As an illustration of the extreme hardships endured by the poor before the era of steam manufactures had set in, we learn that the difficulty in obtaining clothes was so great that at Brentford, close to London, thrifty parents bought rags by the pound, and made clothing for their children by patching the pieces together. Brushes and combs, it is added, were entirely unknown. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say that the poorest beggar of the present day can, if he choose, be more luxuriously clad and cared for than the children of the thrifty poor a hundred years ago. The difference in morals is as great as the difference in manners and education. Hannah More heard a charity sermon, in which the preacher, a dignified ecclesiastic, propounded that “the rich and great should be extremely liberal in their charities, because they _were happily exempted from the severer virtues_.” This was the old Papal practice of the sale of indulgences appearing again in a Protestant dress. No wonder, if this was a type of the Gospel that was preached to the rich, that Patty, Hannah’s sister, was accustomed to say that she had good hope that the hearts of some of the “rich poor wretches” might be touched by her sister’s eloquence. The change of manners may be illustrated by the following anecdote. Hannah More, in the height of her literary celebrity, was asked to sit next the Bishop of Chester, Dr. Porteous, at dinner, and make him talk. She pressed him to take a little wine. He replied, “I can’t drink a _little_, child: therefore I never touch it. Abstinence is easy to me; temperance would be difficult.” These were days when Edmund Spenser was not considered a poet, and when Dryden and Pope were preferred to Shakespeare. Hannah, however, defended Milton’s _L’Allegro_, _Il Penseroso_, and _Lycidas_, against the strictures of Dr. Johnson; though they found themselves in entire agreement in depreciating Milton’s sonnets. Johnson’s simile for a sonnet was “a bead carved out of a cherry stone.” The noble and solemn music of Milton’s majestic sonnets certainly did not harmonise with Johnson’s image, and, therefore, as Milton’s sonnets were not pretty playthings, it was agreed that he could not write sonnets.