Aaron Hill, poet, dramatist, projector

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Preface

The study of a minor author entails two main advantages: his relations with great contemporaries may throw light upon them from a new angle; and his activities, whether significant or not in their results, may illustrate the spirit of his age, and enrich the backgrounds of more memorable lives. There is often, too, a psychological problem of much interest involved in a vanished reputation. Why was a writer, whose works our age declines to notice, highly regarded in his own day? It is a problem merely pushed aside, not solved, by concluding that the judgment of our ancestors was at fault. The attempt to solve it may not always result in a contribution to scholarship, but it may add a very little to our knowledge of human nature, and it sometimes reveals a personality more interesting and attractive than the pages in which that personality found expression.

Aaron Hill is an author who offers all these inducements to study: he had relations more or less intimate with a great poet and a great novelist, and with many less famous writers; he was versatile and enterprising to such an unusual degree that he left few of the typical pursuits of his time untried; and the prominence of his name in his own day, compared with the total eclipse of it in ours, provides us with the psychological problem. "To the really intelligent men among his contemporaries, ■ ' Professor Lounsbury has said, "he must have seemed the most persistent and colossal bore of the century. ' n To disinter an extinct

i Thomas E. Lounsbury, Shakespeare and Voltaire, 87. ' ' It was to posterity," Professor Lounsbury says of Hill in another place (page 151), "that he looked for recognition, forgetting that posterity must

X PREFACE

bore of the past would be a work not so much of pious as of impious pedantry — a criminal attempt to increase the present sum of boredom. But it is curious that men, usually considered to have been really intelligent, expressed opinions the reverse of that which Professor Lounsbury supposes them to have entertained. By some of them Hill was called a genius, by many a man of unusual ability; and almost invariably he was spoken of with great respect. Were all these men either deliberately insincere, or stupidly mistaken ?

This study makes no effort to rescue Hill's poetry from the neglect into which it has deservedly fallen. But in following his career, we meet well-known figures, we catch glimpses of interesting phases of eighteenth century thought and enterprise, and we come to know a man who has no title to be hailed as a genius, but who is, nevertheless, very far from deserving to be dismissed as a "bore of the first water," 2 or as a "joke concocted between the Muses and Momus, to bring the judgments of mortals into contempt." 3

In the unpublished correspondence between Hill and Samuel Richardson, preserved in the Forster MSS. in the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington, I have found the most interesting record of Hill 's later life ; and I am therefore especially indebted to the Keeper of the Dyce and Forster Collections for the privilege of examining this material. In quoting from the correspondence, I have retained the original spelling and punctuation; but in extracts from printed works, I have modernized both, for I see no advantage in directing attention to Hill's vagaries

necessarily be so taken up with its own bores that only at rare intervals can a pious pedantry be trusted to exhume even temporarily the extinct bores of the past."

2 As he is characterized in the Diet, of Nat. Biog.

3 D. C. Tovey, Memoir of Thomson in the Aldine ed. of his works, 1897, p. xxiii.

PREFACE XI

in the use of commas and italics. I wish to express my thanks for courteous assistance to the librarians of Yale, Harvard, and Columbia Universities; to the authorities of the British Museum, the John Rylands Library of Manchester, and the Bodleian ; and to Professor C. H. Firth of Oxford University, through whose kindness I secured reading privileges at the Bodleian. My friend Miss E. R. Clapp examined for me several books to which I did not have access, and made helpful suggestions; and my mother has been a most patient and valuable critic of my work in all its stages.

In the English Department at Columbia University, my thanks are due to Professor A. H. Thorndike and Dr. Carl Van Doren for reading my manuscript. But my deepest obligation is to Professor W. P. Trent, who first suggested the subject of this study, and whose generous interest in its progress has been no less helpful to me than his wide and intimate knowledge of the period. It is a pleasure to express here my appreciation of both.

New York City, May, 1913.

Contents

Chapter Page

I. Hill's Early Life 1

II. Hill 's Projects 28

Chapter I Hill's Eaely Life

Aaron Hill was born on February 10, 1685, in Beaufort Buildings in the Strand. 1 His father was George Hill, an attorney, of Malmsbury Abbey, in Wiltshire, "a gentleman possessed of an estate of about 2000 1. a year, which was entailed upon him, and the eldest son, and to his heirs for many descents. But the unhappy misconduct of Mr. George Hill, and the weakness of the trustees, entangled it in such a manner as hitherto has rendered it of no advantage to his family; for, without any legal title so to do, he sold it all at different times for sums greatly beneath the value of it, and left his children to their mother's care, and her mother's (Mrs. Ann Gregory), who took great pains with her grandson's education."- Perhaps it was his father's misuse of his legal knowledge that led Aaron Hill to acquire what one of his biographers calls a "deep insight" into law — so deep that his arguments sometimes obliged "the greatest council (formally) under their hands to retract their own first given opinions." 3 It was not deep enough to enable him to win a law-suit, however. Another son of George Hill, Gilbert, appears from time to time during his brother Aaron's life and after his death, usually in a state of distress.

1 For biographies of Hill, see the Bibliography. 2Cibber's Lives, V, 252 f. s Ibid., V, 261.

At the age of nine, Aaron Hill was sent to the free grammar-school at Barnstaple in Devon, where he had for a schoolfellow John Gay, also born in 1685. From Barnstaple he went to Westminster, just a little too late to come under the rod of the famous Dr. Busby, who died in 1695. There were two classes of students at Westminster: Town Boys, and King's (or Queen's) Scholars, elected after a year from among the Town Boys. Hill evidently remained a Town Boy, for his name does not appear in the list of those elected to the Foundation. His friendship with Barton Booth, the actor, who entered the school about 1690 and left in 1698 to go on the Dublin stage, probably began at Westminster; and perhaps his interest in the stage was first aroused, like Booth's, by the annual Westminster play. Another Westminster boy, afterwards famous, — John Carteret, Earl of Granville, — was referred to by Hill as a schoolfellow; 4 but he must have entered just about when Hill left, for he was five years his junior. Hill eulogized him in his poem, The Impartial (1745), but confided to his friend Richardson that he really was not sure that what he said of him was true. 5

At Westminster Hill received the usual classical education of the time. 6 One little contemporary picture of conditions in the school is perhaps worth quoting. The mother of a Westminster boy, Colin Campbell, wrote in February, 1691: "Colin is a busie man at all his leasons; is every day at scoul all this winter befor 7 o'clock, and his wax candle with him, and doth not com out till past 11, and they returne at 1, and stay until neir six. This was far

4 In the dedication of The Impartial to Carteret by ' ' his Lordship 's quondam schoolfellow. ' '

5 Hill to Richardson, April 6 and 9, 1744. Forster MSS.

s See G. F. Eussell Barker, Memoir of Bicliard Busby, etc., London, 1895, and John Sargeaunt, Annals of Westminster School, London, 1898.

from his dyot at hom, and in the great cold scoul he sits the whole day over without a hatt or cap, and all the windows broak, and yet thanks be to God, he taks very well with it, tho he never seeth a fire but in my hous." 7 She notes, however, that the reputation of the masters for severity has not been borne out so far in Colin 's case. Hill, too, unless the boy was very different from the man, was probably a ' ' busie man at his leasons, ' ' and tradition says that he was a "busie man" at the lessons of his fellows as well : "Under the care of Dr. Knipe, his genius showed itself in a distinguished light, and often made him some amends for his hard fortune, which denied him such supplies of pocket money as his spirit wished, by enabling him to perform the tasks of many who had not his capacity." 8 It is more likely that his helpfulness was prompted by good-nature, and by the inadequacy of his own tasks to employ all his energy; if he really increased his pocket money by his genius, it was, I think, the only instance of the kind in his life. Aside from this anecdote, there is little to show what sort of boy he was, except one reminiscence of his own, which suggests that he was imaginative and sensitive to impressions : in his Plain Dealer, 9 after praising Spenser for bold descriptions and quick, penetrating fancy, he goes on: "There is in his works an image of Death so dreadfully drawn, and painted in such glowing colors, that (having got it by heart when I was a boy) it made so lively an impression on me that I never failed for a long time after to see it at my bed's foot as soon as the candle was carried out of the room, and met it in every churchyard I passed over after sunset." 10

7 Quoted by Sargeaunt, Annals, etc., 287.

s Cibber 's Lives, V, 253. Dr. Thomas Knipe was Busby 's successor. 9 No. 91. io Hill 's appreciation of earlier poets occasionally took a form that

The conventional Westminster boy proceeded in due course either to Christ Church, Oxford, or Trinity College, Cambridge; but Hill was not the conventional boy. "At fourteen years of age he left Westminster school; and shortly after, hearing his grandmother make mention of a relation much esteemed (Lord Paget, then ambassador at Constantinople), he formed a resolution of paying him a visit there, being likewise very desirous of seeing that empire." 11 Mrs. Gregory, being a woman of "uncommon understanding and great good-nature," sympathized with this adventurous scheme, and furnished him with funds for the voyage. He embarked on March 2, 1700, aud travelled by way of Portugal and Italy. Unfortunately, the diary he is said to have kept has not come to light, but many particulars of the journey were incorporated in his Ottoman Empire. Lord Paget was surprised at the arrival of his young relation, and it is a proof of the attractions of Hill's person and character that he was also pleased at the boy's enterprise. He promptly provided for him "a very learned ecclesiastic in his own house, and under his tuition sent him to travel, being desirous to improve, so far as possible, the education of a person he found worthy of it. ' ' These travels took Hill to Greece, and the islands of the J^gean, and by caravan into the Holy

arouses the ire of their modern admirers, though it was quite in accord with the feeling of his own age. He "improved" poems of Wotton and Donne. (See The Disparity, from a Hint of Sir Henry Wotton, WorTcs, III, 310; and To a Lady who Loved Angling, from a Bint out of Br. Bonne, WorTcs, IV, 58.) In the very brief notice of Hill in The Cambridge History of Eng. Lit., IX, ch. VI, p. 210, the alteration of Wotton 's ' ' You meaner beauties of the night ' ' is singled out by Professor Saintsbury as a crime he finds it very difficult to pardon Hill for.

ii Life by "I. K. " prefixed to Hill 's Bramatic WorTcs.

HILL S EARLY LIFE O

Land ; 12 he visited Mecca as well as Jerusalem. He was in Egypt in the spring of 1701, and back in Constantinople in 1702. Needless to say, he had adventures, and the most interesting parts of his Ottoman Empire are those in which he tells of them, though he introduces them merely by way of illustration.

Once, when Hill and others were returning from a visit to a British ship, they met a Turkish fanatic, "a certain tattered wretch, in the habit of a pilgrim, leaping up and down, with elevated eyes, contracted forehead, and a visage full of passion and deformity. (He) held a dagger in his hand, and skipped about with such . . . violence as made me take his zealous transports for madness ; so that taking him for some simple antic, I laughed aloud at his extravagant diversion. He saw me laugh and made directly towards me with his brandished weapon, which a Greek interpreter, endeavoring to turn aside, received unhappily to the hilt within his bosom." He then hurled his dagger at Hill, who avoided it by dropping to his knee. Of course Hill killed him. 13

At Sestos and Abydos, Hill paid his respects to the lovers; and after quoting Musaeus, he adds with a trace of humor that the sentimental traveller has opportunity enough to weep, for Turkish official red-tape detains him there three days. At Troy he was sure that he had found a fragment of the original wall and the tomb of Hector. His vessel was detained near the coast by adverse winds long enough to permit him to land, with an Italian priest,

12 <■ ' >Tis really a diverting entertainment for a sprightly fancy to observe what multitudes of superstitious Jews swarm up and down in every caravan; the oldest, ugliest, and most decrepit of all mankind, who flock from every distant corner of the spacious universe to die as near Jerusalem as possible, and load themselves and other beasts of burden with the musty bones and tattered relics of their dead relations" (Ottoman Empire, 274).

is Ottoman Empire, 82 f .

and they walked about three miles up into a desolate country overgrown with brambles. At least one Englishman had been there before them, for scratched on the marble of the supposed tomb of Hector were the lines :

" I do suppose that here stood Troy ; My name it is William, a jolly Boy; My other name it is Hudson, and so God bless the sailors, wherever they do go.

I was here in the year of our Lord 1631, and was bound for old England, God bless her." 14

At Samos, Hill watched the sponge divers, and tried diving himself with their apparatus, though "more than most men averse to diving." 15 At Patmos, he was determined to see the chapel where St. John was said to have written the Book of Revelations; and unable to persuade anyone to go on shore with him, he landed alone, and started out with pistols and scimetar to find the monastery. While wandering about, quite lost, on a wooded hill, he discovered "on the brow of an impending precipice a little hut or cave," with a door which he pushed open. "I was all amazed when I perceived the inside of the cell as still as possible; . . . just against the entrance burned a lamp on either side a little altar, and the weak and broken light . . . discovered in the midst a large black coffin filled with something ... as black and dismal ... as the coffin. ' ' This dismal something was a living Italian hermit, who proved to be a most agreeable companion, and escorted the young traveller to the monastery. 16

14 Ottoman Empire, 206 f .

15 Ibid., 210-211. He and his fellow travellers were induced to try their skill when they heard of a law among the divers "that no man shall be allowed to marry, till he can demonstrate by a trial he is qualified to dive for one continued quarter of an hour. ' ' Hill kept his head under only two minutes.

Hill's pictures of the streets of Cairo — especially of a bowing ass, a climbing goat, and a dancing camel — are entertaining. 17 But his most thrilling adventure happened in the catacombs, some fifteen miles southeast of Memphis. To visit them was a dangerous enterprise, for they were remote from protection, and the wandering Arabs had an unpleasant custom of closing the entrances after travellers had entered, and then returning "some few days after to divide the plunder of those miscarried gentlemen." Hill and three others secured a guide, journeyed all night, and found the desert apparently deserted. Near the opening of the catacombs, however, they were surprised to see a ladder of ropes. They "went backwards down, with each man a pistol in one hand and a lighted torch in the other. A strange uncommon smell saluted our first entrance with an odor not to be imagined by such as have not known it by experience, and the blazing torches, striking a faint glimmering light through the thickness of the gloom, discovered, as we walked along, on either side the discolored faces of the dead, with a strange and inexpressible horror. We had scarce passed three yards within the vault when the fore-

1 7 Ibid., 242 f . Hill did not rest till he found out how they taught the camels to dance : ' ' They make a large square hollow place on some stone pavement, not unlike a bath, of such depth that nothing let down thither can get out again but with the same assistance he was first put in by. Under this paved floor, consisting . . . of . . . fire-stone, is built a furnace into which they put a necessary quantity of wood, and heating it to what degree they please, the stones grow hot like some mild oven. Then they put the poor meek camel into this square hollow, heated as it is, and standing around the edges of the place begin to sound their drums or other instruments; continuing so to do, while the unhoofed and tender-footed camel, all impatient of the heat, first draws up one leg, then another, changing swifter as the heat, increasing, burns his feet with greater anguish, till at last he rears himself on end, and capers nimbly on his hinder feet, as if he strove to imitate a dancer. ' ' After a course of this training, he is ready to dance anywhere at the sound of that music.

most of our company, stumbling accidentally on something that lay in his way, fell headlong over it ; whereupon, holding down our torches, we perceived two men in Christian habits, extended cross each other, and appearing newly dead, with all the pale and frightful marks of a convulsive horror in their . . . faces. Between the feet of one there lay a pocketbook and pencil, which taking up and opening, we read with great difficulty . . . lines there written in Italian." It seems the unfortunate Italians had been shut in by Arabs on June 18, 1701 ; it was then June 22. Alarmed, the explorers hurried back to the entrance, arriving just in time to see the stone shoved over the aperture by some persons above. The ladder was gone. Hill urged the company to search for some other exit, and keeping only one torch alight, they hurried from vault to vault. Suddenly they caught a glimpse of six faces against a wall ahead of them. "With one consent we fired our pistols. Tis impossible to make the reader sensible of the prodigious loud report and rumbling noise this one discharge created in the vault. . . . "Whether fear, or some unlucky accident produced the cause, . . . the frighted guide let fall his torch, which presently extinguished." When the smoke cleared away, they perceived a ray of light, and followed the gleam until they came to a hole in the wall, through which they finally escaped into daylight. Several Arabs were riding off with their mules ; they had evidently come back to plunder the Italians and had been surprised by Hill's party. Just then some Turkish soldiers arrived opportunely, recovered the mules, and allowed the party to finish in safety their explorations in the catacombs, and to attend to the obsequies of the Italians. 18

is Ottoman Empire, 264 f. The cut illustrating this adventure represents a cross section of the vaults, quite in the style of a billboard for a modern melodrama, and allows us to see the desert, two stories of the catacombs, and all that is happening above and below

HILL S EARLY LIFE y

After all these adventures — rather unusual for a boy — Hill returned to Constantinople, apparently near the end of the year 1701 or the beginning of 1702. In the acknowledgment of Lord Paget 's kindness, prefixed to the Ottoman Empire, Hill writes that after visiting Palestine, Egypt, and other eastern parts, he came to Constantinople "time enough to owe the best improvements of my education to the generous care of this wise nobleman, whose instructions and example gave me first a notion of the world, and under whose protection I was afterwards so happy as to see it to advantage, having had the honor to attend him from the Turkish court to England, in a journey overland through almost all the celebrated parts of Christendom." Lord Paget, with his suite, started on his return some time in the late spring or early summer of 1702; he went by way of Bulgaria and Koumania into Germany; in September he reached Holland, and was then ordered to proceed to Vienna ; and in December he went from Vienna to the court of Bavaria. Not until April 12, 1703, did he and his suite arrive in England, after a passage from Holland that had been enlivened by a sea-fight with the French. 19

The next certain date in Hill 's life is that of the publication of his Camillus in 1707. He probably remained attached to Lord Paget 's household for a short time after the return to England, and it may be to this period that the mysterious operations of a malevolent female, mentioned by his biographer, belong : 20 ' ' He was in great esteem with that

ground. Lady Mary W. Montagu remembered this adventure when she contradicted a statement of the admirable Mr. Hill's about the sweating pillar of St. Sophia; she says (incorrectly, according to her editor) that "there is not the least tradition of any such matter; and I suppose it was revealed to him in vision during his wonderful stay in the Egyptian catacombs" (Letters and Works, ed. of 1887, I, 236).

isLuttrell, Brief Historical Relation, TV, 287 (April 13, 1703).

ao Gibber 's Lives, V, 254.

nobleman ; insomuch that in all probability he had been still more distinguished by him at his death than in his lifetime, had not the envious fears and malice of a certain female, who was in high authority with that lord, prevented and supplanted his kind disposition towards him. My lord took great pleasure in instructing him himself, wrote him whole books in different languages, on which his student placed the greatest value ; which was no sooner taken notice of by jealous observation than they were stolen from his apartment, and suffered to be some days missing, to the great displeasure of my lord, but still much greater affliction of his pupil, whose grief for losing a treasure he so highly valued was more than doubled by perceiving that, from some false insinuation that had been made, it was believed he had himself wilfully lost them. But young Mr. Hill was soon entirely cleared on that head."

It may have been some such misunderstanding that started Hill off on his travels again, or it may simply have been that a good opportunity for further travel presented itself. Eighteen, he wrote later, was too early an age for a young man to think of leaving England; "this I know by personal experience, having been beholding to my latter travels for a full digestion and improvement of the unripe observations vainly gathered in my former." 21 When a young man is sent abroad, he should be accompanied by a tutor not much older than himself, but of riper experience. It happened fortunately that a noble family in Yorkshire shared this view, and gave into Hill's charge a young gentleman, with whom he travelled for two or three years. This was William Wentworth, of Bretton Hall in Yorkshire, who was born in 1686, and succeeded his father, Sir Matthew, in the baronetcy in March, 1706. 2 - It is very

21 Ottoman Empire, 333.

22 Joseph Hunter, South Yorkshire, London, 1828, II, 243. Sir William was afterwards Deputy Lieutenant and Captain of Train probable that their travels were brought to an end by the death of the young man's father. All that is recorded of this episode in Hill's life is that he brought his pupil home "improved," to the satisfaction of his relations. No doubt this was a more conventional tour than the former.

And now, about 1706-1707, Aaron Hill was back in England, much improved himself by his unusual education, and with one "improved" youth to his credit. What was he going to do? With the activities of his life in one's mind, one might better ask, what was he not going to do? He was evidently a very engaging young man. The pleasant impression made by his portrait in the Ottoman Empire (1709) is confirmed by the description of him in Cibber's Lives: "His person was (in youth) extremely fair and handsome; his eyes were a dark blue, both bright and penetrating; brown hair and visage oval; which was enlivened by a smile the most agreeable in conversation; where his address was affably engaging; to which was joined a dignity which rendered him at once respected and admired by those (of either sex) who were acquainted with him. He was tall, genteelly made, and not thin. His voice was sweet, his conversation elegant, and capable of entertaining upon various subjects."

One of the most picturesque figures in public life at the moment was the Earl of Peterborough. For about two years he had been carrying on the campaign in Valencia, in the interests of the Allies, who were supporting the claims of Charles of Austria to the Spanish throne ; he had been the hero of several brilliant victories — notably the capture of Barcelona — and of many striking incidents. At times, he had conducted himself more like a knight errant than the general of an army. Not the least interesting

bands, and M. P. for Malton. His name is in the list of subscribers both to the Ottoman Empire and to Hill's WorTcs, 1753.

feature of this Valencia campaign was (and is) the difficulty of finding out the truth about it. Peterborough has sometimes been exalted as a hero and sometimes cried down as a mere figure-head. 23 He was, says one of his biographers, "a source of delightful possibilities; nobody knew exactly what he had done, and nobody could predict what he might not do." 24 His conduct in Valencia aroused some suspicions in the government at home, and he was recalled to England in February, 1707. On his way back, he visited many of the courts of Europe, conducting negotiations with powers to whom he was not accredited, and did not reach England until August. The Queen refused to see him, unless he explained satisfactorily several incidents in his career. Although he was a Whig, the Tories, out of hostility to his rival Marlborough, took up his cause, and Dr. Freind published a favorable account of his conduct in Spain. In January, 1708, a Parliamentary inquiry was held, with the result that he was neither vindicated nor censured, but was ordered to clear up his accounts.

23 The Military Memoirs of Captain George Carleton, etc., 1728, long regarded as containing the direct evidence of an eye-witness of Peterborough's exploits, pictured him as a hero. These Memoirs were claimed for Defoe by his biographer Walter Wilson in 1830. Colonel Arthur Parnell {History of the War of the Succession in Spain, 1888), who believed that Peterborough himself promoted the writing of the Memoirs and that Swift wrote them, removed Peterborough from his prominent place in the Valencia campaign, and gave the credit of many of his exploits to others — to Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt, Basset y Kamos, Sir John Leake, and so on. The Earl emerges from Colonel Parnell 's account with his character as a general and as a man considerably battered. William Stebbing, whose Peterborough (1890) is named by the Diet, of Nat. Biog. as one of the best short accounts, takes a much more favorable view of Peterborough than Parnell. In volume IX of The Cambridge History of Eng. Lit., page 25, Professor Trent — as Mr. C. E. Doble had done before — concludes that Defoe was almost certainly the shaper of Carleton 's Memoirs.