to get a chair when fainting with weariness.  I never now go to these things when I can possibly avoid it, and stay when there as few minutes as I can.”  Thus she wrote as early as 1782.  She went through the same experience as did Madame Recamier, learning to prefer a small and select circle, where conversation was the chief charm, especially when this circle was composed only of gifted men and women.  In this incipient disgust of gay and worldly society—­chiefly because it improved neither her mind nor her morals, because it was stupid and dull, as it generally is to people of real culture and high intelligence—­she seems to have been gradually drawn to the learned prelates of the English Church,—­like Dr. Porteus, Bishop of Chester, afterwards of London; the Bishop of St. Asaph; and Dr. Home, then Dean of Canterbury.  She became very intimate with Wilberforce and Rev. John Newton, while she did not give up her friendship for Horace Walpole, Pepys, and other lights of the social world.

About this time (1785) she retired to Cowslip Green, a pretty cottage ten miles from Bristol, and spent her time in reading, writing, and gardening.  The country, with its green pastures and still waters, called her back to those studies and duties which are most ennobling, and which produce the most lasting pleasure.  In this humble retreat she had many visitors from among her illustrious friends.  She became more and more religious, without entirely giving up society; corresponding with the eminent men and women she visited, especially Mrs. Montagu, Dr. Porteus, Mrs. Boscawen, Mr. Pepys, and Rev. John Newton.  In the charming seclusion of Cowslip Green she wrote her treatise on the “Manners of the Great;” the first of that series in which she rebuked the fashions and follies of the day.  It had an immense circulation, and was published anonymously.  This very popular work was followed, in 1790, by a volume on an “Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World,” which produced a still deeper sensation among the great, and was much admired.  The Bishop of London (Porteus) was full of its praises; so was John Newton, although he did not think that any book could wean the worldly from their pleasures.

Thus far most of the associations of Hannah More had been with the fashionable world, by which she was petted and flattered.  Seeing clearly its faults, she had sought to reform it by her writings and by her conversation.  But now she turned her attention to another class,—­the poor and ignorant,—­and labored for them.  She instituted a number of schools for the poor in her immediate neighborhood, superintended them, raised money for them, and directed them, as Madame de Maintenon did the school of St. Cyr; only with this difference,—­that while the Frenchwoman sought to develop the mind and character of a set of aristocratic girls to offset the practical infidelity that permeated the upper walks of life, Hannah More desired to make the children of the poor