Page:Cousins's Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature.djvu/207

 provincial stage. He then took to writing plays, and was the first to introduce the melodrama into England. Among his plays, The Road to Ruin (1792) is the best, and is still acted; others were Duplicity (1781), and A Tale of Mystery. Among his novels are Alwyn (1780), and Hugh Trevor, and he wrote the well-known song, Gaffer Gray. H. was a man of stern and irascible temper, industrious and energetic, and a sympathiser with the French Revolution. 

Author: Raphael Holinshed d. (1580?).—Belonged to a Cheshire family, and is said by to have been at one of the Univ., and to have been a priest. He came to London, and was in the employment of Reginald Wolf, a German printer, making translations and doing hack-work. His Chronicles of Englande, Scotlande, and Irelande, from which drew much of his history, was based to a considerable extent on the collections of, and he had the assistance of W. Harrison, , and others. The introductory description of England and the English was the work of Harrison, Stanyhurst did the part relating to Ireland, and H. himself the history of England and Scotland, the latter being mainly translated from the works of and. Pub. in 1577 it had an eager welcome, and a wide and lasting popularity. A later ed. in 1586 was ed. by J. Hooker and. It is a work of real value—a magazine of useful and interesting information, with the authorities cited. Its tone is strongly Protestant, its style clear. 

Author: Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–1881).—Novelist and poet, b. in Massachusetts, helped to found and ed. Scribner's Monthly (afterwards the Century Magazine), in which appeared his novels, Arthur Bonnicastle, The Story of Sevenoaks, Nicholas Minturn. In poetry he wrote Bitter Sweet (1858), Kathrina, etc. 

Author: Philemon Holland (1552–1637).—Translator, b. at Chelmsford, and ed. at Camb., was master of the free school at Coventry, where he also practised medicine. His chief translations, made in good Elizabethan English, are of Pliny's Natural History, Plutarch's Morals, Suetonius, Xenophon's Cyropædia, and Britannia. There are passages in the second of these which have hardly been excelled by any later prose translator of the classics. His later years were passed in poverty. 

Author:Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) (1809–1894).—Essayist, novelist, and poet, was b. of good Dutch and English stock at Camb., Massachusetts, the seat of Harvard, where he graduated in 1829. He studied law, then medicine, first at home, latterly in Paris, whence he returned in 1835, and practised in his native town. In 1838 he was appointed Prof. of Anatomy and Physiology at Dartmouth Coll., from which he was in 1847 transferred to a similar chair at Harvard. Up to 1857 he had done little in literature: his first book of poems, containing "The Last Leaf," had been pub. But in that year the Atlantic Monthly was started with for ed., and H. was engaged as a principal contributor. In it appeared the trilogy by which he is best known, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1857), The Professor, The Poet (1872), all graceful,