Baptist preacher, born at Ansty, near Leicester, was the youngest of fourteen children. At the age of fifteen he was entered at the Baptist Academy at Bristol. Proceeding to Aberdeen University in 1781, he made the intimate acquaintance of Sir James Mackintosh, with whom he read and discussed philosophy and theology. He graduated in 1785, and became second minister in the collegiate charge of Broadmead Chapel, Bristol, and classical master in the Bristol Academy, which latter post, however, he resigned in 1790. Mr. Hall at once became a popular preacher. In 1791 he succeeded the eccentric Dr. Robinson at Cambridge, where, by the force of his preaching, the influence of his reputation, and the still better influence of his persuasive life and character, he became one of the foremost divines of the day. In 1793 he published his celebrated “Apology for the Freedom of the Press,” and in 1801 his eloquent sermon on “Infidelity;” “Reflections on the War” followed in 1802, and “Sentiments Proper to the Present Crisis” in 1803. In 1806 he was transferred to Leicester, and in 1825 he returned to Bristol. His argumentative treatise, “Terms of Communion,” which appeared in 1810, is distinguished by logical acuteness and catholicity of sentiment.

Personal

  We had among us [1782] some English dissenters, who were educated for the ecclesiastical offices of their sect. Robert Hall, now a dissenting clergyman at Cambridge, was of this number. He then displayed the same acuteness and brilliancy; the same extraordinary vigour, both of understanding and imagination, which have since distinguished him, and which would have secured to him much more of the admiration of the learned and the elegant, if he had not consecrated his genius to the far nobler office of instructing and reforming the poor. His society and conversation had a great influence on my mind. Our controversies were almost unceasing. We lived in the same house, and we were both very disputatious.

  From the commencement of his discourse an almost breathless silence prevailed, deeply impressive and solemnizing from its singular intenseness. Not a sound was heard but that of the preacher’s voice—scarcely an eye but was fixed upon him—not a countenance that he did not watch, and read, and interpret, as he surveyed them again and again with his rapid ever-excursive glance. As he advanced and increased in animation, five or six of the auditors would be seen to rise and lean forward over the front of their pews still keeping their eyes upon him. Some new or striking sentiment or expression would, in a few minutes, cause others to rise in like manner: shortly afterwards still more, and so on, until, long before the close of the sermon, it often happened that a considerable portion of the congregation were seen standing,—every eye directed to the preacher, yet now and then for a moment glancing from one to the other, thus transmitting and reciprocating thought and feeling:—Mr. Hall himself, though manifestly absorbed in his subject, conscious of the whole, receiving new animation from what he thus witnessed, reflecting it back upon those who were already alive to the inspiration, until all that were susceptible of thought and emotion seemed wound up to the utmost limit of elevation on earth, when he would close, and they reluctantly and slowly resume their seats.

  He displayed, in a most eminent degree, the rare excellence of a perfect conception and expression of every thought, however rapid the succession. There were no half-formed ideas, no misty semblances of meaning, no momentary lapses of intellect into an utterance at hazard, no sentences without a distinct object, and serving merely for the continuity of speaking; every sentiment had at once a palpable shape, and an appropriateness to the immediate purpose. If now and then, which was seldom, a word, or a part of a sentence, slightly failed to denote precisely the thing he intended, it was curious to observe how perfectly he was aware of it, and how he would instantly throw in an additional clause, which did signify it precisely…. Under that excitement, when it was the greatest, he did unconsciously acquire a corresponding elation of attitude and expression; would turn, though not with frequent change, toward the different parts of the assembly, and, as almost his only peculiarity of action, would make one step back from his position (which, however, was instantly resumed) at the last word of a climax; an action which inevitably suggested the idea of the recoil of heavy ordnance.

  His religious character had nothing peculiar in it. He had fine taste and great eloquence, but after all was not first-rate,—that is, not equal to Jeremy Taylor or Burke. But he was facile princeps of all the Dissenting preachers of the day.

  Robert Hall did not lose his power of retort even in madness. A hypocritical condoler with his misfortunes once visited him in the mad-house, and said, in a whining tone, “What brought you here Mr. Hall?” Hall significantly touched his brow with his finger, and replied, “What’ll never bring you, sir—too much brain!”

  There was not the semblance of parade, nothing that betrayed the least thought of being eloquent; but there was a power of thought, a grace and beauty, and yet force of expression, a facility of commanding the best language, without apparently thinking of the language at all, combined with a countenance all glowing from the fire within, which constituted a fascination that was to me perfectly irresistible.

  His face was far from being a handsome one. Indeed, it reminded some people of an exaggerated frog’s. But the amplitude of his forehead, the brilliance of his eye, and the strength and breadth of his chest, marked him out always from the roll of common men, and added greatly to the momentum both of his conversation and his preaching…. We have heard his later mode of preaching often described by eye-witnesses. He began in a low tone of voice; as he proceeded his voice rose and his rapidity increased; the two first thirds of his sermon consisted of statement or argument; when he neared the close, he commenced a strain of appeal and then, and not till then, was there any eloquence; then his stature erected itself, his voice swelled to its utmost compass, his rapidity became prodigious, and his practical questions—poured out in thick succession—seemed to sound the very souls of his audience. Next to the impressiveness of the conclusion, what struck a stranger most was the exquisite beauty and balance of his sentences; every one of which seemed quite worthy of, and ready for, the press. Sometimes, indeed, he was the tamest and most commonplace of preachers, and men left the church wondering if this were actually the illustrious man.

  For forty years he had no rival in the English pulpit. During this long time men of all sects and parties, men of the highest intellect and culture, the leaders of the Church, the Bar, and the Senate, sat with rapt attention under the spell of his speech. What was the secret of this attraction? Was it in his personal magnetism,—the majesty of his mien, his gestures, or the musical intonations of his voice? Or was it in his rhetorical skill, the exquisite arrangement and rhythmical flow of his periods, and the dazzling imagery in which his affluent imagination clothed his ideas? In many of these oratorical gifts he was wanting. He had a large-built, robust figure, and a countenance “formed, as if on purpose, for the most declared manifestation of power;” but all his life he was a sufferer from acute physical pains, necessitating the use of large doses of stimulants and narcotics; his voice was weak, his action heavy and ungraceful, and in all the tricks of the rhetorician, the pomp and circumstance of oratory, he was lacking altogether. His style, while it has great vigor and impressiveness, is too highly Latinized to be popular; it abounds in technical phrases and abstract forms of expression, and, except in certain highly-wrought passages, is quite devoid of pictorial embellishment! It was, apparently, in no one predominant quality that his power lay, but in the harmony and momentum in action of all his faculties,—faculties which, whether of mind or heart, have rarely been so admirably adjusted and finely proportioned in any other human being.

  The private manners of Hall were remarkably simple and unaffected; and if his method of expressing his opinions was frequently impetuous, and occasionally somewhat brusque and imperious, this was owing rather to his constitutional energy and straightforward impulsive honesty than to an overbearing and dogmatic temper. Though exercising his sarcastic powers with great unconstraint, he reserved his severity chiefly for errors which implied some kind of moral culpability, and he was always careful to be respectful to true worth even when concealed or deformed by many superficial defects, or conjoined with humble rank or weak mental capacity. In reality few were more unassuming or unselfish or more continuously actuated by feelings truly charitable and benevolent. His mental absorption led to the contraction of many minor eccentricities, one of which was a frequent obliviousness to the flight of time and a consequent inability to remember his engagements. Towards the close of his Cambridge ministry he acquired the habit of smoking, and from that time his pipe was his almost constant companion and one of his principal solaces in his bodily suffering. Indeed talk and tobacco may be said to have supplied his chief means of recreation. In his conversation the calibre and idiosyncrasies of his genius were better displayed than in any of the writings he has left us; and it is said to have exercised an even more captivating charm than did his finest orations. Its most striking characteristics were keen, biting, and original wit, and wild and daring imaginative flights.

  So long ago as 1828, I knew the renowned Baptist minister, the Rev. Robert Hall. I heard him preach at Bristol, and more than once visited him there. Though he lived to be an old man—born in 1764, and dying in 1831—he was a sad sufferer all his life, from some internal ailment, and his eloquent sermons were often delivered while the speaker was struggling with bodily anguish…. I think I never heard a pulpit orator so effective as Robert Hall; yet his eloquence flowed without effort, and was totally devoid of ostentation. He impressed on all who heard him the conviction that he spoke for his Master and not for himself.

  Think of Demosthenes, and, as there is but one Demosthenes and one Robert Hall, think of Hall! It is quite certain that Hall was a far greater man than Demosthenes in the order of his mind, in his elevation of sentiment; and, in his tastes and studies, he much more nearly resembled Cicero, most perfect of pagans and nearest approximation to the Christian philosopher; but Cicero was much more of a rhetorician than either Demosthenes or Hall, aimed more at producing superficial effect, and appears to have cared more about the posing of the body and retaining an unrumpled and uncreased robe. On the other hand, we would not degrade Hall’s character to the level of the Billingsgate of Demosthenes.

  Hall’s fame rests mainly on the tradition of his pulpit oratory, which fascinated many minds of a high order. His eloquence recommended evangelical religion to persons of taste. Dugald Stewart commends his writings as exhibiting “the English language in its perfection,” which is certainly extravagant praise. His conversation, of which some fragments are preserved, was brilliant when his powers were roused by intellectual society.

General

  Please to present one of each of my pamphlets to Mr. Hall. I wish I could reach the perfection of his style. I think his style the best in the English language; if he have a rival, it is Mrs. Barbauld.

  The works of this great preacher are, in the highest sense of the term, imaginative, as distinguished not only from the didactic, but the fanciful. He possesses the “vision and faculty divine,” in as high a degree as any of our writers in prose. His noblest passages do but make truth visible in the form of beauty, and “clothe upon” abstract ideas, till they become palpable in exquisite shapes. The dullest writer would not convey the same meaning in so few words, as he has done in the most sublime of his illustrations.

  With no one prejudice like Johnson, he still reminds us of him—he is what Johnson would have been (if it be possible to conceive him such) had he been a whig and a dissenter. He has something of his dogmatism—something of his superstition—something of his melancholy—something of the same proneness to erect himself before man, and prostrate himself to the earth before God; a mixture of pride and of humility—of domination and self-abasement; he has much too of Johnson’s love for common-sense and home-spun philosophy, combined, however, with an imagination far more vivid and excursive, for which the former qualities did not always serve as an adequate corrective. His learning is not on the same scale as his mother-wit—it is enough, however, to add stamina to his speculations, and for more perhaps he did not greatly care. His knowledge of metaphysical and deistical writers appears to have been that in which he chiefly excelled; his allusions to classical authors are few, and his quotations from them (a practice which he somewhere gives us to understand he held cheap) in general trite and unscholar-like—but he was too affluent to borrow, and too independent to be a slave to authorities.

  Robert Hall’s might be called a great mind,—large in all its capacities, and wide in the extent of its sphere of perception and action. In every such mind it is easy to discern two characters, always opposing, limiting, and balancing each other. It will not narrow itself to the service of a single idea, it will not blind itself to the majesty of nature by gazing on one truth till all others disappear. It will not live in extremes,—it is not fanatical,—it refuses to submit to any narrow rule of belief or of duty,—it is conscious to itself of expanding capacities which no rule can measure, no system bound. This is greatness of mind,—such greatness had Robert Hall. Had the circumstances which surrounded him been more favorable, his mind might have expanded into as perfect and complete humanity as our age has witnessed. This was not granted him; on some sides he was undeveloped; on others limited; yet he was, and will always remain, one of the great men of our day.

  Hall, the most distinguished ornament of the Calvinistic dissenters, has long been justly ranked with the highest of our classics. His sermons are admirable specimens of pulpit eloquence, not to be surpassed in the whole compass of British theology. Those which received the author’s own imprimatur are vastly superior to any that are either taken from his MSS., or supplied from the notes of Short-hand Writers.

  The most striking trait in the character of Hall’s mind is its entire lack of striking traits,—the evenness, harmony, and breadth of its development. He never astonishes, and never disappoints. His wisdom and learning are never obtrusive, and never at fault. In argument and illustration, we trace no redundancy, and complain of no omission. His eloquence is never quickened into a torrent-like flow, but is never dry or languid. He is majestic without pretension, and sensible without dullness. The spirits all come at his bidding, and vanish when they are no longer needed. His quick wit never encroaches on his reverence, and his scorching sarcasm is kept in check by conscientious justice…. Hall’s style is rich, but chaste,—highly rhetorical, but never gaudy. He has no sentences penned for show or sound; but solid thought always underlies his ornament and points his metaphors.

  Hall is, even in print, much more of the orator; although his language with all its richness, betrays, in his published writings, symptoms of anxious elaboration. Probably there could not be cited from him any thing equal in force or originality to some passages of Foster’s; but it would still more certainly be impossible to detect him indulging in feeble commonplaces.

  His command of language is sufficiently copious, though not by any means of the first order. This is perhaps due in no small measure to the course of his reading. He spent comparatively little time upon the masters of the English language…. Hall’s diction is not suited for a popular style. Not only does it want pictorial embellishments, except in the more highly wrought passages; it is positively dry; he has a preference for heavy Latin derivatives, and for abstract forms of expression—the result, as we have said, in some measure, of his favourite studies…. Hall’s mind had a natural craving for broad comprehensive views, and he usually states his case with great perspicuity…. The distinguishing excellence of Hall’s style consists in general vigour and elevation of language. His astonishing popularity was probably due to the occasional bursts of splendid eloquence.

  It is scarcely possible, however, to set him in the history of literature in a place at all proportioned to that which he occupied in his generation. The sermons which live, save in the humble habitual reading of those classes of the community who read sermons for duty and not with any critical perception—are very few, and Robert Hall’s style is of a more formal description—in print—than that of the orators who have outlived their day. But the appreciation of those who heard and knew him was so thorough and enthusiastic, that its warmth still lingers with a genial glow about his name.

  Nonconformity, rich as it was in works of philanthropy and evangelical earnestness, did not originate any new lines of Christian thought. Robert Hall was perhaps its greatest name in the first quarter of the century; in massive and brilliant intellectuality he was unequalled; and the fame of his preaching still survives; but he propagated no new ideas, nor can he be said to have been a new force in religious literature.

  Robert Hall perhaps came nearer than any of his contemporaries to the political and prophetic Milton, whom Wordsworth longed to recall.