Hannah More was born in 1745, in a little village near Bristol. Her father, who was the village schoolmaster, gave his five daughters educations adapted as near as might be to the peculiar talents of each. Three of the girls opened a boarding school in Bristol, when the oldest was only twenty years of age. This school soon became fashionable and ultimately famous. It was to this institution that the early labors of Hannah More were given, and it was here that she attracted the attention of such men as Ferguson the astronomer, the elder Sheridan, Garrick the tragedian, Goldsmith, Reynolds, Burke, and indeed nearly all men of eminence in intellectual and state life. But her associations were not solely with the fashionable world, by which she was petted and flattered, for she turned her attention to labors for the poor and the ignorant. She sought to do for the children who lived amid the savage profligacy of the peasant class what Madame de Maintenon sought to do for girls of the aristocratic class in her country. Both alike aimed to offset the perversion of character which threatened the girls of their respective schools, from different sources, but to the same end,--their destruction. Madame de Maintenon worked to counteract the insidious infidelity that permeated the upper walks of life--Hannah More, to counteract the practical atheism of the lowest plane of life. The fundamental principle of her educational system was the necessity of Christian instruction. She recognized the close relationship of education and religion, and gauged well the significance of the historical fact of woman's debt to Christianity for her elevation. The question which she asked was not that of social utility, but that of personal character. She saw too much of the utilitarian principle in its actual workings, the reducing of human life to the plane of mechanism, to permit her to base her educational efforts upon a utilitarian foundation. She sought to cultivate that "sensibility which has its seat in the heart rather than in the nerves." Anything which detracted from modesty or delicacy, or tended to make a girl bold or forward, she severely rebuked. She taught the wastefulness of expending time upon the cultivation of a talent which one does not possess, and held that excessive cultivation of the æsthetic range of subjects contributes to a decline in those more stable factors upon which is based the security of states. Neither indelicate exposure of the person in style of dress nor extravagance in dancing found favor at her hands. Such were some of the views which were entertained and promulgated by the woman who created an epoch in the attitude of society toward her sex. She taught the dignity of womanhood, from which the duties of domesticity cannot detract, the performance of them as a function of womankind being of all things honorable. The pure common sense of Hannah More did for the women of