and Woollens, including an Exposition of the Commercial Situation of the British Empire,’ 1813. 15. ‘A Letter on the Corn Laws,’ 1815. 16. ‘Remarks on the Bill of the Last Parliament for the Amendment of the Poor Laws, with observations, &c.,’ 1819. 17. ‘Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Edward Gibbon’ (published posthumously), 1826.
A portrait of Sheffield, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a view of Sheffield Place, will be found in Horsfield's ‘Sussex,’ p. 378. His portrait was also painted by M. A. Shee for the Province Hall of New Brunswick in 1806.
[Gent. Mag. 1821, p. 563; Annual Register, 1821, p. 237; Gifford's Life of Pitt, iii. 36, iv. 489; Horace Walpole's Letters; Lord Brougham's Men of Letters; Mathias's Pursuits of Lit.; Burke's Peerage; Lodge's Peerage of Ireland (1789), vii. 204–212.]
HOLST, THEODORE Von (1810–1844), painter. [See Von Holst.]
HOLT, FRANCIS LUDLOW (1780–1844), legal and dramatic author, born in 1780, was son of the Rev. Ludlow Holt, LL.D., of Watford, Hertfordshire, author of some sermons published in 1780-1. He was elected a king’s scholar of Westminster School in 1794, and matriculated in at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1798. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple 27 Jan. 1809, and went on the northern circuit. He became a king’s counsel and bencher of the Inner Temple in 1831, and treasurer of that inn in 1840. He was an exchequer bill loan commissioner, and was vice-chancellor of the county palatine of Lancaster from 1826 till his death on 29 Sept. 1844 at Earl’s Terrace, Kensington. He married a niece of John Bell, proprietor of ‘Bell’s Weekly Messenger,’ of which he was for many years the principal editor.
Holt wrote:
- ‘The Law and Usage of Parliament in Cases of Privilege and Contempt,’ 1810.
- ‘The Law of Libel,’ 1812, 1816; reviewed by Lord Brougham in ‘Edinburgh Review,’ September 1816; American edition 1818.
- ‘Reports of Cases ruled and determined at Nisi Prius, in the Court of Common Pleas, and on the Northern Circuit, from the Sittings after Trinity Term, 55 Geo. III, 1815, to the Sittings after Michaelmas Term, 58 Geo.III, 1817, both inclusive,’ vol. i (the only one published), 1818.
- ‘A System of the Shipping and Navigation Laws of Great Britain, and of the Laws relating to Merchant Ships and Seamen and Maritime Contracts,’ 1st edition, 1820; 2nd edition, 1824.
- ‘The Bankrupt Laws, as established by the New Act, 6 Geo. IV, c.16,’ 1827.
He wrote also one or two dramatic pieces, and published in 1804 a comedy, ‘The Land we live in,’ which was successful as a literary work (it reached a third edition in 1805), though, according to Genest (Hist. of the Stage, vii. 644), unsuitable to the stage, the author having sacrificed plot to dialogue; it was acted at Drury Lane on one night in 1805 (Baker, Biog. Dram. ii. 363).
[Alumni Westmon. pp.440, 449, 450; Alumni Oxon. p. 682; Gent. Mag. 1844, ii. 650; Ann. Reg. 1844, p.272; Brit. Mus. Cat.]
HOLT, JOHN (d. 1418), judge, was a native and landowner of Northamptonshire, and his name occurs in the year-books from the fortieth year of Edward III onwards. In the last year of that reign he became a king's serjeant. He was appointed a judge of the common pleas in 1383 (Cal. Rot. Parl. p. 208), and at Christmas 1384 he was made a knight-banneret (Dugdale, Orig. Jur. pp.46, 103). On 25 Aug. 1387 he was summoned to attend the king at Nottingham and concurred with his colleagues in pronouncing illegal the proceedings of the last parliament, which had appointed a permanent council. For this expression of opinion he was on 3 Feb. 1388 arrested while sitting in court, and on 2 March was put on his trial. He pleaded that he had been compelled to give that opinion by the threats of the Archbishop of York and of the Earl of Suffolk, but he was found guilty by parliament. Upon the intercession of the prelates his life was spared, and his sentence commuted to banishment for life to Ireland, an allowance of forty marks being made him for his residence at Drogheda. In 1391 his manors were granted to his son John, but in January 1397 parliament remitted his banishment, and in the following year his sentence was reversed and his lands were restored. The deposition of Richard II prevented him from recovering the lands. In the second year of the following reign he presented a petition for their restoration, which was granted, but many of them having been granted away in the interim he was compelled to allow the grantees such compensation as the council should think reasonable, and on these terms his lands were restored to him, and passed to his son Hugh on his death in 1418.
[Foss's Lives of the Judges; Cal. Rot. Parl. iii. 233-44, 346-461; Abbr. Rot. Orig. ii. 240; Rot. Pat. p.221; Cal. Inq. p.m. iv. 37, 52.]
HOLT, Sir JOHN (1642–1710), judge, born at Thame, Oxfordshire, on 30 Dec. 1642, was eldest son of Sir Thomas Holt of Gray’s Inn, barrister and serjeant-at-law, recorder of Reading and Abingdon, descended from a
