ALEXANDER

See also:

• ALEXANDER WHYTE (1837- )

WHYTE (1837- )  , Scottish divine, was born at Kirriemuir in Forfarshire on the 13th of January 1837, and was educated at the university of Aberdeen and at New College, Edinburgh . He entered the ministry of the Free Church of Scotland and after serving as colleague in Free St John's, Glasgow (1866-1870), removed to Edinburgh as colleague and successor to Dr R . S . Candlish at Free St George's . In 1909 he succeeded Dr Marcus Dods as principal, and professor of New Testament literature, at New College, Edinburgh . Among his publications are Characters and Characteristics of William Law (1893) ; Bunyan Characters (3 vols., 1894) ; Samuel Rutherford (1894) ; An Appreciation of Jacob Behmen (1895) ; Lancelot Andrewes and his Private Devotions (1895) ; Bible Characters (7 vols., 1897) ; Santa Teresa (1897) ; Father John of Cronstadt (1898) ; An Appreciation of Browne's Religio Medici (1898) ; Cardinal Newman, An Appreciation (1901) . WHYTE-MELVILLE, GEORGE JOHN (1821-1878), English novelist, son of John Whyte-Melville of Strathkinness, Fifeshire, and grandson on his mother's side of the 5th duke of Leeds, was born on the 19th of June 1821 . Whyte-Melville received his education at Eton, entered the army in 1839, became captain in the Coldstream Guards in 1846 and retired in 1849 . After translating Horace (1850) in fluent and graceful verse, he published his first novel, Digby Grand, in 1853 . The unflagging verve and intimate technical knowledge with which he described sportl: scenes and sporting characters at once drew attention to him as a novelist with a new vein . He was the laureate of fox-hunting; all his most popular and distinctive heroes and heroines, Digby Grand, Tilbury Nogo, the Honourable Crasher, Mr Sawyer, Kate Coventry, Mrs Lascelles, are or would be mighty hunters . Tilbury Nogo was contributed to the Sporting Magazine in 1853 and published separately in 1854 .

He showed in the adventures of Mr Nogo—and it became more apparent in his later works—that he had a surer

hand in humorous narrative than in pathetic description; his pathos is the pathos of the preacher . His next novel, General Bounce, appeared in Fraser's Magazine (1854) . When the Crimean War broke out Whyte-Melville went out as a volunteer major of Turkish irregular cavalry ; but this was the only break in his literary career from the time that he began to write novels till his death . By a strange accident, he lost his life in the hunting-field on the 5th of December 1878, the hero of many a stiff ride meeting his fate in galloping quietly over an ordinary ploughed field in the Vale of the White Horse . Twenty-one novels appeared from his pen after his return from the Crimea:—Kate Coventry (1856); The Interpreter (1858); Holmby House (186o) ; Good for Nothing (1861) ; Market Harborough (1861) ; The Queen's Maries (1862); The Gladiators (1863); Brookes of Bridlemere (1864) ; Cerise (1866) ; Bones and I (1868) ; The White Rose (1868); M or N (1869); Contraband (1870); Sarchedon (1871); Satanella . (1873) ; Uncle John (1874) ; Sister Louise (1875) ; Katerfelto (1875); Rosine (1875); Roy's Wife (1878); Black but Comely (18781 . Several of these novels are historical, The Gladiators being perhaps the most famous of them . As an historical novelist Whyte-Melville is not equal to Harrison Ainsworth in painstaking accuracy and minuteness of detail; but he makes his characters live and move with great vividness . It is on his portraiture of contemporary sporting society that his reputation as a novelist must rest; and, though now and then a character reappears, such as the supercilious stud-groom, the dark and wary steeple-chaser, or the fascinating sporting widow, his variety in the invention of incidents is amazing . Whyte-Melville was not merely the annalist of sporting society for his generation, but may also be fairly described as the principal moralist of that society; he exerted a considerable and a wholesome influence on the manners and morals of the gilded youth of his time . His Songs and Verses (1869) and his metrical Legend of the True Cross (1873), though respectable in point of versification, are of no particular merit .