In answer to a series of questions from the Editor, respecting this aged and respectable female, addressed to another correspondent, he says, “What a work you make about an old woman! ‘I’ll answer none of your silly questions; ax Briant!’ as a neighbouring magistrate said to sir Edmund Bacon, who was examining him in a court of justice. The old woman was well enough. There is nothing more to be learned about her, than how long a body may crawl upon the earth, and think nothing worth thinking—as if ‘thinking was but an idle waste of thought;’ and how long a person to whom ‘naught is every thing, and every thing is nothing’, did nothing worth doing. I suppose that the noted H. W. knew as much of life in 105 hours, as Hannah Want did in 105 years. All I know or can learn about her is nothing, and if you can make any thing of it you may. Some of our free-knowledgists, ‘with a pale cast of thought’ have taken a cast of her head, and discovered that her organ of self-destructiveness was harmonized by the organ of long-livitiveness.” This latter correspondent is too hard upon Hannah; but he encloses information on another subject that may be useful hereafter, and therefore what he amusingly says respecting her, is at the service of those readers who are qualified to make something of nothing.
A portrait of Hannah Want, in 1824, when she was in her 104th year, taken by Mr. Robert Childs, “an ingenious gentleman” of Bungay, and etched by him, furnishes the present [engraving] of her.
FLORAL DIRECTORY.
Friars’ Minors Soapwort. Saponaria Officinalis.
Dedicated to the Guardian Angels.
[337] Colossians ii. 17.
[338] Jortin.
[339] Moral Practice of the Jesuits. Lond. 12mo. 1670.