John Hill

“ After John had waited a weary time, the form of the girl appeared above the crest of the hill. She was holding up the skirt of her gown, and glided over the earth so rapidly that she appeared to be running. Beat! beat! oh, heart of John, if there is aught in womanhood to make you throb; if there is aught in infinite grace and winsomeness; if there is aught in perfect harmony of color and form and movement; if there is aught of beauty, in God's power to create that can set you pulsing, beat! for the fairest creature of His hand is hastening to greet you. ”

“ John made his big effort. He attacked the nuts and sawdust which had come back and settled down again in company with a large lump of some unidentified material, as if he were bucking center. They broke before him as, long ago, the Yale line had done, and his voice rang out as if through a megaphone, to the unconcealed disgust of the neighboring gamesters.
"If you go along the path at the foot of the hill," he bellowed rapidly, "and follow it down to the sea, you get a little bay full of red sandstone rocks—you can't miss it—and there's a fine view of the island from there. ”

“ Sir John laughed merrily; the cheerful sentiment delighted him.
“Nick,” he said, “mayst thou have thy desire, and may I be there to see; I should laugh heartily to see thee pink him; but I want thee to ride with me now; saddle our horses and be ready in ten minutes.”
In a dismal dell or hollow glen, which had been worn from the side of a hill, in the course of ages by a streamlet, filled with brambles, nettles, and the slime of rotting vegetation, was a squalid hut, and therein dwelt an old blear-eyed, toothless hag, named Gammer Gatch. ”

“ Many is the time that I have listened to him, with boyish wonder, as, with lightning in his eye, he fought over again his battles of Culloden, Bunker’s Hill, and Ticonderoga.
As John had no children, his intended heir was a nephew. His greatest desire in life was to marry him to a grand-daughter of his old departed benefactress, the Pensassenach. He offered to settle his whole fortune, which was not small, on the young lady, if she would only marry his nephew; and John’s wife did all in her power to back up the proposal. ”

“ John's has laboured under its disadvantages ever since those days. The town has been pinched between the steep hills, and forced to straggle back for miles along the harbour inlet. On the southern side of the basin the slope has beaten the builder, and on the dominant green hill, through the grass of which thrusts grey and red-brown masses of the sharp-angled rock stratum, there are very few houses.
On the north, humanity has made a fight for it, and the white, dusty roads struggle with an almost visible effort up the heavy grade of the hill until they attain the summit. ”

“ For example, the title page of the copy in the British Museum reads, Hypochondriasis; a Practical Treatise On the Nature and Cure of that Disorder, Commonly called the Hyp and the Hypo. The copy in the Royal Society of Medicine contains, among other additions, the words "by Sir John Hill" in pencil, and "8vo Lond. 1766," written in ink and probably a later addition.
[2] Melancholy, hypochondriasis, and the spleen were considered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to be one complex condition, a malady rather than a malaise, which is but a symptom. ”

“ Hill's drawing-room carpet, I who chose the silk hangings for Miss Leonard's boudoir, I who rearranged in the cabinets the curiosities about which no one but a stray mouse or two had been curious for many years. I knew well that I did nothing but what any other person could do, yet it pleased me to see how John overrated my services. It delighted me to hear him praise to his mother my "exquisite taste and skill;" but it pained me to see her anxious look from him to me. I knew she feared that he was getting to love me well ”

“ If Hill's reputation for lying rests on no surer foundation than this, he must be held acquitted of much that is charged him. In the above quotation the term microscopes must be read lenses; thus Johnson's reason for his opinion is unfortunate and clearly shews, as Bishop Elrington has remarked, that Johnson was talking of things he knew nothing about. This is the more to be regretted since the opinion of a man of Johnson's rank, who was contemporary with Hill, might have biassed the judgment of smaller and later men. ”

“ This explanation, I hope, will defend me from so unfair a charge: for indeed no one knows more the narrow limits of human knowledge; or entertains an humbler opinion of the returns of years of application." Nothing could be more proper than this, but against it must be set the opinion of men of his own time, as expressed in the quotation on p. 88, taken from Baker's Biographica Dramatica.
Many estimates of the character of Hill have been put forward, the first of any authority being that of Johnson [32] : "The King then asked him what he thought of Dr Hill. ”

“ The story, the original of which is to be found in the Percy Reliques, tells how George, an apprentice, robs his master and kills his uncle at the instigation of Millwood, an adventuress. Lamb's footnote (page 118) refers to the custom, which was of long endurance, of playing "George Barnwell" in the Christmas and Easter holidays as an object-lesson to apprentices.
Page 121, line 25. The Hills and the Murphys and the Browns. Dr. John Hill (1716?-1775) , the herbalist, controversialist, and miscellaneous writer, who quarrelled with Garrick. In The Reflector Lamb had written the Hooles. ”

“ Thus, dear public, am I, John Smith, tormented for having sacrificed a leg for my country. How often have I felt that I would be far happier if I were still a mark for the bullets at Malvern Hill, Bull Run, or Antietam! This accursed quizzical disposition on the part of the public has made me feel, at times, that life was actually a burden to me!
One day I met an elderly lady in Philadelphia who stopped me on the street, asked a profusion of questions, and wound up by giving me an accurate history of her son. ”

“ He glanced up, half angry, looked me straight in the eye, and a smile started at the southeast corner of his phiz and ran around to his port ear.
"Well, John, old man, I don't mind being sealed to one about your size, right now. I've just sent away the best one in the wide world. Old man, you're looking plump; by the Holy Joe Smith, a sight of you is good for sore eyes!"
Well, we started, and—but there ain't no use in telling you all about it—I went home with Joe, went up a creek with a jaw-breaking Spanish name, for miles, to a very good cattle ranch, that was the property of "Mormon Joe." ”

“ He does not know that I am aware of this, so don't mention it to him."
"Gun is a man," said I; "a great, big-hearted, true man."
"He is a nobleman!" said the nun, arising and going back into the state-room.
Half an hour later, Gunderson came back, took a seat beside me and commenced to talk.
"Say, John, that's the hardest-riding old pelter I ever see, about three inches of slack between engine and tank, pounding like a stamp-mill and—" looking over his shoulder and then at me, "John, I could a swore there was some one standing right there, I felt 'em. ”

“ A Letter addressed to the Royal Society, London, 1750. A Dissertation on Royal Societies, London, 1750. ↑ Short Account of the Life, Writings and Character of the late Sir John Hill, M.D., Edinburgh 1779. ↑ See Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons. Edited by Ed. Clodd; London, 1892, p. 80. ↑ Short Life, lot. cit. ”

“ Here was a fix for John Smith! Night; foreign country; a dead woman on the beach; only two of my race present, and they scared like the deuce; surrounded by a score or two of the swarthy, blood-thirsty natives of a semi-barbarous land! O, how I wished that crutch of mine were but clicking on the side-walk in front of Trinity church, New York; or the State House, Philadelphia. ”

“ This account is entirely laudatory, and describes Hill as being little short of a genius surrounded and continually attacked by "envious and malevolent persons" who "did not fail to make use of every engine malevolence could invent, to depreciate the character and the works of a man, whom they saw, with regret, every way so far their superior." ”

“ Hill also rebelled against contemporary apothecaries and physicians who prescribed popular medicines—such as Berkeley's tar-water, Dover's mercury powders, and James's fever-powders [Pg vii] —as universal panaceas for the cure of the hyp. "No acrid medicine must be directed, for that may act too hastily, dissolve the impacted matter at once, and let it loose, to the destruction of the sufferer; no antimonial, no mercurial, no martial preparation must be taken; in short, no chymistry: nature is the shop that heaven has set before us, and we must seek our medicine there" (p. 24) . ”

“ He then charges Folkes with unworthy conduct towards him, and, in brief, he considered that Folkes and Baker were his enemies. The reason for this, according to Hill, was as follows. An eminent French correspondent had taxed him, supposing him to be a Fellow, with "one of the errors of the Society"; Hill in reply wrote, "I have already set right the error you complain of; but you are to know, that I have the Honour not to be a Member of the Royal Society of London." ”

“ I have been settled here two months, and am here body and soul, without casting the least thought of regret to London, or even to Paris. I think it improbable that I shall ever in my life cross the Tweed, except perhaps a jaunt to the north of England, for health or amusement. I live still, and must for a twelvemonth, in my old house in James's Court, which is very cheerful, and even elegant, but too small to display my great talent for cookery, the science to which I intend to addict the remaining years of my life! ”

“ Many are concerned with Natural History, and these are important as they shew Hill in another and very important character, namely that of a popular writer on Natural History, especially Botany. In one number he described the structure of a common flower, including an account of the movements of a bee in collecting pollen ”

“ The wind was howling, and each blaze of gas in the street-lamps was fluttering and struggling as though it might go out at any moment. I wanted to go to Pier No. 1, North River, from which the boat was to start, and I walked as fast as I could—and that was not slow—toward Broadway, glancing back over my shoulder at intervals of two seconds, to see if my villains were coming. It was the quietest hour I ever saw in New York. Not a stage, carriage, cart or car was astir in that part of the city; and neither policeman nor “any other man” was to be seen. ”

“ What is the meaning of this, dear Smith, which we hear, that you are not to be here above a day or two, on your passage to London? How can you so much as entertain a thought of publishing a book full of reason, sense, and learning, to those wicked abandoned madmen? ”

“ We descended to the water’s edge on the opposite shore, and embarked in a small boat, which the guide propelled with a long pole, and rode a few hundred yards on the bosom of the awful stream. As we went gliding along through those gloomy passages that frown in everlasting silence, our figures barely seen in the dim light of the lamps, and the black walls grumbling at each sound, and echoing it back and forth, I thought that nothing in the depths of the earth could be more like the fabled mythic river over which Charon ferries his passengers to Hades. ”

“ Every one who has had any experience in the matter, must have observed that a person is more lonely in a crowded city, where he is unacquainted, than in the depths of the forest where no human being is seen.
As I had no money to throw away, I stayed at a modest hotel in Park Row, where one could live on less than twenty-five dollars a day. ”

“ And this Hill, who was by no means lacking in self-confidence, knew. His criticism of the Society culminated in his Review of the Works of the Royal Society of London (1751) [8] , which was in appearance like that of the Transactions, and consisted of reviews of several papers with comments by Hill. The work was dedicated to Martin Folkes, the President, on whom he placed the responsibility for publication, for, wrote he in his dedication, "The Purport of the more considerable of them has been long since delivered to you in conversation ”

“ A flight of wooden steps takes the visitor down nearly to the water level, behind the foaming, dashing folds of this fearful curtain; and from the foot of the stairs a narrow plank walk extends some distance, to a point where the sheet of water is again parted by a projecting rock at the brink far above. The visitor, after reaching this welcome recess in the furious torrent, can pass out and take a seat on a great heap of rocks at the foot of the mighty cataract, where he hears nothing but the eternal thunder of waters and a cloud of mist hides the whole world from his view! ”

“ May riches increase without an augmentation of desires. May your chariot still roll along without a failure of your limbs. May your tongue in due time acquire the social sweet garrulity of age, without your teeth losing the sharpness and keenness of youth. ”

“ No matter how fiercely the waves are running, let the wind lull, and a brisk rain of an hour will take all the rough edge off them. It is the dashing and breaking waves that sailors dread. A regular swelling wave, no matter how high it towers, will do no harm, as a vessel will rise with it, and ride lightly over. ”