Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/160

148 she made a new venture, a religious tale or novel for the upper classes, entitled Cœlebs in Search of a Wife. Cœlebs is a young gentleman of four-and-twenty, very carefully brought up by an excellent mother, and serving as a peg upon which to hang numerous sketches of society and character. Cœlebs goes forth, instructed by his mother, and enamoured of the character of Milton's Eve, to seek for as near a likeness of the latter as may exist, but, in accordance with the dying wishes of his parents, intends to come to no decision till he has consulted his father's old friend, Mr. Stanley.

He visits London, as it were, to reconnoitre. He goes to so ill-dressed and badly managed a dinner that he concludes that the daughters must be learned ladies, and therefore begins by asking one if she did not think Virgil the finest poet in the world: "She started and said she had never heard of the person I mentioned, but that she had read Tears of Sensibility, and Rosa Matilda, and Sympathy of Souls, and Two Civil by Half, and the Sorrows of Werter, and the Stranger, and the Orphans of Snowdon."

"Yes, Sir," chimed in the younger sister, who did not rise to so high a pitch of literature, "and we have read Perfidy Punished, and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, and the Fortunate Footman, and the Illustrious Chambermaid."