Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/20

8 highly improving pastoral, wherein a party of young ladies, weary of themselves and of the world, go to consult a worthy shepherdess—by name Urania—telling her 'Tis happiness we seek. Oh! deign to tell Where the coy fugitive delights to dwell.

There is Euphelia, the vain beauty, bred in the regal splendour of a court; Cleora, the learned damsel, who confesses,— This the chief transport I from science drew, That all might know how much Cleora knew.

Then there is the dreamy, novel-reading maiden, Pastorella, saying,— I scorned the manners of the world I saw, My guide was fiction, and romance my law. And, lastly, the gentle Laurinda "never wished to learn, nor cared to know"; so that she is "in sense a woman, but in soul a child." Urania moralizes appropriately to each damsel, and dismisses them all greatly edified.

The absence of all excitement, and especially its freedom from perilous male characters, recommended The Search after Happiness to all the ladies' schools.

There is no more delightful chapter in Miss Mitford's sketches than where she describes the getting up of this highly-improving comedy at the school she attended at Reading. There is something grotesque in