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 ’Ain 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.
In one of his latest writings (Epist. ii. 2. 42, &c.) Horace gives a further account of his education; but we hear no more of his father, nor is there any allusion in his writings to the existence of any other member of his family or any other relative. After the ordinary grammatical and literary training at Rome, he went (45 B.C.) to Athens, the most famous school of philosophy, as Rhodes was of oratory; and he describes himself while there as “searching after truth among the groves of Academus” as well as advancing in literary accomplishment. His pleasant residence there was interrupted by the breaking out of the civil war. Following the example of his young associates, he attached himself to the cause of Brutus, whom he seems to have accompanied to Asia, probably as a member of his staff; and he served at the battle of Philippi in the post of military tribune. He shared in the rout which followed the battle, and henceforth, though he was not less firm in his conviction that some causes were worth fighting for and dying for, he had but a poor opinion of his own soldierly qualities.
He returned to Rome shortly after the battle, stripped of his property, which formed part of the land confiscated for the benefit of the soldiers of Octavianus and Antony. It may have been at this time that he encountered the danger of shipwreck, which he mentions among the perils from which his life had been protected by supernatural aid (Carm. iii. 4. 28). He procured in some way the post of a clerkship in the quaestor’s office, and about three years after the battle of Philippi, he was introduced by Virgil and Varius to Maecenas. This was the turning-point of his fortunes. He owed his friendship with the greatest of literary patrons to his personal merits rather than to his poetic fame; for he was on intimate terms with Maecenas before the first book of the Satires (his first published work) appeared. He tells us in one of his Satires (i. 10. 31) that his earliest ambition was to write Greek verses. In giving this direction to his ambition, he was probably influenced by his admiration of the old iambic and lyrical poets whom he has made the models of his own Epodes and Odes. His common sense as well as his national feeling fortunately saved him from becoming a second-rate Greek versifier in an age when poetic inspiration had passed from Greece to Italy, and the living language of Rome was a more fitting vehicle for the new feelings and interests of men than the echoes of the old Ionian or Aeolian melodies. His earliest Latin compositions were, as he tells us, written under the instigation of poverty; and they alone betray any trace of the bitterness of spirit which the defeat of his hopes and the hardships which he had to encounter on his first return to Rome may have temporarily produced on him. Some of the Epodes, of the nature of personal and licentious lampoons, and the second Satire of book i., in which there is some trace of an angry republican feeling, belong to these early compositions. But by the time the first book of Satires was completed and published (35 B.C.) his temper had recovered its natural serenity, and, though he had not yet attained to the height of his fortunes, his personal position was one of comfort and security, and his intimate relation with the leading men in literature and social rank was firmly established.
About a year after the publication of this first book of Satires Maecenas presented him with a farm among the Sabine hills, near the modern Tivoli. This secured him pecuniary independence; it satisfied the love of nature which had been implanted in him during the early years spent on the Venusian farm; and it afforded him a welcome escape from the distractions of city life and the dangers of a Roman autumn. Many passages in the Satires, Odes and Epistles express the happiness and pride with which the thought of his own valley filled him, and the interest which he took in the simple and homely ways of his country neighbours. The inspiration of the Satires came from the heart of Rome; the feeling of many of the Odes comes direct from the Sabine hills; and even the meditative spirit of the later Epistles tells of the leisure and peace of quiet days spent among books, or in the open air, at a distance from “the smoke, wealth and tumult” of the great metropolis.