His devotional works include:—Holy Observations Lib. I. Some few of David’s Psalmes Metaphrased (1607 and 1609); three centuries of Meditations and Vowes, Divine and Morall (1606, 1607, 1609), edited by Charles Sayle (1901); The Arte of Divine Meditation (1607); Heaven upon Earth, or of True Peace and Tranquillitie of Mind (1606), reprinted with some of his letters in John Wesley’s Christian Library, vol. iv. (1819); Occasional Meditations ... (1630), edited by his son Robert Hall; Henochisme; or a Treatise showing how to walk with God (1639), translated from Bishop Hall’s Latin by Moses Wall; The Devout Soul; or Rules of Heavenly Devotion (1644), often since reprinted; The Balm of Gilead ... (1646, 1752); Christ Mysticall; or the blessed union of Christ and his Members (1647), of which General Gordon was a student (reprinted from Gordon’s copy, 1893); Susurrium cum Deo (1659); The Great Mysterie of Godliness (1650); Resolutions and Decisions of Divers Practicall cases of Conscience (1649, 1650, 1654).
Authorities.—The chief authority for Hall’s biography is to be found in his autobiographical tracts: Observations of some Specialities of Divine Providence in the Life of Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich, Written with his own hand; and his Hard Measure, a reprint of which may be consulted in Dr Christopher Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Biography. The best criticism of his satires is to be found in Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, vol. iv. pp. 363-409 (ed. Hazlitt, 1871), where a comparison is instituted between Marston and Hall. In 1615 Hall published A Recollection of such treatises as have been ... published ... (1615, 1617, 1621); in 1625 appeared his Works (reprinted 1627, 1628, 1634, 1662). The first complete Works appeared in 1808, edited by the Rev. Josiah Pratt. Other editions are by Peter Hall (1837) and by Philip Wynter (1863). See also Bishop Hall, his Life and Times (1826), by Rev. John Jones; Life of Joseph Hall, by Rev. George Lewis (1886); A. B. Grosart, The Complete Poems of Joseph Hall ... with introductions, &c. (1879); Satires, &c. (Early English Poets, ed. S. W. Singer, 1824). Many of Hall’s works were translated into French, and some into Dutch, and there have been numerous selections from his devotional works.
[1] The tomb of Sir John Beauchamp (d. 1358) in old St Paul’s was commonly known, in error, as that of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. “To dine with Duke Humphrey” was to go hungry among the debtors and beggars who frequented “Duke Humphrey’s Walk” in the cathedral.
HALL, MARSHALL (1790-1857). English physiologist, was born on the 18th of February 1790, at Basford, near Nottingham, where his father, Robert Hall, was a cotton manufacturer. Having attended the Rev. J. Blanchard’s academy at Nottingham, he entered a chemist’s shop at Newark, and in 1809 began to study medicine at Edinburgh University. In 1811 he was elected senior president of the Royal Medical Society; the following year he took the M.D. degree, and was immediately appointed resident house physician to the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh. This appointment he resigned after two years, when he visited Paris and its medical schools, and, on a walking tour, those also of Berlin and Göttingen. In 1817, when he settled at Nottingham, he published his Diagnosis, and in 1818 he wrote the Mimoses, a work on the affections denominated bilious, nervous, &c. The next year he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1825 he became physician to the Nottingham general hospital. In 1826 he removed to London, and in the following year he published his Commentaries on the more important diseases of females. In 1830 he issued his Observations on Blood-letting, founded on researches on the morbid and curative effects of loss of blood, which were acknowledged by the medical profession to be of vast practical value, and in 1831 his Experimental Essay on the Circulation of the Blood in the Capillary Vessels, in which he showed that the blood-channels intermediate between arteries and veins serve the office of bringing the fluid blood into contact with the material tissues of the system. In the following year he read before the Royal Society a paper “On the inverse ratio which subsists between Respiration and Irritability in the Animal Kingdom.” His most important work in physiology was concerned with the theory of reflex action, embodied in a paper “On the reflex Function of the Medulla Oblongata and the Medulla Spinalis” (1832), which was supplemented in 1837 by another “On the True Spinal Marrow, and the Excito-motor System of Nerves.” The “reflex function” excited great attention on the continent of Europe, though in England some of his papers were refused publication by the Royal Society. Hall thus became the authority on the multiform deranged states of health referable to an abnormal condition of the nervous system, and he gained a large practice. His “ready method” for resuscitation in drowning and other forms of suspended respiration has been the means of saving innumerable lives. He died at Brighton of a throat affection, aggravated by lecturing, on the 11th of August 1857.
A list of his works and details of his “ready method,” &c., are given in his Memoirs by his widow (London, 1861).
HALL, ROBERT (1764-1831), English Baptist divine, was born on the 2nd of May 1764, at Arnesby near Leicester, where his father, Robert Hall (1728-1791), a man whose cast of mind in some respects resembled closely that of the son, was pastor of a Baptist congregation. Robert was the youngest of a family of fourteen. While still at the dame’s school his passion for books absorbed the greater part of his time, and in the summer it was his custom after school hours to retire to the churchyard with a volume, which he continued to peruse there till nightfall, making out the meaning of the more difficult words with the help of a pocket dictionary. From his sixth to his eleventh year he attended the school of Mr Simmons at Wigston, a village four miles from Arnesby. There his precocity assumed the exceptional form of an intense interest in metaphysics, partly perhaps on account of the restricted character of his father’s library; and before he was nine years of age he had read and re-read Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise on the Will and Butler’s Analogy. This incessant study at such an early period of life seems, however, to have had an injurious influence on his health. After he left Mr Simmons’s school his appearance was so sickly as to awaken fears of the presence of phthisis. In order, therefore, to obtain the benefit of a change of air, he stayed for some time in the house of a gentleman near Kettering, who with an impropriety which Hall himself afterwards referred to as “egregious,” prevailed upon the boy of eleven to give occasional addresses at prayer meetings. As his health seemed rapidly to recover, he was sent to a school at Northampton conducted by the Rev. John Ryland, where he remained a year and a half, and “made great progress in Latin and Greek.” On leaving school he for some time studied divinity under the direction of his father, and in October 1778 he entered the Bristol academy for the preparation of students for the Baptist ministry. Here the self-possession which had enabled him in his twelfth year to address unfalteringly various audiences of grown-up people seems to have strangely forsaken him; for when, in accordance with the arrangements of the academy, his turn came to deliver an address in the vestry of Broadmead chapel, he broke down on two separate occasions and was unable to finish his discourse. On the 13th of August 1780 he was set apart to the ministry, but he still continued his studies at the academy; and in 1781, in accordance with the provisions of an exhibition which he held, he entered King’s College, Aberdeen, where he took the degree of master of arts in March 1785. At the university he was without a rival of his own standing in any of the classes, distinguishing himself alike in classics, philosophy and mathematics. He there formed the acquaintance of Mackintosh (afterwards Sir James), who, though a year his junior in age, was a year his senior as a student. While they remained at Aberdeen the two were inseparable, reading together the best Greek authors, especially Plato, and discussing, either during their walks by the sea-shore and the banks of the Don or in their rooms until early morning, the most perplexed questions in philosophy and religion.
During the vacation between his last two sessions at Aberdeen, Hall acted as assistant pastor to Dr Evans at Broadmead chapel, Bristol, and three months after leaving the university he was appointed classical tutor in the Bristol academy, an office which he held for more than five years. Even at this period his extraordinary eloquence had excited an interest beyond the bounds of the denomination to which he belonged, and when he preached the chapel was generally crowded to excess, the audience including many persons of intellectual tastes. Suspicions in regard to his orthodoxy having in 1789 led to a misunderstanding with his colleague and a part of the congregation, he in July 1790 accepted an invitation to make trial of a congregation at Cambridge, of which he became pastor in July of the following year. From a statement of his opinions contained in a letter to the congregation which he left, it would appear that, while a firm believer in the proper divinity of Christ, he had at this time disowned the cardinal principles of Calvinism—the federal headship of Adam, and the doctrine of absolute election and reprobation; and that he was so far a materialist as to “hold that man’s thinking powers and faculties are the result of a certain organization of matter, and that after death he ceases to be conscious till the resurrection.” It was during his Cambridge ministry, which extended over a period of fifteen years, that his oratory was most brilliant and most immediately powerful. At Cambridge the intellectual character of a large part of the audience supplied a stimulus which was wanting at Leicester and Bristol.