of her authority.  Horace Walpole sat on the doorstep—­or threatened to do so—­till she promised to go down to Strawberry Hill; Foster quoted her; Mrs. Thrale twined her arms about her; Wilberforce consulted her and employed her.  When The Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World was published anonymously, ‘Aut Morus, aut Angelus,’ exclaimed the Bishop of London, before he had read six pages.  Of her village stories and ballads two million copies were sold during the first year.  Caelebs in Search of a Wife ran into thirty editions.  Mrs. Barbauld writes to tell her about ‘a good and sensible woman’ of her acquaintance, who, on being asked how she contrived to divert herself in the country, replied, ’I have my spinning-wheel and my Hannah More.  When I have spun one pound of flax I put on another, and when I have finished my book I begin it again. I want no other amusement.’  How incredible it all sounds!  No wonder that Mrs. Walford exclaims, ’No other amusement!  Good heavens!  Breathes there a man, woman, or child with soul so quiescent nowadays as to be satisfied with reels of flax and yards of Hannah More?  Give us Hannah’s company, but not—­not her writings!’ It is only fair to say that Mrs. Walford has thoroughly carried out the views she expresses in this passage, for she gives us nothing of Hannah More’s grandiloquent literary productions, and yet succeeds in making us know her thoroughly.  The whole book is well written, but the biography of Hannah More is a wonderfully brilliant sketch, and deserves great praise.

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Miss Mabel Wotton has invented a new form of picture-gallery.  Feeling that the visible aspect of men and women can be expressed in literature no less than through the medium of line and colour, she has collected together a series of Word Portraits of Famous Writers extending from Geoffrey Chaucer to Mrs. Henry Wood.  It is a far cry from the author of the Canterbury Tales to the authoress of East Lynne; but as a beauty, at any rate, Mrs. Wood deserved to be described, and we hear of the pure oval of her face, of her perfect mouth, her ‘dazzling’ complexion, and the extraordinary youth by which ’she kept to the last the . . . freshness of a young girl.’  Many of the ‘famous writers’ seem to have been very ugly.  Thomson, the poet, was of a dull countenance, and a gross, unanimated, uninviting appearance; Richardson looked ’like a plump white mouse in a wig.’  Pope is described in the Guardian, in 1713, as ’a lively little creature, with long arms and legs:  a spider is no ill emblem of him.  He has been taken at a distance for a small windmill.’  Charles Kingsley appears as ’rather tall, very angular, surprisingly awkward, with thin staggering legs, a hatchet face adorned with scraggy gray whiskers, a faculty for falling into the most ungainly attitudes, and making the most hideous contortions of visage and frame; with a rough provincial accent and an uncouth way of speaking