published diurnally during two disgraceful
years by Sir John Hill in the columns of the
London Daily Advertiser. Simultaneously
with the production of which disreputable
effusion of spleen and effrontery, Sir John—
wavering between his old love, the stage, and
his new love, literature—blossomed into the
miserablest straggling weed of a dramatist
ever heard of! Writing besides an opera,
called Orpheus, two inane farces; one
entitled the Rout, and the other the Critical
Minute; farces so execrably bad, that they
never actually appear to have won for
themselves the shadowy glory of even being
damned. It is in allusion to these abortive
efforts of the doctor as a playwright, that
David Garrick penned that cruel epigram:—

     For physic and farces, his equal there scarce is—
     His farces are physic, his physic a farce is.

The epigrammatists of those days had no
compassion whatever for Bardana Hill.
Apostrophising the arch-delinquent, quoth
one, with the fury of Scarron and the voice,
one might fancy, of Boanerges:

     Thou essence of dock, of valerian, and sage,
     At once the disgrace and the pest of this age;
     The worst that we wish thee for all thy vile crimes
     Is to take thy own physic and read thy own rhymes.

Whereupon another has thus unpityingly as
well as pithily commented:

          The wish must be in form reversed
               To suit the doctor's crimes;
          For if he takes his physic first,
                He'll never read his rhymes.

Yet for all this, I cannot but remember,
and that too with a sense of amusement,
that Sir John Hill had his revenges!
At the period during which he may be
said to have attained the heyday of his
fortunes; when, upon his rather doubtful
escutcheon might at any rate have been
emblazoned confidently the one radiant device
Florescat; when he was rolling in his
coach from coffee-house to conversazione
from drum to masquerade; when he was
scribbling impertinencies about everything
and everybody,day after day, in his
mendacious and unblushing paper, The Inspector;
when he was selling his quack medicines,
by the ton and by the hogshead,—Sir John
was perpetrating for the entertainment
of his own and other generations, some
of the most extravagant and outrageous
practical jokes that ever varlet adventured
upon. This,moreover, when he was
making large as well as lucrative contributions
to polite as well as to what may be
called at the very least unpolite literature!
Realising by his pen fifteen hundred
pounds sterling in a single twelvemonth,a
circumstance regarded, as long afterwards
as eighteen hundred and fourteen, with
bewildered astonishment by Mr. Alexander
Chalmers: which sum saith that worthy
in his redoubtable Dictionary (to the
amusement I can fancy of the Great Unknown,
if he ever chanced to glance at the passage)
"is, we believe, at least three times as much
as ever was made by any one writer in the
same period of time!"

It is scarcely to be supposed that the
flourishing literary physician made much
by such a venture as his guinea quarto,
entitled "Thoughts concerning God and
Nature," undertaken strangely enough by
such a man (constituting, in truth, a
redeeming trait in his character) as a labour
of love, in answer to the renowned treatise
of Viscount Bolingbroke. The prodigious
sums acquired, so much to the
admiration of Mr. Chalmers, came I should be
disposed to conjecture, from sheer book-
making cunningly applied: such, for
example, as Sir John's two volumes of fictitious
Travels in the East, or, more probably
still, from such a book as the one of
which Hill is now universally reputed to
have been the author according to an
accepted tradition—Mrs. Glasse's Cookery.
Speaking of the popular belief, even then
prevalent, that Dr. Hill wrote Mrs. Glasse's
Cookery book, is it not recorded in the Great
Biography, under date seventeen hundred
and seventy-eight, in the age of the Doctor
sixty-nine, how Johnson, with his customary
snort of indignation, as if somebody had
contradicted him (which nobody had), said
"Well, sir, this shows how much better the
subject of cookery may be treated by a
philosopher?"

Favourably introduced to the notice of the
more eminent members of the Royal Society,
first of all in seventeen hundred and forty-
six by his then recently published and
ingenious Treatise upon Gems, from the Greek of
Theophrastus, Bardana Hill punished them
five years afterwards for the credulity with
which they had unwittingly admitted him to
the privilege of their friendship, and punished
them cruelly: his atrabilious insolence, arising
simply out of their not altogether unnatural
reluctance to welcome the clever charlatan
formally amongst themselves. Sir John
happening then, among his other
miscellaneous avocations, to be engaged, in
conjunction with one Mr. Scott, F.R.S., in
compiling the Supplement to Chambers's
Dictionary, endeavoured by one master-
stroke to gratify his own vanity and the
wishes of his publishers, by having the
magical initials affixed to his own name
also upon the title-page. Hardly can it be
regarded as in any way surprising that
Martin Folkes, then president of the
Royal Society, friend and successor of
Isaac Newton, should have failed to
obtain in Hill's behest, three signatures to
enforce, or indorse, his own generous
recommendation. However this may be, so the
event proved; the application was wholly
inoperative. And, thereupon, away to the