being King Lear. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780. His earliest love was for landscape, but necessity obliged him to turn to the more lucrative business of portrait-painting. At once successful, he had, throughout life, the most fashionable and wealthy sitters, and was the greatest rival of the growing attraction of Lawrence. Ideal subjects were very rarely attempted by Hoppner, though a “Sleeping Venus,” “Belisarius,” “Jupiter and Io,” a “Bacchante” and “Cupid and Psyche” are mentioned among his works. The prince of Wales especially patronized him, and many of his finest portraits are in the state apartments at St James’s Palace, the best perhaps being those of the prince, the duke and duchess of York, of Lord Rodney and of Lord Nelson. Among his other sitters were Sir Walter Scott, Wellington, Frere and Sir George Beaumont. Competent judges have deemed his most successful works to be his portraits of women and children. A Series of Portraits of Ladies was published by him in 1803, and a volume of translations of Eastern tales into English verse in 1805. The verse is of but mediocre quality. In his later years Hoppner suffered from a chronic disease of the liver; he died on the 23rd of January 1810. He was confessedly an imitator of Reynolds. When first painted, his works were much admired for the brilliancy and harmony of their colouring, but the injury due to destructive mediums and lapse of time which many of them suffered caused a great depreciation in his reputation. The appearance, however, of some of his pictures in good condition has shown that his fame as a brilliant colourist was well founded. His drawing is faulty, but his touch has qualities of breadth and freedom that give to his paintings a faint reflection of the charm of Reynolds. Hoppner was a man of great social power, and had the knowledge and accomplishments of a man of the world.
The best account of Hoppner’s life and paintings is the exhaustive work by William McKay and W. Roberts (1909).
HOP-SCOTCH (“scotch,” to score), an old English children’s
game in which a small object, like a flat stone, is kicked by the
player, while hopping, from one division to another of an oblong
space marked upon the ground and divided into a number of
divisions, usually 10 or 12. These divisions are numbered, and
the stone must rest successively in each. Should it rest upon
a line or go out of the division aimed for, the player loses. In
order to win a player must drive the stone into each division
and back to the starting-point.
HOPTON, RALPH HOPTON, Baron (1598–1652), Royalist
commander in the English Civil War, was the son of Robert
Hopton of Witham, Somerset. He appears to have been educated
at Lincoln College, Oxford, and to have served in the army
of the Elector Palatine in the early campaigns of the Thirty
Years’ War, and in 1624 he was lieutenant-colonel of a regiment
raised in England to serve in Mansfeld’s army. Charles I.,
at his coronation, made Hopton a Knight of the Bath. In the
political troubles which preceded the outbreak of the Civil
War, Hopton, as member of parliament successively for Bath,
Somerset and Wells, at first opposed the royal policy, but after
Stratford’s attainder (for which he voted) he gradually became
an ardent supporter of Charles, and at the beginning of the
Great Rebellion (q.v.) he was made lieutenant-general under
the marquess of Hertford in the west. His first achievement
was the rallying of Cornwall to the royal cause, his next to
carry the war from that county into Devonshire. In May 1643
he won the brilliant victory of Stratton, in June he overran
Devonshire, and on the 5th of July he inflicted a severe defeat
on Sir William Waller at Lansdown. In the last action he was
severely wounded by the explosion of a powder-wagon and he
was soon after shut up in Devizes by Waller, where he defended
himself until relieved by the victory of Roundway Down on the
13th of July. He was soon afterwards created Baron Hopton
of Stratton. But his successes in the west were cut short by
the defeat of Cheriton or Alresford in March 1644. After this
he served in the western campaign under Charles’s own command,
and towards the end of the war, after Lord Goring had
left England, he succeeded to the command of the royal army,
which his predecessor had allowed to waste away in indiscipline.
It was no longer possible to stem the tide of the parliament’s
victory, and Hopton, defeated in his last stand at Torrington
on the 16th of February 1646, surrendered to Fairfax. Subsequently
he accompanied the prince of Wales in his attempts
to prolong the war in the Scilly and Channel Islands. But his
downright loyalty was incompatible with the spirit of concession
and compromise which prevailed in the prince’s council
in 1640–1650, and he withdrew from active participation in the
cause of royalism. He died, still in exile, at Bruges in September
1652. The peerage became extinct at his death. The king,
Prince Charles and the governing circle appreciated the merits
of their faithful lieutenant less than did his enemies Waller
and Fairfax, the former of whom wrote, “hostility itself cannot
violate my friendship to your person,” while the latter spoke
of him as “one whom we honour and esteem above any other of
your party.”
HOR, MOUNT (הור), the scene in the Bible of Aaron’s death,
situated “in the edge of the land of Edom” (Num. xxxiii. 37).
Since the time of Josephus it has been identified with the Jebel
Nebi Ḥarūn (“Mountain of the Prophet Aaron”), a twin-peaked
mountain 4780 ft. above the sea-level (6072 ft. above the Dead
Sea) in the Edomite Mountains on the east side of the Jordan-Arabah
valley. On the summit is a shrine said to cover the
grave of Aaron. Some modern investigators dissent from this
identification: H. Clay Trumbull prefers the Jebel Madāra,
a peak north-west of ʽAin Kadis. Another Mount Hor is mentioned
in Num. xxxiv. 7, 8, as on the northern boundary of
the prospective conquests of the Israelites. It is perhaps to be
identified with Hermon. It has been doubtfully suggested that
for Hor we should here read Hadrach, the name of a northern
country near Damascus, mentioned only once in the Bible
(Zech. ix. 1). (R. A. S. M.)
HORACE [Quintus Horatius Flaccus] (65–8 B.C.), the
famous Roman poet, was born on the 8th of December 65 B.C. at
Venusia, on the borders of Lucania and Apulia (Sat. ii. 1. 34).
The town, originally a colony of veterans, appears to have long
maintained its military traditions, and Horace was early imbued
with a profound respect for the indomitable valour and industry
of the Italian soldier. It would seem, however, that the poet
was not brought up in the town itself, at least he did not attend
the town school (Sat. i. 6. 72) and was much in the neighbouring
country, of which, though he was but a child when he left it,
he retained always a vivid and affectionate memory. The
mountains near and far, the little villages on the hillsides, the
woods, the roaring Aufidus, the mossy spring of Bandusia,
after which he named another spring on his Sabine farm—these
scenes were always dear to him and are frequently mentioned
in his poetry (e.g. Carm. iii. 4 and 30, iv. 9). We may thus
trace some of the germs of his poetical inspiration, as well as
of his moral sympathies, to the early years which he spent near
Venusia. But the most important moral influence of his youth
was the training and example of his father, of whose worth,
affectionate solicitude and homely wisdom Horace has given
a most pleasing and life-like picture (Sat. i. 6. 70, &c.). He was
a freedman by position; and it is supposed that he had been
originally a slave of the town of Venusia, and on his emancipation
had received the gentile name of Horatius from the Horatian
tribe in which the inhabitants of Venusia were enrolled. After
his emancipation he acquired by the occupation of “coactor”
(a collector of the payments made at public auctions, or, according
to another interpretation, a collector of taxes) sufficient means
to enable him to buy a small farm, to make sufficient provision
for the future of his son (Sat. i. 4. 108), and to take him to Rome
to give him the advantage of the best education there. To his
care Horace attributes, not only the intellectual training which
enabled him in later life to take his place among the best men of
Rome, but also his immunity from the baser forms of moral
evil (Sat. i. 6. 68. &c.). To his practical teaching he attributes
also his tendency to moralize and to observe character (Sat. i.
4. 105, &c.)—the tendency which enabled him to become the
most truthful painter of social life and manners which the ancient
world produced.
