pro-Union, and in 1861 he went to France to counteract the influence of the Slidell mission. He met with success not only in France, but at Rome and in Ireland, where, however, he made strong anti-English speeches. He died in New York City on the 3rd of January 1864. Hughes was a hard fighter and delighted in controversy. In 1826 he wrote An Answer to Nine Objections Made by an Anonymous Writer Against the Catholic Religion; he was engaged in a bitter debate with Dr John Breckenridge (Presbyterian), partly in letters published in 1833 and partly in a public discussion in Philadelphia in 1835, on the subject of civil and religious liberty as affected by the Roman Catholic and the Presbyterian “religions”; in 1856, through his organ, the Metropolitan Record, he did his best to discredit any attempts by the Catholic press to forward either the movement to “Americanize” the Catholic Church or that to disseminate the principles of “Young Ireland.”
His works were edited by Laurence Kehoe (2 vols., New York, 1864–1865). See John R. G. Hassard, Life of the Most Rev. John Hughes (New York, 1866); and Henry A. Brann, John Hughes (New York, 1894), a briefer sketch, in “The Makers of America” series.
HUGHES, THOMAS, English dramatist, a native of Cheshire, entered Queens’ College, Cambridge, in 1571. He graduated and became a fellow of his college in 1576, and was afterwards a member of Gray’s Inn. He wrote The Misfortunes of Arthur. Uther Pendragon’s son reduced into tragical notes by Thomas Hughes, which was performed at Greenwich in the Queen’s presence on the 28th of February 1588. Nicholas Trotte provided the introduction, Francis Flower the choruses of Acts I. and II., William Fulbeck two speeches, while three other gentlemen of Gray’s Inn, one of whom was Francis Bacon, undertook the care of the dumb show. The argument of the play, based on a story of incest and crime, was borrowed, in accordance with Senecan tradition, from mythical history, and the treatment is in close accordance with the model. The ghost of Gorlois, who was slain by Uther Pendragon, opens the play with a speech that reproduces passages spoken by the ghost of Tantalus in the Thyestes; the tragic events are announced by a messenger, and the chorus comments on the course of the action. Dr W. J. Cunliffe has proved that Hughes’s memory was saturated with Seneca, and that the play may be resolved into a patchwork of translations, with occasional original lines. Appendix II. to his exhaustive essay On the Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (1893) gives a long list of parallel passages.
The Misfortunes of Arthur was reprinted in J. P. Collier’s supplement to Dodsley’s Old Plays; and by Harvey Carson Grumline (Berlin, 1900), who points out that Hughes’s source was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Britonum, not the Morte D’Arthur.
HUGHES, THOMAS (1822–1896), English lawyer and author, second son of John Hughes of Donnington Priory, editor of The Boscobel Tracts (1830), was born at Uffington, Berks, on the 20th of October 1822. In February 1834 he went to Rugby School, to be under Dr Arnold, a contemporary of his father at Oriel. He rose steadily to the sixth form, where he came into contact with the headmaster whom he afterwards idealized; but he excelled rather in sports than in scholarship, and his school career culminated in a cricket match at Lord’s. In 1842 he proceeded to Oriel, Oxford, and graduated B.A. in 1845. He was called to the bar in 1848, became Q.C. in 1869, a bencher in 1870, and was appointed to a county court judgeship in the Chester district in July 1882. While at Lincoln’s Inn he came under the dominating influence of his life, that of Frederick Denison Maurice. In 1848 he joined the Christian Socialists, under Maurice’s banner, among his closest allies being Charles Kingsley. In January 1854 he was one of the original promoters of the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street, and whether he was speaking on sanitation, sparring or singing his favourite ditty of “Little Billee,” his work there continued one of his chief interests to the end of his life. After Maurice’s death he held the principalship of the college. His Manliness of Christ (1879) grew out of a Bible class which he held there. Hughes had been influenced mentally by Arnold, Carlyle, Thackeray, Lowell and Maurice, and had developed into a liberal churchman, extremely religious, with strong socialistic leanings; but the substratum was still and ever the manly country squire of old-fashioned, sport-loving England. In Parliament, where he sat for Lambeth (1865–1868), and for Frome (1868–1874), he reproduced some of the traits of Colonel Newcome. Hughes was an energetic supporter of the claims of the working classes, and introduced a trades union Bill which, however, only reached its second reading. Of Mr Gladstone’s home rule policy he was an uncompromising opponent. Thrice he visited America and received a warm welcome, less as a propagandist of social reform than as a friend of Lowell and of the North, and an author. In 1879, in a sanguine humour worthy of Mark Tapley, he planned a cooperative settlement, “Rugby,” in Tennessee, over which he lost money. In 1848 Hughes had married Frances, niece of Richard Ford, of Spanish Handbook fame. They settled in 1853 at Wimbledon, and there was written his famous story, Tom Brown's School-Days, “by an Old Boy” (dedicated to Mrs Arnold of Fox Howe), which came out in April 1857. It is probably impossible to depict the schoolboy in his natural state and in a realistic manner; it is extremely difficult to portray him at all in such a way as to interest the adult. Yet this last has certainly been achieved twice in English literature—by Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby, and by Hughes in Tom Brown. In both cases interest is concentrated upon the master, in the first a demon, in the second a demigod. Tom Brown did a great deal to fix the English concept of what a public school should be. Hughes also wrote The Scouring of the White Horse (1859), Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Religio laici (1868), Life of Alfred the Great (1869) and the Memoir of a Brother. The brother was George Hughes, who was in the main the original “Tom Brown,” just as Dean Stanley was in the main the original of “Arthur.” Hughes died at Brighton, on 22nd March 1896. He was English of the English, a typical broad-churchman, full of “muscular Christianity,” straightforward and unsuspicious to a fault, yet attaching a somewhat exorbitant value to “earnestness”—a favourite expression of Doctor Arnold. (T. Se.)
HUGLI, or Hooghly, the most westerly and commercially the most important channel by which the Ganges enters the Bay of Bengal. It takes its distinctive name near the town of Santipur, about 120 m. from the sea. The stream now known as the Hugli represents three western deltaic distributaries of the Ganges—viz. (1) the Bhagirathi, (2) the Jalangi and (3) part of the Matabhanga. The Bhagirathi and Jalangi unite at Nadia, above the point of their junction with the lower waters of the Matabhanga, which has taken the name of the Churni before the point of junction and thrown out new distributaries of its own. These three western distributaries are known as the Nadia rivers, and are important, not only as great highways for internal traffic, but also as the headwaters of the Hugli. Like other deltaic distributaries, they are subject to sudden changes in their channels, and to constant silting up. The supervising and keeping open of the Nadia rivers, therefore, forms one of the great tasks of fluvial engineering in Bengal. Proceeding south from Santipur, with a twist to the east, the Hugli river divides Nadia from Hugli district, until it touches the district of the Twenty-Four Parganas. It then proceeds almost due south to Calcutta, next twists to the south-west and finally turns south, entering the Bay of Bengal in 21° 41′ N., 88° E.
In the 40 miles of its course above Calcutta, the channels of the Hugli are under no supervision, and the result is that they have silted up and shifted to such an extent as to be no longer navigable for sea-going ships. Yet it was upon this upper section that all the famous ports of Bengal lay in olden times. From Calcutta to the sea (about 80 m.) the river is a record of engineering improvement and success. A minute supervision, with steady dredging and constant readjustment of buoys, now renders it a safe waterway to Calcutta for ships of the largest tonnage. Much attention has also been paid to the port of Calcutta (q.v.).
The tide runs rapidly on the Hugli, and produces a remarkable example of the fluvial phenomenon known as a “bore.” This consists of the head-wave of the advancing tide, hemmed in where the
