Harvey exercised great influence over Spenser for a short time, and the friendship lasted even though Spenser’s genius refused to be bound by the laws of the new prosody. Harvey is the Hobbinoll of his friend’s Shepheards Calender, and into his mouth is put the beautiful song in the fourth eclogue in praise of Eliza. If he was really the author of the verses “To the Learned Shepheard” signed “Hobynoll” and prefixed to the Faerie Queene, he was a good poet spoiled. But Harvey’s genuine friendship for Spenser shows the best side of a disposition uncompromising and quarrelsome towards the world in general. In 1573 ill-will against him in his college was so strong that there was a delay of three months before the fellows would agree to grant him the necessary grace for his M.A. degree. He became reader in rhetoric about 1576, and in 1578, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Sir Thomas Smith at Audley End, he was appointed to dispute publicly before her. In the next year he wrote to Spenser complaining of the unauthorized publication of satirical verses of his which were supposed to reflect on high personages, and threatened seriously to injure Harvey’s career. In 1583 he became junior proctor of the university, and in 1585 he was elected master of Trinity Hall, of which he had been a fellow from 1578, but the appointment appears to have been quashed at court. He was a protégé of the Earl of Leicester, to whom he introduced Spenser, and this connexion may account for his friendship with Sir Philip Sidney. But in spite of patronage, a second application for the mastership of Trinity Hall failed in 1598. In 1585 he received the degree of D.C.L. from the university of Oxford, and is found practising at the bar in London. Gabriel’s brother, Richard, had taken part in the Marprelate controversy, and had given offence to Robert Greene by contemptuous references to him and his fellow wits. Greene retorted in his Quip for an Upstart Courtier with some scathing remarks on the Harveys, the worst of which were expunged in later editions, drawing attention among other things to Harvey’s modest parentage. In 1599 Archbishop Whitgift made a raid on contemporary satire in general, and among other books the tracts of Harvey and Nashe were destroyed, and it was forbidden to reprint them. Harvey spent the last years of his life in retirement at his native place, dying in 1630.
His extant Latin works are: Ciceronianus (1577); G. Harveii rhetor, sive 2 dierum oratio de natura, arte et exercitatione rhetorica (1577); Smithus, vel Musarum lachrymae (1578), in honour of Sir Thomas Smith; and G. Harveii gratulationum Valdensium libri quatuour (sic), written on the occasion of the queen’s visit to Audley End (1578). The Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D. 1573-80 (1884, ed. E. J. L. Scott, Camden Society), contains rough drafts of the correspondence between Spenser and Harvey, letters relative to the disputes at Pembroke Hall, and an extraordinary correspondence dealing with the pursuit of his sister Mercy by a young nobleman. A copy of Quintilian (1542), in the British Museum, is extensively annotated by Gabriel Harvey. After Greene’s death Harvey published Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets (1592), in which in a spirit of righteous superiority he laid bare with spiteful fulness the miserable details of Greene’s later years. Thomas Nashe, who in power of invective and merciless wit was far superior to Harvey, took upon himself to avenge Greene’s memory, and at the same time settle his personal account with the Harveys, in Strange Newes (1593). Harvey refuted the personal charges made by Nashe in Pierce’s Supererogation, or a New Prayse Of the Old Asse ... (1593). In Christes Teares over Jerusalem (1593) Nashe made a full apology to Harvey, who refused to be appeased, and resumed what had become a very scurrilous controversy in a New Letter of Notable Contents (1593). Nashe thereupon withdrew his apology in a new edition (1594) of Christes Teares, and hearing that Harvey had boasted of victory he produced the most biting satire of the series in Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596). Harvey retorted in The Trimming of Thomas Nashe Gentleman, by the high-tituled patron Don Richardo de Medico campo ... (1597).
His complete works were edited by Dr A. B. Grosart with a “Memorial Introduction” for the Huth Library (1884-1885). See also Isaac Disraeli, on “Literary Ridicule,” in Calamities of Authors (ed. 1840); T. Warton’s History of English Poetry (ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1871); J. P. Collier’s Bibliographical and Critical Account of the Rarest Books in the English Language (1865), and the Works of Thomas Nashe.
HARVEY, SIR GEORGE (1806-1876), Scottish painter, the son of a watchmaker, was born at St Ninians, near Stirling, in February 1806. Soon after his birth his parents removed to Stirling, where George was apprenticed to a bookseller. His love for art having, however, become very decided, in his eighteenth year he entered the Trustees’ Academy at Edinburgh. Here he so distinguished himself that in 1826 he was invited by the Scottish artists, who had resolved to found a Scottish academy, to join it as an associate. Harvey’s first picture, “A Village School,” was exhibited in 1826 at the Edinburgh Institution; and from the time of the opening of the Academy in the following year he continued annually to exhibit. His best-known pictures are those depicting historical episodes in religious history from a puritan or evangelical point of view, such as “Covenanters Preaching,” “Covenanters’ Communion,” “John Bunyan and his Blind Daughter,” “Sabbath Evening,” and the “Quitting of the Manse.” He was, however, equally popular in Scotland for subjects not directly religious; and “The Bowlers,” “A Highland Funeral,” “The Curlers,” “A Schule Skailin’,” and “Children Blowing Bubbles in the Churchyard of Greyfriars’, Edinburgh,” manifest the same close observation of character, artistic conception and conscientious elaboration of details. In “The Night Mail” and “Dawn Revealing the New World to Columbus” the aspects of nature are made use of in different ways, but with equal happiness, to lend impressiveness and solemnity to human concerns. He also painted landscapes and portraits. In 1829 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Scottish Academy; in 1864 he succeeded Sir J. W. Gordon as president; and he was knighted in 1867. He died at Edinburgh on the 22nd of January 1876.
Sir George Harvey was the author of a paper on the “Colour of the Atmosphere,” read before the Edinburgh Royal Society, and afterwards published with illustrations in Good Words; and in 1870 he published a small volume entitled Notes of the Early History of the Royal Scottish Academy. Selections from the Works of Sir George Harvey, P.R.S.A., described by the Rev. A. L. Simpson, F.S.A. Scot., and photographed by Thomas Annan, appeared at Edinburgh in 1869.
HARVEY, WILLIAM (1578-1657), English physician, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, was the eldest son of Thomas Harvey, a prosperous Kentish yeoman, and was born at Folkestone on the 1st of April 1578. After passing through the grammar school of Canterbury, on the 31st of May 1593, having just entered his sixteenth year, he became a pensioner of Caius College, Cambridge, at nineteen he took his B.A. degree, and soon after, having chosen the profession of medicine, he went to study at Padua under H. Fabricius and Julius Casserius. At the age of twenty-four Harvey became doctor of medicine, in April 1602. Returning to England in the first year of James I., he settled in London; and two years later he married the daughter of Dr Lancelot Browne, who had been physician to Queen Elizabeth. In the same year he became a candidate of the Royal College of Physicians, and was duly admitted a fellow (June 1607). In 1609 he obtained the reversion of the post of physician to St Bartholomew’s hospital. His application was supported by the king himself and by Dr Henry Atkins (1558-1635), the president of the college, and on the death of Dr Wilkinson in the course of the same year he succeeded to the post. He was thrice censor of the college, and in 1615 was appointed Lumleian lecturer.
In 1616 he began his course of lectures, and first brought forward his views upon the movements of the heart and blood. Meantime his practice increased, and he had the lord chancellor, Francis Bacon, and the earl of Arundel among his patients. In 1618 he was appointed physician extraordinary to James I., and on the next vacancy physician in ordinary to his successor. In 1628, the year of the publication of the Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis, he was elected treasurer of the College of Physicians, but at the end of the following year he resigned the office, in order, by command of Charles I., to accompany the young duke of Lennox (James Stuart, afterwards duke of Richmond) on his travels. He appears to have visited Italy, and returned in 1632. Four years later he accompanied the earl of Arundel on his embassy to the emperor Ferdinand II. He was eager in collecting objects of natural history, sometimes causing the earl anxiety for his safety by his excursions in a country infested by robbers in consequence of the Thirty Years’ War. In a letter written on this journey, he says: “By the way we could scarce see a dogg, crow, kite, raven, or any bird, or anything to anatomise; only sum few miserable people, the reliques of the war and the plague, whom famine had made anatomies before I came.” Having returned to his practice in London at the close of the year 1636, he accompanied Charles I. in one of his journeys to Scotland (1639 or 1641). While at Edinburgh he visited the Bass Rock; he minutely describes its abundant population of sea-fowl in his treatise De generatione, and incidentally speaks of the account then credited of the solan goose growing on trees as a fable. He was in attendance on the king at the battle of Edgehill (October 1642), where he withdrew under a hedge with the prince of Wales and the duke of York (then boys of twelve and ten years old), “and took out of his pocket a book and read. But he had not read very long before a bullet of a great gun grazed on the ground near him, which made him remove his station,” as he afterwards told John Aubrey. After the indecisive battle, Harvey followed Charles I. to Oxford, “where,” writes the same gossiping narrator, “I first saw him, but was then too young to be acquainted with so great a doctor. I remember he came several times to our college (Trinity) to George Bathurst, B.D. who had a hen to hatch eggs in his chamber, which they opened daily to see the progress and way of generation.” In Oxford he remained three years, and there was some chance of his being superseded in his office at St Bartholomew’s hospital, “because he hath withdrawn himself from his charge, and is retired to the party in arms against the Parliament.” It was no doubt at this time that his lodgings at Whitehall were searched, and not only the furniture seized but also invaluable manuscripts and anatomical preparations.[1]
While with the king at Oxford he was made warden of Merton College, but a year later, in 1646, that city surrendered to Fairfax, and Harvey returned to London. He was now sixty-eight years old, and, having resigned his appointments and relinquished the cares of practice, lived in learned retirement with one or other of his brothers. It was in his brother Daniel’s house at Combe that Dr (afterwards Sir George) Ent, a faithful friend and disciple (1604-1689), visited him in 1650. “I found him,” he says, “with a cheerful and sprightly countenance investigating, like Democritus, the nature of things. Asking if all were well with him—‘How can that be,’ he replied, ‘when the state is so agitated with storms and I myself am yet in the open sea? And indeed, were not my mind solaced by my studies and the recollection of the observations I have formerly made, there is nothing which should make me desirous of a longer continuance. But thus employed, this obscure life and vacation from public cares which would disgust other minds is the medicine of mine.’” The work on which he had been chiefly engaged at Oxford, and indeed since the publication of his treatise on the circulation in 1628, was an investigation into the recondite but deeply interesting subject of generation. Charles I. had been an enlightened patron of Harvey’s studies, had put the royal deer parks at Windsor and Hampton Court at his disposal, and had watched his demonstration of the growth of the chick with no less interest than the movements of the living heart. Harvey had now collected a large number of observations, though he would probably have delayed their publication. But Ent succeeded in obtaining the manuscripts, with authority to print them or not as he should find them. “I went from him,” he says, “like another Jason in possession of the golden fleece, and when I came home and perused the pieces singly, I was amazed that so vast a treasure should have been so long hidden.” The result was the publication of the Exercitationes de generatione (1651).