Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/165

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BARLEY WOOD.
153

opposite party." On the other hand, Dr. Berrington replied by picking her sentence to pieces, and showing her its logical incorrectness, advising her to expunge it altogether, which she seems to have done, for it does not occur in the edition of her collected works. It is curious that he makes no protest against her Jansenist tastes. Did he share them, or was he too wise to betray to an outsider that there were differences of opinion; "as if," he writes, "our tenets, scattered through a thousand brains, were as varying and unstable as your own?"

Very different was the handling poor Cœlebs received at the hands of Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review. Of course, when descending into the arena of secular literature, it was only reasonable to expect to be judged critically on the literary merits of the work, and not to view its religious object as serving for a shield against censure. There were persons who were far from any profanity, and only desired truth and piety to prevail, who convulsed a private circle with laughter by turning into ridicule the priggishness unavoidable in imaginary models of male excellence, especially when drawn by female hands, and those, so utterly unable to construct an interesting story as Hannah More had always been. Distrust of what is known as Evangelicalism, partly of its doctrines, and chiefly of the narrowness and what in Germany is called "pietism," caused the darts to be directed