Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/76

64 have builded." In 1784 Hannah was again with her London friends, among whom she now numbered General Oglethorpe, the foster-brother of "The Old Chevalier," and said to have been the first reformer of prisons and the colonizer of Georgia; also Dr. Beattie, a Scottish minister, whose Minstrel, in Spenserian stanzas, was much admired at the time.

The most valued of all Hannah More's friends was, however, passing away—namely, Johnson. She had been with him at St. Clement's at his last Communion in church, and grieved heartily for his loss, gathering up all the anecdotes about him, and the noble sayings with which, as with a sledge-hammer, he bore down all that opposed truth or virtue. Still, it was weak of her to entreat Boswell to soften down some of Johnson's asperities in his memoirs, to which that prince of biographers replied, "He would not cut off his claws nor make a tiger a cat to please anyone."