was now thrown! Her
father was a very old man, dying slowly by inches. Her own life of
struggle, animation, intelligence, was over, as she imagined, for ever.
No wonder if for a time she was carried away, if she forgot her own
nature, her own imperative necessities, in sympathy with this new
revelation. Here was a new existence, here was a Living Church ready to
draw her within its saving walls. John Joseph Gurney must have been a
man of extraordinary personal influence. For a long time past he had
been writing to her seriously. At last, to the surprise of the world,
though not without long deliberation and her father's full approval, she
joined the Society of Friends, put on their dress, and adopted their
peculiar phraseology. People were surprised at the time, but I think it
would have been still more surprising if she had not joined them. J. J.
Gurney, in one of his letters, somewhat magnificently describes Mrs.
Opie as offering up her many talents and accomplishments a brilliant
sacrifice to her new-found persuasions. 'Illustrations of Lying,'
moral anecdotes on the borderland of imagination, are all that she is
henceforth allowed. 'I am bound in a degree not to invent a story,
because when I became a Friend it was required of me not to do so,' she
writes to Miss Mitford, who had asked her to contribute to an annual.
Miss Mitford's description of Mrs. Opie, 'Quakerised all over, and
calling Mr. Haydon 'Friend Benjamin,' is amusing enough; and so also
is the account of the visiting card she had printed after she became
a Quaker, with 'Amelia Opie,' without any prefix, as is the Quaker
way; also, as is not their way, with a wreath of embossed pink roses
surrounding the name. There is an account of Mrs. Opie published in the
'Edinburgh Review,' in a delightful article entitled the 'Worthies of
Norwich,' which brings one almost into her very presence.

Amelia Opie at the end of the last century and Amelia Opie in the
garb and with the speech of a member of the Society of Friends
sounds like two separate personages, but no one who recollects the
gay little songs which at seventy she used to sing with lively
gesture, the fragments of drama to which, with the zest of an
innate actress, she occasionally treated her young friends, or the
elaborate faultlessness of her appearance--the shining folds and
long train of her pale satin draperies, the high, transparent cap,
the crisp fichu crosse