Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/156

144 remarkable men, Jebb and Knox, wrote the species of criticism which is really precious, and which was accepted in a grateful spirit, leading to some correspondence with Mr. Knox.

The next two years of Hannah's life were spent in a sick-room. A chill caught in the autumn of 1806, on one of her Sunday rounds, led to a pleuritic affection, accompanied with fever, which was doubly serious to a person always delicate, and now in her sixty-first year. For a whole year her pulse could not be materially reduced, and for another she was debarred both from writing and from visiting her schools. In the time of danger, the strongest possible demonstrations of affection were made by her friends, and the poor were in the deepest grief, though Patty did her best for them.

Meanwhile, as an after-clap of the Blagdon persecution, a pamphlet came out accusing Mrs. Hannah More of hiring two men to assassinate a clergyman; of being engaged in Hadfield's attempt to assassinate George III., and of being art and part with Charlotte Corday in the murder of Marat, all as a hireling of Pitt. This was actually the work of a couple of infidel and Jacobinian curates, who appear to have escaped scot free.

However, in the summer of 1808, after two years' confinement to the house, Hannah was able to go to church, and was, after change of air at Weymouth,