… I am diminishing my worldly cares. I have sold Barley Wood. I have exchanged the eight "pampered minions," for four sober servants. As I have sold my carriage and horses, I want no coachman: as I have no garden, I want no gardener. I have greatly lessened my house expenses, which enables me to maintain my schools, and enlarge my charities. My schools alone, with clothing, rents, &c., cost me £150 a year."
Mrs. H. More was sometimes liberally assisted in the support of these schools (as I learned from Miss Martha More,) by three philanthropic individuals, the late Mr. Henry Thornton, the late Mr. Wilberforce, and the late Sir W. W. Pepys, Bart.
Mrs. H. More, in a letter to Sir W. W. Pepys, acknowledging the receipt of one hundred pounds, says, "My most affectionate respects to Lady Pepys. The young race, of course, have all forgotten me; but I have not forgotten the energy with which your eldest son, at seven years old, ran into the drawing room, and said to me, "After all, Ferdinand would never have sent Columbus to find out America if it had not been for Isabella: it was entirely her doing." How gratifying it would have been to H. More, had she lived two or three years longer, to have found in the round of human things, that this energetic boy of seven years, had become (1837) the Lord High Chancellor of England! and now again in 1846.
All the paintings, drawings, and prints which covered the walls of the parlour, on Hannah More's quitting Barley Wood, she gave to her friend, Sir T. D. Ackland, Bart, with the exception of the portrait, by Palmer, of John Henderson, which she kindly presented to myself.
* * * * *
As I purposed, in projecting the present work, to allow myself a certain latitude in commenting on persons of talent connected recently with Bristol, and with whom Mr. C. and Mr. S. were acquainted, and especially when those persons are dead, I shall here in addition briefly refer to the late Robert Hall.
Mr. Hall is universally admitted to have possessed a mind of the first order. He united qualities, rarely combined, each of which would have constituted greatness; being a writer of pre-eminent excellence, and a sacred orator that exceeded all competition.
Posterity will judge of Robert Hall's capacity by his writings alone, but all who knew him as a preacher, unhesitatingly admit that in his pulpit exercises (when the absorption of his mind in his subject rendered him but half sensible to the agony of internal maladies which scarcely knew cessation, and which would have prostrated a spirit less firm) that in these exercises, the superiority of his intellect became more undeniably manifest than even in his deliberate compositions. Here some might approach, who could not surpass; but, as a preacher, he stood, collected, in solitary grandeur.
Let the reader who was never privileged to see or hear this extraordinary man, present to his imagination a dignified figure[12] that secured the deference which was never exacted; a capacious forehead; an eye, in the absence of excitement, dark, yet placid, but when warmed with argument, flashing almost coruscations of light, as the harmonious accompaniments of his powerful language.
But the pulpit presented a wider field for the display of this constitutional ardour. Here, the eye, that always awed, progressively advanced in expression; till warmed with his immortal subject it kindled into absolute radiance, that with its piercing beams penetrated the very heart, and so absorbed the spirit that the preacher himself was forgotten in the magnificent and almost overpowering array of impassioned thoughts and images. With this exterior, let the reader associate a voice, though not strong, eminently flexible and harmonious; a mind that felt, and therefore never erred in its emphasis; alternately touching the chord of pathos, or advancing with equal ease into the region of argument or passion; and then let him remember that every sentiment he uttered was clothed in expressions as mellifluous as perhaps ever fell from the tongue of man.