the faithful myrtle blooms,
For her the sage’s bay.
And even thou shalt claim a name
And challenge some renown;
Boscawen’s friendship is thy fame,
Her praise thy Laurel Crown.[285]
But the two ladies had only begun their career of compliment. Somewhat later Miss More sent to her patron a bottle of ‘otto of roses,’ having learned that that lady’s organs ‘partake the refinement that graces her mind.’ This is not the first instance we have encountered of the use of incense in the bluestocking ritual.
Mrs. Boscawen sometimes varied her flowery wreaths of praise with gifts and practical suggestions. When she learns that Miss More has been reading Homer and Tasso, she at once becomes ambitious for an English epic from the pen of a woman. ‘Some spark,’ she thinks, from these older geniuses, ‘will communicate to that train of poetic fire, qui vous appartient, and the explosion will ascend in many a brilliant star.’[286] The honourable lady demands and obtains an Ode on the Marquess of Worcester’s Birthday, into which the author had the sense to weave a compliment to Mrs. Boscawen and to ‘Glanvilla,’ her estate.[287] Meanwhile the patron is weeping her eyes red over Percy, circulating copies of Miss More’s Essays, eliciting praises from friends and beaux esprits—all duly forwarded—and rebuking, very gently, the rising authoress for not proclaiming more loudly the greatness of the sex: ‘where shall we find a champion if you (armed at all points) desert us?’[288]
Hannah More
From Finden’s engraving of the portrait by Opie (1786)