colleagues, but he triumphed, and was made a marquis and lord privy seal. On the reaction which followed the defeat of the exclusion bill and the Rye-house plot, Halifax, characteristically again, veered round to the whigs now that they were prostrate. He interceded for Russell; he asked the house of lords to provide against the danger to which freedom of conscience and of person would be exposed under the next reign; and by his policy provoked the anger of the very duke of York who was indebted to Halifax for the preservation of his right to the throne. On the death of Charles and the accession of James, accordingly, Halifax was humbled though not dismissed. The new king did not forget the part which Halifax had played in the discussion on the exclusion bill, but could not forgive, on the other hand, his liberal and national policy during the remainder of Charles' reign. Halifax had to surrender the privy seal in exchange for the presidency of the council, in those days a less important office than the other. His complete disgrace followed when he refused to support, in 1685, the repeal of the test acts; he was dismissed, and his name was struck from the council book. But though thus disgraced, and taking a part in the secret negotiations which issued in the landing of the prince of Orange at Tilbury, Halifax steadily declined to join in inviting William to make his appearance in England as an armed liberator. On the arrival of William, and, true to his own cherished policy, he still aimed at a compromise. He was appointed one of James' commissioners to treat with the prince, and it was only when he discovered that he had been duped, and made the bearer of terms by which the king had never intended to abide, that he resolved to head the party which wished to raise William to the throne. In the convention parliament he was chosen speaker of the house of lords, and he vigorously supported the claims of William to kingship against the asserters of Mary's exclusive right to the throne. When all was over, Halifax was the spokesman who, on the 13th of March, 1688, in the presence of both houses and in the name of the estates of the realm, asked the prince and princess of Orange to accept the crown of England. It was the opinion of Lord Macaulay that "our revolution, as far as it can be said to bear the character of any single mind, assuredly bears the character of the large yet cautious mind of Halifax."
Under the new reign Halifax was restored to the charge of the privy seal, and offered the great seal itself, which with his usual prudence he declined. Before long, through the inactivity of Danby, the premiership virtually though not in name devolved upon him; but he was scarcely equal to the duties of a position which less required subtle balancing of pros and cons than prompt and decisive action. The wit and vivacity which had charmed Charles II. at the council board fell flat upon William, who would have preferred less of ingenious talk, and more of resolute action. The disasters of the Irish war were laid to his charge; and the more violent among the whigs, dissatisfied with the elevation of a chief of the trimmers, attacked him fiercely in both houses of parliament. Halifax felt that his political career was closing, and he resigned the speakership of the house of lords. In the frenzy of the late autumn of 1689, which seemed to revive the old days of the Popish Plot, he was examined before the so-called murder committee of the house of lords, appointed to inquire who was answerable for the execution of Russell, Sidney, and their fellow-patriots. It was clearly proved, on such evidence as that of Tillotson among others, that Halifax had behaved with great humanity and tenderness to Russell, and he was honourably acquitted of the charge of complicity or instigation. Soon afterwards, however, he resigned the privy seal. There is reason to believe that, in disgust at the treatment which he had received, he coquetted afterwards with the court of St. Germains, but his error was not of long duration. He advocated the vigorous prosecution of the war with France, and his last work, "An Essay upon Taxes, calculated for the present juncture of affairs," protested against an "ignorant impatience of taxation" for a great and national cause. He died suddenly in 1695, and among his descendants were the celebrated earl of Chesterfield. His "Miscellanies" were published in 1703. There are numerous, interesting, and, for the most part, laudatory notices of him scattered through Lord Macaulay's History of England, and of these we have on the present occasion largely availed ourselves.—F. E.
HALKET, Lady Anne, a Scottish authoress, was born in 1632. Her father, Robert Murray, a cadet of the Tullibardine family, was preceptor to Charles I., and afterwards provost of Eton college; and her mother, who was connected with the noble family of Perth, was sub-governess to the duke of Gloucester, and the Princess Elizabeth. Lady Anne was carefully instructed by her parents in the various branches of a liberal and learned education; but she especially devoted herself to the study of theology and medicine, and became so famous for her proficiency in the latter, as well as in the practice of surgery, that she was consulted by persons of the highest rank, and even by men of great professional eminence. She and her family suffered much for their adherence to the cause of Charles I. during the great civil war. In 1656 she married Sir James Halket of Pitfirrane in Fife, to whom she bore four children. During her first pregnancy, under the apprehension that she would not survive her delivery, she wrote a celebrated tract entitled "The Mother's Will to the Unborn Child." She died in 1699, leaving a great number of treatises in MS., from which a volume of "Meditations" was published in 1701. She was a woman of remarkable piety, and simple and amiable manners, as well as of great talent and learning.—J. T.
HALKET, Elizabeth, the authoress of the celebrated ballad of Hardyknute, was the second daughter of Sir Charles Halket of Pitfirrane, and was born in 1677. At the age of nineteen she married Sir Henry Wardlaw of Pitfirrane in Fife, to whom she bore four daughters and a son. She died about the year 1727. She at first attempted to pass off the ballad of Hardyknute as a genuine fragment of an ancient poem, and caused her brother-in-law. Sir John Bruce of Kinross, to communicate the MS. to Lord Binning—himself a poet—as a copy of a manuscript found in an old vault at Dunfermline. The poem was first published in 1719; it was afterwards admitted by Ramsay into the Evergreen, and for many years was received as a genuine old ballad. The real authorship was first disclosed by Bishop Percy in his Reliques, published in 1755, and has since been established beyond a doubt.—J. T.
HALKETT, Sir Colin, K.C.B., governor of Chelsea hospital, a British officer who distinguished himself in the Peninsular war, and commanded a division of the British army at Waterloo, was born in 1773, and died in 1856.
HALL, Anthony, the learned but somewhat negligent editor of Leland de Scriptoribus, Oxford, 1709, and Triveti Annales, 1718, and author of an account of Berkshire for the Magna Britannia, was born in 1679, son of the Rev. H. Hall of Kirkbridge, Cumberland. From a school at Carlisle he went to Queen's college, Oxford, in 1696, but appears not to have matriculated till 1698. He was afterwards rector of Hampton-Poyle, Oxon. Bishop Tanner, who had intended to edit Leland, though annoyed to find himself anticipated, acknowledged, when publishing his own Bibliotheca de Scriptoribus, that Hall was well fitted for the task. He died at Garford, Berks, in 1723.—J. W. F.
HALL, Basil, Captain, R.N., a distinguished traveller and miscellaneous writer, born at Edinburgh in 1788, was the son of Sir James Hall of Dunglass. Having been educated chiefly at the high school of Edinburgh, he entered the navy as a midshipman in 1802. In 1808 he received a lieutenant's commission, was promoted to the rank of commander in 1814, and to that of post-captain in 1817. When Lord Amherst was sent on a diplomatic mission to China in 1816, Hall was appointed to the command of the Lyra, a small gun-brig which accompanied the expedition; and while the ambassador and his suite were pursuing their mission inland to Pekin, he took the opportunity of visiting some of the places along the coast of Corea, at that time but little known to Europeans. His observations were given in a book which he published on his return to England in 1817, entitled "A Voyage of Discovery to the Western Coast of Corea and the Great Loo-Choo Island in the Japan Sea." This work created much interest on account of the novelty of the scenes and the very peculiar manners of the people described. A third edition of it appeared in 1827 as the first volume of Constable's Miscellany. His next work was "Extracts from a Journal written on the Coast of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, in the years 1820, 1821, and 1822"—a work which constituted the second and third volumes of Constable's Miscellany. The Christmas of 1824 he spent on a visit to Sir Walter Scott, who had long been on terms of intimacy with his father, and he has left in his journal an interesting account of the mode of life at Abbotsford. In 1825 he married a daughter of Sir James Hunter, consul-general for Spain. Thenceforth he abandoned the sea, but the natural activity of his disposition would not
