HĀJJĪ KHALĪFA [in full Muṣṭafā ibn ‘Abdallāh Kātib Chelebī Hājjī Khalīfa] (ca. 1599-1658), Arabic and Turkish author, was born at Constantinople. He became secretary to the commissariat department of the Turkish army in Anatolia, was with the army in Bagdad in 1625, was present at the siege of Erzerum, and returned to Constantinople in 1628. In the following year he was again in Bagdad and Hamadān, and in 1633 at Aleppo, whence he made the pilgrimage to Mecca (hence his title Hājjī). The following year he was in Erivān and then returned to Constantinople. Here he obtained a post in the head office of the commissariat department, which afforded him time for study. He seems to have attended the lectures of great teachers up to the time of his death, and made a practice of visiting bookshops and noting the titles and contents of all books he found there. His largest work is the Bibliographical Encyclopaedia written in Arabic. In this work, after five chapters dealing with the sciences generally, the titles of Arabian, Persian and Turkish books written up to his own time are arranged in alphabetical order. With the titles are given, where possible, short notes on the author, his date, and sometimes the introductory words of his work. It was edited by G. Flügel with Latin translation and a useful appendix (7 vols. Leipzig, 1835-1858). The text alone of this edition has been reproduced at Constantinople (1893).
Hājjī Khalīfa also wrote in Turkish: a chronological conspectus of general history (translated into Italian by G. R. Carli, Venice, 1697); a history of the Turkish empire from 1594 to 1655 (Constantinople, 1870); a history of the naval wars of the Turks (Constantinople, 1729; chapters 1-4 translated by J. Mitchell, London, 1831); a general geography published at Constantinople, 1732 (Latin trans. by M. Norberg, London and Gotha, 1818; German trans. of part by J. von Hammer, Vienna, 1812; French trans. of part by V. de St Martin in his Geography of Asia Minor, vol. I).
For his life see the preface to Flügel’s edition; list of his works in C. Brockelmann’s Gesch. d. arabischen Literatur (Berlin, 1902), vol. ii., pp. 428-429.
(G. W. T.)
HAKE, EDWARD (fl. 1579), English satirist, was educated under John Hopkins, the part-author of the metrical version of the Psalms. He resided in Gray’s Inn and Barnard’s Inn, London. In the address “To the Gentle Reader” prefixed to his Newes out of Powles Churchyard ... Otherwise entitled Syr Nummus (2nd ed., 1579) he mentions the “first three yeeres which I spent in the Innes of Channcery, being now about a dosen of yeeres passed.” In 1585 and 1586 he was mayor of New Windsor, and in 1588 he represented the borough in parliament. His last work was published in 1604. He was protected by the earl of Leicester, whose policy it was to support the Puritan party, and who no doubt found a valuable ally in so vigorous a satirist of error in clerical places as was Hake. Newes out of Paules Churchyarde, A Trappe for Syr Monye, first appeared in 1567, but no copy of this impression is known, and it was re-issued in 1579 with the title quoted above. The book takes the form of a dialogue between Bertulph and Paul, who meet in the aisles of the cathedral, and is divided into eight “satyrs,” dealing with the corruption of the higher clergy and of judges, the greed of attorneys, the tricks of physicians and apothecaries, the sumptuary laws, extravagant living, Sunday sports, the abuse of St Paul’s cathedral as a meeting-place for business and conversation, usury, &c. It is written in rhymed fourteen-syllable metre, which is often more comic than the author intended. It contains, amid much prefatory matter, a note to the “carping and scornefull Sicophant,” in which he attacks his enemies with small courtesy and much alliteration. One is described as a “carping careless cankerd churle.”
He also wrote a translation from Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation, or Following of Christ (1567, 1568); A Touchstone for this Time Present (1574), a scurrilous attack on the Roman Catholic Church, followed by a treatise on education; A Commemoration of the ... Raigne of ... Elizabeth (1575), enlarged in 1578 to A Joyfull Continuance of the Commemoration, &c.; and of Gold’s Kingdom, and this Unhelping Age (1604), a collection of pieces in prose and verse, in which the author inveighs against the power of gold. A bibliography of these and of Hake’s other works was compiled by Mr Charles Edmonds for his edition in 1872 of the Newes (Isham Reprints, No. 2, 1872).
HAKE, THOMAS GORDON (1800-1895), English poet, was born at Leeds, of an old Devonshire family, on the 10th of March 1809. His mother was a Gordon of the Huntly branch. He studied medicine at St George’s hospital and at Edinburgh and Glasgow, but had given up practice for many years before his death, and had devoted himself to a literary life. In 1839 he published a prose epic Vates, republished in Ainsworth’s magazine as Valdarno, which attracted the attention of D. G. Rossetti. In after years he became an intimate member of the circle of friends and followers gathered round Rossetti, who so far departed from his usual custom as to review Hake’s poems in the Academy and in the Fortnightly Review. In 1871 he published Madeline; 1872, Parables and Tales; 1883, The Serpent Play; 1890, New Day Sonnets; and in 1892 his Memoirs of Eighty Years. Dr Hake’s works had much subtlety and felicity of expression, and were warmly appreciated in a somewhat restricted literary circle. In his last published verse, the sonnets, he shows an advance in facility on the occasional harshness of his earlier work. He was given a Civil List literary pension in 1893, and died on the 11th of January 1895.