Hannah More was certainly, as Mrs. Walford says, ‘the fêted and caressed idol of society.’ The theatre at Bristol vaunted, ‘Boast we not a More?’ and the learned cits at Oxford inscribed their acknowledgment of her authority. Horace Walpole sat on the doorstep—or threatened to do so—till she promised to go down to Strawberry Hill; Foster quoted her; Mrs. Thrale twined her arms about her; Wilberforce consulted her and employed her. When The Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World was published anonymously, ‘Aut Morus, aut Angelus,’ exclaimed the Bishop of London, before he had read six pages. Of her village stories and ballads two million copies were sold during the first year. Cælebs in Search of a Wife ran into thirty editions. Mrs. Barbauld writes to tell her about ‘a good and sensible woman’ of her acquaintance, who, on being asked how she contrived to divert herself in the country, replied, ‘I have my spinning-wheel and my Hannah More. When I have spun one pound of flax I put on another, and when I have finished my book I begin it again. I want no other amusement.’ How incredible it all sounds! No wonder that Mrs. Walford exclaims, ‘No other amusement! Good heavens! Breathes there a man, woman, or child with soul so quiescent nowadays as to be satisfied with reels of flax and yards of Hannah More? Give us Hannah’s company, but not—not her writings!’ It is only fair to say that Mrs. Walford has thoroughly carried out the views she expresses in this passage, for she gives us nothing of Hannah More’s grandiloquent literary productions, and yet succeeds in making us know her thoroughly. The whole book is well written, but the biography of Hannah More is a wonderfully brilliant sketch, and deserves great praise.
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Miss Mabel Wotton has invented a new form of picture-gallery. Feeling that the visible aspect of men and women can be expressed in literature no less than through the medium of line and colour, she has collected together a series of Word Portraits of Famous Writers extending from Geoffrey Chaucer to Mrs. Henry Wood. It is a far cry from the author of the Canterbury Tales to the authoress of East Lynne; but as a beauty, at any rate, Mrs. Wood deserved to be described, and we hear of the pure oval of her face, of her perfect mouth, her ‘dazzling’ complexion, and the extraordinary youth by which ‘she kept to the last the . . . freshness of a young girl.’ Many of the ‘famous writers’ seem to have been very ugly. Thomson, the poet, was of a dull countenance, and a gross, unanimated, uninviting appearance; Richardson looked ‘like a plump white mouse in a wig.’ Pope is described in the Guardian, in 1713, as ‘a lively little creature, with long arms and legs: a spider is no ill emblem of him. He has been taken at a distance for a small windmill.’ Charles Kingsley appears as ‘rather tall, very angular, surprisingly awkward, with thin staggering legs, a hatchet face adorned with scraggy gray whiskers, a faculty for falling into the most ungainly attitudes, and making the most hideous contortions of visage and frame; with a rough provincial accent and an uncouth way of speaking which would be set down for absurd caricature on the boards of a comic theatre.’ Lamb is described by Carlyle as ‘the leanest of mankind; tiny black breeches buttoned to the knee-cap and no further, surmounting spindle legs also in black, face and head fineish, black, bony, lean, and of a Jew type rather’; and Talfourd says that the best portrait of him is his own description of Braham—‘a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel.’ William Godwin was ‘short and stout, his clothes loosely and carelessly put on, and usually old and worn; his hands were generally in his pockets; he had a remarkably large, bald head, and a weak voice; seeming generally half asleep when he walked, and even when he talked.’ Lord Charlemont spoke of David Hume as more like a ‘turtle-eating alderman’ than ‘a refined philosopher.’ Mary Russell Mitford was ill-naturedly described by L.E.L. as ‘Sancho Panza in petticoats!’; and as for poor Rogers, who was somewhat cadaverous, the descriptions given of him are quite dreadful. Lord Dudley once asked him ‘why, now that he could afford it, he did not set up his hearse,’ and it is said that Sydney Smith gave him mortal offence by recommending him ‘when he sat for his portrait to be drawn saying his prayers, with his face hidden in his hands,’ christened him the ‘Death dandy,’ and wrote underneath a picture of him, ‘Painted in his lifetime.’ We must console ourselves—if not with Mr. Hardy’s statement that ‘ideal physical beauty is incompatible with mental development, and a full recognition of the evil of things’—at least with the pictures of those who had some comeliness, and grace, and charm. Dr. Grosart says of a miniature of Edmund Spenser, ‘It is an exquisitely beautiful face. The brow is ample, the lips thin but mobile, the eyes a grayish-blue, the hair and beard a golden red (as of “red monie” of the ballads) or goldenly chestnut, the nose with semi-transparent nostril and keen, the chin firm-poised, the expression refined and delicate. Altogether just such “presentment” of the Poet of Beauty par excellence, as one would have imagined.’ Antony Wood describes Sir Richard Lovelace as being, at the age of sixteen, ‘the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld.’ Nor need we wonder at this when we remember the portrait of Lovelace that hangs at Dulwich College. Barry Cornwall, described himself by S. C. Hall as ‘a decidedly rather pretty little fellow,’ said of Keats: ‘His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness,—it had an expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight.’ Chatterton and Byron were splendidly handsome, and beauty of a high spiritual order may be claimed both for Milton and Shelley, though an industrious gentleman lately wrote a book in two volumes apparently for the purpose of proving that the latter of these two poets had a snub nose. Hazlitt once said that ‘A man’s life may be a lie to himself and others, and yet a picture painted of him by a great artist would probably stamp his character.’ Few of the word-portraits in Miss Wotton’s book can be said to have been drawn by a great artist, but they are all interesting, and Miss Wotton has certainly shown a wonderful amount of industry in collecting her references and in grouping them. It is not a book to be read through from beginning to end, but it is a delightful book to glance at, and by its means one can raise the ghosts of the dead, at least as well as the Psychical Society can.
(1) Leaves of Life. By E. Nesbit. (Longmans, Green and Co.)
(2) The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. By W. B. Yeats. (Kegan Paul.)
(3) Dorinda. By Lady Munster. (Hurst and Blackett.)
(4) Four Biographies from ‘Blackwood.’ By Mrs. Walford. (Blackwood and Sons.)
(5) Word Portraits of Famous Writers. Edited by Mabel Wotton. (Bentley and Son.)
MR. WILLIAM MORRIS’S LAST BOOK
(Pall Mall Gazette, March 2, 1889.)