skill. No poet has ever so long and so successfully sustained at their utmost height and intensity the expressed emotions and the united effects of terror and pity. The transcendent imagination and the impassioned sympathy which inspire this most tragic of all tragedies save King Lear are fused together in the fourth act into a creation which has hardly been excelled for unflagging energy of impression and of pathos in all the dramatic or poetic literature of the world. Its wild and fearful sublimity of invention is not more exceptional than the exquisite justice and tenderness and subtlety of its expression. Some of these executive merits may be found in an ill-constructed and ill-conditioned tragi-comedy which was printed in the same year; but few readers will care to remember much more of The Devil's Law Case than the admirable scenes and passages which found favour in the unerring and untiring sight of Webster's first and final interpreter or commentator, Charles Lamb. Thirty-one years later (1634) the noble tragedy of Appius and Virginia was given to the world— a work which would alone have sufficed to perpetuate the memory of its author among all competent lovers of English poetry at its best. Seven years afterwards an unprincipled and ignorant bookseller published, under the title of Two New Playcs: vis. A Cure for a Cuckold: a Comedy. The Thracian Wonder, A Comical History. As it hath been several times acted with great Applause, two plays of which he assigned the authorship to John Webster and William Rowley. This attribution may or may not be accurate; the former play is a mixture of coarsely realistic farce and gracefully romantic comedy. An elegy on Henry, prince of Wales, and a few slight occasional verses, compose the rest of Webster's remaining extant works.
[Edward Phillips, in his Theatrum poëtarum, wrongly attributed to him a share in The Weakest goes to the Wall. The play of Guise, mentioned by Webster himself in the introduction to The Devil's Law Case, is lost.]
Webster's claims to a place among the chief writers of his country were ignored for upwards of two centuries. In 1830 the Rev. Alexander Dyce first collected and edited the works of a poet who had found his first adequate recognition twenty two years earlier at the pious and fortunate hands of Lamb. But we cannot imagine that a presentiment or even a foreknowledge of this long delay in the payment of a debt so long due from his countrymen to the memory of so great a poet would seriously have disturbed or distressed the mind of the man who has given us the clue to his nature in a single and an imperishable sentence—“I rest silent in my own work.” (A. C. S.)
See The Works of John Webster; with some Account of the Author and Notes, by Alexander Dyce (new ed., 1857); The Dramatic Works of John Webster, edited by William Hazlitt the younger (1857); The Best Plays of Webster and Tourneur, edited by J. A. Symonds for the “Mermaid” series (1888–1903), Love's Graduate (Oxford, 1885), in which Webster's supposed share in A Cure for a Cuckold is presented separately by S. Spring-Rice, with an introduction by Edmund Gosse. See also E. Gosse, Seventeenth-Century Studies (1883); and especially an exhaustive treatise by E. E. Stoll, John Webster, The Periods of his Work as determined by his Relations to the Drama of his Day (Boston, Massachusetts, 1905). Mr Stoll's account (see p. 42) shows that the additional biographical suggestions made by Mr Sidney Lee in his article in the Dict. Nat. Biog. are not supported.
WEBSTER, NOAH (1758–1843), American lexicographer and journalist, was born at West Hartford, Connecticut, on the 16th of October 1758. He was descended from John Webster of Hartford, governor of Connecticut in 1656–1657, and on his mother's side from Governor William Bradford of Plymouth. He entered Yale in 1774, graduating in 1778. He studied law, and was admitted to the bar at Hartford in 1781. In 1782–1783 he taught in a classical school at Goshen, New York, and became convinced of the need of better textbooks of English. In 1783–1785 he published at Hartford A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, in three parts, a spelling-book, a grammar and a reader. This was the pioneer American work in its field, and it soon found a place in most of the schools of the United States. During the twenty years in which Webster was preparing his dictionary, his income from the spelling-book, though the royalty was less than a cent a copy, was enough to support his family; and before 1861 the sale reached more than a million copies a year. The wide use of this book contributed greatly to uniformity of pronunciation in the United States, and, with his dictionary, secured the general adoption in the United States of a simpler system of spelling than that current in England. In 1785 he published Sketches of American Policy, in which he argued for a constitutional government whose authority should be vested in Congress. This he regarded as the first distinct proposal for a United States Constitution, and when in 1787 the work of the commissioners was completed at Philadelphia, where Webster was then living as superintendent of an academy, he wrote in behalf of the constitution an Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution. In 1788 he started in New York the American Magazine, but it failed at the end of a year, and he resumed the practice of law at Hartford. In 1793, in order to support Washington's administration, he removed to New York and established a daily paper, the Minerva (afterwards the Commercial Advertiser), and later a semi-weekly paper, the Herald (afterwards the New York Spectator). In 1798 he removed to New Haven. He served in the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1800 and 1802-07, and as a county judge in 1807–11. In 1807 he published A Philosophical and Practical Grammar of the English Language. In 1806 he had brought out A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, and in 1807 he began work on his dictionary. While engaged on it he removed in 1812 to Amherst, Massachusetts, where he was president of the Board of Trustees of the Academy and assisted in founding Amherst College. He was also a member of the General Court of Massachusetts. In 1822 he returned to New Haven, and the next year he received the degree of LL.D. from Yale. He spent a year (1824–1825) abroad, working on his dictionary, in Paris and at the university of Cambridge, where he finished his manuscript. The work came out in 1828 in two volumes. It contained 12,000 words and from 30,000 to 40,000 definitions that had not appeared in any earlier dictionary. An English edition soon followed. In 1840 the second edition, corrected and enlarged, came out, in two volumes. He completed the revision of an appendix a few days before his death, which occurred in New Haven on the 28th of May 1843.
The dictionary was revised in 1847 under the editorship of Professor Chauncey A. Goodrich and published in one volume. In 1859 a pictorial edition was issued. In 1864 it was revised mainly under the direction of Professor Noah Porter, and again in 1890 under the same direction, the latter revision appearing with the title of the International Dictionary of the English Language. The latter was again issued in 1900, with a supplement of 25,000 words and phrases, under the supervision of William Torrey Harris, who edited another revision, in 1909, under the title of the New International Dictionary of the English Language. It has frequently been abridged.
Among Webster's other works are Dissertations on the English Language (1789), a course of lectures that he had given three years before in some of the chief American cities; Essays (1790); The Revolution in France (1794); A Brief History of Epidemics and Pestilential Diseases (1799), in two vols.; The Rights of Neutral Nations in Time of War (1802); Historical Notices of the Origin and State of Banking Institutions and Insurance Offices (1802); and A Collection of Papers on Political, Literary, and Moral Subjects (1843), which included “On the Supposed Change in the Temperature of Winter,” a treatise showing long and careful research. He also published Governor John Winthrop's Journal in 1790, and wrote a History of the United States, of which a revised edition appeared in 1839.
See Memoir of Noah Webster by his son-in-law, Professor Chauncey A. Goodrich, in the quarto editions of the Dictionary, also Noah Webster (1882), by Horace E. Scudder, in “American Men of Letters.”
WEBSTER, THOMAS (1773–1844), British geologist, was born in the Orkney Isles in 1773, and was educated at Aberdeen. He subsequently went to London and studied architecture, the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street being built from his design. In 1826 he was appointed house-secretary and curator to the Geological Society of London, and for many years he rendered important services in editing and illustrating the Transactions of the Society. In 1841–1842 he was professor of geology in University College, London. He was distinguished for his researches on the Tertiary formations of the Isle of Wight, where he recognized the occurrence of both fresh-water and marine strata; he continued his observations on the mainland of Hampshire, and
