GALE, in nautical language, a term of various import. When the wind blows, but not so hard that a ship may not carry her top-sails a-trip, then they say it is a loom gale. When it blows very strong, they say it is a stiff, strong, or fresh gale. When two ships are near each other at sea, and, there being but little wind blowing, one of them finds more of it than the other, they say that the one ship gales away from the other.

Gale, Dr John, an eminent minister amongst the Baptists, was born at London in 1680. He studied at Leyden, where he early distinguished himself, and afterwards at Amsterdam, under Dr Limborch. He was chosen minister of the Baptist congregation at Barbican, where his preaching, being chiefly practical, was greatly resorted to by people of all persuasions. Four volumes of his sermons were published after his death, which happened in 1721. His Reflections on Dr Walts History of Infant Baptism is the best defence of the Baptists ever published; and the reading of that performance induced Mr William Whiston and Dr Foster to become Baptists.

Gale, Theophilus, an eminent nonconformist minister, born in 1628. He was invited to Winchester in 1657; and continued a stated preacher there until the re-establishment of the church by Charles II. when he chose rather to suffer the penalties of the act of conformity, than to submit to it contrary to his conscience. He was afterwards engaged by Philip Lord Wharton as tutor to his sons, whom he attended to an academy at Caen in Normandy; and when this duty had been fulfilled, he became pastor of a congregation of private conventiclers in Holborn. He died in 1678, and is principally known by an elaborate work entitled the Court of the Gentiles, calcu lated to show that the Pagan philosophers derived their most sublime sentiments from the Scriptures.

Gale, Dr Thomas, a learned divine, born at Scruton, in Yorkshire, in the year 1636, was educated at Cambridge, and at length became professor of the Greek language in that university. He was afterwards chosen head master of St Paul’s school, London, and was employed by the city in writing the elegant inscriptions on the monument erected in memory of the conflagration in 1666. In 1676 he was collated to a prebend in the cathedral of St Paul’s; and was likewise elected a fellow of the Royal Society, to which he presented a Roman urn with its ashes. About the year 1697, he gave to the new library of Trinity College, Cambridge, a great number of Arabian manuscripts; and in the same year he was admitted as Dean of York. He died in that city in 1702, and was interred in the cathedral, where a monument, with a Latin inscription, was erected to his memory. He was a learned divine, an eminent historian, one of the best Greek scholars of his age, and maintained a correspondence with the most learned men abroad as well as at home. He published, 1. Historiae Poeticae Scriptores Antiqui, Paris, 1675, in 8vo; 2. Opuscula Mythologien, Ethica, et Physica, Cambridge, 1671, in 8vo; 3. Herodoti Historiarum libri x. London, 1679, in fol.; 4. Historiae Anglicanae Scriptore« quinque, Oxford, 1687, in fol.; 5. Historiae Britannicae, Saxonicse, Anglo-Danicae, Scriptores quindecim, Oxford, 1691, in fol.; 6. Rhetores Selecti, and other works.