Farrar was born in Bombay, India, and attended King William's College on the Isle of Man, King's College, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1852, he was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal for Poetry at Cambridge. He was a master at Harrow School for a few years before becoming the headmaster of Marlborough College from 1871 to 1876. Farrar spent much of his career at Westminster Abbey. He was named canon there in 1876, then rector of St Margaret's (the church next door), and finally archdeacon of the Abbey in 1883. He then became Dean of Canterbury and a chaplain in ordinary, which meant he was associated to the Royal Household. Farrar was a classics professor and comparative philologist who applied Charles Darwin's branching descent theory to the relationships between languages, sparking a lengthy argument with anti-Darwinian linguist Max M�ller. While Farrar was never convinced by the evidence for evolution in biology, he had no theological objections to the concept and argued that it should be studied only on scientific grounds. Farrar was elected to the Royal Society in 1866, following Darwin's recommendation for his philological work. When Darwin died in 1882, then-Canon Farrar assisted in obtaining church permission for him to be buried at Westminster Abbey and delivered the funeral sermon.