Aaron Hill, unlike Rowe, was not distinguished as a dramatist, and succeeded only in two or three adaptations from the French. His claims as a poet are also insignificant. He was born in London in 1684, with expectations that were not destined to be realized, but Fortune was not unkind to him. His uncle, Lord Paget, Ambassador at Constantinople, gave the youth a warm welcome, supplied him with a tutor, and sent him to travel in the East. On Lord Paget's return to England, Hill accompanied him, and together they are said to have visited a great part of Europe. Some time later Hill went abroad again, and was absent two or three years. For awhile—it could not have been long—he was secretary to the Earl of Peterborough, and at the age of twenty-six, his good star being still in the ascendant, he married a young lady 'of great merit and beauty, with whom he had a very handsome fortune.' Hill was then appointed manager of Drury Lane, and he wrote a number of plays, the very names of which are now forgotten. Few men indeed so well known in his own day have sunk into such insignificance in ours. He wrote eight books of a long and unfinished epic called Gideon, which I suppose no one in the present century has had the hardihood to read; like Young he wrote a poem on The Judgment Day, a theme attempted also, shortly before his death, by John Philips, and that, after his kind, he produced a Pindaric ode goes without saying. A long poem called The Northern Star, a panegyric on Peter the Great, is said to have passed through several editions. The poem does not prove Hill to be a poet, but it shows his command of the heroic couplet. The style of the poem, which is an indiscriminate panegyric, may be judged from the following lines:
'Transcendent prince! how happy must thou be!
What can'st thou look upon unblessed by thee?
What inward peace must that calm bosom know,
Whence conscious virtue does so strongly flow!
* * * * *
Such are the kings who make God's image shine,
Nor blush to dare assert their right divine!
No earth-born bias warps their climbing will,
No pride their power, no avarice whets their skill.
They poise each hope which bids the wise obey,
And shed broad blessings from their widening sway;
To raise the afflicted, stretch the healing hand,
Drive crushed oppression from each rescued land,
Bold in alternate right, or sheath or draw
The sword of conquest, or the sword of law;
Spare what resists not, what opposes bend,
And govern cool, what they with warmth defend.'
Hill has the merit of having turned the tables upon Pope, who had put him into the treatise on the Bathos, and then into the Dunciad, where, however, the lines have more of compliment than censure, since he is made to mount 'far off among the swans of Thames.' Irritated by a note in the Dunciad, Hill replied in a long poem entitled The Progress of Wit, a Caveat, which opens with the following pointed lines:
'Tuneful Alexis, on the Thames' fair side,
The ladies' plaything, and the Muses' pride;
With merit popular, with wit polite,
Easy though vain, and elegant though light;
Desiring, and deserving others' praise,
Poorly accepts a fame he ne'er repays;
Unborn to cherish, sneakingly approves,
And wants the soul to spread the worth he loves.'
In a letter to Hill Pope complained of these lines, and had the hypocrisy to say that he never thought any great matters of his poetical capacity, but prided himself on the superiority of his moral life. Hill returned a masterly and incisive reproof to this ridiculous statement, in the course of which he says:
'I am sorry to hear you say you never thought any great matters of your poetry. It is in my opinion the characteristic you are to hope your distinction from. To be honest is the duty of every plain man. Nor, since the soul of poetry is sentiment, can a great poet want morality. But your honesty you possess in common with a million who will never be remembered; whereas your poetry is a peculiar, that will make it impossible that you should be forgotten.'
He adds that if Pope had not been in the spleen when he wrote, he would have remembered that humility is a moral virtue; and how, asks the writer, can you know that your moral life is above that of most of the wits 'since you tell me in the same letter that many of their names were unknown to you?'
Aaron Hill, though he could write a sensible letter, was not a wise man. He was 'everything by turns and nothing long.' Poetry was but one of his accomplishments, and we are told that he cultivated it 'as a relaxation from the study of history, criticism, geography, physic, commerce, agriculture, war, law, chemistry, and natural philosophy, to which he devoted the greatest part of his time.'