HELYOT, PIERRE (1660-1716), Franciscan friar and historian, was born at Paris in January 1660, of supposed English ancestry. After spending his youth in study, he entered in his twenty-fourth year the convent of the third order of St Francis, founded at Picpus, near Paris, by his uncle Jérôme Helyot, canon of St Sepulchre. There he took the name of Père Hippolyte. Two journeys to Rome on monastic business afforded him the opportunity of travelling over most of Italy; and after his final return he saw much of France, while acting as secretary to various provincials of his order there. Both in Italy and France he was engaged in collecting materials for his great work, which occupied him about twenty-five years, _L'Histoire des ordres monastiques, religieux, et militaires, et des congrégations séculières, de l'un et de l'autre sexe, qui ont été établies jusqu'à présent_, published in 8 volumes in 1714-1721. Helyot died on the 5th of January 1716, before the fifth volume appeared, but his friend Maximilien Bullot completed the edition. Helyot's only other noteworthy work is _Le Chrétien mourant_ (1695).
The _Histoire_ is a work of first importance, being the great repertory of information for the general history of the religious orders up to the end of the 17th century. It is profusely illustrated by large plates exhibiting the dress of the various orders, and in the edition of 1792 the plates are coloured. It was translated into Italian (1737) and into German (1753). The material has been arranged in dictionary form in Migne's _Encyclopédie théologique_, under the title "Dictionnaire des orders religieux" (4 vols., 1858).
HEMANS, FELICIA DOROTHEA (1793-1835), English poet, was born in Duke Street, Liverpool, on the 25th of September 1793. Her father, George Browne, of Irish extraction, was a merchant in Liverpool, and her mother, whose maiden name was Wagner, was the daughter of the Austrian and Tuscan consul at Liverpool. Felicia, the fifth of seven children, was scarcely seven years old when her father failed in business, and retired with his family to Gwrych, near Abergele, Denbighshire; and there the young poet and her brothers and sisters grew up in a romantic old house by the sea-shore, and in the very midst of the mountains and myths of Wales. Felicia's education was desultory. Books of chronicle and romance, and every kind of poetry, she read with avidity; and she also studied Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German. She played both harp and piano, and cared especially for the simple national melodies of Wales and Spain. In 1808, when she was only fourteen, a quarto volume of her _Juvenile Poems_, was published by subscription, and was harshly criticized in the _Monthly Review_. Two of her brothers were fighting in Spain under Sir John Moore; and Felicia, fired with military enthusiasm, wrote _England and Spain, or Valour and Patriotism_, a poem afterwards translated into Spanish. Her second volume, _The Domestic Affections and other Poems_, appeared in 1812, on the eve of her marriage to Captain Alfred Hemans. She lived for some time at Daventry, where her husband was adjutant of the Northamptonshire militia. About this time her father went to Quebec on business and died there; and, after the birth of her first son, she and her husband went to live with her mother at Bronwylfa, a house near St Asaph. Here during the next six years four more children--all boys--were born; but in spite of domestic cares arid failing health she still read and wrote indefatigably. Her poem entitled _The Restoration of Works of Art to Italy_ was published in 1816, her _Modern Greece_ in 1817, and in 1818 _Translations from Camoens and other Poets_.
