George Stronach

“ KNOX, JOHN (1720–1790) , Scottish philanthropist, a native of Scotland, born in 1720, followed for many years the trade of bookseller in the Strand, London, retired with a large fortune, and from 1764 until his death devoted himself to the improvement of the fisheries and manufactures of Scotland. Between 1764 and 1775 he made sixteen tours through Scotland. The Highland Society of London gave him every assistance and encouragement, and he was a leading member of the British society formed in Scotland for extending the fisheries and improving the sea-coast. ”

“ VAUTROLLIER, THOMAS (d. 1587?) , printer, was a Huguenot of learning, who came to London from Paris or Rouen about the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. He was admitted a brother of the Stationers' Company on 2 Oct. 1564, and probably worked as a servant to some printer till 1570, when he established a press in Blackfriars. ”

“ Among the measures introduced and carried by the lord advocate were an act to abolish religious tests in the Scottish universities, acts to amend the law of entail, to amend the bankruptcy laws, to diminish the number of sheriffs, and to amend the law of evidence. In February 1854 he introduced a bill to establish a uniform system of valuation and rating in Scotland, and an education bill for Scotland, which was rejected. ”

“ Lee. The Baconians are not quite so cocksure, however, of anything as Mr. Lee is of everything. All they ask is that the Shakspereans will study the whole question, freeing themselves from pre-conceived ideas, and then meet the arguments seriatim. This is just what Mr. Sidney Lee will not or cannot do. Magna est Veritas, and it is truth only that the Baconians seek. Other men of "habits of mind" as scholarly as Mr. Lee's have been engaged in the Shakespeare "mystery" all their lives, and have found difficulties in reconciling the life of the actor with the works of the dramatist ”

“ Successful as a pioneer, Fender's sound commercial instincts always stood him in good stead as an organiser and administrator. In his later years he devoted much attention to the electric lighting of London, being chairman of the Metropolitan Electric Supply Company, the largest undertaking of its kind in this country. ”

“ Lee how he accounts for the fact that two such diverse men in Elizabethan literature used the same expressions, aired the same ideas, the one the counterpart in prose of the other in verse—"the one an aristocrat, the other a plebeian; the one the first subject of the realm, the other an actor; the one highly educated, the other uneducated; the one the son of scholarly parents, the other the son of illiterates, who could not write their names"? ”

“ Kirkwood left Linlithgow and went, in March 1690, to Edinburgh, where he lived for a year without employment. He then started a school ‘with above sevenscore of noblemen and gentlemen's sons.’ He tells us that he afterwards refused the professorship of humanity in St. Andrews, a call to Duns, another call to be professor of Greek and Latin at Jamestown, Virginia, the mastership of the free school at Kimbolton, and of a free school in Ireland. He also states that he was invited to return to Linlithgow school. ”

“ In 1873 he began to lecture on the practice of physic in the extramural school, and at once became the most popular teacher on medicine outside the university walls, introducing many practical improvements in the methods of instruction. ”

“ The positions and circumstances of Shakspere and Bacon were as wide apart as the poles, and yet their thoughts, their expressions, their mistakes are identical. "There is an understanding," says Carlyle, "manifested in the construction of Shakespeare's plays equal to that in Bacon's Novum Organum." "The wisdom displayed in Shakespeare," says Hazlitt, "was equal in profoundness to the great Lord Bacon's Novum Organum.'" Well might Lowell speak of "the apparition known to moderns as Shakespeare;" and Coleridge write: "What! are we to have miracles in sport? ”

“ In the general assembly of the church of Scotland, 1580, a recommendation was made to the king and council that Vautrollier should receive a ‘licence and priviledge’ as a printer in Scotland. The exact date of his arrival in Edinburgh is not known. He brought a large supply of books with him, and traded as a bookseller for several years before he started a press. ”

“ In 1862 he was appointed pathologist to the infirmary, and lecturer on pathology at Surgeons' Hall, as well as a physician to the sick children's hospital. In 1866 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. During these early years Stewart worked incessantly, made observations of real and permanent value on the symptoms and pathology of waxy kidney, and wrote papers on various kidney conditions, on dilatation of the bronchi, on acute atrophy of the liver, and on other subjects. ”

“ Guesses and fictions he substitutes for what he calls "facts." One of his most extraordinary "facts" is that Mr. Donnelly "pretended to have discovered among Bacon's papers a numerical cypher which enabled him to pick out letters appearing at certain intervals in the pages of Shakespeare's First Folio, and the selected letters formed words and sentences categorically stating that Bacon was author of the plays." This precious criticism contains only three mis-statements! Mr. Lee can never have seen The Great Cryptogram, and I challenge him to prove his dicta in the passage I have quoted. ”

“ VEITCH, JAMES, Lord Eliock (1712–1793) , Scottish judge, son of William Veitch of Boigend and Eliock, writer to the signet, Edinburgh, was born on 25 Sept. 1712. After serving an apprenticeship with his father, he was called to the Scottish bar on 15 Feb. 1738. Shortly afterwards he visited the continent, where he became a favourite of Frederick the Great at his court. On returning to Scotland, he kept up a correspondence with his majesty. ”

“ Collins abuses Baconians for believing that "the man of Stratford" did not possess that knowledge. That the author of the plays knew Latin, French and Italian is proved by the fact that the plots and characters of several of his plays are drawn from works in these languages of which also no English translations were then available. But possibly Mr. Lee agrees with the Shakespearean critic Dennis, who wrote, "He who allows Shakespeare had learning, and a learning with the ancients, ought to be looked upon as a detractor from the glory of Great Britain." ”

“ She married John Kincaid of Warriston, who was a man of influence in Edinburgh, being nearly connected with the ancient family of Kincaid of that ilk in Stirlingshire, and possessed of extensive estates in Midlothian and Linlithgowshire. Owing to alleged maltreatment, the young wife conceived a deadly hatred for her husband, and a nurse who lived in her house urged her to take revenge. ”

“ Mackay s works have had a very large circulation, and are characterised by the best qualities of the old school of geographical text-books, being full of facts systematically arranged, scrupulously verified, and illustrated by brief notes of general interest. In one instance he made an attempt to fasten the elementary facts on the minds of young scholars by producing a 'Rhyming Geography' (1873; new edit. 1876) , some of the stanzas of which, once read, are difficult to forget. ”

“ Lee's pre-conceived idea a single jot, although Oliver Wendell Holmes declared: "The wonderful parallelisms [in Shakespeare and Bacon] must and will be wrought out and followed out to such fair conclusions as they shall be found to force honest minds to adopt. ... Our Shakespeare scholars hereabouts are very impatient whenever the question of the authorship of the Plays and Poems is even alluded to. ”

“ He set up the first trip-hammer ever constructed in Massachusetts, and he succeeded in spreading the manufacture of edge-tools through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. In 1748 he made five hundred muskets for the province of Massachusetts Bay, believed to have been the first weapons of the kind produced in the country. During the revolution he was actively employed in casting iron and brass cannon and cannon-balls, for which, in conjunction with a Frenchman, he constructed a foundry. ”

“ In 1885 he was defeated for North Ayrshire by the Hon. H. F. Elliot. In 1886 he became assessor to St. Andrews University, and in 1887 a commissioner to inquire into the working of the Scotch Education Act. Shortly afterwards he joined the fishery board of Scotland, and was granted the degree of LL.D. from Glasgow University in consideration of his scholarly attainments. In December 1887 he was appointed permanent under-secretary for Scotland, an office in which he rendered most valuable assistance in the promotion of Scottish business, notably the Local Government (Scotl.) ”

“ Asquith had in his eye when he said:—"Few things are more interesting to watch than the attempts of scholars and critics to reconstruct the life of a man at once so illustrious and so obscure as the greatest of our poets," and that the work of a Shakespeare biographer is "not so much an essay in biography as in the more or less scientific use of the biographic imagination." The "less" applies admirably to Mr. Sidney Lee's so-called Life of William Shakespeare.
George Stronach. ↑ "With Shakespeare marriage is a divine institution; with Bacon it is a business matter. ”

“ Glass, Elliot, & Co. and the Gutta Percha Company for the manufacture of a new cable of greater strength and value than any previous one; but the latter company refused to proceed without a guarantee. It was at this crisis that Fender offered his personal security for a quarter of a million sterling, when the two companies were amalgamated under the name of the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, with Fender as chairman. Not only was the new cable successfully laid in 1866, but the broken one was recovered. ”

“ He matriculated at the university of Glasgow in 1753, and graduated M.A. in 1756. In 1757 Oliphant entered as a divinity student, and attended for four sessions the classes in the hall of the secession church at Glasgow. He left that body, however, owing to a difference with some of the professors, and joined the communion of the church of Scotland. After receiving his license in 1760 from the presbytery of Kintyre, he officiated for a time in the Gorbals Church, Glasgow, from which he was promoted in 1764 to be minister of the chapel-of-ease in Kilmarnock. ”

“ Shakespeare married young and for love."—Rolfe. [Even the marriage is doubtful, as "no record of the solemnisation of Shakespeare's marriage survives" (p. 191) although Mrs. Stopes maintains:—" But they were married somehow, and William probably brought home his fatherless bride to his father's house."] Bacon's marriage was, at any rate, respectable, and as to the "business" part of it, his wife brought him £220 per annum, to which Bacon added £500 a year, which is more than the "love-mated " but wife-deserting and money-grabbing Shakspere did. ”

“ Chemistry had always been one of his favourite studies, and his scientific knowledge enabled him to take a leading part in the proceedings of the referees, which resulted in the discovery of the process still in use for the elimination of sulphur and ammonia impurities from gas. ”

“ Lord Moncreiff married, on 12 Sept. 1834, Isabella, only daughter of Robert Bell, procurator of the church of Scotland, and sheriff of Berwickshire and Haddingtonshire, and by her (who died on 19 Dec. 1881) he had five sons and two daughters. His eldest son, Henry James, now Baron Moncreiff, sat since 1888, under the title of Lord Well wood, as a lord of session, an office which, as Lord Moncreiff, he still retains.
[Scotsman, 29 April 1890; Addison's Glasgow Graduates; Scottish Law Review, June 1895 (with portrait) ; Burke's Peerage; Men of the Time.] ”

“ In order to annoy him, his opponents in Kilmarnock—the moderates, as they were termed—employed a man to walk the streets of Dumbarton, proclaiming as he went ‘the whole works of the Rev. James Oliphant, presentee to this parish, for the small charge of two pence.’ Oliphant lost his sight shortly before his death, which took place on 10 April 1818. He was twice married: first to Elizabeth Hay, on 27 Nov. 1764 (she died on 29 March 1780, leaving a daughter Charlotte, who married Captain David Denny of Glasgow) ”

“ The only plays possible after i5ii were The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII., in which even Mr. Lee can trace only a few scenes that might have been Shakespeare's. And these he magnifies into "drafts," describing two plays as "more than one play."
Mr. Lee in his "plain and practical" Life fails to give a copy of Shakspere's will. Has he read it? He tells us that the testator devised the tenement in Chapel Lane—which is never mentioned in the will—to his daughter Judith, and all the lands except this tenement to his other daughter, whereas he left no tenement to Judith. ”

“ The elder son of the second marriage, Henry Denison, died in 1881; the younger, John Cuthbert Denison-Pender, is managing director, director, or chairman of numerous telegraph and cable companies. The younger daughter, Marion Denison, married Sir George William des Vœux, governor of Hong Kong, 1887-91.
[Electrician, xxxvii. 334-5, 379-80, 469; Men of the Time; New Monthly Mag. vol. cxvii. (with portrait) ; Biograph, iii. 55-62, new ser. i. 268-276.] ”