831 



WELLS, CHARLES WILLIAM. 



WENCESLAUS. 



0)2 



by the death of Lord Grenville, January 12, 1834, and on the 29th of 

 the same month tho Duke of Wellington was unanimously elected to 

 succeed him. The ceremony of installation took place ou the 9th of 

 June following, and was attended by a vast concourse of persons. 



On the 8th of December 1834 Sir Robert Peel was gazetted as First 

 Lord of the Treasury, and the Duke of Wellington as Secretary of 

 State for Foreign Affairs. This first Peel ministry terminated ou the 

 8th of April 1835. Lord Melbourne, who had succeeded Earl Grey as 

 premier, again resumed that office. William IV. having died on the 

 20th of June 1837, was succeeded by Queen Victoria, and Lord Mel- 

 bourne retained the office of premier till August 30, 1841, when he 

 resigned, and Sir Robert Peel again became prime minister. The 

 Duke of Wellington accepted a seat in tho Cabinet, but without taking 

 office. After the death of Lord Hill, December 10, 1842, the Duke of 

 Wellington succeeded him as Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, and 

 continued uninterruptedly to perform the duties of that office till the 

 termination of his life. The Duke's last political difficulty occurred 

 in 1846, when tho repeal of the Corn-Laws had become a necessity. 

 Sir Robert Peel saw the necessity : he knew that there would be a 

 large majority in the Commons, but success in the Lords depended on 

 the influence of the Duke, who refused to support the measure, and 

 Sir Robert Peel resigned office. The Queen then sent for Lord John 

 Russell, but he was unable to form a ministry, and Sir Robert Peel 

 waa recalled. The Duke then saw the necessity of the repeal. He 

 put aside his own opinion, stood by his friend Sir Robert, told the 

 Lords distinctly that they must yield to the Queen and the Commons, 

 and by his influence and hia proxies passed the measure through the 

 House of Lords, May 28, 1846, by a majority of 47. 



The Duke of Wellington died Sept. 14, 1852, at Walmer Castle, 

 aged 83, seeming as if he had fallen asleep in his chair, after a slight 

 illness in the morning. He was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, London, 

 under the dome, and beside the remains of Lord Nelson. The funeral 

 was public, and similar to that of Nelson, which took place Jan. 9, 1 806 ; 

 and during the procession to the cathedral, Nov. 9, the deep sympathy 

 of all classes of the people for the loss of the greatest of Britain's mili- 

 tary commanders was as strongly manifested as it had been at the 

 funeral of her greatest naval hero. He was succeeded in his title and 

 estates as Duke of Wellington by his eldest son Arthur, Marquis of 

 Douro, who was born in 1807. The Duchess of Wellington died in 

 1831. 



The leading characteristic of the Duke of Wellington's mind seems 

 to have been sound good pense, based on patient examination into 

 details, and a careful study of the whole in order to arrive at a right 

 conclusion. He made allowance for contingencies, passions, interests, 

 estimated things at their real value, and was rarely wrong. His great 

 principle of action seems to have been a sense of duty rather than the 

 stimulus of glory or ambition. His manner was in general singularly 

 calm. He never seemed to be elated by success, nor depressed by 

 discouragements or difficulties. Quickness of decision and energy of 

 execution marked his character during the whole of his life. He was 

 not inflexible however in carrying out his plans as a commander or his 

 views as a statesman ; but altered his course when new information or 

 a change of circumstances offered a sufficient reason for a change of 

 determination. He was regular in his attendance in the House of 

 Lords, and spoke frequently. His influence over the members of that 

 House was such as probably has never been possessed by any other 

 individual. As a public speaker, his delivery, without being fluent or 

 rapid, was emphatic and vehement. In private life he was simple and 

 methodical. He was temperate in the use of food and wine, slept on a 

 hair-mattrass on a simple camp-bedstead, was an early riser, and was 

 indefatigable in his attention to business. He seldom made use of a 

 carriage, and continued to ride on horseback when from the infirmities 

 of age he could no longer sit erect, and he also used the exercise of 

 walking even to the last, though his steps were slow and faltering. 



WELLS, CHARLES WILLIAM, physician, was born at Charles- 

 town in South Carolina, U.S., in May, 1757. His father and mother 

 were natives of Scotland, and emigrated in 1755. He was sent by his 

 father to Dumfries and afterwards to Edinburgh, for the purpose of 

 being educated, and returned to Carolina in 1771. The revolutionary 

 movements shortly after commenced in America, and his father, who 

 espoused the royalist party, was obliged to flee to Great Britain, where 

 he was followed by his son in 1775. He then went to Edinburgh, and 

 commenced the study of medicine, and here formed an intimacy with 

 David Hume, and William Miller, afterwards lord Glenlee. After 

 acting as surgeon in a Scotch regiment in Holland, he graduated at 

 Edinburgh, in 1780. He returned to America the same year, and 

 with the remains of his father's and brother's property went to 

 St. Augustine, in East Florida, where he conducted a newspaper in his 

 brother's name. On the preliminaries of peace being signed in 1783, 

 he again went to Charlestown, where he was seized and thrown into 

 prison, and continued there for three months, having escaped further 

 confinement by paying a ransom. On returning to St. Augustine he 

 was shipwrecked, and only saved his life by swimming on shore. He 

 returned to London and commenced practice as a physician in 1785. 

 In 1790 he was appointed physician to the Finsbury Dispensary, and 

 in 1795 was elected assistant-physician to St. Thomas's Hospital, and 

 full physician in 1800. 



Dr. Wells was a fellow of the Royal Society, and published the 



following papers in their 'Transactions:'!, In 1795, 'On the 

 Influence which incites the Muscles of Animals to contract, in M. Gal- 

 vani's Experiments.' 2, In 1797. ' Experiments on the Colour of the 

 Blood.' 3, In 1811, ' Experiments and Observations on Vision.' In 

 the 2nd and 3rd volumes of the ' Transactions of a Society for the 

 Promotion of Medical and Surgical Knowledge,' he published several 

 papers on various departments of medicine. His contributions to 

 newspapers and magazines were very numerous, embracing politics, 

 general literature, and biography. His last work, and the one on. 

 which his reputation as a philosopher must re&t, is his ' Essay upon 

 Dew,' which was published in 1814. The demonstration of the nature 

 of dew in this work is an extremely fine application of the principles 

 of induction in philosophical inquiry, and has deservedly given the 

 author a wide-spread reputation. The experiments involved in this 

 inquiry were such as to lead him to expose himself frequently for long 

 intervals together to the night-air. The consequence was, that it 

 brought on attacks of disease from which he never ultimately re- 

 covered, and he died on the 18th of September 1817. Dr. Wells was 

 an accurate observer and an acute reason er, and all his productions 

 bear marks of a superior mind. In an edition of his works published 

 in 1821 is an autobiography written a short time previous to his 

 decease, from which this notice has been chiefly drawn. 



WELSTED, LEONARD, a small poet, or versifier, of the last 

 century, was sprung from a reputable Leicestershire family, and was 

 the grandson, through his mother, of the lawyer and antiquary 

 Thomas Staveley, known for his curious volume against popery, 

 entitled ' The Romish Horseleech.' Welsted was born at Abinaton in 

 Northamptonshire, in 1689, and was educated at Westminster School. 

 The common statement that he afterwards studied at both universities 

 rests upon no better authority than a satirical pamphlet, called ' The 

 Characters of the Times,' published, in 8vo, in 1728, which has been 

 sometimes ridiculously attributed to Welsted himself, who is one of 

 the persons satirised in it. Early in life, by the interest of the Earl of 

 Clare (afterwards Duke of Newcastle), he obtained a situation in the 

 Ordnance-Office, which he held till his death, in 1747. Welsted's 

 earliest production is supposed to have been a short poem of some 

 humour, called ' The Apple- Pie, a Tale,' which may be read in Nichols's 

 ' Select Collection of Poems,' with notes, iii. 78. But this was originally 

 attributed to Dr. William King (of whom there is a notice in John- 

 sou's 'Lives of the Poets'); nor was it claimed for Welsted till 1735, 

 when he was asserted to be the author in a periodical publication 

 called ' The Weekly Chronicle ' (for 16th August), with the remark, 

 that King had " let it pass some years, without contradiction as his 

 own." King died in 1712. Others of Welsted's poems appeared in 

 1709, 1710, &c. One of his literary performances is a translation of 

 Longinus from the French ; another is a comedy, entitled ' The Dis- 

 sembled Wanton ; or, My Son, get Money,' which was brought out 

 with considerable success at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1726, and printed 

 the same year. But what has chiefly been the means of preserving 

 Welsted's name is a piece called ' The Triumvirate, or a letter in verse 

 from Palsemon to Celia at Bath," which he published in 1718. For 

 this, which, according to one of the notes on the-'Dunciad,' "wa8 

 meant for a satire on Mr. Pope and some of his friends," the luckless 

 author was immortalised ten years after in the third book of that 

 poem, in the following parody on Denham's well-known lines : 



" Flow, "Welsted, flow ! like thine inspirer, beer ; 

 Though stale, not ripe ; though thin, yet never clear ; 

 So sweetly mawkish, and so smoothly dull ; 

 Heady, not strong ; o'erflowing, though not full." 



But there is a note of Pope's on the prologue to the Satires, which 

 implies that there was also a personal cause for Pope's auimosity 

 against him. He is also noticed in the second book, and in the 

 treatise ' Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry,' published the year before 

 the ' Dunciad.' A note on the passage quoted above affirms that 

 Welsted was one of Sir Robert Walpole's anonymous writers, and that 

 it appeared from the Report of the Secret Committee of 1742 that ho 

 had at one time received 500Z. for his secret services in that capacity. 

 Welsted was twice married : first, to a daughter of Henry Purcell, the 

 eminent musical composer ; secondly, to a sister of Bishop Walker, the 

 defender of Londonderry, who survived him. 



WENCESLA'US, or WENZEL, Emperor, or more correctly King, 

 of Germany, the eldest sou of the Emperor Charles IV., of the house 

 of Luxemburg, was born in 1361. Charles intended to intrust the 

 education of Wenceslaus to his personal friend Petrarch, but the poet 

 declined the honour, and the young prince was instructed by other 

 teachers. The system of education, which was planned by the emperor 

 himself, was bad ; and the consequences were that Wenceslaus became 

 unfit for the high post for which he was destined by his birth. At the 

 age of two, he was crowned king of Bohemia ; at twelve, he was 

 invested with the margraviate of Brandenburg; and at eixteeu, he was 

 chosen and crowned king of the Romans. From the accession of Ru- 

 dolph I., in 1273, no Roman king had been chosen, the electors thinking 

 that the election of a successor to the reigning emperor was incompa- 

 tible with the freedom of election. They objected to the youth of 

 Wenceslaus, but Charles answered them that the sons of kings had 

 received from God souls much more enlightened than those of 

 other men, and as their education was likewise more carefully con- 



