an Ishmaelite fighting for his own hand. The Evangelicals regarded him as a dangerous latitudinarian on the ground of his views on Catholic emancipation, the Sabbath question, the doctrine of election, and certain quasi-Sabellian opinions he was supposed to hold about the character and attributes of Christ, while his view of the church was diametrically opposed to that of the High Church party, and from the beginning he was the determined opponent of what was afterwards called the Tractarian movement. The appointment was challenged in the House of Lords, but without success. In Ireland it was immensely unpopular among the Protestants, both for the reasons just mentioned and as being the appointment of an Englishman and a Whig. Whately's blunt outspokenness and his “want of conciliating manners,” which even his friends admit, prevented him from ever completely eradicating these prejudices, while at the same time he met with determined opposition from his own clergy. He ran counter to their most cherished prejudices from the first by connecting himself prominently with the attempt to establish a national and unsectarian system of education. He enforced strict discipline in his diocese, where it had been long unknown; and he published an unanswerable statement of his views on the Sabbath (Thoughts on the Sabbath, 1832). He took a small country place at Redesdale, 4 m. out of Dublin, where he could enjoy his favourite relaxation of gardening. Here his life was one of indefatigable industry. Questions of tithes, reform of the Irish church and of the Irish Poor Laws, and, in particular, the organization of national education occupied much of his time. But he found leisure for the discussion of other public questions, for example, the subject of transportation and the general question of secondary punishments. In 1837 he wrote his well known handbook of Christian Evidences, which was translated during his lifetime into more than a dozen languages. At a later period he also wrote, in a similar form, Easy Lessons on Reasoning, on Morals, on Mind and on the British Constitution. Among his other works may be mentioned Charges and Tracts (1836), Essays on Some of the Dangers to Christian Faith (1839), The Kingdom of Christ (1841). He also edited Bacon's Essays, Paley's Evidences and Paley's Moral Philosophy. His cherished scheme of unsectarian religious instruction for Protestants and Catholics alike was carried out for a number of years with a measure of success, but in 1852 the scheme broke down owing to the opposition of the new Catholic archbishop of Dublin, and Whately felt himself constrained to withdraw from the Education Board. From the beginning Whately was a keen-sighted observer of the condition of Ireland question, and gave much offence by openly supporting the state endowment of the Catholic clergy as a measure of justice. During the terrible years of 1846 and 1847 the archbishop and his family were unwearied in their efforts to alleviate the miseries of the people. From 1856 onwards symptoms of decline began to manifest themselves in a paralytic affection of the left side. Still he continued the active discharge of his public duties till the summer of 1863, when he was prostrated by an ulcer in the leg, and after several months of acute suffering he died on the 8th of October 1863.
Whately was a great talker, much addicted in early life to argument, in which he used others as instruments on which to hammer out his own views, and as he advanced in life much given to didactic monologue. He had a keen wit, whose sharp edge often inflicted wounds never deliberately intended by the speaker, and a wholly uncontrollable love of punning. Whately often offended people by the extreme unconventionality of his manners. When at Oxford his white hat, rough white coat, and huge white dog earned for him the sobriquet of the White Bear, and he outraged the conventions of the place by exhibiting the exploits of his climbing dog in Christchurch Meadow. With a remarkably fair and lucid mind, his sympathies were narrow, and by his blunt outspokenness on points of difference he alienated many. With no mystical fibre in his own constitution, the Tractarian movement was incomprehensible to him, and was the object of his bitter dislike and contempt. The doctrines of the Low Church party seemed to him to be almost equally tinged with superstition. He took a practical, almost business-like view of Christianity, which seemed to High Churchmen and Evangelicals alike little better than Rationalism. In this they did Whately less than justice, for his religion was very real and genuine. But he may be said to have continued the typical Christianity of the 18th century—that of the theologians who went out to fight the Rationalists with their own weapons. It was to Whately essentially a belief in certain matters of fact, to be accepted or rejected after an examination of “evidences.” Hence his endeavour always is to convince the logical faculty, and his Christianity inevitably appears as a thing of the intellect rather than of the heart. Whately's qualities are exhibited at their best in his Logic, which is, as it were, the quintessence of the views which he afterwards applied to different subjects. He wrote nothing better than the luminous Appendix, to this work on Ambiguous Terms.
In 1864 his daughter published Miscellaneous Remains from his commonplace book and in 1866 his Life and Correspondence in two volumes. The Anecdotal Memoirs of Archbishop Whately, by W. J. Fitzpatrick (1864), enliven the picture.
WHAT-NOT, a piece of furniture, derived from the French étagère, which was exceedingly popular in England in the first three-quarters of the 19th century. It usually consists of slender uprights or pillars, supporting a series of shelves for holding china, ornaments or trifles of any kind—hence the allusive name. In its English form, although a convenient drawing-room receptacle, it was rarely beautiful. The early mahogany examples are, however, sometimes graceful in their simplicity.
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| Fig. 1.—Spikelet and Flowers of Wheat. | ||||||||||||||||||
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WHEAT (Triticum), the most important and the most generally diffused of cereal grasses. It is an annual plant, with hollow, erect, knotted stems, and produces, in addition to the direct developments from the seedling plant, secondary roots and secondary shoots (tillers) from the base. Its leaves have each a long sheath encircling the stem, and at the junction of the blade or “flag” with the sheath a small whitish outgrowth or “ligula.” The inflorescence or ear consists of a central stalk bent zigzag, forming a series of notches (see fig. 1), and bearing a number of flattened spikelets, one of which grows out of each notch and has its inner or upper face pressed up against it. At the base of each spikelet are two empty boat-shaped glumes or “chaff-scales,” one to the right, the other to the left, and then a series of flowers, 2 to 8 in number, closely crowded together; the uppermost are abortive or sterile,—indeed, in some varieties only one or two of the flowers are fertile. Each flower consists of an outer or lower glume, called the flowering glume, of the same shape as the empty glume and terminating in a long, or it may be in a short, awn or “beard.” On the other side of the flower and at a slightly higher level is the “palea,” of thinner texture than the other glumes, with infolded margins and with two ribs or veins. These several glumes are closely applied one to the other so as to conceal and protect the ovary,
