VOLUME XIII SLICE V Hinduism to Home, Earls of (continued 8)

The date of the elder Holbein’s birth is unknown. But his name appears in the books of the tax-gatherers of Augsburg in 1494, superseding that of Michael Holbein, who is supposed to have been his father. Previous to that date, and as early as 1493, he was a painter of name, and he executed in that year, it is said, for the abbey at Weingarten, the wings of an altarpiece representing Joachim’s Offering, the Nativity of the Virgin, Mary’s Presentation in the Temple, and the Presentation of Christ, which now hang in separate panels in the cathedral of Augsburg. In these pieces and others of the same period, for instance in two Madonnas in the Moritz chapel and castle of Nuremberg, we mark the clear impress of the schools of Van der Weyden and Memlinc; whilst in later works, such as the Basilica of St Paul (1504) in the gallery of Augsburg, the wane of Flemish influence is apparent. But this altarpiece, with its quaint illustrations of St Paul’s life and martyrdom, is not alone of interest because its execution is characteristic of old Holbein. It is equally so because it contains portraits of the master himself, accompanied by his two sons, the painters Ambrose (c. 1494-c. 1519) and Hans the younger. Later pictures, such as the Passion series in the Fürstenberg gallery at Donaueschingen, or the Martyrdom of St Sebastian in the Munich Pinakothek, contain similar portraits, the original drawings of which are found in old Holbein’s sketch-book at Berlin, or in stray leaves like those possessed by the duke of Aumale in Paris. Not one of these fails to give us an insight into the character, or a reflex of the features, of the members of this celebrated family. Old Holbein seems to ape Leonardo, allowing his hair and beard to grow wildly, except on the upper lip. Hans the younger is a plain-looking boy. But his father points to him with his finger, and hints that though but a child he is clearly a prodigy.

After 1516 Hans Holbein the elder appears as a defaulter in the registers of the tax-gatherers at Augsburg; but he willingly accepts commissions abroad. At Issenheim in Alsace, where Grünewald was employed in 1516, old Holbein also finds patrons, and contracts to complete an altarpiece. But misfortune or a bailiff pursues him, and he leaves Issenheim, abandoning his work and tools. According to Sandrart, he wanders to Basel and takes the freedom of its gild. His brother Sigismund and others are found suing him for debt before the courts of Augsburg. Where he lived when he executed the altarpiece, of which two wings with the date of 1522 are in the gallery of Carlsruhe, is uncertain; where he died two years later is unknown. He slinks from ken at the close of a long life, and disappears at last heeded by none but his own son, who claims his brushes and paints from the monks of Issenheim without much chance of obtaining them. His name is struck off the books of the Augsburg gild in 1524.

The elder Holbein was a prolific artist, who left many pictures behind him. Earlier than the Basilica of St Paul, already mentioned, is the Basilica of St Mary Maggiore, and a Passion in eleven pieces, in the Augsburg gallery, both executed in 1499. Another Passion, with the root of Jesse and a tree of the Dominicans, is that preserved in the Staedel, Saalhof, and church of St Leonard at Frankfort. It was executed in 1501. The Passion of Donaueschingen was finished after 1502, in which year was completed the Passion of Kaisheim, a conglomerate of twenty-seven panels, now divided amongst the galleries of Munich, Nuremberg, Augsburg and Schleissheim. An altarpiece of the same class, commissioned for the monastery of St Moritz at Augsburg in 1504-1508, has been dispersed and lost. 1512 is the date of a Conception in the Augsburg gallery, long assigned, in consequence of a forged inscription, to Hans Holbein the younger. A diptych, with a Virgin and Child, and a portrait of an old man, dated 1513, came in separate parts into the collections of Mr Posonyi and Count Lanckoronski at Vienna. The sketch-books of Berlin, Copenhagen and Augsburg give a lively picture of the forms and dress of Augsburg residents at the beginning of the 16th century. They comprise portraits of the emperor Maximilian, the future Charles V., Kunz von der Rosen, the fool of Maximilian, the Fuggers, friars, merchants, and at rare intervals ladies.

See also the biography by Stödtner (Berlin, 1896).

HOLBEIN, HANS, the younger (1497-1543), German painter, favourite son of Hans Holbein the elder, was probably born at Augsburg about the year 1497. Though Sandrart and Van Mander declare that they do not know who gave him the first lessons, he doubtless received an artist’s education from his father. About 1515 he left Augsburg with Ambrose, his elder brother, to seek employment as an illustrator of books at Basel. His first patron is said to have been Erasmus, for whom, shortly after his arrival, he illustrated with pen-and-ink sketches an edition of the Encomium Moriae, now in the museum of Basel. But his chief occupation was that of drawing titlepage-blocks and initials for new editions of the Bible and classics issued from the presses of Froben and other publishers. His leisure hours, it is supposed, were devoted to the production of rough painter’s work, a schoolmaster’s sign in the Basel collection, a table with pictures of St Nobody in the library of the university at Zürich. In contrast with these coarse productions, the portraits of Jacob Meyer and his wife in the Basel museum, one of which purports to have been finished in 1516, are miracles of workmanship. It has always seemed difficult indeed to ascribe such excellent creations to Holbein’s nineteenth year; and it is hardly credible that he should have been asked to do things of this kind so early, especially when it is remembered that neither he nor his brother Ambrose were then allowed to matriculate in the guild of Basel. Not till 1517 did Ambrose, whose life otherwise remains obscure, join that corporation; Hans, not overburdened with practice, wandered into Switzerland, where (1517) he was employed to paint in the house of Jacob Hertenstein at Lucerne. In 1519 Holbein reappeared at Basel, where he matriculated and, there is every reason to think, married. Whether, previous to this time, he took advantage of his vicinity to the Italian border to cross the Alps is uncertain. Van Mander says that he never was in Italy; yet the large wall-paintings which he executed after 1519 at Basel, and the series of his sketches and pictures which is still extant, might lead to the belief that Van Mander was misinformed. The spirit of Holbein’s compositions for the Basel town hall, the scenery and architecture of his numerous drawings, and the cast of form in some of his imaginative portraits, make it more likely that he should have felt the direct influence of North Italian painting than that he should have taken Italian elements from imported works or prints. The Swiss at this period wandered in thousands to swell the ranks of the French or imperial armies fighting on Italian soil, and the road they took may have been followed by Hans on a more peaceful mission. He shows himself at all events familiar with Italian examples at various periods of his career; and if we accept as early works the “Flagellation,” and the “Last Supper” at Basel, coarse as they are, they show some acquaintance with Lombard methods of painting, whilst in other pieces, such as the series of the Passion in oil in the same collection, the modes of Hans Holbein the elder are agreeably commingled with a more modern, it may be said Italian, polish. Again, looking at the “Virgin” and “Man of Sorrows” in the Basel museum, we shall be struck by a searching metallic style akin to that of the Ferrarese; and the “Lais” or the “Venus and Amor” of the same collection reminds us of the Leonardesques of the school of Milan. When Holbein settled down to an extensive practice at Basel in 1519, he decorated the walls of the house “Zum Tanz” with simulated architectural features of a florid character after the fashion of the Veronese; and his wall paintings in the town-hall, if we can truly judge of them by copies, reveal an artist not unfamiliar with North Italian composition, distribution, action, gesture and expression. In his drawings too, particularly in a set representing the Passion at Basel, the arrangement, and also the perspective, form and decorative ornament, are in the spirit of the school of Mantegna. Contemporary with these, however, and almost inexplicably in contrast with them as regards handling, are portrait-drawings such as the likenesses of Jacob Meyer, and his wife, which are finished with German delicacy, and with a power and subtlety of hand seldom rivalled in any school. Curiously enough, the same contrast may be observed between painted compositions and painted portraits. The “Bonifacius Amerbach” of 1519 at Basel is acknowledged to be one of the most complete examples of smooth and transparent handling that Holbein ever executed. His versatility at this period is shown by a dead Christ (1521), a corpse in profile on a dissecting table, and a set of figures in couples; the “Madonna and St Pantalus,” and “Kaiser Henry with the Empress Kunigunde” (1522), originally composed for the organ loft of the Basel cathedral, now in the Basel museum. Equally remarkable, but more attractive, though injured, is the “Virgin and Child between St Ursus and St Nicholas” (not St Martin) giving alms to a beggar, in the gallery of Solothurn. This remarkable picture is dated 1522, and seems to have been ordered for an altar in the minster of St Ursus of Solothurn by Nicholas Conrad, a captain and statesman of the 16th century, whose family allowed the precious heirloom to fall into decay in a chapel of the neighbouring village of Grenchen. Numerous drawings in the spirit of this picture, and probably of the same period in his career, might have led Holbein’s contemporaries to believe that he would make his mark in the annals of Basel as a model for painters of altarpieces as well as a model for pictorial composition and portrait. The promise which he gave at this time was immense. He was gaining a freedom in draughtsmanship that gave him facility to deal with any subject. Though a realist, he was sensible of the dignity and severity of religious painting. His colour had almost all the richness and sweetness of the Venetians. But he had fallen on evil times, as the next few years undoubtedly showed. Amongst the portraits which he executed in these years are those of Froben, the publisher, known only by copies at Basel and Hampton Court, and Erasmus, who sat in 1523, as he likewise did in 1530, in various positions, showing his face threequarters as at Longford, Basel, Turin, Parma, the Hague and Vienna, and in profile as in the Louvre or at Hampton Court. Besides these, Holbein made designs for glass windows, and for woodcuts, including subjects of every sort, from the Virgin and Child with saints of the old time to the Dance of Death, from gospel incidents extracted from Luther’s Bible to satirical pieces illustrating the sale of indulgences and other abuses denounced by Reformers. Holbein, in this way, was carried irresistibly with the stream of the Reformation, in which, it must now be admitted, the old traditions of religious painting were wrecked, leaving nothing behind but unpictorial elements which Cranach and his school vainly used for pictorial purposes.

Once only, after 1526, and after he had produced the “Lais” and “Venus and Amor,” did Holbein with impartial spirit give his services and pencil to the Roman Catholic cause. The burgomaster Meyer, whose patronage he had already enjoyed, now asked him to represent himself and his wives and children in prayer before the Virgin; and Holbein produced the celebrated altarpiece now in the palace of Prince William of Hesse at Darmstadt, the shape and composition of which are known to all the world by its copy in the Dresden museum. The drawings for this masterpiece are amongst the most precious relics in the museum of Basel. The time now came when art began to suffer from unavoidable depression in all countries north of the Alps. Holbein, at Basel, was reduced to accept the smallest commissions—even for scutcheons. Then he saw that his chances were dwindling to nothing, and taking a bold resolution, armed with letters of introduction from Erasmus to More, he crossed the Channel to England, where in the one-sided branch of portrait painting he found an endless circle of clients. Eighty-seven drawings by Holbein in Windsor Castle, containing an equal number of portraits, of persons chiefly of high quality, testify to his industry in the years which divide 1528 from 1543. They are all originals of pictures that are still extant, or sketches for pictures that were lost or never carried out. Sir Thomas More, with whom he seems to have had a very friendly connexion, sat to him for likenesses of various kinds. The drawing of his head is at Windsor. A pen-and-ink sketch, in which we see More surrounded by all the members of his family, is now in the gallery of Basel, and numerous copies of a picture from it prove how popular the lost original must once have been. At the same period were executed the portraits of Warham (Lambeth and Louvre), Wyatt (Louvre), Sir Henry Guildford and his wife (Windsor), all finished in 1527, the astronomer Nicholas Kratzer (Louvre), Thomas Godsalve (Dresden), and Sir Bryan Tuke (Munich) in 1528. In this year, 1528, Holbein returned to Basel, taking to Erasmus the sketch of More’s family. With money which he brought from London he purchased a house at Basel wherein to lodge his wife and children, whose portraits he now painted with all the care of a husband and father (1528). He then witnessed the flight of Erasmus and the fury of the iconoclasts, who destroyed in one day almost all the religious pictures at Basel. The municipality, unwilling that he should suffer again from the depression caused by evil times, asked him to finish the frescoes of the town-hall, and the sketches from these lost pictures are still before us to show that he had not lost the spirit of his earlier days, and was still capable as a composer. His “Rehoboam receiving the Israelite Envoys,” and “Saul at the Head of his Array meeting Samuel,” testify to Holbein’s power and his will, also proved at a later period by the “Triumphs of Riches and Poverty,” executed for the Steelyard in London (but now lost), to prefer the fame of a painter of history to that of a painter of portraits. But the reforming times still remained unfavourable to art. With the exception of a portrait of Melanchthon (Hanover) which he now completed, Holbein found little to do at Basel. The year 1530, therefore, saw him again on the move, and he landed in England for the second time with the prospect of bettering his fortunes. Here indeed political changes had robbed him of his earlier patrons. The circle of More and Warham was gone. But that of the merchants of the Steelyard took its place, for whom Holbein executed the long and important series of portraits that lie scattered throughout the galleries and collections of England and the Continent, and bear date after 1532. Then came again the chance of practice in more fashionable circles. In 1533 the “Ambassadors” (National Gallery), and the “Triumphs of Wealth and Poverty” were executed, then the portraits of Leland and Wyatt (Longford), and (1534) the portrait of Thomas Cromwell. Through Cromwell Holbein probably became attached to the court, in the pay of which he appears permanently after 1537. From that time onwards he was connected with all that was highest in the society of London. Henry VIII. invited him to make a family picture of himself, his father and family, which obtained a post of honour at Whitehall. The beautiful cartoon of a part of this fine piece at Hardwicke Hall enables us to gauge its beauty before the fire which destroyed it in the 17th century. Then Holbein painted Jane Seymour in state (Vienna), employing some English hand perhaps to make the replicas at the Hague, Sion House and Woburn; he finished the Southwell of the Uffizi (copy at the Louvre), the jeweller Morett at Dresden, and last, not least, Christine of Denmark, who gave sittings at Brussels in 1538. During the journey which this work involved Holbein took the opportunity of revisiting Basel, where he made his appearance in silk and satin, and pro forma only accepted the office of town painter. He had been living long and continuously away from home, not indeed observing due fidelity to his wife, who still resided at Basel, but fairly performing the duties of keeping her in comfort. His return to London in autumn enabled him to do homage to the king in the way familiar to artists. He presented to Henry at Christmas a portrait of Prince Edward. Again abroad in the summer of 1539, he painted with great fidelity the princess Anne of Cleves, at Düren near Cologne, whose form we still see depicted in the great picture of the Louvre. That he could render the features of his sitter without flattery is plain from this one example. Indeed, habitual flattery was contrary to his habits. His portraits up to this time all display that uncommon facility for seizing character which his father enjoyed before him, and which he had inherited in an expanded form. No amount of labour, no laboriousness of finish—and of both he was ever prodigal—betrayed him into loss of resemblance or expression. No painter was ever quicker at noting peculiarities of physiognomy, and it may be observed that in none of his faces, as indeed in none of the faces one sees in nature, are the two sides alike. Yet he was not a child of the 16th century, as the Venetians were, in substituting touch for line. We must not look in his works for modulations of surface or subtle contrasts of colour in juxtaposition. His method was to the very last delicate, finished and smooth, as became a painter of the old school.

Amongst the more important creations of Holbein’s later time we should note his “Duke of Norfolk” at Windsor, the hands of which are so perfectly preserved as to compensate for the shrivel that now disfigures the head. Two other portraits of 1541 (Berlin and Vienna), the Falconer at the Hague, and John Chambers at Vienna (1542), are noble specimens of portrait art; most interesting and of the same year are the likenesses of Holbein himself, of which several examples are extant—one particularly good at Fähna, the seat of the Stackelberg family near Riga, and another at the Uffizi in Florence. Here Holbein appears to us as a man of regular features, with hair just turning grey, but healthy in colour and shape, and evidently well to do in the world. Yet a few months only separated him then from his death-bed. He was busy painting a picture of Henry the VIII. confirming the Privileges of the Barber Surgeons (Lincoln’s Inn Fields), when he sickened of the plague and died after making a will about November 1543. His loss must have been seriously felt in England. Had he lived his last years in Germany, he would not have changed the current which decided the fate of painting in that country; he would but have shared the fate of Dürer and others who merely prolonged the agony of art amidst the troubles of the Reformation.

(J. A. C.)

The early authorities are Karel Van Mander’s Het Schilder Boek (1604), and J. von Sandrart, Accademia Todesca (1675). See also R. N. Wornum, Life and Work of Holbein (1867); H. Knackfuss, Holbein (1899); G. S. Davies, Holbein (1903); A. F. G. A. Woltmann, Holbein und seine Zeit (1876).

HOLBERG, LUDVIG HOLBERG, Baron (1684-1754), the great Scandinavian writer, was born at Bergen, in Norway, on the 3rd of December 1684. Both Holberg’s parents died in his childhood, his father first, leaving a considerable property; and in his eleventh year he lost his mother also. Before the latter event, however, the family had been seriously impoverished by a great fire, which destroyed several valuable buildings, but notwithstanding this, the mother left to each of her six children some little fortune. In 1695 the boy Holberg was taken into the house of his uncle, Peder Lem, who sent him to the Latin school, and prepared him for the profession of a soldier; but soon after this he was adopted by his cousin Otto Munthe, and went to him up in the mountains. His great desire for instruction, however, at last induced his family to send him back to Bergen, to his uncle, and there he remained, eagerly studying, until the destruction of that city by fire in 1702, when he was sent to the university of Copenhagen. But he soon exhausted his resources, and, having nothing to live upon, was glad to hurry back to Norway, where he accepted the position of tutor in the house of a rural dean at Voss. He soon returned to Copenhagen, where in 1704 he took his degree, and worked hard at French, English and Italian. But he had to gain his living, and accordingly he accepted the post of tutor once more, this time in the house of Dr Smith, vice-bishop of Bergen. The good doctor had travelled much, and the reading of his itineraries and note-books awakened such a longing for travel in the young Holberg that at last, at the close of 1704, having scraped together 60 dollars, he went on board a ship bound for Holland. He proceeded as far as Aix-la-Chapelle, where he fell sick of a fever, and suffered so much from weakness and poverty, that he made his way on foot to Amsterdam, and came back to Norway. Ashamed to be seen so soon in Bergen, he stopped at Christianssand, where he lived through the winter, supporting himself by giving lessons in French. In the spring of 1706 he travelled, in company with a student named Brix, through London to Oxford, where he studied for two years, gaining his livelihood by giving lessons on the violin and the flute. He mentions, with gratitude, the valuable libraries of Oxford, and it is pleasant to record that it was while he was there that it first occurred to him, as he says, “how splendid and glorious a thing it would be to take a place among the authors.” Through London and Elsinore he reached Copenhagen a third time, and began to lecture at the university; his lectures were attended, but he got no money. He was asked in 1709 to conduct a rich young gentleman to Dresden, and on his return journey he lectured at Leipzig, Halle and Hamburg. Once more in Copenhagen, he undertook to teach the children of Admiral Gedde. Weary with this work, he took a post at Borch College in 1710, where he wrote, and printed in 1711, his first work, An Introduction to the History of the Nations of Europe, and was permitted to present to King Frederick IV. two manuscript essays on Christian IV. and Frederick III. The king soon after presented him with the title of Professor, and with the Rosenkrantz grant of 100 dollars for four years, the holder of which was expected to travel. Holberg accordingly started in 1714, and visited, chiefly on foot, a great portion of Europe. From Amsterdam he walked through Rotterdam to Antwerp, took a boat to Brussels, and on foot again reached Paris. Walking and skating, he proceeded in the depth of winter to Marseilles, and on by sea to Genoa. On the last-mentioned voyage he caught a fever, and nearly died in that city. On his recovery he pushed on to Civita Vecchia and Rome. When the spring had come, being still very poor and in feeble health, he started homewards on foot by Florence, across the Apennines, through Bologna, Parma, Piacenza, Turin, over the Alps, through Savoy and Dauphiné to Lyons, and finally to Paris, where he arrived in excellent health. After spending a month in Paris, he walked on to Amsterdam, took sail to Hamburg, and so went back to Denmark in 1716. He spent the next two years in extreme poverty, and published his Introduction to Natural and Popular Law. But at last, in 1718, his talents were recognized by his appointment as professor of metaphysics at the university of Copenhagen; and in 1720 he was promoted to the lucrative chair of public eloquence, which gave him a seat in the consistory. His pecuniary troubles were now at an end. Hitherto he had written only on law, history and philology, although in a Latin controversy with the jurist Andreas Hojer of Flensborg his satirical genius had flashed out. But now, and until 1728, he created an entirely new class of humorous literature under the pseudonym of Hans Mikkelsen. The serio-comic epic of Peder Paars, the earliest of the great classics of the Danish language, appeared In 1719. This poem was a brilliant satire on contemporary manners, and enjoyed an extraordinary success. But the author had offended in it several powerful persons who threatened his life, and if Count Danneskjold had not personally interested the king in him, Holberg’s career might have had an untimely close. During the next two years he published five shorter satires, all of which were well received by the public. The great event of 1721 was the erection of the first Danish theatre in Grönnegade, Copenhagen; Holberg took the direction of this house, in which was played, in September 1722, a Danish translation of L’Avare. Until this time no plays had been acted in Denmark except in French and German, but Holberg now determined to use his talent in the construction of Danish comedy. The first of his original pieces performed was Den politiske Kandestöber (The Pewterer turned Politician); he wrote other comedies with miraculous rapidity, and before 1722 was closed, there had been performed in succession, and with immense success, Den Vaegelsindede (The Waverer), Jean de France, Jeppe paa Bjerget, and Gert the Westphalian. Of these five plays, four at least are masterpieces; and they were almost immediately followed by others. Holberg took no rest, and before the end of 1723 the comedies of Barselstuen (The Lying-in Room), The Eleventh of July, Jakob von Thyboe, Den Bundeslöse (The Fidget), Erasmus Montanus, Don Ranudo, Ulysses of Ithaca, Without Head or Tail, Witchcraft and Melampe had all been written, and some of them acted. In 1724 the most famous comedy that Holberg produced was Henrik and Pernille. But in spite of this unprecedented blaze of dramatic genius the theatre fell into pecuniary difficulties, and had to be closed, Holberg composing for the last night’s performance, in February 1727, a Funeral of Danish Comedy. All this excessive labour for the stage had undermined the great poet’s health, and in 1725 he had determined to take the baths at Aix-la-Chapelle; but instead of going thither he wandered through Belgium to Paris, and spent the winter there. In the spring he returned to Copenhagen with recovered health and spirits, and worked quietly at his protean literary labours until the great fire of 1728. In the period of national poverty and depression that followed this event, a puritanical spirit came into vogue which was little in sympathy with Holberg’s dramatic or satiric genius. He therefore closed his career as a dramatic poet by publishing in 1731 his acted comedies, with the addition of five which he had no opportunity of putting on the stage. With characteristic versatility, he adopted the serious tone of the new age, and busied himself for the next twenty years with historical, philosophical and statistical writings. During this period he published his poetical satire called Metamorphosis (1726), his Epistolae ad virum perillustrem (1727), his Description of Denmark and Norway (1729), History of Denmark, Universal Church History, Biographies of Famous Men, Moral Reflections, Description of Bergen (1737), A History of the Jews, and other learned and laborious compilations. The only poem he published at this time was the famous Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (1741), afterwards translated into Danish by Baggesen. When Christian VI. died in 1747, pietism lost its sway; the theatre was reopened and Holberg was appointed director, but he soon resigned this arduous post. The six comedies he wrote in his old age did not add to his reputation. His last published work was his Epistles, in 5 vols. the last of them posthumous (1754). In 1747 he was created by the new king Baron of Holberg. In August 1753 he took to his bed, and he died at Copenhagen on the 28th of January 1754, in the seventieth year of his age. He was buried at Sorö, in Zealand. He had never married, and he bequeathed all his property, which was considerable, to Sorö College.

Holberg was not only the founder of Danish literature and the greatest of Danish authors, but he was, with the exception of Voltaire, the first writer in Europe during his own generation. Neither Pope nor Swift, who perhaps excelled him in particular branches of literary production, approached him in range of genius, or in encyclopaedic versatility. Holberg found Denmark provided with no books, and he wrote a library for her. When he arrived in the country, the Danish language was never heard in a gentleman’s house. Polite Danes were wont to say that a man wrote Latin to his friends, talked French to the ladies, called his dogs in German, and only used Danish to swear at his servants. The single genius of Holberg revolutionized this system. He wrote poems of all kinds in a language hitherto employed only for ballads and hymns; he instituted a theatre, and composed a rich collection of comedies for it; he filled the shelves of the citizens with works in their own tongue on history, law, politics, science, philology and philosophy, all written in a true and manly style, and representing the extreme attainment of European culture at the moment. Perhaps no author who ever lived has had so vast an influence over his countrymen, an influence that is still at work after 200 years.

The editions of Holberg’s works are legion. Complete editions of the Comedies are too numerous to be quoted; the best is that brought out in 3 vols. by F. I. Lichtenberg, in 1870. Of Peder Paars there exist at least twenty-three editions, besides translations in Dutch, German and Swedish. The Iter subterraneum has been three several times translated into Danish, ten times into German, thrice into Swedish, thrice into Dutch, thrice into English, twice into French, twice into Russian and once into Hungarian. The life of Holberg was written by Welhaven in 1858 and by Georg Brandes in 1884. Among works on his genius by foreigners may be mentioned an exhaustive study by Robert Prutz (1857), and Holberg considéré comme imitateur de Molière, by A. Legrelle (Paris, 1864).

(E. G.)

HOLBORN, a central metropolitan borough of London, England, bounded N.W. by St Pancras, N.E. by Finsbury, S.E. by the City of London, S. and W. by the City of Westminster and St Marylebone. Pop. (1901), 59,405. Area 405.1 acres. Its main thoroughfare is that running E. and W. under the names of Holborn Viaduct, High Holborn and New Oxford Street.

The name of Holborn was formerly derived from Old Bourne, a tributary of the Fleet, the valley of which is clearly seen where Holborn Viaduct crosses Farringdon Street. Of the existence of this tributary, however, there is no evidence, and the origin of the name is found in Hole-bourne, the stream in the hollow, in allusion to the Fleet itself. The fall and rise of the road across the valley before the construction of the viaduct (1869) was abrupt and inconvenient. In earlier times a bridge here crossed the Fleet, leading from Newgate, while a quarter of a mile west of the viaduct is the site of Holborn Bars, at the entrance to the City, where tolls were levied. The better residential district of Holborn, which extends northward to Euston Road in the borough of St Pancras, is mainly within the parish of St George, Bloomsbury. The name of Bloomsbury is commonly derived from William Blemund, a lord of the manor in the 15th century. A dyke called Blemund’s Ditch, of unknown origin, bounded it on the south, where the land was marshy. During the 18th century Bloomsbury was a fashionable and wealthy residential quarter. The reputation of the district immediately to the south, embraced in the parish of St Giles in the Fields, was far different. From the 17th century until modern times this was notorious as a home of crime and poverty. Here occurred some of the earliest cases of the plague which spread over London in 1664-1665. The opening of the thoroughfares of New Oxford Street (1840) and Shaftesbury Avenue (1855) by no means wholly destroyed the character of the district. The circus of Seven Dials, east of Shaftesbury Avenue, affords a typical name in connexion with the lowest aspect of life in London. A similar notoriety attached to Saffron Hill on the eastern confines of the borough. By a singular contrast, the neighbouring thoroughfare of Hatton Garden, leading north from Holborn Circus, is a centre of the diamond trade.

Of the ecclesiastical buildings of Holborn that of first interest is the chapel of St Etheldreda in Ely Place, opening from Holborn Circus. Ely Place takes its name from a palace of the bishops of Ely, who held land here as early as the 13th century. Here died John of Gaunt in 1399. The property was acquired by Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor under Queen Elizabeth, after whom Hatton Garden is named; though the bishopric kept some hold upon it until the 18th century. The chapel, the only remnant of the palace, is a beautiful Decorated structure with a vaulted crypt, itself above ground-level. Both are used for worship by Roman Catholics, by whom the chapel was acquired in 1874 and opened five years later after careful restoration. The present parish church of St Giles in the Fields, between Shaftesbury Avenue and New Oxford Street, dates from 1734, but here was situated a leper’s hospital founded by Matilda, wife of Henry I., in 1101. Its chapel became the parish church on the suppression of the monasteries. The church of St Andrew, the parish of which extends into the City, stands near Holborn Viaduct. It is by Wren, but there are traces of the previous Gothic edifice in the tower. Sacheverell was among its rectors (1713-1724), and Thomas Chatterton (1770) was interred in the adjacent burial ground, no longer extant, of Shoe Lane Workhouse; the register recording his Christian name as William. Close to this church Is the City Temple (Congregational).

Two of the four Inns of Court, Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn, lie within the borough. Of the first the Tudor gateway opens upon Chancery Lane. The chapel, hall and residential buildings surrounding the squares within, are picturesque, but of later date. To the west lie the fine square, with public gardens, still called, from its original character, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Gray’s Inn, between High Holborn and Theobald’s Road, and west of Gray’s Inn Road, is of similar arrangement. The fabric of the small chapel is apparently of the 14th century, and may have been attached to the manor house of Portpool, held at that period by the Lords Grey of Wilton. Of the former Inns of Chancery attached to these Inns of Court the most noteworthy buildings remaining are those of Staple Inn, of which the timbered and gabled Elizabethan front upon High Holborn is a unique survival of its character in a London thoroughfare; and of Barnard’s Inn, occupied by the Mercer’s School. Both these were attached to Gray’s Inn. Of Furnival’s and Thavies Inns, attached to Lincoln’s Inn, only the names remain. The site of the first is covered by the fine red brick buildings of the Prudential Assurance Company, Holborn Viaduct. Among other institutions in Holborn, the British Museum, north of New Oxford Street, is pre-eminent. The varied collections of Sir John Soane, accumulated at his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, are open to view as the Soane Museum. There may also be mentioned the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with museum; the Royal Colleges of Organists, and of Veterinary Surgeons, the College of Preceptors, the Jews’ College, and the Metropolitan School of Shorthand. Among hospitals are the Italian, the Homoeopathic, the National for the paralysed and epileptic, the Alexandra for children with hip disease, and the Hospital for sick children. The Foundling Hospital, Guilford Street, was founded by Thomas Coram in 1739.

HOLCROFT, THOMAS (1745-1809), English dramatist and miscellaneous writer, was born on the 10th of December 1745 (old style) in Orange Court, Leicester Fields, London. His father, besides having a shoemaker’s shop, kept riding horses for hire; but having fallen into difficulties was reduced ultimately to the necessity of hawking pedlary. The son accompanied his parents in their tramps, and succeeded in procuring the situation of stable boy at Newmarket, where he spent his evenings chiefly in miscellaneous reading and the study of music. Gradually he obtained a knowledge of French, German and Italian. At the end of his term of engagement as stable boy he returned to assist his father, who had again resumed his trade of shoemaker in London; but after marrying in 1765, he became a teacher in a small school in Liverpool. He failed in an attempt to set up a private school, and became prompter in a Dublin theatre. He acted in various strolling companies until 1778, when he produced The Crisis; or, Love and Famine, at Drury Lane. Duplicity followed in 1781. Two years later he went to Paris as correspondent of the Morning Herald. Here he attended the performances of Beaumarchais’s Mariage de Figaro until he had memorized the whole. The translation of it, with the title The Follies of the Day, was produced at Drury Lane in 1784. The Road to Ruin, his most successful melodrama, was produced in 1792. A revival in 1873 ran for 118 nights. Holcroft died on the 23rd of March 1809. He was a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, and on that account was, in 1794, indicted of high treason, but was discharged without a trial. Among his novels may be mentioned Alwyn (1780), an account, largely autobiographical, of a strolling comedian, and Hugh Trevor (1794-1797). He also was the author of Travels from Hamburg through Westphalia, Holland and the Netherlands to Paris, of some volumes of verse and of translations from the French and German.

His Memoirs written by Himself and continued down to the Time of his Death, from his Diary, Notes and other Papers, by William Hazlitt, appeared in 1816, and was reprinted, in a slightly abridged form, in 1852.

HOLDEN, HUBERT ASHTON (1822-1896), English classical scholar, came of an old Staffordshire family. He was educated at King Edward’s school, Birmingham, and Trinity College, Cambridge (senior classic, 1845; fellow, 1847). He was vice-principal of Cheltenham College (1853-1858), and headmaster of Queen Elizabeth’s school, Ipswich (1858-1883). He died in London on the 1st of December 1896. In addition to several school editions of portions of Cicero, Thucydides, Xenophon and Plutarch, he published an expurgated text of Aristophanes with a useful onomasticon (re-issued separately, 1902) and larger editions of Cicero’s De officiis (revised ed., 1898) and of the Octavius of Minucius Felix (1853). His chief works, however, were his Foliorum silvula (1852), a collection of English extracts for translation into Greek and Latin verse; Folia silvulae (translations of the same); and Foliorum centuriae, a companion volume of extracts for Latin prose translation. In English schools these books have been widely used for the teaching of Latin and Greek composition.

HOLDEN, SIR ISAAC, Bart. (1807-1897), English inventor and manufacturer, was the son of Isaac Holden, a native of Cumberland, and was born at Hurlet, a village between Paisley and Glasgow, on the 7th of May 1807. His early life was passed in very straitened circumstances, but his father spared no pains to give him as much elementary education as possible. At the age of ten he began to work as weaver’s draw-boy, and afterwards was employed in a cotton mill. Meanwhile his education was continued at the night schools, and from time to time, as funds allowed, he was taken from work and sent to the grammar-school, to which he at last went regularly for a year or two until he was fifteen, when his father removed to Paisley and apprenticed him to an uncle, a shawl-weaver there. This proving too much for his strength, in 1823 he became assistant teacher in a school at Paisley, and in 1828 he was appointed mathematical teacher in the Queen’s Square Academy, Leeds. At the end of six months he was transferred to Lingard’s grammar school, near Huddersfield, and shortly afterwards became classical master at Castle Street Academy, Reading. It was here that in 1829 he invented a lucifer match by adopting sulphur as the medium between the explosive material and the wood, but he refused to patent the invention. In 1830 his health again failed, and he returned to Scotland, where a Glasgow friend set up a school for him. After six months, however, he was recommended for the post of bookkeeper to Messrs. Townend Brothers, worsted manufacturers, of Cullingworth, where his interest in machinery soon led to his transfer from the counting-house to the mill. There his experiments led him to the invention of his square motion wool-comber and of a process for making genappe yarns, a patent for which was taken out by him in conjunction with S. C. Lister (Lord Masham) in 1847. The firm of Lister & Holden, which established a factory near Paris in 1848, carried on a successful business, and in 1859, when Lister retired, was succeeded by Isaac Holden and Sons, which became the largest wool-combing business in the world, employing upwards of 4000 workpeople. In 1865 Holden’s medical advisers insisted on complete change of occupation, and he entered parliament as Liberal member for Knaresborough. From 1868 to 1882 he was without a seat, but in the latter year he was elected for the northern division of the West Riding, and in 1885 for Keighley. He was created a baronet in 1893, and died suddenly at Oakworth House, near Keighley, on the 13th of August 1897.

His son and heir, Sir Angus Holden, was in 1908 created a peer with the title of Baron Holden of Alston.

HÖLDERLIN, JOHANN CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH (1770-1843), German poet, was born on the 20th of March 1770, at Lauffen on the Neckar. His mother removing, after a second marriage, to Nürtingen, he began his education at the classical school there. He was destined by his relations for the church, and with this view was later admitted to the seminaries at Denkendorf and Maulbronn. At the age of eighteen he entered as a student of theology the university of Tübingen, where he remained till 1793. He was already the writer of occasional verses, and had begun to sketch his novel Hyperion, when he was introduced in this year to Schiller, and obtained through him the post of tutor to the young son of Charlotte von Kalb. A year later he left this situation to attend Fichte’s lectures, and to be near Schiller in Jena. The latter recognized in the young poet something of his own genius, and encouraged him by publishing some of his early writings in his periodicals Die neue Thalia and Die Horen. In 1796 Hölderlin obtained the post of tutor in the family of the banker J. F. Gontard in Frankfort-on-Main. For Gontard’s beautiful and gifted wife, Susette, the “Diotima” of his Hyperion, he conceived a violent passion; and she became at once his inspiration and his ruin. At the end of two years, during which time the first volume of Hyperion was published (1797), a crisis appears to have occurred in their relations, for the young poet suddenly left Frankfort. In spite of ill-health, he now completed Hyperion, the second volume of which appeared in 1799, and began a tragedy, Der Tod des Empedokles, a fragment of which is published among his works. His friends became alarmed at the alternate depression and nervous irritability from which he suffered, and he was induced to go to Switzerland, as tutor in a family at Hauptwill. There his health improved; and several of his poems, among which are Der blinde Sänger, An die Hoffnung and Dichtermut, were written at this time. In 1801 he returned home to arrange for the publication of a volume of his poems; but, on the failure of this enterprise, he was obliged to accept a tutorship at Bordeaux. “Diotima” died a year later, in June 1802, and the news is supposed to have reached Hölderlin shortly afterwards, for in the following month he suddenly left Bordeaux, and travelled homewards on foot through France, arriving at Nürtingen destitute and insane. Kind treatment gradually alleviated his condition, and in lucid intervals he occupied himself by writing verses and translating Greek plays. Two of these translations—the Antigone and Oedipus rex of Sophocles—appeared in 1804, and several of his short poems were published by Franz K. L. von Seckendorff in his Musenalmanach, 1807 and 1808. In 1804 Hölderlin obtained the sinecure post of librarian to the landgrave Frederick V. of Hesse-Homburg, and went to live in Homburg under the supervision of friends; but two years later becoming irremediably but harmlessly insane, he was taken in the summer of 1807 to Tübingen, where he remained till his death on the 7th of June 1843.

Hölderlin’s writings are the production of a beautiful and sensitive mind; but they are intensely, almost morbidly, subjective, and they lack real human strength. Perhaps his strongest characteristic was his passion for Greece, the result of which was that he almost entirely discarded rhyme in favour of the ancient verse measures. His poems are all short pieces; of his tragedy only a fragment was written. Hyperion, oder der Eremit in Griechenland (1797-1799), is a romance in letters, in which the stormy fervour of the “Sturm und Drang” is combined with a romantic enthusiasm for Greek antiquity. The interest centres not in the story, for the novel has little or none—Hyperion is a young Greek who takes part in the rising of his people against the Turks in 1770—but in its lyric subjectivity and the dithyrambic beauty of its language.

Hölderlin’s lyrics, Lyrische Gedichte, were edited by L. Uhland and G. Schwab in 1826. A complete edition of his works, Sämtliche Werke, with a biography by C. T. Schwab, appeared in 1846; also Dichtungen by K. Köstlin (Tübingen, 1884), and (the best edition) Gesammelte Dichtungen by B. Litzmann (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1897). For biography and criticism, see C. C. T. Litzmann, F. Hölderlins Leben (Berlin, 1890), A. Wilbrandt, Hölderlin (2nd ed., Berlin, 1891), and C. Müller, Friedrich Hölderlin, sein Leben und sein Dichten (Bremen, 1894).

HOLDERNESSE, EARL OF, an English title borne by Sir John Ramsay and later by the family of Darcy. John Ramsay (c. 1580-1626), a member of the Scottish family of Ramsay of Dalhousie, was knighted for his share in rescuing James VI. from the hands of John Ruthven, earl of Gowrie, in August 1600. In 1606 the king created him Viscount Haddington and Lord Ramsay of Barns, and in 1621 made him an English peer as earl of Holdernesse. Ramsay died without surviving issue in February 1626, when his titles became extinct. In 1644 Charles I. created his nephew, Prince Rupert, earl of Holdernesse, but when the prince died unmarried in November 1682 the earldom again became extinct. Conyers Darcy (1599-1689), who was made earl of Holdernesse in 1682 only a few days after the death of Rupert, was the son and heir of Conyers Darcy, Lord Darcy and Conyers (c. 1571-1654), and succeeded his father in these baronies in March 1654. He was succeeded as 2nd earl by his only son Conyers (c. 1620-1692), who was member of parliament for Yorkshire during the reign of Charles II. In his turn he was succeeded by his grandson Robert (1681-1722). Robert’s only son, Robert Darcy, 4th earl of Holdernesse (1718-1778), was a diplomatist and a politician. From 1744 to 1746 he was ambassador at Venice and from 1749 to 1751 he represented his country at the Hague. In 1751 he became one of the secretaries of state, and he remained in office until March 1761, when he was dismissed by George III. From 1771 to 1776 he acted as governor to two of the king’s sons, a “solemn phantom” as Horace Walpole calls him. He left no sons, and all his titles became extinct except the barony of Conyers, which had been created by writ in 1509 in favour of his ancestor Sir William Conyers (d. 1525). This descended to his only daughter Amelia (1754-1784), the wife of Francis Osborne, afterwards 5th duke of Leeds, and when the 7th duke of Leeds died in 1859 it passed to his nephew, Sackville George Lane-Fox (1827-1888), falling into abeyance on his death. Hornby castle in Yorkshire, now the principal seat of the dukes of Leeds, came to them through marriage of the 5th duke with the heiress of the families of Conyers and of Darcy.

HOLDHEIM, SAMUEL (1806-1860), Jewish rabbi, a leader of reform in the German Synagogue, was born in Posen in 1806 and died in Berlin in 1860. In 1836 he was appointed rabbi at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, in 1840 he was transferred to the rabbinate of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He then became prominent as an advocate on the one hand of religious freedom (much trammelled at the time by Prussian state laws) and on the other of reform within the Jewish community. Various rabbinical conferences were held, at Brunswick (1844), Frankfort-on-the-Main (1845) and Breslau (1846). At all of these Holdheim was a strong supporter of the policy of modifying ritual (especially with regard to Sabbath observance, marriage laws and liturgical customs). In 1846 he was chosen Rabbi of the new Berlin congregation and there exercised considerable influence on the course of Jewish reform.

See I. H. Ritter in the Jewish Quarterly Review, i. 202. The same authority has written the life of Holdheim in vol. iii. of his Geschichte der jüdischen Reformation (Berlin, 1865). Graetz in his History passes an unfavourable judgment on Holdheim, and there were admittedly grounds for opposition to Holdheim’s attitude. A moderate criticism is contained in Dr D. Philipson’s History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (London, 1906).

HOLGUÍN, a town of the high plateau country in the interior of Oriente province, Cuba, about 65 m. N.W. of Santiago de Cuba. Pop. (1907) 7592. The town is near the Marañon and Jigüé rivers, on a plain from which hills rise on all sides except the E., on which side it is open to the winds of the plateau. Holguín was long the principal acclimatization station for Spanish troops. The oldest public buildings are two churches built in 1800 and 1809 respectively. Holguín has trade in cabinet woods, tobacco, Indian corn and cattle products, which it exports through its port Gibara, about 25 m. N.N.E., with which it is connected by railway. Holguín was settled about 1720 and became a ciudad (city) in 1751. In the Ten Years’ War of 1868-78 and in the revolution of 1895-98 Holguín was an insurgent centre.

HOLIDAY, originally the “holy day,” a festival set apart for religious observances as a memorial of some sacred event or sacred person; hence a day on which the ordinary work or business ceases. For the religious sense see Feasts and Festivals, and Sunday. Apart from the use of the term for a single day of rest or enjoyment, it is commonly used in the plural for a recognized and regular period (as at schools, &c.) of absence from work. It is unnecessary here to deal with what may be regarded as private holidays, which are matters of agreement between employer and employed or between the authorities of this or that institution and those who attend it. In recent years there has been a notable tendency in most occupations to shorten the hours of labour, and make holidays more regular. It will suffice to deal here with public holidays, the observance of which is prescribed by the state. In one respect these have been diminished, in so far as saints’ days are no longer regarded as entailing non-attendance at the government offices in England, as was the case at the beginning of the 19th century. But while the influence of religion in determining such holidays has waned, the importance of making some compulsory provision for social recreation has made itself felt. In England four days, known as Bank Holidays (q.v.), are set apart by statute to be observed as general holidays, while the sovereign may by proclamation appoint any day to be similarly observed. Endeavours have been made from time to time to get additional days recognized as general holidays, such as Empire Day (May 24th), Arbor Day, &c. In the British colonies there is no uniform practice. In Canada eight days are generally observed as public holidays: New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Christmas Day, the birthday of the sovereign, Victoria Day, Dominion Day and Labour Day. Some of the provinces have followed the American example by adding an Arbor Day. Alberta and Saskatchewan observe Ash Wednesday. In Quebec, where the majority of the population is Roman Catholic, the holy days are also holidays, namely, the Festival of the Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Easter Monday, the Ascension, All Saint’s Day, Conception Day, Christmas Day. In 1897 Labour Day was added. In New South Wales, the 1st of January, Good Friday, Easter Eve, Easter Monday, the birthday of the sovereign, the 1st of August, the birthday of the prince of Wales, Christmas Day and the 26th of December, are observed as holidays. In Victoria there are thirteen public holidays during the year, and in Queensland fourteen. In New Zealand the public holidays are confined to four, Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, Good Friday and Labour Day. In most of the other British colonies the usual number of public holidays is from six to eight.

In the United States there is no legal holiday in the sense of the English bank holidays. A legal holiday is dependent upon state and territorial legislation. It is usual for the president to proclaim the last Thursday in November as a day of thanksgiving; this makes it only a legal holiday in the District of Columbia, and in the territories, but most states make it a general holiday. Independence Day (July 4th) and Labour Day (first Monday in September) are legal holidays in most states. There are other days which, in connexion with particular events or in remembrance of particular persons, have been made legal holidays by particular states. For example, Lincoln’s birthday, Washington’s birthday, Memorial Day (May 30th), Patriots’ Day (April 19th, Maine and Mass.), R. E. Lee’s birthday (Jan. 19th, Ala., Fla., Ga., Va.), Pioneers’ Day (July 24th, Utah), Colorado Day (Aug. 1st), Battle of New Orleans (Jan. 8th, La.), Bennington Battle Day (Aug. 16th, Vt.), Defender’s Day (Sept, 12th, Md.), Arbor Day (April 22nd, Nebraska; second Friday in May R.I., &c.), Admission Day (September 9th, Cal.; Oct. 31st, Nev.), Confederate Memorial Day (April 26th, Ala., Fla., Ga., Miss., May 10th, N. & S. Car., June 3rd, La., Miss., Texas), &c.

See M‘Curdy, Bibliography of Articles relating to Holidays (Boston, 1905).

(T. A. I.)

HOLINSHED (or Hollingshead), RAPHAEL (d. c. 1580), English chronicler, belonged probably to a Cheshire family, and according to Anthony Wood was educated at one of the English universities, afterwards becoming a “minister of God’s Word.” The authenticity of these facts is doubtful, although it is possible that Raphael was the Holinshed who matriculated from Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1544. About 1560 he came to London and was employed as a translator by Reginald or Reyner Wolfe, to whom he says he was “singularly beholden.” Wolfe was already engaged in the preparation of a universal history, and Holinshed worked for some years on this undertaking; but after Wolfe’s death in 1573 the scope of the work was abridged, and it appeared in 1578 as the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The work was in two volumes, which were illustrated, and although Holinshed did a great deal of the work he received valuable assistance from William Harrison (1534-1593) and others, while the part dealing with the history of Scotland is mainly a translation of Hector Boece’s Scotorum historiae. Afterwards, as is shown by his will, Holinshed served as steward to Thomas Burdet of Bramcott, Warwickshire, and died about 1580.

A second edition of the Chronicles, enlarged and improved but without illustrations, which appeared in 1587, contained statements which were offensive to Queen Elizabeth and her advisers, and immediately after publication some of the pages were excised by order of the privy council. These excisions were published separately in 1723. An edition of the Chronicles, in accordance with the original text, was published in six volumes in 1808. The work contains a large amount of information, and shows that its compilers were men of great industry; but its chief interest lies in the fact that it was largely used by Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists; Shakespeare, who probably used the edition of 1587, obtaining from the Chronicles material for most of his historical plays, and also for Macbeth, King Lear and part of Cymbeline. A single manuscript by Holinshed is known to be extant. This is a translation of Florence of Worcester, and is in the British Museum. See W. G. Boswell-Stone, Shakspere’s Holinshed. The Chronicle and the historical plays compared (London, 1896).

HOLKAR, the family name of the Mahratta ruler of Indore (q.v.), which has been adopted as a dynastic title. The termination -kar implies that the founder of the family came from the village of Hol near Poona.

HOLL, FRANK (1845-1888), English painter, was born in London on the 4th of July 1845, and was educated chiefly at University College School. He was a grandson of William Holl, an engraver of note, and the son of Francis Holl, A.R.A., another engraver, whose profession he originally intended to follow. Entering the Royal Academy schools as a probationer in painting in 1860, he rapidly progressed, winning silver and gold medals, and making his début as an exhibitor in 1864 with “A Portrait,” and “Turned out of Church,” a subject picture. “A Fern Gatherer” (1865); “The Ordeal” (1866); “Convalescent” (the somewhat grim pathos of which attracted much attention), and “Faces in the Fire” (1867), succeeded. Holl gained the travelling studentship in 1868; the successful work was characteristic of the young painter’s mood, being “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.” His insatiable zeal for work of all kinds began early to undermine the artist’s health, but his position was assured by the studentship picture, which created a sort of furore, although, as with most of his works, the blackness of its coloration, probably due to his training as an engraver, was even more decidedly against it than the sadness of its theme. Otherwise, this painting exhibited nearly all the best technical qualities to which he ever attained, except high finish and clearness, and a very sincere vein of pathos. Holl was much below Millais In portraiture, and far inferior In all the higher ways of design; in technical resources, relatively speaking, he was but scantily provided. The range of his studies and the manner of his painting were narrower than those of Josef Israels, with whom, except as a portrait-painter, he may better be compared than with Millais. In 1870 he painted “Better is a Dinner of Herbs where Love is, than a Stalled Ox and Hatred therewith”; “No Tidings from the Sea,” a scene in a fisherman’s cottage, in 1871—a story told with breath-catching pathos and power; “I am the Resurrection and the Life” (1872); “Leaving Home” (1873), “Deserted” (1874), both of which had great success; “Her First-born,” girls carrying a baby to the grave (1876); and “Going Home” (1877). In 1877 he painted the two pictures “Hush” and “Hushed.” “Newgate, Committed for Trial,” a very sad and telling piece, first attested the breaking down of the painter’s health in 1878. In this year he was elected A.R.A., and exhibited “The Gifts of the Fairies,” “The Daughter of the House,” “Absconded,” and a very fine portrait of Samuel Cousins, the mezzotint engraver. This last canvas is a masterpiece, and deserved the success which attended the print engraved from it. Holl was overwhelmed with commissions, which he would not decline. The consequences of this strain upon a constitution which was never strong were more or less, though unequally, manifest in “Ordered to the Front,” a soldier’s departure (1880); “Home Again,” its sequel, in 1883 (after which he was made R.A.). In 1886 he produced a portrait of Millais as his diploma work, but his health rapidly declined and he died at Hampstead, on the 31st of July 1888. Holl’s better portraits, being of men of rare importance, attest the commanding position he occupied in the branch of art he so unflinchingly followed. They include likenesses of Lord Roberts, painted for queen Victoria (1882); the prince of Wales, Lord Dufferin, the duke of Cleveland (1885); Lord Overstone, Mr Bright, Mr Gladstone, Mr Chamberlain, Sir J. Tenniel, Earl Spencer, Viscount Cranbrook, and a score of other important subjects.

(F. G. S.)

HOLLAND, CHARLES (1733-1769), English actor, was born in Chiswick, the son of a baker. He made his first appearance on the stage in the title rôle of Oroonoko at Drury Lane in 1755, John Palmer, Richard Yates and Mrs Cibber being in the cast. He played under Garrick, and was the original Florizel in the latter’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. Garrick thought highly of him, and wrote a eulogistic epitaph for his monument in Chiswick church.

His nephew, Charles Holland (1768-1849) was also an actor, who played with Mrs Siddons and Kean.

HOLLAND, SIR HENRY, Bart. (1788-1873), English physician and author, was born at Knutsford, Cheshire, on the 27th of October 1788. His maternal grandmother was the sister of Josiah Wedgwood, whose grandson was Charles Darwin; and his paternal aunt was the mother of Mrs Gaskell. After spending some years at a private school at Knutsford, he was sent to a school at Newcastle-on-Tyne, whence after four years he was transferred to Dr J. P. Estlin’s school near Bristol. There he at once took the position of head boy, in succession to John Cam Hobhouse, afterwards Lord Broughton, an honour which required to be maintained by physical prowess. On leaving school he became articled clerk to a mercantile firm in Liverpool, but, as the privilege was reserved to him of passing two sessions at Glasgow university, he at the close of his second session sought relief from his articles, and in 1806 began the study of medicine in the university of Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1811. After several years spent in foreign travel, he began practice in 1816 as a physician in London—according to his own statement, “with a fair augury of success speedily and completely fulfilled.” This “success,” he adds, “was materially aided by visits for four successive years to Spa, at the close of that which is called the London season.” It must also, however, be in a great degree attributed to his happy temperament and his gifts as a conversationalist—qualities the influence of which, in the majority of cases belonging to his class of practice, is often of more importance than direct medical treatment. In 1816 he was elected F.R.S., and in 1828 F.R.C.S. He became physician in ordinary to Prince Albert in 1840, and was appointed in 1852 physician in ordinary to the queen. In April 1853 he was created a baronet. He was also a D.C.L. of Oxford and a member of the principal learned societies of Europe. He was twice married, his second wife being a daughter of Sydney Smith, a lady of considerable literary talent, who published a biography of her father. Sir Henry Holland at an early period of his practice resolved to devote to his professional duties no more of his time than was necessary to secure an income of £5000 a year, and also to spend two months of every year solely in foreign travel. By the former resolution he secured leisure for a wide acquaintance with general literature, and for a more than superficial cultivation of several branches of science; and the latter enabled him, besides visiting, “and most of them repeatedly, every country of Europe,” to make extensive tours in the other three continents, journeying often to places little frequented by European travellers. As, moreover, he procured an introduction to nearly all the eminent personages in his line of travel, and knew many of them in his capacity of physician, his acquaintance with “men and cities” was of a species without a parallel. The London Medical Record, in noticing his death, which took place on his eighty-fifth birthday, October 27, 1873, remarked that it “had occurred under circumstances highly characteristic of his remarkable career.” On his return from a journey in Russia he was present, on Friday, October 24th, at the trial of Marshal Bazaine in Paris, dining with some of the judges in the evening. He reached London on the Saturday, took ill the following day, and died quietly on the Monday afternoon.

Sir Henry Holland was the author of General View of the Agriculture of Cheshire (1807); Travels in the Ionian Isles, Albania, Thessaly and Greece (1812-1813, 2nd ed., 1819); Medical Notes and Reflections (1839); Chapters on Mental Physiology (1852); Essays on Scientific and other Subjects contributed to the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews (1862); and Recollections of Past Life (1872).

HOLLAND, HENRY FOX, 1st Baron (1705-1774), English statesman, second son of Sir Stephen Fox, was born on the 28th of September 1705. Inheriting a large share of the riches which his father had accumulated, he squandered it soon after attaining his majority, and went to the Continent to escape from his creditors. There he made the acquaintance of a countrywoman of fortune, who became his patroness and was so lavish with her purse that, after several years’ absence, he was in a position to return home and, in 1735, to enter parliament as member for Hindon in Wiltshire. He became the favourite pupil and devoted supporter of Sir Robert Walpole, achieving unequalled and unenviable proficiency in the worst political arts of his master and model. As a speaker he was fluent and self-possessed, imperturbable under attack, audacious in exposition or retort, and able to hold his own against Pitt himself. Thus he made himself a power in the House of Commons and an indispensable member of several administrations. He was surveyor-general of works from 1737 to 1742, was member for Windsor from 1741 to 1761; lord of the treasury in 1743, secretary at war and member of the privy council in 1746, and in 1755 became leader of the House of Commons, secretary of state and a member of the cabinet under the duke of Newcastle. In 1757, in the rearrangements of the government, Fox was ultimately excluded from the cabinet, and given the post of paymaster of the forces. During the war, which Pitt conducted with extraordinary vigour, and in which the nation was intoxicated with glory, Fox devoted himself mainly to accumulating a vast fortune. In 1762 he again accepted the leadership of the House, with a seat in the cabinet, under the earl of Bute, and exercised his skill in cajolery and corruption to induce the House of Commons to approve of the treaty of Paris of 1763; as a recompense, he was raised to the House of Lords with the title of Baron Holland of Foxley, Wiltshire, on the 16th of April 1763. In 1765 he was forced to resign the paymaster generalship, and four years later a petition of the livery of the city of London against the ministers referred to him as “the public defaulter of unaccounted millions.” The proceedings brought against him in the court of exchequer were stayed by a royal warrant; and in a statement published by him he proved that in the delays in making up the accounts of his office he had transgressed neither the law nor the custom of the time. From the interest on the outstanding balances he had, none the less, amassed a princely fortune. He strove, but in vain, to obtain promotion to the dignity of an earl, a dignity upon which he had set his heart, and he died at Holland House, Kensington, on the 1st of July 1774, a sorely disappointed man, with a reputation for cunning and unscrupulousness which cannot easily be matched, and with an unpopularity which justifies the conclusion that he was the most thoroughly hated statesman of his day. Lord Holland married in 1744 Lady Georgina Caroline Lennox, daughter of the duke of Richmond, who was created Baroness Holland, of Holland, Lincolnshire, in 1762. There were four sons of the marriage: Stephen, 2nd Lord Holland (d. 1774); Henry (d. an infant); Charles James (the celebrated statesman); and Henry Edward (1755-1811), soldier and diplomatist.

See Walpole’s and other memoirs of the time, also the article Fox, Charles James.

HOLLAND, HENRY RICH, 1st Earl of (1590-1649), 2nd son of Robert, 1st earl of Warwick, and of Penelope, Sir Philip Sidney’s “Stella,” daughter of Walter Devereux, 1st earl of Essex, was baptized on the 19th of August 1590, educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, knighted on the 3rd of June 1610, and returned to parliament for Leicester in 1610 and 1614. In 1610 he was present at the siege of Juliers. Favours were showered upon him by James I. He was made gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles, prince of Wales, and captain of the yeomen of the guard; and on the 8th of March 1623 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Kensington. In 1624 he was sent to Paris to negotiate the marriage treaty between Charles and Henrietta Maria. On the 15th of September he was created earl of Holland, and in 1625 was sent on two further missions, first to Paris to arrange a treaty between Louis XIII. and the Huguenots, and later to the Netherlands in company with Buckingham. In October 1627 he was given command of the troops sent to reinforce Buckingham at Rhé, but through delay in starting only met the defeated troops on their return. He succeeded Buckingham as chancellor of Cambridge University; was master of the horse in 1628, and was appointed constable of Windsor and high steward to the queen in 1629. He interested himself, like his elder brother, Lord Warwick, in the plantations; and was the first governor of the Providence company in 1630, and one of the proprietors of Newfoundland in 1637. In 1631 he was made chief-justice-in-eyre south of the Trent, and in this capacity was responsible for the unpopular revival of the obsolete forest laws. He intrigued at court against Portland and against Strafford, who expressed for him the greatest contempt. In 1636 he was disappointed at not obtaining the great office of lord high admiral, but was made instead groom of the stole. In 1639 he was appointed general of the horse, and drew ridicule upon himself by the fiasco at Kelso. In the second war against the Scots he was superseded in favour of Conway. He opposed the dissolution of the Short Parliament, joined the peers who supported the parliamentary cause, and gave evidence against Strafford. He was, however, won back to the king’s side by the queen, and on the 16th of April 1641 made captain general north of the Trent. Dissatisfied, however, with Charles’s refusal to grant him the nomination of a new baron, he again abandoned him, refused the summons to York, and was deprived of his office as groom of the stole at the instance of the queen, who greatly resented his ingratitude. He was chosen by the parliament in March and July 1642 to communicate its votes to Charles, who received him, much to his indignation, with studied coldness. He was appointed one of the committee of safety in July; made zealous speeches on behalf of the parliamentary cause to the London citizens; and joined Essex’s army at Twickenham, where, it is said, he persuaded him to avoid a battle. In 1643 he appeared as a peacemaker, and after failing to bring over Essex, he returned to the king. His reception, however, was not a cordial one, and he was not reinstated in his office of groom of the stole. After, therefore, accompanying the king to Gloucester and taking part in the first battle of Newbury, he once more returned to the parliament, declaring that the court was too much bent on continuing hostilities, and the influence of the “papists” too strong for his patriotism. He was restored to his estates, but the Commons obliged the Lords to exclude him from the upper house, and his petition in 1645 for compensation for his losses and for a pension was refused. His hopes being in this quarter also disappointed, he once again renewed his allegiance to the king’s cause; and after endeavouring to promote the negotiations for peace in 1645 and 1647 he took up arms in the second Civil War, received a commission as general, and put himself at the head of 600 men at Kingston. He was defeated on the 7th of July 1647, captured at St Neots shortly afterwards, and imprisoned at Warwick Castle. He was tried before a “high court of justice” on the 3rd of February 1649, and in spite of his plea that he had received quarter was sentenced to death. He was executed together with Hamilton and Capel on the 9th of March. Clarendon styles him “a very well-bred man and a fine gentleman in good times.”1 He was evidently a man of shallow character, devoid of ability, raised far above his merits and hopelessly unfit for the great times in which he lived. Lord Holland married Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of Sir Walter Cope of Kensington, and, besides several daughters, had four sons, of whom the eldest, Robert, succeeded him as 2nd earl of Holland, and inherited the earldom of Warwick in 1673.

1 Hist. of the Rebellion, xi. 263.

HOLLAND, HENRY RICHARD VASSALL FOX, 3rd Baron (1773-1840), was the son of Stephen Fox, 2nd Baron Holland, his mother, Lady Mary Fitzpatrick, being the daughter of the earl of Upper Ossory. He was born at Winterslow House in Wiltshire, on the 21st of November 1773, and his father died in the following year. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he became the friend of Canning, of Hookham Frere, and of other wits of the time. Lord Holland did not take the same political side as his friends in the conflicts of the revolutionary epoch. He was from his boyhood deeply attached to his uncle, C. J. Fox, and remained steadily loyal to the Whig party. In 1791 he visited Paris and became acquainted with Lafayette and Talleyrand, and in 1793 he again went abroad to travel in France and Italy. At Florence he met with Lady Webster, wife of Sir Godfrey Webster, Bart., who left her husband for him. She was by birth Elizabeth Vassall (1770-1845), daughter of Richard Vassall, a planter in Jamaica. A son was born of their irregular union, a Charles Richard Fox (1796-1873), who after some service in the navy entered the Grenadiers, and was known in later life as a collector of Greek coins. His collection was bought for the royal museum of Berlin when he died in 1873. He married Lady Mary Fitzclarence, a daughter of William IV. by Mrs Jordan. Sir Godfrey Webster having obtained a divorce, Lord Holland was enabled to marry on the 6th of July 1797. He had taken his seat in the House of Lords on the 5th of October 1796. During several years he may be said almost to have constituted the Whig party in the Upper House. His protests against the measures of the Tory ministers were collected and published, as the Opinions of Lord Holland (1841), by Dr Moylan of Lincoln’s Inn. In 1800 he was authorized to take the name of Vassall, and after 1807 he signed himself Vassall Holland, though the name was no part of his title. In 1800 Lord and Lady Holland went abroad and remained in France and Spain till 1805, visiting Paris during the Peace of Amiens, and being well received by Napoleon. Lady Holland always professed a profound admiration of Napoleon, of which she made a theatrical display after his fall, and he left her a gold snuff-box by his will. In public life Lord Holland took a share proportionate to his birth and opportunities. He was appointed to negotiate with the American envoys, Monroe and W. Pinkney, was admitted to the privy council on the 27th of August 1806, and on the 15th of October entered the cabinet “of all the talents” as lord privy seal, retiring with the rest of his colleagues in March 1807. He led the opposition to the Regency bill in 1811, and he attacked the “orders in council” and other strong measures of the government taken to counteract Napoleon’s Berlin decrees. He was in fact in politics a consistent Whig, and in that character he denounced the treaty of 1813 with Sweden which bound England to consent to the forcible union of Norway, and he resisted the bill of 1816 for confining Napoleon in St Helena. His loyalty as a Whig secured recognition when his party triumphed in the struggle for parliamentary reform, by his appointment as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster in the cabinet of Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne, and he was still in office when he died on the 22nd of October 1840. Lord Holland is notable, not for his somewhat insignificant political career, but as a patron of literature, as a writer on his own account, and because his house was the centre and the headquarters of the Whig political and literary world of the time; and Lady Holland (who died on the 16th of November 1845) succeeded in taking the sort of place in London which had been filled in Paris during the 18th century by the society ladies who kept “salons.” Lord Holland’s Foreign Reminiscences (1850) contain much amusing gossip from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. His Memoirs of the Whig Party (1852) is an important contemporary authority. His small work on Lope de Vega (1806) is still of some value. Holland had two legitimate sons, Stephen, who died in 1800, and Henry Edward, who became 4th Lord Holland. When this peer died in December 1859 the title became extinct.

See The Journal of Elizabeth, Lady Holland, edited by the earl of Ilchester (1908); and Lloyd Sanders, The Holland House Circle (1908).

HOLLAND, JOSIAH GILBERT (1819-1881), American author and editor, was born in Belchertown, Massachusetts, on the 24th of July 1819. He graduated in 1843 at the Berkshire Medical College (no longer in existence) at Pittsfield, Mass., and after practising medicine in 1844-1847, and making an unsuccessful attempt, with Charles Robinson (1818-1894), later first governor of the state of Kansas, to establish a hospital for women, he taught for a brief period in Richmond, Virginia, and in 1848 was superintendent of schools in Vicksburg, Mississippi. In 1849 he became assistant editor under Samuel Bowles, and three years later one of the owners, of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, with which he retained his connexion until 1867. He then travelled for some time in Europe, and in 1870 removed to New York, where he helped to establish and became editor and one-third owner of Scribner’s Monthly (the title of which was changed in 1881 to The Century), which absorbed the periodicals Hours at Home, Putnam’s Magazine and the Riverside Magazine. He remained editor of this magazine until his death. Dr Holland’s books long enjoyed a wide popularity. The earlier ones were published over the pseudonym “Timothy Titcomb.” His writings fall into four classes: history and biography, represented by a History of Western Massachusetts (1855), and a Life of Abraham Lincoln (1865); fiction, of which Miss Gilbert’s Career (1860) and The Story of Sevenoaks (1875) remain faithful pictures of village life in eastern United States; poetry, of which Bitter-Sweet (1858) and Kathrina, Her Life and Mine (1867) were widely read; and a series of homely essays on the art of living, of which the most characteristic were Letters to Young People, Single and Married (1858), Gold Foil, hammered from Popular Proverbs (1859), Letters to the Jonses (1863), and Every-Day Topics (2 series, 1876 and 1882). While a resident of New York, where he died on the 12th of October 1881, he identified himself with measures for good government and school reform, and in 1872 became a member and for a short time in 1873 was president of the Board of Education.

See Mrs H. M. Plunkett’s Josiah Gilbert Holland (New York, 1894).

HOLLAND, PHILEMON (1552-1637), English scholar, “the translator-general in his age,” was born at Chelmsford in Essex. He was the son of a clergyman, John Holland, who had been obliged to take refuge in Germany and Denmark with Miles Coverdale during the Marian persecution. Having become a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and taken the degree of M.A., he was incorporated at Oxford (July 11th, 1585). Having subsequently studied medicine, about 1595 he settled as a doctor in Coventry, but chiefly occupied himself with translations. In 1628 he was appointed headmaster of the free school, but, owing probably to advancing age, he held office for only eleven months. His latter days were oppressed by poverty, partly relieved by the generosity of the common council of Coventry, which in 1632 assigned him £3, 6s. 8d. for three years, “if he should live so long.” He died on the 9th of February, 1636-1637. His fame is due solely to his translations, which included Livy, Pliny’s Natural History, Plutarch’s Morals, Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. He published also an English version, with additions, of Camden’s Britannia. His Latin translation of Brice Bauderon’s Pharmacopaea and his Regimen sanitatis Salerni were published after his death by his son, Henry Holland (1583-?1650), who became a London bookseller, and is known to bibliographers for his Baziliωlogia; a Booke of Kings, beeing the true and liuely Effigies of all our English Kings from the Conquest (1618), and his Herωologia Anglica (1620).

HOLLAND, RICHARD, or Richard de Holande (fl. 1450), Scottish writer, author of the Buke of the Howlat, was secretary or chaplain to the earl of Moray (1450) and rector of Halkirk, near Thurso. He was afterwards rector of Abbreochy, Loch Ness, and later held a chantry in the cathedral of Norway. He was an ardent partisan of the Douglases, and on their overthrow retired to Orkney and later to Shetland. He was employed by Edward IV. in his attempt to rouse the Western Isles through Douglas agency, and in 1482 was excluded from the general pardon granted by James III. to those who would renounce their fealty to the Douglases.

The poem, entitled the Buke of the Howlat, written about 1450, shows his devotion to the house of Douglas:—

“On ilk beugh till embrace Writtin in a bill was O Dowglass, O Dowglass Tender and trewe!”

(ii. 400-403).

and is dedicated to the wife of a Douglas—

“Thus for ane Dow of Dunbar drew I this Dyte, Dowit with ane Dowglass, and boith war thei dowis.”

but all theories of its being a political allegory in favour of that house may be discarded. Sir Walter Scott’s judgment that the Buke is “a poetical apologue ... without any view whatever to local or natural politics” is certainly the most reasonable. The poem, which extends to 1001 lines written in the irregular alliterative rhymed stanza, is a bird-allegory, of the type familiar in the Parlement of Foules. It has the incidental interest of showing (especially in stanzas 62 and 63) the antipathy of the “Inglis-speaking Scot” to the “Scots-speaking Gael” of the west, as is also shown in Dunbar’s Flyting with Kennedy.

The text of the poem is preserved in the Asloan and Bannatyne MSS. Fragments of an early 16th century black-letter edition, discovered by D. Laing, are reproduced in the Adversaria of the Bannatyne Club. The poem has been frequently reprinted, by Pinkerton, in his Scottish Poems (1792); by D. Laing (Bannatyne Club 1823; reprinted in “New Club” series, Paisley, 1882); by the Hunterian Club in their edition of the Bannatyne MS., and by A. Diebler (Chemnitz, 1893). The latest edition is that by F. J. Amours in Scottish Alliterative Poems (Scottish Text Society, 1897), pp. 47-81. (See also Introduction pp. xx.-xxxiv.)

HOLLAND, officially the kingdom of the Netherlands (Koningrijk der Nederlanden), a maritime country in the north-west of Europe. The name Holland is that of the former countship, which forms part of the political, as well as the geographical centre of the kingdom (see the next article).

Topography.—Holland is bounded on the E. by Germany, on the S. by Belgium, on the W. and N. by the North Sea, and at the N.E. corner by the Dollart. From Stevensweert southward to the extreme corner of Limburg the boundary line is formed by the river Maas or Meuse.1 On the east a natural geographical boundary was formed by the long line of marshy fens extending along the borders of Overysel, Drente and Groningen. The kingdom extends from 53° 32′ 21″ (Groningen Cape on Rottum Island) to 50° 45′ 49″ N. (Mesch in the province of Limburg), and from 3° 23′ 27″ (Sluis in the province of Zeeland) to 7° 12′ 20″ E. (Langakkerschans in the province of Groningen). The greatest length from north to south, viz. that from Rottum Island to Eisden near Maastricht is 164 m., and the greatest breadth from south-west to north-east, or from Zwin near Sluis to Losser in Overysel, 144 m. The area is subject to perpetual variation owing, on the one hand, to the erosion of the coasts, and, on the other, to reclamation of land by means of endiking and drainage operations. In 1889 the total area was calculated at 12,558 sq. m., and, including the Zuider Zee and the Wadden (2050 sq. m.) and the Dutch portion of the Dollart (23 sq. m.), 14,613 sq. m. In no country in Europe has the character of the territory exercised so great an influence on the inhabitants as in the Netherlands; and, on the other hand, no people has so extensively modified the condition of its territory as the Dutch. The greatest importance attaches therefore to the physical conformation of the country.

The coast-line extends in a double curve from south-west to north-east, and is formed by a row of sand dunes, 171 m. in length, fringed by a broad sandy beach descending very gradually into the sea. In the north and south, however, this line is Coast. broken by the inlets of the sea which form the Frisian and the South Holland and Zeeland islands respectively; but the dunes themselves are found continued along the seaward side of these islands, thus indicating the original continuity of the coast-line. The breadth of the dunes naturally varies greatly, the maximum width of about 4375 yds. being found at Schoorl, north-west of Alkmaar. The average height of the individual dune-tops is not above 33 ft., but attains a maximum of 197 ft. at the High Blinkert, near Haarlem. The steepness of the dunes on the side towards the sea is caused by the continual erosion, probably traceable, in part at least, to the channel current (which at mean tide has a velocity of 14 or 15 in. per second), and to the strong west or north-west winds which carry off large quantities of material. This alteration of coast-line appears at Loosduinen, where the moor or fenland formerly developed behind the dunes now crops out on the shore amid the sand, being pressed to the compactness of lignite by the weight of the sand drifted over it. Again, the remains of the Roman camp Brittenburg or Huis te Britten, which originally lay within the dunes and, after being covered by them, emerged again in 1520, were, in 1694, 1600 paces out to sea, opposite Katwijk; while, besides Katwijk itself, several other villages of the west coast, as Domburg, Scheveningen, Egmond, have been removed further inland. The tendency of the dunes to drift off on the landward side is prevented by the planting of bent-grass (Arundo arenaria), whose long roots serve to bind the sand together. It must be further remarked that both the “dune-pans,” or depressions, which are naturally marshy through their defective drainage, and the geest grounds—that is, the grounds along the foot of the downs—have been in various places either planted with wood or turned into arable and pasture land; while the numerous springs at the base of the dunes are of the utmost value to the great cities situated on the marshy soil inland, the example set by Amsterdam in 1853 in supplying itself with this water having been readily followed by Leiden, the Hague, Flushing, &c.

As already remarked, the coast-line of Holland breaks up into a series of islands at its northern and southern extremities. The principal sea-inlets in the north are the Texel Gat or Marsdiep and the Vlie, which lead past the chain of the Frisian Islands into the large inland sea or gulf called the Zuider Zee, and the Wadden or “shallows,” which extend along the shores of Friesland and Groningen as far as the Dollart and the mouth of the Ems. The inland sea-board thus formed consists of low coasts of sea-clay protected by dikes, and of some high diluvial strata which rise far enough above the level of the sea to make dikes unnecessary, as in the case of the Gooi hills between Naarden and the Eem, the Veluwe hills between Nykerk and Elburg, and the steep cliffs of the Gaasterland between Oude Mirdum and Stavoren. The Dollart was formed in 1277 by the inundation of the Ems basin, more than thirty villages being destroyed at once. The Zuider Zee and the bay in the Frisian coast known as the Lauwers Zee also gradually came into existence in the 13th century. The extensive sea-arms forming the South Holland and Zeeland archipelago are the Hont or West Scheldt, the East Scheldt, the Grevelingen (communicating with Krammer and the Volkerak) and the Haringvliet, which after being joined by the Volkerak is known as the Hollandsch Diep. These inlets were formerly of much greater extent than now, but are gradually closing up owing to the accumulation of mud deposits, and no longer have the same freedom of communication with one another. At the head of the Hollandsch Diep is the celebrated railway bridge of the Moerdyk (1868-1871) 1607 yds. in length; and above this bridge lies the Biesbosch (“reed forest”), a group of marshy islands formed by a disastrous inundation in 1421, when seventy-two villages and upwards of 100,000 lives were destroyed.

Besides the dunes the only hilly regions of Holland are the southern half of the province of Limburg, the neighbourhood of Nijmwegen, the hills of Utrecht, including the Gooi hills, the Veluwe region in Gelderland, the isolated hills in the middle and Relief and levels. east of Overysel and the Hondsrug range in Drente. The remainder of the country is flat, and shows a regular downward slope from south-east to north-west, in which direction the rivers mainly flow. The elevation of the surface of the country ranges between the extreme height of 1057 ft. near Vaals in the farthest corner of Limburg, and 16-20 ft. below the Amsterdam zero2 in some of the drained lands in the western half of the country. In fact, one quarter of the whole kingdom, consisting of the provinces of North and South Holland, the western portion of Utrecht as far as the Vaart Rhine, Zeeland, except the southern part of Zeeland-Flanders, and the north-west part of North Brabant, lies below the Amsterdam zero; and altogether 38% of the country, or all that part lying west of a line drawn through Groningen, Utrecht and Antwerp, lies within one metre above the Amsterdam zero and would be submerged if the sea broke down the barrier of dunes and dikes. This difference between the eastern and western divisions of Holland has its counterpart in the landscape and the nature of the soil. The western division consists of low fen or clay soil and presents a monotonous expanse of rich meadow-land, carefully drained in regular lines of canals bordered by stunted willows, and dotted over with windmills, the sails of canal craft and the clumps of elm and poplar which surround each isolated farm-house. The landscape of the eastern division is considered less typical. Here the soil consists mainly of sand and gravel, and the prevailing scenery is formed of waste heaths and patches of wood, while here and there fertile meadows extend along the banks of the streams, and the land is laid out in the highly regular manner characteristic of fen reclamation (see Drente).

The entire drainage of Holland is into the North Sea. The three principal rivers are the Rhine, the Maas (Meuse) and the Scheldt (Schelde), and all three have their origin outside the country, whilst the Scheldt has its mouth only in Holland, Rivers. giving its name to the two broad inlets of the sea which bound the Zeeland islands. The Rhine in its course through Holland is merely the parent stream of several important branches, splitting up into Rhine and Waal, Rhine and Ysel, Crooked Rhine and Lek (which takes two-thirds of the waters), and at Utrecht into Old Rhine and Vecht, finally reaching the sea through the sluices at Katwijk as little more than a drainage canal. The Ysel and the Vecht flow to the Zuider Zee; the other branches to the North Sea. The Maas, whose course is almost parallel to that of the Rhine, follows in a wide curve the general slope of the country, receiving the Roer, the Mark and the Aa. Towards its mouth its waters find their way into all the channels intersecting the South Holland archipelago. The main stream joining the Waal at Gorinchem flows on to Dordrecht as the Merwede, and is continued thence to the sea by the Old Maas, the North, and the New Maas, the New Maas being formed by the junction of the Lek and the North. From Gorinchem the New Merwede (constructed in the second half of the 19th century) extends between dykes through the marshes of the Biesbosch to the Hollandsch Diep. These great rivers render very important service as waterways. The mean velocity of their flow seldom exceeds 4.9 ft., but rises to 6.4 ft. when the river is high. In the lower reaches of the streams the velocity and slope are of course affected by the tides. In the Waal ordinary high water is perceptible as far up as Zalt Bommel in Gelderland, in the Lek the maximum limits or ordinary and spring tides are at Vianen and Kuilenburg respectively, in the Ysel above the Katerveer at the junction of the Willemsvaart and past Wyhe midway between Zwolle and Deventer; and in the Maas near Heusden and at Well in Limburg. Into the Zuider Zee there also flow the Kuinder, the Zwarte Water, with its tributary the Vecht, and the Eem. The total length of navigable channels is about 1150 m., but sand banks and shallows not infrequently impede the shipping traffic at low water during the summer. The smaller streams are often of great importance. Except where they rise in the fens they call into life a strip of fertile grassland in the midst of the barren sand, and are responsible for the existence of many villages along their banks. Following the example of the great Kampen irrigation canal in Belgium, artificial irrigation is also practised by means of some of the smaller streams, especially in North Brabant, Drente and Overysel, and in the absence of streams, canals and sluices are sometimes specially constructed to perform the same service. The low-lying spaces at the confluences of the rivers, being readily laid under water, have been not infrequently chosen as sites for fortresses. As a matter of course, the streams are also turned to account in connexion with the canal system—the Dommel, Berkel, Vecht, Regge, Holland Ysel, Gouwe, Rotte, Schie, Spaarne, Zaan, Amstel, Dieze, Amer, Mark, Zwarte Water, Kuinder and the numerous Aas in Drente and Groningen being the most important in this respect.