Abraham Holland (died 18 February 1626) was an English poet. He was the son of the translator, Philemon Holland, and the brother of the printer, Henry Holland. His best known work is the Naumachia, a poem on the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.
Abraham Holland was one of the ten children of the translator Philemon Holland and his wife, Anne Bott (1555–1627), the daughter of William Bott (alias Peyton) of Perry Hall, Handsworth, Staffordshire. Holland was a grandson of the Marian exile, John Holland (died 1578), rector of Great Dunmow, Essex. Holland had six brothers and three sisters, including the printer Henry Holland, the print publisher Compton Holland (died 1622),[1] William Holland (1592–1632), a surgeon whose treatise on gout, Gutta Podagrica, was published posthumously in 1633, and Elizabeth Holland, who married a London merchant, William Angell.[2]
Another poem by Holland, the satiricalA continued just inquisition against paper persecutors, was appended to A Scourge for Paper-Persecutors (1625). The latter was a reprint by Holland's brother, Henry, of John Davies of Hereford's Scourge of Folly of 1611.[7]
Death and legacy
Holland died of the plague on 18 February 1626,[8] perhaps at Chelsea, where he appears to have lived for a time.[9] Following his death his brother Henry published a collection of his poems, entitling it Hollandi Posthuma. Included in it were an elegy on King James, an elegy on Henry de Vere, 18th Earl of Oxford, a lengthy poem on the 1625 plague in London, an epistle to his father, Philemon Holland, who was in ill health at the time, as well as various epistles, translations of the Psalms in verse, and his own epitaph.[10] The collection was described as having been delivered to Henry on the day of Abraham Holland's death.[11]
Some of Holland's poems were reprinted in the years following his death. The Naumachia was reprinted in some copies of the Posthuma, and in some copies of his father Philemon Holland's translation of Xenophon's Cyropaedia printed in 1632. Holland's 1625 poem on the plague from the Posthuma, under a new title, London Looke-Backe, was appended to Salomon's Pest-House or Towre-Royall...By I. D. (1630).[12]
Ashmole MS 36–7 f. 157 contains a poem by Holland addressed 'To my honest father, Mr. Michael Drayton, and my new, yet loved friend, Mr. Will. Browne'.[13][14]
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