Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3CHAPTER III. A PEEP AT THE BLUES. The bright world of intellectual life and social elegance into which Hannah More was suddenly and unexpectedly ushered, while it brought her into the society of people whom it was a pleasure and a privilege to know, also brought her into contact with amusements and habits not only foreign to her tastes, but opposed to her principles. In her free home letters, full of good sense and graphic description, she opens a loophole into her heart and habits. The following was written during her second visit to London, in 1775: " Our visit was at Sir Joshua's, where we were received with all the friendship imaginable. I am going to-day to a great dinner: nothing can be conceived so absurd, extravagant, and fantastical, as the present mode of dressing the head. Simplicity and modesty are things so much exploded, that their very names are no longer remembered. I have just escaped from one of the fashionable disfigur- .- ers; and though I charged him to dress me with the greatest simplicity, and to have only a very distant eye upon the fashion, just enough to avoid the pride of singularity, yet in spite of all these sage cautions, I absolutely blush at myself, and turn to the glass with as much caution as a vain beauty just risen from the small-pox, which cannot be a more disfiguring disease than the present mode of dress. Of the one, the calamity may be greater in its consequences; but of the other, it is more corrupt in its cause. " We have been reading a treatise on the morality of Shakspeare. It is a happy and easy way of filling a book that the present race of authors have arrived at—that of criticizing the works of some eminent poet, with monstrous extracts and short remarks. It is a species of cookery that I begin to grow tired of: they cut up their authors i...