Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/158

146 and expensive day, but I trust it has had its uses. Many similar institutions have sprung up in consequence."

Hannah was returning to literary enjoyments, and welcomed with delight Walter Scott's earlier poems. Her judgment given at the same time on Corinne, in a letter to Sir W. W. Pepys, is worth having: "There never was such a book; such a compound of genius and bad taste, such a fermentation of sense and nonsense. The descriptions of Italy are the best, and the descriptions of love the worst, I ever met with. There is no shading. As there is little nature it excites little interest, and the virtuous hero is to me a gloomy specimen of frigid sentimentality. Corinne herself gave me too much the idea of Dr. Graham's Goddess of Health, or the French Goddess of Reason, for me to take a very lively interest in her. Yet let me acknowledge that though, like Pistol, I swallowed and execrated, yet I went on swallowing, and I must own it is a book which requires great knowledge and very considerable powers of mind to produce."

The autumn brought a visit from the Bishop of London, one of the most valued of her still surviving friends. He was so feeble and broken in health that she had little hope of seeing him again, and he continued in a weak state all the winter. On the 2nd May he wrote a note, entreating her prayers,