erday 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.

But whatever may be thought of the respective merits of Miss More's
nineteen volumes and Sir Walter's ninety-eight, there is no doubt that
Barley Wood was as much infested with visitors as ever was Abbotsford.
Eighty a week!

'From twelve o'clock until three each day a constant stream of
carriages and pedestrians filled the e