HUME, JOSEPH, a politician, born in Montrose; studied medicine, and served as a surgeon under the East India Company in India, made his fortune, and came home; adopted the political principles of Bentham and entered Parliament, of which he continued a prominent member till his death; he was an ardent reformer, and lived to see many of the measures he advocated crowned with success (1777-1855).
HUMOUR, distinct from wit, and defined as “a warm, tender, fellow-feeling with all that exists,” as “the sport of sensibility and, as it were, the playful, teasing fondness of a mother for a child” ... as “a sort of inverse sublimity exalting into our affections what is below us,... warm and all-embracing as the sun.”
HUNDRED DAYS, the name given to the period between Napoleon’s return from Elba and his abdication, from Mar. 10 to June 28, 1815, after Waterloo.
HUNDYADES JOHN CORVINUS, a Hungarian captain of the 14th century, a formidable foe of the Turks.
HUNGARY (18,556), the eastern part of Austro-Hungary, including Hungary proper, Transylvania, Croatia, and Slavonia, and, except in military and diplomatic matters and customs dues, with a considerable amount of self-government independent of Austria, differing from it, as it does, in race, language, and many other respects, to such a degree as gives rise to much dissension, and every now and then threatens disruption.
HUNS, THE, a horde of barbarians of Mongolian origin who invaded Europe from the shores of the Caspian Sea in two wars, the first in the 4th century, which at length subsided, and the second in the 5th century, ultimately under Atilla, which, in the main body of them at all events, was driven back and even dispersed; they have been described as a race with broad shoulders, flat noses, small black eyes buried in the head, and without beards.
HUNT, HOLMAN, painter, born in London; became a pupil of Rossetti, and “his greatest disciple,” and joined the Pre-Raphaelite movement; he began with “worldly subjects,” but soon quitted these “virtually for ever” under Rossetti’s influence, and “rose into the spiritual passion which first expressed itself in his ‘Light of the World,’” with this difference, as Ruskin points out, between him and his “forerunner,” that whereas Rossetti treated the story of the New Testament as a mere thing of beauty, with Hunt, “when once his mind entirely fastened on it, it became ... not merely a Reality, not merely the greatest of Realities, but the only Reality”; in this religious realistic spirit, as Ruskin further remarks, all Hunt’s great work is done, and he notices how in all subjects which fall short of the religious element, “his power also is shortened, and he does those things worst which are easiest to other men”; his principal works in this spirit are “The Scape-Goat,” “The Finding of Christ in the Temple,” “The Shadow of Death,” and the “Triumph of the Innocents,” to which we may add “The Strayed Sheep,” remarkable as well for its vivid sunshine, “producing,” says Ruskin, “the same impressions on the mind as are caused by the light itself”; b. 1827.