Anecdotes by Hannah More.
��original manner. We did not part till eleven. He scolded me heartily, as usual, when I differed from him in opinion, and, as usual, laughed when I flattered him z . I was very bold in com batting some of his darling prejudices : nay, I ventured to defend one or two of the Puritans 2 , whom I forced him to allow to be good men, and good writers. He said he was not angry with me at all for liking Baxter 3 . He liked him himself; ' but then,' said he, ' Baxter was bred up in the establishment, and would have died in it, if he could have got the living of Kidderminster. He was a very good man.' Here he was wrong ; for Baxter was offered a bishopric after the Restoration 4 .
I never saw Johnson really angry with me but once ; and his
��1 Ante, ii. 179, n.
2 Her grandmother ' used to tell her younger relatives, that they would have known how to value gospel privileges, had they lived, like her, in the days of persecution, when, at midnight, pious worshippers went with stealthy steps through the snow, to hear the words of inspira tion delivered by a holy man at her father's house ; while her father with a drawn sword guarded the entrance/ Memoirs, i. 7.
3 ' I asked him (writes Boswell) what works of Richard Baxter's I should read. He said, "Read any of them ; they are all good." ' Life, iv. 226. This is a somewhat daring assertion, for ' in forty years Baxter wrote 1 68 books, 85 of them quarto volumes.' Printed uniformly in oc closely printed pages.' J. H. Davies's Life of Baxter, pp. 443-4.
His works were ordered by the University of Oxford to be publicly burnt in the Court of the Schools. James \Vildings' Account Book, p. 252. Nevertheless not only John son praised them, but Barrow said that ' Baxter's practical writings were never mended, and his controversial ones seldom confuted.' Calamy's
��Baxter, ed. 1702, p. 701.
In a note on the Life, iv. 226, I quote Hazlitt's story, that at Kidder minster * Baxter was almost pelted by the women for maintaining from the pulpit that "Hell was paved with infants' skulls." ' This story had its origin, I conjecture, in the following circumstance : * Once all the igno rant rout were raging mad against him for preaching to them the doc trine of original sin, and telling them, " That infants before regeneration had so much guilt and corruption as made them loathsome in the eyes of God. Whereupon they vented it about in the country, that he preached that God hated and loathed infants. So that they railed at him as he passed through the streets."' Ca lamy's Baxter, p. 22.
For his Humble Advice to Parlia ment that officers be authorized to whip those that cannot pay the fines for the non-observance of the Lord's day see Barclay's Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Common wealth, 1876, p. 183.
4 ' Calamy and Baxter refused the sees of Lichfield and Hereford.' Burnet's History of His Own Time, ed. 1818, i. 204.
displeasure
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