Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/684

Rh w o o w o o published by Curll in 1714. Wood was attacked by Bishop Burnet in a Letter to the Bishop of Lichjield and Coventry, 1693, 4to, and defended by his nephew Dr Thomas Wood, in a Vindication of the Historiographer, to which is added the Historiographer s Ansiver, 1693, 4to, reproduced in the subsequent editions of the Athense. The nephew also defended his uncle in An Appendix to the Life of Bishop Seth Ward, 1697, 8vo. On 9th October 1695 Wood had an interview with the earl of Clarendon, but was not able to get his fine remitted. After a short illness he died 28th November 1695, in his sixty- third year, and was buried in the ante-chapel of St John Baptist (Merton College), in Oxford, where he superintended the digging of his own grave but a few days before. He is described as &quot;a very strong lusty man,&quot; of uncouth manners and appearance, not so deaf as he pretended, of reserved and temperate habits, not avaricious, and a despiser of honours. He received neither office nor reward from the university which owed so much to his labours. He never married, and led a life of self-denial, entirely devoted to antiquarian research. Bell-ringing and music were his chief relaxations. His literary style is poor, and his taste and judgment are frequently warped by prejudice, but his two great works and unpublished collections form a price less source of information on Oxford and her worthies. He was always suspected of being a lioman Catholic, and invariably treated Jacobites and Papists better than Dissenters in the Athenae, but he died in communion with the Church of England. Wood s original manuscript.(purchased by the Bodleian in 1846), was first published by John Gutch, as The History and Antiquities of the Colleges and Halls in the University of Oxford, luith a con tinuation, 1786-90, 2 vols. 4to, and The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford, 1792-96, 3 vols. 4to, with portrait of Wood. To these should be added The Antient and Present State of the City of Oxford, cltiefly collected by A. a Wood, with additions by Sir J. Peshall, 1773, 4to. A new edition is in preparation by the Oxford Historical Society. Modius Salium, a Collection of Pieces of Humour, chiefly ill-natured personal stories, was published at Oxford in 1751, 12mo. Some letters between Aubrey and Wood were given in the Gentleman s Magazine (3d ser., ix., x., xi. ). Wood consulted Dr Hudson about getting a third volume of the Athense printed in Holland, saying, &quot;When this volume comes out I ll make you laugh &quot; (Reliq. Hcarnianae, i, 59). This was included in a second edition of the Alhense published by Tonson in 1721, 2 vols. folio, &quot; very much corrected and enlarged, with the addition of above 500 new lives. &quot; The third appeared as &quot; a new edition, with additions, and a continuation by Philip Bliss,&quot; 1813-20, 4 vols. 4to. The Ecclesiastical History Society proposed to bring out a fourth edition, which stopped at the Life, ed. by Bliss, 1848, 8vo (see Gent. Mag., N.S., xxix. 135, 268). Dr Bliss s interleaved copy is in the Bodleian, and Dr Griffiths announced in 1859 that a new edition was contemplated by the Press, and asked for additional matter (see Notes and Queries, 2d ser., vii. 514, and 6th ser., vi. 5, 51). Wood bequeathed his library (127 MSS. and 970 printed books) to the Ashmolean Museum, and the keeper, William Huddesford, printed a catalogue of the MSS. in 1761. In 1860 the whole collection was transferred to the Bodleian, where 25 volumes of Wood s MSS. had been since 1690. Many of the original papers from which the Athene was written, as well as several large volumes of Wood s correspondence and all his diaries are in the Bodleian. with the Lives of Leland and Hearne, 1772, 2 vols. 8vo. A new edition was issued by Bliss, 1848. See also ReHquix ffearnianas, ed. Bliss, 2d ed., 186!) 3 vols Vino llearne s Remarks anil Collections (Oxford Hist. Soc., 1885, Ac.) Muci-ay sAiinfih of the Bodleian Library, 18C8; Nichols s Literary Anecdotes, i. iv v viii Nobles Biogr. History of England, i. (II. IJ T) WOOD, MRS HENRY (1814-1887), novelist, was born on the 17th January 1814. Her maiden name was Ellen Price ; her father was a glove manufacturer in Worcester the original of the cathedral city which, with its church dignitaries and schools, is the scene of so many of her tales. From certain vague memoirs published by her son in the Arcjosy 1 (of which her novels were the mainstay for the _ last twenty years of her life) it appears that the industrial distress described in Mildred Arlcell is a reminiscence of the collapse of the glove trade in Wor cester, consequent on Huskisson s tariff reforms in 1823, from which her father suffered along with other English 1 See &quot;Mrs Henry Wood, In Memoriam,&quot; Argosy, vol. xliii., 1887. glove manufacturers. She married young, it is said, and after her marriage lived for the most part in France, her husband being &quot; at the head of a large shipping and banking firm abroad.&quot; She first came before the public in her own name as the author of a temperance tale (Danesbury House), which had gained the prize of 100 offered by the Scottish Temperance League. This was in 1860; but it appears from the memoirs already referred to that &quot; for many years &quot; before this she had been a regular contributor of stories anonymously, month after month, to Mr Harrison Ainsworfch s magazines, Bentley s Miscellany, and Colburn s New Monthly. Danesbury House was very favourably reviewed, her genuine gifts as a story-teller making themselves apparent in spite of the didactic purpose of the tale ; but Mrs Wood s first great success was made in the following year with East Lynne y one of the most popular novels of the century. A long review in the Times, in which a place was claimed for her in the foremost rank of novelists, was the loudest note in a general chorus of praise, and fairly established her position. The praise of the critics continued throughout the next half-dozen of her novels, which followed one another with great rapidity: The Channings and Mrs Halliburton s Troubles, in 1862 ; Verner s Pride and The SJiadoiv of Ashlydyat, in 1863 ; Lord Oakbuni s Daiighters, Osivald Cray, and Trevlyn Hold, in 1864. These works were held to confirm the promise of East Lynne, and The Shadoiv of Ashlydyat was pronounced to be (as it is still generally considered) the best of them all. Complaints of sameness, almost inevitable, considering the rate of production, of commonplaceness of sentiment and material, and of a certain narrowness and insufficiency in her conceptions of poetical justice first began to be heard in connexion with Mildred Arkell (1865), and became louder as the fertile novelist continued to pour forth her stories with inexhaustible fluency. She became owner of the Argosy in 1867, and her stories quickly raised it to an enormous circulation. She had a certain triumph over her critics with the Johnny Liidlow tales, an imitation of Miss Mitford s Tales of Our Village. Mrs Wood s name was not put to them as they appeared in the Argosy, and when the first series was collected and published separately in 1874 they excited among reviewers an approach to the enthusiasm with which her first efforts had been welcomed. Undoubtedly Mrs Wood possessed many of the qualities of a first-rate story-teller, great simplicity of style, unfailing fluency, a lively interest in prominent traits of character, abundant circumstantiality, skill in exciting curiosity and keeping up suspense, and withal a wonderful clearness of method. Amidst her crowd of characters and incidents you are never puzzled or perplexed, and she very rarely lapses into tediousness. If ever she is tedious, it is from repeating herself. Her &quot; criticism of life &quot; is not very broad or very profound, though it is generally for moral edification ; she is simply an excellent story-teller out of the ordinary materials of the craft. In private life Mrs Wood seems to have been a most amiable person : her son gives a very lovable picture of her. Her death took place on 10th February 1887, at the age of seventy-three. She was active in her work till the very last, and left several completed stories, short and long, ready for publication. WOOD-CARVING. In most countries, during the early development of the plastic art, sculpture in wood took a very important position, and was much used for statues on a large scale, as well as for small works decorated with surface carving. On the whole, wood is much more suitable for carving in slight relief than for sculpture in the round, and its special structure, with bundles of long fibres, strong in one direticon and weak in