no serious objection to the system of modified Episcopacy proposed by Ussher. Consistently with his desire to remain neutral, Hale took the engagement to the Commonwealth as he had done to the king, aud in 1653, already Serjeant, he became a judge in the Court of Common Pleas. Two years afterwards he sat in Cromwell s parliament as one of the members for Gloucestershire. After the death of the Protector, however, he declined to act as a judge under Richard Cromwell, although he represented Oxford in Richard s parliament. At the Restoration in 1660 Hale was very graciously received by Charles II., and in the same year was appointed chief baron of the exchequer, and accepted, with extreme reluctance, the honour of knighthood. After holding the office of chief baron for eleven years he was raised to the higher dignity of lord chief-justice, which he held till February 1676, when his failing health com pelled him to resign. He retired to his native Alderley, where he died on December 25th of the same year. He was twice married, and survived all his ten children save
two.As a judge, Sir Matthew Hale discharged his duties with resolute independence and careful diligence. Lord Campbell says of him that " he is certainly to be considered the most eminent judge who ever filled the office [of chief baron] ; and being promoted to be chief-justice of England, he gave new dignity to the supreme magistracy which had been illustrated by Gascoigne, by Fortescue, and by Coke." His sincere piety made him the intimate friend of Barrow, Tillotson, Wilkins, and Stillingfleet, as well as of the Non conformist leader Baxter. He is chargeable, however, with the condemnation and execution of two poor women tried before him for witchcraft in 1664, a kind of judicial murder then falling under disuse. He is also reproached with having hastened the execution of a soldier for whom he had reason to believe a pardon was preparing.
Of Hale s legal works the only two of importance are his Historia Placitorum Coronce, or History of the Pleas of the Crown, first published in 1739; and the History of the Common Law of England, with an Analysis of the Law, &c., 1713. Among his numerous religious writings the Contemplations, Moral and Divine, occupy the first place. Others are The Primitive Origina tion of Man, 1677; Of the Nature of True Religion, &c., 1684; A Brief Abstract of the Christian Hcliyion, 1688. One of his most popular works is the collection of Letters of Advice to his Children and Grandchildren. He also wrote an Essay touching the Gravita tion and Nongravitation of Fluid Bodies, 1673 ; Dif/iciles Nugw, or Observations touching the Torricellian Experiment, &c. , 1675; and a translation of the Life of Pomponius Atticus, by Cornelius Nepos. His efforts in poetry were inauspicious. He left his valuable col lection of MSS. and records to the library of Lincoln s Inn. His life has been written by Burnet, 1682; by Williams, 1835; by Eoscoe, in his Lives of Eminent Lawyers, in 1838; and by Lord Campbell, in his Lives of the Chief Justices, in 1849.
HALES, Stephen (1677–1761), physiologist and inventor, was born at Beckesbourn in Kent, on the 7th September 1677. He was the sixth son of Thomas Hales, whose father, Sir Robert Hales, was created baronet by Charles II. in 1670. Of his early education little is known, but in June 1696 he was entered as a pensioner of Bene t (now Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge, with the view of taking holy orders. On 16th April 1702 he was elected and in February 1703 admitted to a fellow ship. He received the degree of master of arts in 1703, and of bachelor of divinity in 1711. While at college one of his most intimate friends was William Stukeley, with whom he studied anatomy, chemistry, &c. In 1710 Hales was presented to the perpetual curacy of Teddington in Middlesex, where he remained all his life, notwithstand ing that he was subsequently appointed rector of Porlock in Somerset, and later of Farringdon in Hampshire. In March 1717 he was elected fellow of the Royal Society, to whose Transactions he contributed many valuable papers. In 1732 he was named one of a committee for establishing a colony in Georgia, and the next year he received the degree of doctor of divinity. He was appointed almoner to the princess-dowager of Wales in 1750. On the death of Sir Hans Sloane in 1753, Hales was chosen foreign asso ciate of the French Academy of Sciences. He died at Teddington, January 4, 1761.
Hales is celebrated as the inventor of a " ventilator," by means of which fresh air was introduced into jails, hospitals, mines, ships holds, &c. In the four years (1749-52) after its introduction into the Savoy prison, only 4 prisoners died ; while previously the mortality had been from 50 to 100 per annum. The invention met with immediate favour, especially in France. Hales was the designer of other inventions by means of which sea-water was distilled, corn cleaned and preserved, meat preserved on long voyages, &c.
His chief writings are his Statical Essays (see Chemistry, vol. v. p. 461), consisting of Vegetable Staticks, or an Account of some Statical Experiments on the Sap in Vegetables (1727), and Hcicmo- staticks, or an Account of Hydraulick and Hydrostatick Experi ments made on the Blood and Blood-vessels of Animals (1733). His essay on The Means of Dissolving the Stone in the Bladder, &c., gained him the Copley gold medal in 1737. His Admonition to the Drinkers of Gin, Brandy, &c., appeared in 1734; the Vegetable Staticks, translated by Buffon, in 1735, and the Hcemostaticks, by M. de Sauvages, in 1744. For sketch of his life, with portrait, see Gardener s Chronicle, 1877, pp. 16-17.
a celebrated French musician, was born May 27, 1799, at Paris. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Berton and Cherubini, and in 1819 gained the grand prix de Rome with a cantata called Herminie. In accordance with the conditions of his scholarship he started for Rome, where he devoted himself to the study of Italian music, and wrote an opera and various minor works. His first opera pro duced in Paris after his return from Italy was called L Artisan, which saw the light at the Theatre Feydeau in 1827, apparently without much success. Other works of minor importance, and now forgotten, followed, amongst which only a ballet named Manon Lescaut y produced in 1830, deserves mention. Five years later, in 1835, Hale vy produced the tragic opera La Juive and the comic opera L clair, and on these works his immortality is mainly founded. Both have kept the stage to the present day, and will probably survive changes of taste even greater than those which music has undergone in France during the last forty years. The Jewess is in every way representative of the French grand-Optra, the modern outgrowth of Gluck s music-drama with a strong admixture of the Italian element and of an excess of spectacular splendour wholly strange to the classic simplicity of the original. It is curious that the grand-opera, although an essentially national product of France, was both initiated and brought to its highest perfection by two Germans Gluck and Meyerbeer. The genius of the latter was fatal to Hale vy s fame. By the side of the Huguenots the merits of La Jidve appear in almost diminutive proportions. At the same time Hale vy s work ought not to be treated with contempt. It is full of fine dramatic features, and especi ally the introduction of the Jewish element with which Hale vy, himself a Jew, was well acquainted gives a peculiar interest on this score. L lZdair is a curiosity of musical literature. It is written for two tenors and two soprani, without a chorus, and displays the composer s mastery over the most refined effects of instrumentation and vocalization in a favourable light. After these two works, to which Hale vy owed his fame and his seat at the Institute, he wrote numerous operas of various genres, amongst which only La Heine de Chypre, a spectacular piece analysed by Wagner in one of his Paris letters (1841), and La Tempesta, in 3 acts, written for Her Majesty s Theatre,
London (1850), need be referred to. In addition to his
