This appears in chap. xviii. of the “Plus Ultra.” With great simplicity Glanvill relates:—“At this period of the conference, the disputer lost all patience, and with sufficient spite and rage told me ‘that I was an atheist!—that he had indeed desired my acquaintance, but would have no more on’t,’ and so turned his back and went away, giving me time only to answer that ‘I had no great reason to lament the loss of an acquaintance that could be so easily forfeited.’” The following chapter vindicates the Royal Society from the charge of atheism! to assure the world they were not to be ranked “among the black conspirators against Heaven!” We see the same objections again occurring in the modern system of geology.
This book was so scarce in 1757, that the writer in the “Biographia Britannica” observes that this “small but elegant treatise is still very much esteemed by the curious, being become so scarce as not to be met with in other hands.” Oldys, in 1738, had, in his “British Librarian,” selected this work among the scarce and valuable books of which he has presented us with so many useful analyses.
The history of books is often curious. At one period a book is scarce and valuable, and at another is neither one nor the other. This does not always depend on the caprice of the public, or what may be called literary fashions. Glanvill’s “Plus Ultra” is probably now of easy occurrence; like a prophecy fully completed, the uncertain event being verified, the prophet has ceased to be remembered.
His early history is given by Wood in his usual style. His father had been a Lincolnshire parson, who was obliged to leave his poor curacy because “anabaptistically inclined,” and fled to Ireland, whence his mother and her children were obliged to return on the breaking out of the rebellion of 1641, and landed at Liverpool; afterward, says Wood, “they all beated it on the hoof thence to London, where she, gaining a comfortable subsistence by her needle, sent her son Henry, being then ten years of age, to the collegiate school at Westminster. At that time Mr. Richard Busbie was the chief master, who finding the boy have pregnant parts to a miracle, did much favour and encourage him. At length Sir Henry Vane, junior (the same who was beheaded on Tower Hill, 1662), coming casually into the school with Dr. Lambert Osbaldiston, he did, at the master’s motion, take a kindness to the said boy, and gave him the liberty to resort to his house, and to fill that belly which otherwise had no sustenance but what one penny could purchase for his dinner: and as for his breakfast, he had none, except he got it by making somebody’s exercise. Soon after, Sir Henry got him to be a king’s scholar; and his master perceiving him to be beyond his years in proficiency, he gave him money to buy books, clothes, and his teaching for nothing.” Such was the humble beginning of a learned man, who lived to be a formidable opponent to the whole body of the Royal Society.—Ed.
When Sprat and Glanvill, and others, had threatened to write his life, Stubbe draws this apology for it, while he shows how much, in a time of revolutions, the Royal Society might want one for themselves.
“I was so far from being daunted at those rumours and threats, that I enlarged much this book thereupon, and resolved to charge the enemy home when I saw how weak a resistance I should meet with. I knew that recriminations were no answers. I understood well that the passages of a life like mine, spent in different places with much privacy and obscurity, was unknown to them; that even those actions they would fix their greatest calumnies upon, were such as that they understood not the grounds, nor had they learning enough and skill to condemn. I was at Westminster School when the late king was beheaded. I never took covenant nor engagement. In sum, I served my patron. I endeavoured to express my gratitude to him who had relieved me, being a child, and in great poverty (the rebellion in Ireland having deprived my parents of all means wherewith to educate me); who made me a king’s scholar; preferred me to Christchurch College, Oxon.; and who often supplied me with money when my tender years gave him little hopes of any return; and who protected me amidst the Presbyterians, and Independents, and other sects. With none thereof did I contract any relation or acquaintance; my familiarity never engaged me with ten of that party; and my genius and humour inclined me to fewer. I neither enriched, nor otherwise advanced myself, during the late troubles; and shared the common odium and dangers, not prosperity, with my benefactor. I believe no generous man, who hath the least sense of bravery, will condemn me; and I profess I am ashamed rather to have done so little, than that I have done so much, for him that so frankly obliged a stranger and a child. When Gracchus was put to death for sedition, that faithful friend and accomplice of his was dismissed, and mentioned with honour by all posterity, who, when he was impeached, justified his treason by the avowing a friendship so great that, whatever Gracchus had commanded him, he would not have declined it. And being further questioned, whether he would have burned the capitol at his bidding? he replied again, that he should have done it; but Gracchus would not bid such a thing. They that knew me heretofore, know I have a thousand times thus apologised for myself; adding, that in vassals and slaves, and persons transcendently obliged, their fidelity exempted them from all ignominy, though the principal lords, masters, and patrons, might be accounted traitors. My youth and other circumstances incapacitated me from rendering him any great services; but all that I did, and all that I writ, had no other aim than his interest; nor do I care how much any man can inodiate my former writings, as long as they were subservient to him.
“Having made this declaration, let them (or more able men than they) write the life of a man who hath some virtues of the most celebrated times, and hath preserved himself free from the vices of these. My reply shall be a scornful silence.”—Preface to Stubbe’s “Legends no Histories,” 1670.
His reasons for conformity on these important objects are given with his usual simplicity. “I have at length removed all the umbrages I ever lay under. I have joined myself to the Church of England, not only upon account of its being publicly imposed (which in things indifferent is no small consideration, as I learned from the Scottish transactions at Perth), but because it is the least defining, and consequently the most comprehensive and fitting to be national.”
He died at Bath in 1676, where he had gone in attendance upon several of his patients from the neighbourhood of Warwick, where he for a long time practised as a physician. His old antagonist Glanvill was at that time rector of the Abbey Church in which he was buried, and so became the preacher of his funeral sermon. Wood says he “said no great matter of him.”—Ed.
Pope said to Spence, “It was Dryden who made Will’s coffee-house the great resort for the wits of his time. After his death Addison transferred it to Button’s, who had been a servant of his.” Will’s coffee-house was at the corner of Bow-street, Covent-garden, and Button’s close by in Russell-street.—Ed.
“Some years after the king’s restoration he took pet against the Royal Society, (for which before he had a great veneration,) and being encouraged by Dr. Jo. Fell, no admirer of that society, became in his writings an inveterate enemy against it for several pretended reasons: among which were, first, that the members thereof intended to bring a contempt upon ancient and solid learning, upon Aristotle, to undermine the universities, and reduce them to nothing, or at least to be very inconsiderable. Secondly, that at long running to destroy the established religion, and involve the nation in popery, and I know not what, &c. So dexterous was his pen, whether pro or con, that few or none could equal, answer, or come near him. He was a person of most admirable parts, had a most prodigious memory, though his enemies would not acknowledge it, but said he read indexes; was the most noted Latinist and Grecian of his age; and after he had been put upon it, was so great an enemy to the virtuosi of his time, I mean those of the Royal Society, that, as he saith, they alarmed him with dangers and troubles even to the hazard of his life and fortunes.”—Wood.
The aspersed passage in Glanvill is this: “The philosophers of elder times, though their wits were excellent, yet the way they took was not like to bring much advantage to knowledge, or any of the uses of human life, being, for the most part, that of Notion and Dispute, which still runs round in a labyrinth of talk, but advanceth nothing. These methods, in so many centuries, never brought the world so much practical beneficial knowledge as could help towards the cure of a cut finger.” Plus Ultra, p. 7.—Stubbe, with all the malice of a wit, drew his inference, and turned the point unfairly against his adversary!
I shall here observe how much some have to answer, in a literary court of conscience, when they unfairly depreciate the works of a contemporary; and how idly the literary historian performs his task, whenever he adopts the character of a writer from another who is his adversary. This may be particularly shown in the present instance.
Morhoff, in his Polyhistor Litteraria, censures the Plus Ultra of Glanvill, conceiving that he had treated with contempt all ages and nations but his own. The German bibliographer had never seen the book, but took its character from Stubbe and Meric Casaubon. The design of the Plus Ultra, however, differs little from the other works of Glanvill, which Morhoff had seen, and has highly commended.
The political reverie of Campanella was even suspected to cover very opposite designs to those he seemed to be proposing to the world. He attempted to turn men’s minds from all inquiries into politics and religion, to mere philosophical ones. He wished that the passions of mankind might be so directed, as to spend their force in philosophical discussions, and in improvements in science. He therefore insisted on a uniformity on those great subjects which have so long agitated modern Europe; for the ancients seem to have had no wars merely for religion, and perhaps none for modes of government. One may discover an enlightened principle in the project; but the character of Campanella was a jumble of sense, subtlety, and wildness. He probably masked his real intentions. He appears an advocate for the firm establishment of the papal despotism; yet he aims to give an enlightened principle to regulate the actions of mankind. The intentions of a visionary are difficult to define. If he were really an advocate for despotism, what occasioned an imprisonment for the greater part of his days? Did he lay his project much deeper than the surface of things? Did Campanella imagine that, if men were allowed to philosophise with the utmost freedom, the despotism of religion and politics would dissolve away in the weakness of its quiescent state?
The project is a chimera—but, according to the projector, the political and religious freedom of England formed its greatest obstacle. Part of his plan, therefore, includes the means of weakening the Insular heretics by intestine divisions—a mode not seldom practised by the continental powers of France and Spain.
The political project of this fervid genius was, that his “Prince,” the Spanish king, should be the mightiest sovereign in Europe. For this, he was first to prohibit all theological controversies from the Transalpine schools, those of Germany, &c. “A controversy,” he observes, “always shows a kind of victory, and may serve as an authority to a bad cause.” He would therefore admit of no commentaries on the Bible, to prevent all diversity of opinion. He would have revived the ancient philosophical sects, instead of the modern religious sects.
The Greek and the Hebrew languages were not to be taught! for the republican freedom of the ancient Jews and Grecians had often proved destructive of monarchy. Hobbes, in the bold scheme of his Leviathan, seems to have been aware of this fatality. Campanella would substitute for these ancient languages the study of the Arabic tongue! The troublesome Transalpine wits might then employ themselves in confuting the Turks, rather than in vexing the Catholics; so closely did sagacity and extravagance associate in the mind of this wild genius. But Mathematical and Astronomical schools, and other institutions for the encouragement of the mechanical arts, and particularly those to which the northern genius is most apt, as navigation, &c., were to occupy the studies of the people, divert them from exciting fresh troubles, and withdraw them from theological factions. Campanella thus would make men great in science, having first made them slaves in politics; a philosophical people were to be the subjects of despots—not an impossible event!
His plan, remarkable enough, of weakening the English, I give in his words:—“No better way can possibly be found than by causing divisions and dissensions among them, and by continually keeping up the same; which will furnish the Spaniard and the French with advantageous opportunities. As for their religion, which is a moderated Calvinism, that cannot be so easily extinguished and rooted out there, unless there were some schools set up in Flanders, where the English have great commerce, by means of which there may be scattered abroad the seeds of schism and division. These people being of a nature which is still desirous of novelties and change, they are easily wrought over to anything.” These schools were tried at Douay in Flanders, and at Valladolid in Spain, and other places. They became nests of rebellion for the English Catholics; or for any one, who, being discontented with government, was easily converted to any religion which aimed to overturn the British Constitution. The secret history of the Roman Catholics in England remains yet to be told: they indeed had their martyrs and their heroes; but the public effects appear in the frequent executions which occurred in the reigns of Elizabeth and James.
Stubbe appears to have imagined that the Royal Society was really formed on the principle of Campanella; to withdraw the people from intermeddling with politics and religion, by engaging them merely in philosophical pursuits.—The reaction of the public mind is an object not always sufficiently indicated by historians. The vile hypocrisy and mutual persecutions of the numerous fanatics occasioned very relaxed and tolerant principles of religion at the Restoration; as, the democratic fury having spent itself, too great an indulgence was now allowed to monarchy. Stubbe was alarmed that, should Popery be established, the crown of England would become feudatory to foreign power, and embroil the nation in the restitution of all the abbey lands, of which, at the Reformation, the Church had so zealously been plundered. He was still further alarmed that the virtuosi would influence the education of our youth to these purposes; “an evil,” says he, “which has been guarded against by our ancestors in founding free-schools, by uniformity of instruction cementing men’s minds.” We now smile at these terrors; perhaps they were sometimes real. The absolute necessity of strict conformity to the prevalent religion of Europe was avowed in that unrivalled scheme of despotism, which menaced to efface every trace of popular freedom, and the independence of nations, under the dominion of Napoleon.
To this threat of writing his life, we have already noticed the noble apology he has drawn up for the versatility of his opinions. See p. 347. At the moment of the Restoration it was unwise for any of the parties to reproach another for their opinions or their actions. In a national revolution, most men are implicated in the general reproach; and Stubbe said, on this occasion, that “he had observed worse faces in the society than his own.” Waller, and Sprat, and Cowley had equally commemorated the protectorship of Cromwell and the restoration of Charles. Our satirist insidiously congratulates himself that “he had never compared Oliver the regicide to Moses, or his son to Joshua;” nor that he had ever written any Pindaric ode, “dedicated to the happy memory of the most renowned Prince Oliver, Lord Protector:” nothing to recommend “the sacred urn” of that blessed spirit to the veneration of posterity; as if
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“His fame, like men, the elder it doth grow, |
These lines were, I think, taken from Sprat himself! Stubbe adds, it would be “imprudent in them to look beyond the act of indemnity and oblivion, which was more necessary to the Royal Society than to me, who joined with no party, &c.”—Preface to “Legends no Histories.”
He has described this intercourse of his enemies at court with the king, where, when this punishment was suggested, “a generous personage, altogether unknown to me, being present, bravely and frankly interposed, saying, that ‘whatever I was, I was a Roman; that Englishmen were not so precipitously to be condemned to so exemplary a punishment; that representing that book to be a libel against the king was too remote a consequence to be admitted of in a nation free-born, and governed by laws, and tender of ill precedents.’” It was a noble speech, in the relaxed politics of the court of Charles II. He who made it deserved to have had his name more explicitly told: he is designated as “that excellent Englishman, the great ornament of this age, nation, and House of Commons; he whose single worth balanceth much of the debaucheries, follies, and impertinences of the kingdom.”—A Reply unto the Letter written to Mr. Henry Stubbe, Oxford, 1671, p. 20.
Stubbe gives some curious information on this subject. Harvey published his Treatise at Frankfort, 1628, but Cæsalpinus’s work had appeared in 1593. Harvey adopted the notion, and more fully and perspicuously proved it. I shall give what Stubbe says. “Harvey, in his two Answers to Riolan, nowhere asserts the invention so to himself, as to deny that he had the intimation or notion from Cæsalpinus; and his silence I take for a tacit confession. His ambition of glory made him willing to be thought the author of a paradox he had so illustrated, and brought upon the stage, where it lay unregarded, and in all probability buried in oblivion; yet such was his modesty, as not to vindicate it to himself by telling a lie.”—Stubbe’s Censure, &c., p. 112.
I give this literary anecdote, as it enters into the history of most discoveries, of which the improvers, rather than the inventors, are usually the most known to the world. Bayle, who wrote much later than Stubbe, asserts the same, and has preserved the entire passage, art. Cæsalpinus. It is said Harvey is more expressly indebted to a passage in Servetus, which Wotton has given in the preface to his “Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning,” edition 1725. The notion was probably then afloat, and each alike contributed to its development. Thus it was disputed with Copernicus, whether his great discovery of a fixed sun, and the earth wheeling round that star, was his own; others had certainly observed it; yet the invention was still Copernican: for that great genius alone corrected, extended, and gave perfection to a hint, till it expanded to a system.
So gradual have often been the great inventions of genius. What others conjectured, and some discovered, Harvey demonstrated. The fate of Harvey’s discovery is a curious instance of that patience and fortitude which genius must too often exert in respect to itself. Though Harvey lived to his eightieth year, he hardly witnessed his great discovery established before he died; and it has been said, that he was the only one of his contemporaries who lived to see it in some repute. No physician adopted it; and when it got into vogue, they then disputed whether he was the inventor! Sir William Temple denied not only the discovery, but the doctrine of the Circulation of the Blood. “Sense can hardly allow it; which,” says he, “in this dispute must be satisfied as well as reason, before mankind will concur.”
Stubbe has an eloquent passage, which describes the philosophy of science. The new Experimental School had perhaps too wholly rejected some virtues of the old one; the cultivation of the human understanding, as well as the mere observation on the facts that they collected; an error which has not been entirely removed.
“That art of reasoning by which the prudent are discriminated from fools, which methodiseth and facilitates our discourses, which informs us of the validity of consequences and the probability of arguments, and manifests the fallacies of impostors; that art which gives life to solid eloquence, and which renders Statesmen, Divines, Physicians, and Lawyers accomplished; how is this cried down and vilified by the ignoramuses of these days! What contempt is there raised upon the disputative Ethics of Aristotle and the Stoics; and those moral instructions, which have produced the Alexanders and the Ptolemies, the Pompeys and the Ciceroes, are now slighted in comparison of day-labouring! Did we live at Sparta, where the daily employments were the exercises of substantial virtue and gallantry, and men, like setting dogs, were rather bred up unto, than taught reason and worth, it were a more tolerable proposal (though the different policy of these times would not admit of it); but this working, so recommended, is but the feeding of carp in the air, &c. As for the study of Politics, and all critical learning, these are either pedantical, or tedious, to those who have a shorter way of studying men.”—Preface to “Legends no Histories.”
Dr. King was allied to the families of Clarendon and Rochester; he took a degree as Doctor of Civil Law, and soon got into great practice. “He afterwards went with the Earl of Pembroke, Lord-Lieutenant, to Ireland, where he became Judge Advocate, Sole Commissioner of the Prizes, Keeper of the Records, Vicar-General to the Lord Primate of Ireland; was countenanced by persons of the highest rank, and might have made a fortune. But so far was he from heaping up riches, that he returned to England with no other treasure than a few merry poems and humorous essays, and returned to his student’s place in Christ Church.”—Enc. Brit. He was assisted by Bolingbroke; but when his patronage failed, Swift procured him the situation of editor to “Barber’s Gazette.” He ultimately took to drinking; Lintot the bookseller, told Pope, “I remember Dr. King could write verses in a tavern three hours after he could not speak.” His last patron was Lord Clarendon, and he died in apartments he had provided for him in London, Dec. 25, 1712, and was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey at the expense of his lordship.—Ed.
Sloane describes Clark, the famous posture-master, “Phil. Trans.” No. 242, certainly with the wildest grammar, but with many curious particulars; the gentleman in one of Dr. King’s Dialogues inquires the secretary’s opinion of the causes of this man’s wonderful pliability of limbs; a question which Sloane had thus solved, with colloquial ease: it depended upon “bringing the body to it, by using himself to it.”
In giving an account of “a child born without a brain”—“Had it lived long enough,” said King, “it would have made an excellent publisher of Philosophical Transactions!”
Sloane presented the Royal Society with “a figure of a Chinese, representing one of that nation using an ear-picker, and expressing great satisfaction therein.”—“Whatever pleasure,” said that learned physician, “the Chinese may take in thus picking their ears, I am certain most people in these parts, who have had their hearing impaired, have had such misfortune first come to them by picking their ears too much.”—He is so curious, says King, that the secretary took as much satisfaction in looking upon the ear-picker, as the Chinese could do in picking their ears!
But “What drowning is”—that “Hanging is only apoplexy!” that “Men cannot swallow when they are dead!” that “No fish die of fevers!” that “Hogs s—t soap, and cows s—t fire!” that the secretary had “Shells, called Blackmoor’s-teeth, I suppose from their whiteness!” and the learned Ray’s, that grave naturalist, incredible description of “a very curious little instrument!” I leave to the reader and Dr. King.
Sir Hans Sloane was unhappily not insensible to these ludicrous assaults, and in the preface to his “History of Jamaica,” 1707, a work so highly prized for its botanical researches, absolutely anticipated this fatal facetiousness, for thus he delivers himself:—“Those who strive to make ridiculous anything of this kind, and think themselves great wits, but are very ignorant, and understand nothing of the argument, these, if one were afraid of them, and consulted his own ease, might possibly hinder the publication of any such work, the efforts to be expected from them, making possibly some impression upon persons of equal dispositions; but considering that I have the approbation of others, whose judgment, knowledge, &c., I have great reason to value; and considering that these sorts of men have been in all ages ready to do the like, not only to ordinary persons and their equals, but even to abuse their prince and blaspheme their Maker, I shall, as I have ever since I seriously considered this matter, think of and treat them with the greatest contempt.”
Dr. King’s dispersed works have fortunately been collected by Mr. Nichols, with ample illustrations, in three vols. 8vo, 1776. The “Useful Transactions in Philosophy and other sorts of Learning,” form a collection of ludicrous dissertations of Antiquarianism, Natural Philosophy, Criticism, &c., where his own peculiar humour combines with his curious reading. [In this he burlesqued the proceedings of the Royal and Antiquarian Societies with some degree of spirit and humour. By turning vulgar lines into Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon, a learned air is given to some papers on childish subjects. One learned doctor communicates to another “an Essay proving, by arguments philosophical, that millers, falsely so reputed, are not thieves, with an interesting argument that taylors likewise are not so.” A Welsh schoolmaster sends some “natural observations” made in Wales, in direct imitation of the “Philosophical Transactions” for 1707, and with humorous love for genealogy, reckons that in his school, “since the flood, there have been 466, and I am the 467th master: before the flood, they living long, there were but two—Rice ap Evan Dha the good, and Davie ap Shones Gonnah the naught, in whose time the flood came.” The first paper of the collection is an evident jest on John Bagford and his gatherings for the history of printing, now preserved among the manuscripts of the British Museum. It purports to be “an Essay on the invention of samplers, communicated by Mrs. Judith Bagford, with an account of her collections for the same:” and written in burlesque of a paper in the “Philosophical Transactions” for April, 1697. It is a most elaborate performance, deducing with mock-seriousness the origin of samplers from the ancient tales of Arachne, who “set forth the whole story of her wrongs in needlework, and sent it to her sister;” and our author adds, with much humour, “it is very remarkable that the memory of this story does at present continue, for there are no samplers, which proceed in any measure beyond the first rudiments, but have a tree and a nightingale sitting on it.” Such were the jests of the day against the Royal philosophers.] He also invented satirical and humorous indexes, not the least facetious parts of his volumes. King had made notes on more than 20,000 books and MSS., and his Adversaria, of which a portion has been preserved, is not inferior in curiosity to the literary journals of Gibbon, though it wants the investigating spirit of the modern philosopher.
The twenty-six folios of his “Vegetable System,” with many others, testify his love and his labour. It contains 1600 plates, representing 26,000 different figures of plants from nature only. This publication ruined the author, whose widow (the sister of Lord Ranelagh) published “An Address to the Public, by the Hon. Lady Hill, setting forth the consequences of the late Sir John Hill’s acquaintance with the Earl of Bute,” 1787. I should have noticed it in the “Calamities of Authors.” It offers a sad and mortifying lesson to the votary of science who aspires to a noble enterprise. Lady Hill complains of the patron; but a patron, however great, cannot always raise the public taste to the degree required to afford the only true patronage which can animate and reward an author. Her detail is impressive:—
“Sir John Hill had just wrote a book of great elegance—I think it was called ‘Exotic Botany’—which he wished to have presented to the king, and therefore named it to Lord Bute. His lordship waived that, saying that ‘he had a greater object to propose;’ and shortly after laid before him a plan of the most voluminous, magnificent, and costly work that ever man attempted. I tremble when I name its title—because I think the severe application which it required killed him; and I am sure the expense ruined his fortune—‘The Vegetable System.’ This work was to consist of twenty-six volumes folio, containing sixteen hundred copper-plates, the engraving of each cost four guineas; the paper was of the most expensive kind; the drawings by the first hands. The printing was also a very weighty concern; and many other articles, with which I am unacquainted. Lord Bute said that ‘the expense had been considered, and that Sir John Hill might rest assured his circumstances should not be injured.’ Thus he entered upon and finished his destruction. The sale bore no proportion to the expense. After ‘The Vegetable System’ was completed, Lord Bute proposed another volume to be added, which Sir John strenuously opposed; but his lordship repeating his desire, Sir John complied, lest his lordship should find a pretext to cast aside repeated promises of ample provision for himself and family. But this was the crisis of his fate—he died.” Lady Hill adds:—“He was a character on which every virtue was impressed.” The domestic partiality of the widow cannot alter the truth of the narrative of “The Vegetable System,” and its twenty-six tomes.
His apologist forms this excuse for one then affecting to be a student and a rake:—“Though engaged in works which required the attention of a whole life, he was so exact an economist of his time that he scarcely ever missed a public amusement for many years; and this, as he somewhere observes, was of no small service to him; as, without indulging in these respects, he could not have undergone the fatigue and study inseparable from the execution of his vast designs.”—Short Account of the “Life, Writings, and Character of the late Sir John Hill, M.D.” Edinburgh: 1779.
Hogarth has painted a portrait of Folkes, which is still hanging in the rooms of the Royal Society. He was nominated vice-president by the great Sir Isaac Newton, and succeeded him as president. He wrote a work on the “English Silver Coinage,” and died at the age of sixty-four, 1754.—Ed.
Hill planned his Review with good sense. He says:—“If I am merry in some places, it ought to be considered that the subjects are too ridiculous for serious criticism. That the work, however, might not be without its real use, an Error is nowhere exposed without establishing a Truth in its place.” He has incidentally thrown out much curious knowledge—such as his plan for forming a Hortus Siccus, &c. The Review itself may still be considered both as curious and entertaining.
In exposing their deficiencies, as well as their redundancies, Hill only wishes, as he tells us, that the Society may by this means become ashamed of what it has been, and that the world may know that he is NOT a member of it till it is an honour to a man to be so! This was telling the world, with some ingenuity, and with no little impudence, that the Royal Society would not admit him as a member. He pretends to give a secret anecdote to explain the cause of this rejection. Hill, in every critical conjuncture of his affairs, and they were frequent ones, had always a story to tell, or an evasion, which served its momentary purpose. When caned by an Irish gentleman at Ranelagh, and his personal courage, rather than his stoicism, was suspected, he published a story of his having once caned a person whom he called Mario; on which a wag, considering Hill as a Prometheus, wrote—
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“To beat one man great Hill was fated. |
We shall see the story he turned to his purpose, when pressed hard by Fielding. In the present instance, in a letter to a foreign correspondent, who had observed his name on the list of the Correspondents of the Royal Society, Hill said—“You are to know that I have the honour NOT to be a member of the Royal Society of London.”—This letter lay open on his table when a member, upon his accustomed visit, came in, and in his absence read it. “And we are not to wonder,” says Hill, “that he who could obtain intelligence in this manner could also divulge it. Hinc illæ lachrymæ! Hence all the animosities that have since disturbed this philosophic world.” While Hill insolently congratulates himself that he is not a member of the Royal Society, he has most evidently shown that he had no objection to be the member of any society which would enrol his name among them. He obtained his medical degree from no honourable source; and another title, which he affected, he mysteriously contracted into barbaric dissonance. Hill entitled himself—
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Acad. Reg. Scient. Burd. &c. Soc. |
To which Smart, in the “Hilliad,” alludes—
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“While Jargon gave his titles on a block, |
His personal attacks on Martin Folkes, the president, are caustic, but they may not be true; and on Baker, celebrated for his microscopical discoveries, are keen. He reproaches Folkes, in his severe dedication of the work, in all the dignity of solemn invective.—“The manner in which you represented me to a noble friend, while to myself you made me much more than I deserved; the ease with which you had excused yourself, and the solemnity with which, in the face of Almighty God, you excused yourself again; when we remember that the whole was done within the compass of a day; these are surely virtues in a patron that I, of all men, ought not to pass over in silence.” Baker, in his early days, had unluckily published a volume of lusory poems. Some imitations of Prior’s loose tales Hill makes use of to illustrate his “Philosophical Transactions.” All is food for the malicious digestion of Wit!
His anecdote of Mr. Baker’s Louse is a piece of secret scientific history sufficiently ludicrous.
“The Duke of Montague was famous for his love to the whole animal creation, and for his being able to keep a very grave face when not in the most serious earnest. Mr. Baker, a distinguished member of the Royal Society, had one day entertained this nobleman and several other persons with the sight of the peristaltic motion of the bowels in a louse, by the microscope. When the observation was over, he was going to throw the creature away; but the Duke, with a face that made him believe he was perfectly in earnest, told him it would be not only cruel, but ungrateful, in return for the entertainment that creature had given them, to destroy it. He ordered the boy to be brought in from whom it was procured, and after praising the smallness and delicacy of Mr. Baker’s fingers, persuaded him carefully to replace the animal in its former territories, and to give the boy a shilling not to disturb it for a fortnight.”—“A Review of the Works of the Royal Society,” by John Hill, M.D., p. 5.
These papers had appeared in the London Daily Advertiser, 1754. At their close he gleaned the best, and has preserved them in two volumes. But as Hill will never rank as a classic, the original nonsense will be considered as most proper for the purposes of a true collector. Woodward, the comedian, in his lively attack on Hill, has given “a mock Inspector,” an exquisite piece of literary ridicule, in which he has hit off the egotisms and slovenly ease of the real ones. Never, like “The Inspector,” flamed such a provoking prodigy in the cloudy skies of Grub-street; and Hill seems studiously to have mortified his luckless rivals by a perpetual embroidery of his adventures in the “Walks at Marybone,” the “Rotunda at Ranelagh,” spangled over with “my domestics,” and “my equipage.” [One of his adventures at Ranelagh was sufficiently unfortunate to obtain for him the unenviable notoriety of a caricature print representing him enduring a castigation at the Rotunda gate from an Irish gentleman named Brown, with whose character he had made far too free in one of his “Inspectors.” Hill showed much pusillanimity in the affair, took to his bed, and gave out that the whole thing was a conspiracy to murder him. This occasioned the publication of another print, in which he is represented in bed, surrounded by medical men, who treat him with very little respect. One insists on his fee, because Hill has never been acknowledged as one of themselves; and another, to his plea of want of money, responds, “Sell your sword, it is only an encumbrance.”]
It is useful to remind the public that they are often played upon in this manner by the artifices of political writers. We have observed symptoms of this deception practised at present. It is an old trick of the craft, and was greatly used at a time when the nation seemed maddened with political factions. In a pamphlet of “A View of London and Westminster, or the Town-spy,” 1725, I find this account:—“The seeming quarrel, formerly, between Mist’s Journal and the Flying Post was secretly concerted between themselves, in order to decoy the eyes of all the parties on both their papers; and the project succeeded beyond all expectation; for I have been told that the former narrowly missed getting an estate by it.”—p. 32.
Isaac Reed, in his “Repository of Fugitive Pieces of Wit and Humour,” vol. iv., in republishing “The Hilliad,” has judiciously preserved the offending “Impertinent” and the abjuring “Inspector.” The style of “The Impertinent” is volatile and poignant. His four classes of authors are not without humour. “There are men who write because they have wit; there are those who write because they are hungry; there are some of the modern authors who have a constant fund of both these causes; and there are who will write, although they are not instigated either by the one or by the other. The first are all spirit; the second are all earth; the third disclose more life, or more vapidity, as the one or the other cause prevails; and for the last, having neither the one nor the other principle for the cause, they show neither the one nor the other character in the effect; but begin, continue, and end, as if they had neither begun, continued, nor ended at all.” The first class he instances by Fielding; the second by Smart. Of the third he says:—“The mingled wreath belongs to Hill,” that is himself; and the fourth he illustrates by the absurd Sir William Browne.
“Those of the first rank are the most capricious and lazy of all animals. The monkey genius would rarely exert itself, if even idleness innate did not give way to the superior love of mischief. The ass (that is Smart), which characters the second, is as laborious as he is empty; he wears a ridiculous comicalness of aspect (which was, indeed, the physiognomy of the poor poet), that makes people smile when they see him at a distance. His mouth opens, because he must be fed, while we laugh at the insensibility and obstinacy that make him prick his lips with thistles.”
Woodward humorously attributes Hill’s attack on him to his jealousy of his successful performance of Harlequin, and opens some of the secret history of Hill, by which it appears that early in life he trod the theatrical boards. He tells us of the extraordinary pains the prompter had taken with Hill, in the part of Oroonoko; though, “if he had not quite forgotten it, to very little purpose.” He reminds Hill of a dramatic anecdote, which he no doubt had forgotten. It seems he once belonged to a strolling company at May-fair, where, in the scene between Altamont and Lothario, the polite audience of that place all chorused, and agreed with him, when dying he exclaimed, “Oh, Altamont, thy genius is the stronger.” He then shows him off as the starved apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, in one of his botanic peregrinations to Chelsea Garden; from whence, it is said, he was expelled for “culling too many rare plants”—
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“I do remember an apothecary, |
Hill, who was often so brisk in his attack on the wits, had no power of retort; so that he was always buffeting and always buffeted.
He was also satirised in a poem termed “The Pasquinade,” published in 1752, in which the goddesses of Pertness and Dulness join to praise him as their favourite reflex.
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“Pertness saw her form distinctly shine |
Dulness speaks of him thus rapturously:—