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THE LIFE OF SIR ROWLAND HILL
AND THE
HISTORY OF PENNY POSTAGE.

THE LIFE
OF
SIR ROWLAND HILL
K.C.B., D.C.L., F.R.S., F.R.A.S., etc.
AND THE
HISTORY OF PENNY POSTAGE.

BY
SIR ROWLAND HILL
AND
HIS NEPHEW
GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL, D.C.L.

AUTHOR OF
“DR. JOHNSON: HIS FRIENDS AND HIS CRITICS,” ETC.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:
THOS. DE LA RUE & CO.
110, BUNHILL ROW.
1880
(The right of Translation and Reproduction is reserved.)

PRINTED BY
THOMAS DE LA RUE AND CO., BUNHILL ROW,
LONDON.

TO THE
RIGHT HON.
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE, M.P.
FIRST LORD OF THE TREASURY,
CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER, ETC., ETC.

Sir,

The following pages tell how much Sir Rowland Hill felt your kindness in a time of great trouble. In his Private Journal I find even stronger expressions of his gratitude. “I spoke,” he says in recording one of his interviews with you, “in strong terms, and with emotion which I in vain tried to suppress, of the feeling I entertained towards him for the uniform kindness, sympathy, and support I have received at his hands.” In asking you, therefore, to allow me to dedicate to you all in this work that is mine, I am sure that I have done what would have been pleasing to him.

I am, Sir, with the highest respect,

Your obedient servant,

G. B. HILL.

PREFACE.

Sir Rowland Hill, after his retirement from the public service, as soon as prolonged rest had given him back some portion of his former strength, satisfied a mind which had always found its chief happiness in hard work, by taking upon himself the task of writing the history of his great postal reform. In a “Prefatory Memoir” he gave, moreover, a sketch of the earlier part of his life. It had been his hope that he might live to bring out his book himself; but, for reasons which the reader will find set forth in his Preface,[1] he at last, though with reluctance, came to the decision that the publication must be delayed till after his death. Though he had, as it seemed, really finished his work, and had even gone so far as to have a few copies printed, yet he spent many an hour on its revision. He went through it more than once with the utmost care, sparing no pains to obtain complete accuracy. In the year 1872 he asked me to examine it carefully, and to point out whatever might strike me as being defective either in its method or its execution. I found, as I told him, that the “Prefatory Memoir” was too short, and “The History of Penny Postage” too long. Too little was told of the way in which his character had been trained for the hard task which awaited it, and too much was told of the improvements which had been effected. In the case of inventors it is not so much what a man does, as how he learns to do it, and how he does it, that we all care to know. We so soon come to think that what is has always been, that our curiosity is not much excited about the origin of the conveniences of modern life. Though the improvements themselves we accept as a matter of course, yet if in getting them adopted there was a hard struggle with ignorance, routine, indifference, and jealousy, then our interest is at once aroused. In his book there were very many passages which I had read with the strongest interest, containing as they did the history of a great and a very curious fight. In these there was scarcely any change that I could wish made. But mixed up with these there were accounts of improvements which, though important in themselves, were of little interest to an outsider. I suggested, therefore, that certain parts should be altogether struck out, and that others should be gathered either into one Appendix at the end of the History, or into Appendices at the end of the chapters. Though he did not by any means adopt all my recommendations, yet he entrusted me with the duty of writing the history of his early life. In the course of the next few years he drew up many interesting papers containing the recollections of his childhood and youth. In this he was aided by his brother Arthur, in whose mind, though he has seen more than fourscore years, the past seems to live with all the freshness of yesterday. These papers he put into my hands some months before his death, and, together with them, a large number of old letters and a manuscript history of his life which he had begun to write when he was but seventeen years old. In fact, the abundance of the materials thus placed at my disposal was so great, that my chief difficulty has been to keep my part of the work at all within reasonable limits.

If the “Prefatory Memoir” in which his early life was told had really been an Autobiography, I might well have hesitated, and hesitated long, before I ventured to rewrite it. So much of a man’s character is shown by his style, that even an imperfect life written by himself will, likely enough, be of far greater value than the most perfect life written by another. But, as will be seen later on,[2] so far as the style goes, this Memoir was in no sense autobiographical. It was, indeed, told in the first person; but “I had,” he said, “to devolve upon another the task of immediate composition.” I may add that his brother, who thus assisted him, had not at his command many of the materials which were afterwards placed at my disposal. My uncle had not at that time wished that a full account should be given of his early days, and he had not, therefore, thought it needful to lay before him either the letters or the fragment of an early autobiography which I have mentioned above. He had a strange unwillingness to let this history of his youthful days be seen. In a memorandum which he made a few years ago he says, “These memoirs of the early part of my life having been written, for the most part, when I was very young and ill-informed, contain much which I have since known to be ridiculous; and for this reason I have never shown them to any one—except, I think, a small portion to my wife. After some hesitation I have decided to preserve the memoirs for any use to which my executors may think proper to put them.” A far greater value is added to them by the fact that the author intended them for no other eye but his own. None of his brothers, I believe, even knew that he was writing them. He used, in late years, often to speak to me about them; but it was only a short time before his death that he could bring himself to let me read them. When he gave them to me he bade me remember that he was very young and ignorant when he wrote them. “You must not,” he said, “judge me harshly.” Happily I was soon able to tell him that, though I had been a great reader of autobiographies, there were few which had interested me more than his. I found nothing to dispose me to ridicule, but much that moved my pity, and still more that roused my admiration.

I need scarcely say that the “Prefatory Memoir” has been of great service to me in my task. It is not for me to say how well it is written, or to praise the work of one to whom I owe everything. I may, at all events, acknowledge my debt. I have, as the reader will see, largely drawn upon it. That it was, however, imperfect—necessarily so, as I have shown—will be at once recognised by any one who considers how much I have quoted from my uncle’s Memoirs and from the letters. It contained, for instance, no mention of the visit to Edgeworth-Town, and not a single extract from a letter.

In giving so full an account of my grandparents and of their home-life, I have borne in mind the saying of Mr. Carlyle, that “the history of a man’s childhood is the description of his parents and environment.”[3] In a very large sense is this true of the childhood of Rowland Hill. I have not dwelt so much, as I should otherwise have done, on the character of his eldest brother, towards whom he felt himself indebted in so many ways. By “The Life of Matthew Davenport Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham,” by his daughters, I find myself forestalled in this part of my work.

In my duty as Editor of “The History of Penny Postage,” I have ventured not only here and there on a verbal alteration, but also on considerable omissions, and in some places, on a change of arrangement. In fact, I have acted on the advice which I gave eight years ago. I have gathered into Appendices some of the less important matters, and I have thus enabled my readers, as their tastes may lead them, either to read the whole History, or, if they find that too long, to follow a somewhat briefer but still a connected narrative. In making changes such as these I was running, I was well aware, a great risk of falling into serious errors. A reference, for instance, might be left in to a passage which, by the new arrangement, was either not given at all, or else was found on a later page. I have, however, spared no pains to guard against such blunders, trying always to keep before me the high standard of strict accuracy which the subject of my biography ever set me.

G. B. Hill.

The Poplars, Burghfield, September 21st, 1880.

CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

LIST OF PLATES.

BOOK I.
THE LIFE OF SIR ROWLAND HILL.

“When I was yet a child ...

... my mind was set

Serious to learn and know, and thence to do

What might be public good; myself I thought

Born to that end.”

—Milton

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!

THOMAS WRIGHT HILL.

(FATHER OF SIR ROWLAND HILL.)

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 had what is known in the profession as a good head for law. He was quick at discovering distinctions, possessed logical powers, both strong and subtle, and a memory exceedingly retentive: while his language was at once lucid and accurate. In conversation he was a fluent speaker, and with early practice doubtless would have learnt to make fluent speeches; but I do not think he could ever have brought himself to utter an unnecessary word.”

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:—

“‘Old Daddy,’ as he was afterwards more familiarly called, was one of the kindest and most upright men I ever knew: irascible as became his profession: tender-hearted: intelligent, and reflective: imbued with the liberalism which is now predominant: of moderate scholastic attainments, having indeed been originally engaged in some small business; but resolute in making his boys understand whatever he taught them.”[11]

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.

“And still to love, though pressed with ill,

In wintry age to feel no chill,

With me is to be lovely still.”

On the last evening, when his long life of fourscore years and eight was almost at its lowest ebb, the love for his fellow-men that had thrown a radiance on his whole life was not dim, nor was the natural force of his mind abated. “I shall sadly miss,” his son recorded in his journal, “his warm and intelligent sympathy. Nothing was so acceptable to him, even up to the time of my visiting him last night, as an account of any improvements in progress in the Post-office.” A few days earlier he had exclaimed that he could not have believed that a death-bed could be so pleasant. He knew nothing of that melancholy state when life becomes a burthen and death remains a dread. Much of his happiness arose, he said, from his full confidence in the benevolence of the Creator. He composed the following lines:—

ASPIRATIONS ON A DEATH-BED, ON THE PATIENT’S WINDOW BEING OPENED.

Aura veni.

“Come, gentle breeze, come, air divine,

Comfort this drooping heart of mine!

Ah! solace flows with heaven’s own breath,

Which cheers my soul that sank in death.

The works of God all speak His praise;

To Him eternal anthems raise;

This air of heavenly love’s a token,

Let pensive musing now be broken,

Prayer for far greater boons be spoken.

God, couldst Thou find my soul a place

Within the realms of boundless grace—

The humblest post among the ranks

Of those that give Thee endless thanks—

Then would my leaping powers rejoice

To sing Thy name with heart and voice;

Then toil my character to rear,

By following Thy commands on purer, loftier sphere.

And may I rest my humble frame

On Love supreme, which crowns Thy name.”

“His last parting with this world was to take one by one the hand of each of his children, and, after placing it near his heart, to kiss it, and point upwards with a radiant expression of intense love and happiness.”

Much as Rowland Hill owed to his father, he owed scarcely less to his mother. She, though the inferior of her husband in quick intelligence and originality, was his superior in shrewd common sense and in firmness of purpose. She was as practical as he was theoretical, and as cautious as he was rash. To his father Rowland owed his largeness of view and his boldness of conception. But it was his mother from whom he derived his caution, his patience, and his unwearying prudence. Had he not had such a father, he would not have devised his plan of Penny Postage. Had he not had such a mother, he would not have succeeded in making what seemed the scheme of an enthusiast a complete and acknowledged success. He was never weary in his old age of sounding her praises, and acknowledging how much he owed to her. He could scarcely speak of her without the tears starting into his eyes, while his utterances, broken through strong emotion, could hardly discharge the fulness of his heart. The last record that I have of my conversations with him ends with her praises. “My mother was,” he said, “a most admirable woman in every respect. She had great natural intellect. She had a willingness to exert herself for the good of her family, and she did exert herself beyond her powers.” My record thus ends:—“Here he became so affected that I thought a longer talk might be hurtful to him, and so I came away.”

SARAH HILL.

(MOTHER OF SIR ROWLAND HILL.)

Her husband was no less mindful of her high merits. “Her children arise up, and call her blessed;—her husband also, and he praiseth her.” After her death he more than once told his daughter that the only merit he claimed in bringing up his family was that of letting their mother do exactly as she liked. “It was to her influence—an influence of the most beneficial kind—that he attributed the merit of their becoming good and useful members of society.” “As a theme for eloquence,” he one day wrote to one of his sons, “you may sound the trumpet of past success and long experience in your transcendent mother.” “She was,” said her daughter, “a large-hearted woman, taking upon herself all duties that lay within her reach, whether properly belonging to her or not.” To her great courage her son thus bears testimony:—

“Many instances fell under my own observation, but the one I mention was of earlier date. Happening to be present when, in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, an imperious mistress ordered her terrified maidservant to go and take down the clothes that were hanging out to dry, my mother at once volunteered for the service, and performed it in full, though not without imminent risk of her life; for before she could regain the house a tree, from which she had detached one of the lines, was struck by lightning.”[16]

She had been as a mere child the most dutiful of daughters. She was the most devoted and unselfish of wives and mothers. Yet by strangers all her merits were not quickly seen. Her warm heart was hidden beneath cold and reserved manners. Outsiders were astonished at the extraordinary degree of affection that her children felt for her. Some of this coldness of manner, and all the hidden warmth of heart were inherited from her by her famous son. She had had but a small chance of getting much book-learning, yet she took a strong interest in her husband’s studies and pursuits. Her son said that she possessed remarkable sagacity and no small readiness in contrivance. It was not, however, by inventiveness or by originality that she was distinguished. In those qualities her husband was strong. She was strong where he was weak. If he had every sense but common sense, she had common sense in a high degree. She had with it an unusual strength of character—a strength that made itself none the less felt because it was quiet. “We must not forget,” wrote one of her sons to his brother, when the death of her youngest child was looked for, and they were all dreading the terrible blank that would arise, “we must not forget that mother is not an ordinary woman—her powers of self-control and conformity to existing circumstances are unusually great.” She was not wanting in honest ambition. She did not, indeed, look for any high position for her sons. She smiled incredulously when one of her boys told her that the day would come when she should ride in his carriage. But she was resolved that her children should not sink through poverty out of that middle class into which they were born. She was most anxious that they should have the advantages of that education which had never fallen to her lot. It was her doing that her husband left trade, for which he was but ill-fitted, and started a school. In the step that he thus took she saw the best means of getting their own children taught. She was unwearying in her efforts to add to her husband’s scanty income, and most rigid in her economy. She longed to provide for him and for her children that freedom of action which is only enjoyed by those who have freedom from debt. Her eldest son has thus recorded his recollections of her during the terrible year 1800, when he was but a child of eight years:—

“Well do I remember that time of dearth, and even famine. As I was the eldest, my mother, in the absence of her husband, opened her heart now and then to me; and I knew how she lay in wakefulness, passing much of the night in little plans for ensuring food and clothing to her children by the exercise of the strictest parsimony. How she accomplished her task I know not; I cannot imagine; but certain it was that we never wanted either wholesome food or decent raiment, and were always looked upon by the poor of the neighbourhood as gentlefolk. Her achievement she regarded in after and more prosperous years with honest pride and gratulation. Nor was she less anxious for our instruction than for our physical comforts. She had but little reading, but possessed a quick and lively apprehension and natural good taste. She was clever at figures, working by mental arithmetic; not pursuing rules, but acting on her natural sagacity. She was honourable and high-minded, and had a great contempt for the unreal in religion, morals, or manners; shabby gentility and dirt, especially when concealed, excited her disapprobation. In her youth she was comely, not to say handsome. I remember her, fair-haired and fair-complexioned. She was the tenderest of parents.”

Her merits as the mistress of a household were thus summed up by Rowland Hill. “I scarcely think there ever was a woman out of France who could make so much out of so little.”

The husband and wife each supplied in character that in which the other was wanting. In Rowland was seen a remarkable combination of the strong qualities of each parent. His father, however, had a two-fold influence on his character. Almost as much as he nourished his intellect and one side of his moral nature by sympathy, so he increased another side by the strong feeling of antipathy that he unconsciously raised. The son was shocked with his father’s want both of method and steady persistence, with the easy way in which he often set on one side matters that troubled him, and with the complacency with which he still regarded his theories, however much they were buffeted and bruised by practice. Here Rowland set before him his mother’s best qualities. He had, indeed, received them in large measure from nature, but he cultivated them from his earliest youth with a steadiness that never fell off or wearied. He went, perhaps, into the opposite extreme of that which he shunned, and gained a certain rigidity of character which at times appeared to be excessive.

I have seen a letter from his mother’s brother, Bailie Lea, written years ago to one of his nieces, in which he recalls, he says, “times, some seventy years ago, long before any of you were born.” He describes with some humour how he had helped young Tom Hill in his courtship. He adds, “The happy hour began to draw nigh, the gown was bought, made, and fitted on; the knot tied, the work was done, and it speaks for itself in every quarter of the globe.” With honest and just pride in his sister, the old man adds, “But Tom Hill could not have accomplished the half of what appears with any other woman for a wife than Sally Lea.” Certainly Rowland Hill always believed that he himself could not have accomplished the half of what he did had he not had such a mother. I know not whether my grandfather had any rivals. A charming story that is told of his old age leads me to think that he must have had at least one. His wife, when they had been married close on fifty years, one day called him, with a Birmingham plainness of speech, “An old fool!” A child who was staying in the house overheard him, as he left the room and slowly went up the stairs, muttering to himself, “Humph! she called me an old fool—an old fool!” Then he stopped, and was silent for a few moments, till suddenly rubbing his hands together, he exclaimed, “A lucky dog I was to get her, though!” His memory had carried him back full fifty years, before the ring was bought and the gown made, when young Tom Hill had still to win the heart and hand of Sarah Lea. A few years after her death he was one day missing. Some hours passed by, and nothing could be heard of the aged man who numbered now his fourscore years and four. At length he was seen trudging slowly homewards. He had gone on foot full five miles to his wife’s grave, and on foot he was making his way back.

His marriage had been delayed for a short time by the riots in which the chapels of the dissenters, and many of their houses, were burnt to the ground by a brutal Church-and-King mob. With several of his companions he had hurried off to defend the house of their revered pastor, but their services were unhappily declined. Priestley declared that it was the duty of a Christian minister to submit to persecution. The rest of the story of this eventful scene I shall tell in the words of his eldest son:—

“His companions went away, perhaps to escort their good pastor and his family, whose lives would not have been secure against the ruffians coming to demolish their home and property. My father barred the doors, closed the shutters, made fast the house as securely as he could against the expected rioters, and then awaited their arrival. He has often described to me how he walked to and fro in the darkened rooms, chafing under the restriction which had been put on him and his friends. He was present when the mob broke in, and witnessed the plunder and destruction, and the incendiary fire by which the outrage was consummated. Lingering near the house, he saw a working man fill his apron with shoes, with which he made off. My father followed him, and, as soon as the thief was alone, collared him, and dragged him to the gaol, where he had the mortification to witness the man quietly relieved of his booty, and then suffered to depart, the keeper informing my father that he had had orders to take in no prisoners that night! The mob, which had begun by attacking dissenters as public enemies, burning down their chapels and their houses, and making spoil of their goods, soon expanded their views, and gave unmistakable signs that the distinction between dissenter and churchman had had its hour, and was to be superseded in favour of the doctrine now so well known, ‘La propriété, c’est un vol.’ When matters came to this pass the magistrates swore-in special constables. My father was one of this body; and, like his comrades, compendiously armed with half a mop-stick by way of truncheon, he marched with them to the defence of Baskerville House, in Birmingham, which was under attack by the mob. The special constables at first drove all before them, in spite of the immense disparity of numbers; but after a time, becoming separated in the mêlée, they sustained a total defeat. Some were very severely bruised, and one died of the injuries which he received in the fight. My father, although not conscious at the time of having received a blow, could not the next morning raise his arm. He was always of opinion that if they had had a flag, or some signal of that kind, round which they could have rallied, the fortune of the day would have been reversed.”

The blow that he had received was at all events so severe that his marriage had to be put off for a fortnight. For three or four years the young couple lived at Birmingham.[17] They then removed to Kidderminster, where Rowland was born in the freehold house that had belonged to three generations of his family.[18] It was not, however, to remain long in his father’s hands. The French war ruined the manufacture in which he had engaged, and in the great straits to which he was before long reduced, he was able to retain nothing of his small inheritance. He left Kidderminster, and removed to Wolverhampton, where he found employment. His salary however was so small that it was only by means of the severest thrift that he managed to keep his head above water. It was in the stern school of poverty that Rowland was brought up from his earliest years. Like Garrick, he was “bred in a family whose study was to make four pence do as much as others made four pence half-penny do.”

THE BIRTH-PLACE OF SIR ROWLAND HILL, KIDDERMINSTER.

His father had taken an old farm-house, called Horsehills, that stood about a mile from Wolverhampton. It had long been empty, and the rent was so low that at first it excited his suspicions. It was not till he had signed the lease that he was informed that the house was haunted. He cared much about a low rent, and nothing about ghosts. On such terms he would have been only too glad to find a haunted house each time he changed his place of abode. He lived here till Rowland was seven years old. When the child had become a man of eighty he put on record many of the memories that he still retained of this home of his early days. Here it was that they were living during the terrible dearth of 1800, of which for many a year, men, he says, could hardly talk without a shudder. He could remember how one day during this famine when they were dining on bread and butter and lettuce, a beggar came to the door. His mother took from the dish one of the slices and sent it to the man. He refused it because there was not butter enough for him. The half-starved people took to plundering the fields of the potatoes, and the owners, in order to secure them, set about to dig them up and store them. Late rains, moreover, had followed the hot weather, and the roots had begun to sprout. Rowland writes, “I remember that when our crop of late potatoes was dug up, we children were set to spread them over the floor of the only room that could be spared. It was one of the parlours.” Likely enough they were thus brought into the house as a safer place against the rioters than any outhouse. Bread riots broke out. Most of the judges declaimed on the winter circuits against the forestallers. “A violent clamour was excited against corn-dealers and farmers, which being joined in by the mob, artificial scarcity became the cry. Farmers were threatened, and their barns and ricks in many places were set on fire.”[19] One band of rioters came to Horsehills, thinking no doubt that, as it was a farm-house, the occupier was a farmer. “The house was entered, and a demand made for bread; but the poor fellows, hungry as they doubtless were, listened to explanations; and upon one of them saying, ‘Oh, come away; look at the missis how bad her (she) looks,’ they all quietly withdrew.” I have heard my father say that so terrible had been the dearth, and so painful were the memories it raised, that they had all come to look upon bread as something holy. Once, when a mere child, he had seen a play-fellow wantonly waste a piece of bread by throwing it about. He was seized with alarm lest some terrible judgment from Heaven should come, not only upon the one guilty person, but upon all who were in his company. He feared lest the roof might fall down upon them. It may have been during this time of famine that Rowland, for the first time in his life, and perhaps for the last time, wished to go into debt. He was one day telling me how slowly and painfully he had, in his boyhood, saved up his money in order to buy useful articles of which he stood in need. I asked him whether he had never been tempted by the pastrycook. “No,” he answered; but yet, he added with a smile, according to a story that was told of him, he once had been. He had gone, when a very little child, to a woman who kept a stall in Wolverhampton market-place, and had asked her to let him have a half-penny-worth of sweets on trust. When she refused, he then begged her to lend him a half-penny, with which he would buy the sweets.

One adventure in these days of his childhood impressed itself most deeply on his memory. His father, who had gone one day on business to a town some miles off, was very late in returning. His mother became uneasy, and set off quite alone to meet her husband. Soon after she had started, he returned, but though he had come by the way along which she had gone, he had not met her. He in his turn was full of alarm. He sent off his eldest boy, a lad of nine, in one direction. The two next boys, Edwin and Rowland, who were at most eight and six years old, he bade go by one road to Wolverhampton, and come back by another. He himself took a third way. The boys set out, not indeed without fear, but nevertheless “with a conviction that the work must be done.” The two younger lads had first to go along a dark lane. They then came to a spot where, underneath the cross-ways, there lay buried, as they knew, the body of a lad who had ended his life with his own hand. The place was known as Dead Boy’s Grave. Next they had to pass near the brink of a gravel pit, “to them an awful chasm, which they shuddered by as they could.” At length they made their round, and not far off midnight, as Rowland believed, reached home. There to their great joy they found the rest gathered together. The eldest boy, who had been alone, though a lad of great courage, had suffered not a little from fear. Neither he, nor his father, had met the mother, who reached home before them. As she had been going along the lane, she had been alarmed, she said, by a man who started up on the other side of the hedge. In her fright she had cleared the opposite fence at a bound, and had made her way home over the fields. The next day her husband went with her to the spot, but though he was an active and muscular man, he failed to make in his strength the leap which she had made in the terror which comes from weakness.

Rowland Hill was fond of talking in his old age of his childhood, of which he retained a very clear memory. He remembered how one day in the autumn of 1801, his brothers came back from school with the news that the mail coach had driven into Wolverhampton decked with blue ribbons. Tidings had just arrived of peace with France.[20] The whole country was in a blaze with bonfires and illuminations. Rowland and his brothers, when it grew dark, set fire to the stump of an old tree, and so bore their part in the general rejoicings. When war broke out again with France he was living in Birmingham. “Old Boney,” became the terror of all English children, as “Malbrook,” a hundred years before, had been the terror of all French children. Within half-a-mile of his father’s house, “the forging of gun-barrels was almost incessant, beginning each day long before dawn, and continuing long after nightfall; the noise of the hammers being drowned ever and anon by the rattle from the proof-house.” Their own house each time felt the shock, and his mother’s brewings of beer were injured by the constant jars. On the open ground in front of the house, one division of the Birmingham Volunteers was drilled each Sunday morning. Sunday drilling, in this season of alarms, went on throughout the length and breadth of the land. The press-gang now and then came so far as this inland town. He could remember the alarm they caused him and his brothers. They were fearful not so much for themselves as for their father.

One day a captured French gun-boat was dragged into Birmingham, and shown at a small charge. Hitherto he had seen no vessel bigger than a coal barge. For the first time he saw a real anchor and ship guns. As he returned home with his brothers, they talked over the loss of the Royal George, and other “moving accidents by flood.” He could “well remember the mingled joy and grief at the great, but dearly-bought, victory of Trafalgar.” The following verses of a rude ballad that was sung in the streets remained fixed in his memory:—

“On the nineteenth[21] of October,

Eighteen hundred and five,

We took from the French and Spaniards

A most glorious prize.

“We fought for full four hours,

With thundering cannon balls;

But the death of gallant Nelson

Was by a musket ball.

“Britannia and her heroes

Will long bemoan their loss;

For he was as brave an Admiral,

As e’er the ocean crossed.”

Other memories of his carried back those who heard him talk in his latter years to a state of life that was very unlike the present. The baker who supplied them with bread kept his reckoning by tallies. Their milk-woman had just such another score as that which was presented to Hogarth’s Distressed Poet. A travelling tailor used to come his rounds, and, in accordance with the common custom, live in their house while he was making clothes for the family. In every show of feats of horsemanship, the performance always ended with the burlesque of the Tailor riding to Brentford to vote for John Wilkes. Whenever any disaster came upon the country, there were still found old people who solemnly shook their heads, and gravely pointed it out as another instance of the divine wrath for the great sin that the nation had committed when it made the change of style.

The changes that he saw in the currency were very great. In his early childhood, gold pieces—guineas, half guineas, and seven shilling bits,—were not uncommon, but they began to disappear, and before long were scarcely ever seen. When one did come to hand, it was called a stranger. About the year 1813, one of his brothers sold a guinea for a one pound note and eight shillings in silver. As the gold began to be hoarded, these one pound notes took their place. Bank of England notes were in Birmingham looked upon with suspicion, for they were more often forged than provincial notes. The silver coins of the realm were so well worn, that hardly any of them bore even a trace of an effigy or legend. “Any that were still unworn were called pretty shillings and the like,” and were suspected by the lower class of dealers as something irregular. Together with the state currency, tokens circulated to a great extent. There were Bank of England tokens, of the value of five shillings, three shillings, and one shilling and sixpence. The parish of Birmingham had its notes for one pound, and five shillings, and its workhouse shilling, as the coin was called. It had been issued by the guardians as a convenient means of distributing out-of-door relief. All these coins and tokens were more or less forged. The coins of the realm stood lowest in point of security, then the Bank of England tokens; while the parish tokens were hardly ever imitated, and were everywhere received with confidence. Forgery was constantly carried on. One daring and notorious forger and coiner, named Booth, long defied the police. His house stood in the midst of an open plain, some miles from Birmingham, and was very strongly barricaded. The officers had more than once forced an entry; but so careful had been his watch, that, by the time they had been able to break in, all proofs of his crime had been destroyed. Rowland Hill had seen him riding into town, on his way to the rolling-mills, with the metal in his saddle-bags. The boy took more than a common interest in the man, as in this very rolling-mill one of his own brothers was employed. One day the messenger whom Booth had sent with the metal had forgotten to bring a pattern. “Taking out a three-shilling piece, the man inserted it in one slit after another of the gauge, until he found the one which exactly corresponded with its thickness, and this he gave as the guide.” His long freedom from punishment rendered the coiner careless, and he was at last surprised. The whole Birmingham police force was mustered, and a troop of dragoons was got from the barracks. A ladder had been brought, and an entrance was made through the tiling of the roof. It seemed as if they were once more too late, for at first nothing could be found. One of the “runners,” however, in mounting the ladder, had through the bars of an upper window seen Booth hurriedly thrusting papers, that no doubt were forged notes, into the fire. A hole was broken into the chimney, and in it were found one whole note, and one partly burnt. The prisoners were taken to Birmingham, and thence were sent by the magistrates to Stafford, under the guard of a small body of horse. Booth was hanged.

It is scarcely wonderful that criminals openly defied the laws, for the police-force of Birmingham was very small. The town contained in the early years of this century about seventy thousand inhabitants. Yet the whole police-force for day duty consisted of less than twenty men. By night, guard was kept by the usual body of “ancient and most quiet watchmen.” The town, moreover, like all other towns, was but dimly lighted with its oil-lamps. Rowland was about seventeen years old when, “with almost unbounded delight, I first saw,” he writes, “streets illuminated by gas.” Yet the peace was, on the whole, not ill kept. From 1803 to 1833 there were but three riots, and of these only one was at all serious. The town had not even in those days a Recorder, and the criminals were sent to the Assizes at Warwick. The stage-coaches, as Rowland well remembered, were all furnished with strong staples, to which the fetters of prisoners were fast locked. He had himself, when he was still a little lad, sat on the coach beside a man thus fettered. The fellow made light of his position. “He had,” he said, “only robbed a hen-roost, and they couldn’t touch his neck for that.” Some idle gossip, seeing Rowland thus sitting by the thief, at once spread the report that the boy on the coach was going to Warwick on the charge of robbing his master.

I have been carried away in my narrative not a little distance from the quiet home in the neighbourhood of Wolverhampton. The old farm-house was endeared to Rowland Hill by one memory, for here it was that he first met with his future wife. Her father, Mr. Joseph Pearson, was a manufacturer of Wolverhampton. “I regarded him throughout life,” said his son-in-law, “with esteem and affection. He was in the town, near to which he resided, the recognised leader of the Liberal party, and, at a later period, when the town became enfranchised, was the standing Chairman of the Committee for returning the Liberal candidate. He had always been a staunch Liberal, to use the modern term, and I doubt not was regarded by his Tory neighbours as a Jacobin; for so all were held who either preferred Fox to Pitt, or ventured to question the justice or necessity of the war of 1793. I have been told that during the course of that war he once took part in a meeting held in the market-place of the town to petition for peace, when cannon, brought out in apprehension, or feigned apprehension, of a tumult, stood pointed at the assembly.” He had once, when a young man, during his year of office as constable of the borough, faced a mob of colliers bent on bull-baiting. He pulled up the stake, and put a stop for that day to the sport. About the same time Basil Montagu had to flee for his life from a country town, where he, too, had spoilt sport by saving an innocent man from the gallows. Mr. Pearson took great pleasure in Thomas Hill’s society. In social position he was, indeed, above him, for he was a man of considerable property, and a magistrate for the county. In Mrs. Hill’s rice-puddings, in the making of which she was “a notable woman,” and in her husband’s talk, he found, however, enough to satisfy him.

Rowland was but a year older than Mr. Pearson’s eldest daughter. The beginning of his courtship he has himself told in the following words:—

“Mr. Pearson’s visit led to intimacy between the families, especially as regards the children; and as his eldest daughter had attained the age of five, while I was no more advanced than six, the two were naturally thrown much together, and, in fact, took the first step towards that intimacy and affection which some twenty-five years later were cemented by marriage. One whimsical little passage in these earliest days I must record. Under the high road, in the part nearest to my father’s house, ran what is in the midland counties called a culver (that is a long low arch), placed there for the passage of the rivulet, which turned my little water-wheel. Into this culver my brother and I occasionally crept by way of adventure, and at times to hear the noise of a wagon as it rumbled slowly overhead. Into this ‘cool grot and mossy cell’ I once led my new companion, both of us necessarily bending almost double; and I cannot but look back upon the proceeding as probably our earliest instance of close association and mutual confidence. Many years later we revisited the spot together, but found the passage completely silted up, so as to be inaccessible to future wooers, however diminutive.”

At the age of three or four, Rowland was nearly carried off by the scarlet fever. So ill he was that for a short while his father and mother thought that he had ceased to breathe. The attack left him weak for some years. “I have never overcome,” he wrote in his eighteenth year, “and most probably never shall quite overcome, the effects of that illness. Ever since I can remember I have suffered much from sickness.” He had to pass many hours of every day lying on his back. He used to beguile the time by counting. He assisted himself, as he said, by a kind of topical memory. “My practice was to count a certain number, generally a hundred, with my eye fixed on one definite place, as a panel of the door, or a pane in the window, and afterwards, by counting-up the points, to ascertain the total.” He here first showed that love of calculation which so highly distinguished him in after life. His health remained so feeble that he had passed his seventh birthday before he was taught his letters. Backward though he was in book-learning, he was really a forward child. At the age of five he had made himself a small water-wheel, rude enough no doubt. Yet it worked with briskness in a little stream near his father’s house. A water-wheel had always a great charm for him. He had been taken to see one before he was three years old, and he used to cry to be taken to see it again. When he was an old man he would go miles out of his way to see one at work. The year after he made his wheel, when he was now six, he and his brother Edwin, a boy of eight, built themselves a small model-forge of brick and mortar. The wheel was about two feet and a-half across, and was pretty fairly shaped. It was turned by a stream from the spout of the pump. The axle, which they made out of the stem of a cherry-tree, cost them a good deal of trouble:—

“We attempted to connect our machinery by means of a crank with the handle of the pump, expecting that if we once gave it a start the water would turn the wheel, while this would not only work the forge, but also maintain, by its operation on the pump, the stream necessary to its own movement. In short, we looked for a perpetual motion, and were greatly disappointed to find motion at an end as soon as our own hands were withdrawn from the pump. When we mentioned our perplexity to my father, after informing us that our attempt was hopeless, and giving us such explanation as we could understand, he consoled us under our discomfiture by telling us that many persons, much older and wiser than ourselves, had expended time, labour, and money, in the same fruitless quest.”[22]

A few years after this his father himself came across one of these dreamers. He was taken by a friend to see a machine for producing perpetual motion. The inventor boasted of his success. “There,” he said, “the machine is.” “Does it go?” the visitor asked. “No, it does not go, but I will defy all the world to show why it does not go.”

The lads happily had a fair supply of tools. Their father, in his boyhood, had been fond of using them, and had kept some of them so carefully that they were quite serviceable for his sons. In three old looms that had belonged to their grandfather they found an abundant supply of materials.

Their life at Horsehills, if somewhat hard, was far from being unhappy. A few years after they had left the neighbourhood, Rowland and his elder brothers passed through Wolverhampton on the top of a stagecoach. At a certain point of the road the three boys stood up in order to get a glimpse of their old home. A gentleman seated by them, on learning what they were gazing at, said, “to our no small gratification,” as Rowland remembered, “that we must have been good lads when we lived there, since we were so fond of the place.”

CHAPTER II.

When Rowland Hill was seven years old a great change took place in the family life. His mother had always thought very highly of her husband’s powers and learning. She knew that he was fit for some higher kind of work than any he had hitherto done. She longed, moreover, to procure for her children a better education than any that then seemed likely to be within their reach. One of their friends, Mr. Thomas Clark, kept a school in Birmingham, of which he was willing to dispose. He also had been a member of Dr. Priestley’s congregation, and in the midst of the riots had shown great courage. “Church and King” had been the cry of the mob, and “Church and King” chalked on the house-door was no small safeguard against its fury. Some friendly hand had written these words on the door of the schoolmaster’s house. As soon as he saw them he at once rubbed them out. With this brave and upright man Thomas Hill became in later years closely connected by marriage. His elder daughter married one of Mr. Clark’s sons. Mrs. Hill persuaded her husband to give up his business in Wolverhampton, and to buy the school. They removed it to a convenient house called Hill Top, on the outskirts of Birmingham. Here Rowland passed the next sixteen years of his life. Here—

“His parents, with their numerous offspring, dwelt,

A virtuous household, though exceeding poor!

Pure livers were they all, austere and grave.”

The purchase-money must have been paid off by instalments. I have before me, as I write, a card of the terms. The charges were moderate. Day-scholars paid four guineas or five pounds a year, and boarders twenty guineas or twenty-five guineas, according to age. The address that the new schoolmaster published is somewhat curious. It is as follows:—

ADDRESS.

“T. Hill, sensible of the severe responsibility attached to the office of a public preceptor, resolves, if entrusted with that charge, to devote himself to the duties of it with assiduity, perseverance, and concentrated attention, as indispensable to reputation and success. To ensure the co-operation of his pupils, he will make it his study to excite their reasoning powers, and to induce in them habits of voluntary application; for this purpose, varying the ordinary course of instruction, and, as occasion shall offer, drawing their attention to subjects more particularly fitted to interest their feelings; he will always endeavour, by kindness and patience, firmness and impartiality to secure for himself their affection and esteem. And as he aspires to exhibit models of education, possessing higher excellencies than mechanical dexterity or mere intellectual acuteness; his anxious aim will be to make instruction in art and science, the culture of the understanding, and of the physical powers, subservient to the nobler intention of fostering and maturing the virtues of the heart.”

Rowland was at once placed in the school, and thus at the age of seven his formal education began. His health still continued weak, and his studies were too often broken in upon by illness. He was fortunate enough, however, to find at his new home, in an outbuilding, a workshop, fitted with benches, a vice, and a blacksmith’s forge. “Here,” he said, “we spent much of our spare time, and most of our spare cash, which latter, however, was but very scanty.” The want of pence, indeed, often troubled him full sore. “Ever since I can remember,” as he wrote in a Journal which he began to keep in his eighteenth year, “I have had a taste for mechanics.... In works of the fingers I chiefly excel.” But the best mechanician wants materials, and materials cost money. One Good Friday morning he and his brother Matthew turned dealers. They had been sent with a basket to buy hot cross buns for the household. As they went along, the street-vendors were calling out, after the Birmingham fashion—

“Hot cross buns! Hot cross buns!

One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns!

Sugar ’em, and butter ’em, and clap ’em in your muns.”

The two lads, as they came home, began in jest to repeat the cry. Matthew was an admirable mimic, and had caught it exactly. To their surprise they found themselves beset with purchasers. “Not having face enough to reject demands which we had provoked, perhaps not unwilling to carry on the jest, we soon emptied our basket, and had to return for more, deeming ourselves, however, well recompensed for the additional trouble by the profits arising from the difference between the wholesale price, at which we had been allowed to purchase, and the retail price at which we had sold.” The elder of these two lads the town, as years went on, received as its Recorder; to the younger it raised a statue in his life-time.

This was not the first time that Rowland had turned dealer. Not long after his family had moved to Hill Top his mother gave him a little plot of land for his garden. It was covered with a crop of hoarhound. This he was going to clear away to make room for his flowers, but he was told that it had a money value. “I cut it properly, tied it up in bundles, and, borrowing a basket of my mother, set off one morning on a market-day—Thursday, as I remember—with my younger brother Arthur as my sole companion, for the market-place of the town; and, taking my stand like any other caterer, soon disposed of my wares, receiving eightpence in return. Fortunately I was saved the tediousness of retail dealing, the contents of my basket being purchased in the gross by a woman who had taken her stand near, and who, I hope, cleared a hundred per cent. by the transaction, though she disparaged her bargain by warning me to tell my mother, ‘She must tie up bigger bunches next time.’”

By the age of nine he had saved half-a-guinea, which he laid out on a box of colours. His first great purchase, however, was, as he told me, the volumes of Miss Edgeworth’s “Parent’s Assistant.” These cost him fifteen shillings. “Hers was a name which he could never mention but with gratitude and respect.” I once asked him what were the books that had chiefly formed his character. He answered that he thought he owed most to Miss Edgeworth’s stories. He read them first when he was about eight or nine years old, and he read them a great many times. He said, and the tears came into his eyes as he spoke, that he had resolved in these early days to be like the characters in her stories, and to do something for the world. “I had always had,” he said to me at another time, “a very strong desire to do something to make myself remembered.”

“While yet a child, and long before his time,

Had he perceived the presence and the power

Of greatness.”

Most of his spare money was laid out, however, in the purchase of tools and materials. With such old wood as they could lay hands on, and such new wood as they could afford to buy, he and his brothers set about building a flat-bottomed boat in which they meant to sail through the Birmingham and Worcester Canal into the Severn, and up the Severn to their uncle at Shrewsbury. They had no more misgivings about their scheme than Robinson Crusoe had about his escape from his island in his canoe. Yet there was certainly one great bar to their plan, of which, however, they knew nothing. The canal, at this time, had not been carried half-way to the Severn. They finished their boat, and, though it was found to be too frail for the canal, nevertheless it carried the bold voyagers across a horse-pond.

In the occupations of the workshop, and even in his regular education, Rowland suffered interruption, not only from frequent attacks of illness, but also from the need that his father was under of employing his children part of each day in household work. He could not afford to keep many servants. While Rowland all his life regretted that he had been taken away from school at an early age, yet the hours that he had passed in the discharge of domestic duties he never looked upon as time misspent.

“I was called upon at a very early age to perform many offices which, in richer families, are discharged exclusively by servants—to go on errands, to help in cleaning, arranging, and even repairing, and, in short, to do any sort of work that lay within my power. By this means I gradually acquired, as will hereafter better appear, a feeling of responsibility, and habits of business, dispatch, punctuality, and independence, which have proved invaluable to me through life.”[23]

He might well have taken to himself the words of Ferdinand, and said:—

“Some kinds of baseness

Are nobly undergone, and most poor matters

Point to rich ends.”

No man, indeed, ever felt more deeply than he did the vast importance of that great part of education, which no examinations can test, and which many examiners and framers of schemes of public competition seem to treat with utter contempt.

The feeling of responsibility which he speaks of did not seem to those who knew him as a child to have been, as he himself says, gradually acquired. It grew, no doubt, with exercise, but it was a part of his inbred worth. “From a very early age,” says one of his brothers, “he felt responsibility in a way none of the others of us did. If anything went wrong it was he who felt it.” He had inherited little of his father’s “buoyant optimism,” and none of his contentedness when things were going wrong. From a very early age his mother began to share with him the troubles that well-nigh weighed her down. They had only grown by her husband’s change of occupation. Matters grew worse and worse as the French War went on. “Never surely yet,” wrote her husband, “was a time when debts were collected with more difficulty, or left uncollected with more danger.” She tried more than one plan to add to the earnings of the family, and every plan she used to talk over with Rowland when he was still a mere child. At times she was terribly straightened. Her brother-in-law, Williams, “a tradesman and a scholar,” as her husband described him, once sent them in their distress a present of five pounds. “The sight of it,” wrote my grandfather, in a letter which I have before me, “produced in both of us mingled emotions of pleasure and pain. Pleasure as a strong, too strong, testimonial of your regard and affection, and pain as it could not but remind us of the toils and privations which you are undergoing to enable you to be generous as well as just. So powerful was the latter impression that our first impulse would have urged us to beg leave to return this too serious mark of affection, adopting the ‘burning words’ of David, ‘Shall we drink the blood of these men?’ but cooler consideration led to the fear that such a measure would give more pain to you than relief to ourselves.”

Others of their friends were ready to help them. One of them, in the hearing of one of her children, said to her, “Now, Mrs. Hill, remember you are never to be in want of money to go to market with.” A strong feeling of independence led her, however, to rely on herself, on her husband, and her children. She had a hatred of debt, and in this hatred every one of her children came to share. “I early saw,” said Rowland, “the terrible inconvenience of being poor. My mother used to talk to me more than to all the others together of our difficulties, and they were very grievous. She used to burst into tears as she talked about them. One day she told me that she had not a shilling in the house, and she was afraid lest the postman might bring a letter while she had no money to pay the postage. She had always been careful to save the rags, which she kept in two bags—one for the white, and the other for the coloured. The white were worth three or four times more than the coloured. It occurred to her that she might sell them, though the bags were not full. I was always sent by her on such errands, and I got this time about three shillings for the rags.”

She persuaded her husband to buy a ruling-machine, which she and Rowland chiefly worked. “That business is not at present well performed by anybody in Birmingham, and so it would be a likely thing for some of the lads to work at,” the father wrote to his brother-in-law. She turned the handle, while her little son, a child of nine, fed the machine. “It interfered largely with my education,” he said. In time he learnt to make the brass pens that were used in ruling, and so earned a little money for himself. They next took to making the copy-books, at first with the help of a bookbinder. But the help of this man the boy before long showed was not needed. “I soon acquired, in its simpler forms, the art of bookbinding—an art which I find I have not yet quite lost, having lately, in my seventy-first year, made up a scrap-book in what is called half-binding for the use of my grandchildren.” Johnson also had learnt in his youth how to bind a book, neither did he in advanced life forget the art. “It were better,” wrote Mrs. Thrale to him, “to bind books again, as you did one year in our thatched summer-house, than weigh out doses of mercury and opium which are not wanted.” There were other plans which Mrs. Hill formed, and carried out with unwearying industry, and in all of these her little son was always ready to take his share.

At the age of eleven his education was still more broken in upon, for he was called upon to assist his father and his elder brothers in teaching. “Young and inexperienced as I was,” he wrote, “I had inferiors both in age and knowledge; some of the pupils not being more than six or seven years old.”[24] At the age of twelve his school education came almost entirely to an end. He was, it is true, somewhat longer enrolled among the boys, and he still received some instruction. But henceforth he was much more a teacher than a pupil. One day in every week, for a few years of his boyhood, his employment lay altogether outside school-work. His second brother, Edwin, had been engaged every Wednesday in the Assay Office. But he got a better appointment. “Rowland,” wrote his father, “succeeds Edwin at the Assay Office. So that you see preferment goes on among us, and I will answer we think ourselves as happy on such occasions as our virtuous Governors fancy themselves, even in their sinecures, which our posts certainly cannot be called.”

The best part of his education he got from his father, not in class-hours, but in the daily intercourse of their home life. This went on for many a year after he left off receiving from him regular instruction. “His children were,” Rowland wrote, “though in an irregular and desultory manner, his private pupils, and as a private teacher he was very successful.”[25]

In the year 1807 his father gave a series of lectures on electricity, mechanics, astronomy, pneumatics, and the gases.

“These lectures, to which I paid a fixed attention, gave me a new impulse. I resolved to make an electrical machine for myself, and speedily went to work. The cylinder (plate-glass machines were yet unknown) I got blown at a glass-house in the town, paying for it the sum of sixteen shillings. Of course, to a child, there was much difficulty at almost every step, but my hardest task was to make a pattern for the caps. My first attempt was sufficiently primitive, viz., to cut one out from a large turnip. Not succeeding in this, I resorted to casting. Lead was the metal I naturally chose, as most easily melted; and having, after many attempts, at length succeeded in bringing my sand into due shape, I emptied my ladle into the mould and brought out my pattern cap, which, when duly smoothened in the lathe of a friendly workman in the neighbourhood, I bore, with no small pride and satisfaction, to the founder’s, that it might be cast in brass. One serious difficulty in construction I avoided by carrying the axle, which was a strong iron rod, right through the cylinder, instead of attempting to break it off, as usual, just within the caps. The prime conductor, too, I did not attempt to make hollow, but satisfied myself with bringing a piece of wood into the proper cylindrical shape, and then covering it over, first with paper, and afterwards with tinfoil.

“While the work was in progress I was attacked with illness, and for a time was confined to the house. It was during this period that the new caps, in all their first brightness, arrived from the brass-founder’s; and as soon as I was a little better I was of course eager to attach them to the cylinder; but the workshop being too cold for an invalid, my patience would have been sorely tried had not my indulgent mother made provision for me in the parlour, by substituting for the hearthrug an old carpet folded in several doubles, so as to prevent the droppings from my ladle from injuring the somewhat better carpet on the floor; and here, the cement being melted over a good fire, the cylinder was duly prepared for mounting.

“My simple apparatus was completed in about a year and a-half. I set it to work with no small trepidation, having heard much about the uncertainty of electrical action, and fearing lest my limited means and powers might have left some fatal defect. So great was my uncertainty, that even after giving the machine three or four turns, I still hesitated to apply the decisive test, and great indeed were my pride and joy when my knuckle drew from the conductor its first spark.[26] Downstairs I rushed in quest of sympathy, nor could I be satisfied until my father and many others had witnessed the performance with admiring eyes. A few years afterwards I added some improvements, substituting for the deal frame one of mahogany, procuring a hollow conductor from the tinman’s, made of course according to my own directions, and giving also greater neatness and efficiency to the subordinate parts of the machine and its various adjuncts; and I may add the apparatus, though in a somewhat imperfect state, is still extant. Meanwhile, however, a friend of my father’s, the late Mr. Michael Beasley, a schoolmaster of Stourbridge, who through life showed great affection for me, and to whom I owe much in various ways, having seen the machine in its first simple state, engaged me to make a duplicate for himself, though on a smaller scale. This I accomplished in about six months; and while my outlay amounted to two pounds, I received in payment, for materials and workmanship, the sum of three guineas, which I considered a handsome remuneration, though I have now no doubt that my kind friend would have given me yet more had his means been less restricted.”[27]

It was from his father, that his son got his strong love for astronomy, and acquired, as he said, even while a boy, no inconsiderable knowledge of the subject. A few years before his death, he drew up an interesting paper on his astronomical studies.[28]

In it he says:—

“My father (like myself in youth and early manhood) was a great walker, and we frequently journeyed together. When I was only nine years of age I walked with him, for the most part after dark, from Birmingham to Stourbridge, a distance of twelve miles—with occasional lifts no doubt—according to usage—on his back. I recollect that it was a brilliant starlight night, and the names of the constellations, and of the brighter single stars, their apparent motions, and the distinction between the so-called fixed stars and planets, formed then, as on many similar occasions, never-failing subjects of interesting conversation, and to me of instruction. On the way we passed by the side of a small pool, and the air being still, the surface of the water gave a perfect reflection of the stars. I have a vivid recollection, after an interval of nearly seventy years, of the fear with which I looked into what appeared to me a vast abyss, and of my clinging to my father, to protect me from falling into it.”

His father had a reflecting telescope that showed Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings, a Hadley’s quadrant, an artificial horizon, and a tolerably good clock. He took in, moreover, the “Nautical Almanac.” “By means of this simple apparatus,” wrote his son, “he not only regulated the clock, but determined the latitude, and even the longitude of our house, or rather of the playground. In these occupations I was always his assistant.” No sooner had Rowland learnt anything than he set about teaching it. In fact, as he himself stated, learning and teaching with him generally went on hand in hand. He gave lectures on astronomy to the boys of the school, and later on to a Literary and Scientific Association, of which he was one of the founders. “With a view to these lectures, I read all the contributions of Sir William Herschel to the transactions of the Royal Society. My reverence for the man led me to contrive, on the occasion of my second visit to London, to go round by Slough, in order that I might obtain a glimpse—as the coach passed—of his great telescope, which I knew could be seen over the tops of the neighbouring buildings.” Astronomy was, indeed, as he always said, his favourite science. At an early date he became a member of the Royal Astronomical Society. He kept up his interest in its proceedings till the close of his life. When he had passed the age of threescore years and ten, he discovered some important errors in the Address of one of the Presidents.[29]

All through life, whatever he read he read with an acuteness, a patience, and an earnest desire to arrive at the truth, that would have done honour to a judge.

“When a boy, I was fond of reading books of elementary science. I occasionally met with statements which puzzled me—which appeared to me to be wrong; but assuming, as children do, the infallibility of the author—or perhaps I should say of a printed book—I naturally came to the conclusion that my own understanding was in fault, and became greatly disheartened. After awhile—I forget on what occasion—I applied for a solution of the puzzle to my father, who, possessing a large amount of general information, was well qualified to advise. To my great delight, he assured me that I was right and the author wrong. My unqualified faith in printed statements was now of course at an end; and a habit was gradually formed of mentally criticising almost everything I read—a habit which, however useful in early life, is, as I have found in old age, a cause of much waste of thinking power when the amount is so reduced as to render economy of essential importance. Still, through the greater part of my life, this habit of reading critically, combined as it was with the power of rapid calculation, has been of great use to me, especially in my contests with the Post Office, and, after I had joined the Department, in the revision of the thousands of Reports, Returns, and Minutes prepared by other officers.”

How deep were some of the problems which in his youth he tried to fathom is shown by the following extract from his paper on Astronomy:—

“Some sixty years ago, my attention having been accidentally drawn to a tide-mill for grinding corn, I began to consider what was the source of the power employed, and came to the conclusion that it was the momentum of the Earth’s revolution on its axis. The next question I asked myself was—could such power be diverted—in however slight a degree—without drawing, as it were, on the stock? Further consideration showed me that the draught required for grinding the corn was trifling in comparison with that employed in grinding the pebbles on every seashore upon the Earth’s surface; and consequently that the drain on the Earth’s momentum might suffice in the course of ages to effect an appreciable retardation in the Earth’s diurnal revolution.

“I now, as usual in case of difficulty, applied to my father. He could detect no fault in my reasoning, but informed me that Laplace had demonstrated in his great work (”La Mécanique Céleste“) that the time occupied in the Earth’s diurnal revolution is absolutely invariable. Of course both my father and I accepted the authority as unquestionable; but I never could fully satisfy my mind on the subject, and for the greater part of my life it was a standing puzzle.”

Many were the lines of thought that Thomas Hill opened out before his children. “At an early age,” said his son, “we were all fond of reading, had a strong desire for knowledge, and became studious, assisting one another, and obtaining, when required, effectual help from my father.” Though he was ready enough to help his children, yet he did not himself set them to study. “I had an excellent understanding for mathematics,” his son said, “and my father had a great liking for them, with a fair knowledge of them, yet he did not teach me them.” That is to say, he did not teach them formally and by book. When he was out walking he would work out problems in geometry for his sons, now and then stopping to describe figures with his walking-stick on the dust of the road. It was not till Rowland Hill was twenty-five years old, that he went through Euclid. He had, indeed, some slight acquaintance with the three first books, but even these he knew very imperfectly. One Christmas holidays he gave up all his spare time to Euclid, and made himself master of the whole of it before school opened. Yet five years earlier than this I find the following record in his Journal:—

“It is frequently the case that when walking by myself I make calculations, or invent demonstrations of rules in Mensuration or Trigonometry to beguile away the time, and I find nothing else so effectual. I lately made a calculation in my mind, to determine the distance of a fixed star, supposing its annual parallax to be one second; and, for the sake of round numbers, I took the diameter of the Earth’s orbit at two hundred millions of miles. I forget what was the result of the calculation, but I know that it was many billions of miles. Some time ago, as I was walking to Smethwick, I was making some calculations respecting the capacity of the boiler of a steam-engine, which it was my intention to make, and for some reason or other I wished to find the diagonal of a cube of certain dimensions. Never having seen any rule to accomplish this, I set about to find one; which I soon did.”

Earlier even than this, when he was but seventeen, his friend Mr. Beasley, the Stourbridge schoolmaster, asked him to give lessons in Navigation to a young midshipman, who had come to live with him as his pupil.

“Though I had never yet opened a book on Navigation in my life, I unhesitatingly undertook the task. Probably, in preparing my lessons I had some assistance from my father; but one way or other, I discharged the duty to the satisfaction, I believe, of all concerned, teaching my pupil not merely what might be learnt from books, but also the practical art of Navigation, so far as this could be done on land, so that he became able, by actual observation, to find latitude, longitude, and local time, the second being a matter of some difficulty. This, however, was a serious addition to my work, Mr. Beasley’s school being twelve miles distant, and my weekly journey thither and back being always performed on foot, with a Hadley’s quadrant to carry each time to and fro, though even when so encumbered I was in those days a very brisk walker. I must add that, at the time when this extra labour came upon me, my ordinary hours in school were nine and a-half per diem, in addition to which I, in common with my father and eldest brother, Matthew, had many lessons to give elsewhere.”[30]

A year later, his Journal shows that he began a new study. He had become by this time an accomplished draughtsman, and he thought perhaps to turn his powers to good account. “I this day,” he writes, “began to study Architecture. I can hardly say as yet how I shall like it. I am rather afraid that there is too much to be remembered for me, as I have but a poor memory.” He learnt enough of the Art to enable him, a few years later on, to be the sole architect of his new school-house.

His mind would at this time have puzzled an examiner—his knowledge and his ignorance were so strangely mixed. “One cause,” he said, “of our backwardness in school learning no doubt was that my father, who was proud of us, never informed us of our great deficiencies. Perhaps he was not aware of them, for though very backward we were, I think, in advance of our schoolfellows, who in those early days were drawn almost exclusively from the lower grade of the middle class.” In a passage that I have already quoted, Rowland Hill stated that he owed much in many ways to Mr. Beasley. He it was who first let him know how much there is to learn. He was, indeed, both in parts and in knowledge, far below his brother schoolmaster, Thomas Hill; yet in many ways he was a better teacher. He formed a high opinion of the lad, and as he grew older, used to be fond of talking of “my young friend Rowland Hill,” and of the great things he was to do. He would often take him to the small inn at Hagley, and give him tea. There he would at times hold forth in praise of his powers to the admiration of the small company. When the first Arctic expedition was on the point of starting, he one day said to them, in all gravity, “If the Government really wants to succeed, they will send my young friend Rowland Hill.” At this time his young friend certainly was no longer a boy. As the old man told this story of his early days, he laughed very heartily. Indeed, he had been just as much amused, he said, when he first heard himself thus praised. Nevertheless, extravagant though his good friend’s estimate of him had always been, yet it had done him good, as it had roused his ambition, and had not satisfied and soothed his vanity.

This worthy man, after a life of no small benevolence and usefulness, unhappily went out of his mind. A very harmless vanity that grew upon him was the first sign he gave that his reason was failing. In one of his letters to Rowland Hill, which chance has preserved, he says, “No book need be written in these times, unless it be of an original kind, and very perfect in its construction. But now my vanity urges me to say that my books are of the original character. Who ever published a Dictation Book before me?” The next sign that he gave of his eccentricity—and a very strong sign it was in those days—was leaving off shaving. The following story I tell as his “young friend” told it me. “One morning Mr. Beasley’s son came in late for breakfast. The father, who was very formal in his talk, said to him, ‘Well, Mr. Thomas, what piece of utility have you done this morning? I have wheeled three barrows of muck from the pig-yard into the field.’ His son replied, ‘I, Sir, have shaved my chin this morning, and that’s the utility I have performed.’ His father slowly rose, and stumping out of the room (he was a fat man) exclaimed, ‘What! violate the laws of God and man, and call that utility!” However, as has been shown, he had rendered his young friend one great service, which by him was never forgotten.

Still more did Rowland Hill learn how little he had already learnt, when his eldest brother and he began to give lessons in a neighbouring school. “We went,” he said, “to teach mensuration and the lower branches of mathematics. I went as my brother Matthew’s assistant. The boys were immoral, and, so far as conduct went, were very far behind our boys. But Matthew soon became aware that in instruction, especially in Latin, they were far in advance of ours. This led him to investigate the causes of this superiority. He at once began to take into his own hands the teaching of Latin in our own school.” The two lads had to go a distance of five miles to give these lessons, and Matthew at this time was not strong enough to stand the double walk.

“For the first time in our household history, a horse had to be bought. We had hitherto never dreamt of travelling by any other means than the feet. My father and I undertook the purchase. We had been informed that a certain butcher had a horse on sale. We went to his house, looked as wise as we could, and being informed that the price was twelve pounds, ventured, with some trepidation, to bid eleven. This was refused: the butcher declaring that he did not at all want to part with his horse, and that ‘his missis’ had been scolding him for thinking of such a thing. My father was no more fitted for bargain-making than was the Vicar of Wakefield, and we agreed to pay the full sum. The butcher clinched the matter, as soon as the terms were settled, by taking down a leg of mutton and offering to give it us if we would release him from his bargain. With this offer we were of course too cunning to close. I need not add that the beast was a sorry jade. When it made its first appearance at Mr. ——’s school, the pupils tauntingly inquired which cost most, the horse or the saddle, which was new. I used to ride behind my brother till we were near the house, when I got down and walked. In the end we resold the horse in the horse-fair for five pounds.”

Most of all was Rowland Hill indebted for that first of all knowledge, the knowledge of self, to an eminent physician, Dr. Johnstone, who had engaged him to give lessons to his sons. It was at his table, he said, that it was first brought home to him with full force how little he as yet knew. “I heard matters talked of which I could not in the least understand. This discovery of my ignorance was at first very painful to me, and set me to work very hard—too hard, in fact, for my health.” He thus touchingly describes in his Journal his state of mind. He was twenty-four years old when he made this entry:—

“There is one regret that will force itself upon my mind whenever I am led to contemplate the effects of the improvements which have from time to time been made in the proceedings of the school. I cannot help examining my own education, and contrasting what it unfortunately is with what it might have been had I been placed under the influence of such a system. Except my own, I am unacquainted with any language, whereas my youngest brother Howard, who has been educated, I may almost say, by myself—for it has been almost entirely according to my own plans—is familiar with Latin and French, and has made considerable progress in Greek, and this without neglecting anything else. When I left school—that is, when I became a teacher—I had for about two years held undisputed the first place in the school. It is fair, then, to suppose that I should occupy the same place under any system of procedure—that if I were a boy in the school at this moment, I should be at the head of the school. Compare, then, the acquirements of the boy who now stands in the first place in the school, with mine at his age, and oh, what a difference will be found! When I left school I was a proficient in no single thing. I could not write fit to be seen; I understood but very little of arithmetic; and was not master even of the paltry art of spelling. Of the classics and of the higher branches of the mathematics I was altogether ignorant. I believe drawing was the only thing I understood even tolerably. Every attainment I am now master of—and, God knows, they are but few!—I have acquired since I became a teacher, and for the most part by myself. Fortunately I have, in a tolerably high degree, the faculty of invention (and here I ought to consider that this may be in a great measure the effect of education, and if I have acquired this only, much has been done for me). Many a time have I given lessons, both at home and abroad, on subjects which I began to study with my pupils. Frequently have I solved a problem of which I never had heard till asked by my pupil to explain it to him. I remember well that the first time I ever saw the inside of a work on mensuration was when asked by a young gentleman at a school where I assisted Matthew in giving lessons, to explain to him one of the most difficult problems in the book: it is to find the area of a zone—a problem which involves many minor ones. Many of these I had before invented for myself, ignorant of the existence of any work on the subject. I was able to give the young man the assistance he required, and with so little hesitation that I believe he did not suspect my ignorance.

“Circumstances similar to this have forced me into an acquaintance with many subjects, and I may truly say that almost all I know has been acquired in teaching others. For from the circumstance of my having, till within the last few years, found among those with whom I associated, few who were my equals, and scarcely any who were my superiors, I thought that, except my father and one or two other individuals, there were none whose acquirements would entitle them to a rank higher than my own. I was, therefore, satisfied with the progress I had made. But what was my disappointment when the increasing character of the school and other circumstances opened my way into a class of society among whom I found it was taken for granted that a man should be acquainted with Latin, and Greek, and French—languages of which I was profoundly ignorant, and the knowledge of which I foolishly thought was confined to a few. No one knows the pain which I have frequently felt when, in a company where I was but slightly known, the conversation has turned upon literary subjects, lest it should be discovered that I was unacquainted with that which no one seemed to take credit to himself for knowing, and to be ignorant of which appeared, therefore, to be so much the more disgraceful. With what shame have I sometimes declared my ignorance, rather than appear to understand that which I did not! What would I not give to become young again, and enter the school in its present state! I do not blame my father; he has been an excellent parent to us all. The difficulties he had to contend with in early life were such as to leave him but little time to attend to the education of his children. His whole efforts, together with my mother’s, were necessary to enable him to maintain us; and notwithstanding his talents are so great, he certainly is not acquainted with the modes of influencing others. System is what he likes as little as he understands. We cannot blame him for this; we may with as much justice blame a man because he is not six feet high. And I have often thought that the education which he gave us was more favourable to originality than if we had made great acquirements. Perhaps if I had been a good classical scholar I never should have invented the system of operating upon others which I have arranged. It is impossible to say how it would have been. I have often asked myself the question, Is it now too late to educate myself? I am afraid it is too late to do much. Ever since I was a child I have worked very hard; my time has always been very closely occupied in gaining a livelihood; and I now begin to feel the effects of so laborious a life. My memory is less tenacious than it was; and I find great difficulty in beginning a study to which I am not accustomed. Besides, my time is so fully occupied in attending to the school, and to the great mass of private teaching on which I am engaged (altogether seldom amounting to less than thirteen hours per day, even subtracting meal-times), that I feel I cannot work any harder. My mind almost always feels wearied. If I rise earlier than usual in the morning, I am no gainer, for I fall to sleep in the middle of the day; so that the only alternative left me is, either to be satisfied with the little time I can now devote to my own improvement, or give up some of my engagements, and thus lessen our income, which is not at all superfluous. What to do I know not; and the dissatisfied, uncertain state of mind in which I now am makes me sometimes very miserable, and I am afraid materially injures my health. Here I ought to say that my kind parents have frequently expressed their wish that I should not labour so hard as I do, but I am constantly in hopes that by so doing I may secure future ease.”

The ease that he desired to secure was only that “independence, that first earthly blessing,” to use Gibbon’s words, which a man may enjoy to the full, and yet scorn delights and live laborious days, while he freely indulges the last infirmity of noble mind, and pursues with unrestrained course some lofty object of ambition. “So inviting are the distant prospects of ambition,” Rowland Hill wrote in his Journal only a year later, “and such is my anxiety to correct the defects of my education, that I feel it difficult to resist the temptation of sacrificing physical to mental health—future strength to future fame.... I am convinced of the necessity of making very vigorous improvements in my own mind. I hope I have already done much, and I am determined to accomplish more.” In some of his letters that have been preserved, I see that more than once he turned his mind towards Cambridge. Even at the age of seven-and-twenty he had not given up all hope of getting for himself a University education. He asked his eldest brother to ascertain the cost. On hearing from him in answer, he wrote, “I do not know how to decide respecting Cambridge. I am disappointed at finding the thing so terribly expensive.”

In more than one Literary and Scientific Society that he helped to found, he had long laboured hard to train his mind and increase his knowledge. He and his brothers, as he told me when he gave me an account of the foundation of the first of these small societies, were becoming aware of their great deficiencies in education. To cure these, some of them formed a Mutual Improvement Society. It never numbered more than five members. Their father gave them the use of a comfortable summer-house that was in the garden at Hill Top. Here they met early every Sunday morning, and set each other tasks for the coming week. They then read through, and talked over the tasks of the last week. He said, with a smile, that he could well remember strongly supporting in the summer-house the abolition of the National Debt, by the simple means of not paying it. They bought the quarto edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, and took in the “Edinburgh Review.” They paid for their own coal, and for their breakfast, which they always cooked with their own hands. “We never thought of coming upon our father for anything. We enjoyed the meal the most in the week.” From his Journal I find that it was in the year 1816 that this society was founded, and that its object was “the improvement of our literary knowledge.”

In the following year the members, while still keeping up their Sunday morning meetings, formed a second society for literary and scientific discussion. They met each Thursday evening in the summer-house. In course of time these two societies came to an end. But in 1819 a third society was formed. I extract the following entries from his Journal:—

“December 17th, 1819.—This evening I read a lecture on the history of Astronomy before a society of young men which has lately been formed, and of which I am a member. We have adopted the name of a society I have before mentioned, and which is not now in existence. We call it ‘The Society for Literary Improvement;’ our place of assembly is a large room in Great Charles Street. There are at present about twenty members, who lecture in rotation. After the lecture, which is but short, a discussion on the subject follows.

* * * * *

“December, 1820.—During the last half-year I have continued the subject of Astronomy, by giving two lectures on the Solar System. I also opened the discussion at one of our monthly meetings by an address ‘On the nature and utility of systematic arrangements.’” Each of these lectures was delivered from short notes. At the first lecture on Astronomy, I was so completely taken-up with my subject that I was not aware how fast time was flying, till, looking at my watch, I found that I had been speaking an hour and three-quarters.

* * * * *

“November, 1821.—Since February, which is the date of the last entry in this book, I have delivered two lectures before the Society for Literary and Scientific Improvement; one on Comets and the Asteroids, the other on the Fixed Stars.

“We have adopted a plan of electing a committee which secures a very exact representation of the whole body. Every member is returned by unanimous votes, and he may be recalled at any moment by a resolution of the majority of his constituents, who may then return another representative, but this must be done by a unanimous vote. Very much to my surprise, I was the first member elected.”

The plan of election had been devised by his father, who, as I have already said, was strongly in favour of the representation of minorities. I have before me a copy of the laws of this society. The tenth, in which the mode of election is described, I give below:—[31]

On a loose sheet of paper that I have found, I find the following statement:—

“The objects proposed in arranging the plan of choosing the Committee are:—

“1st. A fair representation (as near as can be) of all the classes of which the general body is composed.

“2nd. Responsibility on the part of the members of the Committee.

“To obtain the first of these objects, it has been provided that each member of the Committee shall be chosen by a section only of the society; and, as will appear upon examination, opportunity is afforded, in forming the sections, for every voter to class himself with those whose views most resemble his own.

“To obtain the second object, frequent elections are appointed, and to every section of the society is secured an undoubted right to the services of one individual member of the Committee. Added to this are the provisions that the proceedings of the Committee may be attended by any member of the society as an auditor, and that a public register is to be kept of the attendance, or non-attendance, of each member of the Committee.”

Some months after the Society had been founded Rowland Hill made the following entry in his Journal:—

“The Society for Scientific and Literary Improvement has gradually increased in numbers and importance ever since its establishment. We have had some excellent lectures, and I always look forward to the night of meeting with pleasure. I am still a member of the Committee. Our time has been very much occupied in revising the Laws, which we have now printed. At the request of the Committee I wrote the Preface which is annexed to the Laws.[32] If the Society should ever become numerous, which now appears probable, I am confident, from the form of its constitution, that it will become a formidable body.”

In the following passage in the Preface, its author was stating, no doubt, the difficulties which he had himself undergone:—

“The experience of almost every one who has passed the time usually devoted to education, but who still feels desirous of improvement, must have convinced him of the difficulty of regularly devoting his leisure hours to the object he has in view, from the want of constantly acting motives, and the absence of regulations which can enforce the observance of stated times. However strong the resolutions he has made, and whatever may be his conviction of the necessity of adhering to them, trivial engagements, which might easily be avoided, will furnish him, from time to time, with excuses to himself for his neglect of study. Thus may he spend year after year, constantly wishing for improvement, but as constantly neglecting the means of it, and old age may come upon him before he has accomplished the object of his desires; then will he look back with regret on the many opportunities he has lost, and acknowledge in despair that the time is gone by.”

With much vigour does he defend the mode of election:—

“Experience,” he says, “proves that, owing to imperfect methods of choosing those who are to direct the affairs of a society, the whole sway sometimes gets into the hands of a small party, and is exercised, perhaps unconsciously, in a way that renders many persons indifferent and alienates others, until all becomes listlessness, decay, and dissolution.”

While this Society was in full vigour, yet another was started by Rowland Hill and some of his brothers:—

“About Michaelmas, eight of us agreed to form another society, to meet on the Sunday mornings at each others’ houses, according to the plan of the old society, which has before been mentioned. Since that time we have met with the greatest regularity. When I joined each of these societies, I did it with a view of improving myself in extemporaneous speaking: this, at least, was one object. I then made a determination to speak upon every subject which should come before either society, a resolution which I have hitherto kept invariably. Besides this practice, I give an extemporaneous lecture once a week to the boys. At first it was a great labour to make an address at all, but now I speak with comparative ease. It is very seldom that I make the slightest preparation for speaking.”

The Minutes of this Society I have before me. Each member in turn “had to provide a subject for the consideration of the Society, and might propose either an extract for criticism, an outline for composition, or a question for discussion.” The subjects were, on the whole, very well chosen. They certainly would contrast favourably with those which used to be debated in the Union Society of Oxford in my undergraduate days. The following is the list of the subjects provided by Rowland Hill:—Are Importation Duties beneficial to Society or otherwise? Paper Currency; Instinct; The Fine Arts; The Political Effects of Machinery; Inductive Philosophy, as applied to the Common Affairs of Life; The Effects of the Extension of Education; Duelling; The Constitution of Minor Societies; The Qualities Necessary to Produce Success in Life; Rank; Public Opinion; The Economy of Time. Among the subjects introduced by other members, I find:—A Critical Review of Miss Edgeworth’s “Ormond”; The Possibility of the Introduction of a Philosophical Language; The Means we Possess of Judging of Others; The Study of Languages; Critical Remarks upon a portion of Kenilworth; Is it better to Admit or Exclude the Representation of Death on the Stage? Is the Acquirement of Literary Attainments Prejudicial to Commercial Pursuits?

In other ways, moreover, he was steadily training his mind and increasing his knowledge. Thus I find recorded in his Journal:—

“April 20th, 1818.—This morning I began to learn French, in company with William Matthews.[33] We are to meet at our house every other morning at five o’clock, and study till seven. We do not at present intend to have a teacher; perhaps when we have gained a little knowledge of the language we may apply to one. As my time is so valuable to me, I intend to spend one of our vacations in France, when I have made a considerable progress in the language, as that will be the most rapid way of learning.

* * * * *

“May 25th.—We have discontinued the French for the present, as William Matthews is obliged to give his attention to some other pursuit.”

Some two or three years later is the following entry:—

“At Christmas I had an attack of my old complaint—the ear-ache—which confined me to the house for a fortnight. However, I turned the time to advantage by reading French with such industry that, although I knew but little of the language when I began, yet at the end of the fortnight I could read it with sufficient ease as to be amused by it. I recollect that in one day I read a hundred pages of ‘Gil Blas,’ closely printed in small type.”

His efforts at self-improvement were—as he recorded in his old age—to some extent at least, misdirected. When he was a boy of thirteen he won the first of three prizes for original landscape-drawings, which had been offered by the proprietor of “The School Magazine”[34] to all candidates under sixteen. In the number of the Magazine for September, 1807, appeared the following announcement:—

“We have received several beautiful drawings in different styles, which do great credit to the talents of the young persons by whom they are sent, and to the exertions of the gentlemen under whom they have studied the pleasing art.

“The principal prize is awarded to Master Rowland Hill, who has given us a view of St. Philip’s Church, Birmingham, and the surrounding objects, as taken from the playground of Hill Top School.

“Master Hill is thirteen years and eight months only, and his performance is attested by his father, Mr. Thomas Wright Hill, and his drawing-master, Mr. Samuel Lines. To him is awarded—

“‘A Drawing-Box, value Three Guineas.’”

“What,” he wrote in his Journal a few years later, “was my surprise and delight to find that I had obtained the first prize! The whole family participated in my joy, and I believe this was the happiest day of my life.” But his success, as he himself has pointed out, had its drawback:—

“This, and the éclat I obtained a year or two later by painting the scenes for our little theatre, caused my parents and myself to assume that nature intended me for an artist. I accordingly employed the greater part of my spare time in practising drawing from patterns, from nature, from plaster-casts of the human frame, and, eventually, from life. Sketching from nature I found a most agreeable occupation, especially as it fell in with my love of visiting ancient ruins and fine scenery. I continued to pursue drawing with great earnestness for several years, and some of my drawings obtained the honour (undeserved, I fear) of appearing in the Birmingham Exhibitions. At length, however, I discovered that I possessed no natural aptitude for the artistic profession, and, consequently, directed my efforts to other matters.”

CHAPTER III.

In the account that I have given of Rowland Hill’s mental training, I have, in more than one place, been carried somewhat out of the regular course of my narrative. I must now return to the time when he was still a mere boy, and was as yet but little aware how boundless is the ocean of knowledge, on whose shores he had picked up but the tiniest of shells. He would not by any means have been accounted a forward child. In any school famous for learning he would have taken a low place. Nevertheless, his comrades had not failed to discover his peculiar power. One of his brothers thus writes about him:—

“My brother Rowland’s character is, to a considerable extent, portrayed in the History of Penny Postage; and, amongst the rest, his power of commanding success. But it may be well for me to testify, relative to this quality, that he showed it from a very early age. For myself, I can say that whenever I knew that he had set an object before him, I felt sure that it would be attained; and yet this was not from any high estimate of his talents; for, being less than three years his junior, and perhaps of a more sprightly and imaginative disposition, I fear I was wont to assume in comparing his mental powers with mine, and certainly did not soon recognise their high order. Probably, if I analyzed my feeling at all, I based it chiefly on belief in his perseverance. Again and again I had seen work prosper in his hands, and had had few or no failures to point to; whereas I knew that I was ever devising mighty plans which came to nothing. His early performances were chiefly of a mechanical nature, and diligent practice rendered him very fertile in resources—a fact of which I was well aware years before I could have designated the power by its proper term.”

It was in the management of the school theatre that this fertility in resources first became conspicuous. His younger brother, Arthur, had a strong dramatic turn, and was eager, like many another lad of thirteen, to strut and fret his hour upon the stage. Others he found ready to join him, and then for aid and advice he turned to Rowland, who was by two years his senior.

“The more I told them about the cost and other difficulties, the more anxious they grew as to the success of their enterprise, until at length, by their joint entreaty, I was prevailed on to assume the management; undertaking myself to paint the scenes, construct the machinery, and direct the whole course of action. I declined to become a performer, having no turn that way.”[35] The young company put their money into a common stock. The Manager recorded in his Journal:—“A code of laws was drawn up for the management of the theatre, and we were very exact in the observance of them. I was constituted manager, with power to appoint the different actors, and, under certain restrictions, to appropriate the funds in what way I pleased.”

It was in the summer of 1811 that they formed their plans; but it was not till the Easter of the following year that they were ready to give their first performance. Their difficulties were great. The school-room was to be their theatre; and in the school-room they could only work before the boys had risen, and after they had gone to bed. In the code of laws which governed the company, it was laid down that they should rise an hour before the usual time. Whatever scenery they set up had always to be taken down before lessons began. The room was long, but narrow, and not lofty enough to allow the scenes, at the time of shifting, to be drawn up. Not one of the company had ever been behind the curtain of a real theatre. Rowland, however, undertook to be architect, carpenter, scene-painter, and manager. He had, by this time, become most expert in the use of his tools. He was never so happy as when he was working in his carpenter’s shop. His knowledge of drawing and painting was also turned to good account. He began by carefully planning his work, and taking the most exact measurements. So accurately had everything been contrived beforehand, that when the scenes and their supports came to be put up they all fell at once into their proper places. The young company was greatly hampered by want of funds, and had from time to time to turn from the theatre to more than one plan of raising money. Among other “ways and means,” they set up a manufactory of fire-balloons, and gained some money by the tickets of admission that they sold to those who witnessed the ascent. At first they could only afford the simplest of materials for their scenes. These were painted on brown paper, the sheets being glued together. The side-scenes were painted on both sides, and revolved, in changing, on a pivot in the middle. Each season saw, however, an increase of magnificence, and some of the young artist’s scenery was so strongly made and so carefully painted that it has been in use even in the last few years.

Meanwhile, his younger brother was engaged in writing a tragedy, and in drilling his company. “Finding all dramas to which he had access far too long and difficult for his purpose, he boldly turned author; and parts were learned and scenes practised, though with considerable increase to inevitable difficulties, from the circumstance that the drama grew as the work proceeded, new thoughts striking the young dramatist, and new scenes being added for their development.” Thus The Hostile Chieftains, a tragedy founded on one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s tales, was written six times over. The Tragedy of Nero, as well befitted so great a subject, was the composition of three of the brothers working together. Even the manager, architect, carpenter, and scene-painter had found time to lend a hand. The first season opened with the performance of The Rivals, a tragedy, and not by Sheridan. It was witnessed with great applause by crowded audiences during its run of two nights. It was in the third season that The Hostile Chieftains was performed. Meanwhile, no doubt as a necessary preparation for Mrs. Radcliffe, a trap-door had been made in the ceiling. A band of musicians also was formed. This was the last season of the little company, but it ended gloriously; for the play had a run of five nights.

In many other ways did the young lad show his ingenuity. He was the family carpenter, locksmith, and clock-cleaner. He even took to pieces and set to rights a watch which had been returned to the maker for repairs, but was sent back as faulty as ever. When he was sixteen Mr. Beasley projected a new piece of “utility”—a school-atlas—and called upon “his young friend, Rowland Hill,” to undertake the task of constructing the maps. “This was,” Rowland wrote in his Journal, a few years later, “a much greater undertaking than I at first imagined, owing to the great difference that exists in the works which it was necessary to consult. In a chart of the Mediterranean belonging to my father, Algiers is as much as three inches from its proper place.... I have given it up entirely. I could not be satisfied with copying from another map, and from the great number of books and maps which it was necessary to consult, I found that, with the little time I could devote to it, it must be the work of not less than ten or fifteen years.” He finished, however, the map of Spain and Portugal, which was published.

Three years later, when he was now nineteen, he gave still further proofs of his ingenuity:—

“In January, 1815, my father gave a lecture on electricity to the Birmingham Philosophical Society, of which he was a Fellow, I performing the experiments. At that period the means of securing electrical action were either imperfect, or, at best, not very generally known. A previous attempt (by another Fellow of the Society) to give an illustrated lecture on the subject had utterly failed; and it was confidently believed by various members that, in the theatre of the institution at least—whether because of the crowded audiences usually attending the lectures, whether from insufficient ventilation, or from some unknown cause—all further attempt was useless. This stimulated my father to the effort, the more so as his successful lectures, previously mentioned, had been given under circumstances far more unfavourable. His credit was thus staked upon the issue, and he resolved, and I with him, that no effort should be spared to secure success. We carefully examined the whole of the Society’s apparatus, and brought it into complete order. Remembering an exhibition of constellations at one of my father’s former lectures, I went to work to prepare more, which I desired to make on a much larger scale; but glass, the material on which the tinfoil was laid, being not only inconveniently fragile, but at that time, on account of the high duty, an expensive article, I tried the substitution of cardboard, which fortunately I found to be, when quite dry, a satisfactory non-conductor. Using this, I produced several constellations of such size as to be well seen by a large body of spectators; and, which delighted me even more, I so arranged one, viz, that of the Great Bear, that while receiving the spark it was kept in constant revolution. At length we got everything to do well; but our elation at this preliminary success was considerably checked by hearing that our predecessor had thus far done as well as ourselves. This made us very anxious, and our care was redoubled. Observing that the lecture-table was covered with lead, surmounted with green baize, and fearing that this combination would in some measure rob our conductor (the nap acting as so many points), we covered the whole with glazed brown paper; and again, anxious lest any accumulation of electric influence, either in the subjacent lead or elsewhere, might be troublesome, we crossed the table with a number of wires, which, being first brought into connection below, were passed through the floor, and lastly, being thrust into the spout of a pump in the basement, were brought into contact with the column of water within, so as to make our conduction, or rather abduction, complete. We also took advantage of a furnace, which had been set up behind the lecture-table for chemical purposes, to diffuse as much warmth as possible over our whole apparatus, that all dampness might be kept away.

“At length the important night arrived, and, notwithstanding all our precautions, we went to the lecture-room in great trepidation. The clock struck seven, and the electrical machine, which had been kept near a large fire in the apparatus-room till the last moment, was carried in and attached to the table. The lecture began, and the machine was set in motion, while we stood in breathless anxiety to watch the result. To our inexpressible relief we soon saw that it was in full power; and experiment succeeded experiment without the slightest failure. All had proceeded well till about the middle of the lecture, when suddenly the rod of the winch, which, with superfluous caution, had been made of glass, snapped in two, and the machine was brought to a stand. Though enough had been done to establish the success of our attempt, my father, naturally anxious to complete his lecture, and remembering that he was in the midst of a manufacturing town, inquired earnestly whether any one present could furnish a substitute of any description, however rude. One or two gentlemen immediately disappeared, and, meantime, my own machine, which had been brought as a provision against mishap, was used for some minor experiments, for which its power well sufficed. While this was going on my brother Edwin had carried the broken winch into a small workshop on the premises, and, sawing off the leg of a stool, had shaped this at the ends, fitted it to the winch handle, and, returning to the room, attached it to the socket on the axle of the machine, which again began to revolve, so that when our kind friends returned with their substitutes the necessity for them had passed away, and the lecture went on swimmingly to the end; my Great Bear, which was, so far as I know, a novelty, attracting particular attention, and eliciting, contrary to the rule and usage of the society, a round of applause.

“One of the loudest foreboders of evil consoled himself for his error by remarking on the number of assistants ‘Hill’ had had, adding that he had better have brought his wife and all his family to help him. So trifling a circumstance would not have been noticed here had it not touched the key-note of our success. In our course through life, from the beginning to the present hour, each one of us has been always ready to help the others to the best of his power; and no one has failed to call for such assistance again and again. Each one, I am sure, recognises in this fact a main cause of such success as he has attained; and I cannot too emphatically declare that to mine it has been essential.

“In the following January my father gave a second and last lecture on the same subject. Emboldened by our past success, we proceeded to experiments involving greater risk of failure; among others a thunder-cloud, which, to effect its discharge (whereby a model building was to be blown up with gunpowder), had to be moved by electric influence through a distance of not less, I think, than eight or ten feet. But the crowning illustration, with which the lecture concluded, was a revolving planisphere of my construction, four feet in diameter, and representing all stars, of not less than the fourth magnitude, within forty degrees of the South Pole. Wishing that the various magnitudes should appear in the illustration, I devised an arrangement for that purpose. For producing the sparks to represent stars of the first magnitude, I cut the approaching edges of the tinfoil into a round shape, and placed them about one-twelfth of an inch asunder; for those of the second magnitude I gave the edges a pointed shape, also reducing the space between them to a minimum; for stars of the third and fourth magnitudes, while retaining the same arrangement, I produced further obscuration by covering the one with a single thickness, and the other with two thicknesses, of thin paper. To represent the Magellanic clouds was a more difficult matter; but here also I hit upon an expedient. Piercing the disc, in the proper places, with holes proportionate to the size and in the form of the respective nebulae, I placed behind each hole in a plane parallel to that of the disc, and distant about half an inch from it, a piece of paper somewhat more than sufficiently large to correspond with the perforation; and I so arranged that this paper was illuminated by sparks at the back of the disc. When I add that the planisphere thus illuminated was at the same time kept in constant and equable revolution, I shall perhaps be regarded as justified in the belief entertained at the time that the whole result was a more exact representation of the starry heavens than had ever before been produced. The applause previously given to my Great Bear was more than redoubled on sight of my Southern Sky, and the lecture terminated amidst the congratulations of friends, my father being, of course, greatly pleased, myself sufficiently elated, and the whole family triumphant. I may add that a full description of my planisphere will be found in the ‘Philosophical Magazine’ for October, 1818.”[36]

In 1816 he devised and constructed an alarum water-clock:—

“As a complete description of this might weary the reader, I will give only a general conception of its structure. As already implied, the lapse of time was to be marked by the flow of water, and the most obvious difficulty being to render this equable, I employed for the purpose a floating syphon. The tube, which was so fine as to pass only about three drops per minute, was stuck through a flat piece of cork, which floated on the surface of water in a tin can; and as the water issued from the syphon it dropped into another can, though of much smaller size, hung at one end of a balance; so that, as this latter can filled, it became heavy enough to bear its own end of the beam down, while the opposite end, being of course tilted up, struck the trigger, which, as in ordinary alarums, released the weight, thus setting the clapper in motion. Now the length of time required to give the counterbalancing weight of water depended, of course, on the amount of weight put on the trigger-beam; and this was varied according to requirement, principally by means of a sliding weight, hanging from the beam as from a common steelyard. This sufficed so far as quarter hours were concerned, additional means of some complexity being used for securing the observance of smaller portions of time. The end was that I could count on being called within three or four minutes of the time fixed upon. In its early days, however, I was sometimes annoyed by irregularity, and, upon careful inspection, I perceived that this was caused by dust, which, falling into the water, found its way into the syphon, and impeded the flow. To remove this inconvenience, I enclosed my alarum in a box, taking care also to change the water with sufficient frequency. I remember that on the evening when I first got the machine to work, not willing to leave my new light under a bushel, I fetched up half-a-dozen boys into the room where it stood, that they might see and admire. When I had explained the mechanism, and arranged for a réveille at the end of a quarter of an hour, the boys sat down in expectation; and probably being over-worked, according to our practice at the time, one of them fell fast asleep. Great was my delight, and great the amusement of his companions, when, at the end of the time, this, the first person ever awakened by alarum of mine, started up with a sudden exclamation of surprise and alarm, showing that my little machine had effectually performed its duty.

“I may here remark that for one machine that I executed there were many that I devised. Thus I find the following entry in my Journal about a year later:—

“‘December 21st, 1817.—I also wish to make a model of a boat to be driven by pumping [in] water at the prow and forcing it out at the stern. This is an idea of my father’s; and I think it will obviate the objection against driving canal boats by machinery, which is that the paddles agitate the water to such a degree as to injure the sides of the canal’

“A few years later I set down another first conception, this time of my own, which, however, I never carried further. The record is as follows:—

“‘Steam vessels might be propelled by means of an endless screw, something like a corkscrew with the wire flattened in a direction perpendicular to the axis. There might be several fixed at the sides, at the stern, &c. This apparatus would work equally well whether altogether or partly immersed in water. If one could be placed so as to move like a rudder, it would be exceedingly efficient in changing the direction of the boat.’”[37]

I find also in his Journal for the year 1817, the following record: “If I can find time, I intend to construct a model of an engine which I have long thought of. It is something similar to a steam-engine, only that it is to work by exploding a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen gases. Such an engine I think might be employed to advantage in driving carriages, as the gases might be condensed.” A few months later he writes: “During the Christmas vacation I tried a few experiments to ascertain the force of exploded oxygen and hydrogen when in combination, and found it to be so small that it cannot be applied to the purpose I intended; at least, that such an engine would be far more expensive than one to work by steam.”

Soon after he had finished his clock he undertook a very different piece of work. He had already taught himself the art of land-surveying. “I learned the art,” he wrote, “as best I could; I might almost say I found it out, for I had then no book on the subject, and my father had no special knowledge of the matter.” As was usual with him, he at once began to teach what he himself had learnt. With a class he measured and mapped the playground and some little of the neighbourhood. About this time a murder—famous in legal history—was committed within four miles of Hill Top, and at once roused a strong public interest.

“The name of the victim was Mary Ashford. Thornton, the man charged with the crime, and whom the whole neighbourhood believed to be guilty, got off at the trial by setting up an alibi. So strong was the feeling excited by this escape, that it was resolved to resort to the long-disused right of appeal; and a subscription being speedily raised to defray the expenses, the necessary proceedings were commenced. This startling course brought the matter into the London papers, and interest became general. Illustrated journals there were none, but my drawing-master published a portrait of the poor girl—taken, I suppose, after death—with a view of the pond in which the body was found; and one of the Birmingham newspapers (the Midland Chronicle) gave a rude plan of the ground on which the chief incidents occurred. This, however, being apparently done without measurement, and not engraved either on wood or copper, but made up as best could be done with ordinary types, was of course but a very imperfect representation. I resolved to improve upon this, and, in conjunction with a former schoolfellow, to whom, though he was much older than myself, I was then giving private lessons in surveying, I led my class to the spot, took the measurements, and constructed a complete map, not merely of the spot where the murder was committed, but of the neighbourhood, so far as to include the place of the alleged alibi. This was published not only in Birmingham but also in London, and we cleared about fifteen pounds by the enterprise. It may be convenient to the reader to add, though this has nothing to do with my story, that when the case of appeal came before the Court of King’s Bench, Thornton, throwing down his glove in due form, demanded wager of battle; and as this barred all other measures, while of course the age of ordeals was passed, the proceedings came to an end, and the prisoner was released. However, he never again ventured to show himself near the scene of his alleged crime. In the next Session of Parliament an Act was passed abolishing wager of battle, and with it the right of appeal. I remember that our family verdict on the subject condemned the latter half of this measure.”[38]

Rowland Hill’s map was copied by a dishonest tradesman:—

“Incensed at such rascally treatment,” he records in his Journal, “I told my publisher I was determined to maintain an action for damages against the man. On examining the Act respecting the copyright of engravings, my brother Matthew was fearful that we might not succeed in the event of a trial, because we had not specified on the plate the exact day on which it was published. It said ‘published,’ etc., ‘Nov., 1817,’ I immediately had the plate altered before any more impressions were taken; but as several had been sold of the first kind, my brother thought that there would be some danger in risking a trial.”

The inventions and schemes that I have described were rather the occupations of Rowland Hill’s few hours of leisure than the real work of his life. It was in school-work that he was closely engaged for long hours every day during many a year. His position was not a little trying. Had it not been for one side of his father’s character, it might have become unbearable. He and his brother Matthew, as they grew older and saw more of the outside world, had become more and more dissatisfied with the state of the school. They were both ambitious youths; and up to a certain age their chief ambition—at all events, their nearest ambition—was to make Hill Top a thoroughly good school. Before many years had passed, the elder brother was bent on making his way at the bar, while Rowland was thinking how he should reform the education of England—I might almost say, of the world. As his views widened with increasing years, he recorded in his Journal:—

“The beneficial effects which I every day see arise from the improvements which have been introduced into the school, and the acknowledged superiority of our system of education, lead me to think that the combination of talent, energy, and industry which exists in our family, directed as it is, with few exceptions, to the science of education, may some time or other produce effects which will render our name illustrious in after ages. The more I mix with the world, the more insight I have into the proceedings and opinions of other men, the conviction is forced upon me that our family possesses talents, and energy, and devotedness to one object, seldom to be met with.... Our plans are calculated for large numbers, and to obtain them is the present object of all our attention. Some of us think that the best mode will be to attempt to induce the public to establish a large school or college for the education of the children of the upper and middle classes. Other members of the family are afraid that in so doing we may risk our present establishment; but I think that the attempt may be so managed as not in the slightest degree to injure our present school, but rather to forward its success. To establish this college is the height of my ambition. I feel confident that, with great numbers and great capital, the science and practice of education might be improved to such a degree as to show that it is now in its infancy.”

It was at the age of twenty-five, when he had for some years been the real head of the school, that he made this record. When, however, his brother and he first began their reforms, their efforts were turned to much smaller matters. Matthew set about improving the teaching, while Rowland chiefly took in hand the organization of the school and the management of the accounts. As regards most of their changes, their father at first showed, if not great unwillingness, at all events considerable indifference. Often they had to set themselves against some of his most cherished theories; often they had to stir him up to action when he would have liked much rather to remain in complete repose. “It is an old sore,” writes one of the brothers, later on, “to witness my father’s apathy in the midst of all our exertions.” It was at first no easy matter to win his consent to their plans of reform, but he soon recognised his sons’ ability, and gave their powers full play. Many a man who is too easy-going to carry out to the full the work that lies before him, is yet “rough, unswayable, and rude,” when his own children come forward and do his work with their own hands. This was not Thomas Hill’s character. “My father,” his son said, “showed no signs of vexation, nor was he ever jealous of any of us. He used only to express a fear that I had got too much on my hands. So far from being jealous, he was proud of my doing the work, and used to boast of it to others.” How highly, indeed, he had always thought of his son is shown by the following anecdote, which I find recorded in Rowland’s Journal for 1817:—