Like Dr. Johnson, Horace Walpole liked to fill his house with a lot of female devotees; but whilst Johnson seemed to prefer a parcel of disagreeable, ugly, and cantankerous women, always quarrelling among themselves and with everybody else, Walpole liked his women to be young and fair, full of life and mirth. By what strange circumstance was the cynical and sarcastic Walpole led into a sort of friendship with the mild and pietistic Mrs. Hannah More? It was in 1784 that this queer friendship began. It appears that about that date Hannah More had discovered at Bristol a milk woman who wrote verses, just such verses as Hannah More and Walpole—neither of whom had an idea of poetry—would consider wonderful. A subscription must be started for the benefit of the milkwoman, and Hannah More applied to Horace Walpole, who set up for a Mæcenas, though he always expressed the utmost contempt for authors, for a contribution. Of course, Hannah More did not make this application without a dose of fulsome compliment to Horace Walpole’s genius, and he went into the trap, subscribed, and expressed his admiration of the milkwoman’s poetry. The woman’s name was Yearsley; she was quite ready to receive the money, but, having evidently a very high opinion of her own doggerel, she refused to listen to the literary advice given to her by Horace Walpole and her patroness, with whom she very soon quarrelled. Walpole condoled with Hannah thus: ’You are not only benevolence itself, but, with fifty times the genius of Dame Yearsley, you are void of vanity. How strange that vanity should expel gratitude! Does not the wretched woman owe her fame to you? ... Dame Yearsley reminds me of the troubadours, those vagrants whom I used to admire till I knew their history, and who used to pour out trumpery verses, and flatter or abuse, accordingly as they were housed and clothed, or dismissed to the next parish. Yet you did not set this person in the stocks, after procuring an annuity for her.’ By this letter we see what were Horace Walpole’s ideas of patronage: flattery and a pittance, independence and the stocks. Walpole was open to flattery. Dr. Johnson was not—at least, not from a woman; he despised the sex too much to care for their praise. When Hannah More laid it on very thick in his case, he fiercely turned round on her and said: ’Madam, before you flatter a man so grossly to his face, you should consider whether or not your flattery is worth his having.’ And, with all his admiration for her character, Walpole could not help sneering at what he called her saintliness, and venting his sarcasm on her silly ’Cœlebs in Search of a Wife,’ the absurdity of which has, indeed, been surpassed by a few modern novels of the same tendency. The last we hear of their friendship is that he made her a present of a Bible—fancy the satyr’s leer with which he must have presented it to her! She paid him out for the implied irony by wishing that he would read it.