of Hannah More is now forgotten, but "Percy" is a
good play, and it is clear that the authoress might
have excelled as a dramatic writer had she devoted
herself to that difficult species of composition. In
1786 she published another volume of verse, "Florio,
a Tale for Fine Gentlemen and Fine Ladics," and
"The Bas Bleu, or Conversation." The latter (which
Johnson complimented as a great performance) was
an elaborate eulogy on the Bas Bleu Club, a literary
assembly that mct at Mrs Montagu's.
The following couplets have been quoted as terse and pointed:—
"In men this blunder still you find,
All think their little set-mankind."
"Small habits, well pursued, betimes
May reach the dignity of crimes."
Such lines mark the good sense and keen observation of the writer, and these qualities Hannah now resolved to devote exclusively to high objects. The gay life of the fashionable world had lost its charms; and, having published her "Bas Bleu," she retired to a small cottage and garden near Bristol, where her sisters kept a flourishing boarding-school. Her first prose publication was "Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society," produced in 1788. This was followed, in 1791, by an "Esti-
