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HUG
965
HUG

took his B.A. degree in 1808, and proceeded M.A. in 1811. In 1815 he was elected fellow of Trinity hall, and finally fellow of Emanuel. In 1818 he took the degree of B.D. His university career was also marked by some prize poems. In 1812 he sailed, in company with Mr. Parker of Lancashire, to visit the shores of the Mediterranean, and in 1820 he published as the result of this voyage, "Travels in Sicily, Greece, and Albania," illustrated by Mr. Cockerell, now so eminent as an architect. Besides many other productions, Mr. Hughes compiled a continuation of the history of England, in sequence to Hume and Smollet, which embraced the period between 1760 and 1835. His ecclesiastical preferments were as follow—Prebendary of Peterborough in 1827; rector of Fisherton, Lincoln, in 1832; rector of Hardwick, Northampton, 1832; and perpetual curate of Edgeware, Middlesex, in 1846. At the latter place he died, August 11, 1847. His collections in literature and art were sold by Leigh and Sotheby in January, 1848; the manuscripts including papers connected with his travels in Greece and Turkey.—W. J. P.

HUGO, Charles Louis, was born at Saint Mihiel, Lorraine, in 1667, was a canon of the Premonstratensian order, a doctor of divinity, abbé of Etival, and titular bishop of Ptolemais. He died in 1739. He was the author of "Annales Præmonstratensium," a history of his own order; a "Life of St. Norbert," its founder; "Sacræ Antiquitatis Monumenta, historica, dogmatica, diplomatica, cum notis;" and he is also asserted to have written a very daring defence of Lorraine against the pretensions of France. He left in manuscript a history of Lorraine.—W. J. P.

HUGO, Herman, a learned priest, was born at Brussels in 1588. He was successively confessor to the duke of Arschot and almoner to Ambrose Spinola, whom he accompanied to the field of battle with no lack of courage or coolness. The plague having broken out in the Spanish army, Hugo was attacked by it, and expired at Rheinberg in 1629. His first work was published in 1617, and treated "De Prima Scribendi Origine, et universæ rei literariæ antiquitate." His "Pia Desideria," his chief production, appeared in 1632, and consists of long paraphrases, in elegiac verse, of scriptural passages. His versification has been praised, but the book is naturally a very feeble dilution of the grand old Hebrew poetry. However, it has been translated at various times into French, English, German, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian. An account of the siege of Breda, at which Herman Hugo was himself present, may still be consulted by the historical student. Besides publishing some other works, Hugo left two in manuscript—a history of Brussels, and a treatise against atheism.—W. J. P.

* HUGO, Victor-Marie, Viscount (as one of Louis Philippe's pairs de France), poet, dramatist, novelist, and politician, was born at Besançon on the 26th of February, 1802. His father, General Hugo, had early been a volunteer soldier of the republic, and ripened into an ardent Napoleonist; his mother, on the other hand, a native of Brittany, had encountered the perils of the insurrection in La Vendée, and was at heart a Bourbonist; hence the poet was exposed from childhood to the clash of two influences diametrically opposite. His early years were years of wandering. From Besançon to Elba, from Elba to Paris, from Paris to Avelliano, of which his father was appointed governor, and where the boy played at the foot of Vesuvius; thence to Spain, where the elder Hugo was appointed first major-domo of the palace to King Joseph, and the younger placed for a year in the seminary of nobles; and finally to Paris again—he was perpetually on the move. After the fall of the empire. General Hugo and his wife were separated, and Victor was destined by his father for the ecole polytechnique and a military life. But the youth's tastes were more poetical than martial. While a boy he had written his first verses on Roland and chivalry, themes with which his Spanish education had familiarized him. At fifteen his verses on "The advantages of Study" would have been crowned by the French Academy, had that body not considered their author to be mystifying them when he named his real age. He had written a tragedy celebrating the return of the Bourbons, and his odes had been crowned by the Toulouse Académie des Jeux Floraux, when he prevailed upon his father to allow him to give up the ecole polytechnique and devote himself to letters. His earliest prose works, "Bug Jargal" and "Hans d'Islande," are two melodramatic novels, wide apart in scene; for one deals with an episode in the revolt of the St. Domingo negroes, while the story of the other is laid in Scandinavia; but both are crude and extravagant. It was different with his earliest poems. His "Odes," the first series of which was published in 1821, royalist and religious in their tone, were indeed more ardent than the average French poetry of the time, but in style and expression they were severely classical. The spirit which they breathed recommended their author to the notice of Louis XVIII., and helped him to the pension bestowed on him by that monarch. But Hugo's genius was not one of a land long to remain shackled by the conventionalities of the old school of French poetry. He soon obeyed the new impulse given to French literature by the writers in the Globe, the journal which the aged Göthe read and admired, and in which, with an intellectual catholicism even greater than Madame De Stael's, homage was paid to forms of literary expression the most opposed to all that had been deemed admissible in France. In the now forgotten war between the classicists and the romanticists, Victor Hugo gradually but unmistakably came over to the latter. Once a romanticist, he became a leader of the party, with such men as Alfred de Vigny and Sainte-Beuve combating under him. In the preface to his drama, or dramatic poem of "Cromwell," published in 1827, he boldly proclaimed the doctrine that art should copy nature in all her infinite variety, and that the grotesque should be a principal element in modern poetry. In his "Orientales," published in 1829—fantastic, savage, passionate, like the eastern life which they mirrored—few could have recognized the author of the "Odes" of 1821. In the hands of Victor Hugo, French poetry became invested with new and unsuspected flexibility and potency of rhythm. In 1829, the year of the publication of the "Orientales," appeared a prose composition, "Le Dernier Jour d'un condemné," written with great and sombre power, the soliloquy, in the last hours of life, of a man condemned to die, and intended to aid in the abolition of capital punishments. To 1829 also belongs the performance of "Hemani," the success of which was considered by the romanticists a crowning victory. 1831, the year after the revolution of the three days, witnessed the publication of the work by which Victor Hugo obtained a European reputation, the romance of "Notre Dame de Paris." Although the characters are amenable to the reproach of Göthe, that they are more puppets than human beings, yet the skilful reproduction of antique Paris and its multifarious life, the vivid pictorialism of the delineation—dramatic in its movement and interest—must ever preserve for it a high place in modern fiction; and Quasimodo is the most successful application Hugo has made of his theory of the grotesque. For some eight years, with such striking exceptions indeed as the pensive "Feuilles d'automne," 1831, and the "Voix intérieures," 1837, Victor Hugo's principal works were chiefly dramas—"Marion de l'Orme;" "Le Roi s'amuse;" "Lucrecè Borgia;" "Marie Tudor;" "Ruy Bias"—in most of which the poet sought to develop the questionable thesis that the hideous, moral or physical, may be beautified if there is some one noble sentiment working amid the otherwise loathsome mass. Whatever may be thought of the thesis, to one of these dramas, "Marion de l'Orme," cannot be denied, from a purely dramatic point of view, the praise of being a play wonderfully moving and absorbing in its interest. In 1842 Hugo published "Le Rhin," letters of tour and travel, with a political aim—that of uniting France and Germany against England and Russia—the left bank of the Rhine, it being distinctly indicated, to be the price paid by Germany for the French alliance. It was in spite of, and not on account of the doctrines broached in "Le Rhin," that Louis Philippe made its author in 1845 a peer of France. After the revolution of 1848 Hugo became a member of the national assembly, and leant at first to the party of moderation, opposing Cavaignac and supporting the candidature of Louis Napoleon. Hostile critics of his political career ascribe his subsequent junction with the extreme democratic party to the non-recognition by the prince-president of his claims to office. An exile after the coup d'état, Victor Hugo took refuge in Jersey, whence he fulminated in 1852, against the emperor of the French, his prose "Napoleon le petit," and the "Chatiments" in verse. "Les Contemplations," a volume of verse, mournful in its tone, but wide in the range of thought and feeling embraced in it, has also been produced since he took up his residence in the Channel Islands. M. Hugo is said to be engaged in the preparation of a great prose romance, "Les Misérables," in the interest of the social and democratic republic.—F. E.

HUGTENBURG, Johan van, was born at Haarlem in 1646. He had his first instruction in painting from John Wyk,