The Life of Sir Rowland Hill and the History of Penny Postage, Vol. 1 (of 2)

by Sir Rowland Hill; George Birkbeck Norman Hill

CHAPTER I.

Rowland Hill, the third son of Thomas Wright Hill and Sarah Lea, his wife, was born at Kidderminster on the third day of December, 1795. On both sides he sprang from families which belonged to the middle-class, but which, by the time of his birth, had somewhat come down in the world. When he was presented with the freedom of the City of London a few months before his death, the Chamberlain informed him that he belonged to a line which already twice before had received that high distinction. Whether he could claim kindred with Sir Rowland Hill of Queen Elizabeth’s time, and with Sir Rowland Hill, the famous soldier of the Peninsular War, I have no means of knowing. In a fire which sixty years ago burnt down part of his father’s house, many family deeds were destroyed, some of which, he informed me, went back to the age of the Tudors. He was not, however, without ancestors, who justly raised in him a strong feeling of pride. His father’s mother, Sarah Symonds, “had a common descent with the family of Symons, or Symeon, of Pyrton, the heiress of which branch married John Hampden.”[4] His father, who had many kinsmen of the name of Butler, had been told in his youth that he was related by blood to the author of “Hudibras.”[5] With these two famous men his connection was but remote. But both father and mother could tell the boy of nearer and undoubted ancestors, who had shown, some of them, strong independence of character, and one or two a noble spirit of self-sacrifice. In the eloquent words of Romilly, he might have said that “his father left his children no other inheritance than the habits of industry, the example of his own virtuous life, an hereditary detestation of tyranny and injustice, and an ardent zeal in the cause of civil and religious freedom.” With perfect truthfulness he might have applied these words to his mother also. The detestation of tyranny and injustice, and the ardent zeal in the cause of civil and religious freedom were, indeed, hereditary, in most of the branches of his family. They were chiefly old Puritan stocks, with much of the narrowness, but all the integrity of the best of the Nonconformists.

His father had received a hurt in defending a house against the brutal mob which, in the year 1791, burned down in Birmingham the chapels and the dwellings of unoffending dissenters. His grandfather, James Hill, had shown his attachment to civil liberty in a curious way. He was a baker in Kidderminster—“a substantial freeholder,” as his son described him. He was descended from a considerable landowner who had married twice, and had left the children of his first wife very much to shift for themselves. One of them had settled in trade in Kidderminster.[6] James Hill was his grandson. In his time the bakers all heated their ovens with faggots, which they bought of the neighbouring squire. An election for the county came on; the squire was one of the candidates, and the steward asked James Hill for his vote. “My father,” his son records, “could not bring himself to the expected compliance. The result was that at the next faggot-harvest[7] his application was refused, and he was thus put to great inconvenience.” The baker, however, was an ingenious man. Coals were cheap if faggots were dear. He began by trying a mixture of coals and wood. He found, by repeated trials, that he could go on lessening the quantity of faggots and increasing the quantity of coal. Other bakers profited by his experience, and the faggots now lacked purchasers. “Applications were made to him to know if he had no room for faggots, from the quarter which had refused the supply.”[8] James Hill’s brother, John, had enrolled himself as a volunteer against the Young Pretender in 1745; for, like a famous brother-volunteer, Fielding’s Tom Jones, “he had some heroic ingredients in his composition, and was a hearty well-wisher to the glorious cause of liberty and of the Protestant religion.” He was once summoned to Worcester to serve on a jury, when he alone of the twelve jurymen refused a bribe. The judge, coming to hear of this, praised him highly, and whenever he went the same circuit asked whether he was to have the pleasure of meeting “the honest juror.” Later on in life he became, like Faraday, a Sandemanian, and was bound by conscience to a kind of practical communism. He died in the year 1810, at the age of ninety-one, and so was well known by Rowland Hill and his brothers. It is a striking fact that there should still be living men who can well remember one who volunteered against the Young Pretender.

James Hill’s wife was the grand-daughter of a medical practitioner at Shrewsbury of the name of Symonds, who had married Miss Millington, the only sister of a wealthy lawyer of that town. An election for the borough came on. The doctor refused to place his vote at the disposal of his rich brother-in-law, the attorney. “The consequence is,” writes Thomas Hill “that Millington’s Hospital now stands a monument of my great-grandfather’s persistence and his brother-in-law’s implacability. Of this privation,” he adds, “my mother used to speak with very good temper. She said the hospital was a valuable charity, and she believed that no descendant of her grandfather’s was the less happy for having missed a share of the fortune bestowed upon the hospital.” Through this lady Rowland Hill was related to the Rev. Joshua Symonds, the friend and correspondent of Howard and Wilberforce.[9] Such were the worthies he could undoubtedly boast of on his father’s side. There is no man among them whom the world would reckon as famous; and yet I remember how proud I felt as a mere child when my father first told me of the “honest juror,” and of the forefather who had lost a fortune by his vote. To such feelings as these Rowland must have been susceptible in a singular degree.

The story of his mother’s ancestors is more romantic, but, perhaps, even more affords a just cause for honest pride. Her grandmother’s name was Sarah Simmons. She had been left an orphan at an early age, and was heiress to a considerable fortune. She was brought up by an uncle and aunt, who were severe disciplinarians, even for the time in which they lived. They tried to force her to marry a man for whom she had no liking, and, when she refused, subjected her to close confinement. She escaped from their house in the habit of a countrywoman, with a soldier’s coat thrown over it. In those days, and much later also, poor women in wet weather often wore the coats of men. She set out to walk to Birmingham, a distance of some fifteen miles. On the road she was overtaken by one of her uncle’s servants, mounted on horseback, who asked of her whether she had been passed by a young lady, whose appearance he described. She replied that no such person had passed her, and the man rode away, leaving her rejoicing at the completeness of her disguise. She reached Birmingham, and there supported herself by spinning. To her fortune she never laid claim. At the end of two years she married a working man named Davenport. For thirteen years they lived a happy life, when a fever broke out in the town, and carried off a great number of people. One of her neighbours died among the rest. The alarm was so great that no one was found daring enough to go near the dead man’s house. Mrs. Davenport, fearful that his unburied body might spread the pestilence still more widely through the neighbourhood, herself ordered his coffin, and with her own hands laid him in it. Her devotion cost her her life. In a few days this generous woman was herself swept away by the fever. Her husband never held up his head after her death, and in about a year was himself carried to his grave. They left four children behind them; the eldest a girl of thirteen. She showed herself the worthy child of such a mother. From her she had learnt how to spin, and by her spinning, aided no doubt by that charity which the poor so bountifully show to the poor, she managed to support herself and her brothers until the two boys were old enough to be apprenticed to trades. Then she went out to service in a farm-house. She married her master’s son, whose name was William Lea. He had been called out to serve in the militia when it was raised on the landing of the Young Pretender. He, like John Hill, the volunteer, lived till he was past ninety, and, like him, was known by kinsmen who are still living. Once he saved a poor old woman from death by drowning, to which she had been sentenced on a charge of witchcraft by a brutal mob. Where the Birmingham cattle-market now is, there was of old a piece of water known as the Moat. In it he saw the unhappy woman struggling for her life, and surrounded by a crowd as cruel as it was ignorant. Being a powerful man he easily forced his way through, leapt into the water, and brought the poor creature to land. He took her home and kept her in his house for some days till she had recovered her strength. Mrs. Lea, according to her daughter, was a woman of considerable information. She had been taught by her mother by word of mouth as they sat spinning together, and she, in her turn, in the same way taught her daughter. Her views of political events were much wider and more liberal than those of most of the people round her. Her daughter often heard her condemn the harsh policy of the mother-country towards our settlements in America, and foretell as the result the separation between the two that soon followed. She had had too heavy a burthen of care thrown on her when she was still a child, and her health broke down almost before she had reached middle life. She died when her daughter Sarah, Rowland Hill’s mother, was but fifteen. The young girl had for some years, during her mother’s long illness, taken upon herself the chief part of all the household duties. At the same time she had been a most devoted nurse. For most of her life she was troubled with wakefulness. She had, she said, formed the habit when she was a mere child, and used to lie awake in the night fearing that her sick mother might require her services. She had a brother not unworthy of her. He settled in Haddington, where the name of Bailie Lea was long held in respect. When the cholera visited that town in 1832 he was found “fearlessly assisting all who stood in want of aid.” In the houses on both sides of him the dreadful disorder raged, and at length his own servant was struck down. The old man showed no signs of fear, but bore himself as became the grandson of the woman who had lost her life by her devotion to the public good when the fever raged in Birmingham.

In the short account that I have thus given of Rowland Hill’s kindred, there is seen much of that strong sense of duty, that integrity, that courage, and that persistency which in so high a degree distinguished him even from his very childhood. There are but few signs shown, however, of that boldness of thought and fertility of mind which were no less his mark. These he inherited from his father. Thomas Wright Hill was, indeed, as his son said of him, a man of a very unusual character. I have never come across his like, either in the world of men or books. He had a simplicity which would have made him shine even in the pages of Goldsmith. He had an inventiveness, and a disregard for everything that was conventional, that would have admirably fitted him for that country where kings were philosophers, or philosophers were kings. He had, his friends used to say, every sense but common-sense. He was the most guileless of men. He lived fourscore years and eight, and at the end of his long life he trusted his fellow-men as much as he had at the beginning. His lot had been for many years a hard one. His difficulties had been great—such as might have well-nigh broken the heart of many a man. “If ever,” he once wrote, “that happy day shall arrive when we can pay off every account as presented, we should fancy ourselves in a terrestrial Paradise.” He longs “to accelerate the arrival of that blessed hour, if that be ever to come, when I shall be able to say, ‘I owe no man anything but love.’” Yet he had always been cheerful. When death one winter came upon his household, and carried off his youngest son, he wrote, “Christmas, for the first time, as far as I can remember, comes without a smile.” He had by this time seen sixty-eight Christmases, and at one period of his life, poverty had been an unfailing guest at his board. He had inherited from his father, as he said, a buoyant spirit of optimism which carried his thoughts beyond all present mishaps. He never spoke ill of the world. Like Franklin, he said on his death-bed that he would gladly live his days over again. His relish of life had even at the last lost but little of its keenness. Yet he met his death with the most unruffled calmness, and with profound resignation. I account myself happy in that he lived to such an age, that I was able to know him well. The sitting-room in the house where he spent his last years faced, indeed, the south. The sun could not, however, every day have shone in at his window. Nevertheless in my memory it seems as if the aged man were always seated in perpetual sunshine. How much of the brightness and warmth must have come from his own cheerful temperament!

THOMAS WRIGHT HILL.

(FATHER OF SIR ROWLAND HILL.)

When at the age of fourteen he left the Grammar School of his native town, he was apprenticed to one of his uncles, a brass-founder in Birmingham. It had been at one time his strong wish to be articled to an attorney; but “his good mother was incredulous as to the possibility of a lawyer and an honest man being united in the same person.” His eldest son, the late Mr. Matthew Davenport Hill, said that his father had many of the qualities which make an able lawyer:—

“He had what is known in the profession as a good head for law. He was quick at discovering distinctions, possessed logical powers, both strong and subtle, and a memory exceedingly retentive: while his language was at once lucid and accurate. In conversation he was a fluent speaker, and with early practice doubtless would have learnt to make fluent speeches; but I do not think he could ever have brought himself to utter an unnecessary word.”

He used to read with eagerness all law books that came in his way, and was, says his son, better informed on all matters pertaining to the law than almost any layman he ever met with. I greatly doubt, however, whether as a lawyer he could have made his way. When he was in his seventieth year, his son was counsel in a political trial, where the judge so far forgot his position on the bench, as in summing-up to speak of the learned gentleman who was opposed to him. “Thanks to God,” wrote the old man on hearing of the case, “that it is not my profession to plead before such judgment-seats. I should ruin the best of causes by unbridled indignation.” With his eager and impatient mind, with his love for “the divine principle of utility,” he would never have borne “the tyranny of lawyers,” which was, to use Gibbon’s words, “more oppressive and ridiculous than even the old yoke of the clergy.”

Leaving school as he did at an early age his education was but imperfect. Nevertheless in his Calvinistic home he had studied one book thoroughly, and that was the Bible. Its beautiful language was ever at his command. On Sunday afternoons, while he was still a child, it had been his father’s wont to entertain him and his brother with Scripture stories told in homely words. “The story of Gideon,” wrote the old man, more than eighty years later, “was a great favourite, and ecstatic was the moment when my father came to narrate the breaking of the jugs, the sudden blaze of the lamps, and the accompanying shout of the watchword—‘The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon.’” The child used to delight in reading the Latin quotations in Stackhouse’s “History of the Bible.” He did not understand them, but he found pleasure in the melody of the words. Later on at school he acquired a fair knowledge of Latin and some knowledge of Greek, but he was removed at too early an age to become much of a scholar. Like many another youth of those days eager after knowledge, he had but few books at his command. Even his copy of Robinson Crusoe was but a fragment. It began, as he vividly recollected, with the words “‘More than thirty dancing round a fire,’ by which,” he wrote, “those who are familiarly acquainted with that fascinating book will perceive how dreadfully my copy had suffered mutilation.” A friend of his father’s—a man of secluded habits and of a studious turn of mind, and therefore set down by some of the good people of Kidderminster as being in league with the Evil One—knowing that the boy was fond of reading, bequeathed to him two volumes. One of the trustees wished to have them burnt at once, as they bore a suspicious appearance and came from a dangerous quarter. “My father,” wrote his son, “who was somewhat less credulous than his neighbours, said, ‘Oh! let the boy have them;’ whereupon were put into my hands a ‘Manual of Geography,’ and a copy of ‘Euclid’s Elements.’” On Euclid he at once fastened, and soon mastered it. He went on to algebra and the higher mathematics. To astronomy he devoted himself with an ardour that never flagged. When he was eighty-four years old he repaired with his telescope to Willingdon that he might observe the great eclipse of the sun of the year 1847. To this eclipse he had long been looking forward, but unhappily he was disappointed by a cloudy sky. Even within a month or two of his death he was engaged in framing a system of nomenclature for the stars.

His settlement at Birmingham was, in one way, most fortunate. It brought him under the instruction of the excellent Priestley. He left the strict and narrow sect in which he had been brought up, and joined a congregation which its pastor, perhaps with justice, described as the most liberal of any in England. He became an orthodox Unitarian. “For about five years I had,” as he said on his death-bed, “great privileges in the pastoral services of Dr. Priestley, and especially in his lectures to the younger members of his congregation, and in occasional conversations with him. This delightful period was closed by the Birmingham riots.” The philosopher could not but have liked his thoughtful and high-minded disciple. In fact, Thomas Hill was heard to say, with not a little pride, that when he had once made some request of Priestley, he received as answer, “You know, Hill, I never can refuse you anything.”

Rowland Hill said that through his father he himself owed much to Priestley as a teacher of politics and science. To him as a teacher of religion he acknowledged no obligation. From Priestley Thomas Hill got, no doubt, an increased relish for the study of Natural Philosophy. When he was a child of nine, he had been present at some of Ferguson’s lectures. Much that he had heard and seen had been beyond his understanding, but “some parts of the lecturer’s apparatus were,” as he said, with a memory that had with the flight of nearly eighty years lost none of its freshness, “delightfully comprehensible.” He gradually acquired a considerable knowledge of most of the branches of Natural Philosophy, and what he knew he knew thoroughly. On some of these subjects he lectured at the Birmingham Philosophical Institution, and lectured well. He did not, however, servilely follow authority. So early as 1807, and perhaps earlier, writes his son, “he emphatically protested against the use of the term, ‘electric fluid,’ (substituting that of ‘electric influence,’) and against the Franklinian theory of positive and negative electricities.”

His favourite study, next to astronomy, was the formation of our letter-sounds, and here he was under no obligation, either to Priestley, or, so far as I know, to anyone else. In a lecture that he delivered before the Institution so early as 1821, he established the distinction between vocal and whispered sounds. It is to him that Dr. Guest, the learned master of Caius College, Cambridge, refers in the following passage in his “History of English Rhythms.”[10] “The distinction here taken between vocal and whisper letters appears to me important. I once thought it was original; but in conversing on this subject with a respected friend, to whose instructions I owe much, I found his views so nearly coinciding with my own, that I have now but little doubt the hint was borrowed.”

For years he laboured at a philosophic system of short-hand. It never came into general use, nor, with all its ingenuity, was it likely to do so. For were brevity set on one side, and philosophy on the other, he would not have hesitated for a moment in his choice. His hand should be as short as philosophy allowed, but not one whit shorter. “After nearly half-a-century of thought, and many a year of labour,” he wrote to one of his sons, “I have, as I think, succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectations in constructing a short-hand. Cast your eye over it, and observe the distinctness of the elementary characters—the graceful shape of the words—the perfect continuity of every combination as to the consonants—the distinctness of the lines resulting from the lineality of the short-hand writing. The art rests almost wholly in myself, and it is, my dear fellow, too good, I feel sure, to be lost now so perfect.” In a later letter, written in the spring of the year in which the great Reform Bill was carried, he says, with a charming and touching simplicity of character not unworthy of Don Quixote himself, “Were The Bill once passed, one might hope for general amendment. Then should I think seriously of publishing my short-hand, which I am sure is a good thing. The more closely I compare my own system with others, the more I like it.”

It was not vanity that led him to wish for the spread of his short-hand. He was not, indeed, insensible to fame, but the ruling passion that was strong in him to the very end of his life was the love of his fellow-men. In one letter he speaks of “the divine principle of divided labour;” in another he prays that “the divine principle of utility may be carried into every corner of human practice.” There might justly be applied to him the words that he himself used of a friend: “He had a matchless benevolence—an interest in the happiness of others.” His youngest son’s death was a dreadful blow to him. “The vacancy,” he wrote, “seems appalling.” One brother was lying dead at home, another had fallen ill in London. The old father feared that some “inconsiderate expression of impatience” of his, written before the news had reached him of his son’s illness, might have increased his fever. “You must forgive one who knew not what he did.” In the midst of all his sorrow and anxiety he found no small comfort. His beloved child had lived to see the beginning of good times. “The French Revolution (of 1830,) and the change of ministry to a liberal complexion, he had to rejoice in, and this affords us great consolation.” So, too, his private troubles were at another time overwhelmed beneath the greater troubles of his country. “Our family trials,” he writes, “merge completely in the sad prospects for our country.”

At the age of forty he had left trade, for which he was but little fitted, and had opened a school. One of the ablest among his pupils thus describes him:—

“‘Old Daddy,’ as he was afterwards more familiarly called, was one of the kindest and most upright men I ever knew: irascible as became his profession: tender-hearted: intelligent, and reflective: imbued with the liberalism which is now predominant: of moderate scholastic attainments, having indeed been originally engaged in some small business; but resolute in making his boys understand whatever he taught them.”[11]

He had, indeed, some high qualifications for the schoolmaster’s life. His “great and pure simplicity”—I use the words of another of his pupils—could not but win the hearts and ennoble the characters of all who were under him. He was, wrote a third, “a genuine man, to whom, if to any of the children of men, may be applied the emphatically Christian praise, that ‘He was an Israelite indeed, in whom there was no guile.’” On his simplicity his boys could easily impose, but though they tricked him, they never ceased to respect him. The morality of his school was, on the whole, high. It was, above all, distinguished by great truthfulness and honesty. Certainly, in one respect, he was an excellent teacher. He was, as Mr. Sargant says, resolute in making his boys understand whatever he taught them. He was altogether free from one of the worst, and one of the commonest, faults of a teacher. He never confounded rules with reasons. He cared far more that his pupils should understand why a thing is done, than how a thing is done. “His explanations of the first principles in mathematics,” says one of his pupils, “were very clear.” From this same gentleman I learn that not a little that is now taught as new in the modern system of geometry had been taught him by his old master. A week before his death he mentioned with satisfaction, that a definition which he had given of a straight line had been pronounced by a mathematician to be the best that existed.[12]

“He looked,” as I have been told by one who was long under him, “at the bearings of every subject, irrespective of its conventionalities. In every case he would be asking, ‘If we were to begin the world afresh, how should we proceed?’ He would always consider what is the best thing to be done, and next how can it be done irrespectively of everything conventional. When he had once arrived at his conclusions, and laid down his principles, he would carry them out without regard to anyone or anything.” Yet he was as free from arrogance as any man could well be. He had an old-fashioned courtesy which never forsook him even when he caned an unruly boy. Towards women, towards children, towards the oppressed, towards the poor, in a word towards those who were weaker than himself, he bore himself like a second Knight of La Mancha, or another Colonel Newcome. Nevertheless he was not a good teacher. He had at least one great failing. He was wanting, as one of his sons has said, in mental perspective. There was no “keeping” in his mind. In the image that he formed to himself of the world of learning, all things seemed to be equally in the foreground. He could not distinguish between the relative values of the different branches of study. All kinds of knowledge ranked in his eyes as of equal importance. He was, for instance, an excellent teacher of correct pronunciation and clear articulation. “We were,” says Mr. Sargant, “thoroughly taught the elements of English; and our spelling was immaculate.... The dropping of an ‘h’ was one of the seven deadly sins.” He had a quick ear for melodious and rhythmical sounds. In writing of the year 1770, he said, “It was a date which I found no pleasure in expressing. The previous year, 1769, was that in which I first became acquainted with the way of distinguishing years by their number, and I was well pleased with the metrical expression of the number first learnt. That of the subsequent 1770 ended in what my ear felt as a bathos, and I longed for the metrical restoration of 1771.” He was not seven years old when 1770 thus distressed him. He used to tell how as a child he had been delighted with the name Melinda, and how he used to repeat it again and again. His ear was grievously offended by what he called a collision. There was a collision when two like sounds came together. When his boys repeated the multiplication table they had to speak euphoniously. A collision here would have been a most serious offence. They said five sixes are thirty, but five times five is twenty-five. Five fives would have set their master’s teeth on edge, as Dean Gaisford’s were set by a wrong Greek accent. “Your old friend, Mr. A——,” he wrote to his eldest son, “has sent No. 1. of his Birmingham—m—m—Mercury. I hope more skill and more taste will appear in the selection of materials than has been evinced in the choice of a name.” In returning home from the lectures that he gave at the Philosophical Institution—and very good lectures they were, too—he would with pride draw the attention of his friends to the fact that they had not heard that night one single collision. “He used to delight,” as his son once told me, “in peculiar terms, and would amend Euclid’s language. Thus, instead of allowing the boys to say ‘the lines are at right angles to each other,’ he taught them to say, ‘the lines have a mutual perpendicularity.’ To my great annoyance the boys made a catch-cry of this, and I could hear them shouting out in the playground, ‘the lines have a mutual perpendicularity.’”

He had devised an admirable plan for curing stammering, and here he was as successful in practice as in theory. He never failed to work a cure, but he had to complain that “strange as it might appear, it was frequently much more easy to induce the capacity for speaking without stammering than the inclination.” The regard that he paid to mere utterance was, however, so excessive that the general progress of his pupils was greatly retarded. He took months to carry a class through numeration, for, fond though he was of mathematics, he paid more attention to the modulation of the voice when the figures had to be expressed aloud in words, than to the figures themselves. He took the class up to decillions. Why he stopped there it was not easy to see. It was no slight task to get a Midland County lad to express, with a correctness that would satisfy the master’s ear, a number far smaller than a decillion. When he had learnt the arithmetical value of the figures, when he had been taught to say hundred, and not underd, nine and not noine, five and not foive, the modulation of the whole sentence remained as a vast, but not, as he at length found, an insuperable task. If far too much time was wasted, no small good was thus done. His pupils were always known by the distinctness and correctness of their utterance.

He was, indeed, very fond of forming theories, but he too often forgot to test them by practice. Having once convinced himself by a process of reasoning that they were sound, he did not think it needful to put them to the proof. He was also in this part of his character like Don Quixote, who, when he had found that his pasteboard helmet did not bear the blows of his sword, having patched it up, was satisfied of its strength, and, without putting it to a second trial, looked upon it as a most finished piece of armour. When he came to build his new school-house he showed his love of theory in a curious way. “My father,” wrote his son, “having found that, with but slight deviation from the line of road, the house might be made to stand in exact coincidence with the cardinal points, would, I believe, from that moment, have been almost more willing to abandon the scheme than to lose such an opportunity of gratifying his taste.” Now most men when they build a house, build it to serve, not as the letters on a vane to show the points of the compass, but as a place of residence. A place of residence is certainly not the better, but a good deal the worse, for standing in exact coincidence with the cardinal points.

Notwithstanding his faults as a schoolmaster, he was, in many ways, admirable as a father. His children could say of him what Burns said of his father:—“He conversed familiarly on all subjects with us, as if we had been men.” “Perhaps,” wrote Mr. M. D. Hill, “after all, the greatest obligation we owe to our father is this: that from infancy he would reason with us—argue with us, would perhaps be a better expression, as denoting that it was a match of mind against mind, in which all the rules of fair play were duly observed; and we put forth our little strength without fear. Arguments were taken at their just weight; the sword of authority was not thrown into the scale.” He did not much delight to season his fireside with personal talk. It was all those matters that make up the life of a good citizen in a free state that he mostly discussed. In subjects such as these, time has proved that he was no fanciful theorist. Strong and staunch Liberal though he always was, in no single respect was he ever a man of violent or extreme views. He never was a Republican. The news of the opening scenes of the French Revolution had, indeed, been to him glad tidings of great joy. But the horrors of the Reign of Terror he never forgot or condoned. They did not scare him however from the path of reform. Unlike many of the Whigs, he always hated Bonapartism. He had, indeed, condemned as much as any man the conduct of England when in 1793 she joined the confederacy against France. He could never forgive Pitt his share in that proceeding. But when Bonaparte wantonly broke through the Peace of Amiens, and renewed the war, he was dead against him. He would have said with Southey, that had he only a single guinea in the world, he would, rather than see peace made for want of funds, give half of it in war-taxes. “My own wish,” he wrote in 1807, when the fear of a French invasion was still in the minds of men, “is that every man and every boy throughout the United Islands should be compelled, under a penalty that would be submitted to for conscience sake alone—that each should be compelled to provide himself with arms, and learn to use them.” He had his children and his pupils drilled. He was above all things a sturdy Englishman. But he longed for reforms—reforms of all kinds, but reforms that kept well within the lines of the Constitution. Above all he longed for a thorough reform of Parliament, as the fount and source of all other reforms. In that gloomiest of all years, 1811, he wrote, “a Parliamentary reform, a strong effusion of the healthy vigour of Democracy, is the only hope.” Six years later, writing to his eldest son, he says, “You will see that I have not lost sight of the excellent maxim—‘The whole man must stand or fall together.’ If your father cannot get rich without fawning, he must remain poor. If he cannot live without it, he must die, as by far the easiest alternative. Your account of London is appalling. But the land, the sunshine, the rain on our planet are as ever. Why then despair? The political heavens lower; but who shall say of what force the storm shall be, and of what duration? Who shall predict ravages too great to be compensated by succeeding seasons of calm? Let us not fear for ourselves—little indeed is needful to life—let us fear for our beloved country, and each to his utmost so trim the bark as to avoid the rocks of anarchy on the one hand, and the equally fatal, though less conspicuous, shoals of despotism on the other. The time is coming, I apprehend, when none that carries a conscience will be able to remain neuter.” He had in political matters that reasonableness which is the mark of the best English mind. When in 1819 the proposal had been made that the franchise of Grampound should be transferred to some large town, he wrote, “Cobbett and Co. would persuade the multitude to despise the boon as falling far short of what should be granted, and thus they furnish the foes of all reform with a pretence for withholding this trifling, but far from unimportant, concession.”

Evil, indeed, were the days in which the vigour of his manhood was spent, and gloomy ofttimes must have been the family talk. But amid all the gloom there was no despondency. He belonged to that hopeful but small band of brave men who amid the darkest days of the long Tory rule steadfastly held up the banner of freedom and progress. He did his best to train up his children as soldiers in the good cause. Recruits were indeed needed. The government was the most oppressive that there had been in England since the days of the Stuarts, while the upper and middle classes were sunk in an indifference that had not been witnessed since the evil times of the Restoration. “If any person,” wrote Romilly in 1808, “be desirous of having an adequate idea of the mischievous effects which have been produced in this country by the French Revolution and all its attendant horrors, he should attempt some legislative reform, on humane and liberal principles. He will then find, not only what a stupid dread of innovation, but what a savage spirit it has infused into the minds of many of his countrymen.” There were scarcely any Reformers left in Parliament. The great Whig party was either indifferent or hopeless. The Criminal Law was everywhere administered with savage severity. The Bishops, with the Archbishop of Canterbury at their head, were ready to hang a poor wretch for the crime of stealing goods that were worth five shillings. The royal dukes fought hard for the slave trade. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, and honest men were left to languish in prison.

Such were the evil days in which Thomas Hill brought up his children, and such were the evil deeds which were ever rousing his fiercest anger. The savageness of the penal code he hotly denounced. He had heard of the execution of a man whom he had known for a crime which no one now would dream of punishing with death. “I feel only compassion,” he wrote, “for the poor sufferer. Institutions more atrocious than his crimes have exacted from him a ten-fold forfeit, and he now is the injured party. It is a consolation for me to have abhorred the Draconian statutes even from my boyhood.” Slavery and the slave-trade, and religious oppression of every kind, whether carried out by law or by custom, he utterly loathed and detested. “We were all,” said one of his sons, “born to a burning hatred of tyranny.” He was too poor to take in a newspaper by himself, but he joined with three or four of his neighbours in subscribing to a London weekly journal. It was always read aloud in the family circle. The sons caught almost from their infancy their father’s ardent love of liberty. “He tuned their hearts, by far the noblest aim.” One of them could remember how, when he was a child, an account of a trial was read aloud by his eldest brother. “I underwent,” he writes, “considerable excitement in its recital, caused principally, as I recollect, by the spirited manner in which the defendant, who employed no counsel, resisted all attempts to put him down. My father’s enthusiasm, I remember, was so strong as to draw from him the wild exclamation, ‘Why the man’s a god!’” This enthusiasm he retained through life. “Beg of Arthur,” he wrote to one of his sons, on tidings coming of the Battle of Navarino, “not to get over-intoxicated with the Greek news. I bustled home to make him quite happy, and, on inquiring for him out of breath, found he had started.” I remember well how I used to read aloud to the old man, now in his eighty-seventh year, the accounts of the Hungarian Insurrection, and how deep were his groans over the defeat of the patriots, and how burning was his indignation at the cruelties of the Austrians and the Russians.

It was not merely a spirit of freedom that he implanted in his children. In the midst of his enthusiasm he never failed to consider the best cure for the evils which he attacked. He was a diligent reader of Adam Smith. “What he read he was fond of giving forth and discussing, willingly listening to objections, and never leaving them unanswered.... Our whole family might be regarded as a little political economy club, sitting not indeed at stated times, but yet at short intervals, and debating, if not with much method, yet with great earnestness. He was,” added his son, “in political matters always right. As long as his children could remember he was a thorough free-trader. He condemned all laws against usury. He laughed at all social objections to the employment of machinery.[13] He strongly condemned the judge-made law which involved in partnership all persons who were paid for the use of capital by a share in profits, and foresaw the benefits to be derived from a general system of limited liability. He was earnestly in favour of the representation of minorities, and about sixty years ago drew up a plan for effecting this, which was in substance the same as that lately promulgated, and, indeed, independently devised, by Mr. Hare.[14] He maintained the justice of allowing counsel to address the jury for the defence in trials for felony, and even of receiving the evidence of parties.”[15] He filled the minds of his children with a passion for sweeping away injustice, and baseness, and folly from the face of the earth. To apply to him his own words, “he invigorated their souls for the conception and accomplishment of many things permanently great and good.” He was cheered by the great changes for the better which he lived to see. “Surely,” he once wrote, “the days of routine and mummery are swiftly passing away.” A few months before the Reform Bill was carried he wrote to one of his sons:—“Even I hope to see mighty changes wrought. You, my dear boy, may hope to enjoy the beneficial effects of them. For myself it will be amply sufficient if I can die assured that my dear children will reap even the first-fruits of that harvest for which we have all been thus long labouring.”

Dear as his memory is to me, yet I cannot but own that his character had its imperfect side. It was not only that he allowed himself to be mastered by his theories. There was, moreover, a want of thoroughness in much that he did. He never could satisfy himself that he had done all which could be done, and so he rarely brought anything to completion. He was readier to conceive than firm to execute. He worked slowly, and was too much inclined to put off to another day any piece of business which he much disliked. He lived, indeed, with great simplicity; but, owing in part to his own bad management of business matters, he was never able to shake himself free from a burden of debt till his sons came to his help. It is, perhaps, not wonderful that he took the world somewhat easily, as he had from nature such a happy constitution, that the more he was troubled, the longer and the more soundly he could sleep.

His, indeed, was a temperament that wins a man happiness, but refuses him fame. He had little ambition and few wants. His utmost wishes scarce travelled beyond a simple house, a sufficiency of homely fare and clothing, a good library, and a set of philosophical and astronomical instruments. “Never be cast down,” he wrote to one of his sons; “moderate success is nearly a certainty, and more is not worth a wish.” It was not that he lived the sour life of an anchorite. Few men had a heartier relish of all honest pleasures. He was even famed for his love of apple-pie. “My dear,” I have heard him say after the simplest of meals, when asked by his daughter whether he had enjoyed his food, “My dear, I only hope the Queen has had half as good a dinner.” Such hospitality as he could afford he at all times delighted in showing. Who that partook of his Sunday morning breakfasts could ever forget the charming courtesy and the warmth of affection that make the aged man’s simple parlour live in the memory like a landscape of Claude’s?

The love that he had ever borne his fellow-men came to the relief of the sufferings of his last hours. As he was dying, the gloom that had covered the world during so much of his manhood seemed to him at last to have been cleared away. The Great Exhibition of 1851 had just been opened. “Thank God! thank God!” he said, “for living to see this day!... This real peace meeting. I cannot join them with my voice, but I can in my heart. ‘All people that on earth do dwell, Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.’ I leave the world bright with hope. Never, surely, has God’s government of the world been so clear as at the present period.” The day before his death he insisted that one of his sons and his doctor should breakfast in his room, as, though he was himself unable to eat, he took pleasure in seeing others eat and refresh themselves.

“And still to love, though pressed with ill,

In wintry age to feel no chill,

With me is to be lovely still.”

On the last evening, when his long life of fourscore years and eight was almost at its lowest ebb, the love for his fellow-men that had thrown a radiance on his whole life was not dim, nor was the natural force of his mind abated. “I shall sadly miss,” his son recorded in his journal, “his warm and intelligent sympathy. Nothing was so acceptable to him, even up to the time of my visiting him last night, as an account of any improvements in progress in the Post-office.” A few days earlier he had exclaimed that he could not have believed that a death-bed could be so pleasant. He knew nothing of that melancholy state when life becomes a burthen and death remains a dread. Much of his happiness arose, he said, from his full confidence in the benevolence of the Creator. He composed the following lines:—

ASPIRATIONS ON A DEATH-BED, ON THE PATIENT’S WINDOW BEING OPENED.

Aura veni.

“Come, gentle breeze, come, air divine,

Comfort this drooping heart of mine!

Ah! solace flows with heaven’s own breath,

Which cheers my soul that sank in death.

The works of God all speak His praise;

To Him eternal anthems raise;

This air of heavenly love’s a token,

Let pensive musing now be broken,

Prayer for far greater boons be spoken.

God, couldst Thou find my soul a place

Within the realms of boundless grace—

The humblest post among the ranks

Of those that give Thee endless thanks—

Then would my leaping powers rejoice

To sing Thy name with heart and voice;

Then toil my character to rear,

By following Thy commands on purer, loftier sphere.

And may I rest my humble frame

On Love supreme, which crowns Thy name.”

“His last parting with this world was to take one by one the hand of each of his children, and, after placing it near his heart, to kiss it, and point upwards with a radiant expression of intense love and happiness.”

Much as Rowland Hill owed to his father, he owed scarcely less to his mother. She, though the inferior of her husband in quick intelligence and originality, was his superior in shrewd common sense and in firmness of purpose. She was as practical as he was theoretical, and as cautious as he was rash. To his father Rowland owed his largeness of view and his boldness of conception. But it was his mother from whom he derived his caution, his patience, and his unwearying prudence. Had he not had such a father, he would not have devised his plan of Penny Postage. Had he not had such a mother, he would not have succeeded in making what seemed the scheme of an enthusiast a complete and acknowledged success. He was never weary in his old age of sounding her praises, and acknowledging how much he owed to her. He could scarcely speak of her without the tears starting into his eyes, while his utterances, broken through strong emotion, could hardly discharge the fulness of his heart. The last record that I have of my conversations with him ends with her praises. “My mother was,” he said, “a most admirable woman in every respect. She had great natural intellect. She had a willingness to exert herself for the good of her family, and she did exert herself beyond her powers.” My record thus ends:—“Here he became so affected that I thought a longer talk might be hurtful to him, and so I came away.”

SARAH HILL.

(MOTHER OF SIR ROWLAND HILL.)

Her husband was no less mindful of her high merits. “Her children arise up, and call her blessed;—her husband also, and he praiseth her.” After her death he more than once told his daughter that the only merit he claimed in bringing up his family was that of letting their mother do exactly as she liked. “It was to her influence—an influence of the most beneficial kind—that he attributed the merit of their becoming good and useful members of society.” “As a theme for eloquence,” he one day wrote to one of his sons, “you may sound the trumpet of past success and long experience in your transcendent mother.” “She was,” said her daughter, “a large-hearted woman, taking upon herself all duties that lay within her reach, whether properly belonging to her or not.” To her great courage her son thus bears testimony:—

“Many instances fell under my own observation, but the one I mention was of earlier date. Happening to be present when, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, an imperious mistress ordered her terrified maidservant to go and take down the clothes that were hanging out to dry, my mother at once volunteered for the service, and performed it in full, though not without imminent risk of her life; for before she could regain the house a tree, from which she had detached one of the lines, was struck by lightning.”[16]

She had been as a mere child the most dutiful of daughters. She was the most devoted and unselfish of wives and mothers. Yet by strangers all her merits were not quickly seen. Her warm heart was hidden beneath cold and reserved manners. Outsiders were astonished at the extraordinary degree of affection that her children felt for her. Some of this coldness of manner, and all the hidden warmth of heart were inherited from her by her famous son. She had had but a small chance of getting much book-learning, yet she took a strong interest in her husband’s studies and pursuits. Her son said that she possessed remarkable sagacity and no small readiness in contrivance. It was not, however, by inventiveness or by originality that she was distinguished. In those qualities her husband was strong. She was strong where he was weak. If he had every sense but common sense, she had common sense in a high degree. She had with it an unusual strength of character—a strength that made itself none the less felt because it was quiet. “We must not forget,” wrote one of her sons to his brother, when the death of her youngest child was looked for, and they were all dreading the terrible blank that would arise, “we must not forget that mother is not an ordinary woman—her powers of self-control and conformity to existing circumstances are unusually great.” She was not wanting in honest ambition. She did not, indeed, look for any high position for her sons. She smiled incredulously when one of her boys told her that the day would come when she should ride in his carriage. But she was resolved that her children should not sink through poverty out of that middle class into which they were born. She was most anxious that they should have the advantages of that education which had never fallen to her lot. It was her doing that her husband left trade, for which he was but ill-fitted, and started a school. In the step that he thus took she saw the best means of getting their own children taught. She was unwearying in her efforts to add to her husband’s scanty income, and most rigid in her economy. She longed to provide for him and for her children that freedom of action which is only enjoyed by those who have freedom from debt. Her eldest son has thus recorded his recollections of her during the terrible year 1800, when he was but a child of eight years:—

“Well do I remember that time of dearth, and even famine. As I was the eldest, my mother, in the absence of her husband, opened her heart now and then to me; and I knew how she lay in wakefulness, passing much of the night in little plans for ensuring food and clothing to her children by the exercise of the strictest parsimony. How she accomplished her task I know not; I cannot imagine; but certain it was that we never wanted either wholesome food or decent raiment, and were always looked upon by the poor of the neighbourhood as gentlefolk. Her achievement she regarded in after and more prosperous years with honest pride and gratulation. Nor was she less anxious for our instruction than for our physical comforts. She had but little reading, but possessed a quick and lively apprehension and natural good taste. She was clever at figures, working by mental arithmetic; not pursuing rules, but acting on her natural sagacity. She was honourable and high-minded, and had a great contempt for the unreal in religion, morals, or manners; shabby gentility and dirt, especially when concealed, excited her disapprobation. In her youth she was comely, not to say handsome. I remember her, fair-haired and fair-complexioned. She was the tenderest of parents.”

Her merits as the mistress of a household were thus summed up by Rowland Hill. “I scarcely think there ever was a woman out of France who could make so much out of so little.”

The husband and wife each supplied in character that in which the other was wanting. In Rowland was seen a remarkable combination of the strong qualities of each parent. His father, however, had a two-fold influence on his character. Almost as much as he nourished his intellect and one side of his moral nature by sympathy, so he increased another side by the strong feeling of antipathy that he unconsciously raised. The son was shocked with his father’s want both of method and steady persistence, with the easy way in which he often set on one side matters that troubled him, and with the complacency with which he still regarded his theories, however much they were buffeted and bruised by practice. Here Rowland set before him his mother’s best qualities. He had, indeed, received them in large measure from nature, but he cultivated them from his earliest youth with a steadiness that never fell off or wearied. He went, perhaps, into the opposite extreme of that which he shunned, and gained a certain rigidity of character which at times appeared to be excessive.

I have seen a letter from his mother’s brother, Bailie Lea, written years ago to one of his nieces, in which he recalls, he says, “times, some seventy years ago, long before any of you were born.” He describes with some humour how he had helped young Tom Hill in his courtship. He adds, “The happy hour began to draw nigh, the gown was bought, made, and fitted on; the knot tied, the work was done, and it speaks for itself in every quarter of the globe.” With honest and just pride in his sister, the old man adds, “But Tom Hill could not have accomplished the half of what appears with any other woman for a wife than Sally Lea.” Certainly Rowland Hill always believed that he himself could not have accomplished the half of what he did had he not had such a mother. I know not whether my grandfather had any rivals. A charming story that is told of his old age leads me to think that he must have had at least one. His wife, when they had been married close on fifty years, one day called him, with a Birmingham plainness of speech, “An old fool!” A child who was staying in the house overheard him, as he left the room and slowly went up the stairs, muttering to himself, “Humph! she called me an old fool—an old fool!” Then he stopped, and was silent for a few moments, till suddenly rubbing his hands together, he exclaimed, “A lucky dog I was to get her, though!” His memory had carried him back full fifty years, before the ring was bought and the gown made, when young Tom Hill had still to win the heart and hand of Sarah Lea. A few years after her death he was one day missing. Some hours passed by, and nothing could be heard of the aged man who numbered now his fourscore years and four. At length he was seen trudging slowly homewards. He had gone on foot full five miles to his wife’s grave, and on foot he was making his way back.

His marriage had been delayed for a short time by the riots in which the chapels of the dissenters, and many of their houses, were burnt to the ground by a brutal Church-and-King mob. With several of his companions he had hurried off to defend the house of their revered pastor, but their services were unhappily declined. Priestley declared that it was the duty of a Christian minister to submit to persecution. The rest of the story of this eventful scene I shall tell in the words of his eldest son:—

“His companions went away, perhaps to escort their good pastor and his family, whose lives would not have been secure against the ruffians coming to demolish their home and property. My father barred the doors, closed the shutters, made fast the house as securely as he could against the expected rioters, and then awaited their arrival. He has often described to me how he walked to and fro in the darkened rooms, chafing under the restriction which had been put on him and his friends. He was present when the mob broke in, and witnessed the plunder and destruction, and the incendiary fire by which the outrage was consummated. Lingering near the house, he saw a working man fill his apron with shoes, with which he made off. My father followed him, and, as soon as the thief was alone, collared him, and dragged him to the gaol, where he had the mortification to witness the man quietly relieved of his booty, and then suffered to depart, the keeper informing my father that he had had orders to take in no prisoners that night! The mob, which had begun by attacking dissenters as public enemies, burning down their chapels and their houses, and making spoil of their goods, soon expanded their views, and gave unmistakable signs that the distinction between dissenter and churchman had had its hour, and was to be superseded in favour of the doctrine now so well known, ‘La propriété, c’est un vol.’ When matters came to this pass the magistrates swore-in special constables. My father was one of this body; and, like his comrades, compendiously armed with half a mop-stick by way of truncheon, he marched with them to the defence of Baskerville House, in Birmingham, which was under attack by the mob. The special constables at first drove all before them, in spite of the immense disparity of numbers; but after a time, becoming separated in the mêlée, they sustained a total defeat. Some were very severely bruised, and one died of the injuries which he received in the fight. My father, although not conscious at the time of having received a blow, could not the next morning raise his arm. He was always of opinion that if they had had a flag, or some signal of that kind, round which they could have rallied, the fortune of the day would have been reversed.”

The blow that he had received was at all events so severe that his marriage had to be put off for a fortnight. For three or four years the young couple lived at Birmingham.[17] They then removed to Kidderminster, where Rowland was born in the freehold house that had belonged to three generations of his family.[18] It was not, however, to remain long in his father’s hands. The French war ruined the manufacture in which he had engaged, and in the great straits to which he was before long reduced, he was able to retain nothing of his small inheritance. He left Kidderminster, and removed to Wolverhampton, where he found employment. His salary however was so small that it was only by means of the severest thrift that he managed to keep his head above water. It was in the stern school of poverty that Rowland was brought up from his earliest years. Like Garrick, he was “bred in a family whose study was to make four pence do as much as others made four pence half-penny do.”

THE BIRTH-PLACE OF SIR ROWLAND HILL, KIDDERMINSTER.

His father had taken an old farm-house, called Horsehills, that stood about a mile from Wolverhampton. It had long been empty, and the rent was so low that at first it excited his suspicions. It was not till he had signed the lease that he was informed that the house was haunted. He cared much about a low rent, and nothing about ghosts. On such terms he would have been only too glad to find a haunted house each time he changed his place of abode. He lived here till Rowland was seven years old. When the child had become a man of eighty he put on record many of the memories that he still retained of this home of his early days. Here it was that they were living during the terrible dearth of 1800, of which for many a year, men, he says, could hardly talk without a shudder. He could remember how one day during this famine when they were dining on bread and butter and lettuce, a beggar came to the door. His mother took from the dish one of the slices and sent it to the man. He refused it because there was not butter enough for him. The half-starved people took to plundering the fields of the potatoes, and the owners, in order to secure them, set about to dig them up and store them. Late rains, moreover, had followed the hot weather, and the roots had begun to sprout. Rowland writes, “I remember that when our crop of late potatoes was dug up, we children were set to spread them over the floor of the only room that could be spared. It was one of the parlours.” Likely enough they were thus brought into the house as a safer place against the rioters than any outhouse. Bread riots broke out. Most of the judges declaimed on the winter circuits against the forestallers. “A violent clamour was excited against corn-dealers and farmers, which being joined in by the mob, artificial scarcity became the cry. Farmers were threatened, and their barns and ricks in many places were set on fire.”[19] One band of rioters came to Horsehills, thinking no doubt that, as it was a farm-house, the occupier was a farmer. “The house was entered, and a demand made for bread; but the poor fellows, hungry as they doubtless were, listened to explanations; and upon one of them saying, ‘Oh, come away; look at the missis how bad her (she) looks,’ they all quietly withdrew.” I have heard my father say that so terrible had been the dearth, and so painful were the memories it raised, that they had all come to look upon bread as something holy. Once, when a mere child, he had seen a play-fellow wantonly waste a piece of bread by throwing it about. He was seized with alarm lest some terrible judgment from Heaven should come, not only upon the one guilty person, but upon all who were in his company. He feared lest the roof might fall down upon them. It may have been during this time of famine that Rowland, for the first time in his life, and perhaps for the last time, wished to go into debt. He was one day telling me how slowly and painfully he had, in his boyhood, saved up his money in order to buy useful articles of which he stood in need. I asked him whether he had never been tempted by the pastrycook. “No,” he answered; but yet, he added with a smile, according to a story that was told of him, he once had been. He had gone, when a very little child, to a woman who kept a stall in Wolverhampton market-place, and had asked her to let him have a half-penny-worth of sweets on trust. When she refused, he then begged her to lend him a half-penny, with which he would buy the sweets.

One adventure in these days of his childhood impressed itself most deeply on his memory. His father, who had gone one day on business to a town some miles off, was very late in returning. His mother became uneasy, and set off quite alone to meet her husband. Soon after she had started, he returned, but though he had come by the way along which she had gone, he had not met her. He in his turn was full of alarm. He sent off his eldest boy, a lad of nine, in one direction. The two next boys, Edwin and Rowland, who were at most eight and six years old, he bade go by one road to Wolverhampton, and come back by another. He himself took a third way. The boys set out, not indeed without fear, but nevertheless “with a conviction that the work must be done.” The two younger lads had first to go along a dark lane. They then came to a spot where, underneath the cross-ways, there lay buried, as they knew, the body of a lad who had ended his life with his own hand. The place was known as Dead Boy’s Grave. Next they had to pass near the brink of a gravel pit, “to them an awful chasm, which they shuddered by as they could.” At length they made their round, and not far off midnight, as Rowland believed, reached home. There to their great joy they found the rest gathered together. The eldest boy, who had been alone, though a lad of great courage, had suffered not a little from fear. Neither he, nor his father, had met the mother, who reached home before them. As she had been going along the lane, she had been alarmed, she said, by a man who started up on the other side of the hedge. In her fright she had cleared the opposite fence at a bound, and had made her way home over the fields. The next day her husband went with her to the spot, but though he was an active and muscular man, he failed to make in his strength the leap which she had made in the terror which comes from weakness.

Rowland Hill was fond of talking in his old age of his childhood, of which he retained a very clear memory. He remembered how one day in the autumn of 1801, his brothers came back from school with the news that the mail coach had driven into Wolverhampton decked with blue ribbons. Tidings had just arrived of peace with France.[20] The whole country was in a blaze with bonfires and illuminations. Rowland and his brothers, when it grew dark, set fire to the stump of an old tree, and so bore their part in the general rejoicings. When war broke out again with France he was living in Birmingham. “Old Boney,” became the terror of all English children, as “Malbrook,” a hundred years before, had been the terror of all French children. Within half-a-mile of his father’s house, “the forging of gun-barrels was almost incessant, beginning each day long before dawn, and continuing long after nightfall; the noise of the hammers being drowned ever and anon by the rattle from the proof-house.” Their own house each time felt the shock, and his mother’s brewings of beer were injured by the constant jars. On the open ground in front of the house, one division of the Birmingham Volunteers was drilled each Sunday morning. Sunday drilling, in this season of alarms, went on throughout the length and breadth of the land. The press-gang now and then came so far as this inland town. He could remember the alarm they caused him and his brothers. They were fearful not so much for themselves as for their father.

One day a captured French gun-boat was dragged into Birmingham, and shown at a small charge. Hitherto he had seen no vessel bigger than a coal barge. For the first time he saw a real anchor and ship guns. As he returned home with his brothers, they talked over the loss of the Royal George, and other “moving accidents by flood.” He could “well remember the mingled joy and grief at the great, but dearly-bought, victory of Trafalgar.” The following verses of a rude ballad that was sung in the streets remained fixed in his memory:—

“On the nineteenth[21] of October,

Eighteen hundred and five,

We took from the French and Spaniards

A most glorious prize.

“We fought for full four hours,

With thundering cannon balls;

But the death of gallant Nelson

Was by a musket ball.

“Britannia and her heroes

Will long bemoan their loss;

For he was as brave an Admiral,

As e’er the ocean crossed.”

Other memories of his carried back those who heard him talk in his latter years to a state of life that was very unlike the present. The baker who supplied them with bread kept his reckoning by tallies. Their milk-woman had just such another score as that which was presented to Hogarth’s Distressed Poet. A travelling tailor used to come his rounds, and, in accordance with the common custom, live in their house while he was making clothes for the family. In every show of feats of horsemanship, the performance always ended with the burlesque of the Tailor riding to Brentford to vote for John Wilkes. Whenever any disaster came upon the country, there were still found old people who solemnly shook their heads, and gravely pointed it out as another instance of the divine wrath for the great sin that the nation had committed when it made the change of style.

The changes that he saw in the currency were very great. In his early childhood, gold pieces—guineas, half guineas, and seven shilling bits,—were not uncommon, but they began to disappear, and before long were scarcely ever seen. When one did come to hand, it was called a stranger. About the year 1813, one of his brothers sold a guinea for a one pound note and eight shillings in silver. As the gold began to be hoarded, these one pound notes took their place. Bank of England notes were in Birmingham looked upon with suspicion, for they were more often forged than provincial notes. The silver coins of the realm were so well worn, that hardly any of them bore even a trace of an effigy or legend. “Any that were still unworn were called pretty shillings and the like,” and were suspected by the lower class of dealers as something irregular. Together with the state currency, tokens circulated to a great extent. There were Bank of England tokens, of the value of five shillings, three shillings, and one shilling and sixpence. The parish of Birmingham had its notes for one pound, and five shillings, and its workhouse shilling, as the coin was called. It had been issued by the guardians as a convenient means of distributing out-of-door relief. All these coins and tokens were more or less forged. The coins of the realm stood lowest in point of security, then the Bank of England tokens; while the parish tokens were hardly ever imitated, and were everywhere received with confidence. Forgery was constantly carried on. One daring and notorious forger and coiner, named Booth, long defied the police. His house stood in the midst of an open plain, some miles from Birmingham, and was very strongly barricaded. The officers had more than once forced an entry; but so careful had been his watch, that, by the time they had been able to break in, all proofs of his crime had been destroyed. Rowland Hill had seen him riding into town, on his way to the rolling-mills, with the metal in his saddle-bags. The boy took more than a common interest in the man, as in this very rolling-mill one of his own brothers was employed. One day the messenger whom Booth had sent with the metal had forgotten to bring a pattern. “Taking out a three-shilling piece, the man inserted it in one slit after another of the gauge, until he found the one which exactly corresponded with its thickness, and this he gave as the guide.” His long freedom from punishment rendered the coiner careless, and he was at last surprised. The whole Birmingham police force was mustered, and a troop of dragoons was got from the barracks. A ladder had been brought, and an entrance was made through the tiling of the roof. It seemed as if they were once more too late, for at first nothing could be found. One of the “runners,” however, in mounting the ladder, had through the bars of an upper window seen Booth hurriedly thrusting papers, that no doubt were forged notes, into the fire. A hole was broken into the chimney, and in it were found one whole note, and one partly burnt. The prisoners were taken to Birmingham, and thence were sent by the magistrates to Stafford, under the guard of a small body of horse. Booth was hanged.

It is scarcely wonderful that criminals openly defied the laws, for the police-force of Birmingham was very small. The town contained in the early years of this century about seventy thousand inhabitants. Yet the whole police-force for day duty consisted of less than twenty men. By night, guard was kept by the usual body of “ancient and most quiet watchmen.” The town, moreover, like all other towns, was but dimly lighted with its oil-lamps. Rowland was about seventeen years old when, “with almost unbounded delight, I first saw,” he writes, “streets illuminated by gas.” Yet the peace was, on the whole, not ill kept. From 1803 to 1833 there were but three riots, and of these only one was at all serious. The town had not even in those days a Recorder, and the criminals were sent to the Assizes at Warwick. The stage-coaches, as Rowland well remembered, were all furnished with strong staples, to which the fetters of prisoners were fast locked. He had himself, when he was still a little lad, sat on the coach beside a man thus fettered. The fellow made light of his position. “He had,” he said, “only robbed a hen-roost, and they couldn’t touch his neck for that.” Some idle gossip, seeing Rowland thus sitting by the thief, at once spread the report that the boy on the coach was going to Warwick on the charge of robbing his master.

I have been carried away in my narrative not a little distance from the quiet home in the neighbourhood of Wolverhampton. The old farm-house was endeared to Rowland Hill by one memory, for here it was that he first met with his future wife. Her father, Mr. Joseph Pearson, was a manufacturer of Wolverhampton. “I regarded him throughout life,” said his son-in-law, “with esteem and affection. He was in the town, near to which he resided, the recognised leader of the Liberal party, and, at a later period, when the town became enfranchised, was the standing Chairman of the Committee for returning the Liberal candidate. He had always been a staunch Liberal, to use the modern term, and I doubt not was regarded by his Tory neighbours as a Jacobin; for so all were held who either preferred Fox to Pitt, or ventured to question the justice or necessity of the war of 1793. I have been told that during the course of that war he once took part in a meeting held in the market-place of the town to petition for peace, when cannon, brought out in apprehension, or feigned apprehension, of a tumult, stood pointed at the assembly.” He had once, when a young man, during his year of office as constable of the borough, faced a mob of colliers bent on bull-baiting. He pulled up the stake, and put a stop for that day to the sport. About the same time Basil Montagu had to flee for his life from a country town, where he, too, had spoilt sport by saving an innocent man from the gallows. Mr. Pearson took great pleasure in Thomas Hill’s society. In social position he was, indeed, above him, for he was a man of considerable property, and a magistrate for the county. In Mrs. Hill’s rice-puddings, in the making of which she was “a notable woman,” and in her husband’s talk, he found, however, enough to satisfy him.

Rowland was but a year older than Mr. Pearson’s eldest daughter. The beginning of his courtship he has himself told in the following words:—

“Mr. Pearson’s visit led to intimacy between the families, especially as regards the children; and as his eldest daughter had attained the age of five, while I was no more advanced than six, the two were naturally thrown much together, and, in fact, took the first step towards that intimacy and affection which some twenty-five years later were cemented by marriage. One whimsical little passage in these earliest days I must record. Under the high road, in the part nearest to my father’s house, ran what is in the midland counties called a culver (that is a long low arch), placed there for the passage of the rivulet, which turned my little water-wheel. Into this culver my brother and I occasionally crept by way of adventure, and at times to hear the noise of a wagon as it rumbled slowly overhead. Into this ‘cool grot and mossy cell’ I once led my new companion, both of us necessarily bending almost double; and I cannot but look back upon the proceeding as probably our earliest instance of close association and mutual confidence. Many years later we revisited the spot together, but found the passage completely silted up, so as to be inaccessible to future wooers, however diminutive.”

At the age of three or four, Rowland was nearly carried off by the scarlet fever. So ill he was that for a short while his father and mother thought that he had ceased to breathe. The attack left him weak for some years. “I have never overcome,” he wrote in his eighteenth year, “and most probably never shall quite overcome, the effects of that illness. Ever since I can remember I have suffered much from sickness.” He had to pass many hours of every day lying on his back. He used to beguile the time by counting. He assisted himself, as he said, by a kind of topical memory. “My practice was to count a certain number, generally a hundred, with my eye fixed on one definite place, as a panel of the door, or a pane in the window, and afterwards, by counting-up the points, to ascertain the total.” He here first showed that love of calculation which so highly distinguished him in after life. His health remained so feeble that he had passed his seventh birthday before he was taught his letters. Backward though he was in book-learning, he was really a forward child. At the age of five he had made himself a small water-wheel, rude enough no doubt. Yet it worked with briskness in a little stream near his father’s house. A water-wheel had always a great charm for him. He had been taken to see one before he was three years old, and he used to cry to be taken to see it again. When he was an old man he would go miles out of his way to see one at work. The year after he made his wheel, when he was now six, he and his brother Edwin, a boy of eight, built themselves a small model-forge of brick and mortar. The wheel was about two feet and a-half across, and was pretty fairly shaped. It was turned by a stream from the spout of the pump. The axle, which they made out of the stem of a cherry-tree, cost them a good deal of trouble:—

“We attempted to connect our machinery by means of a crank with the handle of the pump, expecting that if we once gave it a start the water would turn the wheel, while this would not only work the forge, but also maintain, by its operation on the pump, the stream necessary to its own movement. In short, we looked for a perpetual motion, and were greatly disappointed to find motion at an end as soon as our own hands were withdrawn from the pump. When we mentioned our perplexity to my father, after informing us that our attempt was hopeless, and giving us such explanation as we could understand, he consoled us under our discomfiture by telling us that many persons, much older and wiser than ourselves, had expended time, labour, and money, in the same fruitless quest.”[22]

A few years after this his father himself came across one of these dreamers. He was taken by a friend to see a machine for producing perpetual motion. The inventor boasted of his success. “There,” he said, “the machine is.” “Does it go?” the visitor asked. “No, it does not go, but I will defy all the world to show why it does not go.”

The lads happily had a fair supply of tools. Their father, in his boyhood, had been fond of using them, and had kept some of them so carefully that they were quite serviceable for his sons. In three old looms that had belonged to their grandfather they found an abundant supply of materials.

Their life at Horsehills, if somewhat hard, was far from being unhappy. A few years after they had left the neighbourhood, Rowland and his elder brothers passed through Wolverhampton on the top of a stagecoach. At a certain point of the road the three boys stood up in order to get a glimpse of their old home. A gentleman seated by them, on learning what they were gazing at, said, “to our no small gratification,” as Rowland remembered, “that we must have been good lads when we lived there, since we were so fond of the place.”

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