Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/28

16 nine languages, and had translated Epictetus from the Greek.

Frances Reynolds, who kept house for her brother Sir Joshua, had not brought from Devonshire any extraordinary attainments, but she was an agreeable, intelligent woman, who knew how to do what the French call tenir un salon, and her drawing-room was one of the points of contact between the Wits and the Bas Bleus. To her Hannah carried letters of introduction when she set forth, with Patty and an unnamed friend, on what was then a perilous journey, whether by post-chaise or stage-coach, through ditch-like roads beset by highwaymen. However, neither then, nor in her thirty-seven subsequent journeys, does she seem to have met with any accident.

When settled in lodgings in Henrietta Street, the first experience of the sisters was the sight of the new comedy, Sheridan's Rivals, with which Hannah does not seem to have been greatly impressed. "For my own part," she says, "I think he ought to be treated with great indulgence; much is to be forgiven in an author of three-and-twenty, whose genius is likely to be his principal inheritance. I love him for the sake of his ingenious and admirable mother. On the whole I was tolerably entertained."

It seems that the play was sacrificed by bad acting; especially of the part of Sir Lucius O'Trigger. But little did Hannah or the public guess that this almost