ALABASTER, William, an English divine, was born at Hadley, in the county of Suffolk. He was one of the doctors of Trinity College in Cambridge; and he attended the earl of Essex as his chaplain in the expedition to Cadiz in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It is said that his first resolutions of changing his religion were occasioned by his seeing the pomp of the churches of the Roman communion, and the respect with which the priests seemed to be treated amongst them; and appearing thus to waver in his mind, he soon found persons who took advantage of this disposition of his, and of the complaints which he made of not being advanced according to his deserts in England, in such a manner, that he did not scruple to go over to the Popish religion, as soon as he found that there [7:2:372]was no ground to hope for greater encouragement in his own country. However that matter be, he joined himself to the Romish communion; but was disappointed in his expectations. He was soon displeased at this; and he could not reconcile himself to the discipline of that church, which made no consideration of the degrees which he had taken before. It is probable, too, that he could not approve of the worship of creatures, which Protestants are used to look upon with horror. Upon this he returned to England in order to resume his former religion. He obtained a prebend in the cathedral of St Paul, and after that the rectory of Therfield in Hertfordshire. He was well skilled in the Hebrew tongue; but he gave a wrong turn to his genius by studying the Cabala, with which he was strangely infatuated. He gave a proof of this in a sermon which he preached upon taking his degree of doctor of divinity at Cambridge. He took for his text the beginning of the first book of Chronicles, “Adam, Seth, Enos and having touched upon the literal sense, he turned immediately to the mystical, asserting, that Adam signified misfortune and misery, and so of the rest. His verses were greatly esteemed. He wrote a Latin tragedy, entitled Roxana, which, when it was acted in a college at Cambridge, was attended with a very remarkable accident. There was a lady who was so terrified at the last word of the tragedy, Sequar, Sequar, which was pronounced with a very shocking tone, that she lost her senses all her lifetime after. He died in the year 1640. His Apparatus in Revelationem Jesu Christi was printed at Antwerp in 1607. His SpiraculumTubarum, seu,Fοηs Spiritualium Expositionum ex acquivocis Pentaglotti significationibus, and his Ecce Sponsus venit, seu Tuba Pulchritudinis, hoe est, Demonstratio quod non sit illicitum nec impossibile computare dnrationem nnindi et tempus secundi adventus Christi, were printed at London. From these titles we may judge what were the taste and genius of the author.

Alabaster, in Natural History, a mineral substance whose base is calcareous earth. It differs from marble in being combined, not with the carbonic, but with the sulphuric acid.

Alabaster, in Antiquity, a term used for a vase wherein odoriferous liquors were anciently put. The reason of the denomination is, that vessels for this purpose were frequently made of the alabaster stone, which Pliny and other ancients represent as peculiarly proper for this purpose. Several critics will have the box mentioned in the Gospels as made of alabaster to have been of glass; and though the texts say that the Woman broke it, yet the pieces seem miraculously to have been united, since we are told the entire box was purchased by the emperor Constantine, and preserved as a relic of great price. Others will have it that the name alabaster denotes the form rather than the matter of this box: in this view they define alabaster by a box without a handle, deriving the word from the privative α, and λα∕¾, ansa, handle. Alabaster is also said to have been used for an ancient liquid measure, containing ten ounces of wine, or nine of oil. In this sense the alabaster was equal to half the sextary.