failed to secure a seat. He died by his own hand on the 12th of December 1696. Hampden wrote numerous pamphlets, and Bishop Burnet described him as “one of the learnedest gentlemen I ever knew.”
See S. R. Gardiner’s Hist. of England and of the Great Civil War; the article on Hampden in the Dict. of Nat. Biography, by C. H. Firth, with authorities there collected; Clarendon’s Hist. of the Rebellion; Sir Philip Warwick’s Mems. p. 239; Wood’s Ath. Oxon. iii. 59; Lord Nugent’s Memorials of John Hampden (1831); Macaulay’s Essay on Hampden (1831). The printed pamphlet announcing his capture of Reading in December 1642 is shown by Mr Firth to be spurious, and the account in Mercurius Aulicus, January 27 and 29, 1643, of Hampden commanding an attack at Brill, to be also false, while the published speech supposed to be spoken by Hampden on the 4th of January 1642, and reproduced by Forster in the Arrest of the Five Members (1660), has been proved by Gardiner to be a forgery (Hist. of England, x. 135). Mr Firth has also shown in The Academy for 1889, November 2 and 9, that “the belief that we possess the words of Hampden’s last prayer must be abandoned.”
HAMPDEN, RENN DICKSON (1793–1868), English divine,
was born in Barbados, where his father was colonel of militia,
in 1793, and was educated at Oriel College, Oxford. Having
taken his B.A. degree with first-class honours in both classics
and mathematics in 1813, he next year obtained the chancellor’s
prize for a Latin essay, and shortly afterwards was elected to
a fellowship in his college, Keble, Newman and Arnold being
among his contemporaries. Having left the university in 1816
he held successively a number of curacies, and in 1827 he published
Essays on the Philosophical Evidence of Christianity,
followed by a volume of Parochial Sermons illustrative of the
Importance of the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ (1828). In
1829 he returned to Oxford and was Bampton lecturer in 1832.
Notwithstanding a charge of Arianism now brought against him
by the Tractarian party, he in 1833 passed from a tutorship
at Oriel to the principalship of St Mary’s Hall. In 1834 he was
appointed professor of moral philosophy, and despite much
university opposition, Regius professor of divinity in 1836.
There resulted a widespread and violent though ephemeral
controversy, after the subsidence of which he published a Lecture
on Tradition, which passed through several editions, and a volume
on The Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. His
nomination by Lord John Russell to the vacant see of Hereford
in December 1847 was again the signal for a violent and organized
opposition; and his consecration in March 1848 took place in
spite of a remonstrance by many of the bishops and the resistance
of Dr John Merewether, the dean of Hereford, who went so far
as to vote against the election when the congé d’élire reached
the chapter. As bishop of Hereford Dr Hampden made no
change in his long-formed habits of studious seclusion, and
though he showed no special ecclesiastical activity or zeal, the
diocese certainly prospered in his charge. Among the more
important of his later writings were the articles on Aristotle,
Plato and Socrates, contributed to the eighth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, and afterwards reprinted with
additions under the title of The Fathers of Greek Philosophy
(Edinburgh, 1862). In 1866 he had a paralytic seizure, and
died in London on the 23rd of April 1868.
His daughter, Henrietta Hampden, published Some Memorials of R. D. Hampden in 1871.
HAMPDEN-SIDNEY, a village of Prince Edward county,
Virginia, U.S.A., about 70 m. S.W. of Richmond. Pop. about
350. Daily stages connect the village with Farmville (pop. in
1910, 2971), the county-seat, 6 m. N.E., which is served by the
Norfolk & Western and the Tidewater & Western railways.
Hampden-Sidney is the seat of Hampden-Sidney College,
founded by the presbytery of Hanover county as Hampden-Sidney
Academy in 1776, and named in honour of John Hampden
and Algernon Sidney. It was incorporated as Hampden-Sidney
College in 1783. The incorporators included James Madison,
Patrick Henry (who is believed to have drafted the college
charter), Paul Carrington, William Cabell, Sen., and Nathaniel
Venable. The Union Theological School was established in
connexion with the college in 1812, but in 1898 was removed
to Richmond, Virginia. In 1907–1908 the college had 8 instructors,
125 students, and a library of 11,000 volumes. The
college has maintained a high standard of instruction, and many
of its former students have been prominent as public men,
educationalists and preachers. Among them were President
William Henry Harrison, William H. Cabell (1772–1853),
president of the Virginia Court of Appeals; George M. Bibb
(1772–1859), secretary of the treasury (1844–1845) in President
Tyler’s cabinet; William B. Preston (1805–1862), secretary of
the navy in 1849–1850; William Cabell Rives and General
Sterling Price (1809–1867).
HAMPSHIRE (or County of Southampton, abbreviated
Hants), a southern county of England, bounded N. by Berkshire,
E. by Surrey and Sussex, S. by the English Channel, and W.
by Dorsetshire and Wiltshire. The area is 1623.5 sq. m. From
the coast of the mainland, which is for the most part low and
irregular, a strait, known in its western part as the Solent, and
in its eastern as Spithead, separates the Isle of Wight. This
island is included in the county. The inlet of Southampton
Water opens from this strait, penetrating inland in a north-westerly
direction for 12 m. The easterly part of the coast forms
a large shallow bay containing Hayling and Portsea Islands,
which divide it into Chichester Harbour, Langston Harbour
and Portsmouth Harbour. The westerly part forms the more
regular indentations of Christchurch Bay and part of Poole Bay.
In its general aspect Hampshire presents a beautiful variety of
gently rising hills and fruitful valleys, adorned with numerous
mansions and pleasant villages, and interspersed with extensive
tracts of woodland. Low ranges of hills, included in the system
to which the general name of the Western Downs is given, reach
their greatest elevation in the northern and eastern parts of the
county, where there are many picturesque eminences, of which
Beacon, Sidown and Pilot hills near Highclere in the north-west,
each exceeding 850 ft., are the highest. The portion of the county
west of Southampton Water is almost wholly included in the
New Forest, a sequestered district, one of the few remaining
examples of an ancient afforested tract. The river Avon in the
south-west rises in Wiltshire, and passing Fordingbridge and
Ringwood falls into Christchurch Bay below Christchurch,
being joined close to its mouth by the Stour. The Lymington
or Boldre river rises in the New Forest, and after collecting the
waters of several brooks falls into the Solent through Lymington
Creek. The Beaulieu in the eastern part of the forest also enters
the Solent by way of a long and picturesque estuary. The
Test rises near Overton in the north, and after its junction with
the Anton at Fullerton passes Stockbridge and Romsey, and
enters the head of Southampton Water. The Itchen rises near
Alresford, and flowing by Winchester and Eastleigh falls into
Southampton Water east of Southampton. The Hamble rises
near Bishops Waltham, and soon forms a narrow estuary opening
into Southampton Water. The Wey, the Loddon and the Blackwater,
rising in the north-eastern part of the county, bring that
part into the basin of the Thames. The streams from the chalk
hills run clear and swift, and the trout-fishing in the county is
famous. Salmon are taken in the Avon.
Geology.—Somewhat to the north of the centre of the county is a broad expanse of hilly chalk country about 21 m. wide; the whole of it has been bent up into a great fold so that the strata on the north dip northward steeply in places, while those on the south dip in the opposite direction more gently. In the north the chalk disappears beneath Tertiary strata of the “London Basin,” and some little distance south of Winchester it runs in a similar manner beneath the Tertiaries of the “Hampshire Basin.” Scattered here and there over the chalk are small outlying remnants which remain to show that the two Tertiary areas were once continuous, before the agencies of denudation had removed them from the chalk. These same agencies have exposed the strata beneath the chalk over a small area on the eastern border.
The oldest formation in Hampshire is the Lower Greensand in the neighbourhood of Woolmer Forest and Petersfield; it is represented by the Hythe beds, sandstones and limestones which form the high ridge which runs on towards Hind Head, then by the sands and clays of the Sandgate beds which lie in the low ground west of the ridge, and finally by the Folkestone beds; all these dip westward beneath the Gault. The last-named formation, a clay, worked here and there for bricks, crops out as a narrow band from Fareham through Worldham and Stroud common to Petersfield.
