FORTUNATUS, VENANTIUS HONORIUS CLEMENTIANUS (530-609), bishop of Poitiers, and the chief Latin poet of his time, was born near Ceneda in Treviso in 530. He studied at Milan and Ravenna, with the special object of excelling as a rhetorician and poet, and in 565 he journeyed to France, where he was received with much favour at the court of Sigbert, king of Austrasia, whose marriage with Brunhild he celebrated in an _epithalamium_. After remaining a year or two at the court of Sigbert he travelled in various parts of France, visiting persons of distinction, and composing short pieces of poetry on any subject that occurred to him. At Poitiers he visited Queen Radegunda, who lived there in retirement, and she induced him to prolong his stay in the city indefinitely. Here he also enjoyed the friendship of the famous Gregory of Tours and other eminent ecclesiastics. He was elected bishop of Poitiers in 599, and died about 609. The later poems of Fortunatus were collected in 11 books, and consist of hymns (including the _Vexilla regis prodeunt_, Englished by J.M. Neale as "The royal banners forward go"), epitaphs, poetical epistles, and verses in honour of his patroness Radegunda and her sister Agnes, the abbess of a nunnery at Poitiers. He also wrote a large poem in 4 books in honour of St Martin, and several lives of the saints in prose. His prose is stiff and mechanical, but most of his poetry has an easy rhythmical flow. An edition of the works of Fortunatus was published by C. Brower at Fulda in 1603 (2nd ed., Mainz, 1617). The edition of M.A. Luschi (Rome, 1785) was afterwards reprinted in Migne's _Patrologiae cursus completus_, vol. lxxxviii. See the edition by Leo and Krusch (Berlin, 1881-1885). There are French lives by Nisard (1880) and Leroux (1885). FORTUNE, ROBERT (1813-1880), Scottish botanist and traveller, was born at Kelloe in Berwickshire on the 16th of September 1813. He was employed in the botanical garden at Edinburgh, and afterwards in the Royal Horticultural Society's garden at Chiswick, and upon the termination of the Chinese War in 1842 was sent out by the Society to collect plants in China. His travels resulted in the introduction to Europe of many beautiful flowers; but another journey, undertaken in 1848 on behalf of the East India Company, had much more important consequences, occasioning the successful introduction into India of the tea-plant. In subsequent journeys he visited Formosa and Japan, described the culture of the silkworm and the manufacture of rice paper, and introduced many trees, shrubs and flowers now generally cultivated in Europe. The incidents of his travels were related in a succession of interesting books. He died in London on the 13th of April 1880.