opinion, or when caught praising books which he, as a moralist, abhorred,—­like the novels of Fielding and Smollet; for the only novelist he could tolerate was Richardson.  Once when she warmly expatiated in praise of the Jansenists, the overbearing autocrat exclaimed in a voice of thunder:  “Madam, let me hear no more of this!  Don’t quote your popish authorities to me; I want none of your popery!” But seeing that his friend was overwhelmed with the shock he gave her, his countenance instantly changed; his lip quivered, and his eyes filled with tears.  He gently took her hand, and with the deepest emotion exclaimed:  “Child, never mind what I have said,—­follow true piety wherever you find it.”  This anecdote is a key to the whole character of Johnson, interesting and uninteresting; for this rough, tyrannical dogmatist was also one of the tenderest of men, and had a soul as impressible as that of a woman.

The most intimate woman friend, it would seem, that Hannah ever had was Mrs. Garrick, both before and after the death of her husband; and the wife of Garrick was a Roman Catholic.  Hannah More usually spent several months with this accomplished and warm-hearted woman at her house in Hampton, generally from March to July.  This was often her home during the London season, after which she resided in Bristol with her sisters, who made a fortune by their boarding-school.  After Hannah had entered into the literary field she supported herself by her writings, which until 1785 were chiefly poems and dramas,—­now almost forgotten, but which were widely circulated and admired in her day, and by which she kept her position in fashionable and learned society.  After the death of Garrick, as we have said, she seemed to have acquired a disgust of the gay and fashionable society which at one time was so fascinating.  She found it frivolous, vain, and even dull.  She craved sympathy and intellectual conversation and knowledge.  She found neither at a fashionable party, only outside show, gay dresses, and unspeakable follies,—­no conversation; for how could there be either the cultivation of friendship or conversation in a crowd, perchance, of empty people for the most part?  “As to London,” says she, “I shall be glad to get out of it; everything is great and vast and late and magnificent and dull.”  I very seldom go to these parties, and I always repent when I do.  My distaste of these scenes of insipid magnificence I have not words to tell.  Every faculty but the sight is starved, and that has a surfeit.  I like conversation parties of the right sort, whether of four persons or forty; but it is impossible to talk when two or three hundred people are continually coming in and popping out, or nailing themselves to a card table.  “Conceive,” said she, “of the insipidity of two or three hundred people,—­all dressed in the extremity of fashion, painted as red as bacchanals, poisoning the air with perfumes, treading on each other’s dresses, not one in ten able