Hill, Aaron

(1685-1750)

   The son of a Wiltshire country gentleman, he was born in London and educated at Westminster School. In 1700 he went to Istanbul, where his relative, Lord Paget, the ambassador, sent him touring in the east with a tutor. In 1709 he published Full Account of the Ottoman Empire, and in the same year he addressed a complimentary poem, "Camillus," to Lord Peterborough. In 1711 he translated Rossi's libretto for Handel's opera Rinaldo. His attempts at being an entrepreneur failed and cost him, and others, a great deal of money. Alexander Pope satirized him in The Duncaid (1728), to which Hill responded in The Progress of Wit (1730). In 1724 he launched the bi-weekly Plain Dealer and co-coauthored the theatrical periodical Promoter (1734-1736). Seventeen plays are credited to him, some of them adaptations. Some of his poems: "Alone, in an Inn, at Southampton," "Apology for Death," "May-Day," "Modesty," "On a Lady, Preached into the Colic, by One of Her Lovers," "The Garden Window," "The Lord's Prayer in Verse," "The Recollected Complainer," "To Mr. Thomson," "Whitehall Stairs," "Written on a Window."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Poets' Corner - Index of Poets (http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/poem-gh.html). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Faber Book of Useful Verse. Simon Brett, ed. Faber and Faber, 1981. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse. Roger Lonsdale, ed. Oxford University Press, 2003. The Oxford Book of Garden Verse. John Dixon Hunt, ed. Oxford University Press, 1993. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).