He drank, and read Constantin Volney's Law of Nature and Tom Paine's The Age of Reason.
[1] In April 1814 Hall returned to Maidstone as proprietor of the bookshop where he had been errand-boy 28 years before.
[1] Hall retired from business in 1850, and in 1854 went to reside at Heath Cottage, Kentish Town, taking up religious and temperance work.
The first edition consisted of a series of selections from Karl Heinrich von Bogatzky's Golden Treasury, with a short introduction by Hall.
In subsequent editions he gradually substituted pages from his own for those taken from Bogatzky, until in the end the short work was his own with the exception of one extract.