An accident to her false teeth as she played Lady Brumpton turned applause into ridicule. Her last appearance in York, and probably on any stage, was on 11 April 1772. She returned to Covent Garden an object of charity. Her distresses were the cause of the establishment of the Theatrical Fund, from which, as she was not on the books of either Drury Lane or Covent Garden, she could receive nothing but a donation. Through the influence of Thomas Hull [q. v.] and his wife she was made wardrobe-keeper and dresser at the Richmond Theatre. She died in poverty and obscurity.
[In his Wandering Patentee, 1795, Tate Wilkinson devotes thirty pages (i. 123–53) to a gossiping and good-natured account of this actress. She is praised in A General View of the Stage, by Mr. Wilkes (Samuel Derrick), 1759, and by various writers of the period. Genest's Account of the Stage, Hitchcock's Irish Stage, and Gilliland's Dramatic Mirror have been consulted. Dibdin's Edinburgh Stage speaks of Mrs. Bland Hamilton playing in Edinburgh in 1765–6, and says ‘she has lost her voice, her looks, her teeth, and is deformed in her person.’]
HAMILTON, ALEXANDER (d. 1732), merchant and author, describes himself as ‘having a rambling mind and a fortune too narrow to allow him to travel like a gentleman.’ He therefore ‘applied himself to the study of nautical affairs,’ and having spent his younger days ‘in visiting most of the maritime kingdoms of Europe and some parts of Barbary,’ and having made a voyage to Jamaica, he went out to the East Indies in 1688, and remained there till 1723. During this time he seems to have followed a life of commercial adventure, sometimes as captain of a ship, sometimes as supercargo, sometimes in a ship of his own, or in one privately owned, sometimes in a ship of one or other of the rival companies, and so to have visited almost every port, from Jeddah in the Red Sea to Amoy in China. His adventures and experiences are told in a most interesting manner in his ‘New Account of the East Indies’ (2 vols. 8vo, 1727; 2nd edit. 2 vols. 8vo, 1744), a work which, in the charm of its naïve simplicity, perfect honesty, with some similarity of subject in its account of the manners and history of people little known, offers a closer parallel to the history of Herodotus than perhaps any other in modern literature. Its historical value must, however, be weighted with his distinct confession that ‘these observations have been mostly from the storehouse of my memory, and are the amusements or lucubrations of the nights of two long winters;’ and again, that ‘If I had thought while I was in India of making my observations or remarks public and to have had the honour of presenting them to so noble a patron’—as the Duke of Hamilton, to whom the work is dedicated—‘I had certainly been more careful and curious in my collections, and of keeping memorandums to have made the work more complete.’ As these reminiscences extend over five-and-thirty years, they may well be occasionally untrustworthy; still, as a seaman, we may suppose that he had his journals, or, as a merchant, his trade memoranda, which would to some extent keep him straight. Of his honesty and of his truthfulness, within the limits of his memory and observation, it is impossible to doubt. He returned to England in 1723, seems to have spent a considerable part of 1724 in Holland, presumably settling his business affairs, and the two following years in writing and arranging his ‘lucubrations.’ He describes himself as having ‘brought back a charm that can keep out the meagre devil, poverty, from entering into my house, and so I have got holy Agur's wish in Prov. xxx. 8.’ A ‘Captain Alexander Hamilton’ died 7 Oct. 1732 (Gent. Mag. 1732, p. 1030).
[The only authority for Hamilton's life is his own book; there is also some mention of him in Clement Downing's Compendious History of the Indian Wars (1737), pp. 14–25.]
HAMILTON, ALEXANDER (1739–1802), professor of midwifery in Edinburgh University, was born in 1739 at Fordoun, Kincardineshire, where his father, a retired army surgeon, practised. In 1758 he became assistant to John Straiton, surgeon, of Edinburgh; on his master's death in 1762 he was admitted member of the Edinburgh College of Surgeons, and commenced to practise. He afterwards obtained a medical degree, and was admitted a licentiate, and subsequently fellow, of the Edinburgh College of Physicians. In 1777, as deacon of the Edinburgh College of Surgeons, he made a strenuous effort to get surgery taught in the university by a separate professor, but failed, owing to the opposition of Monro secundus. After lecturing on midwifery with success for some years, he was in 1780 appointed joint professor of midwifery in the university of Edinburgh with Dr. Thomas Young, and sole professor in 1783 on Young's death. Through his exertions the Lying-in Hospital was established in 1791. He was a successful practitioner and writer on midwifery. [For details respecting the accusation made by Dr. James Gregory in 1792 that Hamilton was the author of a pamphlet on the ‘Study of Medicine in Edinburgh University,’ which Hamilton denied, see Gregory, James (1753–1821) and Hamilton, James, jun. (d. 1839).]
