Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/57

Rh world, such as is exemplified by an engraving of the period, which is still to be seen in some old country houses, representing the finding of Moses by Pharoah's daughter in the likeness of Queen Charlotte, with all her attendants arrayed fashionably in Court plumes, and little pyramids interspersed among the roofs of the city in the background. However, the dramas had the essential qualities of reverence and sound principles, and they added to the general esteem in which their author was held. Indeed, Mrs. Trimmer wrote that they excited in her much the same devotional sentiment as the Scriptures themselves.

With them appeared, in the form of a letter to Mrs. Boscawen, a poem on "Sensibility." At that period of reaction from coarseness, sensibility was held to be the greatest charm a human creature could possess. This meant not the feeling which acts, but the feeling that weeps and shrinks. Rousseau had made natural impulse and tenderness appear the great motives of human life, and Goethe had followed this up in the passionate tale of the Sorrows of Werther, which had appeared about eight years previously, and had been translated into every European language. The French, as we may see in the memoirs of the time, thought it needful to weep for a couple of days at every parting, and in England the fashion was to consider semistarvation, agitated nerves, fainting fits, tears, fright, and helplessness, the token of delicate refinement.