once for all started by Scott, there is in all these writers an absolute
and utter want of comprehension of historical propriety, of local and
temporal colour, and of all the marks which were so soon to distinguish
fiction. Yet at the very same time the yearning after the historical is
shown in the most unmistakable fashion from Godwin down to the Misses
Lee, Harriet and Sophia (the latter of whom in 1783 produced, in _The
Recess_, a preposterous Elizabethan story, which would have liked to be
a historical novel), and other known and unknown writers.

Another lady deserves somewhat longer notice. Hannah More, once a
substantially famous person in literature, is now chiefly remembered by
her association with great men of letters, such as Johnson in her youth,
Macaulay and De Quincey in her old age. She was born as early as 1745
near Bristol, and all her life was a Somerset worthy. She began--a
curious beginning for so serious a lady, but with reforming
intentions--to write for the stage, published _The Search after
Happiness_ when she was seventeen, and had two rather dreary tragedies,
_Percy_ and the _Fatal Secret_, acted, Garrick being a family friend of
hers. Becoming, as her day said, "pious," she wrote "Sacred Dramas," and
at Cowslip Green, Barley Wood, and Clifton produced "Moral Essays," the
once famous novel of _Coelebs in Search of a Wife_, and many tracts,
the best known of which is _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_. She died
at a great age on 7th September 1833. Hannah More is not to be spoken of
with contempt, except by ignorance or incompetence. She had real
abilities, and was a woman of the world. But she was very unfortunately
parted in respect of time, coming just before the days when it became
possible for a lady to be decent in literature without being dull.

If a book and not a chapter were allowed about this curious, and on the
whole rather neglected and undervalued, Fifth Act of the eighteenth
century, many of its minor literary phenomena would have to be noticed:
such as the last state of periodicals before the uprising of the
_Edinburgh Review_, and the local literary coteries, the most notable of
which was that of Norwich, with the Aldersons, Sayers the poet, who
taught Southey and others to try blank verse in other measures than the
decasyllabic, William Taylor, the apostle of German literature in
England, and others. But, as it is, we must concentrate our attention on
its main lines.

In these