was not sufficiently strong to induce him to run much risk for his sake; for on learning that a descent was about to be made on Scotland, the duke retired to his estates in Staffordshire, and on the appearance of the French fleet on the coast he was taken into custody and carried to London. On the overthrow of the whig ministry in 1710 various honours and offices were bestowed upon the duke, and he was in the following year created a British peer by the titles of Duke of Brandon and Baron Dutton; but the house of lords offered a violent resistance to this step, and after a long debate, and by a narrow majority, decided that no Scottish peer being created a peer of Great Britain since the Union had a right to sit in that house. This resolution, though quite illegal, was not rescinded till 1782, when Douglas, eighth duke of Hamilton, was permitted to take his seat in the house of peers as duke of Brandon. In 1712 Duke James was appointed master-general of the ordnance, and was decorated with the order of the garter, in addition to that of the thistle which he had received from King James. His grace was shortly after nominated ambassador extraordinary to France, but before he could set out for the French court he was killed in November, 1712, in a duel with Lord Mohun, an odious villain already stained with several murders. The jacobites, who had formed great expectations from the duke's mission, went so far as to affirm that Mohun had been instigated by some of the whig party to challenge the duke, and that the unfortunate nobleman was killed, not by his antagonist, who also fell, but by General Macartney, Mohun's second, who fled at the time, and remained abroad for several years. He ultimately surrendered himself, and was tried in 1716 and acquitted of the murder, but found guilty of homicide. The duke resembled his predecessors both as regards his mediocre talents and his fickleness of character. Mackay, who gives him credit for bravery and good sense, speaks of his "black, coarse complexion" and rough manners, and adds, "He is very forward and hot for what he undertakes, ambitious and haughty, and a violent enemy." His grandson—
James, sixth duke, married Miss Gunning, the celebrated beauty, who after his death became duchess of Argyll, and was the mother of four dukes—two of Hamilton and two of Argyll—and was created a peeress of Great Britain in 1766 by the title of Baroness Hamilton. Her eldest son, James George, seventh Duke of Hamilton, on the death of the duke of Douglas in 1761, became the male representative and chief of the famous house of Douglas; and his guardians made an unsuccessful attempt to obtain for him the possession of the family estates. (See Douglas family.) Lord Archibald Hamilton, younger son of Archibald, ninth duke, represented the county of Lanark in several parliaments, and was an active and influential member of the whig opposition to the Pitt, Addington, and Portland ministries. William Alexander Anthony Archibald, eleventh duke of Hamilton and eighth duke of Brandon, was born in 1811, married in 1843 the Princess Maria of Baden, and succeeded his father in 1852. He died in July, 1863, and was succeeded by his son William Alexander Louis Stephen. There are two dukedoms, three marquisates, four earldoms, and eight baronies borne by the head of the Hamilton family. A junior branch of the house, descended from Lord Claude Hamilton, noticed above, has been raised to the peerage under the title of Marquis of Abercorn, and obtained extensive grants of land in the north of Ireland. He is the representative of the Hamiltons in the male line.—J. T.
HAMILTON, Alexander, Major-general, sometime secretary of the treasury of the United States, was born in the British West Indian island of Nevis, on the 11th January, 1757. His father, who was of Scotch extraction, had emigrated to Nevis with commercial views, which he failed in realizing, and married a young widow of French Huguenot descent; nor do Hamilton's American biographers fail to note in him a union of French verve with Scotch sagacity and shrewdness. After having received a fair elementary education, he entered at twelve the counting-house of a New York merchant, who had an establishment in the island. The employer saw and fostered the superior intellect of his assistant, and tradition says that a clever description of the hurricane of 1772, furnished by the young Hamilton to a local newspaper, introduced him to the notice, and procured him the patronage, of the leading personages of the colony. However this may be, he was enabled by the aid of patrons to repair to America in search of a better education than Nevis could afford, and with ultimate views on the profession of the law. We find him at last a student of King's college (after the Revolution, Columbia college), New York, a prominent member of debating clubs, a political rhymer in newspapers, and at that period developing a strong devotional feeling. When but seventeen he spoke at the New York city meeting held in the fields on the 0th of July, 1774, on the subject of American grievances. The youthful appearance of his slender and diminutive form, gained him at once a hearing, and the success of his fiery rhetoric made him a politician. After distinguishing himself by some feats of collegiate soldiering, he entered the revolutionary army, and became an aid-de-camp and favourite of Washington. Having married in 1780 a daughter of General Schuyler, he retired from the army in 1782, with the rank of colonel, and resuming the study of the law was admitted to the supreme court, and acquired a considerable practice. Elected a member of congress by the state of New York, he was one of the delegates to the convention of 1787, which framed the constitution of the United States, and which bears the impress of his political convictions. In the secret debates of that assembly he took the anti-democratic side, pleading powerfully for a strong federal government. His views were publicly enforced in a series of letters in the New York Daily Advertiser (in the composition of them he had some slight assistance from Jay and Madison), which, afterwards republished with the title of "The Federalist," have since remained an admired text-book of federalist principles. Appointed in 1787 by Washington secretary of the treasury, an office somewhat equivalent to that of our chancellor of the exchequer, Hamilton had a herculean task to grapple with in organizing the finances of the young republic. Here again he had to combat his old antagonists, who wished to repudiate a federal obligation for the payment of debts incurred by the several states in the common cause. Hamilton triumphed, though opposed in the cabinet itself by Jefferson; he consolidated the debts of the states, provided by a judicious system of taxation for the extinction of the federal debt, and established a national bank. He is the founder of the federal finance of the United States. In 1795, he retired spontaneously from the cabinet, and to provide for the wants of a large family, resumed successfully the practice of his profession. He still remained, however, an active politician, and when in 1798, under the presidency of Adams, war between the States and France was imminent, it was made a sine qua non by Washington who was summoned from seclusion to take the command-in-chief, that Hamilton should be his second in command. This eminent man, who has received the emphatic praises both of Talleyrand and of Guizot, died within twenty-four hours, of wounds received in a duel fought near New York on the 12th of June, 1804, and forced on him by the notorious Aaron Burr, whose aims both on the presidency and vice-presidency of the States had been thwarted by the publication of opinions of Hamilton's adverse to his claims, and reflecting on his personal character. In 1834-40, memoirs of his life were published by his son, John C. Hamilton.—F. E.
HAMILTON, Alexander, an English orientalist, is said to have been born about 1765, and to have died at Liverpool on the 30th December, 1824. In no English biographical dictionary, or other work of reference, have we been able to discover any notice of his career, an omission naturally commented on in the brief memoir of him in the Biographie Universelle (Michaud's), of which that in the Nouvelle Biographie Génerale is little more than a transcript. According to the Biographie Universelle, Hamilton was long a resident in India, where he studied the Sanscrit language and literature. On his return to Europe, having examined the collections of Indian MSS. in the library of the British museum and in that of the East India Company, he went to Paris and inspected those in what is now the Bibliothèque Imperiale. A detenu in France after the rupture of the peace of Amiens, he is described as probably the only person on the continent who then understood Sanscrit, which he is reported to have taught—no slight distinction—to Frederick Schlegel, to Chezy, and to Fauriel. During his residence in France he compiled a catalogue of the Sanscrit MSS. in the Bibliothèque Imperiale, which was published in French (Paris, 1807) and in English. After his return to England he was appointed a professor at Haileybury. Among his contributions to Sanscrit literature (several of them anonymous, and all of them described in Gildemeister's Bibliothecæ Sanscritæ Specimen) were the Hitopadesa in Sanscrit, 1810; and the "Terms of Sanscrit Grammar.—F. E.
