Sebastian Evans

Born on 2 March 1830 at Market Bosworth, Leicestershire, he was the youngest son of Arthur Benoni Evans by his wife Anne, daughter of Captain Thomas Dickinson, R.N. Sir John Evans was his elder brother and the poet Anne Evans his elder sister. After early education under his father at the Market Bosworth grammar school, he won a scholarship in 1849 at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1853 and proceeding M.A. in 1857. On leaving university, Evans became a student at Lincoln's Inn on 29 January 1855, but was shortly appointed secretary of the Indian Reform Association, and in that capacity was the first man in England to receive news of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. That year he resigned the secretaryship and turned a talent for drawing to use, becoming manager of the art department of the glass-works of Messrs. Chance Bros. & Co., at Oldbury, near Birmingham. This position he held for ten years and designed many windows, including one depicting the Robin Hood legend for the International Exhibition of 1862. Evans knew leading literati of the mid-Victorian period and was later a close friend of Edward Burne-Jones, who illustrated his history of the "Graal". Towards the end of his life he retired to Abbot's Barton, Canterbury, where he died on 19 December 1909. ==Works==

While an undergraduate Evans published a volume of sonnets on the death of the Duke of Wellington (1852). His other published collections of poems were: • ''Brother Fabian's Manuscripts and other Poems'', 1865. • Songs and Etchings, 1871. • In the Studio, a Decade of Poems, 1875. He translated Francis of Assisi's 'Mirror of Perfection' (1898) and Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (1904), and with his son Francis ''Lady Chillingham's House Party'', adapted from Édouard Pailleron's ''Le Monde où l'on s'ennuie'' (1901). In 1881 he re-edited his father's Leicestershire Words for the English Dialect Society. Evans was a translator in verse and prose from mediaeval French, Latin, Greek, and Italian. In 1898 he published The High History of the Holy Graal (new edit. 1910 in ''Everyman's Library), a version of the old French romance of Perlesvaus, as well as an original study of the legend in In Quest of the Holy Graal''. Evans exhibited at the Royal Academy and elsewhere pictures in oils, water colours and black and white, and practised wood-carving, engraving and book-binding. ==Family==

In 1857 Evans married Elizabeth, youngest daughter of Francis Bennett-Goldney, one of the founders of the London Joint Stock Bank. Of two sons, Sebastian and Francis, the latter took the name Francis Bennett-Goldney, and went into politics. ==Notes==