had fallen in the mêlée. He escaped, however, without a wound, and continued with the army in France until its withdrawal in 1818. Hill lived in retirement for some years at his estate of Hardwicke Grange. He carried the royal standard at the coronation of George IV. and became general in 1825. When Wellington became premier in 1828, he received the appointment of general commanding-in-chief, and on resigning this office in 1842 he was created a viscount. He died on the 10th of December of the same year. Lord Hill was, next to Wellington, the most popular and able soldier of his time in the British service, and was so much beloved by the troops, especially those under his immediate command, that he gained from them the title of “the soldier’s friend.” He was a G.C.B, and G.C.H., and held the grand crosses of various foreign orders, amongst them the Russian St George and the Austrian Maria Theresa.
The Life of Lord Hill, G.C.B., by Rev. Edwin Sidney, appeared in 1845.
HILL (O. Eng. hyll; cf. Low Ger. hull, Mid. Dutch hul, allied
to Lat. celsus, high, collis, hill, &c.), a natural elevation of the
earth’s surface. The term is now usually confined to elevations
lower than a mountain, but formerly was used for all such
elevations, high or low.
HILLAH, a town of Asiatic Turkey, in the pashalik of Bagdad,
60 m. S. of the city of Bagdad, in 32° 2′ 35″ N., 44° 48′ 4012″ E.,
formerly the capital of a sanjak and the residence of a mutasserif,
who in 1893 was transferred to Diwanieh. It is situated on both
banks of the Euphrates, the two parts of the town being connected
by a floating bridge, 450 ft. in length, in the midst of a
very fertile district. The estimated population, which includes a
large number of Jews, varies from 6000 to 12,000. The town has
suffered much from the periodical breaking of the Hindieh dam
and the consequent deflection of the waters of the Euphrates to
the westward, as a result of which at times the Euphrates at this
point has been entirely dry. This deflection of water has also
seriously interfered with the palm groves, the cultivation of
which constitutes a large part of the industry of the surrounding
country along the river. The bazaars of Hillah are relatively
large and well supplied. Many of the houses in the town are
built of brick, not a few bearing an inscription of Nebuchadrezzar,
obtained from the ruins of Babylon, which lie less than an hour
away to the north.
Bibliography.—C. J. Rich, Babylon and Persepolis (1839); J. R. Peters, Nippur (1857); H. Rassam, Asshur and the Land of Nimrod (1897); H. V. Geere, By Nile and Euphrates (1904). (J. P. Pe.)
HILLARD, GEORGE STILLMAN (1808–1879), American
lawyer and author, was born at Machias, Maine, on the 22nd of
September 1808. After graduating at Harvard College in 1828,
he taught in the Round Hill School at Northampton, Massachusetts.
He graduated at the Harvard Law School in 1832, and
in 1833 he was admitted to the bar in Boston, where he entered
into partnership with Charles Sumner. He was a member of the
state House of Representatives in 1836, of the state Senate in
1850, and of the state constitutional convention of 1853, and
in 1866–70 was United States district attorney for Massachusetts.
He devoted a large portion of his time to literature.
He became a member of the editorial staff of the Christian
Register, a Unitarian weekly, in 1833; in 1834 he became editor
of The American Jurist (1829–1843), a legal journal to which
Sumner, Simon Greenleaf and Theron Metcalf contributed; and
from 1856 to 1861 he was an associate editor of the Boston
Courier. His publications include an edition of Edmund
Spenser’s works (in 5 vols., 1839); Selections from the Writings of
Walter Savage Landor (1856); Six Months in Italy (2 vols., 1853);
Life and Campaigns of George B. McClellan (1864); a part of the
Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (1876); besides a
series of school readers and many articles in periodicals and
encyclopaedias. He died in Boston on the 21st of January
1879.
HILLEBRAND, KARL (1829–1884), German author, was
born at Giessen on the 17th of September 1829, his father
Joseph Hillebrand (1788–1871) being a literary historian and
writer on philosophic subjects. Karl Hillebrand became involved,
as a student in Heidelberg, in the Baden revolutionary movement,
and was imprisoned in Rastatt. He succeeded in escaping
and lived for a time in Strassburg, Paris—where for several
months he was Heine’s secretary—and Bordeaux. He continued
his studies, and after obtaining the doctor’s degree at the
Sorbonne, he was appointed teacher of German in the École
militaire at St Cyr, and shortly afterwards, professor of foreign
literatures at Douai. On the outbreak of the Franco-German
War he resigned his professorship and acted for a time as
correspondent to The Times in Italy. He then settled in
Florence, where he died on the 19th of October 1884. Hillebrand
wrote with facility and elegance in French, English and
Italian, besides his own language. His essays, collected under
the title Zeiten, Völker und Menschen (Berlin, 1874–1885), show
clear discernment, a finely balanced cosmopolitan judgment
and grace of style. He undertook to write the Geschichte Frankreichs
von der Thronbesteigung Ludwig Philipps bis zum Fall
Napoleons III., but only two volumes were completed (to 1848)
(2nd ed., 1881–1882). In French he published Des conditions
de la bonne comédie (1863), La Prusse contemporaine (1867),
Études italiennes (1868), and a translation of O. Müller’s Griechische
Literaturgeschichte (3rd ed., 1883). In English he published
his Royal Institution Lectures on German Thought during the
Last Two Hundred Years (1880). He also edited a collection
of essays dealing with Italy, under the title Italia (4 vols.,
Leipzig, 1824–1877).
See H. Homberger, Karl Hillebrand (Berlin, 1884).
HILLEL, Jewish rabbi, of Babylonian origin, lived at Jerusalem
in the time of King Herod. Though hard pressed by
poverty, he applied himself to study in the schools of Shemaiah
and Abtalion (Sameas and Pollion in Josephus). On account
of his comprehensive learning and his rare qualities he was
numbered among the recognized leaders of the Pharisaic scribes.
Tradition assigns him the highest dignity of the Sanhedrin,
under the title of nasi (“prince”), about a hundred years before
the destruction of Jerusalem, i.e. about 30 B.C. The date at
least can be recognized as historic; the fact that Hillel took
a leading position in the council can also be established. The
epithet ha-zaḳen (“the elder”), which usually accompanies
his name, proves him to have been a member of the Sanhedrin,
and according to a trustworthy authority Hillel filled his leading
position for forty years, dying, therefore, about A.D. 10. His
descendants remained, with few exceptions, at the head of
Judaism in Palestine until the beginning of the 5th century,
two of them, his grandson Gamaliel I. and the latter’s son
Simon, during the time when the Temple was still standing.
The fact that Josephus (Vita 38) ascribes to Simon descent from
a very distinguished stock (γένους σφόδρα λαμπροῦ), shows in
what degree of estimation Hillel’s descendants stood. When
the dignity of nasi became afterwards hereditary among them,
Hillel’s ancestry, perhaps on the ground of old family traditions,
was traced back to David. Hillel is especially noted for the
fact that he gave a definite form to the Jewish traditional
learning, as it had been developed and made into the ruling and
conserving factor of Judaism in the latter days of the second
Temple, and particularly in the centuries following the destruction
of the Temple. He laid down seven rules for the interpretation
of the Scriptures, and these became the foundation of rabbinical
hermeneutics; and the ordering of the traditional doctrines
into a whole, effected in the Mishna by his successor Judah I.,
two hundred years after Hillel’s death, was probably likewise
due to his instigation. The tendency of his theory and practice
in matters pertaining to the Law is evidenced by the fact that
in general he advanced milder and more lenient views in opposition
to his colleague Shammai, a contrast which after the
death of the two masters, but not until after the destruction of
the Temple, was maintained in the strife kept up between the
two schools named the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai.
The well-known institution of the Prosbol (προσβολή), introduced
by Hillel, was intended to avert the evil consequences of the
scriptural law of release in the seventh year (Deut. xv. 1). He
was led to this, as is expressly set forth (M. Giṭṭin, iv. 3), by a
regard for the welfare of the community. Hillel lived in the
