Life by T. Jackson (London, 1839).
GOODWIN, NATHANIEL CARL (1857- ), American actor, was born in Boston on the 25th of July 1857. While clerk in a large shop he studied for the stage, and made his first appearance in 1873 in Boston in Stuart Robson’s company as the newsboy in Joseph Bradford’s Law. He made an immediate success by his imitations of popular actors. A hit in the burlesque Black-eyed Susan led to his taking part in Rice and Goodwin’s Evangeline company. It was at this time that he married Eliza Weathersby (d. 1887), an English actress with whom he played in B. E. Woollf’s Hobbies. It was not until 1889, however, that Nat Goodwin’s talent as a comedian of the “legitimate” type began to be recognized. From that time he appeared in a number of plays designed to display his drily humorous method, such as Brander Matthews’ and George H. Jessop’s A Gold Mine, Henry Guy Carleton’s A Gilded Fool and Ambition, Clyde Fitch’s Nathan Hale, H. V. Esmond’s When we were Twenty-one, &c. Till 1903 he was associated in his performances with his third wife, the actress Maxine Elliott (b. 1873), whom he married in 1898; this marriage was dissolved in 1908.
GOODWIN, THOMAS (1600-1680), English Nonconformist divine, was born at Rollesby, Norfolk, on the 5th of October 1600, and was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where in 1616 he graduated B.A. In 1619 he removed to Catharine Hall, where in 1620 he was elected fellow. In 1625 he was licensed a preacher of the university; and three years afterwards he became lecturer of Trinity Church, to the vicarage of which he was presented by the king in 1632. Worried by his bishop, who was a zealous adherent of Laud, he resigned all his preferments and left the university in 1634. He lived for some time in London, where in 1638 he married the daughter of an alderman; but in the following year he withdrew to Holland, and for some time was pastor of a small congregation of English merchants and refugees at Arnheim. Returning to London soon after Laud’s impeachment by the Long Parliament, he ministered for some years to the Independent congregation meeting at Paved Alley Church, Lime Street, in the parish of St Dunstan’s-in-the-East, and rapidly rose to considerable eminence as a preacher; in 1643 he was chosen a member of the Westminster Assembly, and at once identified himself with the Congregational party, generally referred to in contemporary documents as “the dissenting brethren.” He frequently preached by appointment before the Commons, and in January 1650 his talents and learning were rewarded by the House with the presidentship of Magdalen College, Oxford, a post which he held until the Restoration. He rose into high favour with the protector, and was one of his intimate advisers, attending him on his death-bed. He was also a commissioner for the inventory of the Westminster Assembly, 1650, and for the approbation of preachers, 1653, and together with John Owen (q.v.) drew up an amended Westminster Confession in 1658. From 1660 until his death on the 23rd of February 1680 he lived in London, and devoted himself exclusively to theological study and to the pastoral charge of the Fetter Lane Independent Church.
The works published by Goodwin during his lifetime consist chiefly of sermons printed by order of the House of Commons; but he was also associated with Philip Nye and others in the preparation of the Apologeticall Narration (1643). His collected writings, which include expositions of the Epistle to the Ephesians and of the Apocalypse, were published in five folio volumes between 1681 and 1704, and were reprinted in twelve 8vo volumes (Edin., 1861-1866). Characterized by abundant yet one-sided reading, remarkable at once for the depth and for the narrowness of their observation and spiritual experience, often admirably thorough in their workmanship, yet in style intolerably prolix—they fairly exemplify both the merits and the defects of the special school of religious thought to which they belong. Calamy’s estimate of Goodwin’s qualities may be quoted as both friendly and just. “He was a considerable scholar and an eminent divine, and had a very happy faculty in descanting upon Scripture so as to bring forth surprising remarks, which yet generally tended to illustration.” A memoir, derived from his own papers, by his son (Thomas Goodwin, “the younger,” 1650?-1716?, Independent minister at London and Pinner, and author of the History of the Reign of Henry V.) is prefixed to the fifth volume of his collected works; as a “patriarch and Atlas of Independency” he is also noticed by Anthony Wood in the Athenae Oxonienses. An amusing sketch, from Addison’s point of view, of the austere and somewhat fanatical president of Magdalen is preserved in No. 494 of the Spectator.
GOODWIN, WILLIAM WATSON (1831- ), American classical scholar, was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 9th of May 1831. He graduated at Harvard in 1851, studied in Germany, was tutor in Greek at Harvard in 1856-1860, and Eliot professor of Greek there from 1860 until his resignation in 1901. He became an overseer of Harvard in 1903. In 1882-1883 he was the first director of the American School for Classical Studies at Athens. Goodwin edited the Panegyricus of Isocrates (1864) and Demosthenes On The Crown (1901); and assisted in preparing the seventh edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. He revised an English version by several writers of Plutarch’s Morals (5 vols., 1871; 6th ed., 1889), and published the Greek text with literal English version of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (1906) for the Harvard production of that play in June 1906. As a teacher he did much to raise the tone of classical reading from that of a mechanical exercise to literary study. But his most important work was his Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (1860), of which the seventh revised edition appeared in 1877 and another (enlarged) in 1890. This was “based in part on Madvig and Krüger,” but, besides making accessible to American students the works of these continental grammarians, it presented original matter, including a “radical innovation in the classification of conditional sentences,” notably the “distinction between particular and general suppositions.” Goodwin’s Greek Grammar (elementary edition, 1870; enlarged 1879; revised and enlarged 1892) gradually superseded in most American schools the Grammar of Hadley and Allen. Both the Moods and Tenses and the Grammar in later editions are largely dependent on the theories of Gildersleeve for additions and changes. Goodwin also wrote a few elaborate syntactical studies, to be found in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, the twelfth volume of which was dedicated to him upon the completion of fifty years as an alumnus of Harvard and forty-one years as Eliot professor.
GOODWIN SANDS, a dangerous line of shoals at the entrance to the Strait of Dover from the North Sea, about 6 m. from the Kent coast of England, from which they are separated by the anchorage of the Downs. For this they form a shelter. They are partly exposed at low water, but the sands are shifting, and in spite of lights and bell-buoys the Goodwins are frequently the scene of wrecks, while attempts to erect a lighthouse or beacon have failed. Tradition finds in the Goodwins the remnant of an island called Lomea, which belonged to Earl Godwine in the first half of the 11th century, and was afterwards submerged, when the funds devoted to its protection were diverted to build the church steeple at Tenterden (q.v.). Four lightships mark the limits of the sands, and also signal by rockets to the lifeboat stations on the coast when any vessel is in distress on the sands. Perhaps the most terrible catastrophe recorded here was the wreck of thirteen ships of war during a great storm in November 1703.