HARP-LUTE, or Dital Harp, one of the many attempts to revive the popularity of the guitar and to increase its compass, invented in 1798 by Edward Light. The harp-lute owes the first part of its name to the characteristic mechanism for shortening the effective length of the strings; its second name—dital harp—emphasizes the nature of the stops, which are worked by the thumb in contradistinction to the pedals of the harp worked by the feet. It consists of a pear-shaped body, to which is added a curved neck supported on a front pillar or arm springing from the body, and therefore reminiscent of the harp. There are 12 catgut strings. The curved fingerboard, almost parallel with the neck, is provided with frets, and has in addition a thumb-key for each string, by means of which the accordance of the string is mechanically raised a semitone at will. The dital or key, on being depressed, acts upon a stop-ring or eye, which draws the string down against the fret, and thus shortens its effective length. The fingers then stop the strings as usual over the remaining frets. A further improvement was patented in 1816 as the British harp-lute. Other attempts possessing less practical merit than the dital harp were the lyra-guitarre, which appeared in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century; the accord-guitarre, towards the middle of the same century; and the keyed guitar.
(K. S.)
HARPOCRATES, originally an Egyptian deity, adopted by the Greeks, and worshipped in later times both by Greeks and Romans. In Egypt, Harpa-khruti, Horus the child, was one of the forms of Horus, the sun-god, the child of Osiris. He was supposed to carry on war against the powers of darkness, and hence Herodotus (ii. 144) considers him the same as the Greek Apollo. He was represented in statues with his finger on his mouth, a symbol of childhood. The Greeks and Romans, not understanding the meaning of this attitude, made him the god of silence (Ovid, Metam. ix. 691), and as such he became a favourite deity with the later mystic schools of philosophy.
See articles by G. Lafaye in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dictionnaire des antiquités, and by E. Meyer (s.v. “Horos”) in Roscher’s Lexikon der Mythologie.
HARPOCRATION, VALERIUS, Greek grammarian of Alexandria. He is possibly the Harpocration mentioned by Julius Capitolinus (Life of Verus, 2) as the Greek tutor of Antoninus Verus (2nd century A.D.); some authorities place him much later, on the ground that he borrowed from Athenaeus. He is the author of a Λεξικὸν (or Περὶ τῶν λέξεων) τῶν δέκα ῥητόρων, which has come down to us in an incomplete form. The work contains, in more or less alphabetical order, notes on well-known events and persons mentioned by the orators, and explanations of legal and commercial expressions. As nearly all the lexicons to the Greek orators have been lost, Harpocration’s work is especially valuable. Amongst his authorities were the writers of Atthides (histories of Attica), the grammarian Didymus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and the lexicographer Dionysius, son of Tryphon. The book also contains contributions to the history of Attic oratory and Greek literature generally. Nothing is known of an Ἀνθηρῶν συναγωγή, a sort of anthology or chrestomathy attributed to him by Suidas. A series of articles in the margin of a Cambridge MS. of the lexicon forms the basis of the Lexicon rhetoricum Cantabrigiense (see [Dobree, P. P.]).
The best edition is by W. Dindorf (1853); see also J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, i. (1906), p. 325; C. Boysen, De Harpocrationis fontibus (Kiel, 1876).
HARPOON (from Fr. harpon, a grappling-iron, O. Fr. harpe, a dog’s claw, an iron clamp for fastening stones together; the source of these words is the Lat. harpago, harpa, &c., formed from Gr. ἁρπαγή, hook, ἁρπάζειν, to snatch, tear away, cf. “harpy”), barbed spear, particularly one used for spearing whales or other large fish, and either thrown by hand or fired from a gun (see [Whale-Fishery]).