SIR JOHN HILL,
WITH
THE ROYAL SOCIETY, FIELDING, SMART, &c.
A Parallel between Orator Henley and Sir John Hill—his love of the Science of Botany, with the fate of his “Vegetable System”—ridicules scientific Collectors; his “Dissertation on Royal Societies,” and his “Review of the Works of the Royal Society”—compliments himself that he is NOT a Member—successful in his attacks on the Experimentalists, but loses his spirit in encountering the Wits—“The Inspector”—a paper war with Fielding—a literary stratagem—battles with Smart and Woodward—Hill appeals to the Nation for the Office of Keeper of the Sloane Collection—closes his life by turning Empiric—Some Epigrams on Hill—his Miscellaneous Writings.
In the history of literature we discover some who have opened their career with noble designs, and with no deficient powers, yet unblest with stoic virtues, having missed, in their honourable labours, those rewards they had anticipated, they have exhibited a sudden transition of character, and have left only a name proverbial for its disgrace.
Our own literature exhibits two extraordinary characters, indelibly marked by the same traditional odium. The wit and acuteness of Orator Henley, and the science and vivacity of the versatile Sir John Hill, must separate them from those who plead the same motives for abjuring all moral restraint, without having ever furnished the world with a single instance that they were capable of forming nobler views.
This orator and this knight would admit of a close parallel;[281] both as modest in their youth as afterwards remarkable for their effrontery. Their youth witnessed the same devotedness to study, with the same inventive and enterprising genius. Hill projected and pursued a plan of botanical travels, to form a collection of rare plants: the patronage he received was too 363 limited, and he suffered the misfortune of having anticipated the national taste for the science of botany by half a century. Our young philosopher’s valuable “Treatise on Gems,” from Theophrastus, procured for him the warm friendship of the eminent members of the Royal Society. To this critical period of the lives of Henley and of Hill, their resemblance is striking; nor is it less from the moment the surprising revolution in their characters occurred.
Pressed by the wants of life, they lost its decencies. Henley attempted to poise himself against the University; Hill against the Royal Society. Rejected by these learned bodies, both these Cains of literature, amid their luxuriant ridicule of eminent men, still evince some claims to rank among them. The one prostituted his genius in his “Lectures;” the other, in his “Inspectors.” Never two authors were more constantly pelted with epigrams, or buffeted in literary quarrels. They have met with the same fate; covered with the same odium. Yet Sir John Hill, this despised man, after all the fertile absurdities of his literary life, performed more for the improvement of the “Philosophical Transactions,” and was the cause of diffusing a more general taste for the science of botany, than any other contemporary. His real ability extorts that regard which his misdirected ingenuity, instigated by vanity, and often by more worthless motives, had lost for him in the world.[282]
At the time that Hill was engaged in several large compilations for the booksellers, his employers were desirous that the honours of an F.R.S. should ornament his title-page. This versatile genius, however, during these graver works, had suddenly emerged from his learned garret, and, in the shape of a fashionable lounger, rolled in his chariot from the Bedford to Ranelagh; was visible at routs; and sate at the theatre a tremendous arbiter of taste, raising about him tumults and divisions;[283] and in his “Inspectors,” a periodical paper which he published in the London Daily Advertiser, retailed all the great matters relating to himself, and all the little matters he collected in his rounds relating to others. Among other personalities, he indulged his satirical fluency on the scientific collectors. The Antiquarian Society were twitted as medal-scrapers and antediluvian knife-grinders; conchologists were turned into cockleshell merchants; and the naturalists were made to record pompous histories of stickle-hacks and cockchafers. Cautioned by Martin Folkes, President of the Royal Society,[284] not to attempt his election, our enraged comic philosopher, 365 who had preferred his jests to his friends, now discovered that he had lost three hundred at once. Hill could not obtain three signatures to his recommendation. Such was the real, but, as usual, not the ostensible, motive of his formidable attack on the Royal Society. He produced his “Dissertation on Royal Societies, in a letter from a Sclavonian nobleman to his friend,” 1751; a humorous prose satire, exhibiting a ludicrous description of a tumultuous meeting at the Royal Society, contrasted with the decorum observed in the French Academy; and moreover, he added a conversazione in a coffee-house between some of the members.
Such was the declaration of war, in a first act of hostility; but the pitched-battle was fought in “A Review of the Works of the Royal Society, in eight parts,” 1751. This literary satire is nothing less than a quarto volume, resembling, in its form and manner, the Philosophical Transactions themselves; printed as if for the convenience of members to enable them to bind the “Review” with the work reviewed. Voluminous pleasantry incurs the censure of that tedious trifling which it designs to expose. In this literary facetia, however, no inconsiderable knowledge is interspersed with the ridicule. Perhaps Hill might have recollected the successful attempts of Stubbe on the Royal Society, who contributed that curious knowledge which he pretended the Royal Society wanted; and with this knowledge he attempted to combine the humour of Dr. King.[285]
Hill’s rejection from the Royal Society, to another man would have been a puddle to step over; but he tells a story, and cleanly passes on, with impudent adroitness.[286]
Hill, however, though he used all the freedom of a satirist, by exposing many ridiculous papers, taught the Royal Society a more cautious selection. It could, however, obtain no forgiveness from the parties it offended; and while the respectable men whom Hill had the audacity to attack, Martin Folkes, the friend and successor of Newton, and Henry Baker, the naturalist, were above his censure,—his own reputation remained in the hands of his enemies. While Hill was gaining over the laughers on his side, that volatile populace soon discovered that the fittest object to be laughed at was our literary Proteus himself.
The most egregious egotism alone could have induced this 367 versatile being, engaged in laborious works, to venture to give the town the daily paper of The Inspector, which he supported for about two years. It was a light scandalous chronicle all the week, with a seventh-day sermon. His utter contempt for the genius of his contemporaries, and the bold conceit of his own, often rendered the motley pages amusing. The Inspector became, indeed, the instrument of his own martyrdom; but his impudence looked like magnanimity; for he endured, with undiminished spirit, the most biting satires, the most wounding epigrams, and more palpable castigations.[287] His 368 vein of pleasantry ran more freely in his attacks on the Royal Society than in his other literary quarrels. When Hill had not to banter ridiculous experimentalists, but to encounter wits, his reluctant spirit soon bowed its head. Suddenly even his pertness loses its vivacity; he becomes drowsy with dulness, and, conscious of the dubiousness of his own cause, he skulks away terrified: he felt that the mask of quackery and impudence which he usually wore was to be pulled off by the hands now extended against him.
A humorous warfare of wit opened between Fielding, in his Covent-Garden Journal, and Hill, in his Inspector. The Inspector had made the famous lion’s head, at the Bedford, which the genius of Addison and Steele had once animated, the receptacle of his wit; and the wits asserted, of this now inutile lignum, that it was reduced to a mere state of blockheadism. Fielding occasionally gave a facetious narrative of a paper war between the forces of Sir Alexander Drawcansir, the literary hero of the Covent-Garden Journal, and the army of Grub-street; it formed an occasional literary satire. Hill’s lion, no longer Addison’s or Steele’s, is not described without humour. Drawcansir’s “troops are kept in awe by a strange mixed monster, not much unlike the famous chimera of old. For while some of our Reconnoiterers tell us that this monster has the appearance of a lion, others assure us that his ears are much longer than those of that generous beast.”
Hill ventured to notice this attack on his “blockhead;” and, as was usual with him, had some secret history to season his defence with.
“The author of ‘Amelia,’ whom I have only once seen, told me, at that accidental meeting, he held the present set of writers in the utmost contempt; and that, in his character of Sir Alexander Drawcansir, he should treat them in the most unmerciful manner. He assured me he had always excepted me; and after honouring me with some encomiums, he proceeded to mention a conduct which would be, he said, useful to both; this was, the amusing our readers with a mock fight; giving blows that would not hurt, and sharing the advantage in silence.”[288]
Thus, by reversing the fact, Hill contrived to turn aside the frequent stories against him by a momentary artifice, arresting or dividing public opinion. The truth was, more probably, as Fielding relates it, and the story, as we shall see, then becomes quite a different affair. At all events, Hill incurred the censure of the traitor who violates a confidential intercourse.
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And if he lies not, must at least betray. Pope. |
Fielding lost no time in reply. To have brought down the Inspector from his fastnesses into the open field, was what our new General only wanted: a battle was sure to be a victory. Our critical Drawcansir has performed his part, with his indifferent puns, but his natural facetiousness.
“It being reported to the General that a hill must be levelled, before the Bedford coffee-house could be taken, orders were given; but this was afterwards found to be a mistake; for this hill was only a little paltry dunghill, and had long before been levelled with the dirt. The General was then informed of a report which had been spread by his lowness, the Prince of Billingsgate, in the Grub-street army, that his Excellency had proposed, by a secret treaty with that Prince, to carry on the war only in appearance, and so to betray the common cause; upon which his Excellency said with a smile:—‘If the betrayer of a private treaty could ever deserve the least credit, yet his Lowness here must proclaim himself either a liar or a fool. None can doubt but that he is the former, if he hath feigned this treaty; and I think few would scruple to call him the latter, if he had rejected it.’ The General then declared the fact stood thus:—‘His Lowness came to my tent on an affair of his own. I treated him, though a commander in the enemy’s camp, with civility, and even kindness. I told him, with the utmost good-humour, I should attack his Lion; and that he might, if he pleased, in the same manner defend him; from which, said I, no great loss can happen on either side—’”
The Inspector slunk away, and never returned to the challenge.
During his inspectorship, he invented a whimsical literary stratagem, which ended in his receiving a castigation more lasting than the honours performed on him at Ranelagh by the cane of a warm Hibernian. Hill seems to have been desirous of abusing certain friends whom he had praised in the Inspectors; so volatile, like the loves of coquettes, are the literary friendships of the “Scribleri.” As this could not be done with any propriety there, he published the first number of a new paper, entitled The Impertinent. Having thus relieved his private feelings, he announced the cessation of this new enterprise in his Inspectors, and congratulated the public on the ill reception it had given to the Impertinent, applauding them for their having shown by this that “their indignation was superior to their curiosity.” With impudence all his own, he adds—“It will not be easy to say too much in favour of the candour of the town, which has despised a piece that cruelly and unjustly attacked Mr. Smart the poet.” What innocent soul could have imagined that The Impertinent and The Inspector were the same individual? The style is a specimen of persiflage; the thin sparkling thought; the pert vivacity, that looks like wit without wit; the glittering bubble, that rises in emptiness;—even its author tells us, in The Inspector, it is “the most pert, the most pretending,” &c.[289]
Smart, in return for our Janus-faced critic’s treatment, balanced the amount of debtor and creditor with a pungent Dunciad The Hilliad. Hill, who had heard of the rod in pickle, anticipated the blow, to break its strength; and, according to his adopted system, introduced himself and Smart, with a story of his having recommended the bard to his bookseller, “who took him into salary on my approbation. I betrayed him into the profession, and having starved upon it, he has a right to abuse me.” This story was formally denied by an advertisement from Newbery, the bookseller.
“The Hilliad” is a polished and pointed satire. The hero is thus exhibited on earth, and in heaven.
On earth, “a tawny sibyl,” with “an old striped curtain—”
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And tatter’d tapestry o’er her shoulders hung— Her loins with patchwork cincture were begirt, That more than spoke diversity of dirt. Twain were her teeth, and single was her eye— Cold palsy shook her head—— |
with “moon-struck madness,” awards him all the wealth and fame she could afford him for sixpence; and closes her orgasm with the sage admonition—
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The chequer’d world’s before thee; go, farewell! Beware of Irishmen; and learn to spell! |
But in heaven, among the immortals, never was an unfortunate hero of the vindicative Muses so reduced into nothingness! Jove, disturbed at the noise of this thing of wit, exclaims, that nature had never proved productive in vain before, but now,
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On mere privation she bestow’d a frame, And dignified a nothing with a name; A wretch devoid of use, of sense, of grace, The insolvent tenant of incumber’d space! |
Pallas hits off the style of Hill, as
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The neutral nonsense, neither false nor true— Should Jove himself, in calculation mad, Still negatives to blank negations add; How could the barren ciphers ever breed; But nothing still from nothing would proceed. Raise, or depress, or magnify, or blame, Inanity will ever be the same. |
But Phœbus shows there may still be something produced from inanity.
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E’en blank privation has its use and end— From emptiness, how sweetest music flows! How absence, to possession adds a grace, And modest vacancy, to all gives place. So from Hillario, some effect may spring; E’en him—that slight penumbra of a thing! |
The careless style of the fluent Inspectors, beside their audacity, brought Hill into many scrapes. He called Woodward, the celebrated harlequin, “the meanest of all characters.” This Woodward resented in a pamphlet-battle, in which Hill was beaten at all points.[290] But Hill, or the Monthly Reviewer, who might be the same person, for that journal writes with the tenderness of a brother of whatever relates to our hero, pretends that the Inspector only meant, that “the character of Harlequin (if a thing so unnatural and ridiculous ought to be called a character) was the meanest on the stage!”[291]
I will here notice a characteristic incident in Hill’s literary life, of which the boldness and the egotism is scarcely paralleled, even by Orator Henley. At the time the Sloane Collection of Natural History was purchased, to form a part of our grand national establishment, the British Museum, Hill offered himself, by public advertisement, in one of his Inspectors, as the properest person to be placed at its head. The world will condemn him for his impudence. The most reasonable objection against his mode of proceeding would be, that the thing undid itself; and that the very appearance, by public advertisement, was one motive why so confident an offer should be rejected. Perhaps, after all, Hill only wanted to advertise himself.
But suppose that Hill was the man he represents himself to be, and he fairly challenges the test, his conduct only appears eccentric, according to routine. Unpatronised and unfriended men are depressed, among other calamities, with their quiescent modesty; but there is a rare spirit in him who dares to claim favours, which he thinks his right, in the most public manner. I preserve, in the note, the most striking passages of this extraordinary appeal.[292]
At length, after all these literary quarrels, Hill survived his literary character. He had written himself down to so low a degree, that whenever he had a work for publication, his employers stipulated, in their contracts, that the author should conceal his name; a circumstance not new among a certain race of writers.[293] But the genius of Hill was not annihilated 375 by being thrown down so violently on his mother earth; like Anthæus, it rose still fresh; and like Proteus, it assumed new forms.[294] Lady Hill and the young Hills were claimants on his industry far louder than the evanescent epigrams which darted around him: these latter, however, were more numerous than ever dogged an author in his road to literary celebrity.[295] His science, his ingenuity, and his impudence once more practised on the credulity of the public, with the innocent quackery of attributing all medicinal virtues to British herbs. 376 He made many walk out, who were too sedentary; they were delighted to cure headaches by feverfew tea; hectic fevers by the daisy; colics by the leaves of camomile, and agues by its flowers. All these were accompanied by plates of the plants, with the Linnæan names.[296] This was preparatory to the Essences of Sage, Balsams of Honey, and Tinctures of Valerian. Simple persons imagined they were scientific botanists in their walks, with Hill’s plates in their hands. But one of the newly-discovered virtues of British herbs was, undoubtedly, that of placing the discoverer in a chariot.
In an Apology for the character of Sir John Hill, published after his death, where he is painted with much beauty of colouring, and elegance of form, the eruptions and excrescences of his motley physiognomy, while they are indicated—for they were too visible to be entirely omitted in anything pretending to a resemblance—are melted down, and even touched into a grace. The Apology is not unskilful, but the real purpose appears in the last page; where we are informed that Lady Hill, fortunately for the world, possesses all his valuable recipes and herbal remedies!