Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 26.djvu/400

 St. Andrews. In 1775 he was licensed as a probationer by the presbytery of Haddington, and afterwards preached regularly in the college church. He was ordained by the same presbytery in 1778, and in 1780 was inducted as one of the ministers of St. Andrews, holding his parochial charge along with his chair. He received the degree of D.D. in 1787, and in the same year was appointed dean of the order of the Thistle. After having held the Greek chair for sixteen years, he became professor of divinity in St. Mary's College in January 1788, and in 1791 was promoted to the principalship. He was soon afterwards appointed one of his majesty's chaplains for Scotland, and in 1799 he received the deanery of the Chapel Royal as ‘an acknowledgment of his public services as a churchman.’ For these latter preferments he was much indebted to the first Lord Melville, with whom he was on terms of friendship, and who consulted him on Scottish ecclesiastical affairs. From 1773 Hill had been constantly a member of the general assembly, and he was raised to the moderator's chair in 1789. He early distinguished himself as a supporter of Principal Robertson, and succeeded him as leader of the moderate party, a position which he held for upwards of thirty years. Combining great natural abilities with unwearied industry, equanimity of temper, and dignified and courteous manners, he discharged his manifold duties with conspicuous success. He was esteemed a model of pulpit eloquence; his ‘Lectures on Divinity’ form one of the most valuable theological works which Scotland has produced; while his thorough knowledge of the constitution of the church, great power in debate, business capacity, and conciliatory spirit towards those who differed from him qualified him for the place which he long held in the ecclesiastical councils of his country. He died on 19 Dec. 1819, in his seventieth year.

Hill married, on 7 June 1782, Harriet, daughter of Alexander Scott, merchant, Edinburgh, and had, with other children, Alexander [q. v.], professor of divinity in Glasgow; David, chief secretary of the Honourable East India Company at Madras; Thomas, minister of Logie-Pert; Janet, who married Dr. John Cook, professor of divinity in St. Andrews; Jane, who married Dr. Macnair, minister of Paisley; and Harriet, who married Mark Sprot, esq., of Garnkirk, Lanarkshire. Hill published: 1. ‘Occasional Sermons.’ 2. Volume of ‘Sermons,’ London, 1796. 3. ‘Lectures upon Portions of the Old Testament,’ 1812. 4. ‘Theological Institutes,’ Edinburgh, 1817. 5. ‘Lectures on Divinity,’ 3 vols., Edinburgh, 1821. 

HILL, HUGH (1802–1871), judge, second son of James Hill, by Mary, daughter of Hugh Norcott of Cork, was born in 1802 at Graig, near Doneraile, co. Cork, where his family had been long settled. He graduated B.A. at Dublin in 1821, kept two years' terms at the King's Inns, and then joined the Middle Temple in London. He practised with great success as a special pleader under the bar between 1827 and 1841, when he was called to the bar and joined the northern circuit. He became a Q.C. in 1851; on 29 May 1858 he was appointed a judge of the court of queen's bench, and about the same time was made a serjeant-at-law; he was also knighted. Owing to prolonged illness he retired from the bench in December 1861. He died at the Royal Crescent Hotel, Brighton, on 12 Oct. 1871. In 1831 he married Anoriah, daughter of Richard Holden Webb, controller of customs, and by her had two sons, who both survived him; his wife died in 1858. 

HILL, JAMES (d. 1728?), antiquary, a native of Herefordshire, was called to the bar as a member of the Middle Temple. Between 1715 and 1717 he issued proposals for publishing by subscription a history of the city of Hereford in two parts, devoted to its ecclesiastical and its civil state respectively, with ‘transcripts from original records,’ ‘geometrical plans of the city, churches, monasteries, and chapels,’ and engravings of monuments, arms, ancient seals, and portraits of eminent persons. He proposed to follow this, if successful, by another volume treating of the county. The plan is printed in Rawlinson's ‘English Topographer,’ 1720, pp. 71–3. Owing to Hill's premature death nothing came of the project. In 1718 he was elected F.S.A., and was admitted F.R.S. on 30 April 1719. He showed to the Society of Antiquaries in the year of his election a ‘vast collection of drawings, views, inscriptions, plans, and observations in MS., the fruits of his travels in the west of England that summer’ (, British Topography, i. 410). One of his drawings, a west view and ichnography of Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire, was engraved by J. Harris for John Stevens's ‘History of Antient Abbeys,’ 1723, ii. 57 (ib. i. 789). When at a meeting of the So-