Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/22

10 and perhaps in wit and vivacity in public, though at home Sally was considered the wag. They were in the best society of the old merchant city, numbering among their friends Dean Tucker, and Dr. Langhorne, whom Hannah had met at Weston-super-Mare, and who asked her to correspond with him. Dr. James Stonehouse was also on intimate terms with the sisters. They also knew a Mr. Peach, who had helped Hume to correct his history. In fact, the professional society of Bristol was evidently of a superior order, and, as was the case in other old cathedral towns, included persons in trade who were often as cultured as the classes higher in social rank. Poor Chatterton was living his strange life there, and it will be further remembered that here dwelt Amos Cottle, bookseller, who afterwards appreciated the Lake poets in their crude youth; and here, too, worked as dressmakers the ladies who married Southey and Coleridge.

Bristol was a great centre of operations to Charles Wesley, but Methodism never seems to have attracted the More sisters. They were thoughtful religious women after the eighteenth-century pattern, devout and careful of their own souls, but never looking beyond the ordinary duties about them.

It is rather curious in these days to see the utter insensibility to church architecture in those times. Though she lived in the city of St. Mary Redcliffe,