Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/22

 good thing to be born in the year 1745. Miss More's reputation was already established at the dawning of my cherished half-century, and, for the whole fifty years, her life was a series of social, literary, and religious triumphs. In her youth, she was mistaken for a wit. In her old age, she was revered as a saint. In her youth, Garrick called her "Nine,"—gracefully intimating that she embodied the attributes of all the Muses. In her old age, an acquaintance wrote to her: "You who are secure of the approbation of angels may well hold human applause to be of small consequence." In her youth, she wrote a play that everybody went to see. In her old age, she wrote tracts that everybody bought and distributed. Prelates composed Latin verses in her honour; and when her "Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World" was published anonymously, the Bishop of London exclaimed in a kind of pious transport, "Aut Morus, aut Angelus!" Her tragedy, "Percy," melted the heart of London. Men "shed tears in abundance," and women were "choked with emotion" over the "affecting circumstances of the Piece."