was buried in Bath; but her best monument you can see without going there; it is her book of Evelina and her Diary. HANNAH MORE OVER-FINE literary people will, I suppose, hardly recognize Hannah More-or Mistress Hannah More,1 as I prefer to call her, in virtue of a good old English, and a good old New Englandish custom, too, which gave this title of dignity to matronly women-married or unmarried, of mature age, and of worthy lives. We must go into the neighborhood of that picturesque old city of Bristol, in the West of England, to find her. She was one of the five daughters of a respectable schoolmaster in Gloucestershire. Hannah, though among the youngest, proved the clever one, and had written poems, more than passably good, before she was fifteen; and had completed a pastoral drama, when only seventeen. She was, moreover, comely; she was witty and alert of mind, and had so won upon the affections of a neighbor landholder, and wealthy gentleman of culture, that a marriage between the two came after a while to be arranged for; but this affair 1 Hannah More, b. 1745; d. 1833. never went beyond the arrangement,- for reasons which do not clearly appear. It does appear that the parties remained friendly, and that Mistress Hannah More was in receipt of an annual pension of £200-in the way of amende perhaps-her life through, from the backsliding but friendly groom. I am sorry to tell this story of her (about the £200). I think so well of her as to wish she had put it in an envelope, and returned it with her compliments -year after year-if need were. However, it went, as did many another hundred pounds and thousand pounds of her earnings, in the line of those great charities which illustrated and adorned her life. Her elder sisters as early as 1757 established in Bristol a school for young ladies, which became one of the most popular and favorite schools of the West of England; and when Hannah, some fifteen years later, went up to London, to look after the publication of her Search after Happiness, one or two of the sisters accompanied her; and Miss Hannah, who was "taken off her feet" by the acting of Garrick, was met most kindly by the great tragedian-was taken to his house, indeed, and became thereafter one of the most intimate of the friends of Mrs. Garrick. Dr. Johnson, too, was enchanted by the brisk humor and lively repartee in these clever West-of-England girls; and we have on record a bit of his talk to one of them. He said, in his leviathan way: "I have heard that you are engaged in the useful and honorable employment of teaching young ladies." Whereupon they tell the story of it all, in their bright, full, eager way, and of their successes and the Doctor, softened and made jolly and companionable, says, "What, five women live happily together in the same house! Bless me! I never was in Bristol-but I will come and see you. I'll come; I love you all five!" One of the sisters wrote home that she thought-"perhaps the big Doctor might marry Hannah; for 't was nothing but-'My love,' and 'My little Kitten,' between them all the evening." Shortly thereafter Mistress More wrote her tragedy of Percy; nobody, I think, reads it now; but Garrick became sponsor for it—writing both prologue and epilogue; and by reason perhaps of his sponsorship it ran some twenty nights successively; the tale of her stage profits running up to £600, which would pay for a good many trips from London to Bristol. When she came to treat for the publication of a poem which she wrote at that period-she being ignorant of rates,—it was arranged with her publisher that she should receive the sum, whatever it might have been, which was paid Goldsmith for The Deserted Village! In those early years she was the lively one, and the gay one, and the worldly one of the family; but with the death of Garrick, which came upon her like a blow, life and all its colors seemed to change. She haunted London and the theatres no more; she went up to weep indeed at her home on the Adelphi Terrace1 with the disconsolate Mrs. Garrick; but all phases of life have now, for Miss More, taken on a soberer hue; she teaches; she founds schools for the poor; she founds chapels; she writes tracts; her forward and sturdy evangelical proclivities involve her indeed in difficulties with the local church authorities; for her charities go vaulting over their canons; whereupon she relents and abases herself-and then sins in the same holy and beneficent ways of charity again-canons or no canons. As a worker she is indefatigable; she drives, rides, and walks over her missionary ground near to Bristol, with the zeal of a gold-hunter. There were those who questioned her wisdom 'Near present London "Embankment"; John Adams was in that day stopping at a tavern near by. and who questioned the quality of her wit, but never one, I think, anywhere, who questioned her goodness. She wrote a novel called Calebs in Search of a Wife. Do you happen to have read it? I hardly know whether to advise it, or not; there is so much to read! But if you do, you will find most excellent English in it, and a great deal of very good preaching; and many hints about the social habits of that time -trustworthy even to the dinner hour and the lunch hour; and maxims good enough for a copy book, or a calendar; and you will findwhat you will not find in all stories nowadays -a definite beginning and a definite end. I know what you may say, if you do read it. You would say that the sermons are too long, and that the hero is a prig; and that you would never marry him if he were worth twice his fortune, and were to offer himself ten times over. Well-perhaps not; but he had a deal of money. And that book of Calebs-whatever you may choose to say of it, had a tremendous success; it ran over Europe like wildfire; was translated into French, into German, into Dutch, into Polish, and I know not what language besides; and across the Atlantic-in those colonial days, when book-shops were not, as now, at every corner-over thirty thousand |