the 4th of November
1816. He was the brother of David Dudley Field, Cyrus W.
