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In July, 1736, a paragraph in the Grub Street Journal states that while the horses were being run on the Hampstead course, a gentleman, about sixty years of age, was observed hanging almost double over a gate, his head nearly touching the ground. His horse was grazing near him, and there had been no foul play; his watch and money were upon him. The dead man was a Mr. Hill, a teller in the Excise Office.

What an occasion would this incident have afforded for the fiery declamation and denunciation of the great Nonconformist preacher, George Whitfield, who three years afterwards writes in his Diary that he took his station under a tree near the horse-course at Hampstead! He was preaching there by invitation, and his audience, he tells us, were ‘some of the politer sort,’ which gave him occasion to speak to their souls of our spiritual race, and he adds, ‘most were attentive, but others mocked.’

Johnson somewhat cynically said of him that ‘he had known Whitfield at college before he became better than other people’; but he also said that ‘he believed he sincerely meant well, but had a mixture of politics and ostentation, while Wesley thought only of religion.’