HALL (generally known as Swabian Hall), a town of Wurtemberg, circle of Jagst, is situated in a deep valley on both sides of the Kocher, and on the railway from Heilbronn to Krailsheim, 35 miles N.E. of Stuttgart. It is surrounded by strong walls, and possesses seven churches, one of them dating from the 15th century and having fine mediaeval carving; a town-house, a lyceum, a real-school of the second order, a hospital, and a house of correction. A short distance south from the town is the old castle of Komburg, now used as a garrison for invalid soldiers, with a richly adorned Benedictine church dating from the 12th century. The town is chiefly known for its extensive saltworks, supplied by means of a pipe from Wilhelmsglück mine, 5 miles distant. Connected with the salt-works there is a salt-bath and whey-diet establishment. The other industries of the town are cotton-spinning and weaving, and the manufacture of leather, soap, starch, sago, brushes, pencils, machines, carriages, and metal wares. The population in 1875 was 8430.
Hall originally belonged to the counts of Westheim, and later to the Knights Templars. It was made a free imperial city in the 14th century, and was afterwards included in the different leagues of the cities, knights, and counts. In 1802 it came into the possession of Wiirtemberg.
HALL, Basil (1788-1844), British traveller and miscellaneous writer, was born at Edinburgh, December 31, 1788. His father, Sir James Hall of Dunglass, was author of an essay on Gothic Architecture, and contributed to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which he for a time was president, several ingenious papers on geology, in support of Hutton’s theory as against that of Werner. His mother was Helen, daughter of Dunbar, fourth earl of Selkirk. Basil Hall was educated at the High School of Edinburgh, and in 1802 entered the navy, where he rose to the rank of post-captain in 1817. By observing the ethnological as well as the physical peculiarities of the countries he visited, he collected the materials for a very large number of scientific papers, which he contributed to various journals and encyclopaedias. In 1816 he commanded the sloop “Lyra,” which accompanied Lord Amherst’s embassy to China; and in this vessel he performed the cruise which he describes in the most popular and perhaps the most interesting of his works— An Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea and the Great Loo-choo Island in the Japan Sea (London, 1818). In 1820 he held a command on the Pacific coast of America, and in 1824 published two volumes of Extracts from a Journal written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico in the years 1820-21-22. Retiring on half-pay in 1824, Hall in 1825 married a daughter of Sir John Hunter, and in her company travelled (1827-28) through the United States. In 1829 he published his Travels in North America in the years 1827 and 1828, a book almost as popular as his first, less from its intrinsic merit than from the violence with which it was assailed by the American press for its views of American society. Schloss Hainfeld, or a Winter in Lower Styria (1836), is partly a romance, partly a description of a visit paid by the author to the castle of the Countess Purgstall. Spain and the Seat of War in Spain appeared in 1837. The Fragments of Voyages and Travels (9 vols.) were issued in three detachments between 1831 and 1840. Captain Hall was a fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh, and a member of the Astronomical Society of London, and has left a number of scientific and miscellaneous writings besides those mentioned. His last work, a collection of sketches and tales under the name of Patchwork (1841), had not been long published before its author was seized with insanity, from which he was only released by his death, in Haslar Hospital, Portsmouth, September 11, 1844.
HALL, Charles Francis (1821-1871), an Arctic explorer, was born at Rochester, New Hampshire, United States, in 1821. After following the trade of blacksmith he became a journalist in Cincinnati, but his enthusiasm for Arctic exploration led him in 1859 to volunteer to the American Geographical Society to “go in search of the bones of Franklin.” With the proceeds of a subscription he was equipped for his modest expedition, and obtained a passage in May 1860 on board a New London whaling vessel commanded by Captain Buddington, the same who had picked up the English search-ship “Resolute.” The whaler having become blocked up with ice, Hall took up his abode with the Eskimo, living with them for two years, adopting their habits and acquiring their language, making special friends of two natives, man and wife, who had been in England and knew something of our language. He wandered about with the Eskimo in the region to the north of Hudson’s Bay, acquiring much information, especially about the people. He published an account of his experiences in 1864, under the title of Arctic Pesearches, and Life among the Esquimaux. Having learned little or nothing, however, about the fate of the Franklin expedition, he returned in 1864, remaining among the Eskimo till 1869. Unfortunately the full journal he kept of his five years’ wanderings has never been published. The expedition which brought Hall most prominently into notice was fitted out in 1871 in the steamer “Polaris,” which was sent out at the expense of the United States Government, its object being to reach the supposed open Polar Sea, and if possible attain the Pole. Hall was in command, while Buddington was sailing master. There was a modest but competent scientific staff, and among the crew were Hall’s two old Eskimo friends, who had became devoted to him. On June 29, 1871, the “Polaris” left New York, and making a remarkably rapid passage up Davis Straits and Smith Sound, reached on August 30 the lat. of 82° 16' N., until the last English expedition the highest northern latitude reached of which there is any authentic report. Hall and most of the officers and crew were for proceeding onwards, but they were overruled by Buddington, and went into winter quarters in a sheltered cove on the Greenland coast, named Polaris Bay, in 81° 38' N. On October 24th Hall returned from a successful sledge expedition to the north, and was suddenly seized by an illness of which he died on November 8th. As there were some suspicions of poison, an inquiry was made by the Navy Department, who found that there was no proof of foul play. Captain Buddington, on whom the command devolved, determined in August of next year to return, but the “Polaris” was greatly hampered by the ice. The danger became so great that on October 15 th boats and stores were put on the ice, on which nineteen of the crew had disembarked. Suddenly the ship broke away, and the party on the ice drifted slowly southwards for 195 days, and were picked up off the coast of Labrador, in 53° 35' N., by a whaling steamer 2000 miles from where they had parted with the “Polaris.” The party in the ship reached Littleton’s Island, where they passed the winter, building two boats from the boards of the vessel, in which they set sail southwards in June 1873. On the 23d of that mouth they were picked up by a Dundee whaler, and were brought to that town, from which they ultimately reached the United States. The scientific results of the unfortunate Hall’s last expedition were of considerable importance, and have been published by the United States Government, as also has an independent account in German by Dr Bessels, one of the scientific staff.
HALL, or Halle, Edward (oδ. 1547), an English lawyer who takes high rank among the earlier narrators of his country’s history, was born in London about the close of the 15th century and died in 1547, the year of the death of King Henry VIII. Though his name has all the appearance of a purely English word, it is none the less of foreign origin, John Hall of Northall, in Shropshire, our author’s father, tracing his lineage back to Frederick of Halle in Tyrol, natural son of Albert of Austria. From Eton Edward Hall passed to Cambridge, and according to some accounts it would appear that at a later date he was also a student at Oxford. Entering Gray’s Inn he was duly called to the bar; and we find him afterwards filling the offices of common sergeant, under-sheriff of the city of London, summer reader of Gray’s Inn (1533), double reader in Lent (1540), and judge of the sheriff court. The date of the first appearance of his chronicle has been matter of question; but it is generally agreed that there was no such edition as that of 1542 assigned by the older bibliographers to Berthelette. The real editio princeps is almost certainly that issued by Grafton in 1548, the year after Hall’s death, with a continuation compiled mainly from the author’s MSS.; it is remarkable, says Mr Hazlitt {Collections and Notes'), as having probably more variations in the copies than any book in the language. A reprint was published in 1809 under the supervision of Sir Henry Ellis, who, however, furnished neither introduction nor comment.
Hall’s work deserves a higher title than that of chronicle; partly, perhaps, by a happy accident, but partly also by the author’sjudicious management, it possesses no small unity of theme and construction. Beginning with the famous combat at Coventry between Henry of Hereford and Thomas Mowbray, it follows the tragic progress of the strife between York and Lancaster till it is brought to a close by the marriage of Henry VII. with Margaret of York, and then it shows England united and at rest under Henry VIII. The policy of this monarch is presented under a very favourable light, and in the religious question the author sides emphatically and intolerantly with Protestantism. For all kinds of ceremonial in utterance and action he has all a lawyer’s respect, and his pages are often adorned and encumbered with the pageantry and material garniture of his story. In his style he unites the redundant reduplication and painful particularization of his profession with that evident effort after balance of clauses and fanciful and forcible phraseology which not long afterwards resulted in “Euphuism.” On the whole the work is not only valuable but attractive. To the historian it furnishes what is evidently the testimony of an eye-witness on several matters of interest which are neglected by other narrators; and to the student of literature it has the exceptional charm of being one of the prime sources of Shakespeare’s historical plays. Compare James Gairdner, Early Chroniclers of Europe; England, London, 1879.
HALL, James (1793-1868), an American judge and the author of a number of books chiefly relating to the Western States, was born at Philadelphia, August 19, 1793. After for some time prosecuting the study of law, he in 1812 joined the army, and in the war with Great Britain distinguished himself in engagements at Lundy’s Lane, Niagara, and Fort Erie. On the conclusion of the war he accompanied an expedition against Algiers, but in 1818 he resigned his commission, and continued the study of law at Pittsburg. In 1820 he removed to Shawneetown, Illinois, where he commenced practice at the bar and also edited the Illinois Gazette. Soon after he was appointed public prosecutor of the circuit, and in 1824 legislature judge. On the abolition of the latter office four years afterwards he was appointed State treasurer, but he continued at the same time his legal practice and also edited the Illinois Intelligencer. Subsequently he became editor of the Western Souvenir, an aunual publication, and of the Illinois Monthly Magazine, afterwards the Western Monthly Magazine. He died near Cincinnati, July 5, 1868.
The following are his principal works:— Letters from the West, originally contributed to the Portfolio, and collected and published in London in 1828; Legends of the West, 1832; The Soldier's Bride and other Talcs, 1832; The Harpe's Head, a Legend of Kentucky., 1833; Sketches of the West, 2 vols., 1835; Tales ofthe Border, 1835; Notes on the Western States, 1838; History of the Indian Tribes, in conjunction with T. L. M i Keeney, 3 vols., 1838-44; The Wilderness and the War-Path, 1845; Romances of Western History, 1857.
HALL, Joseph (1574-1656), bishop of Norwich, one of the wittiest as well as wisest writers of his century, was born at Bristow Park, parish of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, July 1, 1574. Designed from infancy for the church, he received his early education at the school of his native place, whence in his fifteenth year he passed to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. After being chosen for two years in succession to read the rhetoric lectures in the public schools, l·Iall became a fellow of his college in 1595, and in the following year received the degree of master of arts. Having taken holy orders, he in 1601 became rector of Halstead in Suffolk, near Bury St Edmunds. Two years later he married; and in 1605 he accompanied Sir Edmund Bacon to the Spanish Netherlands. In 1612 Hall was presented to the curacy of Waltham-Holy-Cross, in Essex, and about the same time received the degree of doctor of divinity. Meanwhile his talent3 as a preacher, and the ability shown in his controversial writings, had brought him into notice at court. He was appointed chaplain to Prince Henry and prebendary of Wolverhampton. The latter dignity he soon resigned. In 1616 Hall accompanied the earl of Carlisle on his mission to France, but was compelled by illness to return; in 1617 he went with James I. into Scotland, and in 1618 was appointed by him one of the English deputies to the synod at Dort; but he was again forced by sickness to return before the business, of the assembly was finished. The year before (1617) he had been appointed dean of Worcester. In the years that followed Hall preached frequently before the court and took an active part in the controversies of the day, especially in that between the Arminian and Calvinistic parties in the Church of England, to the latter of which he belonged. In 1624 he refused the see of Gloucester, but in 1627 became bishop of Exeter. In this position, by his toleration of lecturings and his Calvinistic mode of preaching and administering his diocese, he incurred the suspicion of disaffection to episcopacy, and on three occasions appeared on his knees before the king, to answer for his puri-. tanical practices. Hall felt bitterly these undeserved charges of Laud, and threatened to “cast up his rochet” rather than be subject to them. No better proof of his attachment to the Church of England is needed than his Episcopacy by Divine Hight Asserted, written in 1640 at the suggestion of Laud. In 1641 Hall was translated to the see of Norwich. The same year he joined eleven other bishops in presenting to parliament a protest against all laws passed in their enforced absence. Upon this the bishops were accused of high treason and thrown into the Tower. Hall in his Hard Measure relates the trials he underwent both at this time and afterwards. The accusation fell to the ground, and in six months the bishops were released (June 1642), only,however, on each finding security for £5000. Hall proceeded to Norwich, which he had not yet visited, and set about his pastoral duties; but in April 1643 his revenues and personal property were sequestrated by parliament, a nominal allowance of £400 a year being made for his maintenance. Mrs Hall with great difficulty obtained a fifth of her husband’s property. The bishop was next ejected from his palace, and the cathedral was dismantled. Having retired to a small estate at Higham near Norwich, which he had been able to buy, he there, with his books, bought for him by a friend, spent the rest of his life, writing and preaching “till he was first forbidden by men, and at last disabled by God.” He died 8th September 1656, in his eighty-third year.
The great bulk of Bishop Hall’s writings is controversial, and therefore of comparatively ephemeral interest; but some of them continue to deserve attention. His satires, published under the name of Virgidemiarum Sixe Bookes, consist of three bookes of Toothlesse Satyrs, subdivided into (1) Poetical, (2) Academicall, and (3) Morall, published in 1597, and three bookes of Byting Satyrs, published in 1598. They appeared together in 1599. Hall claims to be the first English satirist, though Hallam disputes his title, and at the same time rather disparages the satires, which have on the other hand been very highly praised by Campbell and Wartom In his Epistles (1608-11) Hall claims to be the introducer of that style of prose composition also into English; but both Ascham and Howell anticipated him. The Contemplations upon the Principal Passages of the History of the New Testament (1612-15), a devout and pious work, one by which perhaps Hall is most generally known, are happily distinguished from most compositions of the class to which they belong by a shy and racy wit which not unfrequently puts the reader in mind of Thomas Fuller. Mundus Alter et Idem, a species of allegorical romance, published in 1643, was translated into English by John Healey, under the title of Discovery of a New World. Other writings of this “English Seneca,” as Sir Henry Wotton called him, are Explication of Hard Texts (1633-34), Christian Meditations (1640), and Henochismus, sive Tractatus de modo ambulandi cum Deo, translated in 1769. An edition of his works was published in 1808 at London, in 10 vols., by the Rev. Josiah Pratt; and a later and better one, in 12 vols., at Oxford (1837-39), by the Rev. Peter Hall. A life of Bishop Hall by the Rev. John Jones appeared in 1826.
HALL, Marshall (1790-1857), the discoverer of the “diastaltic nervous system,” was born at Basford, Notts, February 18, 1790. His father, Robert Hall, a cotton manufacturer at that place, is well known as the introducer of the modern processes of bleaching on a large scale. Having attended Blanchard’s academy at Nottingham, where Kirke White was educated, Marshall Hall commenced in 1809 his studies for the medical profession at Edinburgh university. In 1811 he was elected senior president of the Royal Medical Society; the following year he took the M.D. degree, and was immediately appointed resident house physician to the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh. This appointment he resigned after two years, when he visited Paris and its medical schools, and, on a walking tour, those also of Berlin, Göttingen, &c, In 1817, taking up his abode at Nottingham, he published his Diagnosis, in which he insisted that, before treatment, the exact nature of a malady should be ascertained. He rapidly acquired an extensive country practice, his improved method in puerperal cases and his disuse of the venesection then popular attracting many patients. In 1818 he wrote the Mimoses, a work on the affections denominated bilious, nervous, &c. The next year he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1825 he became physician to the Nottingham general hospital. In 1826 he removed to London, and in the following year he published his Commentaries on the more important diseases of females. He pursued his studies of the effects of bloodletting, and his Researches (issuedin 1830) were acknowledged by the medical profession to be of vast practical value. Much practical good also resulted from his warning against mistaking exhaustion for inflammation. Hall married in 1829, and the same year he made the discovery which placed him in rank with Harvey. It is described in A Critical and Experimental Essay on the Circulation of the Blood in the Capillary Vessels, in which he showed that the blood-channels intermediate between arteries and veins serve the office of bringing the fluid blood into contact with the material tissues of the system. About this time he made his original investigations on quantity of respiration, detailed in The Inverse Ratio which subsists between the Respiration and Irritability in the Animal Kingdom, a work which led to the treatises on hibernation. In 1831 he proposed a simple and bloodless operation for the removal of vascular naevus. His most important discovery in physiology was the “diastaltic spinal system,” his views being embodied in a paper on Therefiex Function of the Medulla Oblongata and the Medulla Spinalis, 1832, in which year he was elected fellow of the Royal Society, London. This paper was supplemented in 1837 by another On the True Spinal Marrow, and the Excito-motor System of Herves, in which he explained the real classification and distribution of the entire nervous system. The “reflex function” excited great attention in Germany and Holland, and M. Flourens described it as “a great epoch in physiology.” Hall thus became the authority on the multiform deranged states of health referable to an abnormal condition of the nervous system, and he made plain the obscure class of convulsive affections. The action of strychnia as a spinal tonic or excitant, the relief of the epileptic, tracheotomy in laryngismal epilepsy, and the “ready method” in asphyxia, were among the later objects of his investigation. His “ready method ”—sometimes called Marshall Hall’s method—for resuscitation in drowning and other forms of suspended respiration—is perhaps the most popular of his discoveries; by it innumerable lives have been preserved. Dr Hall lectured at various medical schools, at the college of physicians, and also at New York during his American tour. His papers in medical and scientific journals, including the Comptes Rendus, are remarkable for lucidity and brevity. He died at Brighton of a throat affection, aggravated by lecturing, August 11, 1857. A list of his works, most of which have been translated into foreign languages, and details of his “ready method,” <fcc., are given in his Memoirs by his widow, London, 1861.
HALL, Robert (1764-1831), one of the greatest of English pulpit orators, was born May 2, 1764, at Arnsby near Leicester, where his father, a man whose cast of mind in some respects resembled closely that of the son, waβ pastor of a Baptist congregation. Robert was the youngest of a family of fourteen. In infancy his physical powers were so feeble that until two years of age he was unable to walk, and, although his expression and gestures indicated great mental vivacity, he was equally slow to acquire the faculty of articulate speech. It even appears that he had learned to read before he was able to imitate spoken sounds, his nurse having taught him the letters of the alphabet and the formation of words from the inscriptions on the tombstones of a churchyard adjoining his father’s dwelling-house. When once the interest in this exercise had loosened his reluctant tongue his progress was remarkably rapid, and before he had attained his third year the fluency of his talk gave some indications of his future oratorical eminence. While still at the dame’s school his passion for books absorbed the greater part of his time, and in the summer it was his custom after school hours to retire to the churchyard with a volume which he continued to peruse there till nightfall, making out the meaning of the more difficult words with the help of a pocket dictionary. From his sixth to his eleventh year he attended the school of Mr Simmons at Wigston, a village 4 miles from Arnsby.
There his precocity assumed the exceptional form of an intense interest in metaphysics, partly perhaps on account of the restricted character of his father’s library; and before he was nine years of age he had read and re-read Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise on the Will and Butler’s Analogy. This incessant study at such an early period of life seems, however, to have had an injurious influence on his health, and may have been partly the cause of the disease from which he experienced such suffering in after life, and symptoms of whose existence began at this time to manifest themselves. Occasionally he was already troubled with intense pain in the back, and after he left Mr Simmons’s school his appearance was so sickly as to awaken fears of the presence of consumption. In order therefore to obtain the benefit of a change of air, he stayed for some time in the house of a gentleman near Kettering, who with an impropriety which Hall himself afterwards referred to as “egregious,” prevailed upon the boy of eleven to give occasional addresses at prayer meetings. As his health seemed rapidly to recover, he was sent to a school at Northampton conducted by the Rev. John Ryland, where he remained a year and a half, and “made great progress in Latin and Greek.” On leaving school he for some time studied divinity under the direction of his father, and in October 1778 he entered the Bristol academy for the preparation of students for the Baptist ministry. Here the self-possession which had enabled him in his twelfth year to address unfalteringly various audiences of grown-up people seems to have strangely forsaken him; for when, in accordance with the arrangements of the academy, his turn came to deliver an address in the vestry of Broadmead Chapel, he broke down on two separate occasions and was unable to finish his discourse. On the 13th August 1780 he was set apart to the ministry, but he still continued his studies at the academy; and in 1781, in accordance with the provisions of an exhibition which he held, he entered King’s College, Aberdeen, where he took the degree of master of arts in March 1785. At the university he was without a rival of his own standing in any of the classes, distinguishing himself alike in classics, philosophy, and mathematics. He there formed the acquaintance of Mackintosh (afterwards Sir James), who, though a year his junior in age, was a year his senior as a student, and who became attached to him “because he could not help it.” While they remained at Aberdeen the two were inseparable, reading together the best Greek authors·, especially Plato, and discussing, either during their walks by the sea-shore and the banks of the Don or in their rooms until early morning, the most perplexed questions in philosophy and religion. The interest of their conversation seems to have lain more in the difference than the agreement of their opinions; but their controversies, so far from causing any even temporary estrangement, tended only to cement more closely their friendship and to deepen iu each the respect for the mental and moral qualities of the other.
During the vacation between his last two sessions at Aberdeen, Hall acted as assistant pastor to Dr Evans at Broadmead Chapel, Bristol, and three months after leaving the university he was appointed classical tutor in the Bristol academy, an office which he held for more'than five years. Even at this period his extraordinary eloquence had excited an interest beyond the bounds of the denomination to which he belonged, and when he preached the chapel was generally crowded to excess, the audience including many persons of intellectual tastes. It would appear, however, that, in tfi,e case of Mr Fuller, Dr Ryland, and other theological authorities, his exuberant intellectual energy and his outspoken expression of tolerance for certain aspects of Socinianism caused trembling to be greatly mingled with their admiration; and ultimately, suspicions in regard to his orthodoxy having in 1789 led to a misunderstanding with his colleague and a part of the congregation, he in July 1790 accepted an invitation to make trial of a congregation at Cambridge, of which he became pastor in July of the following year. From a statement of his opinions contained in a letter to the congregation which he left, it would appear that, while a firm believer in the proper divinity of Christ, he had at this time disowned the cardinal principles of Calvinism·—the federal headship of Adam, and the doctrine of absolute election and reprobation; and that he was so far a materialist as to “hold that man’s thinking powers and faculties are the result of a certain organization of matter, and that after death he ceases to be conscious till the resurrection.” It was during his Cambridge ministry, which extended over a period of fifteen years, that his oratory was most brilliant and most immediately powerful. At Cambridge the intellectual character of a large part of the audience supplied a stimulus which was wanting at Leicester and Bristol, but besides this his physical powers were then at their best, and were still unaffected by the constant pain which already so severely tested his powers of endurance and rendered the discharge of his duties such a marvellous triumph of will. Above all it was not till near the close of this period that his intellectual pathway was crossed by the shadow of mental derangement, and an element of weakness and uncertainty introduced into his career which for some time clouded the horizon of his hopes and perhaps placed a permanent check on his highest form of intellectual enterprise. While at Cambridge he gave to the world some of the more important of the few and small publications which, although those who were his constant hearers have affirmed that several of his imperfectly reported sermons convey a juster impression of the usual character of his oratory, are the only correct and properly authenticated records of his style of thought and composition. His first published compositions had apolitical origin. In 1791 appeared Christianity consistent with the Love of Freedom, in which he defende<l the political conduct of dissenters against the attacks of the Rev. John Clayton, minister of Weighhouse, and gave eloquent expression to his hopes of great political and social ameliorations as destined to result nearly or remotely from the subversion of old ideas and institutions in the maelstrom of the French Revolution. In 1793 he expounded his political sentiments in a powerful and more extended pamphlet entitled an Apology for the Freedom of the Press, which at once obtained an extensive circulation, and doubtless to some extent aided in the formation of that public opinion which has given birth in England to the present remarkable era of gradual and unswerving political progress. On account, however, of certain asperities into which the warmth of his feelings had betrayed him, and his conviction that he had treated his subject in too superficial a manner, he refused to permit the publication of the pamphlet beyond the third edition, until the references of political opponents and the circulation of copies without his sanction induced him in 1821 to prepare a new edition, from which he omitted the attack on Bishop Horsley, and to which he prefixed an advertisement stating that his political opinions had undergone no substantial change. His other publications while at Cambridge were three sermons— On Modern Infidelity (1801), Reflections on War (1802), and Sentiments proper to the present Crisis (1803). From his first attack of insanity, which occurred in November 1804, he recovered so speedily that he was able to resume his duties in April 1805, but a more severe recurrence of the malady rendered it advisable for him on his second recovery to resign his pastoral office, which he did in March 1806. On leaving Cambridge he paid a visit to his relatives in Leicestershire, and then for some time resided at Enderby, preaching occasionally in some of the neighbouring villages. Latterly he ministered to a small congregation in Harvey Lane, Leicester, from whom at the close of 1806 he accepted a call to be their stated pastor. In the autumnof 1807 he changedhis residence from Enderby to Leicester, and in 1808 he married the servant of a brother minister. His proposal of marriage had been made after an almost momentary acquaintance, and, according to the traditionary account, in very abrupt and peculiar terms; but, judging from his subsequent domestic life, his choice did sufficient credit to his penetration and sagacity. His writings at Leicester embraced various tracts printed for private circulation; anumberof contributions to the Eclectic lieview, among which may be mentioned his articles on “Foster’s Essays” and on “Zeal without Innovation”; several sermons, including those On the Advantages of Knowledge to the Lower Classes (1810), On the Death of the Princess Charlotte (1817), and On the Death of Dr Pyland (1825); and his pamphlet on Terms of Communion, in which he advocated intercommunion with all those who acknowledged the “essentials” of Christianity. In 1819 he published an edition in one volume of his sermons formerly printed. On the death of Dr Ryland, Hall was invited to return to the pastorate of Broadmead Chapel, Bristol, and as the peace of the congregation at Leicester had been to some degree disturbed by a controversy regarding several cases of discipline, he resolved to accept the invitation, and removed there in April 1826. About this period the malady—renal calculus —which had for many years rendered his life an almost continual martyrdom, and whose influence he had triumphed over with such marvellous fortitude, began to show signs of indirectly obtaining the mastery over his vigorous constitution; and henceforth increasing infirmities and sufferings, which rest and change of scene could do little to alleviate, surrounded with deepening external gloom the spirit whose cheerfulness and peace they seemed to leave almost totally uninjured. Gradually the inability to take proper exercise, by inducing a plethoric habit of body and impeding the circulation, led to a diseased condition of the heart, which resulted in his death, February 21, 1831.
The private manners of Hall were remarkably simple and unaffected; and if his method of expressing his opinions was frequently impetuous, and occasionally some what brusque and imperious, this was owing rather to his constitutional energy and straightforward impulsive honesty than to an overbearing and dogmatic temper. Though exercising his sarcastic powers with great unconstraint, he reserved his severity chiefly for errors which implied some kind of moral culpability, and he was always careful to be respectful to true worth even when concealed or deformed by many superficial defects, or conjoined with humble rank or weak mental capacity. In reality few were more unassuming or unselfish or more continuously actuated by feelings truly charitable and benevolent. His mental absorption led to the contraction of many minor eccentricities, one of which was a frequent obliviousness to the flight of time and a consequent inability to remember his engagements. Towards the close of his Cambridge ministry he acquired the habit of smoking, and from that time his pipe was his almost constant companion and one of his principal solaces in his bodily suffering. Indeed talk and tobacco may be said to have supplied his chief means of recreation. In his conversation the calibre and idiosyncrasies of his genius were better displayed than in any of the writings he has left us; and it is said to have exercised an even more «captivating charm than did his finest orations. Its most striking characteristics were keen, biting, and original wit, and wild and daring imaginative flights.
Both physically and mentally Hall possessed a rare combination of qualities fitting him to excel as a public speaker. Hedid not attain success without effortand discipline, but the faults which hampered his capabilities were not of a formidable character. He was of powerful and athletic build, and his great breadth of chest, while it lent an impression of massiveness to his bearing, indicated abundant capacity to sustain the kind of physical exertion which oratory entails. His voice was deficient in strength and volume, but exceptionally pure and melodious, and capable of being thoroughly interpenetrated by emotion. Its inadequacy in tone was also compensated for by its great flexibility, which enabled him by the momentum of rapid utterance to obtain all the vocal force necessary to the highest oratorical effects. According to Foster, his countenance “was formed as if on purpose for the most declared manifestation of power.” The forehead was high and sloping, with well-arched brows, beneath which his dark and brilliant eye, in his more excited moments, burned and glowed with thought and passion. The lower part of his countenance indicated a vehement and headstrong temperament under the control of an iron will—doubtless powerfully reinforced by the strong moral sensibility which gave a peculiar elevation and dignity to features possessing no trait of grace or beauty. Perhaps the “stern, intense, and somewhat formidable expression,” which Foster referred to as wanting in the portrait accompanying his works, had its origin, partly in his constant suffering.
His gestures in speaking were few and simple, and his manner seemed to be naturally determined by his mental emotions without conscious purpose on his part. He gave the impression of thorough self-forgetfulness and absorption in his subject, and during the latter part of an oration of being wholly possessed and dominated by the thoughts and sentiments which he uttered. It is generally affirmed that in his spoken sermons his style was more easy, graceful, and various than in any of the sermons which he prepared for the press. In the latter the structure of the sentences is often formal and laboured, the rhythm artificial and monotonous; and idiomatic vigour is in some degree sacrificed to elegance and pomp. In the higher flights of his eloquence his language was, however, unsurpassed for purity and happy adaptation to the thought. Indeed one of his most remarkable gifts is said to have been his extemporaneous command of a clear and felicitous vocabulary, which seemed to clothe every shade of his meaning with its appropriate expression, and whose musical cadences formed a not unimportant element in the fascination exercised by bis oratory. It is true that in many cases his language had before he spoke undergone considerable mental elaboration, but he was nevertheless so little enslaved to his memory that, according to his own statement, he never entered the pulpit without omitting something which he wished to say and saying something which he wished to-omit. In preaching his severe taste and deep sense of solemnity restrained every tendency to eccentricity or extravagance, and he never permitted his brilliant wit to emit even the faintest and most momentary sparkle. It may therefore be believed that on a secular platform his oratory would have been more racy and natural, and from the scope afforded for the free exercise of all his powers would have attained to a more varied perfection. In his occasional reviews his style is clear and pointed, but apart from this it is his sarcasm that chiefly conveys the impression of more than average ability. The predominant element of his eloquence was reasoning. His statements and propositions were animated with passion and illuminated, by a vivid and rich if not strikingly powerful and original imagination; but in no instance did passion or imagination seem to obtain the chief sway. It was generally not till towards the close of his sermon that the spell of his eloquence asserted its highest influence over his audience. Then the various trains of thought through which he had been guiding·them seemed to meet in an intense focus where reason, imagination, and passion were blended together, and in whose light the theme he had been expounding stood revealed in such vivid truth and beauty as to captivate for the moment every heart But though stating truth chiefly in the form of reasoning, Le constantly exhibited it rather in its moral than in its theological aspects. His eloquence was indeed morally more than intellectually powerful; and its moral purpose was besides achieved not so much by the direct inculcation of moral duties, or the detection and exposure of moral deformities, as by his unconscious exhibition of his own moral elevation and of the ardour and purity of his hopes and aims. Indeed in many of his sermon3 both the form and matter of his thought seemed to be determined rather by his own individual interest in his subject than by the consideration of the capacities and wants of his hearers. Though exhibiting a catholicity of spirit much in advance of his time, the range of his thought is completely included within the limits of traditional opinion. In treating of what he regarded as the cardinal truths of religion he is of course oratorically effective, but the dexterous and brilliant manner in which he wields the old controversial weapons does not compensate for their inherent inadequacy. He indulges too frequently in innuendoes against the moral character and motives of his opponents, and fails to sound the full depth of the speculative problems upon which he attempts to dogmatize. His sermons will always be esteemed by the student of English literature for their many passages of splendid and finished eloquence, but his theological writings as a whole are of course without that quaint interest attaching to representations of truth which though now old and effete originally exhibited it with the freshness and vividness of a discovery; while on the other hand they have no sufficient colouring from modern tendencies to give to them a more than superficial value in relation to those phases of religious thought which are predominant at the present time.
See Works of Robert Hall, A. Μ., with a Brief Memoir of his Life, by Olinthus Gregory, LL.D., and Observations on his Character as Preacher by John Foster, originally published in 6 vols., London, 1832; Reminiscences of the Rev. Robert Hall, A.Μ., by John Greene, London, 1832; Biographical Recollections of the Rev. Robert Hall, by J. W. Morris, 1848; Fifty Sermons of Robert Hall from Notes taken at the time of their Delivery, by the Rev. Thomas Grinfield, Μ. A., 1843; Reminiscences of College Life in Bristol during the Ministry of the Rev. Robert Hall, A.Μ., by Frederick Trestrail, 1879.
