Part 233 (1/2)

HARDICANUTE, king of England and Denmark, the son of Canute and his successor on the Danish throne; was king of England only in part till the death of his brother Harold, whom he survived only two years, but long enough to alienate his subjects by the re-imposition of the Danegelt; _d_. 1642.

HARDING, JOHN, or HARDYNG, an English rhyming chronicler in the reign of Edward IV.; had been a soldier, and fought at Agincourt (1378-1465).

HARDING, STEPHEN, a Benedictine monk, born in Devons.h.i.+re, of n.o.ble descent, a born ascetic, who set himself to restore his order to its primitive austerity; retired with a few others into a dismal secluded place at Citeaux, and became abbot; was joined there by the great St.

Bernard, his kindred, and followers, to the great aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of the order; _d_. 1134.

HARDINGE, HENRY, VISCOUNT, a distinguished soldier and Governor-General of India, born at Wrotham, Kent; joined the army in 1798, and served through the Peninsular and Waterloo campaigns, but wounded at Ligny he was unable to take part in the final struggle with Napoleon; he now turned his attention to politics; was Secretary of War under Wellington, and subsequently twice Chief Secretary for Ireland; in 1844 he was appointed Governor-General of India, and later distinguished himself under Gough in the first Sikh War; a viscounts.h.i.+p and pension followed in 1845, and seven years later he succeeded Wellington as Commander-in-Chief of the British army (1785-1856).

HARDOUIN, JEAN, a French cla.s.sical scholar, born at Quimper, Brittany; early entered the Jesuit order; was from 1683 librarian of the College of Louis le Grand in Paris; he is chiefly remembered for his wild a.s.sertion that the bulk of cla.s.sical literature was spurious, and the work of 13th-century monks; Virgil's ”aeneid” he declared to be an allegorical account of St. Peter's journey to Rome, and the original language of the New Testament to be Latin; his edition of Pliny, however, evinces real scholars.h.i.+p (1646-1729).

HARDWaR, a town on the Ganges, 39 m. NE. of Saharunpur, North-West Provinces; famous for its large annual influx of pilgrims seeking ablution in the sacred river; a sacred festival held every twelfth year attracts some 300,000 persons.

HARDY, THOMAS, novelist, born in Dorsets.h.i.+re, with whose scenery he has made his readers familiar; bred an architect; first earned popularity in 1874 by his ”Far from the Madding Crowd,” which was followed by, among others, ”The Return of the Native,” ”The Woodlanders,” and ”Tess of the D'Urbervilles,” the last in 1892, books which require to be read in order to appreciate the genius of the author; _b_. 1840.

HARDY, SIR THOMAS DUFFUS, an eminent palaeographer, born in Jamaica; he acquired his skill in MS. deciphering as a clerk in the Record Office in the Tower; in 1861 he was elected deputy-keeper of the Public Records, and nine years later received a knighthood; his great learning is displayed in his editions of various ”Rolls” for the Record Commission, in his ”Descriptive Catalogue of MSS.,” &c. (1804-1878).

HARDY, SIR THOMAS MASTERMAN, BART., a brave naval officer, whose name is a.s.sociated with the closing scene of Nelson's life, born at Portisham, in Dorsets.h.i.+re; as a commander in the battle of the Nile he greatly distinguished himself, and gained his post-commission to Nelson's flags.h.i.+p, the _Vanguard_; at Trafalgar he commanded the _Victory_, and subsequently brought Nelson's body to England; he received a baronetcy, and saw further service, eventually attaining to the rank of vice-admiral (1769-1839).

HARE, JULIUS CHARLES, archdeacon of Lewes, born at Vicenza; took orders in the Church, and in 1832 became, in succession to his uncle, rector of Hurstmonceaux, in Suss.e.x, the advowson of which was in his family, in which rectory he laboured till his death; he was of the school of Maurice; wrote ”The Mission of the Comforter,” and with his brother Augustus ”Guesses at Truth”; had John Sterling as his curate for a short time, and edited his remains as well as wrote his Life, the latter in so exclusively ecclesiastical a reference as to dissatisfy Carlyle, his joint-trustee, and provoke him, as in duty bound, to write another which should exhibit their common friend in the more interesting light of a man earnestly struggling with the great burning problems of the time, calling for some wise solution by all of us, church and no church (1795-1855).

HAREM, the apartment or suite of apartments in a Mohammedan's house for the female inmates and their attendants, and the name given to the collective body of them.

HARFLEUR, a village in France with a strong fortress, 4 m. S. of Havre, taken by Henry V. in 1415, and retaken afterwards by both French and English, becoming finally French in 1450.

HARGRAVES, EDMUND, discoverer of the gold-field in Australia, born at Gosport, Devon; had been to California, concluded that as the geological formation was the same in Australia where he had come from, he would find gold there too and found it in New South Wales in 1851, for which the Government gave him 10,000 (1818-1890).

HARGREAVES, JAMES, inventor of the spinning-jenny, born at Standhill, near Blackburn; was a poor and illiterate weaver when in 1760 he, in conjunction with Robert Peel, brought out a carding-machine; in 1766 he invented the spinning-jenny, a machine which has since revolutionised the cotton-weaving industry, but which at the time evoked the angry resentment of the hand-weaver; he was driven from his native town and settled in Nottingham, where he started a spinning-mill; he failed to get his machine patented, and died in comparative poverty (1745-1778).

HARI-KARI, called also a ”happy despatch,” a form of suicide, now obsolete, permitted to offenders of high rank to escape the indignity of a public execution; the nature of it may be gathered from the name, ”a gash in the belly.”

HaRING, WILHELM, German novelist, born at Breslau; bred for law, but abandoned it for literature; wrote two romances, ”Walladmor” and ”Schloss Avalon,” under the pseudonym of ”Walter Scott,” which imposed upon some; he afterwards a.s.sumed the name of Wilibald Alexis, a name by which he was long honourably known (1797-1871).

HARINGTON, SIR JOHN, courtier and miscellaneous writer, translated by desire of Queen Elizabeth Ariosto's ”Orlando Furioso” (1561-1612).