Shortly thereafter Mistress More wrote her tragedy of _Percy_; nobody, I think, reads it now; but Garrick became sponsor for it--writing both prologue and epilogue; and by reason perhaps of his sponsorship it ran some twenty nights successively; the tale of her stage profits running up to £600, which would pay for a good many trips from London to Bristol. When she came to treat for the publication of a poem which she wrote at that period--she being ignorant of rates,--it was arranged with her publisher that she should receive the sum, whatever it might have been, which was paid Goldsmith for _The Deserted Village_! In those early years she was the lively one, and the gay one, and the worldly one of the family; but with the death of Garrick, which came upon her like a blow, life and all its colors seemed to change. She haunted London and the theatres no more; she went up to weep indeed at her home {175} on the Adelphi Terrace[10] with the disconsolate Mrs. Garrick; but all phases of life have now, for Miss More, taken on a soberer hue; she teaches; she founds schools for the poor; she founds chapels; she writes tracts; her forward and sturdy evangelical proclivities involve her indeed in difficulties with the local church authorities; for her charities go vaulting over their canons; whereupon she relents and abases herself--and then sins in the same holy and beneficent ways of charity again--canons or no canons. As a worker she is indefatigable; she drives, rides, and walks over her missionary ground near to Bristol, with the zeal of a gold-hunter. There were those who questioned her wisdom and who questioned the quality of her wit, but never one, I think, anywhere, who questioned her goodness. She wrote a novel called _Coelebs in Search of a Wife_. Do you happen to have read it? I hardly know whether to advise it, or not; there is so much to read! But if you do, you will find most excellent English in it, and a great deal of {176} very good preaching; and many hints about the social habits of that time--trustworthy even to the dinner hour and the lunch hour; and maxims good enough for a copy book, or a calendar; and you will find--what you will not find in all stories nowadays--a definite beginning and a definite end. I know what you may say, if you do read it. You would say that the sermons are too long, and that the hero is a prig; and that you would never marry him if he were worth twice his fortune, and were to offer himself ten times over. Well--perhaps not; but he had a deal of money. And that book of _Coelebs_--whatever you may choose to say of it, had a tremendous success; it ran over Europe like wildfire; was translated into French, into German, into Dutch, into Polish, and I know not what language besides; and across the Atlantic--in those colonial days, when book-shops were not, as now, at every corner--over thirty thousand copies were sold. Those of us who can remember forty and fifty years