he has brought to bear upon the execution of his nearly three hundred coppers, ensure, and have indeed already compassed, the acceptance of him as a master among masters in that art of etching. Rembrandt's, Van Dyck's, Méryon's, Claude's, are, in fact, the only names which there is full warranty for pronouncing beside his own.
No account of Whistler's career would be complete without a reference to his supremely controversial personality. In 1878 he brought a libel action against Ruskin for his criticisms in Fors Clavigera (1877). Ruskin had denounced one of his nocturnes at the Grosvenor Gallery as “a pot of paint flung in the public face.” After a long trial, Whistler was awarded a farthing damages. His examination caused much interest, especially in artistic circles, on account of his attitude in vindication of the purely artistic side of art; and it was in the course of it that he answered the question as to how long a certain “impression” had taken him to execute by saying, “All my life.” His eccentricity of pose and dress, combined with his artistic arrogance, sharp tongue, and bitter humour, made him one of the most talked-about men in London, and his mots were quoted everywhere. He followed up his quarrel with Ruskin by publishing a satirical pamphlet, Whistler v. Ruskin: Art v. Art Critics. In 1885 he gave his Ten o'Clock Lecture in London, afterwards embodied in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). The substance of this flippantly written and amusing outburst was an insistence on the liberty of the artist to do what was right in his artistic eyes, and the inability of the public or the critics to have any ideas about art worth considering at all. In 1895 another quarrel, with Sir William Eden, whose wife's portrait Whistler had painted, but refused to hand over, came into the courts in Paris; and Whistler, though allowed to keep his picture, was condemned in damages. In later years he lived mainly in Paris, but he returned to live in London in 1902; and he died on the 17th of July 1903 at 74 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. In 1888 he had married Mrs Goodwin, widow of E. W. Goodwin, the architect, and daughter of J. B. Philip, the sculptor; she died in 1896, leaving no children. In 1886 he became president of the Royal Society of British Artists (a title at which afterwards he scoffed); and he took a leading part later in founding the International Art Society, of which he was the first president. His “Nocturne in blue and silver” was presented to the National Gallery after his death by the National Art Collection Fund.
See also T. R. Way and G. R. Dennis, The Art of J. McN. Whistler (1901); F. Wedmore, Mr Whistler's Etchings; Théodore Duret, Histoire de J. McN. Whistler et de son œuvre (1904); Mortimer Menpes, Whistler as I knew him; W. G. Bowdoin, Whistler, the Man and his Work (1902); Catalogue of Memorial Exhibition (International Society, 1905); and E. R. and J. Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler (1905). (F. We.)
WHISTON, WILLIAM (1667-1752), English divine and mathematician, was born on the 9th of December 1667 at Norton in Leicestershire, of which village his father was rector. He was educated privately, partly on account of the delicacy of his health, and partly that he might act as amanuensis to his father, who had lost his sight. He afterwards entered at Clare College, Cambridge, where he applied himself to mathematical study, and obtained a fellowship in 1693. He next became chaplain to John Moore (1646-1714), the learned bishop of Norwich, from whom he received the living of Lowestoft in 1698. He had already given several proofs of his noble but overscrupulous conscientiousness, and at the same time of a propensity to paradox. His New Theory of the Earth (1696), although destitute of sound scientific foundation, obtained the praise of both Newton and Locke, the latter of whom justly classed the author among those who, if not adding much to our knowledge, “at least bring some new things to our thoughts.” In 1701 he resigned his living to become deputy at Cambridge to Sir Isaac Newton, whom two years later he succeeded as Lucasian professor of mathematics. In 1707 he was Boyle lecturer. For several years Whiston continued to write and preach both on mathematical and theological subjects with considerable success; but his study of the Apostolical Constitutions had convinced him that Arianism was the creed of the primitive church; and with him to form an opinion and to publish it were things almost simultaneous. His heterodoxy soon became notorious, and in 1710 he was deprived of his professorship and expelled from the university. The rest of his life was spent in incessant controversy—theological, mathematical, chronological and miscellaneous. He vindicated his estimate of the Apostolical Constitutions and the Arian views he had derived from them in his Primitive Christianity Revived (5 vols., 1711-1712). In 1713 he produced a reformed liturgy, and soon afterwards founded a society for promoting primitive Christianity, lecturing in support of his theories at London, Bath and Tunbridge Wells. One of the most valuable of his books, the Life of Samuel Clarke, appeared in 1730. While heretical on so many points, he was a firm believer in supernatural Christianity, and frequently took the field in defence of prophecy and miracle, including anointing the sick and touching for the king's evil. His dislike to rationalism in religion also made him one of the numerous opponents of Benjamin Hoadly's Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament. He proved to his own satisfaction that Canticles was apocryphal and that Baruch was not. He was ever pressing his views of ecclesiastical government and discipline, derived from the Apostolical Constitutions, on the ecclesiastical authorities, and marvelled that they could not see the matter in the same light as himself. He assailed the memory of Athanasius with a virulence at least equal to that with which orthodox divines had treated Arius. He attacked Sir Isaac Newton's chronological system with success; but he himself lost not only time but money in an endeavour to discover the longitude. Of all his singular opinions the best known is his advocacy of clerical monogamy, immortalized in the Vicar of Wakefield. Of all his labours the most useful is his translation of Josephus (1737), with valuable notes and dissertations, often reprinted. His last “famous discovery, or rather revival of Dr Giles Fletcher's,” which he mentions in his autobiography with infinite complacency, was the identification of the Tatars with the lost tribes of Israel. In 1745 he published his Primitive New Testament. About the same time (1747) he finally left the Anglican communion for the Baptist, leaving the church literally as well as figuratively by quitting it as the clergyman began to read the Athanasian creed. He died in London, at the house of his son-in-law, on the 22nd of August 1752, leaving a memoir (3 vols., 1749-1750) which deserves more attention than it has received, both for its characteristic individuality and as a storehouse of curious anecdotes and illustrations of the religious and moral tendencies of the age. It does not, however, contain any account of the proceedings taken against him at Cambridge, these having been published separately at the time.
Whiston is a striking example of the association of an entirely paradoxical bent of mind with proficiency in the exact sciences. He also illustrates the possibility of arriving at rationalistic conclusions in theology without the slightest tincture of the rationalistic temper. He was not only paradoxical to the verge of craziness, but intolerant to the verge of bigotry. “I had a mind,” he says, “to hear Dr (John) Gill preach. But, being informed that he had written a folio book on the Canticles, I declined to go to hear him.” When not engaged in controversy he was not devoid of good sense. He often saw men and things very clearly, and some of his bon mots are admirable.
WHITAKER, JOSEPH (1820-1895), English publisher, was born in London on the 4th of May 1820, and apprenticed to a bookseller at the age of fourteen. After a long experience with various book selling firms, he began business on his own account as a theological publisher. In January 1858 he started the Bookseller, and for 1869 published the first issue of Whitaker's Almanack, the annual work of reference, which also met with immediate success. In 1874 he published the first edition of the Reference Catalogue of Current Literature, of which several editions have since appeared. Whitaker died at Enfield on the 15th of May 1895. He had been the father of fifteen children.
WHITBREAD. SAMUEL (1758-1815), English politician, came of a Bedfordshire Nonconformist family; his father had made a considerable fortune as owner of the well-known brewery associated with his name. Educated at Eton and St John's College,
