Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/429

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Younger
405
Yule

a little volume (in the metre of ‘Don Juan’), entitled ‘Thoughts as they Rise’ (Glasgow, 12mo). The title is a good one, suggesting, as it does, the lack of metrical finish conspicuous in work by no means devoid of inspiration. After ‘sweethearting’ and love lyrics, he held the next best thing in the world to be fly-fishing, and he turned his intimate knowledge of this last subject to good account when he dated from St. Boswells Green in September 1839 his ‘River Angling for Salmon and Trout, more particularly as practised in the Tweed and its Tributaries’ (Edinburgh, 1840, 16mo, two editions; revised, Kelso, 1860, 16mo, and 1864, 8vo; it was highly praised in the ‘Field’ for its ‘practical’ value, and good copies of the first edition are still at a premium). He was as keen an observer of men as of fish, and he became courted alike as the most proficient Scots angler and as the ‘Tweedside Gnostic.’ He laughed at the chartist movement as chimerical, but poverty was to him almost a religion; he both hated and despised the rich, nor was he at any pains to conceal his views. Of a duke to whom it was once suggested he might appeal, he said roughly, ‘We have no natural sympathies, save eating, that is, when a poor man has to eat.’ A typical cobbler in many respects, he thought deeply but rather crossly. His perception of lyrical poetry and natural beauty was exquisite, but he had a disgust, partly envious, for ‘the classics,’ and he looked on the Waverley novels as ‘old piper stories,’ ‘dwarf and witch tales,’ and monstrous caricatures of Scottish manners. The ‘baronial hall’ was his abhorrence. In 1847, being then sixty-two, he won a prize for an essay on ‘The Temporal Advantage of the Sabbath … in relation to the Working Classes’ (published as ‘The Light of the Week,’ London, 1849, 12mo, 1851 and 1853, 8vo), an admirable example of the sententious essay, lit up by vivid illustrations such as a practised speaker or preacher might envy. He went up to London to receive his prize of 15l. at the hands of the Earl of Shaftesbury, and on his return was banqueted by the neighbourhood, in which he was extremely popular. About 1849 he was appointed village postmaster, but the routine work proved beyond his patience, and in January 1856 he threw up the post and returned to cobbling. He died very poor, but honest and industrious to the last, on 18 June 1860, and was buried beside his ‘Nannie’ (often celebrated in his writings; she died in 1856) in St. Boswells kirkyard. He left some rich materials for a ‘memoir’ of himself, to which he had given the title ‘Obscurities in Private Life developed; or Robinson Crusoe untravelled.’ These were recast into an ‘Autobiography of John Younger,’ and published at Kelso in 1881. His best thoughts are contained in this and in two bulky volumes of correspondence which remain unpublished. Good engraved portraits of Younger are prefixed both to the ‘Autobiography’ and to ‘River Angling.’

[Younger's Autobiography (bringing his life down to about 1820), and Biographical Sketch prefixed to River Angling, 1860; Henderson's My Life as an Angler, 1879; Westwood and Satchell's Bibliotheca Piscatoria, 1883, p. 244; Scotsman, 20 June 1860; Sunderland Times, 22 June 1860; Winks's Illustrious Shoemakers, 1883, pp. 319–21; Hindes Groome's Gazetteer of Scotland, s.v. ‘St. Boswells;’ Allibone's Dict. of Engl. Lit.; Book Prices Current, 1899; Brit. Mus. Cat.]

T. S.


YPRES, WILLIAM of, erroneously styled Earl of Kent (d. 1165?). [See William.]


YULE, Sir HENRY (1830–1889), geographer, born 1 May 1820 at Inveresk, near Edinburgh, was youngest son of Major William Yule (1761–1839) of the East India Company's service and of his wife Eliza, daughter of Paterson of Braehead in Ayrshire. The family was settled for several generations as tenant-farmers at Dirleton in East Lothian. The name is Scandinavian. Major Yule, Sir Henry's father, was versed in oriental literature. He retired from India in 1806 with a valuable collection of Persian and Arabic MSS. which was presented by his sons to the British Museum. He issued privately in 1832 a lithographed edition of the ‘Apothegms of Ali, the son of Abu Talib’ in the Arabic with an old Persian version and an English translation by himself.

Henry Yule was educated at the high school in Edinburgh, and was afterwards a pupil, first with Henry Parr Hamilton [q. v.], and then with James Challis [q. v.], subsequently Plumian professor at Cambridge. His fellow-pupils included John Mason Neale [q. v.] and Harvey Goodwin the mathematician, afterwards bishop of Carlisle, who has described Yule's intellectual development as extraordinary for his years. He had,the bishop adds, ‘considerable geometrical ingenuity,’ but ‘showed much more liking for Greek plays and for German than for mathematics.’ Having acquired a competent acquaintance with the classics, he went to Addiscombe in 1837, and, passing out head of the college in 1839, went for a year to Chatham. In 1840 he was appointed to the Bengal Engineers. His first appointment in India was among the Kásias, a primitive Mongo-