revised. ‘Jonathan’—a considerable fragment of another sacred epic—was the only important addition to his prior publications in the ‘Workes.’
This was a sorrowful year for him; Sir Anthony Alexander, his second son, died in London on 17 Sept. 1637; and Lord Alexander, his eldest son, died, also at London, on 18 May 1638 (Reg. of Letters). Lord Alexander gave extraordinary promise of capacity and worth.
In 1636, and onward, the Earl of Stirling was in chronic pecuniary embarrassments, and his creditors merciless and urgent. In the evening-time of his life he must have been cruelly robbed and wronged, for on 12 Sept. 1640 he died at London ‘insolvent.’ His remains were borne to Scotland and interred in ‘Bowie's yle,’ in the High Church, Stirling. He was succeeded by his grandson, ‘ane infant,’ son of Lord Alexander and the Lady Mary Douglas; but he only survived to inherit the proud family honours for a few months, whereupon his uncle Henry became earl. The title lapsed in 1739 on the death of the fifth earl, who died without issue.
Alexander filled a large and conspicuous space in his generation, as scholar, courtier, statesman, coloniser, and poet; he touched national events at many points, and won the not easily won friendship and lofty praise of such men as Drayton and Aytoun, Habington and Drummond, and Edward Alleyn; and his entire ‘Workes’ were long afterwards read by Milton (if indeed Shakespeare himself did not read his ‘Monarchicke Tragedies’); and he won the golden and unstinted praise of Addison. Broadly, his poems are weighty with thought after the type of Fulk Greville, Lord Brooke, though scarcely so obscure as his. His tragedies have ‘brave translunary things,’ if laboured and dull as a whole. His ‘Avrora’ and minor pieces are elegant and musical. There is less of conceit in the merely conceitful sense than was common with contemporaries, and if you only persevere, opalescent hues edge long passages otherwise comparable with mist and fog. As a man he grows in our regard the nearer one gets at the facts. Manlier speech never was addressed to kings than by him in his ‘Parænesis’ and ‘Tragedies’ and elsewhere. His ‘noble poverty’ is the best vindication of his integrity. He stands above any contemporary Scot, alike in many-sidedness and strenuousness of character.
[Memorials of the Earl of Stirling and the House of Alexander, by Charles Rogers (1877); extracts from Hawthornden MSS. in Archæologia Scotica, vol iv.; Hazlitt's Handbook, 1867; A Mapp and Description of New England, together with a Discourse of Plantations and Colonies (1630); Anderson's Scottish Nation; Dr. Irving's Lives and History (edited by Dr. Carlyle); Park's Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors; Alexander's Poems in their successive editions—the earliest of which bring high prices still; his disappointing Anacrisis, or so-called Censure of Poets ancient and modern, printed in Rogers's Memorials, ii. 205–10.]
ALEXANDER, WILLIAM (1726–1783), an American general, who claimed to be the sixth earl of Stirling, was born at New York in 1726. His father, James Alexander, had been an officer of engineers in the army of the Pretender, and after the failure of the Scottish rebellion had taken refuge in America, where in 1720 he was appointed surveyor-general in New York and New Jersey, and subsequently acquired a leading position at the bar. At New York he married the widow of David Provoost, who, on account of the fortune he had made by smuggling, was called ‘ready-money Provoost.’ After the death of her first husband the lady began a provision business of a lawful kind, which she continued to carry on after her marriage to Surveyor Alexander. William, their only son, became clerk with his mother, and subsequently a copartner. Obtaining a contract for supplying the king's troops, he was led to join the commissariat of the army, shortly after which he attracted the notice of General Shirley, the commander-in-chief, who made him his aide-de-camp and private secretary. Having gone to England in 1756 to give evidence in behalf of Shirley, who had been charged with neglecting his duty, he was persuaded to assert a claim to the earldom of Stirling. Chiefly on the evidence of two old men, who affirmed his descent from John Alexander, uncle of the first earl, a jury at Edinburgh served him heir-male of Henry, fifth earl of Stirling, but in March 1762 the Lords' committee on privileges decided against his claims. Previously to this he had returned to America, where he continued to make use of the title to the close of his life. He succeeded his father as surveyor-general, was subsequently chosen a member of the provincial council, and also became the first governor of Columbia College, which he had taken an active part in promoting. In the dispute which led to the revolt of the American colonies he was strenuously opposed to the policy of Great Britain, and when the rupture took place he was chosen to command the first regiment of militia raised by authority of the provincial congress. At the very beginning of the war he distinguished himself by the brilliant capture of a British armed transport
