Hudson

to 1860 he was rector of the Episcopal Church at
Litchfield, Conn. During the Civil War he served
from 1862 to 1865 as chaplain of the 1st New
York Volunteer Engineers. With his dirties as
chaplain he combined those of war-correspondent
for the New York Evening Post. A letter writ-
ten by him to the editor of the Post, which was
published on May 24, 1864, contained hostile
criticism of the military policy of Gen. B, F. But-
ler, his departmental commander. This resulted
in his detention under close arrest in the prison
camp of the departmental headquarters from
Sept. 19 till Nov. 8. He had certainly been guilty
of a breach of military discipline by his criticism
of a superior officer; and he had further aggra-
vated his offense by disregarding for more than
two months, on the plea of bad health, an order
to return to his regiment, after having been per-
mitted early in the summer to visit his family in
Massachusetts on the occasion of the illness and
subsequent death of one of his children. On the
other hand, General Butler acted illegally in
keeping an officer under arrest for so long a
period without trial or even the preferring of
charges. Hudson's version of the affair is set
forth with bitter scorn in a pamphlet entitled
A Chaplain's Campaign with General Butler
(1865), reprinted under the title, General But-
ler's Campaign on the Hudson (1883). General
Butler replied with equal acrimony in Official
Documents Relating to a "Chaplain's Campaign
(not) with General Butler" but in New York
(1865 ). The case was reviewed in February 1865
by General Grant, who, "without excusing Chap-
lain Hudson for his disobedience of orders," con-
demned General Butler, and granted Hudson
honorable discharge from the army.

In 1865 Hudson settled in Cambridge, Mass.,
and devoted his time to the work of lecturing
and writing on English literature, particularly
on Shakespeare. In 1872 he published in two vol-
umes Shakespeare, his Lije, Art, and Characters.
This work marked a great advance over the
Lectures of 1848, in scholarly mastery of the
field and in critical discrimination, at the same
time retaining the human interest and popular
appeal of the earlier work. Here and in the
"Harvard Edition" of Shakespeare, in twenty
volumes, published in 1880-81, Hudson appears
not as an original scholar adding to the sum of
our knowledge about Shakespeare, but as the
scholarly popularizer, and the esthetic critic.
So considered, his work was at the time of its
publication of a high order of excellence. Despite
the new knowledge which has accumulated dur-
ing half a century, and the consequent change in
methods of approach, his analyses of Shake-

Hudson

speare's characters still retain a significant value,
His editions of the plays, edited and revised by
later scholars, are still widely current under the
title of "The New Hudson Shakespeare." Be-
sides his work on Shakespeare, Hudson pub-
lished the following: Sernwns (18/4); English
in Schools: a Series oj Essays (1881); and
Studies in Wordsworth (1884). In 1927 a
bronze tablet was erected to his memory in the
Old Chapel of Middlebury College.

[Apart from the books cited above, the chief sources
of information about Hudson's life are: obituary notices
in Education, Mar. 1886, and in the Boston Transcript,
Jan. 18,^1886; a biographical introduction by A. J.
George, in Essays on English Studies by Henry N.
Hudson, LL.D. (1906); the general catalogue of Mid-
dlebury Coll.; and a pamphlet by Chas. B. Wright en-
titled The Place in Letters of Henry Norman Hudson
(p.p. 1915). A brief contemporary account of Hud-
son's early public lectures is given in the (7. S> Mag.
and Democratic Rev., Apr. 1845,] R.K.R.

HUDSON, MARY CLEMMER AMES [See
CLEMMER, MARY, 1839-1884],

HUDSON, THOMSON JAY (Feb. 22,1834-
May 26, 1903), author, was born at Windhatn,
Ohio, the son of John and Ruth (Pulsifer) Hud-
son. The early years of his life were spent on
his father's farm and in the schools of his native
town. He was destined by his father for the min-
istry and was given private tutoring in college
subjects with that end in view, but instead he
turned to law. He was admitted to the Cleveland
bar in 1857 and for the following three years
practised law at Mansfield, Ohio. He then moved
to Port Huron, Mich., where he began to practise
law, but soon turned to journalism. He was in
turn an editor of the Port Huron Commercial
Daily, of the Detroit Daily Union, and of the De-
troit Evening News. In 1866 he was a candidate
for the United States Senate but was defeated. In
1877 he became the Washington, D. C, corre-
spondent for the Scripps syndicate. Three years
later his career took another decided turn when
he entered the United States Patent Office and
from 1886 until 1893 he held the post of chief
examiner.

In the meantime he had become increasingly
interested in psychology and psychical phenom-
ena, and in 1893 he published his best-known
work, The Law of Psychic Phenomena. Over a
hundred thousand copies of this volume were
sold and it served to popularize both him and his
subject to such a degree that he resigned from
the Patent Office and devoted himsdf entirely to
lecturing and writing. He is largely responsible
for making the terms "subjective mind" and
"suggestion" household words in America. His
"hypothesis" was that all mental and psychic
phenomena could be explained as the effects of

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