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THE LITERARY LADY

of British morality by denouncing that nobleman's "profligate" letters; and we find the Rev. Montagu Pennington lamenting years afterwards her refusal "to apply her wit and genius to counteract the mischief which Lord Chesterfield's volumes had done."

Miss Hannah More's dazzling renown rested on the same solid support. She was so strong morally that to have cavilled at her intellectual feebleness would have been deemed profane. Her advice (she spent the best part of eighty-eight years in offering it) was so estimable that its general inadequacy was never ascertained. Rich people begged her to advise the poor. Great people begged her to advise the humble. Satisfied people begged her to advise the discontented. Sir William Pepys wrote to her in 1792, imploring her to avert from England the threatened dangers of radicalism and a division of land by writing a dialogue "between two persons of the lowest order," in which should be set forth the discomforts of land ownership, and the advantages of labouring for small wages at trades. This simple and childlike scheme would, in Sir William's opinion, go far