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HEBBEL 



HUBERT 



believed that glimpses into heaven have been 

 vouchsafed to them, but their accounts of these 

 visions have usually been but incongruous and 

 contradictory. The figurative language in which 

 its unseen glories are described in Scripture has 

 made such an excitation of fancy the more easy 

 for devout souls rapt in profound meditation about 

 what it has not been given to the eye of man to see 

 nor the heart to conceive. 



Aristotle declares that all men have a conception 

 of gods, and that all agree in placing their habita- 

 tion in the most elevated region of the universe. 

 The Egyptian, the Scandinavian, the Assyrian, and 

 all primitive religions maintain the existence of a 

 heaven as the place of reward after death for virtu- 

 ous lives lived on earth ; and indeed it may be 

 taken as the universal corollary to the universally 

 held belief in the immortality of the soul, even 

 though it may be only under the form of the final 

 stage in a cycle of purificatory transmigrations. 

 But among primitive peoples it is little more than 

 a dim and shadowy continuation of this present 

 world, the pale ghosts that inhabit it wearing the 

 form and fashion that they wore in life. The idea 

 of future retribution enters early into the moral 

 consciousness of man, but it would hardly be true 

 to say that it is everywhere present. The Teutonic 

 warrior had his war-horse and his armour laid in 

 his barrow that he might continue into the spirit- 

 world the joys of life, his Valhalla being but a 

 glorified extension of the warrior's life, just as the 

 Red Indian's paradise is but a richer and more 

 extensive hunting-ground. Yet the unseen life is 

 often but poor and cheerless compared with the 

 warm and actual world even in the Elysian fields 

 the shade of Achilles would gladly change places 

 with the meanest soldier in the Grecian host. 



The Koran adopts the Cabbalistic notion of seven 

 heavens, which rise above each other like the stages 

 of a building ; and it places the chief happiness of 

 heaven in the unrestricted and inexhaustible joys 

 of sense. The Cabbalistic writers divide these 

 seven heavens according to the successive degrees 

 of glory which they imply. The seventh is the 

 abode of God and of the highest order of angels ; 

 the sixth, fifth, fourth, and third are the succes- 

 sive abodes of the various grades of angels, arranged 

 according to the degrees of dignity. The second is 

 the region of the clouds, and the first the space 

 between the clouds and the earth. 



For the development of Jewish and Christian Escha- 

 tology, and the significance of the conception of heaven, 

 see the article HELL, under which the subject of future 

 rewards and punishments is discussed with some fullness. 



Hebbel, FRIEDRICH, lyrical and dramatic poet, 

 was born at Wesselburen, in Ditmarsh, 18th March 

 1813. After travelling in Germany, France, and 

 Italy, he settled at Vienna in 1846, where he mar- 

 ried the actress Christine Enghaus. He died at 

 Vienna, 13th December 1863. His principal works 

 are his Gedichte (2 vols. 1841-48), and several 

 dramas, the best among them being Judith ( 1840), 

 Maria Magdalena ( 1844), Agnes Berncmer (1855), 

 Gyges und sein Ring (1856), and his master- 

 piece, Die Nibelungen (1862). Hebbel had strong 

 dramatic talent, skill in drawing character, and 

 command of vigorous language, but no feeling 

 for beauty. His dramas are destitute of love and 

 joyousness ; they depict the revolt of passionate 

 natures, the frenzied riot of evil desires, and are 

 characterised by an almost daemonic vigour of 

 action. His collected works appeared in 12 vols. 

 (Hamburg) in 1866-68. See Biographies by Kuh 

 (1877) and Frankl (1884), and Hebbel s Tagebucher 

 (2 vols. 1887). 



He be, the goddess of youth, the daughter of 

 Zeus and Hera, was the wife of Hercules after he 



had been deified. She was the cupbearer in Olym- 

 pus, before Zeus conferred that office upon Gany- 

 mede ; but she always retained the power of 

 restoring the aged to the bloom of youth and 

 beauty. According to Apollodorus, she became the 

 mother of two sons by Hercules Alexiares and 

 Aniketos. In Homer she always appears as a 

 virgin. In Athens altars were erected to her con- 

 jointly with Hercules. In Rome she was wor- 

 shipped under the name of Juventas, and a temple 

 in her honour existed on the Capitoline Hill at the 

 time of Servius Tullius. Statues of Hebe are ex- 

 tremely rare ; she is to be recognised only by the 

 nectar-cup. All the world knows the masterpiece 

 of Canova. 



Heber, REGINALD, an English poet, and second 

 Bishop of Calcutta, was born at Malpas, Cheshire, 

 21st April 1783. It was as a student of Brasenose 

 College, Oxford, that he produced his prize poem 

 Palestine ( 1803), the only prize poem perhaps which 

 holds a place in English literature. In 1807 he was 

 inducted into the family -living at Hodnet, in Shrop- 

 shire. He was a frequent contributor to the 

 Quarterly Review, his political views being those of 

 a Tory and High Churchman, and in 1812 he pub- 

 lished a volume of Hymns. He was appointed 

 Bampton lecturer in 1815, a prebendary of St Asaph 

 in 1817, and in 1822 was elected preacher of Lin- 

 coln's Inn. In the following January he accepted 

 the see of Calcutta. The apostolic zeal with which 

 he conducted his episcopacy was suddenly ter- 

 minated by his death, of apoplexy, at Trichinopoly, 

 on 3d April 1826. He was a voluminous writer, 

 and published sermons, A Journey through India, 

 &c., and he edited Jeremy Taylor's Works (1822). 

 As a poet, his lame rests upon Palestine and 

 his Hymns (new ed. 1878), which include such 

 well-known favourites as ' Lord of Mercy and 

 of Might,' 'From Greenland's Icy Mountains,' 

 'Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty!' 'The 

 Son of God goes forth to War,' &c. See Lives by 

 his widow (1830) and G. Smith (1895). RICHARD 

 HEBER, his half-brother, was born in Westminster 

 in 1774, and died in 1833. He was a famous biblio- 

 maniac. Dibdin estimated his collection in England 

 at 105,000 vols., in addition to which he possessed 

 many thousands of books on the Continent, the 

 whole having cost him 180,000. 



Hubert, JACQUES RENE, commonly known as 

 Pere Duchesne, one of the most despicable char- 

 acters of the French Revolution, was born at 

 Alengon, in 1755. At an early age he went to 

 Paris as a servant, but was dismissed from more 

 than one situation for embezzling money. Soon 

 after the commencement of the Revolution he 

 became one of the most prominent members of 

 the extreme Jacobins ; and when this group 

 established Le Pere Duchesne newspaper, for 

 the purpose of crushing the constitutional paper 

 edited Iby Lemaire and bearing the same title, 

 Hebert was made editor of it. And he conducted 

 his paper with such reckless ribaldry as to make 

 himself a darling of the mob. In consequence of 

 the events of the 10th August he became a member 

 of the revolutionary council, and played a con- 

 spicuous part in the massacres of September. He 

 was one of the commission appointed to examine 

 Marie Antoinette, and his name will survive in 

 unending infamy for one foul and baseless charge 

 he brought against her. He and his associates, 

 called Hebertists or Enrages, were mainly instru- 

 mental in converting the church of Notre Dame 

 into a temple of Reason. But he went too fast 

 for Robespierre, who got rid of him through the 

 guillotine, 24th March 1W4. His whining coward- 

 ice on the scaffold earned him the jeers and insults 

 of the fickle mob. 



