Oliphant, LAURENCE, traveller, novelist, and mystic, was born in 1829, son of Sir Anthony Oliphant, Chief-justice of Ceylon. In early youth he travelled with Jung Bahadur to Nepal, and after his return was admitted a member of the Scottish bar, and later of the English bar at Lincoln's Inn. His first work, A Journey to Khatmandu (1852), was followed by The Russian Shores of the Black Sea (1853), the fruit of his travels in Russia in 1852. He next became private secretary to the Earl of Elgin, Governor-general of Canada, whom later he accompanied on his special embassy to China, thus finding material for his books Minnesota and the Far West (1855) and A Narrative of the Earl of Elgin's Mission to China and Japan in 1857-59 (1860). In 1861, while acting as Chargé d'Affaires in Japan, he was severely wounded by assassins, and consequently resigned his post. From 1865 to 1868 he sat in parliament for the Stirling burghs. Having become profoundly influenced by certain peculiar religious opinions, he renounced London society, joined for a time the community of T. L. Harris (q.v.) in the United States, and finally settled at Haifa (q.v.) in Palestine. He died at Twickenham, 23d December 1888. The religious opinions of his later years he gave to the world in Sympneumata (1886) and Scientific Religion (1888), as well as in his novel Masallah (1886), while they already formed the background of his earlier novel, Altiora Peto (1883). Oliphant, when he subjected his intellect to occultism, brought a bright career to an abrupt conclusion, and flung away a rare literary endowment. His Piecadilly (1870) was a book of altogether exceptional promise, bright with wit, delicate irony, and, above all, individuality; but its promise was never fulfilled.
Other books of Oliphant's were The Transueaucasian Campaign under Omar Pasha (1856); Patriots and Filibusters (1860); The Land of Gilead (1881); Traits and Travesties, Social and Political (1882); The Land of Khemi (1882); Haifa (1887); and Episodes in a Life of Adventure (1887). See his Life by Mrs Oliphant.