200 Whitford Of course Peter is not alone in his mockery of Hannah More. In the Probationary Odes, for instance, one of the prefa- tory "recommendatory testimonies," probably the work of Richard Tickell, is an amusing burlesque of her sentimental prose style; it is, in pretence, her epistolary account of an inter- view between Sir Joseph Mawbey and "Lactilla, " the poetizing milk-woman of Bristol. 120 Peter's criticism, however, is most extensive and most thorough. For twenty years and more, he directed occasional shafts at the Bluestockings. In his earliest successful satire, An Epistle to the Reviewers (1778), he remarked; 'Tis merit only can command their praise; Witness the volumes of Miss Hannah More: The Search for Happiness, that beauteous Song Which all of us would give our ears to own; The Captive, Percy, that, like mustard strong, Make our eyes weep, and understandings groan. Hail, Bristol town! Boeotia now no more; Since Garrick's Sappho sings, though rather slowly: All hail Miss Hannah! worth at least a score, Ay, twenty score, of Chatterton and Rowley. 111 Here Peter was acidulously sarcastic concerning the affectation of the finer feelings, a phase of unclassical emotionalism with which he was entirely out of sympathy. Yet here he was not utterly discourteous and indecent, as in some of his later satires, and only a little less moderate in tone than the gentler satirists of the decade, Goldsmith and Tickell. Seven years later, in The Lousiad (1785), he mentioned along with Cumberland's plays, Miss Burney's novels, and Miss Seward's poems, the "Sacred Dramas of Miss Hannah More, Where all the Nine with little Moses snore." m Now that is by no means a complimentary couplet; on the other band, it is certainly not insulting. In Nil Admirari and Expos- 120 Rolliad, 265-266. "Lactilla" was the author of Poems on Seieral Occa- sions by Anne Yearsley, a milk-woman oj Bristol, from which (3rd edition, Lon- don, 1785, p. 66), I take these specimen lines: "I dearly love to hear the ceaseless sound, When Noise and Nonsense are completely mix'd." 121 Peter Pindar, I, 7.
132 Peter Pindar, I, 195.
