Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/111

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HOLLAND
99
school lie became articled clerk to a mercantile firm in Liverpool, but, as the privilege was reserved to him of pass ing 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 tem perament 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 a fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1828 a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. 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, more over, 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 Agri culture of Cheshire, 1807; Travels in the Ionian Isles, Albania, Thcssaly, and Greece, 1812-13, 2d ed., 1819; Medical Notes and Reflections. 1839; Chapters on Mental Physiology, 1852; Essays on Scientific and other Subjects contributed to the Edinburgh and Quar terly Reviews, 1862; and Recollections of Past Life, 1872, which is less interesting than it might have been, owing to the reticence of the author in regard to personal details and characteristics.

HOLLAND, Philemon (1551–1636), usually styled, in the words of Thomas Fuller, " the translator-general of his age," was born in 1551 at Chelmsford, in Essex, the son of a clergyman, John Holland, who had been obliged to take refuge abroad during the Marian persecution. Having be come a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and passed M.A. at Oxford in 1587, he further took the degree of M.D. at Cambridge in 1591. In 1612 he was sworn free man of the city of Coventry, and in 1617, dressed in a suit which cost 11, Is. lid., he had the honour of reading, as the recorder s deputy, an oration to King James I. In 1628 he was appointed head master of the free school of Coventry, but, owing probably to advancing old age, he held office only for 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 Februaty 9, 1636, survived by only one of his seven sons. The fame of Philemon Holland is due solely to his activity as a translator ; Livy, Pliny s Natural His tory, Plutarch s Morals, Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and Xenophon s Cyropaedia successively employed him; and he also published an English version of Camden s Britannia. Pope s allusion to his voluminousness is well known—


" ])e Lyra there his dreadful front extends, And here the groaning shelves Philemon bends."


Henry Holland, his surviving son, became a London bookseller, and is known to bibliographers for his Baziliw- logia; a Booke of Kings, beeing the true and liuely Effigies of all our English Kings from the Conquest (London, 1618), and his Her&ologia Anglica, hoc estdariss. et doctiss. aliquot Anglorum viuce Effigies, Vitcv et Elogia (1620).


See Colvile s Worthies of Warwickshire, (Warwick, 1869), and Lowndes s Bibliographical Manual.

HOLLAND, Henry Richard Vassall Fox, third Baron (1773–1840), nephew of Charles James Fox and only son of Stephen Fox, second Lord Holland, was born at Winterslow House, Wiltshire, 21st November 1773. Of his ancestry an account is given in the article Fox (Charles James). Not long after his birth he was with difficulty saved from the fiames which destroyed the splendid family mansion in which he was born. When little more than a year old he succeeded, through the death of his father, to the peerage. On the death of his mother in his fifth year, the care of his early education nominally devolved upon her brother, the earl of L T pper Ossory, but the character of his early training and studies was deter mined chiefly by his uncle Charles James Fox, of whom he wrote " He seemed to take pleasure in awakening my ambition, and directing it both by conversation and corre spondence, and yet more by talking to me of my studies and inspiring me with a love of poetry both ancient and modern." After spending eight or nine years at Eton, where he had as contemporaries J. Hookham Frere, Mr Canning, and Frederick Howard, fifth earl of Carlisle, he in 1790 entered Christ Church College, Oxford. Though the years of his early manhood were occupied more in amusement than in study, he acquired at school and the university a taste for classical literature which he more fully cultivated in after life. Before taking his seat in the House of Lords, he made two tours on the Continent,- in 1791, while still a student at Oxford, visiting Paris about the time when Louis XVI. accepted the revolutionary con stitution ; and in 1793 making a prolonged stay in Spain, where he began the study of its language and literature. Thence he went in 1795 to Italy; and at Florence he formed the acquaintance of Lady Webster, wife of Sir Godfrey Webster, whom after her divorce from her husband who received 6000 damages in the action against Lord Holland he married in 1797. After the marriage he assumed his wife s family name of Vassall, but its use was discontinued by his son, the fourth and last Lord Holland.

Lord Holland s early inheritance of a peerage must be regarded rather as a misfortune than an advantage, for it debarred him from a career in the House of Commons which might have proved as brilliant as that of his uncle Charles Fox, and raised him to an assembly, not only more listless and much less numerous, but where at the time he entered it the Whig party, of whose principles the influence of his uncle had induced him to become a strenuous supporter, could muster only a minority of six or seven in a house of eighty or ninety. He began his political career