stirring air, 'Scots wha hae wi' Wallace
bled.'" Hannah More was related to her ancestors. She explains who
Hannah More was.

Whenever a person informs us who Sir William Wallace was, or who wrote
"Hamlet," or where the Declaration of Independence was fought, it fills
us with a suspicion wellnigh amounting to conviction, that that person
would not suspect us of being so empty of knowledge if he wasn't
suffering from the same "claim" himself. Then we turn to page 20 of the
Autobiography and happen upon this passage, and that hasty suspicion
stands rebuked:

"I gained book-knowledge with far less labor than is usually requisite.
At ten years of age I was as familiar with Lindley Murray's Grammar as
with the Westminster Catechism; and the latter I had to repeat every
Sunday. My favorite studies were Natural Philosophy, Logic, and Moral
Science. From my brother Albert I received lessons in the ancient
tongues, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin."

You catch your breath in astonishment, and feel again and still again
the pang of that rebuke. But then your eye falls upon the next sentence
but one, and the pain passes away and you set up the suspicion again
with evil satisfaction:

"After my discovery of Christian Science, most of the knowledge I had
gleaned from school-books vanished like a dream."

That disappearance accounts for much in her miscellaneous writings. As I
was saying, she handles her "ancestral shadows," as she calls them, just
as I do mine. It is remarkable. When she runs across "a relative of my
Grandfather Baker, General Henry Knox, of Revolutionary fame," she sets
him down; when she finds another good one, "the late Sir John Macneill,
in the line of my Grandfather Baker's family," she sets him down, and
remembers that he "was prominent in British politics, and at one time
held the position of ambassador to Persia"; when she discovers that her
grandparents "were likewise connected with Captain John Lovewell, whose
gallant leadership and death in the Indian troubles of 1722-25 caused
that prolonged contest to be known historically as Lovewell's War,"
she sets the Captain down; when it turns out that a cousin of her
grandmother "was John Macneill, the New Hampshire general, who fought at
Lundy's Lane and won distinction in 1814 at the battle of Chippewa,"
she catalogues the General. (And tells where Chippewa was.) And then she
skips all her platform people; never mentions one of them. It shows that
she is just as