stus, procured for him the warm friendship of the eminent
members of the Royal Society. To this critical period of the lives of
Henley and of Hill, their resemblance is striking; nor is it less from
the moment the surprising revolution in their characters occurred.

Pressed by the wants of life, they lost its decencies. Henley
attempted to poise himself against the University; Hill against the
Royal Society. Rejected by these learned bodies, both these Cains of
literature, amid their luxuriant ridicule of eminent men, still evince
some claims to rank among them. The one prostituted his genius in his
"Lectures;" the other, in his "Inspectors." Never two authors were
more constantly pelted with epigrams, or buffeted in literary
quarrels. They have met with the same fate; covered with the same
odium. Yet Sir John Hill, this despised man, after all the fertile
absurdities of his literary life, performed more for the improvement
of the "Philosophical Transactions," and was the cause of diffusing a
more general taste for the science of botany, than any other
contemporary. His real ability extorts that regard which his
misdirected ingenuity, instigated by vanity, and often by more
worthless motives, had lost for him in the world.[282]

At the time that Hill was engaged in several large compilations for
the booksellers, his employers were desirous that the honours of an
F.R.S. should ornament his title-page. This versatile genius, however,
during these graver works, had suddenly emerged from his learned
garret, and, in the shape of a fashionable lounger, rolled in his
chariot from the Bedford to Ranelagh; was visible at routs; and
sate at the theatre a tremendous arbiter of taste, raising about him
tumults and divisions;[283] and in his "Inspectors," a periodical
paper which he published in the _London Daily Advertiser_, retailed
all the great matters relating to himself, and all the little
matters he collected in his rounds relating to others. Among other
personalities, he indulged his satirical fluency on the scientific
collectors. The Antiquarian Society were twitted as medal-scrapers and
antediluvian knife-grinders; conchologists were turned into
cockleshell merchants; and the naturalists were made to record
pompous histories of stickle-hacks and cockchafers. Cautioned by
Martin Folkes, President of the Royal Society,[284] not to attempt
his election, our enraged comic philosopher, who had preferred
his jests to his frien