an English botanist and social notability of the eighteenth century, was born in London about 1716. He began life as an apothecary in Westminster, was afterwards keeper of the botanical gardens of various noblemen, next took to the stage, from which he was hissed, and ended by adopting the career of letters. Some little scientific treatises which he published met with great success, and this success completely turned his head. He set up a carriage, affected the airs of a fine gentleman, and tried to force his way into fashionable society. To effect the latter purpose he established a paper, The Inspector, in which he chronicled all the gossip and scandal current among "the quality," and which he used as a vehicle for puffing the quack medicines in which he dealt largely. His audacious impudence and insatiable vanity urged him to court notoriety in any form; and neither was he in the least abashed by the personal castigations which he not unfrequently received in public from the victims of his scandalous periodicals. Had he not preferred to be notorious he might have been famous, for he really did possess a very considerable aptitude for science; and to botanical science, in particular, he made some valuable contributions, such as his Vegetable System, in 26 vols., 1759-75. The price of this work was 38 guineas plain, and 160 with the plates coloured. His British Herbal; General Natural History; and History of the Materia Medica, were all far from contemptible works.

One of the great objects of his ambition was to be admitted into the Royal Society, but his applications were always rejected with scorn. Enraged at his repeated failures, he published a Review of the Works of the Royal Society, in which he exhausted against some of his early friends and benefactors all the resources of his wit and scientific knowledge. His self-love was a little consoled by his receiving from the university of St Andrews, in Scotland, the honorary degree of M.D., and from the king of Sweden, to whom he used to send his works, the title of Chevalier of the Order of Wasa, on the strength of which he called himself Sir John. He died in 1775. (An extremely good account of Sir John's quarrel with the Royal Society, and many interesting details of his life, are given in Disraeli's Miscellanies of Literature.)

Hill, Rev. Rowland, A.M., the most popular preacher of the Whitefield school that has appeared in England since Whitefield's death, was a cadet of the patrician family of the Hills of Hawkstone, in Salop, and was born in 1745. Like other members of his family, Rowland Hill gave early evidence of piety; and at Eton and Cambridge, where he was educated, he evinced it under circumstances which put its genuineness beyond a doubt. While a student at the university, where he graduated with great distinction, he spent all his leisure time in visiting the sick and poor, and in praying from house to house—conduct so utterly at variance with the received notions of college decorum, that he was only saved from expulsion by the powerful influence of his family. After taking orders, he was appointed in 1773 to the parish of Kingston, Somersetshire, where he began to indulge his favourite taste for open-air preaching, and soon attracted great crowds of the rural population to the sermons which he preached nearly every day of the week. In 1782, having resolved to make the metropolis his headquarters, he had the Surrey Chapel built for him, and soon filled it with an audience such as no other preacher in London could boast. During the summer months he retired to his country-house in Wales, whence he made what he called "gospel tours" into all parts of the country. In 1798, and again in 1824, he visited Edinburgh, where, on the Calton Hill, he preached to audiences of ten, fifteen, and even twenty thousand persons. After these tours he always returned with renewed enthusiasm to his duties at Surrey Chapel, where he continued to officiate almost to the day of his death, 11th April 1833.

Without a tithe of the intellect or literary skill of his great contemporaries, Hall and Chalmers, Rowland Hill had yet a gift of popular oratory nowise inferior to theirs. His power over a mixed audience was scarcely surpassed by that of Whitefield, whom he seems to have had always before his eyes as his model. There was no faculty which he possessed that he did not freely avail himself of in driving home into the hearts of his hearers the great truths of the gospel. Not unfrequently he violated the laws of good taste by eccentricities of manner, but, whether he convinced his hearers with the broadest humour or the most pungent wit, or melted them to tears with the deepest pathos, he never lost his moral influence over them by condescending to buffoonery on the one hand or melo-dramatic affectation on the other. His earnestness and intensity carried him safely through where a mere actor would infallibly have broken down. The current stories of his pulpit eccentricities require to be received with great caution. His works, which were for the most part on controverted subjects of temporary interest, are already forgotten, but the memory of the man will long be cherished by his country as one of the most truly apostolic and disinterested ministers whose names adorn the annals of the national church. (An ambitious but ill-written life of Rowland Hill, by the Rev. Edwin Sidney, A.M., a protégé of his, was published in London in 1834.)

Hill, Rowland, better known under his title of Lord Hill, was one of the most distinguished officers in the British army during the great wars of revolutionary France. He was a cadet of the ancient family of the Hills of Hawkstone, in Shropshire, and was the nephew of his namesake the famous preacher. Born in 1772, and entering the army very young, Hill received, or at least completed, his education at the military school of Strasbourg. He took part in the siege of Toulon, and afterwards in the Egyptian campaign, and, partly by purchase, partly by merit, rose to the rank of major-general. In 1808 he went to Spain with the Duke of Wellington, and from Vimeiro to Vittoria, in advance or retreat he proved himself the most indefatigable coadjutor of the great captain. In 1809 he was appointed to succeed Lord Paget; two years later he defeated the French under Girard at Cavarez with great slaughter; for his conduct at Talavera he was publicly thanked by parliament; and for his capture of the forts of Almarez, which cut off the communication between the French armies on the N. and S. sides of the Tagus, he was rewarded with the title of Baron of Almarez. In 1813 he held temporarily the chief command of the English and Hanoverian troops in Belgium; and two years later crowned the glories of his noble career by his conduct at Waterloo. In 1828 he was made commander-in-chief, and exercised all the influence of his fame and position to improve the condition and promote the interests of the British army, in which he effected many valuable reforms. In the distribution of the extensive patronage which he had to dispose of he was proverbially impartial, and always made a point of advancing professional merit, regardless of the claims of party or family connection. On resigning the command-in-chief in 1842 he was made a viscount, which honour, however, he did not long live to enjoy, as he died on the 10th December of that same year.

Lord Hill was the most popular soldier of his time in the British service, and was so much beloved by the troops, especially those under his immediate command, that he gained from them the honourable title of "the soldier's friend." "With Hill," they used to say, "both victory and life may be ours." On the other hand, the strategic skill and military capacity he displayed in the Peninsula secured for him the not less honourable title of "the right arm of the Duke of Wellington." From the first day he entered the army he displayed the germs of those qualities that afterwards led him on to fame, rank, and power—boldness that amounted to daring, and was yet always under the control of the judgment, skill equal to independent commands of the most difficult kind, and a regard for the moral and physical welfare of the army such as had never before been shown by any commander-in-chief.