I notice that quite recently English Nonconformists celebrated the centenary of Robert Hall, one of the greatest of nineteenth century pulpit orators. He was the youngest of fourteen children of the Leicestershire divine who wrote the well-known "Helps to Zion's Travellers," and was a most precocious child. It is said that he learned his alphabet from tombstones, wrote hymns before his ninth year, and even preached at a religious meeting in a Baptist minister's house when he was only eleven.
At King's College, Aberdeen, where he took his M.A. at twenty-three, he was a noted Greek scholar. He and his friend, Sir James Mackintosh, were nicknamed "Plato and Herodotus." His eloquence in the pulpit drew huge audiences, and his warm attack on the materialism of the celebrated Dr Priestley, then making much stir in politics, science and theology, earned him still greater notoriety.
Hall was a doughty champion of liberty, and his "Apology for the Freedom of the Press" was one of the most startling of English tracts published during the French Revolution. In 1817, at half an hour's warning, and without notes of any kind, he preached a long-remembered sermon on the death of Princess Charlotte. He was widely read in many languages, and, most curiously, thought our countrywoman, Maria Edgeworth, the most irreligious writer whom he had ever read.
The Irish Times, March 2nd, 1931.