of “Puck” perched upon a toadstool and with his toe rousing a frog. “Eros and Euphrosyne” and “The Rainbow” were seen at the Academy in 1848.
Woolner became, in the autumn of 1845, one of the seven Pre-Raphaelite Brethren, and took a leading part in The Germ (1850), the opening poem in which, called “My Beautiful Lady,” was written by him. He had already modelled and exhibited portraits of Carlyle, Browning and Tennyson. Unable to make his way in art as he wished, Woolner in 1852 tried his luck as a gold-digger in Australia. Failing in this, he returned to England in 1857, where during his absence his reputation had been increased by means of a statue of “Love” as a damsel lost in a daydream. Then came his second portraits of Carlyle, Tennyson and Browning, the figures of Moses, David, St John the Baptist and St Paul for the pulpit of Llandaff cathedral, the medallion portrait of Wordsworth in Grasmere church, the likenesses of Sir Thomas Fairbairn, Rajah Brooke of Sarawak, Mrs Tennyson, Sir W. Hooker and Sir F. Palgrave. The fine statue of Bacon in the New Museum at Oxford was succeeded by full-size statues of Prince Albert for Oxford, Macaulay for Cambridge, William III. for the Houses of Parliament, London, and Sir Bartle Frere for Bombay, busts of Tennyson, for Trinity College, Cambridge, Dr Whewell, and Archdeacon Hare; statues of Lord Lawrence for Calcutta, Queen Victoria for Birmingham, Field for the Law Courts, London, Palmerston for Palace Yard, the noble colossal standing figure of Captain Cook that overlooks the harbour of Sydney, New South Wales, which is Woolner's masterpiece in that class; the recumbent effigy of Lord F. Cavendish (murdered in Dublin) in Cartmel church, the seated Lord Chief Justice Whiteside for the Four Courts, Dublin, and John Stuart Mill for the Thames Embankment, London; Landseer, and Bishop Jackson for St Paul's, Bishop Fraser for Manchester, and Sir Stamford Raffles for Singapore. Among Woolner's busts are those of Newman, Darwin, Sedgwick, Huxley, Cobden, Professor Lushington, Dickens, Kingsley, and Sir William Gull, besides the repetition, with variations, of Gladstone for the Bodleian, Oxford, and Mansion House, London, and Tennyson. The last was acquired for Adelaide, South Australia. Woolner's poetic and imaginative sculptures include “Elaine with the Shield of Lancelot,” three fine panels for the pedestal of the Gladstone bust at Cambridge, the noble and original “Moses” which was commissioned in 1861 and is on the apex of the gable of the Manchester Assize Courts, and two other works in the same building; “Ophelia,” a statue (1869); “In Memoriam”; “Virgilia sees in a vision Coriolanus routing the Volsces”; “Guinevere”; “Mercury teaching a shepherd to sing,” for the Royal College of Music; “Ophelia,” a bust (1878); “Godiva,” and “The Water Lily.”
In 1864 he married Alice Gertrude Waugh, by whom he had two sons and four daughters. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1871, and a full member in 1874. Woolner wrote and published two amended versions of “My Beautiful Lady” from The Germ, as well as “Pygmalion” (1881), “Silenus” (1884), “Tiresias” (1886), and “Poems" (1887) comprising “Nelly Dale” (1886) and “Children.” Having been elected professor of sculpture in the Royal Academy, Woolner began to prepare lectures, but they were never delivered, for he resigned the office in 1879. He died suddenly on the 7th of October 1892, and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary's, Hendon.
WOOLSACK, i.e. a sack or cushion stuffed with wool, a name more particularly given to the seat of the lord chancellor in the House of Lords. It is a large square cushion of wool, without back or arms, covered with red cloth. It is stated to have been placed in the House of Lords in the reign of Edward III. to remind the peers of the importance of the wool trade of England. The earliest legislative mention, however, is in an act of Henry VIII. (c. 10 s. 8): “The lord chancellor, lord treasurer and all other officers who shall be under the degree of a baron of a parliament shall sit and be placed at the uppermost part of the sacks in the midst of the said parliament chamber, either there to sit upon one form or upon the uppermost sack.” The woolsack is technically outside the precincts of the house, and the lord chancellor, wishing to speak in a debate, has to advance to his place as a peer.
WOOLSEY, THEODORE DWIGHT (1801-1889), American educationalist, was born in New York City on the 31st of October 1801. He was the son of a New York merchant, a nephew of Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, and a descendant of Jonathan Edwards. He graduated at Yale in 1820, was a tutor at Yale in 1823-1825, studied Greek at Leipzig, Berlin and Bonn in 1827-1830, became professor of Greek language and literature at Yale in 1831, and was elected president of the college and entered the Congregational ministry in 1846. He resigned the presidency in 1871, and died on the 1st of July 1889 in New Haven. During his administration the college grew rapidly, the scientific school and the school of fine arts were established, and the scholarly tone of the college was greatly improved. Much of his attention in his last years was devoted to the American commission for the revision of the authorized version of the New Testament, of which he was chairman (1871-1881). He prepared excellent editions of Alcestis (1834), Antigone (1835), Prometheus (1837) and Gorgias (1843). He published several volumes of sermons and wrote for the New Englander, of which he was a founder, for the North American Review, for the Princeton Review and for the Century, and his Introduction to the Study of International Law, designed as an Aid in Teaching and in Historical Studies (1860) and his Divorce and Divorce Legislation (1882) went through many editions. He also wrote Political Science, or the State Theoretically and Practically Considered (1877), and Communism and Socialism, in their History and Theory (1880). His son, Theodore Salisbury Woolsey (b. 1852), became professor of international law at Yale in 1878. He was one of the founders of the Yale Review (1892, a continuation of the New Englander), and is the author of America's Foreign Policy (1892).
WOOLSTON, THOMAS (1669-1731), English deist, born at Northampton in 1669, the son of a “reputable tradesman,” entered Sidney College, Cambridge, in 1685, studied theology, took orders and was made a fellow of his college. After a time, by the study of Origen, he became possessed with the notion of the importance of an allegorical interpretation of Scripture, and advocated its use in the defence of Christianity both in his sermons and in his first book, The Old Apology for the Truth of the Christian Religion against the Jews and Gentiles Revived (1705). For many years he published nothing, but in 1720-1721 the publication of letters and pamphlets in advocacy of his notions, with open challenges to the clergy to refute them, brought him into trouble. It was reported that his mind was disordered, and he lost his fellowship. From 1721 he lived for the most part in London, on an allowance of £30 a year from his brother and other presents. His influence on the course of the deistical controversy began with his book, The Moderator between an Infidel and an Apostate (1725, 3rd ed. 1729). The “infidel” intended was Anthony Collins (q.v.), who had maintained in his book alluded to that the New Testament is based on the Old, and that not the literal but only the allegorical sense of the prophecies can be quoted in proof of the Messiahship of Jesus; the “apostate” was the clergy who had forsaken the allegorical method of the athers. Woolston denied absolutely the proof from miracles, called in question the fact of the resurrection of Christ and other miracles of the New Testament, and maintained that they must be interpreted allegorically, or as types of spiritual things. Two years later he began a series of Discourses on the same subject, in which he applied the principles of his Moderator to the miracles of the Gospels in detail. The Discourses, 30,000 copies of which were said to have been sold, were six in number, the first appearing in 1727, the next five 1728-1729, with two Defences in 1729-1730. For these publications he was tried before Chief Justice Raymond in 1729 and sentenced (November 28) to pay a fine of £25 for each of the first four Discourses, with imprisonment till paid, and also to a year's imprisonment and to give security for his good behaviour during life. He failed to find this security, and remained in confinement until his death on the 21st of January 1731.
