Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/813

Rh favourite at the court of the prince and princess (afterwards George II. and Queen Caroline), to which Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, Chesterfield, and other wits resorted, and which was celebrated for the beauty and accomplishments of its ladies, such as Miss Bellenden (afterwards duchess of Argyle), Miss Howe, Miss Lepell, and Mrs Howard, whose names will live for ever in the poetry of Pope, Gay, and Swift, and in the lively memoirs and correspondence of that brilliant circle. Hervey was married to Miss Lepell in 1720. Having entered the House of Commons as member for Bury (1725), he in 1730 received the appointment of vice-chamberlain to the king ; in 1733 Sir Robert Walpole called him up to the House of Lords, where he proved a frequent and effective speaker ; and in 1740 he succeeded Lord Godolphin as lord privy seal, which office he held until the Walpole administration was driven from power in 1742. Notwithstanding miserable health he continued to take an active part in politics until his death, which occurred on August 8, 1743. He was survived by four sons, three of whom became successively earls of Bristol. Destitute of any commanding talents or solid principle, a sceptic in religion and a profligate in morals, Lord Hervey was yet far above the intellectual rank assigned him by his merciless satirist, Pope. He wrote and spoke vigorously on public questions, was studious and laborious, a fair scholar, and a writer of pleas- ing occasional verses. The origin of the hostility which led to the allusion in the Dunciad (iv. 104) in 1728, and afterwards to the attacks in the Prologue and Epilogue to the Satires, remains obscure. “It would be now idle,” as Mr Croker remarks, “to seek for a cause of quarrel which the parties were, a hundred years ago, unable or unwilling to explain; but may it not be sufficiently accounted for by the jealousies almost inevitable between persons of such similar and therefore discordant tastes and tempers, living together in a circle of tittle-tattle, scandal, and pasquinades?” Political differences had probably something to do with it, Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montague (who sharel with him the poet’s enmity) having at the accession of George II. adhered to Walpole, while Pope and his brother wits were chiefly associated with the opposition. Lord Hervey left be- hind him Afemoirs of the Reign of George the Second, from his Accession to the Death of Queen Caroline, which were not published until 1848, when they appeared in two volumes, edited, with a biographical notice, by Mr Croker. The work throws much light on the interior of the court— its coarseness, dulness, and immorality ; but it isas degrad- ing to the author as itis to the English monarchy, for Lord Hervey appears rather in the light of a court parasite and malignant gossip than in that of a fair historian or an English gentleman.  HERZEGOVINA, an Illyrian province, ethnographically belonging to the Serbo-Croatian nationality, under the titular dominion of the Turkish sultan, but since 1878 ad- ministered by Austria-Hungary. The Turks included it in the vilayet of Bosnia. It is bounded N. and E. by Bosnia, S. by Montenegro, and W. by Dalmatia, only touching the Adriatic by the narrow enclaves of Klek and Suttorina. The province extends about 117 miles in a south-east direction between 17° 10’ and 20° 15’ E. long. By the treaty of Berlin the Herzegovinian districts of Niksich and Dormitor have been placed under the government of the prince of Montenegro.

.—The Austrians have not yet (1879) had time to complete trustworthy statistics as to the population and resources of the province, and those published in the days of Turkish administration must be received with great reserve. The best statistical accounts of Herzegovina are those collected for the Austrian Government by the staff-officers Majors Roskiewicz and Thoemmel, and their dis- crepancy is the best proof of the difficulties which have hitherto prevented an exact calculation. According to Roskiewicz the population of Herzegovina amounted in 1868 to 230,000 souls. Thoemmel (in 1867) gives it as 207,970, of whom 101,848 were Pravoslavs or adherents of the Orthodox Greek Church, 56,000 Maho- metans, 49,217 Roman Catholics, 1340 Gipsies, and 65 Jews. Dr Blau (late Prussian consul-general at Scraievo) fixes the Herzegovinian population in 1872 approximately at 230,000, viz. 130,000 of the Orthodox Greek Church, 55,000 Mussulmans, 42,000 Roman Catholics, 2500 Gipsies, and 500 Jews. Klaich, however, the most recent Slavonic authority on the province (1878), reduces the total population to 185,421. During the troubles that ensued on the insurrection of 1875, about two-thirds of the Christian population fled beyond the Dalmatian and Montenegrin border, and the fearful mortality among these refugees has largely diminished the Herzegovinian population during the last three years. With the exception of the Gipsies, the Jews, and a small sprinkling of Osmanili officials, the whole population is Slavonic, the Mahometans being for the most part renegade descendants of the feudal nobility that had formed itself here before the Turkish conquest. Much of the old Slavonic customs and family life still holds among the Herzegovinian Mussulmans, and here as in Bosnia polygamy is unknown. The Herzegovinians are tall, broad, and darker, and of greater personal bravery than the Bosnians ; they are brachycephalic. In frame as well as character they approach very nearly to the Montenegrin type, and in the mountain districts they are divided, like the Montenegrins and Albanians, imto clans or nahias, whose loyalty is reserved for their own waiwodes or mill- tary chiefs. Their temperament is pre-eminently poetic, in so much that the recent insurrection has already given rise to many epic lays, which are recited to the sound of the guzla or Serbian lyre by the national minstrels. The Serbo- Croatian language is spoken in its purest form in Herzego- vina, and the Narenta valley has been called the Serbian Val d’Arno. The Orthodox Greek population is chiefly settled in the district east of the Narenta; to the west of that river the population is mostly Roman Catholic, and the Mahometans inhabit the larger towns. According to the Schematismus of the Franciscan P. Bakula, the popu- lation of the capital Mostar amounted in 1873 to 29,116, of whom 20,306 were Mahometans, 5008 Greeks, and 2821 Roman Catholics. Of the other towns, J.jubuski has, according to Klaich, a population of about 3000 souls, Stolatz 3500, Focha 10,000, Niksich (now under Mon- tenegro) 4000, and Trebinje 3000.

Natural Features.—Herzegovina, which has been de- scribed as the Turkish Switzerland, is divided into a variety of mountain plateaus by the parallel ranges of the Dinaric Alps; and the whole country is bisected by the river Narenta, which cleaves its way through the mountains from the Bosnian frontier towards the Adriatic. The valley of the Narenta and its tributaries forms the main artery of the province. There is situated the capital Mostar; and a fine highroad, the only avenue of communication between Seraievo (Bosna Serai) and the Adriatic, follows the river bank from the Dalmatian frontier to the Bosnian. The “ polyes” or mountain plateaus are the most characteristic feature of the country. The smaller towns and villages group themselves on their level and comparatively fertile surface, and the districts or cantons thus formed are walled round by a natural rampart of white limestone mountains. These ‘“nolyes” may be described as oases in what is otherwise a desert expanse of mountains. The surface of some, as