Booth wished to appear in a new tragedy, and Hill wrote in a week that "Elfrid" which the public damned in a night.[91] Hill was always ready to write. At Westminster, he had filled his pockets by writing the exercises of young gentlemen who had not wit for the work; and by and by he will be writing the "Bastard," for Savage. Meanwhile, here was "Elfrid," written and condemned. The author allowed that it was "an unpruned wilderness of fancy, with here and there a flower among the leaves, but without any fruit of judgment." At this time, Hill was a young fellow of four and twenty, with great experience and some reputation. A friendless young "Westminster," he had at fifteen found his way alone to Constantinople, where he obtained a patron in the ambassador, the sixth Lord Paget,--a distant relation of the youthful Aaron. Under the peer's auspices, Hill travelled extensively in the East; and subsequently, ere he was yet twenty, accompanied Sir William Wentworth, as travelling tutor, over most of Europe. Later, his poem of "Camillus," in defence of Lord Peterborough, procured for him the post of secretary to that brave and eccentric peer, with whom he remained till his marriage. Then Aaron lived with a divided allegiance to his wife and the stage, for the improvement of which he had many an impracticable theory. He would willingly have written a tragedy for Booth once a week. Tragedies not being in request, Hill tried farce, and produced his "Walking Statue," a _screamer_, as improbable as his "Elfrid" was _unpruned_. The audience would not tolerate it; and Hill came before them in a few days with a comedy,--"Trick upon Trick," at which the house howled rather than laughed.[92] Whereupon Hill new-nibbed his pen, and addressed himself to composition again. The treasury gained more by the appearance of Elrington, in "Oroonoko," than by Hill's novelties. Then, the trial of putting the fairy dancer, Santlow, into boy's clothes, and giving her the small part of the Eunuch in "Valentinian" to play, and an epilogue to be spoken in male attire, succeeded so well, that she was cast for Dorcas Zeal in Charles Shadwell's "Fair Quaker of Deal," wherein she took the town, and won the heart of Booth. In this character-piece Flip, the sea-brute, is contrasted with Beau Mizen, the sea-fop; but the latter is, in some degree, a copy of Baker's Maiden, the progenitor of the family of Dundreary.