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OFFICE, BREAM'S BUILDINGS, CHANCERY LANE, EC.

BY JOHN C. FRANCIS.

ORADO

COBED

t

8th S. X. JULY 4, '96.J

NOTES AND QUERIES.

LONDON, SATURDAY, JULY 4, 1896.

Lord Macaulay tells us that Capt. Richard Hill,
the murderer of Wm. Mountfort, the actor, was
profligate captain in the army "; and Mountfort's
biographer in the 'Dict. of Nat. Biog.' describes
Hill as "a known ruffler and cutthroat." Both
these sweeping assertions are, to say the least of
them, somewhat hyperbolical. Hill was only six-
teen years of age when he ran the unfortunate actor
through with his sword, in Howard Street, Strand,
on 9 Dec., 1692. Lord Mohun, who was Hill's
accomplice and an accessory after the fact, was
seventeen, and this point went in his favour when
he was tried by his peers for murder. But no one
has, heretofore, ever made any excuse for Hill, who
lived to repent and to amend his ways, which
cannot be said for Lord Mohun, who, five
years subsequent to the above murder, was again
arraigned for manslaughter. Curious to say,
Mohun's victim on this latter occasion was Capt.
William Hill, of the Coldstream Guards, who was
stabbed in a drunken brawl, at a tavern near
Charing Cross, in September, 1697.

At the age of twelve Richard Hill was appointed

a subaltern in Viscount Lisburne's newly raised

regiment of foot. He served in the Irish campaign,

and owing to the mortality in his regiment from

fever and losses in action, he obtained command

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of a company when he was only fifteen. We may

conclude that Lord Lisburne's regiment was rather

a fast corps, and a bad school, as regards morals,

for a very young officer, for we find the inspecting

officer at Dundalk Camp, in December, 1689,

sending the following confidential report to William

III. relative to Lord Lisburne's regiment: "Le

Colonel s'en mette fort peu et avec cela d'un humeur

extravagant; qui aussi prend tous les jours plus de

vin qu'il ne peust [sic] porter."

On 21 March,

1692, Hill exchanged with Capt. Vincent Googene,
of Col. Thos. Erle's regiment of foot (Military
Entry Book,' vol. ii., H. O. Series). By this
exchange Hill found himself in command of the
grenadier company in a crack infantry regiment.
This fact was a little trying for a youth of his age,
and the society of an unlicked cub like young Lord
Mohun had a bad effect on Hill's character. He
also had the misfortune to have money at his dis-
posal; and it came out in evidence, at Lord Mohun's
trial, that Hill's scheme for carrying off Anne
Bracegirdle, the well-known actress, was to cost
him 50l. The fair actress was rescued as she was

being forcibly hurried into the coach by the soldiers

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whom Hill had hired for the occasion. Frustrated
in his villainy, young Hill dismissed his military
hirelings. Begone! I have done with you,'
cried this veteran centurion, in a tone which
Jonathan Wild might have adopted when he dis-
missed his myrmidons. Unfortunately Hill stayed
behind with Lord Mohun, and their brains, over-
heated by wine, to which in the case of the former
was added mad jealousy against Mountfort, a sup-
posed favoured rival in the fair actress's affections,
devised the scheme of murder which Hill carried
into effect the same night. Hill escaped after com-
mitting the crime, and nothing further is recorded
of him by the historian. But in the cellars of the
Public Record Office is a MS. petition to Queen
Anne, which runs as follows:-

"To the Queen's most Excellent Majestie.
"The humble petition of Captain Richard Hill.

"Showeth that your Petitioner at the age of sixteen,
after four years' service in Ireland and Flanders, under
the command of Lieut.-General Earl, was unhappily
drawn into a quarrel with Mr. Montford wherein he
had the misfortune to give him a mortal wound; for
which unadvised act your Petitioner has humbled him-
self before God these eleven years past, and since his
misfortune went volunteer with Col. Gibson to New-
behaviour there, as Lieut.-General Erle has of his car-
foundland, who has given a character of your Petitioner's
riage and conduct in Ireland and Flanders, as appears by
the certificates herewith annexed.

"May it therefore please your most Sacred Majestie,
in consideration of your Petitioner's past services, and in
compassion to his youth, to extend your Royal mercy to
your Petitioner for a crime to which he was betrayed by
the heat and folly of youth, that he may thereby be
enabled to serve your Majestie and his Country, as his
earnest desire is, to the last drop of his blood.

"And your Petitioner shall ever pray, &c."
Only one of the two certificates annexed to the

above petition need be given here, although both are equally favourable :

"Whereas Capt. Richard Hill was under my command during the late Irish war, and a volunteer with me in Flanders, I must needs give him this character that he behav'd himself on all occasions as a man of honour and really with more courage and conduct than from one of his years could have been expected. For he was but twelve years old when he came into the army, and but sixteen when his misfortune hap'ned, which is eleven years since. Now the great concern for his misfortune, and his earnest desire to serve her Majesty again, even in any post, will I hope move her compassion and mercy in obtaining bis freedom which I am ready to certify to her Majesty whenever 'tis thought convenient. "THO. EARLE."

Hill had friends at court to plead for him, as witness the following:

"A Memorial for the Rt. Hon. Sir Chas. Hedges, Secretary of State.

"That his Grace the Duke of Somerset has promised to call for Captain Hill's petition in the first Cabinet Council and the Lord President has promised to speak to both. Therefore your Honour is most humbly desired to have the said Captain's petition and certificates in readiness to lay before her Majesty for the more effectual obtaining of her Royal mercy."

There is reason to believe that Hill was pardoned. In 'Recommendations for Commissions in the New Levies in 1706' (War Office MS.), the name of Capt. Richard Hill appears in a list of officers recommended by the Duke of Ormonde.

CHARLES DALTON.

LITERATURE VERSUS SCIENCE. (See 8th 8. viii. 286, 332; ix. 51.) What PROF. TOMLINSON says under this heading is an interesting addition to the question on the relations between these two branches of human knowledge, a question which is peculiar to, and characteristic of, our century.

I had occasion to touch on it in my study on Tennyson (pp. 175 sq.), speaking of the scientific element in the works of your late Laureate, of whom it was well said that "he spiritualized Evolution and brought it into Poetry." I pointed out the numerous allusions to the progress of science and the scientific similes in which he indulges, as well as his views on the future of science,t and concluded that he certainly would

*See Nineteenth Century, October, 1893, p. 670.
†Truth of science waiting to be caught.
'The Golden Year.'

Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from
point to point.
'Locksley Hall,'

I wander'd nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science.

lb.

All diseases quench'd by science, no man halt, or deaf,
or blind.
'Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.'

When science reaches forth her arms
To feel from world to world, and charms
Her secret from the latest moon.

'In Memoriam,' xxi:

not have joined in the much-quoted toast given by Keats to the infamy of Newton: "The only things which threatened to paralyze his artistic function were the overwhelming revelations of astronomy";* which fear is strange enough when we remember that Tennyson was a great stargazer and that of this very science, in which he thought to behold a menace looming over poetry, a contemporary poet had sung:—

L'astronomie, au vol sublime et prompt.†

Victor Hugo was not afraid of any science whatever, and Mr. Swinburne could write of him :‡ "The mysteries of calculation......were hitherto, I imagine, a field unploughed, a sea uncloven, by the share or by the prow of an adventurer in verse. The feat was reserved for the sovereign poet of the nineteenth century."

Counterparts to Tennyson's and Hugo's enthusiasm for science are exhibited in Poe's sonnet entitled 'Science,' of which I give here the first lines:

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes:
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realties?

How should he love thee?

and in the opening words of Coleridge's 'Essay on Shakespeare': "Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, as prose to metre." In the same spirit wrote Macaulay in one of his ‘Essays':

"In an enlightened age there will be much intelli
gence, much science, much philosophy, abundance of
just classification and subtle analysis, and of wit and
eloquence, and of verses, and even of good ones; but
little poetry. Men will judge and compare. They will
talk about the old poete, and comment on them, but they
will not create them, and to a certain degree enjoy them.
But they will scarcely be able to conceive the effect
which poetry produced on their ruder ancestors, the
agony, the ecstasy, the plenitude of belief."
Of a quite contrary opinion seems to have been
"Poetry is not
Carlyle, at least when he wrote:
dead! it will never die. Its dwelling and birth-
place is in the soul of man, and it is eternal as
the being of man."§ Byron repeatedly stated
that poetry has nothing to fear from science :-

Truth sometimes will lend her noblest fires,
And decorate the verse herself inspires.
Let Poesy go forth, pervade the whole.||
Truth, the great desideratum !¶

'Tis the part

Of a true poet to escape from fiction
Whene'er he can,

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The question of the relation of science to literature-an important one, as it also implies that of the future of the latter has been recently taken up and treated in different ways by men both of letters and science. In an article entitled 'Hopes and Fears for Literature,' Prof. Dowden refers to the opinion held on the matter by Miss F. P. Cobbe, who, in writing on Literature, Religion, and Moral versus Science,' affirms: "When science, like poverty, comes in at the door, art, like love, flies out of the window." Quite different is the opinion of Matthew Arnold; for him

"the future of poetry is immense. Criticism and science having deprived us of old faiths and traditional dogmas, poetry, which attaches itself to the idea, will take the place of religion and philosophy, or what now pass for such, and will sustain those who, but for it, are forlorn."§ Prof. Dowden sums up his own views in these words :

"The results of scientific study are in no respect antagonistic to literature, though they may profoundly modify that view of the world which has hitherto found in literature an imaginative expression. The conceptions of a great cosmos, of the reign of law in nature, of the persistence of force, of astronomic, geologic, biologic evolution, have in them nothing which should paralyze the emotions or the imagination. To attempt, indeed, a poetical 'De Rerum Natura' at the present moment were premature; but when these and other scientific conceptions have become familiar they will form an accepted intellectual background from which the thoughts and feelings and images of poetry will stand out quite as effectively as the antiquated cosmology of the Middle Ages."

Sir John Lubbock combats those who pretend that science withers whatever it touches (because "Science teaches us that the clouds are a sleety mist, Art that they are a golden throne"), affirming that, "for our knowledge, and even more for our appreciation, feeble as even yet it is, of the overwhelming grandeur of the Heavens, we are mainly indebted to Science." In the same spirit speak of the subject Mr. H. M. Posnett, in the preface to his 'Comparative Literature (1886), and Mr. J. Burrough, in an article on 'The Lite

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rary Value of Science,* who shows how (p. 188) แ a literary and poetical substrate" is to be found in Darwin's works. I shall also add that the question was treated in England so early as 1824 in an article of the European Magazine (pp. 383 sqq.) 'On the Necessity of Uniting the Study of the Belles Lettres to that of the Sciences.' But the question is an international one; and perhaps it will not be uninteresting to see how it was differently discussed by scientific and literary men in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Considering the peculiar character of this paper, I shall limit myself to a list of quotations and references, which, however, will not prove quite useless to him who chooses to trace the history of the PAOLO BELLEZZA. question.

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Circolo Filologico, Milan.

(To be continued.)

PEPYSIANA.-1. In a brief for the French Protestants, dated 31 Jan., 1688, the name of "Samuel Pepys" appears amongst the number of those appointed "to dispose and distribute the money."

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2. In 1685 was published A True Account of the Captivity of Thomas Phelps, at Machaness, in Barbary, and of his Strange Escape' in that year. It contains the following dedication, printed at the back of the title-page :

To the Honourable Samuel Pepys, Esq.; SIR, Having by your generous Favour had the Honour of being introduc'd into His Majesties presence, where I delivered the substance of this following Narra tive, and being press'd by the importunity of Friends to Publish it to the World, to which mine own inclinations were not averse, as which might tend to the information of my fellow Sea-men, as well as satisfying the curiosity of my Country-men, who delight in Novel and strange Stories; I thought I should be very far wanting to myself, if I should not implore the Patronage of your ever Honoured Name, for none ever will dare to dispute the truth of any matter of Fact here delivered, when they shall understand that it has stood the test of your sagacity. Sir, Your Eminent and Steady Loyalty, whereby you asserted His Majesties just Rights, and the true Priviledges of your Country in the worst of times, gives me confidence to expect, that you will vouchsafe this condescension to a poor, yet honest Sea-man, who have devoted my Life to the Service of His Sacred Majesty and my Country; who have been a Slave, but now have attained my freedom, which I prize so much, the more, in that I can with Heart and Hand subscribe my self, Honourable Sir,

Your most Obliged and Humble Servant
THO. PHELPS.
T. N. BRUSHFIELD, M.D.

Salterton, Devon.

PORTRAITS OF BISHOP MORLEY, OF WINCHESTER (1662-1684).-There are two portraits in oils of this eminent prelate at Oxford, one in Christ Church Hall, by Sir Peter Lely, and another in the hall of Pembroke College, which have doubtless

*Macmillan's Magazine, vol. liv. (1885), pp. 184 $27.

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