Diffused on sofas of voluptuous ease.
With languid tones imperious mandates urge,
With arm recumbent wield the household scourge.
There are moments when Mrs. Barbauld soars to the inimitable, when she reaches the highest and happiest effect that absurdity is able to produce.
With arm recumbent wield the household scourge
is one of these inspirations; and another is this pregnant sentence, which occurs in a chapter of advice to young girls: “An ass is much better adapted than a horse to show off a lady.”
To point to Hannah More as a brilliant and bewildering example of sustained success is to give the most convincing proof that it was a good thing to be born in the year 1745. Miss More’s reputation was already established at the dawning of my cherished half-century, and, for the whole fifty years, her life was a series of social, literary, and religious triumphs. In her youth, she was mistaken for a wit. In her old age, she was revered as a saint. In her youth, Garrick called her “Nine,”—gracefully intimating that she embodied the attributes of all the Muses. In her old age, an acquaintance wrote to her: “You who are secure of the approbation of angels may well hold human applause to be of small consequence.” In her youth, she wrote a play that everybody went to see. In her old age, she wrote tracts that everybody bought and distributed. Prelates composed Latin verses in her honour; and when her “Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World” was published anonymously, the Bishop of London exclaimed in a kind of pious transport, “Aut Morus, aut Angelus!” Her tragedy, “Percy,” melted the heart of London. Men “shed tears in abundance,” and women were “choked with emotion” over the “affecting circumstances of the Piece.” Sir William Pepys confessed that “Percy” “broke his heart”; and that he thought it “a kind of profanation” to wipe his eyes, and go from the theatre to Lady Harcourt’s assembly. Four thousand copies of the play were sold in a fortnight; and the Duke of Northumberland sent a special messenger to Miss More to thank her for the honour she had done his historic name.
As a novelist, Hannah was equally successful. Twenty thousand copies of “Cœlebs in Search of a Wife” were sold in England, and thirty thousand in America. “The Americans are a very approving people,” acknowledged the gratified authoress. In Iceland “Cœlebs” was read—so Miss More says—“with great apparent profit”; while certain very popular tracts, like “Charles the Footman” and “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,” made their edifying way to Moscow, and were found by the missionary Gericke in the library of the Rajah of Tanjore. “All this and Heaven, too!” as a reward for being born in 1745. The injustice of the thing stings us to the soul. Yet it was the unhesitating assumption of Heaven’s co-partnership which gave to Hannah More the best part of her earthly prestige, and made her verdicts a little like Protestant Bulls. When she objected to “Marmion” and “The Lady of the Lake” for their lack of “practical precept,” these sinless poems were withdrawn from Evangelical book-shelves. Her biographer, Mr. Thompson, thought it necessary to apologize for her correspondence with that agreeable worldling, Horace Walpole, and to assure us that “the fascinations of Walpole’s false wit must have retired before the bright ascendant of her pure and prevailing superiority.” As she waxed old, and affluent, and disputatious, it was deemed well to encourage a timid public with the reminder that her genius, though “great and commanding,” was still “lovely and kind.” And when she died, it was recorded that “a cultivated taste for moral scenery was one of her distinctions”;—as though Nature herself attended a class of ethics before venturing to allure too freely the mistress of Barley Wood.
It is in the contemplation of such sunlight mediocrity that the hardship of being born too late is felt with crushing force. Why cannot we write “Letters on the Improvement of the Mind,” and be held, like Mrs. Chapone, to be an authority on education all the rest of our lives; and have people entreating us, as they entreated her, to undertake, at any cost, the intellectual guidance of their daughters? When we consider all that a modern educator is expected to know—from bird-calls to metric measures—we sigh over the days which demanded nothing more difficult than the polite expression of truisms.