ithout friends. Her sister Patty was an
invaluable assistant. Wilberforce and Thornton helped her with their
purses. Newton, Bishop Porteus and other clergy strengthened her with
their counsel and rendered her personal assistance; and at the close of
the eighteenth century, the neighbourhood of Cowslip Green wore a very
different aspect from what it had worn twenty years earlier.

If we were to judge of Hannah More's writings by their popularity, and
the undoubted effects which they produced, or by the testimony which men
of approved talents and discernment have borne to their value, we should
place her in the very first rank of eighteenth century writers. 'Her
style and manner are confessedly superior to those of any moral writer
of the age.' She is 'one of the most illustrious females that ever was
in the world. 'One of the most truly Evangelical divines of this whole
age, perhaps almost of any age not apostolic.' Bishop Porteus actually
recommended her writings both in a sermon and in a charge. A feeling of
disappointment will probably be raised in most readers who turn from
these extravagant eulogies to the works themselves. They are full of
somewhat vapid truisms, and their style is too ornate for the present
age. Like so many writers of her day, she wrote Johnsonese rather than
English. She loved long words, and amplified where she should have
compressed. However, it is an ungracious task to criticise one who did
good work in her time. After all, the truest test of the merits of a
writer who wrote with the single object that Hannah More did, is the
effect she produced. Her writings were once readable and very
influential. If the virtue now appears to have gone out of them, we may
be thankful that it lasted so long as it was needed.

To conclude this long chapter. If any think that the picture here drawn
of the leaders of the Evangelical Revival is too highly coloured, and
that in this, as in all human efforts, frailties and mistakes might be
discovered in abundance, the writer can only reply that he has not
knowingly concealed any infirmities to which these good men were
subject, though he frankly admits that he has touched upon them lightly
and reluctantly. He feels that they were the salt of the earth in their
day; that their disinterestedness, their moral courage in braving
obloquy and unpopularity, their purity of life, the spirituality of
their teaching, and the world of practical good they did among a
negle