ambitious as they now are--that Hannah More had the _entrée_ into the
best society under the patronage of the greatest writers of the age. She
was a literary lion before she was twenty-five. She attracted the
attention of Sheridan by her verses when she was scarcely eighteen. Her
"Search after Happiness" went through six editions before the year 1775.
Her tragedy of "Percy" was translated into French and German before she
was thirty; and she realized from the sale of it £600. "The Fatal
Falsehood" was also much admired, but did not meet the same success,
being cruelly attacked by envious rivals. Her "Bas Bleu" was praised by
Johnson in unmeasured terms. It was for her poetry that she was best
known from 1775 to 1785, the period when she lived in the fashionable
and literary world, and which she adorned by her wit and brilliant
conversation,--not exactly a queen of society, since she did not set up
a _salon_, but was only an honored visitor at the houses of the great; a
brilliant and beautiful woman, whom everybody wished to know.

I will not attempt any criticism on those numerous poems. They are not
much read and valued in our time. They are all after the style of
Johnson and Pope;--the measured and artificial style of the eighteenth
century, in imitation of the ancient classics and of French poetry, in
which the wearisome rhyme is the chief peculiarity,--smooth, polished,
elaborate, but pretty much after the same pattern, and easily imitated
by school-girls. The taste of this age--created by Burns, Byron,
Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Longfellow, and others--is very
different. But the poems of Hannah More were undoubtedly admired by her
generation, and gave her great _éclat_ and considerable pecuniary
emolument. And yet her real fame does not rest on those artificial
poems, respectable as they were one hundred years ago, but on her
writings as a moralist and educator.