With this false honor Christians have no commerce;
Religion disavows, and truth disowns it.”
One more tragedy, the “Inflexible Captive,” completes Miss More’s labors in this department of literature. She arrived at the conclusion that, by contributing plays, however pure, to the existing stage, she should be using her powers to heighten its general attraction as a place of amusement; and, considering the English theatre as, on the whole, the most profligate in the world, she resolved to abjure it and all its concerns forever—an instance of self-love sacrificed to principle hardly to be paralleled. When her works were collected, the tragedies were allowed to take their place, in order, as the author tells us in a preface written in her happiest manner, that she might ground on such publication her sentiments upon the general tendency of the drama, and, by including in her view her own compositions, might involve herself in the general object of her own animadversions.
She makes no apology for the republication of her “Sacred Dramas,” though they may, perhaps, be regarded as falling within the range of some of her criticisms on the old Mysteries and Moralities—pieces “in which events too solemn for exhibition, and subjects too awful for detail, are brought before the audience with a formal gravity more offensive than levity itself.”
As a general poet, Miss More was, at this period, the very height of the fashion. Horace Walpole thought himself honored in being permitted to print some of her pieces in the most lavish style of expense, at the press of Strawberry Hill. But fashions in literature are scarcely more lasting than those in dress. Her poems are now immersed in Lethe, except a few terse couplets, which have floated down to the 145 present generation on the stream of oral citation, and are now often in the mouths of people who fancy that they belong to Swift or Gay. Many of her poems are, however, worthy of a better fate. They are distinguished by purity and elevation of sentiment, ease and strength of diction, and harmony of versification. In the last particular she received great praise from Johnson, who pronounced her to be “the best versificatrix in the English language.”
We will give a few extracts. The first is from “Sensibility,” a poem in which she claims for that quality the place which Mrs. Grenville, in a then well-known ode, arrogated for “Indifference.”
“Sweet sensibility! thou keen delight!
Unprompted moral! sudden sense of right!
Perception exquisite! fair virtue’s seed!