At this early period, too, the signs of that precarious health which exercised her piety and virtue by so many trials in the course of her long life, began to appear; and it was recorded in the family, that pain and suffering were in her at that early period without their usual attendants of fretfulness and impatience. In her days of infancy, when she could possess herself of a scrap of paper, her delight was to scribble upon it some essay or poem, with some well-directed moral, which was afterward secreted in a dark corner where the servant kept her brushes and dusters. Her little sister, with whom she slept, was usually the repository of her nightly effusions; who, in her zeal lest these compositions should be lost, would sometimes steal down to procure a light, and commit them to the first scrap of paper which she could find. Among the characteristic sports of Hannah’s childhood, which their mother was fond of recording, we are told that she was wont to make a carriage of a chair, and then call to her sisters to ride with her to London to see bishops and booksellers; an intercourse which we shall hereafter show to have been realized. The greatest wish her imagination could frame, when her scraps of paper were exhausted, was, that she might one day be rich enough to have a whole quire to herself; and when, by her mother’s indulgence, the prize was obtained, it was soon filled with supposititious letters to depraved characters, to reclaim them from their errors, and letters in return expressive of contrition and resolutions of amendment. [Sidenote: A Puritan family.] This branch of the family was attached to the established church, Mr. More himself being a stanch Tory, and what is known as a High Churchman; but the other members of the family were Presbyterians, and the daughters of Mr. Jacob More had frequently heard their father say that he had two great-uncles captains in Oliver Cromwell’s army. Jacob More’s mother appears, from family tradition, to have possessed a mind of more than ordinary vigor. She was a pious woman, and used to tell her younger relatives that they would have known how to value gospel privileges had they lived, like her, in the days of proscription and persecution, when, at midnight, pious worshippers went with stealthy steps through the snow, to hear the words of inspiration delivered by a holy man at her father’s house; while her father, with a drawn sword, guarded the entrance from violent or profane intrusion. W. ROBERTS: ‘Memoirs of Hannah More,’ New York: Harper & Bros., 1834. * * * * * [Sidenote: Puritan tendencies illustrated.] I would wish you a Merry Christmas as well as a Happy New-Year, but that I hate the word merry _so_ applied; it is a fitter epithet for a _bacchanalian_ than a _Christian_ festival, and seems an apology for idle mirth and injurious excess. HANNAH MORE: _Letter to her sister from Hampton_ 1780, in ‘Memoirs,’ by W. Roberts.