the immortals, never was an unfortunate hero of
the vindicative Muses so reduced into nothingness! Jove, disturbed at
the noise of this thing of wit, exclaims, that nature had never proved
productive in vain before, but now,

On mere privation she bestow'd a frame,
And dignified a nothing with a name;
A wretch devoid of use, of sense, of grace,
The insolvent tenant of incumber'd space!

Pallas hits off the style of Hill, as

The neutral nonsense, neither false nor true--
Should Jove himself, in calculation mad,
Still negatives to blank negations add;
How could the barren ciphers ever breed;
But nothing still from nothing would proceed.
Raise, or depress, or magnify, or blame,
Inanity will ever be the same.

But Phoebus shows there may still be something produced from inanity.

E'en blank privation has its use and end--
From emptiness, how sweetest music flows!
How absence, to possession adds a grace,
And modest vacancy, to all gives place.
So from Hillario, some effect may spring;
E'en him--that slight penumbra of a thing!

The careless style of the fluent Inspectors, beside their audacity,
brought Hill into many scrapes. He called Woodward, the celebrated
harlequin, "the meanest of all characters." This Woodward resented in
a pamphlet-battle, in which Hill was beaten at all points.[290] But
Hill, or the Monthly Reviewer, who might be the same person, for that
journal writes with the tenderness of a brother of whatever relates to
our hero, pretends that the Inspector only meant, that "the character
of Harlequin (if a thing so unnatural and ridiculous ought to be
called a character) was the _meanest_ on the stage!"[291]

I will here notice a characteristic incident in Hill's literary life,
of which the boldness and the egotism is scarcely paralleled, even by
Orator Henley. At the time the Sloane Collection of Natural History
was purchased, to form a part of our grand national establishment, the
British Museum, Hill offered himself, by public advertisement, in one
of his _Inspectors_, as the properest person to be placed at its head.
The world will condemn him for his impudence. The most reasonable
objection against his mode of proceeding would be, that the thing
undid itself; and that the very appearance, by public advertisement,
was one motive why so confident an offer should be rejected. Perhaps,
after all, Hill only wanted to _advertise himself_.

But suppose that Hill