at their houses, received by them all as more than an equal,--for she was not only beautiful and witty, but had earned considerable reputation for her poetry. Garrick particularly admired her as a woman of genius, and performed one of her plays ("Percy") twenty successive nights at Drury Lane, writing himself both the prologue and the epilogue. It must be borne in mind that when first admitted to the choicest society of London,--at the houses not merely of literary men, but of great statesmen and nobles like Lord Camden, Lord Spencer, the Duke of Newcastle. Lord Pembroke, Lord Granville, and others,--she was teaching in a girls' school at Bristol, and was a young lady under thirty years of age. It was as a literary woman--when literary women were not so numerous or ambitious as they now are--that Hannah More had the _entrée_ into the best society under the patronage of the greatest writers of the age. She was a literary lion before she was twenty-five. She attracted the attention of Sheridan by her verses when she was scarcely eighteen. Her "Search after Happiness" went through six editions before the year 1775. Her tragedy of "Percy" was translated into French and German before she was thirty; and she realized from the sale of it £600. "The Fatal Falsehood" was also much admired, but did not meet the same success, being cruelly attacked by envious rivals. Her "Bas Bleu" was praised by Johnson in unmeasured terms. It was for her poetry that she was best known from 1775 to 1785, the period when she lived in the fashionable and literary world, and which she adorned by her wit and brilliant conversation,--not exactly a queen of society, since she did not set up a _salon_, but was only an honored visitor at the houses of the great; a brilliant and beautiful woman, whom everybody wished to know. I will not attempt any criticism on those numerous poems. They are not much read and valued in our time. They are all after the style of Johnson and Pope;--the measured and artificial style of the eighteenth century, in imitation of the ancient classics and of French poetry, in which the wearisome rhyme is the chief peculiarity,--smooth, polished, elaborate, but pretty much after the same pattern, and easily imitated by school-girls. The taste of this age--created by Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Longfellow, and others--is very different. But the poems of Hannah More were undoubtedly admired by her generation, and gave her great _éclat_ and considerable pecuniary emolument. And yet her real fame does not rest on those artificial poems, respectable as they were one hundred years ago, but on her writings as a moralist and educator.