Hilliard

The following year, at the anniversary of the
Phi Beta Kappa Society, he read "The Judg-
ment/' a vision-poem describing the day of final
retribution. Though highly praised by contem-
porary critics, it is labored in imagery and con-
ventional in conception. The poem was pub-
lished in 1821. His plans for a business career
being interrupted by the War of 1812, he re-
tired from Boston, where he had resided for
three years after his graduation, and returned
to New Haven. At this period he wrote two
verse dramas, Demetria and Percy's Masque.
In 1819 he visited England. In London he first
published Percy's Masque (1819), a five-act
drama which owes its inspiration to Bishop
Percy's ballad, "The Hermit of Warkworth."
Returning to America in 1820, Hillhouse en-
gaged in business as a hardware merchant in
New York City. In 1822, he married Cornelia
Lawrence, eldest daughter of Isaac Lawrence, a
wealthy merchant of New York, and the follow-
ing year he removed to New Haven, where he
built a house on Pierson-Sage Square. Here he
spent the remainder of his life in study and
literary pursuits. In 1824, he wrote Hadad
(1825), a blank-verse drama in five acts based
upon the Biblical narrative of Absalom's rebel-
lion. His introduction to this piece informs the
reader that "The peculiar feature of this poem is
ascribable to the Book of Tobit, where the su-
pernatural throws a mystical wildness over a
touching narrative of human interests." This,
the longest and most pretentious of his dramatic
poems, received the greatest praise from his
contemporaries. It is, however, less important
than Demetria, a romantic tragedy of intrigue,
written in 1813 and published in 1839. Though
highly conventional in plot and feeble in char-
acter drawing, Demetria may fairly be called his
best poem because of the purity of its style and
the elegance of its verse. For a man of his schol-
arly inclinations and apparent leisure his liter-
ary output was extremely small. Almost all his
writings are contained in two slender volumes:
Dramas, Discourses, and Other Pieces (1839).

[Some biographical material is found in the notes to
his poem, Sachem*s-Wood (1838) ; and in C W. Ever-
est, The Poets of Conn. (1843) J the most accurate
biography is in F, B. Dexter, Biog. Sketches Gratis. Yale
Co//., vol. VI (1912) ; family history is given in Mar-
garet P. Hillhouse, Hist, and GeneaL Colls. Relating
to the Descendants of Rev. fas. Hillhouse (1924) J the
most judicious contemporary criticism of his poetry,
though at times too laudatory, is found in the Southern
Lit. Messenger, Apr. 1841, pp. 329-35; other articles
are listed in Poole's Index to Periodical Literature,']

H.W.S-—g—r.

HILLIARD, FRANCIS (Nov. i, i8o6-0ct.
9, 1878), legal writer, was born in Cambridge,

Hilliard

Mass., the son of William Hilliard, a printer and
bookseller, and his wife Sarah Lovering. The
first Hilliard came to New England in 1635 and
the family settled in New Hampshire. Francis'
grandfather, Timothy, was pastor of the First
Parish Church in Cambridge from 1783 until
his death in 1790. Francis left Harvard with
some thirty-seven members of the class of 1823,
who had rebelled at the disciplinary measures
imposed upon a classmate, but with the most of
these he received his degree in 1842, out of
course. In 1826 he attended Harvard Law
School for a few months. He was admitted to
the Middlesex bar, and to the Suffolk bar in
1830. He practised law in Boston with some
success and married Catherine Dexter Haven,
daughter of Samuel Haven. After residing in
Dracut, Dedham, and Cambridge, the couple
finally settled in Roxbury. Hilliard served as a
member of the legislature, commissioner of in-
solvency, and judge of insolvency for Norfolk
County. On the establishment of the Roxbury
police court in 1855, he was appointed its first
judge. He died in Worcester, Mass.

He early abandoned practice for writing and
published the following treatises, the most of
which went through more than one edition:
Elements of Law (1835); An Abridgment of
the American Law of Real Property (2 vols.,
1838-39); A Treatise on the Law of Sales of
Personal Property (1841) ; The Law of Mort-
gages (1853) J The Law of Vendors and Pur-
chasers of Real Property (1858) ; The Law of
Torts (1859) > d Treatise on the Law of Bank-
ruptcy and Insolvency (1863) ; The Law of In-
functions (1865); The Law of New Trials
(1866); The Law of Remedies for Torts
(1867); The Law of Contracts (1872); The
Law of Taxation (1875); American Law: A
Comprehensive Summary of the Law in its
Various Departments (2 vols., 1877-78). At the
time that he wrote, judges and lawyers lacked
legal treatises which cited American decisions
and showed how far the English common law
had been followed by American courts or mod-
ified to suit new conditions. Textbooks present-
ing cases from all states were also needed in
order to encourage the development of national
judge-made law rather than particularistic local
doctrines. Hilliard was one of the first and most
voluminous of the authors who met these needs.

His chief distinction lies in the fact that he
wrote (1859) the first, treatise in English on
Torts, a work which devoted much more atten-
tion to the common features of the various
wrongs than Addison's later book on the English
law, Wrongs and Their Remedies, Being a Trea-

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