l; 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.

* * * * *

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