Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/149

 sequently returned to England, and resided in the neighbourhood of his birthplace. At Ryles (or Royals) Green, near Combermere Abbey, he made his will on 11 Sept. 1600, which was proved on 28 May 1601. He seems to have died unmarried.

Whitney's reputation depends upon his celebrated work, entitled ‘A Choice of Emblemes and other Devises, for the moste parte gathered out of sundrie writers, Englished and moralised, and divers newly devised, by Geffrey Whitney. A worke adorned with varietie of matter, both pleasant and profitable: wherein those that please maye finde to fit their fancies: Because herein, by the office of the eie and the eare, the minde maye reape dooble-delighte throughe holsome preceptes, shadowed with pleasant devises: both fit for the vertuous, to their incoraging; and for the wicked, for their admonishing and amendment’ (2 pts., Leyden, 1586, 4to). The book was dedicated to the Earl of Leicester from London on 28 Nov. 1585 with an epistle to the reader dated Leyden 4 May 1586. The author speaks as if this were a second edition; if so, the first was written only, and not printed. His emblems, 248 in number, generally one or more stanzas of six lines (a quatrain followed by a couplet), have a device or woodcut prefixed, with an appropriate motto. Being addressed either to his kinsmen or friends, or to some eminent contemporary, they furnish notices of persons, places, and things not elsewhere readily to be met with. Of the devices twenty-three only are original, while twenty-three are suggested by, and 202 identical with, those of Alciati, Paradin, Sambucus, Junius, and Faerni. The work was the first of its kind to present to Englishmen an adequate example of the emblem books that had issued from the great continental presses; and it was mainly from it, as a representative book of the greater part of emblem literature which had preceded it, that Shakespeare gained the knowledge which he evidently possessed of the great foreign emblematists of the sixteenth century. Whitney's verses are often of great merit, and always manifest a pure mind and extensive learning.

The only other works which can be positively assigned to Whitney are: 1. ‘An Account in Latin of a Visit to Scratby Island, off Great Yarmouth,’ 1580, a translation of which is printed in Manship's ‘History of Great Yarmouth.’ 2. Some verses in Dousa's ‘Odæ Britannicæ,’ Leyden, 1586, 4to. Isabella Whitney, a sister of the poet, was likewise a writer of verses. Her principal work, ‘A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posye, contayning a Hundred and Ten Phylosophicall Flowers,’ appeared in 1573.

[Green's facsimile reprint of the Choice of Emblems, 1866, and the same writer's Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers; Melville's Family of Whitney; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. i. 527; Ritson's Bibl. Anglo-Poetica; Corser's Collectanea; Cooper's Athenæ Cantabr. ii. 23–4.] 

WHITSHED, JAMES HAWKINS (1762–1849), admiral of the fleet, born in 1762, was third son of James Hawkins (1713–1805), bishop of Raphoe, and in 1773 was entered on the books of the Ranger sloop, then on the Irish station. He was afterwards borne on the books of the Kent, guardship at Plymouth, and first went afloat in the Aldborough, serving on the Newfoundland and North American stations, till, on 4 Sept. 1778, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. During 1779 he was in the Amazon, on the home station, and in December he joined the Sandwich, flagship of Sir George Brydges (afterwards Lord) Rodney [q. v.], with whom he was present in the action off Cape St. Vincent on 16 Jan. 1780. At Gibraltar he was made commander into the San Vincente sloop, and, going out to the West Indies with Rodney, was present in the action of 17 April 1780, and on the next day, 18 April, was posted to the Deal Castle, which, in a violent hurricane in the following October, was blown from her anchorage at St. Lucia, and wrecked on the coast of Porto Rico. The crew happily escaped to the shore, and Hawkins, after recovering from a dangerous fever brought on by the exposure, was honourably acquitted by a court-martial of all blame, and was sent to England with despatches. In July 1781 he was appointed to the Ceres frigate, in which, in the following spring, he took out Sir Guy Carleton (afterwards Lord Dorchester) [q. v.] to New York, and brought him back to England in December 1783. For the next three years Hawkins commanded the Rose frigate at Leith and on the east coast of Scotland. He then studied for three years at Oxford, attending lectures on astronomy, and travelled on the continent, mainly in Denmark and in Russia. In 1791 he assumed the name of Whitshed, that of his maternal grandmother, in accordance with the terms of a cousin's will.

In 1793 he was appointed to the Arrogant of 74 guns, one of the squadron under Rear-admiral George Montagu [q. v.] in May and June 1794. In 1795 he was moved into the Namur, one of the ships which in January 1797 were detached from the Channel fleet with Rear-admiral [Sir] William Parker