religious amid the savage profligacy which then marked the peasant class.  The first school she established was at Cheddar, a wild and sunless hollow, amid yawning caverns, about ten miles from Cowslip Green,—­the resort of pleasure parties for its picturesque cliffs and fissures.  Around this weird spot was perhaps the most degraded peasantry to be found in England, without even spiritual instruction,—­for the vicar was a non-resident, and his living was worth but L50 a year.  In her efforts to establish a school in such a barbarous and pagan locality Hannah met with serious obstacles.  The farmers and petty landholders were hostile to her scheme, maintaining that any education would spoil the poor, and make them discontented.  Even the farmers themselves were an ignorant and brutal class, very depraved, and with intense prejudices.  For a whole year she labored with them to disarm their hostilities and prejudices, and succeeded at last in collecting two hundred and fifty children in the schoolhouse which she had built.  Their instruction was of course only elemental, but it was religious.

From Cheddar, Hannah More was led to examine into the condition of neighboring places.  Thirteen contiguous parishes were without a resident curate, and nine of these were furnished with schools, with over five hundred scholars.  Her theory was,—­a suitable education for each, and a Christian education for all.  While she was much encouraged by her ecclesiastical aristocratic friends, she still encountered great opposition from the farmers.  She also excited the jealousy of the Dissenters for thus invading the territory of ignorance.  All her movements were subjected to prelates and clergymen of the Church of England for their approval; for she put herself under their patronage.  And yet the brutal ignorance of the peasantry was owing in part to the neglect of these very clergymen, who never visited these poor people under their charge.  As an excuse for them, it may be said that at that time there were 4,809 parishes in England and Wales in which a clergyman could not reside, if he would, for lack of a parsonage.  At that time, even in Puritan New England, every minister was supposed to live in a parsonage.  To-day, not one parish in ten is provided with that desirable auxiliary.

Not only were the labors of Hannah More extended to the ignorant and degraded by the establishment of schools in her neighborhood, at an expense of about L1,000 a year, part of which she contributed herself, but she employed her pen in their behalf, writing, at the solicitation of the Bishop of London, a series of papers or tracts for the times, with special reference to the enlightenment of the lower classes on those subjects that were then agitating the country.  The whole land was at this time inundated with pamphlets full of infidelity and discontent, fanned by the French Revolution, then passing through its worst stages of cruelty, atheism, and spoliation.  Burke about