Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/349

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D.N.B. 1912–1921

doctorates, his appointment as the first Gifford lecturer at St. Andrews (1888), and the freedom of his native town of Selkirk, conferred upon him in 1889. Merton College elected him an honorary fellow in 1890. He was more than once urged, by Sir Francis Doyle and Matthew Arnold among others, to stand for the professorship of poetry at Oxford, but always refused. He died of angina pectoris after a few hours' illness at Banchory, Aberdeenshire, on 20 July 1912, and is buried in the cathedral precincts at St. Andrews. He had no children. His portrait was painted in 1887 by Sir W. B. Richmond, and is reproduced in volume i of his Collected Poems (1923). A memorial by Percy Portsmouth in Selkirk free library contains a profile portrait in relief. He was averse from any biography of himself or from publication of his letters, and there will be no authorized Life.

Specimens of a Bibliography of Lang's works (1889), a Catalogue of a ‘Lang’ Library (1898), and a collection of verses addressed to Lang by his contemporaries, called A New Friendship's Garland (1899), were privately printed at Dundee by C. M. Falconer. There is also in the Dundee reference library a manuscript collection, in one volume, of all the poems written by Lang and uncollected by him, between the years 1863 and 1904, transcribed by C. M. Falconer and revised by Lang.

[The Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 1912 [G. S. G.]; notice by G. Saintsbury in Oxford Magazine, 17 October 1912; commemorative address by W. P. Ker, 28 November 1912, in Proceedings of the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature, 1913; R. S. Rait, G. Murray, S. Reinach, and J. H. Millar in commemorative article, Quarterly Review, April 1913; G. Saintsbury in Quarterly Review, October 1923; private information.]

G. S. G.


LASCELLES, Sir FRANK CAVENDISH (1841–1920), diplomatist, was born in London 23 March 1841, the fifth son of the Hon. William Saunders Sebright Lascelles, third son of Henry Lascelles, second Earl of Harewood [q.v.]. His mother was Lady Caroline Georgiana, eldest daughter of George Howard, sixth Earl of Carlisle [q.v.]. He was educated at Harrow, and entered the diplomatic service in 1861. After serving for two years as an attaché in Madrid, he was transferred to Paris in 1864 and promoted to third secretary in 1865. Lascelles saw the Second Empire at its apogee at the time of the great Paris international exhibition of 1867. He then went on to Berlin, where he remained till the end of the Franco-Prussian War. He returned to Paris in February 1871 after the siege, and remained at the embassy under (Sir) Edward Baldwin Malet [q.v.] during the Commune, while the ambassador, Lord Lyons, accompanied the French government to Versailles. Proceeding in the same year, with the rank of second secretary, to Copenhagen, he was transferred in succession to Rome (1873), Washington (1876), and Athens (1878), and he was three times sent to take charge of the agency and consulate-general in Cairo during the last two stormy years of the Khedive Ismail's reign, which ended in Ismail's enforced abdication in 1879.

In recognition of his services in Egypt Lascelles was promoted at the end of 1879 to be agent and consul-general in Bulgaria, which country the Treaty of Berlin (1878) had virtually detached from the Ottoman Empire and constituted into an autonomous principality with Prince Alexander of Battenberg as its first ruler. He was still at Sofia when, in September 1885, a bloodless revolution at Philippopolis led to the union of Eastern Rumelia with the principality and to the first war between Bulgaria and Serbia. In the following year, owing to the hostility of the Tsar Alexander III, who resented the independent attitude of Bulgaria, Prince Alexander was kidnapped by a pro-Russian faction of the Bulgarian army, and in spite of the popular enthusiasm which greeted his return, was driven to abdicate and leave Bulgaria. Lascelles had won Lord Salisbury's approval by giving Prince Alexander his full support throughout this difficult period; he had also earned the special goodwill of Queen Victoria, who warmly favoured the prince's suit for the hand of her granddaughter, Princess Charlotte of Prussia, though Bismarck was vehemently opposed to it.

Lascelles was promoted to be British minister to Roumania at the beginning of 1887, and to Persia in 1891. In 1894 he was appointed British ambassador to Russia, and at the end of 1895 he was specially selected to succeed Sir Edward Malet who had been ambassador in Berlin for twelve years. Lascelles held this embassy for the same length of time as his predecessor, during a period when German ambitions and the menace of Germany's naval expansion led to a growing estrangement between her and Great Britain. The first public revelation of this was the famous telegram dispatched by William II to President Kruger in January 1896, only a few days after the new ambas--

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