HALE, NATHAN (1756-1776). American hero of the War of Independence, was born at Coventry, Conn., and educated at Yale, then becoming a school teacher. He joined a Connecticut regiment after the breaking out of the war, and served in the siege of Boston, being commissioned a captain at the opening of 1776. When Heath’s brigade departed for New York he went with them, and the tradition is that he was one of a small and daring band who captured an English provision sloop from under the very guns of a man-of-war. But on the 21st of September, having volunteered to enter the British lines to obtain information concerning the enemy, he was captured in his disguise of a Dutch school-teacher and on the 22nd was hanged. The penalty was in accordance with military law, but young Hale’s act was a brave one, and he has always been glorified as a martyr. Tradition attributes to him the saying that he only regretted that he had but one life to lose for his country; and it is said that his request for a Bible and the services of a minister was refused by his captors. There is a fine statue of Hale by Macmonnies in New York.
See H. P. Johnston, Nathan Hale (1901).
HALE, WILLIAM GARDNER (1849- ), American classical scholar, was born on the 9th of February 1849 in Savannah, Georgia. He graduated at Harvard University in 1870, and took a post-graduate course in philosophy there in 1874-1876; studied classical philology at Leipzig and Göttingen in 1876-1877; was tutor in Latin at Harvard from 1877 to 1880, and professor of Latin in Cornell University from 1880 to 1892, when he became professor of Latin and head of the Latin department of the University of Chicago. From 1894 to 1899 he was chairman and in 1895-1896 first director of the American School of Classical Studies at Rome. He is best known as an original teacher on questions of syntax. In The Cum-Constructions: Their History and Functions, which appeared in Cornell University Studies in Classical Philology (1888-1889; and in German version by Neizert in 1891), he attacked Hoffmann’s distinction between absolute and relative temporal clauses as published in Lateinische Zeitpartikeln (1874); Hoffmann replied in 1891, and the best summary of the controversy is in Wetzel’s Der Streit zwischen Hoffmann und Hale (1892). Hale wrote also The Sequence of Tenses in Latin (1887-1888), The Anticipatory Subjunctive in Greek and Latin (1894), and a Latin Grammar (1903), to which the parts on sounds, inflection and word-formation were contributed by Carl Darling Buck.
HALEBID, a village in Mysore state, southern India; pop. (1901), 1524. The name means “old capital,” being the site of Dorasamudra, the capital of the Hoysala dynasty founded early in the 11th century. In 1310 and again in 1326 it was taken and plundered by the first Mahommedan invader of southern India. Two temples, still standing, though never completed and greatly ruined, are regarded as the finest examples of the elaborately carved Chalukyan style of architecture.
HALES, or Hayles, JOHN (d. 1571), English writer and politician, was a son of Thomas Hales of Hales Place, Halden, Kent. He wrote his Highway to Nobility about 1543, and was the founder of a free school at Coventry for which he wrote Introductiones ad grammaticam. In political life Hales, who was member of parliament for Preston, was specially concerned with opposing the enclosure of land, being the most active of the commissioners appointed in 1548 to redress this evil; but he failed to carry several remedial measures through parliament. When the protector, the duke of Somerset, was deprived of his authority in 1550, Hales left England and lived for some time at Strassburg and Frankfort, returning to his own country on the accession of Elizabeth. However he soon lost the royal favour by writing a pamphlet, A Declaration of the Succession of the Crowne Imperiall of Inglande, which declared that the recent marriage between Lady Catherine Grey and Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, was legitimate, and asserted that, failing direct heirs to Elizabeth, the English crown should come to Lady Catherine as the descendant of Mary, daughter of Henry VII. The author was imprisoned, but was quickly released, and died on the 28th of December 1571. The Discourse of the Common Weal, described as “one of the most informing documents of the age,” and written about 1549, has been attributed to Hales. This has been edited by E. Lamond (Cambridge, 1893).
Hales is often confused with another John Hales, who was clerk of the hanaper under Henry VIII. and his three immediate successors.