Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/173

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SORROWS.
161

soon after came in crying, 'Give me the moon. It is my moon. I will have the moon.'


"The Application.

"Now, I am a large spoiled child. Your Ladyship has so accustomed me to have all my wants, expressed, unexpressed, granted, and my very wishes and even thoughts anticipated, that I too, thus spoiled, am in danger of crying for the moon. You, as a natural consequence, will fly to Herschel, and consult him on the best means of conveying it, undertaking, if the whole should not be portable, to send me a crescent, or a still smaller slice."

Then follows a criticism on the poem, regretting the wasting the fifth canto in songs, so that the catastrophe in the sixth is hurried on.

In the summer of 1813, Mrs. More paid a visit to Lady Olivia at her house in Huntingdonshire, but she was ill almost all the time she was there, and when she went on to Mr. Henry Hoare's, at Mitcham, she had a great shock in the news of the death of her old friend Lord Barham, with whom she had been about to stay. She again became so ill that she had only one meal with the family all the time she was at Mitcham, but when she went on to Strawberry Hill, where Lady Waldegrave had made her home, some improvement in health enabled her to revisit the scenes where she had