Six new Hill letters.

SIR JOHN HILL (1714-1775), the mid-Georgian entrepreneur, man of letters and science, must have written at least ten times the approximately two hundred letters that survive.' Disappearance of the other nine-tenths is not mysterious: Hill was vilified by most of his contemporaries, who enjoyed little, if any, sense that the documents pertaining to his life could ever be of any interest to posterity. With a few exceptions, most of Hill's extant letters were written to his patrons, the powerful Whig lords now clearly associated with mid-Georgian England: the Dukes of Newcastle, Northumberland, Devonshire, and Richmond, as well as Hill's most loyal patron, Lord Bute, George III's Prime Minister, and lesser aristocrats whom these lords attracted to their spacious country seats and elegant town houses. The librarians on archivists of these influential lords naturally retained most of the documents in their possession, and Hill's letters, whether deemed important or not, survived in this way. But a far greater percentage of Hill's letters were sent to non-aristocrats to booksellers in Grub Street and the provinces and to members of his family and these must have constituted the more interesting aspect of his correspondence for any future biographers.2 Yet precisely this body of his writing is lost, perhaps for ever.3 As a consequence, the portrait of Hill-the-man that has emerged derives in large part from letters soliciting favours from well-known political figures and scientists; who included, as well as the noblemen just mentioned, a host of distinguished figures: Peter Collinson, the naturalist; Emanuel Mendes da Costa, the Jewish Secretary of the Royal Society; Martin Folkes, the President of the Royal Society at mid-century; David Garrick, the famous actor and producer; Albrecht von Haller, the brilliant professor and natural scientist at Go-ttingen; Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish taxonomist and botanist.4