Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/194

182 of hours that have been thus swallowed up. . . . The useful reading compared with the idle, like our medicine compared with our food, is but as grains to pounds. . . . It is not that old age has made me insensible to the charms of genius. In that one respect, I think, I am not grown obtuse. I have been really looking for leisure to read one or two of Sir Walter Scott's novels."

Mrs. More did not fail to enjoy Scott, but she thought that, though his works were free from the coarseness of earlier writers, they were deficient in the practical precepts to be gleaned from them.

An illness which kept Mrs. More thirteen weeks in bed occupied the spring of 1821-22; but again she recovered, and resumed her usual habits, and her powers were not impaired, as may be seen by some verses which accompanied a pair of garters. She was in the habit of knitting these to be sold for charitable purposes, and Sir Thomas Dyke Acland had bespoken a pair for a crown. It is worth while to compare this composition with the Bas Blanc she wrote with the stockings for the little Pepys forty years before. Few ideas are repeated, and those that are rather gain than lose in the process:— Slowly, yet gladly, to my valued friend The enclosed most faultless of my works I send. Two cantos make the whole, surpris'd you 'll see They're better for their strict identity. Length—to my previous works so worthy blame, Here the just meed of your applause may claim.