fore her death she expressed a strong desire to die. She went to bed, apparently in her usual health, but was found to be in a state of coma in the morning, and she died on the afternoon of the same day, 23d February

1851.

XXII

HANNAH MORE

MISS CHARLOTTE M. YONGE'S charming little biography of Hannah More brings strikingly before us the picture of the authoress of Calebs in Search of a Wife, and also depicts in a way that will not easily be forgotten, some of the more striking contrasts between the present day and the England of eighty or ninety years ago. There are some who are always inclined to say the old is better"; but they must be very curiously constituted who can look back on the social condition of our country at the end of the last century and beginning of this, without being filled with amazement and thankfulness at the improvement that has taken place.

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It is not so generally remembered as it ought to be, that the second half of Hannah More's life was devoted to the service of the poor, especially to the spread of some measure of education and civilisation in the then almost savage districts in the neighbourhood of Cheddar, and of the Mendip Hills. Yet even so advanced an educationalist as Hannah More thought that on no account should the poor be taught to write. In a letter to Bishop Beadon, describing her system of instruction for the poor children in the parishes immediately under her care, she says: "They learn on week-days such coarse work as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in

habits of industry and piety." We cannot have a more apt illustration of the fact that the advanced reformer of one generation may become, by the natural growth of society, the type of what is most exaggeratedly retrograde in the next. It would be very ungenerous and shortsighted on our part to condemn Hannah More for her narrowness of view. She belonged to a day when the farmers in the village, where she sought to establish a Sunday school, begged her to desist because "religion would be the ruin of agriculture, and had done nothing but mischief ever since it had been brought in by the monks at Glastonbury." At another place her educational schemes were so stoutly opposed by all the leading inhabitants that it was impossible to obtain for the school the shelter of any roof, and the children were accordingly assembled to sing a few hymns under an apple-tree. They were soon, however, driven from this shelter by the fears of the owner of the tree, who said he was afraid the hymn singing was "methody," and that "methody" had blighted an apple-tree belonging to his mother!

Even these examples of ignorance and superstition might possibly, however, be matched at the present day. More thoroughly significant of a state of things that is past and gone for ever, is the following incident. "On a Sunday," about the year 1790, "in the midst of morning service the congregations in the Bristol churches were startled by the bell and voice of the crier, proclaiming the reward of a guinea for a poor negro girl who had run away." The idea of property in human beings is one that is now universally abhorrent; but less than a hundred years ago the loss of such property could be cried in the midst of congregations assembled to acknowledge the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity, and it was only one here and there among the worshippers who felt the blasphemy and the mockery of the proceeding. As an illustration of the extreme hardships endured by poor before the era of steam manufactures had set in, we learn that the difficulty in obtaining clothes was so

the

great that at Brentford, close to London, thrifty parents bought rags by the pound, and made clothing for their children by patching the pieces together. Brushes and combs, it is added, were entirely unknown. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say that the poorest beggar of the present day can, if he choose, be more luxuriously clad and cared for than the children of the thrifty poor a hundred years ago. The difference in morals is as great as the difference in manners and education. Hannah More heard a charity sermon, in which the preacher, a dignified ecclesiastic, propounded that "the rich and great should be extremely liberal in their charities, because they were happily exempted from the severer virtues." This was the old Papal practice of the sale of indulgences appearing again in a Protestant dress. No wonder, if this was a type of the Gospel that was preached to the rich, that Patty, Hannah's sister, was accustomed to say that she had good hope that the hearts of some of the "rich poor wretches" might be touched by her sister's eloquence.

The change of manners may be illustrated by the following anecdote. Hannah More, in the height of her literary celebrity, was asked to sit next the Bishop of Chester, Dr. Porteous, at dinner, and make him talk. She pressed him to take a little wine. He replied, "I can't drink a little, child: therefore I never touch it. Abstinence is easy to me; temperance would be difficult."

These were days when Edmund Spenser was not considered a poet, and when Dryden and Pope were preferred to Shakespeare. Hannah, however, defended Milton's L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas, against the strictures. of Dr. Johnson; though they found themselves in entire agreement in depreciating Milton's sonnets. Johnson's simile for a sonnet was "" a bead carved out of a cherry stone.' The noble and solemn music of Milton's majestic sonnets certainly did not harmonise with Johnson's image, and, therefore, as Milton's sonnets were not pretty playthings, it was agreed that he could not write sonnets.

The bigotry and narrowness of religious criticism at

that day may be measured by the fact, which Hannah mentions in one of her letters, that her book on Practical Piety had been attacked by the Calvinists as giving a sanction to idolatry, because she had spoken of the sun as “he.” She did not altogether escape being tarred with the same brush, if we may judge from the passage in Calebs, where she makes Mr. Stanley complain of Day's Sandford and Merton, and other books which had lately been written for the young, that there was "no intimation in them of the corruption of human nature, and thus that they contradict the catechism when it speaks of being 'born in sin, and the children of wrath.'" She could not help, it appears, taking her religion sadly, as English people are supposed to take their pleasures. There was, however, a great fund of natural gaiety and light-heartedness in her, but whether she considered this one of the results of being a child of wrath or not, she did not seem to think gaiety, any more than writing, was a thing to be encouraged in the poor. She describes a great meeting of the schools founded by herself in the Mendip Hills. This annual "Mendip feast took the form of what we should now call a gigantic school treat. The schools established were spread over an area of twenty-eight miles, and nearly the whole population of the villages, to the number of seven or eight thousand people, attended. The children were generously regaled on substantial fare. But nothing in the form of a game or a festivity of any kind was permitted. The singing of "God save the King" "is the only pleasure in the form of a song we ever allow. . . . The meeting," she says again, "took its rise from religious institutions. The day passed in the exercise of duties, and closed with joy. Nothing of a gay nature was introduced. . . .'

One cannot help thinking, on reading this, that she had only herself to thank if, in spite of all her talents and goodness, her name became a byword for severity and primness. Charles Lamb speaks in one of his early letters of "outHannahing Hannah More "; and she herself tells what she states is a true story, illustrating the way in which she was