war, compelled him to make peace next year at Newcastle.
Alexander now turned his attention to securing the Western
Isles, which still owned a nominal dependence on Norway.
Negotiations and purchase were successively tried but without
success. Alexander next attempted to seduce Ewen, the son of
Duncan, lord of Argyll, from his allegiance to the Norwegian
king. Ewen refused his overtures, and Alexander sailed
forth to compel him. But on the way he was seized with
fever at Kerrera, and died there on the 8th of July 1249.
ALEXANDER III. (1241-1285), king of Scotland, son of
Alexander II. by his second wife Mary de Coucy, was born in
1241. At the age of eight years the death of his father
called him to the throne. The years of his minority were
marked by an embittered struggle for the control of affairs
between two rival parties, the one led by Walter Comyn, earl
of Menteith, the other by Alan Durward, the justiciar. The
former was in the ascendant during the early years of the
reign. At the marriage of Alexander to Margaret of England in
1251, Henry III. seized the opportunity to demand from his
son-in-law homage for the Scottish kingdom, but the claim was
refused. In 1255 an interview between the English and Scottish
kings at Kelso resulted in the deposition of Menteith and his
party in favour of their opponents. But though disgraced,
they still retained great influence; and two years later,
seizing the person of the king, they compelled their rivals
to consent to the erection of a regency representative of both
parties. On attaining his majority in 1262, Alexander declared
his intention of resuming the projects on the Western Isles which
had been cut short by the death of his father thirteen years
before. A formal claim was laid before the Norwegian king
Haakon. Not only was this unsuccessful, but next year Haakon
replied by a formidable invasion. Sailing round the west
coast of Scotland he halted off Arran, where negotiations were
opened. These were artfully prolonged by Alexander until
the autumn storms should begin. At length Haakon, weary of
delay, attacked, only to encounter a terrific storm which
greatly damaged his ships. The battle of Largs, fought next
day, was indecisive. But even so Haakon's position was
hopeless. Baffled he turned homewards, but died on the
way. The Isles now lay at Alexander's feet, and in 1266
Haakon's successor concluded a treaty by which the Isle of
Man and the Western Isles were ceded to Scotland in return for
a money payment, Orkney and Shetland alone being retained.
Towards the end of Alexander's reign, the death of all his
three children within a few years made the question of the
succession one of pressing importance. In 1284 he induced the
Estates to recognize as his heir-presumptive his grand-daughter
Margaret, the ``Maid of Norway''; and next year the desire for
a male heir led him to contract a second marriage. But all
such hopes were defeated by the sudden death of the king, who
was killed by a fall from his horse in the dark while riding
to visit the queen at Kinghorn on the 16th of March 1285.
ALEXANDER (ALEXANDER OBRENOVICH) (1876-1903), king of
Servia, was born on the 14th of August 1876. On the 6th of
March 1889 his father, King Milan, abdicated and proclaimed
him king of Servia under a regency until he should attain his
majority at eighteen years of age. King Alexander, on the
13th of April 1893, being then in his seventeenth year, made
his notable first coup d'etat, proclaimed himself of full
age, dismissed the regents and their government, and took the
royal authority into his own hands. His action was popular,
and was rendered still more so by his appointment of a radical
ministry. In May 1894 King Alexander, by another coup
d'etat, abolished the liberal constitution of 1889 and
restored the conservative one of 1869. His attitude during
the Turco-Greek war of 1897 was one of strict neutrality. In
1898 he appointed his father commander-in-chief of the Servian
army, and from that time, or rather from his return to Servia
in 1894 until 1900, ex-king Milan was regarded as the de
facto ruler of the country. But while, during the summer of
1900, Milan was away from Servia taking waters in Carlsbad,
and making arrangements to secure the hand of a German princess
for his son, and while the premier, Dr Vladan Dyorevich,
was visiting the Paris Universal Exhibition, King Alexander
suddenly announced to the people of Servia his engagement to
Mme Draga Mashin, a widow, formerly a lady-in-waiting to Queen
Natalie. The projected union aroused great opposition at
first. Ex-King Milan resigned his post; so did the government;
and King Alexander had great difficulty in forming a new
cabinet. But the opposition subsided somewhat on the
publication of Tsar Nicholas's congratulations to the king on
his engagement and of his acceptance to act as the principal
witness at the wedding. The marriage was then duly celebrated
on the 5th of August 1900. Still this union was unpopular and
weakened the position of King Alexander in the army and the
country. He tried to reconcile political parties by granting
from his own initiative a liberal constitution (April 6,
1901), introducing for the first time in the constitutional
history of Servia the system of two chambers (skupshtina and
senate). This did in a certain measure reconcile the political
parties, but did not reconcile the army, which, already
dissatisfied with the king's marriage, became still more
so at the rumours that one of the two unpopular brothers of
Queen Draga, Lieutenant Nicodiye, was to be proclaimed heir-
apparent to the throne. Meanwhile the independence of the
senate and of the council of state caused growing irritation
to King Alexander, which led him to another coup d'etat.
He suspended (March 1903) the constitution for half an hour,
time enough to publish the decrees by which the old senators
and councillors of state were dismissed and replaced by new
ones. This arbitrary act naturally increased the dissatisfaction
in the country. The general impression was that inasmuch as
the senate was packed with men devoted to the royal couple,
and inasmuch as the government obtained a large majority at
the general elections, King Alexander would not hesitate any
longer to proclaim Queen Draga's brother as the heir to the
throne. Apparently to prevent this, but in reality to replace
Alexander Obrenovich by Peter Karageorgevich, a military
conspiracy was organized. The conspirators penetrated into
the palace and savagely murdered King Alexander and Queen
Draga in the early morning of the 11th of June 1903. (C. MI.)
ALEXANDER, son of Numenius, Greek rhetorician, flourished
in the first half of the second century A.D. In addition to
general treatises on rhetoric, he wrote a special work Peri
ton tes dianoias kai tes lexeos schematon, of which
only an abridgment is extant; later epitomes were made in Latin
by Aquila Romanus and Julius Rufinianus under the title De
Figuris Sententiarum et Elocutionis. Another epitome was
made in the fourth century by a Christian for use in Christian
schools, containing additional examples from Gregory of Nazianzus.
Text in Spengel, Rhetores Graeci (1856).
ALEXANDER, ARCHIBALD (1772-1851), American Presbyterian
divine, was born, of Scottish-Irish descent, in that part
of Augusta county which is now Rockbridge county, Virginia,
on the 17th of April 1772. After completing his preliminary
education in the little school at Lexington, Virginia, which
later developed into Washington and Lee University, he came
under the influence of the religious movement known as the
``great revival'' (1789-1790) and devoted himself to the study of
theology. Licensed to preach in 1791, he was engaged for
several years as an itinerant Presbyterian preacher in his
native state, and acquired during this period the facility in
extemporaneous speaking for which he was remarkable. He was
president of Hampden-Sidney College from 1796 to 1807, with a
short intermission (in 1801-1802), and in 1807 became pastor
of Pine Street Church, Philadelphia. In 1812 he became first
professor in the newly established Presbyterian Theological
Seminary at Princeton, New Jersey, where he remained until
his death at Princeton on the 22nd of October 1851, filling
successively the chairs of didactic and polemic theology
(1812-1840), and pastoral and polemic theology (1840-1851). He
married, in 1802, Janetta Waddel, the daughter of the celebrated
blind preacher, James Waddel (1739-1805), whose eloquence
was described in William Wirt's Letters of a British Spy
(1803). Dr Alexander wrote a considerable number of theological
works, which had a large circulation. Among these may be
mentioned his Brief Outline of the Evidences of the Christian
Religion (1825), which passed through several editions, and
was translated into various languages; The Canon of the Old
and New Testament Ascertained; or the Bible Complete without
the Apocrypha and Unwritten Traditions (1826); A History
of the Israelitish Nation (1852), and Outlines of Moral
Science (1852), the last two being published posthumously.
See the biography (New York, 1854) by his son James W. Alexander.
ALEXANDER, FRANCIS (1800-1881), American portrait- painter,
was born in Windham county, Connecticut, in February 1800.
Brought up on a farm, he taught himself the use of colours,
and in 1820 went to New York City and studied painting with
Alexander Robertson. He spent the winters of 1831 and 1832
in Rome, and then for nearly a decade he lived in Boston,
Massachusetts, where he had considerable vogue, and where
in 1842 he painted a portrait of Charles Dickens. One of
his best portraits is that of Mrs Fletcher Webster in the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He died in 1881 in Florence.
ALEXANDER, GEORGE (1858- ), English actor, whose family
name was Samson, was born in Reading on the 19th of June 1858,
the son of a Scottish manufacturer. He went into business in
London after leaving school, but having acted as an amateur
he determined to make the stage his profession. His first
appearance was at Nottingham in 1879, and after some seasons
of provincial experience he made his first London appearance
as Caleb Deecie in Two Roses in 1881 with Irving at the
Lyceum. He was selected by W. S. Gilbert to support Mary
Anderson in Comedy and Tragedy, returned for a time to the
Lyceum, where he was Irving's principal associate, especially
as Faust (1886) and Macduff (1888); and, after starting
successfully under his own management at the Avenue Theatre in
1890 with Dr Bill, in 1891 became manager of the St James's
Theatre. There he produced a number of successful plays, notably
Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of
being Earnest, Pinero's Second Mrs Tanqueray, The Princess
and the Butterfiy, His House in Order and The Thunderbolt;
C. Haddon Chambers's The Idler; H. A. Jones's Masqueraders;
Alfred Sutro's John Glayde's Honour and The Builder of
Bridges; Carton's Liberty Hall and The Tree of Knowledge;
Anthony Hope's Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau;
and Stephen Phillips's Paolo and Francesca, himself playing
the leading parts with great distinction. In 1907 he was
elected a member of the London County Council as a municipal
reformer, but continued to act regularly at the St James's.
ALEXANDER, SIR JAMES EDWARD (1803-1885), British soldier and
traveller, was born on the 16th of October 1803. He joined
the East India Company's army in 1820, transferring into the
