commit the grossest crimes under the mask of sentiment, and with the apology of irresistible passion, or unsuitable alliance, or some other equally false and corrupt motive: this, I doubt not, has been one grand and leading cause of the corruption of principle which has lately so peculiarly disgraced our courts of justice, and made it almost dangerous for a lady of delicacy to look over a newspaper, for fear of having her eyes offended with one of those disgusting trials.' She has some pleasantries which we think do her not less honour in their own way. The following excellent satire upon Frenchified English was addressed to Horace Walpole, and entitled A Letter from a Lady to her Friend, in the Reign of George the Fifth: ' 'Alamode Castle, June 20, 1840.- Dear Madam,-I no sooner found myself here than I visited my new apartment, which is composed of five pieces; the small room which gives upon the garden is practised through the great one, and there is no other issue. As I was quite exceeded with fatigue, I had no sooner made my toilette than I let myself fall on a bed of repose, where sleep came to surprise me. My lord and I are in the intention to make good cheer, and a great expense; and this country is in possession to furnish wherewithal to amuse oneself. All that England has of illustrious, all that youth has of amiable, or beauty of ravishing, sees itself in this quarter. Render yourself here then, my friend, and you shall find assembled all that there is of best, whether for letters, whether for birth. 6 Yesterday I did my possible to give to eat: the dinner was of the last perfection, and the wines left nothing to desire. The repast was seasoned with a thousand rejoicing sallies, full of salt and agreement, and one more brilliant than another. Lady Frances charmed me as for the first time; she is made to paint, has a great air, and has infinitely of expression in her physiognomy; her manners have as much of natural, as her figure has of interesting. 'I had prayed Lady B. to be of this dinner, as I had heard nothing but good of her, but I am now disabused on her subject: she is past her first youth, has very little instruction, is inconsequent, and subject to caution; but having evaded with one of her pretenders, her reputation has been committed by the bad faith of a friend, on whose fidelity she reposed herself; she is therefore fallen into devotion, goes no more to spectacles, and play is defended at her house. Though she affects a mortal serious, I observed that her eyes were of intelligence with those of Sir James, near whom I had taken care to plant myself, though this is always a sacrifice with costs. Sir James is a great sayer of nothings; it is a spoilt mind; full of fatuity and pretension; his conversation is a tissue of impertinences, and the bad tone which reigns at present has put the last hand to his defects. He makes but little case of his word, but as he lends himself to whatever is proposed of amusing, the women all throw themselves at his head. Adieu.' No one can rise from the perusal of the letters which have furnished us with these extracts, without being satisfied that Hannah More More must have been a delightful addition to the society of London. But Mr. Roberts tells us, and the letters themselves confirm his statement, that even before Garrick died she had begun to suspect that the gay world was taking too strong a hold on her affections, and to revolve the possibility of realizing the vision of her earliest childhood, and building for herself, in some sequestered village, a cottage too low for a clock.' In the year 1786 she effected this long-cherished purpose, and Cowslip Green received her a very tiny dwelling, with a pretty garden, at no great distance from Bristol, where her exemplary sisters were still labouring in their vocation. In due season these ladies satisfied their modest desires as to worldly wealth, and shared Hannah's retirement during the summer months, while she, in turn, joined them in the winter in a house which they built for themselves in Pulteney Street, Bath. In after time, they gave up both Cowslip Green and Bath, and erected a large and comfortable house at Barley Grove-a property of some extent, which they purchased and improved; but from the day that the school was given up, the existence of the whole sisterhood appears to have flowed on in one uniform current of peace and contentment, diversified only by new appearances of Hannah as аn authoress, and the ups and downs which she and the others met with in the prosecution of a most brave and humane experiment-namely, their zealous effort to extend the blessings of education and religion among the inhabitants of certain villages, situated in a wild country some eight or ten miles from their abode, who, from a concurrence of unhappy local and temporary circumstances, had been left in a state of ignorance hardly conceivable at the present day. 6 It would be idle in us to dwell here on works so well known as the Thoughts on the Manners of the Great,' the Essay on the Religion of the Fashionable World,' and so on, which finally established Miss More's name as a great moral writer, possessing a masterly command over the resources of our language, and devoting a keen wit and a lively fancy to the best and noblest of purposes. She seems to us to have, even at an early period, attached an undue importance to many things, and to have, in the end, seriously abridged her own field of usefulness by the needless severity of her attacks on trifles. It is, for instance, quite melancholy to find her expending a solemn diatribe on the blasphemy of a newspaper paragraph which mentioned the ascension' of a balloon. These were sad weaknesses-but that, in spite of them all, she was the instrument of very great good to English society, high as well as low, who dares to dispute? How many have thanked God for the hour that first made them acquainted with the writings of Hannah More! Whenever Whenever she visited London in her middle life, she took up her residence under the roof of Mrs. Garrick, who had now almost entirely withdrawn from mixed society; and her friends of the giddy world and the blue world appear to have gradually given place to such honoured names as Beilby Porteus, Kennicott, Horne, and Shute Barrington. It is, in many points of view, to be regretted, that her habitual residence near Bristol prevented her from seeing such friends as these so often as she and they would have desired; for the consequence certainly was, that she gradually connected herself more and more closely with persons far inferior to her and them in intellectual rank, and at length came to be, not without some show of reason, regarded by the public at large as too much the adherent of a prejudiced and rather uncharitable party in the religious republic. The genuine liberality of her heart and conduct was never better exemplified than in the whole affair of her intercourse with Ann Yearsley, the Bristol milkwoman,' whose story has recently been recalled from oblivion by Mr. Southey's Essay on the Uneducated Poets. The popularity of that elegant work renders it needless for us to go into the details of the case on the present occasion. She was warned on the threshold by her friend Mrs. Montague, in these striking and beautiful words : I am surprised and charmed with your account of the poetical milkwoman; but I beg of you to inform yourself, as much as you can, of her temper, disposition, and moral character. It has sometimes happened to me, that, by an endeavour to encourage talents and cherish virtue, by driving from them the terrifying spectre of pale poverty, Ihave introduced a legion of little demons: vanity, luxury, idleness, and pride, have entered the cottage the moment poverty vanished.' Miss More, however, persisted; and, by her own ardent efforts, and the assistance of her friends, soon rescued Lactilla' from all her pecuniary distresses. The sad result we need not dwell upon. No long time has elapsed before we find Hannah thus terminating a letter to Mrs. Montague: I am come to the postscript, without having found courage to tell you what I am sure you will hear with pain, at least it gives me infinite pain to write it-I mean the most open and notorious ingratitude of our milk woman. There is hardly a species of slander the poor unhappy creature does not propagate against me, in the most public manner, because I have called her a milkwoman, and because I have placed the money in the funds, instead of letting her spend it. I confess my weakness-it goes to my heart, not for my own sake, but for the sake of our common nature; so much for my inward feelings: as to my active resentment, I am trying to get a place for her husband, and am endeavouring to make up the sum I have raised for her to five hundred pounds. Do not let this harden your heart or mine against any future object. Fate bene per voi is a beautiful maxim,' The The milkwoman presently put her slander into a printed shape; and Mrs. Montague, on reading the libel, found one thing for which Mrs. More's letter had not prepared her: here is her comment : Mrs. Yearsley's conceit that you can envy her talents gives me comfort, for as it convinces me she is mad, I build upon it a hope that she is not guilty in the All-seeing eye.' The last allusion Mrs. More herself makes to the behaviour of Lactilla' is on the occasion of a second publication of hers, in which the admirable patroness was again, after a lapse of two years, maligned and insulted with a cool bitterness that may well be called diabolical-and it is in these words-she is addressing Horace Walpole :- Do, dear Sir, join me in sincere compassion, without one atom of resentment. If I wanted to punish an enemy, it should be by fastening on him the trouble of constantly hating somebody.' (vol. ii. p. 81.) 6 We think no one who has read a recent tract entitled Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott, by the Ettrick Shepherd,' can be at a loss for a tolerably complete parallel to the whole of this story of Hannah More and the Bristol Milkwoman. The unbounded benevolence on the side of the superior, and the festering vanity and jealousy of the inferior, at length bursting into open outrage against every good feeling and every rule of common decency, are alike in both cases: with this small difference in favour of the milkwoman, that she did not keep silence until the object of her envious spleen was no more; and with this difference also in favour of Hannah, that she was thus enabled to assert her own dignity as who doubts Sir Walter would, under similar circumstances, have done ?—by the tranquillity of a compassionate forgiveness. The second and third of these volumes are chiefly occupied with details about the Sunday and other schools established at Cheddar and elsewhere by Hannah and Martha More. In September, 1796, the former says, I think our various schools and societies consist of about sixteen or seventeen hundred.' Some of these were fifteen miles from their residence; and the devotion of the sisters to this wide-spread scheme of benevolence was such, that it may be said to have occupied them for many years as completely as any worldly profession occupies the most diligent and successful individual. Such conduct is above all praise. It is only to be regretted that Mr. Roberts has not followed up the most interesting series of letters in which this part of Mrs. More's history is conveyed, by something like a clear statement of the ultimate result of her exertions. He exposes, very properly, the noxious interference with which, from very small motives, a curate of one of her parishes thwarted and perplexed her; and all that he says VOL. LII. NO. CIV. 2 G about about the conduct of the then Bishop of Bath and Wells, who on every occasion supported and countenanced the sisterhood, is satisfactory to the mind; but we are left in the dark as to the great practical question in how far the scheme realized in the issue Hannah More's fervent anticipations; and another scarcely less important, namely, whether the machinery she had arranged was found to be at all effective when advancing years and other circumstances made it impossible for her and her sister to continue their own daily labours in its superintendence. That much good was done it is, however, impossible for us to doubt; and we transcribe this account of the funeral of one of their humble assistants, as in itself a sufficient testimony. Cheddar, August 18, 1795.-We have just deposited the remains of our excellent Mrs. Baber, to mingle with her kindred dust. Who else has ever been so attended, so followed to the grave? Of the hundreds who attended, all had some tokens of mourning in their dress. All the black gowns in the village were exhibited, and those who had none had some broad, some little bits, of narrow black ribbon, such as their few spare pence could provide. The house, the garden, and place before the door were full. But how shall I describe it? Not one single voice or step was heard their very silence was dreadful; but it was not the least affecting part to see their poor little ragged pocket-handkerchiefs, not half sufficient to dry their tears-some had none; and those tears that did not fall to the ground, they wiped off with some part of their dress. Though the stones were rugged, you did not hear one single footstep. The undertaker from Bristol wept like a child, and confessed, that, without emolument, it was worth going a hundred miles to see such a sight. I forgot to mention, the children sobbed a suitable hymn over the grave. Here was no boisterous, hysterical grief, for the departed had taught them how to select suitable texts for such occasions, and when to apply the promises of Scripture. I think almost tears enough were shed to lay the dust.' It is well known that Mrs. More, among other good works, gave a powerful support to the old constitution of these realms by various political tracts, in prose and verse, which she put forth during the revolutionary war. It is impossible to read the letters in which she adverts to the internal danger of her country at that period, without applying her language to the still more alarming condition of England at the present day. What a true picture is the following! · Bath, happy Bath, is as gay as if there were no war, nor sin, nor misery in the world! We run about all the morning, lamenting the calamities of the times, anticipating our ruin, and regretting the general dissipation; and every night we are running into every excess, to a degree unknown in calmer times. Yet it is the fashion to affect to be religious, and to show it by inveighing against the wickedness of France!' As |