HOUSMAN, LAURENCE (1867- ), English writer and artist, was born on the 18th of June 1867. Having studied at South Kensington, he first made a reputation as a book-illustrator. Some of his best pictorial work may be seen in the editions of Meredith’s Jump to Glory Jane (1892), the Weird Tales of Jonas Lie (1892), Jane Barlow’s Land of Elfintoun (1894), Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1893), Werewolf (1896), by his sister, Miss Clemence Housman, Shelley’s Sensitive Plant (1898), and his own Farm in Fairyland (1894). His designs were engraved on wood by Miss Housman. His volumes of verse include Green Arras (1896), Rue (1899), Spikenard (1898) and Mendicant Rhymes (1906); and the mysticism which characterizes the devotional poems in Spikenard recurs in his half-allegorical tales, All Fellows (1896), The Blue Moon (1904) and The Cloak of Friendship (1906). His nativity play, Bethlehem, was presented in the Great Hall of London University at South Kensington for a week in December 1902. In 1900 he published anonymously An Englishwoman’s Love Letters, which created a temporary sensation; and he followed this essay in popular fiction by the novels A Modem Antaeus (1901) and Sabrina Warham (1904). On the 23rd of December 1904 his fantastic play Prunella, written in collaboration with Mr Granville Barker, was produced at the Court Theatre.
His brother, Alfred Edward Housman (b. 1859), an accomplished scholar, professor of Latin at University College, London, is known as a poet by his striking lyrical series, A Shropshire Lad (1896).
HOUSSAYE, ARSÈNE (1815-1896), French novelist, poet and man of letters, was born at Bruyères (Aisne), near Laon, on the 28th of March 1815. His real surname was Housset. In 1832 he found his way to Paris, and in 1836 he published two novels, La Couronne de bluets and La Pécheresse. He had many friends in Paris, among them Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier, and he wrote in collaboration with Jules Sandeau. He produced art criticism in L’Histoire de la peinture flamande et hollandaise (1846); semi-historical sketches In Mlle de la Vallière et Mme de Montespan (1860) and Galerie de portraits du XVIIe siècle (1844); literary criticism in Le Roi Voltaire (1858) and his famous satirical Histoire du quarante et unième fauteuil de l’académie française (1855); drama in his Comédiennes (1857); poetry in his Symphonie des vingt ans (1867), Cent et un sonnets (1873), &c.; and novels, Les Filles d’Ève (1852) and many others. In 1849, through the influence of Rachel, he was entrusted with the administration of the Théâtre Français, a position he filled with unfailing tact and success until 1859, when he was made inspector-general of works of art. He died on the 26th of February 1896.
His Confessions, souvenir; d’un démi-siècle appeared in 1885-1891. See also J. Lemaître, Arsène Houssaye (1897), with a bibliography.
His son, Henry Houssaye (1848- ), the historian, was born in Paris. His early writings were devoted to classical antiquity, studied not only in books but on the actual Greek sites which he visited in 1868. He published successively Histoire d’Apelles (1867), a study on Greek art; L’Armée dans la Grèce antique (1867); Histoire d’Alcibiade et de la république athénienne depuis la mort de Périclès jusqu’à l’avènement des trente tyrans (1873); Papers on Le Nombre des citoyens d’Athènes au Vème siècle avant l’ère chrétienne (1882); La Loi agraire à Sparte (1884); Le Premier Siège de Paris en 52 av. J.-C. (1876); and two volumes of miscellanies, Athènes, Rome, Paris, l’histoire et les mœurs (1879), and Aspasie, Cléopatre, Théodora (6th ed. 1889). The military history of Napoleon I. then attracted him. His first volume on this subject, called 1814 (1888), went through no fewer than forty-six editions. It was followed by 1815, the first part of which comprises the first Restoration, the return from Elba and the Hundred Days (1893); the second part, Waterloo (1899); and the third part, the second abdication and the White Terror (1905). He was elected a member of the French Academy in 1895.
HOUSTON, SAM, or Samuel (1793-1863), American general and statesman, of Scotch-Irish descent, was born near Lexington, Virginia, on the 2nd of March 1793. His father, who had fought in the War of Independence, died in 1806, and soon afterward Samuel removed with his mother to the frontier in Blount county, Tennessee. When he was about fifteen his elder brothers obtained for him a place as clerk in a trader’s store, but he ran away and lived with the Cherokee Indians of East Tennessee for nearly three years. On his return he opened a country school, and later attended a session or two of the Academy at Maryville. During the War of 1812 he served under Andrew Jackson against the Creek Indians, and his bravery at the battle of Tohopeka, in which he was disabled by several wounds, won promotion to a lieutenancy. In 1817 he was appointed sub-agent in managing the business relating to the removal of the Cherokees from East Tennessee to a reservation in what is now Arkansas, but he was offended at a rebuke from John C. Calhoun, then secretary of war, for appearing before him in Indian garments, as well as at an inquiry into charges affecting his official integrity, and he resigned in 1818. He entered a law office in Nashville, and was admitted to the bar, and was soon elected a district attorney. From 1823 to 1827 Houston represented the ninth district of Tennessee in Congress, and in 1827 was elected governor of the state by the Jackson Democrats. He married Eliza Allen in January 1829; his wife left him three months later, and he resigned his office of governor, again took up his residence among the Cherokees, who were at this time about to remove to Indian Territory, and was formally adopted a member of their nation.
In 1830 and again in 1832 he visited Washington to expose the frauds practised upon the Cherokees by government agents, and attracted national attention by an encounter on the 13th of April 1832 with William Stanberry, a Congressman from Ohio, who intimated that Houston himself was seeking to defraud them. Commissioned by President Jackson, Houston went to Texas in December 1832 to negotiate treaties with the Indian tribes there for the protection of American traders on the border. He decided to remain in Texas, and was elected a delegate to the constitutional convention which met at San Felipe on the 1st of April 1833 to draw up a memorial to the Mexican Congress asking for the separation of Texas from Coahuila, in which the anti-American party was in control, as well as to frame a constitution for the commonwealth as a new member of the Mexican Republic, and he served as chairman of the drafting committee, and took a prominent part in the preparations for war when next year the petition was refused. In October 1835, soon after the outbreak of the War for Texan Independence, the committees of the township of Nacogdoches chose Houston as commander-in-chief of the forces in eastern Texas, and after the San Felipe convention in November he was chosen commander-in-chief of the Texan army. On the 21st of April 1836, while in command of 743 raw troops, he met on the bank of the San Jacinto about 1600 Mexican veterans led by Santa Anna and completely routed them; on the next day Santa Anna was taken prisoner.