a Scottish historical painter of considerable celebrity, was born at Alloa, on the 13th February 1744. At a very early age he showed such marks of genius as attracted the notice of some gentlemen living in the neighbourhood. In a remote part of the country, and deprived of the ordinary means of indulging his propensity to drawing, he betook himself, when a boy, to such implements and materials as he could readily procure; and the mechanical skill and taste which he displayed, particularly in the use of his knife, have been mentioned as remarkable for his years. Mr Stewart, then collector of the Customs at Alloa, having mentioned these proofs of natural talent to Mr Foulis the printer, who some time before had instituted an academy in Glasgow for painting and engraving, young Allan was invited to study under his care. Here he remained about seven years, studying the elementary principles of his art; and, by the proficiency which he attained, justified the opinion of his talents which had procured him admission to that ill-fated seminary. But although the public taste for the fine arts in Scotland was at that time so feeble as to leave his liberal and public-spirited preceptor without support, Allan, on leaving the academy, had the good fortune to gain the patronage of individuals whose generosity enabled him to prosecute his views, and to improve his taste, by studying the works of art abroad. He devoted himself with great zeal to his profession at Rome, where he remained sixteen years; during which time his subsistence chiefly depended on the copies which he made from the most celebrated pictures of the ancient masters. Among the original works which he then painted, was one which gained for him the gold medal given by the Academy of St Luke, in the year 1773, for the best specimen of historical composition. This picture represents the Origin of Painting, and is well known by the excellent engraving of it by Cunego. His design of the Calabrian Shepherds is also a composition of great merit; and his four views of the Carnivals at Rome, etched by Paul Sandby, are said likewise to have been very successful.

On his return to his native country, he took up his residence at Edinburgh; and soon after, on the death of Alexander Runciman, in 1786, was appointed director and master of the academy established by the Board of Trustees for Manufactures in Scotland. There he executed a great variety of works, of various degrees of merit; but perhaps none such as might have been expected from the author of the Origin of Painting. Those, indeed, by which he is most known, are of a cast altogether different, being remarkable for the comic humour which they display. The Scotch Wedding, the Highland Dance, the Repentance Stool, with his Illustrations of the Gentle Shepherd, are all of this class, and so generally known, from his own spirited etchings in aqua-tinta, as to need no description.

Mr Allan was long remembered and spoken of as an excellent private character. He died at Edinburgh on the 6th August 1798, in the 53rd year of his age.

Allan, Sir William, R.A., and President of the Scottish Royal Academy for the Fine Arts, raised himself from obscurity, by the force of native genius and indefatigable perseverance, to a high rank among the painters of his age and country. A detail of the steps by which this eminent artist and excellent man overcame the difficulties of his first position, however valuable as an example to the young aspirant for distinction, would be here misplaced. We shall content ourselves with an outline of his professional career.

William Allan was born at Edinburgh, in 1782, of humble but respectable parents, who afforded him the elements of a classical education in the High School of his native city. He early showed a strong attachment to drawing; and it was intended that he should become an ornamental coach-painter. With this view he was entered as a pupil in the School of Design established by the Board of Trustees for Arts and Manufactures, then under the direction of Mr Graham as master. This able teacher had the good fortune to have among his first pupils Allan and Wilkie. The two youthful artists were placed at the same table, and for months studied the same designs. During this time they contracted a friendship which terminated only with their lives. In the Edinburgh school Allan remained for several years, and exhibited such proficiency that he aspired to the higher branches of painting. He subsequently was for some time a student in the Royal Academy of London; and afterwards attempted to practise his art in the vast field of the metropolis. But not meeting with the encouragement he had hoped to find, young Allan, with that decision which was one of his characteristics, speedily determined, with very scanty resources, to seek his fortunes abroad. Some circumstances made him think of Russia as a probable field; and having procured a few introductions, especially one to Sir Alexander Crichton, then the imperial family physician, our artist, in 1804, embarked for Riga; but was carried by a succession of storms to Memel in Prussia, where the state of his finances compelled him to remain for some time, supporting himself, as he best could, by the exercise of his pencil. At last he was enabled to set out for St Petersburg by land; and on his way he encountered the Russian army, then on its route for the campaign that terminated in the bloody field of Austerlitz. He soon arrived in the Russian capital, where the kindness of Crichton, and his other introductions, procured him abundant employment. Allan remained long in Petersburg, where the emoluments of his profession enabled him to indulge his eager desire to travel for improvement in his art; and for several years he made occasional excursions into Southern Russia, Turkey, the Crimea, and Circassia, where he stored his mind, and filled his portfolio, with those vivid sketches of Cossacks, Tartars, Turks, Circassians, and other orientals, of which he made such admirable use in his subsequent pictures.

After a ten years' residence abroad, Mr Allan, in 1814, took up his abode in his native place; where his talents, his unassuming manners, and his interesting conversation, won him the esteem and friendship of Walter Scott, and the other literary ornaments of the northern capital. At this time he produced his masterly picture, The Circassian Captives, which, after delighting the eyes of his fellow citizens, was exhibited at London in 1815. This beautiful composition, which united graceful forms and powerful expression with novel and picturesque costumes, established Allan's reputation as a master in the highest walk of art. But liberal collectors were then comparatively rare amongst us; and the picture remained in the studio of the artist, until some of his admiring friends resolved to subscribe what would be a remunerating price, and thus decide by lot who should obtain the picture. The fortunate possessor is the Earl of Wemyss, of whose collection it is a chief ornament. About the same time, the Grand Duke Nicolas, now emperor of Russia, visited Edinburgh, and purchased two of Allan's capital pictures, Siberian Exiles, and the Circassian prince Haslan Gheray crossing the River Kuban with his followers. This imperial patronage gave a very Mr Allan, however, had the misfortune to suffer from ophthalmia, which threatened him with total blindness. Obliged to suspend his loved profession, he was advised to spend the winter in the milder air of Italy. He went to Rome during that season, and to Naples in the hot weather, from whence he passed to Constantinople. With renovated health, he returned home by the classic shores of Asia Minor and Greece, and with rich stores of materials for future compositions, as appeared in his fine picture of the *Constantinopolitan Slave-Market*, and other productions of his pencil. For several years he uninterruptedly pursued his profession in Edinburgh; but in 1834, the care of his health, and his desire of further improvement in his art, induced him to visit the south of Spain; and he made a short excursion to the opposite coast of Morocco. In 1841 he went again to Petersburg; when he was employed by his imperial patron to paint *Peter the Great as a Naval Architect*, a fine composition, which is now in the winter palace of the emperor, after having been exhibited in London in 1845. The author of this memoir met him in Holland in 1847, on his return from a professional tour in Germany and Belgium; making, as was his custom, his relaxation from the pencil subservient to his love of his art.

Mr Allan had been elected an *Associate* of the Royal Academy of London in 1826, and an *Academician* in 1835. Honours now flowed in upon him. On the death of his early friend Sir David Wilkie, he was appointed *Limner to Her Majesty for Scotland*. On the decease of the president of the Scottish Academy in 1838, Allan was elected to that office, which he held till his death; in 1842 he received the honour of knighthood; and in 1849, he was appointed one of the commissioners of the Board of Arts and Manufactures; but the declining state of his health, which was but too obvious to his friends, induced him to decline the honourable office, to the sincere regret of the members of that Board.

Sir William Allan was now confined to the house by a chronic bronchitis. But his professional energy and love for his art remained unabated; and, till increasing debility interrupted his labours, he was assiduously engaged on a grand picture—the subject being *Bruce at Bannockburn*—which, though far advanced, remains unfinished. It exhibits no trace of impaired powers; and it is as conspicuous as his two fine pictures of the *Battle of Waterloo*, for the spirit of the composition, and the skill with which the artist has contrived to vary the formality of armies drawn up in battle array, by interesting episodes, all conducive to the main story.

Sir William Allan died on Friday, 22d of February 1850, unmarried, in the 68th year of his age, deeply regretted by numerous friends, and by the public, who justly considered him as an ornament to the country that gave him birth. The following is a chronological list of the principal works of this eminent artist:

1. Circassian Captives. 2. Tartar Bandits. 3. Haslan Gheray crossing the Kuban. 4. Polish-Jewish Wedding. 5. Siberian Exiles with their Cossack Guards. 6. Slave-Market at Constantinople. 7. Lord Byron after crossing the Hellespont at Abydos. 8. Assassination of David Rizzio; by many considered his masterpiece. 9. Moorish Love-Letter. 10. Battle of Prestonpans. 11. Incident in the campaign of Robert Bruce in Ireland. 12. Peter the Great teaching Shipbuilding to his Subjects. 13. Polish Exiles on their route to Siberia. 14. Naval Battle. 15. Battle of Waterloo from the French position; purchased by the Duke of Wellington. 16. Napoleon and the English Sailors at Boulogne. 17. Battle of Waterloo from the English position. This picture was painted for the competition of artists in Westminster Hall in 1846; but though highly prized by the best judges, was not successful. 19. Several fine landscapes of Scottish scenery. 20. Battle of Bannockburn, left unfinished.

*Allan*, a river of Perthshire, in Scotland, which passes by Dunblane, and falls into the Forth near Stirling.

*Allan*, Bridge of, a beautiful village on the above river, three miles from Stirling, much frequented in summer on account of its mineral well. It has rapidly increased in size within the last few years.

*ALLANTOIS*, or *Allantoides*, a thin transparent bag investing the fetus of quadrupeds, as cows, goats, sheep, &c., filled with a urinous liquor conveyed to it from the bladder of the young animals by means of the urachus.

*ALLATIUS*, Leo, keeper of the Vatican library, a native of Scio, and a celebrated writer of the seventeenth century. He was of great service to the Port Royalists in their controversy with M. Claude, touching the belief of the Greeks with regard to the eucharist. No Latin was ever more devoted to the See of Rome, or more inveterate against the Greek schismatics, than Allatus. He never was married, nor did he take orders; and when Pope Alexander VII. asked him one day why he did not enter into orders, he answered, "Because I would be free to marry." The pope rejoined, "If so, why do you not marry?" "Because," replied Allatus, "I would be at liberty to take orders."

"Thus," as the sarcastic Bayle observes, "he passed his whole life, wavering between a parish and a wife; sorry, perhaps, at his death, for having chosen neither of them; when, if he had fixed upon one, he might have repented his choice for thirty or forty years." In his works he discovers more erudition and industry than sound judgment; and his style is perplexed and diffuse. He died at Rome in 1669, aged 83.

*ALLECTUS*, the prime minister and confidential friend of Carausius, emperor of Britain. In order to avoid the punishment due to the several enormous crimes with which he was chargeable, he fell upon the desperate expedient of murdering his master, and usurping the imperial dignity, which he maintained for three years. With the design of recovering Britain, the Caesar Constantius despatched a portion of his fleet and army under the command of the praetorian prefect Asclepiodotus. The fleet of Allectus was stationed off the Isle of Wight to receive them; but under the cover of a thick fog, the invaders escaped their notice, and landed in safety on the western coast, and, according to Gibbon, convinced the Britons "that a superiority of naval strength will not always protect their country from a foreign invasion." In expectation of an attack from Constantius, who commanded the fleet off Boulogne, the usurper had taken his station in the vicinity of London; but informed of the descent of Asclepiodotus, he made forced marches to oppose his progress. In the battle which ensued Allectus was slain, and his forces received a total defeat; and thus Britain, after a separation of ten years, was restored to the Roman empire, A.D. 297.

*ALLEGANY*, the name of several counties in the United States of North America.—1. In the state of New York, with a population in 1850 of 37,880. 2. In Pennsylvania, Pop. 138,098. 3. In Maryland, Pop. 22,873. 4. In the valley district of Virginia, Pop. 3516.

*ALLEGANY MOUNTAINS*, situated between the Atlantic Ocean, the Mississippi River, and the Lakes, are a long and broad range of mountains, composed of several ridges, tending north-east and south-west, nearly parallel to the sea-coast, about 1100 miles in length, and from 50 to 200 miles in breadth. The ridges which compose this immense range of mountains have different names in the different states, viz., the Blue Ridge, the North Mountain or North Ridge, Laurel Ridge, Jackson's Mountains, and Cumberland Mountains. All these different and immense ridges...