Charlotte Mary Yonge

“ The King was delighted with it, and Bishop Porteous, who was in the secret, wrote this note to Hannah:—
My Dear Mrs. Chip,—I have this moment received your husband's dialogue and it is supremely excellent. I look upon Mr. Chip to be one of the finest writers of the age, this work alone will immortalise him, and, what is better still, I trust it will help to immortalise the Constitution. If the sale is as rapid as the book is good, Mr. Chip will get an immense fortune and completely destroy all equality at once. ”

“ Miss Reynolds told the sisters that "Sir Eldred was the theme in all polite circles, and that the beauteous Bertha has kindled a flame in the cold bosom of Johnson."
Garrick was equally delighted, and read the verses aloud to select audiences with all the effect of his perfect elocution. On one of these occasions Hannah wrote: "I think I never was so ashamed in my life, but he read it so superlatively that I cried like a child. Only think what a scandalous thing to cry at one's own poetry. ”

“ On Sunday, the 25th of October, 140 children assembled at the school, and the little mission party took them to church, which they found more crowded than it had been for forty years, except on a club day. The curate preached for twelve minutes on the laws of the land and the divine right of Kings, but the divine right of the King of Kings seemed to be a law above his comprehension. The farmers looked on in armed neutrality, with the prevailing sentiment that reading never did good to anyone, and that religion would be the ruin of agriculture. ”

“ Thence Hannah wrote on the New Year's Day of 1792:—
"The waters, I think, are doing me good, and I have been very much better since I came to close winter quarters, owing, under God, to my being quite shut up. Much as I love air and exercise, the loss of them is but a petty sacrifice to what many are called to make; and as I have no avocation at present which makes it a duty to run risks by going out, I am thankful to be furnished with so good a pretence for laying in a little health for future services ”

“ Conquest is pillage with a nobler name,
Who makes the sum of human blessings less,
Or sinks the stock of general happiness.
Though erring fame may grace, though false renown
His life may blazon or his memory crown,
Yet the last Audit shall reverse the cause,
And God shall vindicate His broken laws.
The influences which had freshly come into Miss More's life, and the yearnings for higher things that had always been hers, led her to devote her talent to something more serious than the playful and complimentary, or even ironical, verses which had hitherto been her forte. ”

“ Before we came in sight of the little town of Wrington, we entered an avenue thickly bordered with luxuriant evergreens, which led directly to the cottage of Barley Wood. As we drew nearer the building, a thick hedge of roses, jessamine, woodbine, and clematis, fringed the smooth and sloping lawn on one side; on the other, laurel and laurustinus were in full and beautiful verdure. From the shrubbery the ground ascends, and is well wooded by flowing larch, dark cypress, spreading chestnut, and some hardy forest trees. ”

“ Nothing shows more what Hannah, in spite of her lively playfulness, must have been than the fact that she was indispensable to her friends in time of sorrow. She had not long returned to Bristol before she was summoned to Oxford to aid Mrs. Kennicott in attending on her husband in a fatal illness at Christchurch. Indeed, Hannah was actually present during the last moments, having forced the wife from the room. ”

“ She must have been carefully educated in a dread of mysticism, for the dislike of it in a person with so strong a feeling for poetry was remarkable. She had a veritable instinct for poetry, which made her stand up against Johnson himself when he contemned L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas. Neither of them, however, appreciated the sonnets, for it was to Hannah that Johnson made the well-known speech: "Milton, Madam, was a genius that could cut a colossus from a rock, but could not carve beads out of cherry-stones." ”

“ Good Mrs. Baker was a tower of strength, and Cheddar became a sort of normal school. Also the old vicar of Shipham died, and his successor, Mr. Jones, was no absentee, but a hearty and zealous worker.
Axbridge was the next place attempted. It was a small stocking-making town, with a corporation very poor, yet so luxurious as never to admit a plain joint of meat at its civic banquets. The fighting vicar, however, was civil to the ladies, and sanctioned their labours. Nor did the corporation reject them; so that they were able to begin with a hundred poor little dirty, half-starved creatures. ”

“ Such were the descriptions that the quiet sisterhood at Cowslip Green gave the young Member of Parliament, who in those hours of retirement had been praying for the wretched beings that he had seen at Cheddar. To begin what we should call in these days a Mission was the only thing to be done; but missions had not then been invented, and the clergy were worse than useless in the matter. There was nobody to depend on but the ladies themselves; and at last, when Hannah and Patty had volunteered, Mr. Wilberforce said: "If you will be at the trouble, I will be at the expense." ”

“ One of the company happened to say a word about poetry. 'Hush, hush!' said he; 'it is dangerous to say a word of poetry before her; it is talking of the art of war before Hannibal.'"
Then followed a breakfast where Hannah had a discussion with that strange person, the Scotch Lord Monboddo, who complained that everything was degenerating.
"Men are not so tall as they were; women not so handsome. Nobody can write a long period." ”

“ Tawny Rachel, his wife, is a fortune-teller, and we have the story of a poor victim whom she deludes into deserting a faithful lover to marry in favour of one who has administered a fee to the Sybil. Rachel's best red cloak is her ironing-cloth on Sunday, and her blanket by night! There is more action in this story than in most of them. The robbery of Widow Brown's red-streaked apples, and the suspicion being directed to the good boy of the parish, is very exciting, especially as the excellent Tom Price is in woeful danger of being set in the stocks or whipped round the market-place. ”

“ On the Sunday before the school was to be opened there was a curious scene. The clerk read out a paper signed John Barrow, summoning all opposed to the school to meet on Friday at the church, and the clergyman read another calling on parents and children to meet for the opening of the school on Sunday. Not a creature would sign the paper prepared against the school. A person on whose estate the despot had a mortgage answered, "Mr. Barrow, though I am much in your power, I am still a man!" ”

“ Hannah constantly corresponded with him, and, as his nephew and biographer says, to her "was due the commencement of what eventually became the most readable of libraries." When he was only six years old, she wrote, "Though you are a little boy now, you will one day, if it please God, be a man; but long before you are a man I hope you will be a scholar. ”

“ She writes: "Some ladies carry on their heads a large quantity of fruit, and yet they would despise a poor useful member of society who carried it there for the purpose of selling it. Some, at the back of their perpendicular caps, hang three or four ostrich feathers of different colours."
Surely Hannah must have concocted with Garrick the head-dress with which he put these enormities out of fashion by appearing on the stage in the character of Sir John Brute with a whole kitchen garden on his head, including glass cucumber frames, and a pendant carrot at each ear. ”

“ A sweet-faced, bright-eyed old woman is shown, small and spare, of the fairy godmother type, in the close cap, with the frilled chin-stay and double ruffle then held to be appropriate to advanced age, but still with much of the life and fire of the sprightly young woman with powdered curls pourtrayed by Opie more than forty years before, in the merry days of Hampton and the Bas Bleu. ”

“ The only one of my youthful fond attachments which exists still in its full force is a passion for scenery, raising flowers, and landscape gardening, in which I can still indulge in some measure, as far as opening a walk from my chamber window among a little grove of trees which I planted twenty-four years ago. ”

“ Those affectionate critics, whose estimate is what an author values far more than any external opinion, had become sadly thinned in numbers, but Sir William Pepys wrote with hearty admiration, that he thought Practical Piety the best of all Mrs. H. More's performances, and calculated "to terrify the wicked, to rouse the negligent, and to keep the most watchful on their guard"; but he added that some of the best and most religious people he knew, thought the rule too strict and almost deterrent. Hannah's reply was that "The standard of religion should always be kept high. ”

“ In August she had a terrible illness, which she fully anticipated would be her last. "Nothing but the icy hand of death can cool me," she said. "Poor Patty, I shall soon rejoin her."
But the rest was not yet attained. She began to recover, and, when making some arrangements with a friend, she said, "Not that I have the remotest idea of living through the winter, but we must plan for time and prepare for eternity." ”

“ She was greatly touched when the Shipham schoolmaster came over, with his donkey and panniers, to fetch the books yearly supplied to the school, and she asked him why no one from the parish had for weeks been at Barley Wood, "Why, madam," he answered, "they be so cut up, they have not the heart to come." ”

“ When the authoress went, as usual, to town in 1786, for her annual stay, Horace Walpole said "a thousand diverting things about Florio, and accused her of "having imposed on the world by a dedication full of falsehood." He was full of interest about the recent discovery of the Paston letters, but Hannah thought "they would be of no great literary merit," "and as for me, I have no great appetite for anything as merely being curious, unless it has other merits;" ”

“ I know not if you have seen a book on popular education written by a man of great talents. Truth compels me to bear my public testimony against his extravagant plan, which is that there is nothing which the poor should not be taught; they must not stop short of science. ”

“ Thornton, Wilberforce's brother-in-law, had given him the living of St. Mary Woolnoth, and there Hannah More made acquaintance with him, and commenced a lasting friendship and correspondence.
Under this influence, Cowper was writing indignant and pathetic verses upon slavery, and Miss More did her part in a poem, which certainly was not without effect.
There is something absolutely fine in the outburst—
And thou, White Savage, whether lust of gold,
Or lust of conquest rule thee uncontroll'd,
Hero or robber! by whatever name,
Thou plead thy impious claim to wealth as fame. ”

“ Her ravings were really touching, and must have been very effective, but neither Hannah nor her friends seem to have had the smallest scruple as to entertaining a Christian audience with suicide after the high Roman fashion—as indeed the tragic stage was in those days a conventional world, quite apart from any relation to the facts of history, manners, or real life, and with a code as well as customs of its own. ”

“ Percy:—
There was a young and valiant knight,
⁠Sir Eldred was his name;
And never did a worthier knight
⁠The rank of knighthood claim.
The versification is smooth, the story the same as that of the old ballad of Gil Morice, anticipating the catastrophe of Rokeby, by which Mortham mistakes his wife's brother for a former lover, and kills him in her arms, causing thus her death and eliciting the moral:
The deadliest wounds with which we bleed,
⁠Our crimes inflict alone;
Man's mercies from God's hand proceed,
⁠His miseries from his own. ”

“ Hannah More's life had been an unusually long and brilliant one, scarcely broken by death or change, and the five sisters were all on the verge of old age. Still together, still with perfect oneness in heart and life, and the younger pair still active and effective, though delicate and often suffering. ”

“ Dearer to her than all her fame must have been what she records in a letter to Wilberforce:—"Do you remember John Hill, our first scholar, whose piety and good manners you used to notice? He afterwards became a teacher, but war tore him from us. Judge of our pleasure to see him at Weymouth, in full regimentals, acting as paymaster and sergeant-major! There was a sort of review. Everybody praised the training of eight hundred men so well disciplined; the officers said they were fit for any service. ”

“ A visitor is just gone, quite chagrined that I am such a rigid Methodist that I cannot come to her assembly on Sunday, though she protests, with great piety, that she never has cards, and that it is quite savage in me to think there can be any harm in a little agreeable music. ”