William Roberts, a barrister by profession, wrote weighty legal treatises and was the editor of the Looker-On, an early-nineteenth-century London quarterly journal of evangelical sympathies. As a literary biographer he is remembered as the author of Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More (1834), a work that has not fared well in the view of critics and historians of biography. Shortly after the publication of Memoirs, the influential critic and editor of the Quarterly Review, John Gibson Lockhart, wrote of the work that "had it been possible for any literator, with Mrs. Hannah More's correspondence at his hand, to produce an uninteresting work ... we are obliged to confess our belief that the task must have been accomplished by Mr. Roberts." Lockhart admits that "the regard with which Mrs. More honored ... him [Roberts] would of itself be a sufficient pledge of the purity of his intentions.... But...