Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/155

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HON—HON
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in the centre of the town, in the Norman style; the dispensary; the St Margaret’s charity, originally erected as a hospital for lepers, but now used as almshouses; the union workhouse, erected in 1836, with accommodation for 250 inmates; the grammar school, the national schools, and the British school opened in 1878. The town is famed for its lace manufacture; and there are also breweries, malting establishments, flour mills, tanneries, brick and tile works, and an iron foundry. The population of the municipal borough in 1871 was 3464.


Honiton is supposed to have originated in a Roman settlement at Hembury fort, about 3 miles from the town, where there are still traces of an extensive camp conjectured to be the Moridunum of Antoninus. The town first sent members to parliament in the reign of Edward I., but after the reign of Edward II. the privilege was suspended until 1640. In 1867 its representation was limited to one member, and in 1868 it was disfranchised. It was incorporated as a municipal borough in 1846.

HONORIUS, Flavius Augustus, was emperor of the West from 397 to 425 a.d. His reign of twenty-eight years was one of the most eventful in the Roman annals; the weakness and timidity of the emperor co-operated with the attacks of the Goths and Vandals in promoting the rapid disintegration of the empire. But his influence on the current of events was purely negative, and his reign will be noticed under Roman History.

HONORIUS I., pope from 625 to 638, succeeded Boniface V. The festival of the Elevation of the Cross is said to have been instituted during his pontificate, which was marked also by considerable missionary enterprise. Honorius in his lifetime had favoured the formula proposed by the emperor Heraclius with the design of bringing about a reconciliation between the Monophysites and the Catholics, which bore that Christ had accomplished His work of redemption by one manifestation of His will as the God-man. For this he was, more than forty years after his death, anathematized by name along with the other Monothelite heretics by the council of Constantinople (First Trullan) in 680; and this condemnation was subsequently confirmed by more than one pope, particularly by Leo II., as has been abundantly proved by unimpeachable evidence against the contentions of Baronius and Bellarmine (see Hefele, Die Irrlehre des Honorius u. das vaticanische Lehre der Unfehlbarkeit, 1871, who, however, has modified his view in Conciliengeschichte, 1877). Honorius I. was succeeded by Severinus.

HONORIUS II.[1] (Lambert of Ostia), pope from 1124 to 1130, succeeded Calixtus II. As papal legate he had been one of the framers of the concordat of Worms (1122). During his pontificate the Præmonstratensian order, and also that of the Knights Templars, received papal sanction. His successor was Innocent II.

HONORIUS III., pope from 1216 to 1227, was the successor of Innocent III., whose uncompromising policy in the struggle between the papacy and the empire he had not firmness and vigour to continue. He consented to crown Frederick II. as Holy Roman emperor in 1220, although the engagements made with his predecessor had not been fulfilled; the promises which he himself had exacted he was somewhat slow to urge, and it was left to his successor Gregory IX. to insist upon their accomplishment. He gave papal sanction to the Dominican order in 1216, and to the Franciscan in 1223; and during his pontificate also many of the tertiary orders first came into existence.

HONORIUS IV. succeeded Martin IV., and was pope for two years (12851287). After an uneventful pontificate he was succeeded by Nicholas IV.

HONTHEIM, Johann Nikolaus von (1701–1790), a zealous opponent of Ultramontanism, was born at Treves, January 27, 1701. After receiving his early education at the Jesuit college of his native town, he studied jurisprudence both there and at Louvain and Leyden. On obtaining the degree of doctor of laws at Treves in 1724 he took the ecclesiastical habit, and went to Rome in order to make himself acquainted with the forms of the curia. Returning to Treves in 1728, he was appointed ecclesiastical councillor of the consistory, in 1732 professor of law, in 1741 privy councillor of the archbishop, and in 1748 suffragan of the see. In 1750 he published at Treves Historia Trevirensis diplomatica, and in 1763, under the pseudonym of Justinus Febronius, De Statu ecclesiæ et legitima potestate Romani Pontificis liber singularis, in which he maintained the Gallican theory that the supreme authority of the church was vested not in the pope but in the general council. This work he in perfect simplicity and sincerity dedicated to Pope Clement XIII., who, however, condemned it and caused it to be burned at Rome. When Hontheim was discovered to be the author he was induced to make a retractation, but in his Febronius abbreviatus et emendatus (Vienna, 1771) and Febronii commentarius (Vienna, 1781) he nevertheless gave further currency to his old views. He died at Montquintin, Luxembourg, September 2, 1790.

HONTHORST, Gerard van (born at Utrecht 1590, died at Utrecht 1656), was brought up as a painter at the school of Bloemart, who exchanged the style of the Franckens for that of the pseudo-Italians at the beginning of the 16th century. Infected thus early with a mania which came to be very general in Holland, Honthorst went to Italy, where he copied the naturalism and eccentricities of Michelangelo da Caravaggio. Home again about 1614, after acquiring a considerable practice in Rome, he set up a school at Utrecht which flourished exceedingly; and he soon became so fashionable that Sir Dudley Carleton, then English envoy at the Hague, recommended his works to the earl of Arundel and Lord Dorchester. At the same time the queen of Bohemia, sister of Charles I. and electress palatine, being an exile in Holland, gave him her countenance and asked him to teach her children drawing; and Honthorst, thus approved and courted, became known to Charles I., who invited him to England. There he painted several portraits, and a vast allegory, now at Hampton Court, of Charles and his queen as Diana and Apollo in the clouds receiving the duke of Buckingham as Mercury and guardian of the king of Bohemia’s children. Charles I., whose taste was flattered alike by the energy of Rubens and the elegance of Van Dyck, was thus first captivated by the fanciful mediocrity of Honthorst, who though a poor executant had luckily for himself caught, as Lord Arundel said, “much of the manner of Caravaggio’s colouring, then so much esteemed at Rome.” It was his habit to transmute every subject into a night scene, from the Nativity, for which there was warrant in the example of Correggio, to the penitence of the Magdalen, for which there was no warrant at all. But unhappily this caprice, though “sublime in Allegri and Rembrandt,” was but a phantasm in the hands of Honthorst, whose prosaic pencil was not capable of more than vulgar utterances, and art gained little from the repetition of these quaint vagaries. Sandrart gave the measure of Honthorst’s popularity at this period when he says that he had as many as twenty apprentices at one time, each of whom paid him a fee of 100 florins a year. In 1623 he was president of his guild at Utrecht. After that he went to England as above stated, returning to settle anew at Utrecht, where he married. His position amongst artists was acknowledged to be important, and in 1626 he received a visit from Rubens, whom he painted as the




  1. This name had been assumed in the previous century (106164) by Peter Cadalus; but he never was recognized as a legitimate pope.