HAMILTON, THOMAS (1789–1842), Scottish writer, younger brother of the philosopher, Sir William Hamilton, Bart., was born in 1789. He was educated at Glasgow University, where he made a close friend of Michael Scott, the author of Tom Cringle’s Log. He entered the army in 1810, and served throughout the Peninsular and American campaigns, but continued to cultivate his literary tastes. On the conclusion of peace he withdrew, with the rank of captain, from active service. He contributed both prose and verse to Blackwood’s Magazine, in which appeared his vigorous and popular military novel, Cyril Thornton (1827). His Annals of the Peninsular Campaign, published originally in 1829, and republished in 1849 with additions by Frederick Hardman, is written with great clearness and impartiality. His only other work, Men and Manners in America, published originally in 1833, is somewhat coloured by British prejudice, and by the author’s aristocratic dislike of a democracy. Hamilton died at Pisa on the 7th of December 1842.
HAMILTON, WILLIAM (1704–1754), Scottish poet, the author
of “The Braes of Yarrow,” was born in 1704 at Bangour in Linlithgowshire,
the son of James Hamilton of Bangour, a member
of the Scottish bar. As early as 1724 we find him contributing
to Allan Ramsay’s Tea Table Miscellany. In 1745 Hamilton
joined the cause of Prince Charles, and though it is doubtful
whether he actually bore arms, he celebrated the battle of
Prestonpans in verse. After the disaster of Culloden he lurked
for several months in the Highlands and escaped to France;
but in 1749 the influence of his friends procured him permission
to return to Scotland, and in the following year he obtained
possession of the family estate of Bangour. The state of his
health compelled him, however, to live abroad, and he died at
Lyons on the 25th of March 1754. He was buried in the Abbey
Church of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh. He was twice married—“into
families of distinction” says the preface of the authorized
edition of his poems.
Hamilton left behind him a considerable number of poems, none of them except “The Braes of Yarrow” of striking originality. The collection is composed of odes, epitaphs, short pieces of translation, songs, and occasional verses. The longest is “Contemplation, or the Triumph of Love” (about 500 lines). The first edition was published without his permission by Foulis (Glasgow, 1748), and introduced by a preface from the pen of Adam Smith. Another edition with corrections by himself was brought out by his friends in 1760, and to this was prefixed a portrait engraved by Robert Strange.
In 1850 James Paterson edited The Poems and Songs of William Hamilton. This volume contains several poems till then unpublished, and gives a life of the author.
HAMILTON, SIR WILLIAM (1730–1803), British diplomatist
and archaeologist, son of Lord Archibald Hamilton, governor
of Greenwich hospital and of Jamaica, was born in Scotland on
the 13th of December 1730, and served in the 3rd Regiment of
Foot Guards from 1747 to 1758. He left the army after his
marriage with Miss Barlow, a Welsh heiress from whom he
inherited an estate near Swansea upon her death in 1782. Their
only child, a daughter, died in 1775. From 1761 to 1764 he
was member of parliament for Midhurst, but in the latter year
he was appointed envoy to the court of Naples, a post which he
held for thirty-six years—until his recall in 1800. During the
greater part of this time the official duties of the minister were
of small importance. It was enough that the representative
of the British crown should be a man of the world whose means
enabled him to entertain on a handsome scale. Hamilton was
admirably qualified for these duties, being an amiable and
accomplished man, who took an intelligent interest in science
and art. In 1766 he became a member of the Royal Society,
and between that year and 1780 he contributed to its Philosophical
Transactions a series of observations on the action of
volcanoes, which he had made, or caused to be made, at Vesuvius
and Etna. He employed a draftsman named Fabris to make
studies of the eruption of 1775 and 1776, and a Dominican,
Resina, to make observations at a later period. He published
several treatises on earthquakes and volcanoes between 1776
and 1783. He was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and
of the Dilettanti, and a notable collector. Many of his treasures
went to enrich the British Museum. In 1772 he was made a
knight of the Bath. The last ten years of his life presented a
curious contrast to the elegant peace of those which had preceded
them. In 1791 he married Emma Lyon (see the separate article
on Lady Hamilton). The outbreak of the French Revolution
and the rapid extension of the revolutionary movement in
Western Europe soon overwhelmed Naples. It was a misfortune
for Sir William that he was left to meet the very trying political
and diplomatic conditions which arose after 1793. His health
had begun to break down, and he suffered from bilious fevers.
Sir William was in fact in a state approaching dotage before
his recall, a fact which, combined with his senile devotion to
Lady Hamilton, has to be considered in accounting for his
extraordinary complaisance in her relations with Nelson. He
died on the 6th of April 1803.
See E. Edwards, Lives of the Founders of the British Museum (London, 1870); and the authorities given in the article on Emma, Lady Hamilton.
HAMILTON, SIR WILLIAM, Bart. (1788–1856), Scottish metaphysician,
was born in Glasgow on the 8th of March 1788. His
father, Dr William Hamilton, had in 1781, on the strong recommendation
of the celebrated William Hunter, been appointed
to succeed his father, Dr Thomas Hamilton, as professor of
anatomy in the university of Glasgow; and when he died in
1790, in his thirty-second year, he had already gained a great
reputation. William Hamilton and a younger brother (afterwards
Captain Thomas Hamilton, q.v.) were thus brought up
under the sole care of their mother. William received his early
education in Scotland, except during two years which he spent
in a private school near London, and went in 1807, as a Snell
exhibitioner, to Balliol College, Oxford. He obtained a first-class
in literis humanioribus and took the degree of B.A. in 1811,
M.A. in 1814. He had been intended for the medical profession,
but soon after leaving Oxford he gave up this idea, and in 1813
became a member of the Scottish bar. His life, however, was
mainly that of a student; and the following years, marked by
little of outward incident, were filled by researches of all kinds,
through which he daily added to his stores of learning, while
at the same time he was gradually forming his philosophic
system. Investigation enabled him to make good his claim to
represent the ancient family of Hamilton of Preston, and in 1816
he took up the baronetcy, which had been in abeyance since the
death of Sir Robert Hamilton of Preston (1650–1701), well known
in his day as a Covenanting leader.
Two visits to Germany in 1817 and 1820 led to his taking up the study of German and later on that of contemporary German philosophy, which was then almost entirely neglected in the British universities. In 1820 he was a candidate for the chair of moral philosophy in the university of Edinburgh, which had fallen vacant on the death of Thomas Brown, colleague of Dugald Stewart, and the latter’s consequent resignation, but was defeated on political grounds by John Wilson (1785–1854), the “Christopher North” of Blackwood’s Magazine. Soon afterwards (1821) he was appointed professor of civil history, and as such delivered several courses of lectures on the history of modern Europe and the history of literature. The salary was £100 a year, derived from a local beer tax, and was discontinued after a time. No pupils were compelled to attend, the class dwindled, and Hamilton gave it up when the salary ceased. In January 1827 he suffered a severe loss in the death of his mother, to whom he had been a devoted son. In March 1828 he married his cousin Janet Marshall.
In 1829 his career of authorship began with the appearance of the well-known essay on the “Philosophy of the Unconditioned” (a critique of Comte’s Cours de philosophie)—the first of a series of articles contributed by him to the Edinburgh Review. He was elected in 1836 to the Edinburgh chair of logic and metaphysics, and from this time dates the influence which, during the next twenty years, he exerted over the thought of the younger
