(Saxon habban, nebben, to have, not to have), a colloquial expression signifying "hit or miss," and originally applied to anything that depended on chance. It hence came to be used as an invitation to reciprocal drinking.

HOCHÉ, LAZARE, one of the noblest spirits and ablest generals of the French Republic, was born of humble parents in 1768 at Montreuil, near Versailles. At the age of sixteen he enlisted, and his republican zeal, aided by his genuine military skill and knowledge, raised him so rapidly through the lower grades of the service, that at the early age of twenty-four he was entrusted with the command-in-chief of the army of the Moselle. He justified the high hopes he had inspired by defeating the Austrians in several engagements, and driving them out of Alsace. Incurring the suspicions of Robespierre, he was recalled from the frontiers and thrown into prison, and was only saved from the guillotine by the timely fall of that redoubted leader on the 9th Thermidor 1794. Released by the Convocation, he was sent into La Vendée to bring to a close the bloody war which the republic was then waging with the royalist peasantry of western France. By the noble chivalry and generosity of his character, as much as by strategic skill, he succeeded in pacifying La Vendée and Brittany. After accomplishing this task, in which the noblest blood of France had flowed like water, he was appointed to head the army of invasion which the French were organizing for the conquest of Ireland; but the fleet in which he embarked was destroyed or dispersed by storms, and Hoche was himself with difficulty saved. In the following year he was sent to the eastern frontier to act against Austria; and by a series of masterly manoeuvres he hemmed in the Austrian general Kray, and would have taken him and his whole army prisoners of war had not peace been declared. Soon after this he died suddenly at Wetzlar, not without suspicion of poison. This suspicion was very generally believed at the time, but nothing has ever transpired to give a colour to it; and it is quite unlikely that if there had been any real grounds for it, it would not, by this time, have been proved beyond a doubt. His death was regarded by his countrymen as a great national calamity; but they only understood the full import of the calamity when, as Napoleon's star rose higher and higher on the ascendant, they found that they had lost the only man in whom that great soldier had to fear an equal.

HOCUS-POCUS, a term applied to conjuror's tricks. According to Turner it was the name of an Anglo-Saxon magician; but others regard the two words as a corruption of the hoc est corpus used by priests in the mass.