[Footnote A: _Hannah More_, by Marian Harland. New York and London: G.P. Putnam.]
Miss Harland's preface is most engaging. She reminds a married sister how in the far-off days of their childhood in a Southern State their Sunday reading, usually confined or sought to be confined, to 'bound sermons and semi-detached tracts,' was enlivened by the _Works of Hannah More_. She proceeds as follows:
'At my last visit to you I took from your bookshelves one of a set of volumes in uniform binding of full calf, coloured mellowly by the touch and the breath of fifty odd years. They belonged to the dear old home library.... The leaves of the book I held fell apart at _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_.'
I leave my readers to judge how uncomfortable these innocent words made me:
'The usher took six hasty strides As smit with sudden pain.'
I knew that set of volumes, their distressing uniformity of binding, their full calf. Their very fellows lie mouldering in an East Anglian garden, mellow enough by this time and strangely coloured.
Circumstances alter cases. Miss Harland thinks that if the life of Charlotte Brontë's mother had been mercifully spared, the authoress of _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_ might have grown up more like Hannah More than she actually did. Perhaps so. As I say, circumstances alter cases, and if the works of Hannah More had been in my old home library, I might have read _The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain_ and _The Search after Happiness_ of a Sunday, and found solace therein. But they were not there, and I had to get along as best I could with the _Pilgrim's Progress_, stories by A.L.O.E., the crime-stained page of Mrs. Sherwood's _Tales from the Church Catechism_, and, 'more curious sport than that,' the _Bible in Spain_ of the never-sufficiently-bepraised George Borrow.
What, however, is a little odd about Miss Harland's enthusiasm for Hannah More's writings is that it expires with the preface. _There_, indeed, it glows with a beautiful light:
'And _The Search after Happiness!_ You cannot have forgotten all of the many lines we learned by heart on Sunday afternoons in the joyful spring-time when we were obliged to clear the pages every few minutes of yellow jessamine bells and purple Wistaria petals flung down by the warm wind.'