[Welsh], or Welch, John, a Scottish divine, a Nithsdale man; became Presbyterian minister of Ayr, and was distinguished both as a preacher and for his sturdy opposition to the ecclesiastical tyranny of James VI., for which latter he suffered imprisonment and exile; he was an ancestor of Jane Welsh Carlyle, and was married to a daughter of John Knox, who, when the king thought to win her over by offering her husband a bishopric, held out her apron before sovereign majesty, and threatened she would rather kep (catch) his head there than that he should live and be a bishop; she figures in the chapter in "Sartor" on Aprons, as one of Carlyle's apron-worthies (1570-1625).
[Welsh Calvinistic Methodists], the largest Nonconformist body in Wales, of native growth, and that originated in the middle of the 18th century in connection with a great religious awakening; has an ecclesiastical constitution on Presbyterian lines, and is in alliance with the Presbyterian Church of England; it consists of 1330 churches, and has a membership of over 150,000, that is, on their communion roll, and two theological seminaries, one at Trevecca and one at Bala.
[Welshpool] (6), town in Montgomeryshire, North Wales, on the left bank of the Severn, 19 m. W. of Shrewsbury, the manufacture of flannels and woollen goods being the chief industry.
[Wends], a horde of savage Slavs who, about the 6th century, invaded and took possession of vacant lands on the southern shores of the Baltic, and extended their inroads as far as Hamburg and the ocean, south also far over the Elbe in some quarters, and were a source of great trouble to the Germans in Henry the Fowler's time, and after; they burst in upon Brandenburg once, in "never-imagined fury," and stamped out, as they thought, the Christian religion there by wholesale butchery of its priests, setting up for worship their own god "Triglaph, ugliest and stupidest of all false gods," described as "something like three whales' cubs combined by boiling, or a triple porpoise dead-drunk." They were at length "fairly beaten to powder" by Albert the Bear, "and either swept away or else damped down into Christianity and keeping of the peace," though remnants of them, with their language and customs, exist in Lusatia to this day.
[Wendt, Hans], German theologian, born in Hamburg, professor at Kiel and at Heidelberg; has written an excellent "Leben Jesu" among other able works; b. 1853.
[Wenegeld], among the old Saxons and other Teutonic races a fine, the price of homicide, of varying amount, paid in part to the relatives of the person killed and in part to the king or chief.
[Wener, Lake], the largest lake in Sweden, in the SW., 150 ft. above the sea-level and 100 m. long by 50 m. of utmost breadth, contains several islands, and abounds in fish.
[Wentworth]. See [Strafford].
[Werewolf], a person transformed into a wolf, or a being with a literally wolfish appetite, under the presumed influence of a charm or some demoniac possession.
[Werner, Friedrich Ludwig Zacharias], a dramatist of a mystic stamp, born at Königsberg; is the subject of an essay by Carlyle, and described by him as a man of a very dissolute spiritual texture; wrote the "Templars of Cyprus," the "Story of the Fallen Master," &c. (1768-1823).