Gypsy. (The Flight of the Duchess.) The old crone who is sent by the Duke to frighten the Duchess, and who rescues her from her unhappy life.
Hakeem or Hakem. (Return of the Druses.) He was the chief of the Druses. The first hakeem was the Fatimite Caliph B’amr-ellah. He professed to be the incarnate deity. He was slain near Cairo, in Egypt, on Mount Makattam.
Halbert and Hob. (Dramatic Idyls, First Series, 1879.) Two men, father and son, of brutal type, and the last of their line, are sitting quarrelling one Christmas night in their homestead. High words, followed by taunts and curses, led to an attack on the father by his furious son, who flew at his throat with the intention of casting him out in the snow. The father was strong and could have held his own in the scuffle, but suddenly all power left him: he was struck mute. This still more enraged the son, who pulled him from the room till they reached the house-door-sill. Slowly the father found utterance and told his son that on just such a Christmas night long ago he had attacked his father in a similar manner and had dragged him to the same spot, when he was arrested by a voice in his heart. “I stopped here; and, Hob, do you the same!” The son relaxed his hold of his father’s throat, and both returned upstairs, where they remained in silence. At dawn the father was dead, the son insane. “Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?” Certainly there is, says the mental pathologist. Persons born with such and such cranial and cerebral characteristics cannot help being brutal and criminal. They are handicapped heavily by nature from the hour of their birth, and they only follow out a law of their development, for which they are not responsible when they become criminal. The mental pathologist would have no difficulty in drawing the portraits of Halbert and Hob. There is a monotony and family likeness in the criminal physiognomy which does not require an expert to detect. When a specialist such as Dr. Down goes over a great prison like Broadmoor, he has no difficulty in indicating for us the precise aberrations from the normal type which distinguish between the honest man and the criminal. This would be a terrible reflection on the Divine providence, if we omitted to take into account the pregnant last line of Mr. Browning’s poem:
“That a reason out of nature must turn them soft, seems clear.”
As Nature is never without her compensations, so there is a reason above all our materialism, our facial angles, our oxycephalic and our microcephalic heads which justifies the ways of God to men. Doctors are slow to recognise this, but judges always act upon the principle. Experts in criminal pathology find responsibility with great difficulty in the men they are endeavouring to save from the gallows. The judge, however, keeps to the common-sense rule that if the criminal knew that he was doing what he ought not to do, he is responsible before the law for his crime. Halbert heard the voice in his heart—Hob relaxed his hold of the father’s throat. Conscience rules supreme even over heredity and cerebral aberration. The basis of this story is found in Aristotle’s Ethics, I., vii., c. 6.
“Heap Cassia, Sandal-buds, and Stripes.” The first line of the song in Paracelsus iv.
Helen’s Tower. Lines written at the request of the Earl of Dufferin and Clandeboye, on the tower which the Earl erected to the memory of his mother, Helen, Countess of Giffard. (Printed in the Pall Mall Gazette, Dec. 28th, 1883.)
Henry, Earl Mertoun. (A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.) He was Mildred Tresham’s lover, and was killed by her brother, Earl Tresham.
Herakles == Hercules, who wrestles with death, conquers him, and restores Alkestis to her husband, in Balaustion’s Adventure. The Raging Hercules of Euripides, which Balaustion read to Aristophanes, is translated by Mr. Browning in the volume Aristophanes’ Apology.