Great Englishwomen: An Historical Reading Book for SchoolsSynge, M. B. (Margaret Bertha)
History
Great Englishwomen: An Historical Reading Book for Schools
Synge, M. B. (Margaret Bertha)
Women -- Great Britain -- Biography
Hannah More still kept up with the world outside; she watched with the
keenest interest the struggle against slavery; her heart ached for the
victims of the French Revolution across the Channel, and she wrote
pamphlets on both subjects. Then came an attack on her writings; people
said she wished for the success of France; some said she was an enemy to
liberty, and many other false things.
This made Hannah More very unhappy. She liked to be loved, she could not
bear to be hated; she who was ready to see good in all, could not bear to
be forced to see evil. Then her poor people upheld her, and
school-teachers and church-workers came forward to bear witness to the
world-wide good her writings had done. Sympathy flowed in from all sides,
and she found heart to go on again.
At last the happy home was broken up--the bright home where the poor
people had never failed to find warmth and shelter and a welcome from the
five sisters.
The three eldest died first. Still, through all the sad partings, Hannah
More bravely worked on, while she had strength for it, writing when she
could, and keeping bright those who still remained around her.
A few years later Patty died; she was the nearest of all to Hannah's
heart, and the "aching void" she felt after her sister's death affected
her health. Long and dangerous illnesses constantly left her unable to
work for many months. Her work had been taken up by others now, and the
"tide she had helped to turn had already swept past her."
"I learns geography and the harts and senses," boasted a little girl in a
county parish, meaning the arts and sciences.
"I am learning syntax," a little servant said to Hannah More when
questioned about her school.
Hannah More died at the age of eighty-eight, after years of intense
suffering. She had lived to see how education was helping the poorer
classes, and stamping out crime; how a little love and kindness had helped
even the rough miners in their work, and how the children, taught in the
village schools, were already growing up better and happier men and women,
and it pleased her, long after her health and memory had failed, to hear
that they still remembered the name of Hannah More.
ELIZABETH FRY (1780-1845).
Elizabeth Fry was one of those rare women whose "life was work." Once
having recognized the path of duty, she never left it; through illness and
suffering, trouble and sorrow, she held fast to it, and the result was
grand. For she was our first great prison reformer, the first to open the
eyes of the nation to the alarming state of the prisons, the first to take
active steps for their improvement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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