and Hannah, the fourth sister, had written one or two ballads, after the fashion of the day. In a holiday time Hannah and her sister Sally came up to London; Miss Reynolds introduced them to Johnson, and after meeting him a few times in society, Johnson invited himself to tea with the two sisters in their lodgings. The next day Miss Hannah and Miss Sally write their accounts of the evening to the three sisters at home. Miss Hannah says: "I never spent an evening more pleasantly or more profitably. Dr. Johnson, full of wisdom and piety, was very communicative. To enjoy Dr. Johnson perfectly one must have him all to oneself. Our tea was not over till nine o'clock. We then fell upon 'Sir Eldred' [one of her ballads]; he read both poems through, suggested some little alterations in the first, and did me the honour to write one whole stanza." Then Miss Sally goes on: "After much critical discourse with Hannah, Dr. Johnson turns round to me, and with one of his most amiable looks, which must be seen to form the least idea of it, he says, 'I have heard that you are engaged in the useful and honourable employment of teaching young ladies;' upon which we entered upon the history of our birth, parentage, and education, showing how we were born with more desires than guineas, and how, as years increased our appetites, the cupboard at home began to grow too small to gratify them, and how we set out to seek our fortunes, and how we found a great house with nothing in it, and how it was like to remain so till, looking into our knowledgeboxes, we happened to find a little larning, a good thing when land is gone, or rather none; and so, at last, by giving a little of this larning to those who had less, we got a good store of gold in return, but how, alas! we wanted the wit to keep it. 'I love you both,' cries the inamorato. 'I love you all five; I never was at Bristol; I will come on purpose to see you. What! five women all live happily together! I will come and see you. I have spent a happy evening. I

You live lives to

am glad I came; God for ever bless you! shame duchesses.' He took his leave with so much warmth and tenderness we were quite affected at his manner."

Dr. Johnson went to see the five Miss Mores in their school at Bristol; and he became the kind friend and adviser of Hannah More, who after a while gave up her work in the school in order to devote herself to literature, and who then spent the greater part of every year in London. In 1777 she wrote a play, Percy, which Garrick brought out, and which was considered to be the most successful of all the tragedies put on the stage that winter. Later on she wrote two works on education, which urged the better culture of women, and met objections likely to be brought against it. Hannah More made money by her writings, and so did her sisters in their school; and they lived for many years together at a house called Barley Wood, in Somersetshire. Here they were among the first to carry into action the growing feeling of the time, that all mankind form but one brotherhood, and that each individual may be raised from the misery and degradation of ignorance and sin. In the midst of the greatest difficulties and much opposition, they succeeded in personally establishing schools for the poor in ten different villages among the Mendip Hills, in most of which Christianity in any form was unknown, and the character of the people so violent that no one had ever ventured to enter the villages, even to apprehend known criminals. In connection with this work, Hannah More and her sister Sally began to write stories and ballads for the poor, to be sold very cheaply to hawkers, who would carry them. round to the cottages. In this, again, they were the leaders in a new and untried path; for until now none had tried to make literature a means of bringing light and help into lives sunk in sordid toil, or in the deeper degradation of mere brutal existence.

We have now seen Johnson among his friends in society we must look at him in his home. Here we shall see no solitary lodging, in which a lonely man might make himself comfortable by indulging his selfish tastes and fancies. Johnson's house in Bolt Court was a home for others who had no home but this. A Miss Williams, a friend of Mrs. Johnson's, had come up to London to have an operation performed on her eyes. She became totally blind, and had no means of support; and for more than thirty years she lived in Johnson's house--not always a pleasant inmate, for she had a very bad temper. Another lady who found a home there was Mrs. Dumorelin, the daughter of Johnson's old friend and godfather, Dr. Swinfen; she was a widow and in want. There was besides these a Miss Carmichael; a poor negro, Francis Barber; and a Mr. Levett, who had been a kind of doctor among the poor, but was unable to gain a livelihood. Not one of them was chosen as an agreeable companion, but solely on the ground of need, which Johnson could by self-denial supply; and perhaps of all kinds of self-denial, there is none more pure than the "taking in" of the stranger to the home; to "clothe the naked" and to "visit the sick and imprisoned are often easy manifestations of love compared with this. Johnson's depth of tenderness and compassion was shown on every occasion. "No man loved the poor like Dr. Johnson," Mrs. Thrale says; and out of his pension of £300 a year he did not spend more than £70 or £80 upon himself. His love for little children and his kindness to animals were also remarkable. At the same time he had a rugged contempt for sentimental sympathy and affected philanthropy, which at the time when it was fashionable to pretend to "exquisite sensibility" often made him speak roughly on matters of overstrained feeling.

During his last years he suffered much from the dread of coming insanity, and would pray to God that his faculties

might be spared to the end; and they were preserved to him in perfect clearness to the last hour of his life. He spoke with earnest, thoughtful words to many of his friends who visited him. He asked his old friend Reynolds to read the Bible; he prayed with his doctor; and he wrote after the usual forms in making his will, "I offer up my soul to the great and merciful God; I offer it full of sin, but in full assurance that it will be cleansed in the blood of my Redeemer." His love for his friends was strong to the last. When three or four were once together with him at the same time, Burke said, "I am afraid that so many of us must be oppressive to you." "No, sir, it is not so,” Johnson replied, "and I must be in a wretched state indeed when your company would not be a delight to me." Shortly before his death he said in Latin, "Jam moriturus" (now I am about to die), and, falling into a calm sleep, his soul passed away to God.

"Great souls," says Carlyle, speaking of Johnson, “are always loyally submissive, reverent to what is over them; only small mean souls are otherwise. I could not find a better proof of what I said the other day: that the sincere man was by nature the obedient man, that only in a world of heroes was there loyal obedience to the heroic."

DURING the sway of the French influence, poetry was written chiefly for the pleasure of a circle of persons living an artificial life, and the subjects for verse were chosen from the ideas and objects most familiar to this class of readers. Nature was used principally for illustration and figures of speech; and minute observation, and personal acquaintance with Nature, were not necessary for this secondary employment of its surface features. The town-bred critics, moreover, were not able to discover any departure from accurate truth, even in this general, broad use of Nature, for their impressions were only derived from second-hand, conventional descriptions. But as readers of poetry were found more and more among the people, many of whom lived in the midst of Nature itself, and had a close acquaintance with it, the demand for correctness in descriptions of Nature became increasingly greater; and we find two poets of the eighteenth century rising to fame by their fresh and careful painting of the real beauty of Nature.

The chief of these was James Thomson. He was born in 1700, in a little Scotch village in Roxburghshire, and he spent his youth on the slopes of the Cheviot Hills, far away from the life of cities. Here, before he began to call himself a poet, he would notice with the poet's eye for beauty the changing effects of the seasons, the sunrise and sunset,