Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/37

Rh Miss Reynolds told the sisters that "Sir Eldred was the theme in all polite circles, and that the beauteous Bertha has kindled a flame in the cold bosom of Johnson."

Garrick was equally delighted, and read the verses aloud to select audiences with all the effect of his perfect elocution. On one of these occasions Hannah wrote: "I think I never was so ashamed in my life, but he read it so superlatively that I cried like a child. Only think what a scandalous thing to cry at one's own poetry. I could have beaten myself, for it looked as if I thought it very moving, which, I can truly say, is far from being the case. But the beauty of the jest lies in this. Mrs. Garrick twinkled as well as I, and made as many apologies for crying at her husband's reading as I did for crying at my own verses. She got out of the scrape by pretending she was touched at the story, and I by saying the same thing of the reading. It furnished us with a great laugh at the catastrophe, when it would really have been decent to have been a little sorrowful."

Garrick further wrote a poem representing the male sex as mortified by the success of a female performance, till Apollo appears and claims it:— True! cries the god of verse, 'tis mine, And now the farce is o'er, To vex proud man, I wrote each line, And gave them Hannah More!