THE LIFE
OF
SIR ROWLAND 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!

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 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:—

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.