and provocative of temper.  Think of the room they take!  As for selling them, it is not so easy to sell nineteen volumes of a stone-dead author, particularly if you live three miles from a railway-station and do not keep a trap.  Elia, the gentle Elia, as it is the idiotic fashion to call a writer who could handle his ‘maulies’ in a fray as well as Hazlitt himself, has told us how he could never see well-bound books he did not care about, but he longed to strip them so that he might warm his ragged veterans in their spoils.  My copy of Hannah More was in full calf, but never once did it occur to me—­though I, too, have many a poor author with hardly a shirt to his back shivering in the dark corners of the library—­to strip her of her warm clothing.  And yet I had to do something, and quickly too, for sorely needed was Miss More’s shelf.  So I buried the nineteen volumes in the garden.  ’Out of sight, out of mind,’ said I cheerfully, stamping them down.

This has hardly proved to be the case, for though Hannah More is incapable of a literary resurrection, and no one of her nineteen volumes has ever haunted my pillow, exclaiming,

       ‘Think how thou stab’dst me in my prime of youth,’

nevertheless, I have not been able to get quite rid of an uneasy feeling that I was rude to her ten years ago in print—­not, indeed, so rude as was her revered friend Dr. Johnson 126 years ago to her face; but then, I have not the courage to creep under the gabardine of our great Moralist.

When, accordingly, I saw on the counters of the trade the daintiest of volumes, hailing, too, from the United States, entitled Hannah More,[A] and perceived that it was a short biography and appreciation of the lady on my mind, I recognised that my penitential hour had at last come.  I took the little book home with me, and sat down to read, determined to do justice and more than justice to the once celebrated mistress of Cowslip Green and Barley Wood.

 [Footnote A:  Hannah More, by Marian Harland.  New York and London: 
 G.P.  Putnam.]

Miss Harland’s preface is most engaging.  She reminds a married sister how in the far-off days of their childhood in a Southern State their Sunday reading, usually confined or sought to be confined, to ’bound sermons and semi-detached tracts,’ was enlivened by the Works of Hannah More.  She proceeds as follows: 

’At my last visit to you I took from your bookshelves one of a set of volumes in uniform binding of full calf, coloured mellowly by the touch and the breath of fifty odd years.  They belonged to the dear old home library....  The leaves of the book I held fell apart at The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.’

I leave my readers to judge how uncomfortable these innocent words made me: 

’The usher took six hasty strides
As smit with sudden pain.’

I knew that set of volumes, their distressing uniformity of binding, their full calf.  Their very fellows lie mouldering in an East Anglian garden, mellow enough by this time and strangely coloured.