Fanny Price, but is converted by her to worthier aims, and ends by
becoming the best friend and benefactor of her and her rustic suitor.
There is an impressive sketch of the elderly prude:--

"--wise, austere, and nice,
Who showed her virtue by her scorn of vice";

and another of the selfish and worldly life of the Lady at the Great
House who prefers to spend her fortune in London, and leaves her tenants
to the tender mercies of her steward. Her forsaken mansion is described
in lines curiously anticipating Hood's _Haunted House_:--

"--forsaken stood the Hall:
Worms ate the floors, the tap'stry fled the wall:
No fire the kitchen's cheerless grate display'd;
No cheerful light the long-closed sash convey'd;
The crawling worm that turns a summer fly,
Here spun his shroud, and laid him up to die
The winter-death:--upon the bed of state,
The bat shrill shrieking woo'd his flickering mate."

In the end her splendid funeral is solemnised:--

"Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean,
With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene;
Presents no objects tender or profound
But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around."

And the sarcastic village-father, after hearing "some scholar" read the
list of her titles and her virtues, "looked disdain and said":--