# Hannah More (British edition 1888)/Chapter 3

CHAPTER III.
THE LONDON WORLD.
The private income which Mr. Turner's annuity placed at Hannah More's disposal set her free from the obligations of the school, and enabled her to gratify her longings to behold a larger, fuller world than that of Bristol,—
Yearning for the large excitement that the coming years would yield, Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field.
Her letters are undated, but it must have been in 1772 or 1773 that she first plunged into the new life of London, when she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. These were the days when the evils of the Court of George II. had not become unfashionable, in spite of the influence of George III. and Queen ​Charlotte. The philosophy of Voltaire and Rousseau was affected by the more pretentious; there was much open and unblushing immorality in the higher ranks; card-playing for large sums of money was almost universal; and the routs and masquerades described in Sir Charles Grandison and Evelina may be taken as types of the favourite diversions of the young and lively in
The teacup times of hood and hoop, And when the patch was worn.
There were, however, other circles. There was that which was sometimes called that of the Wits, which assembled at their head-quarters at St. James's Coffee House, and which Goldsmith so ably sketched in Retaliation, though he durst not there touch on the elephant of this true menagerie of lions, Samuel Johnson, or his satellite Boswell, and contented himself with describing those of lesser pretension, such as Edmund Burke,—
Though equal to all things, for all things unfit, Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit, For a patriot too cool, for a drudge disobedient, And too fond of the right to pursue the expedient.
There, too, was Sir Joshua Reynolds,—
Still born to improve us in every part, His pencil our faces, his manners our heart;
and David Garrick, the great actor, "an abridgement of all that is pleasant in man."
​And connected with these by intellect and taste, as well as with the higher aristocracy by birth and rank, was the Bas Bleu, a society of ladies, of whom the foremost was Mrs. Montagu, the daughter of a Yorkshire squire, and whose husband, Edward Montagu, was the grandson of the Earl of Sandwich. She was very charming in conversation, and had obtained considerable celebrity by publishing a vindication of Shakespeare against the attacks of Voltaire, somewhat disappointing to read after seeing all the encomiums lavished on it, but a wonderful performance for a woman at that time. Her house, at the corner of Portman Square, was one of the old aristocratic mansions enclosed in a court, and here on May Day she was wont to give a dinner to the chimney sweeps of London. One of her rooms had hangings of peacocks' feathers, admired and be-rhymed at that time, but thought less beautiful by the next generation. Other members of this delightful society were Mrs. Vesey, called by her friends the Sylph, wife of a member of the Irish Parliament; Mrs. Delany, of the old loyal Granville family, and wife of Dean Delany, is well known through Lady Hall's biography; Mrs. Boscawen, the widow of a distinguished admiral, and a woman of high culture; Mrs. Chapone, noted for some excellent letters to her niece on self-culture; and Elizabeth Carter, daughter to the perpetual curate of Deal, knew about ​nine languages, and had translated Epictetus from the Greek.
Frances Reynolds, who kept house for her brother Sir Joshua, had not brought from Devonshire any extraordinary attainments, but she was an agreeable, intelligent woman, who knew how to do what the French call tenir un salon, and her drawing-room was one of the points of contact between the Wits and the Bas Bleus. To her Hannah carried letters of introduction when she set forth, with Patty and an unnamed friend, on what was then a perilous journey, whether by post-chaise or stage-coach, through ditch-like roads beset by highwaymen. However, neither then, nor in her thirty-seven subsequent journeys, does she seem to have met with any accident.
When settled in lodgings in Henrietta Street, the first experience of the sisters was the sight of the new comedy, Sheridan's Rivals, with which Hannah does not seem to have been greatly impressed. "For my own part," she says, "I think he ought to be treated with great indulgence; much is to be forgiven in an author of three-and-twenty, whose genius is likely to be his principal inheritance. I love him for the sake of his ingenious and admirable mother. On the whole I was tolerably entertained."
It seems that the play was sacrificed by bad acting; especially of the part of Sir Lucius O'Trigger. But little did Hannah or the public guess that this almost ​unsuccessful drama would furnish household words long after the popular favourites of the day were forgotten. Soon after followed an entertainment at the amiable Sir Joshua Reynolds's, where the party dined, drank tea, and supped, and did not come away till one o'clock. There must have been at least eight hours of the "brilliant circle of both sexes, not in general literary, though partly so."
It must have been mid-winter, for in the next letter, written after visiting Hampton Court and Twickenham, she speaks of the Thames being frozen. This visit failed in making her acquainted with Dr. Johnson; that "Idler, that Rambler," she says, "was out of town." But Miss Reynolds promised to introduce her to him whenever it should be possible. The publisher Caddell, who was, like herself, a native of Stapylton, interested her by telling her that he had sold four thousand copies of the Journey to the Hebrides in the first week. "It is an agreeable work," says Hannah, though the subject is sterility itself." Another instance of the insensibility of the time to the marvels of nature.
But another great wish was fulfilled; she saw Garrick in some of his most famous parts, and a letter she wrote, describing him as King Lear, was handed about by her friends, and prepared the way for her introduction to him when she went to London the following year with her two sisters, Sally and Patty, both of whom were capital letter-writers.
​David Garrick was then about sixty-five years old, and was on the point of retiring from the stage. He was a gentleman by birth, grandson to one of the exiles of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and had worked as an assistant master in Dr. Johnson's school at Edial, in Leicestershire, and, when both grew sick of the undertaking, had gone with him to seek his fortune in London. There, after attempting to be a wine merchant, by—as Foote averred—living in a cellar with three quarts of vinegar, Garrick found his vocation in the theatre. His talents raised him to the first eminence as an actor, and, by-and-by, he became manager of Drury Lane Theatre. The stage, as he conducted it, so engrossed people's minds that it was even called "the Fourth Estate." He married Eva Maria Veigel, a young Austrian dancer, who at Vienna had been so much admired by one of the young archdukes that, though her conduct was irreproachable, the Empress Maria Theresa thought it wise to send her out of reach. La Violetta, as she was called, by her beauty, grace, and an unusual charm of manner, at once gained the heart of the English Roscius. He married her as soon as possible, and never let her perform publicly again. It was a most happy marriage. She remained a Roman Catholic, and always retained her foreign manner and accent, which seem to have given a piquancy to her conversation; but she was an excellent mistress in his ​two houses at the Adelphi and at Hampton, and was received cordially in society. Indeed, Garrick kept his home entirely apart from his profession, and Mrs. Montagu declared that she had only once met an actor there, and never had seen a card in it.
The Garricks were curious to see the lady who had written the letter about "King Lear," and no sooner did they meet her than a liking began, which ripened into a strong friendship. At their house, the next day, Hannah met Mrs. Montagu; and Miss Reynolds immediately after procured her a meeting with Dr. Johnson himself, who astonished her by coming forward to meet her with Sir Joshua's macaw on his arm, and repeating the first verse of a morning hymn which she had written. Then followed an introduction to Edmund Burke, "the sublime and beautiful Edmund Burke," as Sally wrote; and altogether the sisters were made free of what was probably the choicest circle of intelligent society then in existence; not so brilliant, original, or elegant as those salons at Paris, where "philosophy" was already preparing the way for change, but infinitely purer, deeper, and more conscientious, and with no lack of vivacity.
The three sisters, with their high cultivation, lively manners, country simplicity, and warm enthusiasm, must have been delightful to their new friends, who were for the most part by a good many years their ​senior and must have looked on them as mere girls. Miss Reynolds delighted them by proposing to take them to visit Dr. Johnson in his own house at Bolt Court, where he had given shelter to a broken-down surgeon and three destitute ladies, one of them, Anna Williams, an old friend of his late wife, being blind, and with such a temper that he paid half-a-crown a week extra to the servants to put up with her.
Sally More thus describes the visit:—
​A few weeks later Sally writes:—
It has been said that Johnson was importuned by Hannah's compliments, and that he once told her that she should consider what her praise was worth before she was so lavish of it. That he may have said something of the kind in an ill-humour is quite possible; but it is evident that he was very fond of her in general, and that her bright readiness and power of repartee amused him greatly. It was an age of compliments that would now sound fulsome, if not absurd, and Hannah was a demonstrative person, so that what seems like flattery was the expression of genuine enthusiasm, and was usually accepted as such. From her letters, the drollery of Hannah can quite be perceived. For instance, she writes to one of her sisters:—
"Bear me, some god, O quickly bear me hence, To wholesome Solitude, the nurse of——
'sense' I was going to add in the words of Pope, till I recollected that pence had a more appropriate meaning."