‘Such books as Miss More’s,’ she says, ’would to-day in America fall from the press like a stone into the depths of the sea of oblivion, creating no more sensation upon the surface than the bursting of a bubble in mid-Atlantic.’

And again: 

’That Hannah More was a power for righteousness in her long generation we must take upon the testimony of her best and wisest contemporaries.’

However good may be your intentions, it seems hard to avoid being rude to this excellent lady.

I confess I never liked her love story.  Anything more cold-blooded I never read.  I am not going to repeat it.  Why should I?  It is told at length in Miss More’s authorized biography in four volumes by William Roberts, Esq.  I saw a copy yesterday exposed for sale in New Oxford Street, price 1s.  Miss Harland also tells the tale, not without chuckling.  I refer the curious to her pages.

Then there are those who can never get rid of the impression that Hannah More ‘fagged’ her four sisters mercilessly; but who can tell?  Some people like being fagged.

Precisely when Miss More bade farewell to what in later life she was fond of calling her gay days, when she wrote dull plays and went to stupid Sunday parties, one finds it hard to discover, but at no time did it ever come home to her that she needed repentance herself.  She seems always thinking of the sins and shortcomings of her neighbours, rich and poor.  Sometimes, indeed, when deluged with flattery, she would intimate that she was a miserable sinner, but that is not what I mean.  She concerned herself greatly with the manners of the great, and deplored their cards and fashionable falsehoods.  John Newton, captain as he had been of a slaver, saw the futility of such pin-pricks: 

‘The fashionable world,’ so he wrote to Miss More, ’by their numbers form a phalanx not easily impressible, and their habits of life are as armour of proof which renders them not easily vulnerable.  Neither the rude club of a boisterous Reformer nor the pointed, delicate weapons of the authoress before me can overthrow or rout them.’

But Miss More never forgot to lecture the rich or to patronize the poor.

Coelebs in Search of a Wife is an impossible book, and I do not believe Miss Harland has read it; but as for the famous Shepherd, we are never allowed to forget how Mr. Wilberforce declared a few years before his death, to the admiration of the religious world, that he would rather present himself in heaven with The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain in his hand than with—­what think you?—­Peveril of the Peak!  The bare notion of such a proceeding on anybody’s part is enough to strike one dumb with what would be horror, did not amazement swallow up every other feeling.  What rank Arminianism!  I am sure the last notion that ever would have entered the head of Sir Walter was to take Peveril to heaven.