We all know, by our own sensations, how great an influence the stomach exercises over our daily happiness. Mrs. Hannah More says, in her quaint way, There are only two bad things in this world-sin and bile.' When in a perfectly healthy condition, everything goes on well-all is couleur de rose; on the contrary, our doctors tell us that the horrors of hypochondriasis are mainly owing to dyspepsia, or indigestion. That this is true we have no doubt, though we are not yet fully disposed to adopt the French maxim― mauvais cœur, bon estomac'-as comprehending the requisites of physical enjoyment.

6

Our lively neighbours, however, possess such indisputable claims to be our masters in the art of cookery, that everything coming from them which relates in any way to the table is entitled to be received with attention and acknowledged with gratitude. Les lois, règles, applications et exemples de l'art de bien vivre,' laid down with great exactness in the Code Gourmand,' named at the head of this paper, have afforded us some amusement; and we think few of our readers could help smiling at the solemn trifling of the confirmed epicure who has here recorded the results of his gastronomical experience. It is paying him but a poor compliment, that he is worth a hundred Dr. Kitcheners.

The ceremonies to be observed, from the first sending out of an invitation to the service of the last remove of an entertainment, are described with rigorous formality:

· CHAP. I. TITRE PREMIER.

'Art. 3.-La date de l'invitation se mesure d'après l'importance du repas. Pour plus de sûreté et de régularité, elle ne peut avoir à courir moins de quatre jours, ni plus de trente.

Art. 4.-Quand le dîner doit être orné d'une pièce notable, on l'indique par un post-scriptum; on écrit, "Il y aura une carpe du Rhin," comme il y aura un violon.'

Art. 5.-Le vaste surtout chargé de fleurs est à jamais proscrit de la table d'un vrai gourmand; valut il mille écus, il faut lui préférer le modeste hors-d'oeuvre dont il envahit la place.'

CHAP. II. TITRE SECOND.

' Art. 1.—Un convive qui sait son monde n'entamera jamais une conversation avant la fin du premier service; jusque-là le dîner est une affaire sérieuse, dont il serait imprudent de distraire l'assemblée.' Art. 2.-Toute phrase commencée doit être suspendue à l'arrivée d'une dinde aux truffles.

6

Art. 3.-Un convive ne doit être que poli pendant le premier service; il est tenu d'être galant au second; il peut être tendre au dessert. Jusqu'au champagne'

But the Convive is getting too lively for our English notionsso we must turn a new leaf, and introduce the reader to more sober company.

ART.

ART. VI.-Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More. By William Roberts, Esq. 4 vols. London,

1834.

HAD

AD it been possible for any literator, with Mrs. Hannah More's correspondence at his command, to produce an uninteresting work under the title which we have transcribed, we are obliged to confess our belief that the task must have been accomplished by Mr. Roberts. The regard with which Mrs. More honoured him would of itself be a sufficient pledge for the purity of his intentions; and we willingly acknowledge that, in his own part of this bulky book, he has occasionally expressed amiable. feelings. But the selection of him for this undertaking appears, on the whole, to have been about as unfortunate as any that could have been thought of. He writes with the facility of a practised turner of periods, but with the confusion and verbosity of one whose brain has been less exercised than his hand. He sees, and therefore describes, few things clearly; nor has he any notion what the things are concerning the history, manners, and deportment of such a person as Hannah More, that her biographer ought to have made it his business to describe. His method of compiling and arranging is so clumsy, that if any one can extract from this book a distinct notion even of the principal events and dates in her life, he must have bestowed more attention on the materials of which it is composed than the editor himself has thought fit to If year and month be not written at the top of the sheet, Mr. Roberts never even seems to think of trying to make out the date from the contents; thus, for example, he states it as doubtful whether Hannah's first visit to London was in 1778 or 1774, though a letter printed in vol. i. p. 48, distinctly settles the point in favour of the latter year; while he gives another dateless letter at p. 36, as the first she wrote from London, though that letter is full of the praises of the Journey to the Hebrides, which was not published until January, 1775. We shall not waste space in exposing more of his blunders of this class, though the book swarms with them. A more serious and equally pervading mischief is, that Mr. Roberts takes part with nothing but the peculiar views and prejudices of the religious sect, if it may be so called, to which Mrs. Hannah More, in the later years of her life, lent the distinction of her too exclusive favour. All the earlier, brighter, and we take leave to say by no means the least honourable pages of her history, have accordingly but little interest in his eyes; he seems to be throughout in the vein of apologising for her ever having been on terms of intimacy with anybody out of his own little pale; forgetting that her place within that circle

was,

was, in no trivial degree, the fruit of the eminence which she had previously attained to without it; unconscious that her power to serve the cause which she ultimately adopted would have been comparatively nothing, had the range of her experience been as limited as that of her biographer's sympathy.

Authoresses, as we had occasion not long ago to show in a tabular form, are, generally speaking, a long-lived race; and Mrs. More offers no exception to the rule. She died September 7th, 1833, in the 89th year of her age; having been born in 1745, at Stapleton, in Gloucestershire, where her father kept a small school. One of Mr. Roberts's correspondents, however, is exceedingly anxious, more so than we should have expected in this quarter, to show that Hannah was come of a gentle race in Norfolk; and we read that her father, Jacob More, had originally been designed for the church, but laid aside this plan of life in consequence of the failure of a lawsuit, by which he was deprived of a landed estate worth in those days 8000l. per annum. The lady adds:

We who are spared to see the result of this trying dispensation of Providence, must pause to meditate a while on his infinite wisdom and mercy, more particularly when we look at the descendant of the more fortunate cousin, who enjoyed his unjustly gotten wealth but a short time. Death entered his dwelling, and his eldest son soon dissipated all the property, as he lived in the lowest state of profligacy.'-p. 9.

This is all we are told of the lawsuit and its results; and we must say it appears to us queer enough, that a lawyer like Mr. Roberts should permit his fair friend to babble thus complacently about ' unjustly gotten wealth,' which was gotten only in the usual course of the administration of English justice. Moreover, we do not exactly comprehend the lady's logic when she points out an extraordinary and memorable example of divine wisdom and mercy in the termination of the lawsuit against Mr. Jacob More. What she means probably is, that had Jacob got the estate, Hannah would never have written Colebs,' &c., &c. But none of Hannah's books were written under the pressure of poverty,— when she wrote the best of them she was rich; and we can see no reason why she, though brought up in a wealthy squire's house in place of a poor schoolmaster's, might not have cultivated both religion and literature quite as zealously as she actually did. But the truth is, we feel considerable doubts as to the authenticity of this whole story. When Jacob's lawsuit was decided, if there ever was such a lawsuit, that is to say, before he settled in Gloucestershire, about one hundred and twenty years ago, 8000l. was a very large income; it was at the least equal to 16,000l. a year now. The family that possessed such property in Norfolk must have been well known,

known, and probably highly connected-yet here is all the trace we find of its very existence-and, to conclude, it would be satisfactory to have one instance besides of the heir to an estate of 16,000l., or even 8000l. a year, having been originally designed for the church.' Sure we are that when any heir to a large landed estate adopts that profession, it must be under the influence of feelings too powerful to be easily baffled; and we do not understand on what principle a profoundly pious youth who married a farmer's daughter, and sat down for life in a small village school, should have been too lofty to eschew those means of proceeding through the university to holy orders, which the piety of our ancestors placed within the reach of the poorest. One word still more seriously who doubts that divine Providence overrules the destinies of individuals and of families? But it seems to us that they who, in the spirit of certain sectaries, are constantly ready to point out the specific objects and methods of its operation, are scarcely less presumptuous than the self-elected interpreters of unfulfilled prophecy; and this writer's Death entered his dwelling, &c.'-her now boldly proclaiming that such a visitation was the righteous and correcting sequel of the at worst mistaken verdict of a Norwich jury, A.D. 1720, must be allowed to be worthy of the most pitiable æra of puritanical cant.

It appears that Hannah was wonderfully precocious in her literary attainments. The biographer gravely records that her nurse, a pious old woman, had lived in the family of Dryden, and the inquisitive mind of the little Hannah was continually prompting her to ask for stories about the Poet!'-p. 14. This was when little Hannah had reached her fourth birth-day. The pious old nurse had probably been a giddy young housemaid when she lived in the family of a man who died fifty years before this time; and how edifying must have been the reminiscences, which, after the lapse of fifty, sixty, or seventy years, rewarded from her lips the enthusiastic inquisitiveness of the little Hannah about glorious John.' What a pity that Mr. Roberts has not deigned to preserve any of them! One would have been enchanted to know on authority the exact quantity of the dose of stewed prunes. But the enthusiasm for Dryden could, after all, have been commendable only in a child. Mr. Roberts produces her as in her mature days denying almost any merit to Dryden's Fables-a judgment in which no doubt the worthy biographer fully concurs.

But at eight years old her thirst for learning became very conspicuous; and her father, having hardly any books, would have been at a loss to satisfy her eager desire to learn the histories of the Greeks and Romans,' but for his very wonderful memory;' and a wonderful memory it must indeed have been, since it' enabled him to relate to her while sitting on his knee, all the striking events which they contained'-in fashion following:

'He

He recited to her the speeches of his favourite heroes, first in their original language to gratify her ear with the sound, and then translated them into English; particularly dwelling on the parallels and wise sayings of Plutarch; and these recollections made her afterwards remark, that the conversation of an enlightened parent or preceptor constituted one of the best parts of education!-p. 12.

Imagine the good schoolmaster spouting, from memory, to a child of eight years, the wise sayings of Solon and Lycurgus in the pure Greek of old Plutarch; and imagine who can that Hannah More had arrived at the recondite dogma about education, which she appears to have taken such pains in enforcing upon the mind of her biographer, in consequence of her grateful recollection of these cabalistical intonations. Parson Adams lecturing Joseph Andrews on the structure of the Choëphore was nothing to this.

We are favoured with a few more anecdotes of Hannah's juvenile years, as (happy omen!) that she used to get astride of a chair, and say she was riding to London 'to see bishops and booksellers;' that she hoarded scraps of paper and wrote verses on them, and confessed to her sister that her highest ambition was to have a whole quire to herself,—and so on. At twelve she was

sent to Bristol, where her elder sisters had some years before established a boarding-school, and there she soon attracted notice by the quickness of her parts and docility of her temper. Among the persons whose conversation in those early days served to encourage and stimulate her in her intellectual pursuits, the author names Ferguson the astronomer, and the elder Sheridan, both of whom delivered occasional lectures in Bristol, and were naturally in the habit of visiting the Miss More's establishment, but especially Mr. Peach, a linen-draper of the town, of whose abilities and knowledge she was accustomed in after days to speak with admiration. Her biographer adds:

He had been the friend of Hume, who had shown his confidence in his judgment, by entrusting to him the correction of his history, in which, he used to say, he had discovered more than two hundred Scotticisms. But for this man, it appears, two years of the life of the historian might have passed into oblivion, which were spent in a merchant's counting-house in Bristol, whence he was dismissed on account of the promptitude of his pen in the correction of the letters intrusted to him to copy. More than twenty years after the death of Mr. Peach, the subject of these Memoirs, being in company with Dr. Percy, then Bishop of Dromore, Mr. Gibbon, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and others, who were conjecturing what might have been the cause of this chasm of two years in the life of Hume (of which the Bishop was then proposing to give a sketch), she was enabled to clear up the mystery, by relating the above anecdote.'—vol. i. pp. 16-17.

We are, however, already weary of criticising Mr. Roberts-but

there