Holley

died and was buried at sea. He was survived by
his wife and their two children.

[Chas. Caldwell, A Discourse on the Genius and
Character of the Rev. Horace Holley (1828); John
Pierpont, A Discourse Delivered in Hollis St. Church,
Boston, Sept. 2, 1827, Occasioned by the Death of
Horace Holley (1827); Jas. S. Loring, The Hundred
Boston Orators (1852) ; Robert Davidson, Hist, of the
Presbyt. Church in Ky. (1847); Robert Peter, Tran-
sylvania Univ. (1896); F. B. Dexter, Biog. Sketches of
the Grads. of Yale Coll., vol. V (1911).] T.B.M.

HOLLEY, MARIETTA (July 16, i8j|6-Mar.
i, 1926), humorist, poet, essayist, novelist, was
the daughter of John B. Holley, a farmer living
on the road between Adams and Pierrepont Man-
or in Jefferson County, N. Y., and Mary (Taber)
Holley. In the farmhouse—on the site of which
five generations of the Holley family had lived—
Marietta Holley was born, and in the immediate
vicinity she spent the greater part of her life.
Her only public education, gained at a nearby
school, was supplemented by a further period of
study at home, and by private tutoring in French
and music. She showed considerable talent in
drawing, and for many years she gave piano les-
sons to the children of the neighborhood. Grad-
ually, however, her interest in writing, which
since childhood had manifested itself in sketches
and verses, came to predominate. Her literary
output during the forty-one years from the pub-
lication of My Opinions and Betsy Bobbet's
(1873), to Josiah Allen on the Woman Question
(1914), was very large, and in combination with
her numerous sketches and poems for the lead-
ing magazines of the country, established her
pen name of "Josiah Allen's Wife" as a house-
hold word in the United States, while the fame
of her Samantha books spread even to foreign
countries. "Miss Marietta Holley has done
much to add to the gaiety of nations/' writes a
reviewer in the Critic of January 1905. "As
'Josiah Allen's Wife/ she has entertained as
large an audience, I should say, as has been en-
tertained by the humor of Mark Twain. Miss
Holley's humor is homely but none the less at-
tractive to thousands of readers. Its very home-
liness is its charm." The droll, imperturbable
sanity of Samantha, busy over her cooking and
the manifold practical duties of her beloved
household, was offset, in a manner delightful to
countless women readers, by a recurring rest-
lessness which resulted either in outbursts against
the limitations imposed by masculine tradition
on her sex, or in excursions with her husband,
Josiah Allen, to the outside world—whether to
the Philadelphia Centennial, the Chicago World's
Fair, the St Louis Exposition, the races at Sara-
toga, or beyond the seas to Europe and Hawaii.
Whatever the context, her comments are filled

Holley

with homespun metaphor, abounding in awk-
ward aphorisms. "You have to hold up the ham-
mer of a personal incident to drive home the nail
of Truth and have it clench and hold fast," says
Samantha; and the close reader of Marietta Hol-
ley is aware that the authoress is here expressing
in Samantha's clumsy vernacular one of her own
basic theories of writing. But it is in Samantha's
philippics against the liquor traffic, white slav-
ery, and male corruption and stupidity in govern-
ment that it is possible to identify most complete-
ly the character of Josiah Allen's Wife with that
of the author. Miss Holley was a friend of Su-
san B. Anthony and Frances E. Willard [qq.v.'],
both of whom were deeply indebted to her for the
valuable propaganda of the Samantha books and
of her other writings on the subjects of woman's
suffrage and temperance. Samantha, standing
before her various books in the library at the
Chicago World's Fair, exclaims in a moment of
unguarded enthusiasm, "It is dretful fond of me
the nation is, and well it may be. I have stood
up for it time and agin, and then I've done a
sight for it in the way of advisin* and backin' it
up," perhaps giving in these words a not unfair
appraisal of the literary achievement of her cre-
ator.

[See Who's Who in America, 1924-25 J J- A. Had-
dock, The Growth of a Century: As Illustrated in the
Hist, of Jefferson County (1895) ; R. A. Oakes, Cental
and Family Hist, of the County of Jefferson, N. Y.
(1905) ; Gazetteer of Jefferson County, N. Y. (1890),
ed. by Hamilton Child; F. E. Willard and M. A. Liver-
more, A Woman of the Century (1893) ; N. Y. Times,
Mar. 2, 1926. The date of birth was supplied by the
town clerk of Ellisburg, Jefferson County, N. Y.]

E.M.Jr.

HOLLEY, MYRON (Apr. 29, i;79-Mar. 4,
1841), Abolitionist, born at Salisbury, Conn.,
was the son of Luther and Sarah (Dakin) Hol-
ley and by family tradition a direct descendant
of Edmund Halley, the English astronomer.
Horace Holley [q&."\ was his younger brother.
In 1799 he graduated from Williams College and
began the study of law in the office of Judge Kent
at Cooperstown, N. Y. In 1802 he practised law
at Salisbury, and in the following year he moved
to Canandaigua in New York. There he aban-
doned the law, and having purchased the stock
of Bemis, a local merchant, he became the book-
seller for the village and the surrounding coun-
try. In 1804 he married Sallie House who bore
him six daughters. Elected in 1816 to represent
Canandaigua in the General Assembly, he be-
came deeply interested in the projected Erie
Canal and was appointed one of the canal com-
missioners. He acted as treasurer of the com-
mission and expended more than $2,500,000 for
the state. Because of the method of the disbur$e-

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