Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/169

Rh you will be a scholar. I therefore wish you to purchase such books as will be useful and agreeable to you then, and that you employ this little sum in laying a little tiny corner-stone for your future library."

A year or two after, she thanks him for his "two letters so neat and free from blots. By this obvious improvement you have entitled yourself to another book. You must go to Hatchard's and choose. I think we have nearly exhausted the Epics. What say you to a little good prose, Johnson's Hebrides, or Walton's Lives, unless you would like a neat edition of Cowper's poems, or Paradise Lost for your own eating? In any case choose something you do not possess. I want you to become a complete Frenchman that I may give you the works of Racine, the only dramatic poet I know, in any modern language, that is perfectly pure and good."

It is somewhat amusing that, whereas Louis Philippe was Madame de Genlis's favourite pupil, and Dean Stanley the representative of Dr. Arnold, Lord Macaulay should have been so much under Hannah More's influence! The aptest scholars do not always run in the groove that their teachers have left them.