Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/185

 ��[' HANNAH MORE visited London in 1773 or 1774, in company with two of her sisters ; her introduction to Mr. and Mrs. Garrick took place in about a week after her arrival. It was afterwards his delight to introduce his new friend to the best and most gifted society.' Memoirs, i. 47.

In her childhood she had been wont 'to make a carriage of a chair, and then to call her sisters to ride with her to London to see bishops and booksellers.' Ib. i. 14.

She was born in 1745 ten months before the Young Pretender invaded England, and died in 1833, the year after the great Reform Bill was passed.

'Her nurse, a pious old woman, had lived in the family of Dryden, whose son she had attended in his last illness, and the inquisitive mind of the little Hannah was continually prompting her to ask for stories about the poet Dryden.' Ib. i. n. It must have been Dryden's third son, Erasmus Henry, whom the old woman nursed. He died in 1710, nine years after his father. Scott's Life of Dryden, ed. 1834, p. 396.

When Macaulay was six years old Hannah More wrote to him : ' Though you are a little boy now, you will one day, if it please God, be a man ; but long before you are a man I hope you will be a scholar. I therefore wish you to purchase such books as will be useful and agreeable to you then y and that you employ this very small sum in laying a little tiny corner stone for your future library.' A year or two afterwards she wrote : ' You must go to Hatchard's and choose another book. I think we have nearly exhausted the Epics. What say you

1 From Memoirs of the Life and More, by William Roberts, Esq. Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah 4 vols. 1834.

VOL. II. N to

�� �