877 



YALDEN, THOMAS. 



YARRELL, WILLIAM. 



878 



ing. It is the statement of Jocher that his salary as professor was 

 insufficient for his maintenance, and that he was therefore obliged to 

 work for the booksellers ; but in the ' Biographic Universelle ' (art. 

 ' Xylander,' by Weiss) it is maintained that his salary was sufficient. 

 If he was drunken and extravagant, it may very well have happened 

 that he was always poor and glad to work for money. In the elegiac 

 versus prefixed to his translation of Dion Cassius, and placed at the 

 end of his dedicatory epistle, he complains of his poverty. This dedi- 

 cation is dated November 1, 1557, and in the following year he was 

 appointed professor at Heidelberg. The greater part of his works 

 appeared after his appointment at Heidelberg. Xylander was also 

 named by the elector palatine Frederic, secretary to the convocation 

 at Maulbrunn, which was held for the settlement of some differences 

 among the Protestants. He is said to have received money for his 

 services from this prince, and also from the Duke of Wiirtemberg. 

 It seems probable therefore that, with all these means and what he 

 received for his literary labours, if he was poor after he went to Heidel- 

 berg, it must have been through his own improvidence. 



Xylander's works are very numerous. A large part of them consists 

 of translations from Greek and Latin authors. His translations into 

 Latin are 1, Plutarch's Works, Basel, 1561-70. 2, Strabo, accom- 

 panied with the Greek text, fol., Basel, 1571. 3, ' The Chronicle of 

 Cedrenus,' with the Greek text, fol., Basel, 1565. 4, Tryphiodorus, in 

 Latin verse ; he is said to have made this version when he was sixteen 

 years of age. 4, The work of Michael Psellus, ' De Quatuor Disciplinis 

 Mathematicis,' with notes, 8vo, Basel, 1556. 5, 'The History of Dion 

 Cassius,' fol., Basel, 1558, with the Latin translation of Xiphilinus by 

 W. Blanc, which he corrected. [XIPHILINUS.] 6, 'The Meditations of 

 the Emperor Marcus Aurelius,' 8vo, Zurich, 1558 ; 12mo, Lyon, 1559 ; 

 Greek and Latin, 8vo, Basel, 1568. To this last and corrected edition 

 Xylander added the versions of Antoninus Liberalis, the work gene- 

 rally attributed to Apollouius Dyecolus, and which here appears under 

 the Latin title of ' Historiso Commentitise ; ' Phlegon Trallianus, and 

 Antigonus Carystius ' De Mirabilibus ' ('Icrropiiav flapaS6^oiv 'Swaywyfy. 

 7, Diophantus, with the Greek text, fol., Basel, 1575. This work was 

 dedicated to the Duke of Wiirtemberg, who made him a present of 

 500 reichsthaler on the occasion. Though the translation is not free 

 from faults, it is acknowledged to have great merit, considering the 



difficulty of the subject and the haste with which it was made. 

 8, Xylander made the first German translation of the first six books 

 of Euclid, Basel, 1562. This is a very rare work : the seventh, eighth, 

 and ninth books had been already translated into German by Johann 

 Schey,bel, 4to, Tubingen, 1555. 9, Polybius, into German. 10, The 

 New Testament, into German. 



Xylander commenced an edition of Pausanias, which was completed 

 by Sylburg, and published in 1583. The Greek text of the edition of 

 Stephanus Byzantinus, printed by Oporinus, fol., at Basel, 1568, was 

 amended by Xylander, but, as it appears, without the aid of manu- 

 scripts. He also superintended the edition of Theocritus, 8vo, Basel, 

 1558, which contains the Greek scholia and notes by Xylander; and 

 the edition of Horace, 8vo, Heidelberg, 1575. 



Among his other labours, he drew up ' Institutiones Aphoristic 

 Logicse Aristotelis, ita scripto ut adoleecentibus proponi commode, 

 eorumque ad Aristotelea percipienda acuere ingenium et memoriam 

 juvare possint,' a work intended for the instruction of youth and as an 

 introduction to the study of Aristotle, 4to, Heidelberg, 1577. The 

 writer of this article has never seen the ' Institutiones,' and can only 

 conjecture that it somewhat resembles in plan and design Trendelen- 

 burg's ' Elementa Logices Aristotelicae,' 2nd ed., Berlin, 1842. Tren- 

 delenburg however has not mentioned Xylander's work in his preface, 

 from which we conclude that he was either unacquainted with it, or 

 that it is not exactly what we might conjecture it to be. 



There are other works of Xylander, but the above are the principal. 

 The Life of this laboi'ious scholar deserves and requires to be written 

 with more care than it has been yet. The ordinary accounts are at 

 variance with one another : some of them attribute to him works that 

 he had either little to do with or perhaps nothing at all ; and some 

 omit several works that are undoubtedly his. Xylander was a man of 

 great ability, well versed in Greek and Roman literature, both as to 

 the matter and the language. He wrote Latin with great ease and 

 correctness, and his versions are generally correct. 



(Jocher, Allyem. Gelehrten Lexicon, probably not very accurate; 

 Bayle, Dict. t art. ' Xylander,' a very insufficient article ; Biog. Univ., 

 art. ' Xylander,' by Weiss, is a much better and more complete article, 

 and it contains the references to the original authorities for Xylander's 

 Life and Works.) 



Y 



VALDEN, THOMAS, was, according to Jacob, in his 'Lives of the 

 - Poets,' the ' Biographia Britannica,' and Dr. Johnson, in his ' Lives 

 of the Poets,' the youngest of the six sons of Mr. John Yalden, of 

 Sussex, and was born in the city of Exeter in 1671. Anthony Wood 

 however, who calls him not Yalden, but Youlding, gives a very differ- 

 ent account : in his 'Athena) Oxonienses' (iv. 601), that writer says, 

 " Thomas Youlding, a younger son of John Youlding, sometime a page 

 of the presence and groom of the chamber to Prince Charles, after- 

 wards a sufferer for his cause, and an exciseman in Oxon, after the 

 restoration of King Charles II., was born in the parish of St. John 

 Baptist, in Oxon, on the 2nd day of January 1669 (in which parish I 

 myself also received my first breath)." This account, though it has 

 not been generally adopted, appears to derive some confirmation from 

 the existence in the ante-chapel of Merton College of an epitaph 

 recording the interment there of "John Youlding, gentleman, who 

 was page," &c., as in Wood : he is stated to have died on the 25th of 

 July 1670, in his fifty-ninth year. Thomas Yalden, or Youlding, was 

 admitted of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1690 ; and among his con- 

 temporaries there were Sacheverell and Addison, with both of whom 

 he continued to live in friendship ever afterwards. Yalden made his 

 first public appearance as a poet in an ' Ode to St. Cecilia's Day,' which 

 was published, set to music by Purcell, in 1693. This was followed in 

 1695 by another performance, entitled ' On the Conquest of Namur, a 

 Pindaric Ode inscribed to his most sacred and victorious Majesty.' 

 He had taken his degree of M.A. with great applause in 1694, and 

 having then entered into holy orders, he succeeded Atterbury in 1698, 

 as lecturer at Bridewell Hospital. In 1700 he published a poem enti- 

 tled ' The Temple of Fame,' on the death of the Duke of Gloucester, 

 and was the same year made Fellow of his college. Soon after this he 

 was presented by the college to a living in Warwickshire, which admit- 

 ted of being held along with his fellowship, and he was also elected 

 moral philosophy reader, " an office," says the ' Biographia Britannica,' 

 " for life, endowed with a handsome stipend and peculiar privileges." 

 On the accession of Queen Anne, he wrote another poem, in celebra- 

 tion of that event ; and from this time he is said to have unreservedly 

 sided with the high church party. In 1706 he was taken into the 

 family of the Duke of Beaufort ; and the following year he took his 

 degree of D.D. Some time after this he was presented to the adjoin- 

 ing rectories of Chalton and Cleanville in Hertfordshire ; and he is 

 said to have also enjoyed the sinecure prebends of Deans, Harris, and 

 Pendles, in Devonshire. Upon the discovery of what is called Bishop 

 Atttrbury's plot, in 1722, Yalden was taken up, and his papers were 

 seized ; but it soon appeared that although he was intimate with Kelly, 

 the bishop's secretary, and in the habit of corresponding with him, the 



treason, if it existed, was certainly in no part of his concoction or 

 privity. All that is further related of him is, that he died on the 16th 

 of July 1736, having to the end of his life, as Dr. Johnson expresses 

 it, " retained the, friendship and frequented the conversation of a very 

 numerous and splendid set of acquaintance." Besides the two early 

 poems that have been mentioned, he published, in 1702, a collection 

 of fables in verse, under the title of ' ^Esop at Court,' which is reprinted 

 in the fourth volume of Nichols's Collection, pp. 198-226; 'An Essay 

 on the Character of Sir Willoughby Ashton, a poem,' folio, 1704 ; ' On 

 the Mines of Carbery Price, a poem ; ' ' A Hymn to Darkness,' in imi- 

 tation or emulation of Cowley, which Johnson considers to be his best 

 performance, and to be " imagined with great vigour, and expressed 

 with great propriety ; " ' A Hymn to Light,' which, in the estimation 

 of the same authority, " is not equal to the other ; " a translation of 

 the second book of Ovid's ' Art of Love ; ' and many other translations 

 and short original pieces. Many of Yalden's productions in verse are 

 printed in the third and fourth volumes of Dryden's (or Tonson's) col- 

 lection of ' Miscellany Poems ; ' a number of them are also given in 

 the more recent collections of the ' English Poets,' by Johnson and 

 A. Chalmers ; but some appear to be lost, or at least they eluded the 

 research of Mr. Nichols (see his Collection, iii. 167, and iv. 198). 

 Yalden, who had considerable humour, is the author of a paper in 

 prose, entitled ' Squire Bickerstaff detected, or the Astrological Impos- 

 tor Convicted ; ' it is a pretended answer to Swift's attacks on Par- 

 tridge, the astrologer, which he drew up on Partridge's application, 

 and which that person is said to have printed and published without 

 any perception of the joke. It is printed in most of the editions of 

 Swift's works. 



YARRELL, WILLIAM, a celebrated British naturalist, was born in 

 Duke-street, St. James's, Westminster, in June 1784. His father was 

 a newspaper agent, and to his business his son succeeded, and continued 

 in it till nearly the close of his life. When young he was fond of 

 field-sports and was not only the first shot, but the first angler of his 

 day. The accurate habit indicated by his superiority in these sports, 

 was the prevailing character of his mind. He was not only the first 

 shot in London but for many years the first sporting authority upon 

 all that had to do with the habits, locality, and appearance of British 

 birds. It was the same with fish. Not satisfied with obtaining his 

 prey, he examined it, preserved it, and described it, and thus became 

 a naturalist. At the age of forty he became a Fellow of the Liuntean 

 Society, and from this time he gave up the gun and rod for the pen. 

 From 1825 to the year of his death 1856, he became a constant con- 

 tributor to the Transactions of the Linnsean Society and the various 

 Journals devoted to natural history literature. His earlier papers 



