HILL, Aaron, a poet of considerable eminence, the son of a gentleman of Malmesbury-abbey in Wiltshire, was born in 1685. His father's imprudence having cut off his paternal inheritance, he left Westminster school at 14 years of age; and embarked for Constantinople, to visit Lord Paget the English ambassador there, who was his distant relation. Lord Paget received him with surprise and pleasure, provided him a tutor, and sent him to travel: by which opportunity he saw Egypt, Palestine, and a great part of the east; and returning home with his noble patron, visited most of the courts of Europe. About the year 1709, he published his first poem entitled Camillus, in honour of the earl of Peterborough who had been general in Spain; and being the same year made master of Drury-lane theatre, he wrote his first tragedy Elfred, or the Fair Inconstant. In 1710, he became master of the opera-house in the Hay-market; when he wrote an opera called Rinaldo, which met with great success, being the first that Mr Handel set to music after he came to England. Unfortunately for Mr Hill, he was a projector as well as poet, and in 1715 obtained a patent for extracting oil from beech-nuts; which undertaking, whether good or bad, miscarried after engaging three years of his attention. He was also concerned in the first attempt to settle the colony of Georgia; from which he never reaped any advantage; and in 1728 he made a journey into the Highlands of Scotland, on a scheme of applying the woods there to ship-building; in which also he lost his labour. Mr Hill seems to have lived in perfect harmony with all the writers of his time, except Mr Pope, with whom he had a short paper-war, occasioned by that gentleman's introducing him in the Dunciad, as one of the competitors for the prize offered by the goddess of Dullness, in the following lines:
" Then Hill essay'd; scarce vanish'd out of sight,
" He buoys up infant, and returns to light;
" He bears no token of the fabler streams,
" And mounts far off among the Swans of Thames."
This, though far the gentlest piece of satire in the whole poem, and conveying at the same time an oblique compliment, roused Mr Hill to take some notice of it; which he did by a poem written during his peregrination in the north, entitled, "The Progress of Wit, a Caveat for the use of an eminent writer;" which he begins with the following eight lines, in which Mr Pope's too well-known disposition is elegantly, yet very severely, characterized:
" Tuneful Alexis on the Thames' fair side,
" The Ladies play-thing and the Muses pride;
" With merit popular, with wit polite,
" Easy tho' vain, and elegant tho' light;
" Desiring and deserving others praise,
" Poorly accepts a Fame he ne'er repays:
" Unborn to cherish, sneakingly approves:
" And wants the soul to spread the worth he loves."
The sneakingly approves, in the last couplet, Mr Pope was much affected by; and indeed through their whole controversy afterwards, in which it was generally thought that Mr Hill had much the advantage, Mr Pope seems rather to express his repentance by denying the offence, than to vindicate himself supposing it to have been given. Besides the above poems, Mr Hill, among many others, wrote one, called The northern star, upon the actions of Czar Peter the Great; for which he was several years afterwards complimented with a gold medal from the empress Catharine, according to the Czar's desire before his death. He likewise altered some of Shakespeare's plays, and translated some of Voltaire's. His last production was Merope; which was brought upon the stage in Drury-lane by Mr Garrick. He died on the 8th of February 1749, as it is said, in the very minute of the earthquake; and after his decease four volumes of his works in prose and verse were published in octavo, and his dramatic works in two volumes.