Hannah More was the first, and I trust the worst, of a large class--‘the ugliest of her daughters Hannah,’ if I may parody a poet she affected to admire. This class may be imperfectly described as ‘the well-to-do Christian.’ It inhabited snug places in the country, and kept an excellent, if not dainty, table. The money it saved in a ball-room it spent upon a greenhouse. Its horses were fat, and its coachman invariably present at family prayers. Its pet virtue was Church twice on Sunday, and its peculiar horrors theatrical entertainments, dancing, and threepenny points. Outside its garden wall lived the poor who, if virtuous, were for ever curtsying to the ground or wearing neat uniforms, except when expiring upon truckle-beds beseeching God to bless the young ladies of The Grange or the Manor House, as the case might be. As a book ‘Cœlebs in Search of a Wife’ is as odious as it is absurd--yet for the reason already assigned it may be read with a certain curiosity--but as it would be cruelty to attempt to make good my point by quotation, I must leave it as it is. It is characteristic of the unreality of Hannah More that she prefers Akenside to Cowper, despite the latter’s superior piety. Cowper’s sincerity and pungent satire frightened her; the verbosity of Akenside was much to her mind: ‘Sir John is a passionate lover of poetry, in which he has a fine taste. He read it [a passage from Akenside’s “Pleasures of Imagination”] with much spirit and feeling, especially these truly classical lines: ‘“_Mind--mind_ alone; bear witness, earth and heaven, The living fountains in itself contains Of Beauteous and Sublime; here hand in hand Sit paramount the graces; here enthroned Celestial Venus, with divinest airs, Invites the soul to never-fading joy.” ‘“The reputation of this exquisite passage,” said he, laying down the book, “is established by the consenting suffrage of all men of taste, though, by the critical countenance you are beginning to put on you look as if you had a mind to attack it.” ‘“So far from it,” said I [Cœlebs], “_that I know nothing more splendid in the whole mass of our poetry_.”’