Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/23

Rh near the Mayor's chapel, as well as the Cathedral, and within reach of Wells and Glastonbury, there is not a single reference to their beauty in any of Hannah More's letters; and it may be doubted whether she had any notion of admiring natural scenery beyond the trim garden and shady park, though perhaps she loved it more than she knew, for picnics among the lovely Clifton rocks and woods were the holiday recreation of the sisterhood. She certainly, in all her works, seems to feel that "the proper study of mankind is man."

However, at this period, she was to study man in a new and more trying light. Two young ladies named Turner, who were among the pupils, always spent their holidays with their guardian cousin, the Squire of Belmont, a house very beautifully placed on a kind of natural terrace on the steep slope of hills extending above the valley of the Avon. They were encouraged to invite their friends to come with them. Hannah and Patty, then twenty-two and twenty, were of the party, and there was much planning of walks and landscape gardening. Hannah wrote inscriptions for favoured spots, and these Mr. Turner, with more courtesy than taste, caused to be painted in black and white on boards exactly like notices to trespassers, and affixed to trees, where they were extant within the last forty years.

All this led to the natural result. Mr. Turner fell