were there have pronounced Cumberland's story a bit of blague. According to the newspapers of the day, Cumberland, instead of sitting by Drummond's side and telling him when to laugh in his peculiar manner, was visibly chagrined by the success of the piece, and as wretched as any man could well be. But Adam Drummond must have been a reality. His laugh still echoes in one's ears.

A

HANNAH MORE

1894

N ingenious friend of mine, who has collected a library in which every book is either a masterpiece of wit or a miracle of rarity, found great fault with me the other day for adding to my motley heap the writings of Mrs. Hannah More. In vain I pleaded I had given but eight shillings and sixpence for the nineteen volumes, neatly bound and lettered on the back. He was not thinking, so he protested, of my purse, but of my taste, and he went away, spurning the gravel under his feet, irritated that there should be such men as I.

I

I, however, am prepared to brazen it out. freely admit that the celebrated Mrs. Hannah More is one of the most detestable writers that ever held a pen. She flounders like a huge conger-eel in an ocean of dingy morality. She may have been a wit in her youth, though I am not aware of any evidence of it-certainly her poem, Bas Bleu, is none-but for all the rest of her days, and they were many, she was an encyclopædia of all literary vices. You may search her nineteen volumes through without lighting upon one original thought, one happy phrase. Her religion lacks reality. Not a single expression of genuine piety, of heart-felt emotion, ever escapes her lips. She is never pathetic, never terrible. Her creed is powerless either to

attract the well-disposed or make the guilty tremble. No naughty child ever read The Fairchild Family or Stories from the Church Catechism without quaking and quivering like a short-haired puppy after a ducking; but then Mrs. Sherwood was a woman of genius, whilst Mrs. Hannah More was a pompous failure.

Still, she has a merit of her own, just enough to enable a middle-aged man to chew the cud of reflection as he hastily turns her endless pages. She is an explanatory author, helping you to understand how sundry people who were old when you were young came to be the folk they were, and to have the books upon their shelves they had.

Hannah More was the first, and I trust the worst, of a large class—" the ugliest of her daughters Hannah," if I may parody a poet she affected to admire. This class may be imperfectly described as "the well-to-do Christian." It inhabited snug places in the country, and kept an excellent, if not dainty, table. The money it saved in a ballroom it spent upon a greenhouse. Its horses were fat, and its coachman invariably present at family prayers. Its pet virtue was Church twice on Sunday, and its peculiar horrors theatrical entertainments, dancing, and threepenny points. Outside its garden wall lived the poor who, if virtuous, were for ever curtsying to the ground or wearing neat uniforms, except when expiring upon truckle-beds beseeching God to bless the young ladies of The Grange or the Manor House, as the case might be.

As a book Calebs in Search of a Wife is as odious as it is absurd-yet for the reason already assigned it may be read with a certain curiosity-but as it

would be cruelty to attempt to make good my point by quotation, I must leave it as it is.

It is characteristic of the unreality of Hannah More that she prefers Akenside to Cowper, despite the latter's superior piety. Cowper's sincerity and pungent satire frightened her; the verbosity of Akenside was much to her mind:

Sir John is a passionate lover of poetry, in which he has a fine taste. He read it [a passage from Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination] with much spirit and feeling, especially these truly classical lines:

Mind, mind alone-bear witness, earth and heaven—
The living fountains in itself contains

Of Beauteous and Sublime; here hand in hand
Sit paramount the graces; here enthroned
Celestial Venus, with divinest airs,

Invites the soul to never-fading joy.

"The reputation of this exquisite passage," said he, laying down the book, "is established by the consenting suffrage of all men of taste, though, by the critical countenance you are beginning to put on you look as if you had a mind to

attack it."

"So far from it," said I [Cœlebs], “that I know nothing more splendid in the whole mass of our poetry."

Miss More had an odd life before she underwent what she calls a "revolution in her sentiments, a revolution, however, which I fear left her heart of hearts unchanged. She consorted with wits, though always, be it fairly admitted, on terms of decorum. She wrote three tragedies, which were not rejected as they deserved to be, but duly appeared on the boards of London and Bath with prologues and epilogues by Garrick and by Sheridan. She dined and supped and made merry. She had a prodigious flirtation with Dr. Johnson, who called her a saucy girl, albeit she was thirty-seven; and once, for there was no end to his waggery,

lamented she had not married Chatterton, "that posterity might have seen a propagation of poets." The good doctor, however, sickened of her flattery, and one of the rudest speeches even he ever made was addressed to her.

After Johnson's death Hannah met Boswell, full of his intended book, which she did her best to spoil with her oily fatuity. Said she to Boswell, "I beseech your tenderness for our virtuous and most revered departed friend; I beg you will mitigate some of his asperities," to which diabolical counsel the Inimitable replied roughly, “He would not cut off his claws nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody."

The most moving incident in Hannah More's life occurred near its close, and when she was a lone, lorn woman-her sisters Mary, Betty, Sally, and Patty having all predeceased her. She and they had long lived in a nice house or "place" called Barley Wood, in the neighbourhood of Bristol, and here her sisters one after another died, leaving poor Hannah in solitary grandeur to the tender mercies of Mrs. Susan, the housekeeper; Miss Teddy, the lady's-maid; Mrs. Rebecca, the housemaid; Mrs. Jane, the cook; Miss Sally, the scullion; Mr. Timothy, the coachman; Mr. John, the gardener; and Mr. Tom, the gardener's man. Eight servants and one aged pilgrim-of such was the household of Barley Wood!

Outwardly decorum reigned. Poor Miss More fondly imagined her domestics doted on her, and that they joyfully obeyed her laws. It was the practice at family prayer for each of the servants to repeat a text. Visitors were much impressed,