great. In 1627 he was at Frankfort, working under Matthew Merian, an etcher and engraver; thence he passed to Strasburg and thence, in 1633, to Cologne. It was there that he attracted the notice of the famous amateur Thomas, earl of Arundel, then on an embassy to the imperial court ; and with him Hollar travelled to Vienna and Prague, and finally came in 1637 to England, destined to be his home for many years. Though he lived in the household of Lord Arundel, he seems to have worked not exclusively for him, but to have begun that slavery to the publishers which was afterwards the normal condition of his life. In his first year in England he made for Stent, the printseller, the magnificent View of Greenwich, nearly a yard long, and received thirty shillings for the plate, perhaps a twentieth part of what would now be paid for a single good impression. Afterwards we hear of his fixing the price of his work at fourpence an hour, and measuring his time by a sandglass. The civil war had its effect on his fortunes, but none on his industry. Lord Arundel left England in 1642, and Hollar passed into the service of the duke of York, taking with him a wife and two children. With other royalist artists, notably Inigo Jones and Paithorne, he stood the long and eventful siege of Basing House ; and as we have some hundred plates from his hand dated during the years 1643 and 1644 he must have turned his enforced leisure to good purpose. Taken prisoner, he escaped or was released, and joined Lord Arundel at Antwerp, and there he remained eight years, the prime of his working life, when he produced his finest plates of every kind, his noblest views, his miraculous muffs " and " shells," and the superb portrait of the duke of York. In 1652 he returned to London, and lived fora time with Faithorne the engraver near Temple Bar. During the following years were published many books which he illustrated: Ogilby s Virgil and Homer, Stapylton s Juvenal, and Dugdale s Warwickshire, St Paul s, and Mon- asticon (part i.). The booksellers continued to impose on the simple-minded foreigner, pretending t> decline his work that he might still further reduce the wretched price he charged them. Nor did the Restoration improve his position. The court did nothing for him, and in the great p ague he lost his young son, who, we are told, might have rivalled his father as an artist. After the great fire he produced some of his famous "Views of London"; and it may have been the success of these plates which induced the king to send him, in 1668, to Tangier, to draw the town and forts. During his return to England occurred the desperate and successful engagement fought by his ship the "Mary Rose," under Captain Kempthorne, against s<?ven Algerine men-of-war, a brilliant affair which Hollar etched for Ogilby s Africa. He lived eight years after his return, still working for tlie booksellers, and retaining to the end his wonderful powers ; witness the large plate of Edinburgh (dated 1670), one of the greatest of his works. He died in extreme poverty, his last recorded words being a request to the bailiffs that they would n*>t carry away the bed on which he was dying.
Hollar has been called by a recent critic " the most accurate delineator and the most ingenious illustrator of his time, and as to technic the most able etcher." His variety was boundless ; his plates number some 2740, and include views, portraits, ships, religious subjects, heraldic subjects, landscapes, and still lif: in a hundred different forms. No one that ever lived has been able to represent fur, or shells, or a butterfly s wing, as he has done. His architectural drawings, such as those of Antwerp and Stras burg cathedrals, and his views of towns, are mathematically exact, but they are pictures as well. He could reproduce the decorative works of other artists quite faultlessly, as in the famous chalice after Mantegna s drawing. His Theatrtnn Mulierum and similar collections reproduce for us with literal truth the outward aspects of the people of his day; and his portraits, a branch of art in which he has been unfairly disparaged, are of extraordinary refinement and power. His genius is wholly unlike that of his great contemporary Rembrandt ; it aims rather at the delicate rendering of details than at the truth of character and the mystery of light and shade. But in his own way Hollar is as perfect as Rembrandt.
Almost complete collections of Hollar s works exist in the British Museum and in the library at Windsor Castle. Two admirable catalogues of his plates have been made, one in 1745 (2d ed., 1759), by George Vertue, and one in 1853 by Parthey. The latter, pub lished at Berlin, is a model of German thoroughness and accuracy, and leaves very little to be added by future research.
HOLLY, Ilex, L., a genus of trees and shrubs of the natural order Ilicinece or Aqiafoliacecc, containing some one hundred and fifty species, of which several occur in the temperate northern hemisphere, North-West America ex- cepted, by far the larger number in tropical Asia and America, and very few in Africa and Australia. In Europe, where /. Aquifolium is the sole surviving species, the genii? was richly represented during the Miocene period by forms at first South American and Asiatic, and later North Ameri can in type (Schimper, Paleont. Veget., iii. 204, 1874). Tho leaves are generally coriaceous and evergreen, and are alternate and stalked ; the flowers are commonly dioecious, are in axillary cymes, fascicles, or umbellules, and have a persistent four- to five-lobed or parted calyx, a white, rotate four- or rarely five- or six-cleft corolla, with the four or five stamens adherent to its base in the male, sometimes hypo- gynous in the female flowers, and a two- to twelve-celled ovary ; and the fruit is a globose, very seldom ovoid, and usually red drupe, containing two to sixteen one-seeded stones.
The Common Holly, or Hulver (apparently the /crjAaorpos of
Theophrastus;
[1] Ang.-Sax., holen or holegn ; Mid. Eng., Imlyn or holin, whence holm and holmtree ;
[2] Welsh, celyn; Germ., Stechpalme, lliilse, Hulst; Old Fr., houx and Fr., houlx),
[3] L Aq uijolium, L., is an evergreen shrub or low tree, having smooth, ash coloured bark, and wavy, pointed, smooth, and glossy leaves, 2 to 3 inches long, with a spinous margin, raised and cartilaginous below, or, as commonly on the upper branches of the older trees, entire a peculiarity alluded to by Southey in his poem The Holly Tree. The flowers, which appear in May, are ordinarily dioecious, as in all the best of the cultivated varieties in nurseries (Gard. Chron., 1877, i. 149). Darwin (Diff. Forms of Flow., p. 297, 1877) says of the holly : " Dm ing several years I have examined many plants, but have never found one that was really herma phrodite." Shirley Hibberd, however (Gard. Chron., 1877, ii. 777), mentions the occurrence of "flowers bearing globose anthers well furnished with pollen, and also per fect ovaries." In his opinion, I. Aquifolium changes its sex from male to female with age. In the female flowers the st.imens are destitute of pollen, though but slightly or not at all shorter than in the male flowers ; the latter are
- ↑ 1 Hist. Plant. , i. 9. 3, iii. 3. 1 , and 4. 6, et passim. On the aquifolium or aquifolia of Latin authors, commonly regarded as the holly, see A. de Grandsagne, Hist. Kat. de Mine, bk. xvi., "Notes," pp. 199, 206.
- ↑ The term "holm," as indicative, of .1 prevalence of holly, is stated to have entered into the names of several places in Britain. From its superficial resemblance to the holly, the tree Quercvs Ilex, L., the evergreen oak, received the appellation of "holm-oak."
- ↑ Skeat (Elynwlog. lUct., 1879) with reference to the word holly remarks : "The form of the base Kul, (-Teutonic Hul) is probably connected with Lat. cut men, a peak, culmus, a stalk; perhaps because the leaves are pointed. " Grimm (Deut. Wort-rb., Bd. iv.) suggests that the term Hulst, as the O.H.G. Ifulis, applied to the butchers broom, or knee-holly, in the earliest times used for hedges, may have reference to the holly as a protecting (hullender) plant.
