The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [811]
Walker, Joseph Cooper (1761–1810), antiquary; best remembered as a pioneering student of contemporary literature and vernacular poetry in the Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786); one of the original members of the Royal Irish Academy (1785): 172, 580 n. b
Walker, Thomas (1698–1744), actor and playwright; Drury Lane comedian, debuting in 1715; ran his own great booth in Bird Cage Alley at Southwark fair; moved to Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1721; established himself in the role of Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera; beset by debt throughout his life: 458
Wall, Dr Martin (1747–1824), physician at Oxford: 926
Waller, Edmund (1606–87), poet and politician; elected to the Short Parliament in 1640, representing Amersham, and sat for St Ives, Cornwall, in the Long Parliament until his expulsion in 1643; discredited by the fiasco of ‘Waller’s plot’, an attempt to establish a middle party in 1643 that resulted in bloodshed and the precipitation of civil war; lyricist and panegyrist poised between the Renaissance and Augustan ages: 292, 454, 692, 700 n. a, 782 and n. a, 783–4, 819, 924 nn. a and b
Walmsley, Gilbert (1680–1751), friend of S.J.; lived in the bishop’s palace at Lichfield for thirty years; described by Anna Seward as Garrick’s and S.J.’s first patron; some of his correspondence with Garrick and S.J. remains in Garrick’s Private Correspondence and in S.J.’s Letters: 48–9 and n. b, 59, 60, in, 228, 514, 761
Walmsley, Mrs Magdalen (i709?-86), wife of the above: 513
Walpole, Horace, 4th Earl of Orford (1717–97), author, politician and patron of the arts; son of Robert Walpole; the historian of his own times; founder of the Strawberry Hill press; author of the Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1763) and committed to the Gothic revival in landscaping and architecture; patron of Thomas Chatterton and implicated in the Rowley controversy; extensive Memoirs only published posthumously; publicly disliked S.J., a rival literary titan of the eighteenth century; reputation has suffered in posterity: 219 n. b, 568, 867 n. a, 937–8
Walpole, Sir Robert, 1st Earl of Orford (1676–1745), prime minister; leader of the Whigs; member of the Kit-Cat Club from 1703; Secretary at War (1708–10); treasurer of the navy (1710-n); Paymaster of the Forces (1714, 1720); first lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1715); played a key role in formulating a response to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble; returned to first lord of the Treasury in 1721; headed the Townshend-Walpole ministry (1722-3); knight of the Garter (1726); ridiculed for venality in The Beggar’s Opera and Gulliver’s Travels; indisputably ‘prime minister’, the first to claim this title, by the 1730s; resigned in 1742; unassailable position held largely due to the favour of George I and II and their mistrust of the Tories: 75, 76, 82, 321, 363, 448, 451, 547, 568, 653, 809, 938
Walsh, William (1663–1708), poet; colleague of Dryden; Low Church Whig; member of the Kit-Cat Club; mentor of Alexander Pope, proofing manuscripts of some of his pastorals: 330 n. a
Walton, Izaak (1593–1683), author and biographer; unwavering royalist; friend and biographer (1640) of John Donne; senior warden of the Yeomanry (1638); best remembered for his Compleat Angler (1653), although the fishing manual was not tremendously popular in his own lifetime; wrote further lives of Hooker, Sir Henry Wotton, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson; considerable influence on J.B. for the style and form of his Life: 411, 413–14, 456, 502, 577, 936
Warburton, Dr William (1698–1779), bishop of Gloucester (1760) and controversialist; staunchly loyal Whig; rector of Brant Broughton, Lincs. (1728–46); close friend of Pope, making an imaginative contribution to The Dunciad, Book 4, and acting as the poet’s executor after death; friend of Richardson, Sterne and Fielding; author of the controversial Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1738–41); Shakespeare scholar; chaplain to the King (1754); dean of Bristol (1757): 11, 20, 91, 100–101, 143 and n. b, 151, 177, 282 n. a, 283 and n. a, 558 n. a,