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“For The Port Folio,” The Port Folio, vol. 4, no. 8 (22 August 1807), pp. 118–9.
Anonymous
Hannah More (1745–1833), one of the “bluestockings,” was a British educator, social reformer, and evangelical moralist author. Her Hints towards forming the Character of a Young Princess (London, 1805) wrapped up all of that and was an often reprinted work in the first half of the nineteenth century. The passages in Hints in which she was most critical of Hume — especially as historian — also circulated widely in America where they were excerpted in periodicals ranging from the Missionary Herald at Home and Abroad, to The Literary Magazine & American Register, and to The Port Folio, as reprinted here. There are several recent books on More, including Anne Stott’s Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford, 2003), but M.G. Jones’s biography, Hannah More (Cambridge, 1952), also still holds value.
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For The Port Folio.
In a new work, ascribed to Mrs. H. More, and entitled “Hints for the education of a young Princess,” we find much moral instruction and much fine writing. In the following stricture upon HUME’S History of England, we are at a loss which most to admire, the justness of the sentiments, or the energy and beauty of the style.
His political prejudices do not strikingly appear till the establishment of the House of Stuart, nor his religious antipathies till about the dawn of the Reformation, under Henry V. From that period to its full establishment, he is, perhaps, more dangerous, because less ostensibly daring than some other infidel historians. He is a serpent under a bed of roses. He does not so much ridicule religion himself, as invite others to ridicule it. There is in his manner a sedateness, which imposes; in his skepticism a sly gravity which puts the reader more off his guard, than the vehemence of censure or the levity of wit: for we are always less disposed to suspect a man who is too wise to appear angry. That same wisdom makes him too correct to invent calumnies, but it does not preserve him from doing what is scarcely less disingenuous; he implicitly adopts the injurious relations of those annalysts who were most hostile to the reformed Faith; though he must have known their accounts to be aggravated and discoloured, if not absolutely invented. He thus makes others responsible for the worst things he asserts, and spreads the mischief, without avowing the malignity. When he speaks from himself, the sneer is so cool, the irony so sober, the contempt so discreet, the moderation so insidious, the difference between Popish bigotry and Protestant firmness, between the fury of the persecutor, and the resolution of the martyr so little marked; the distinctions between intolerant frenzy and heroick zeal so melted into each other, that though he contrives to make the reader feel some indignation at the tyrant, he never leads him to feel any reference for the sufferer. He ascribes such a slender superiority to one religious system above another, that the young reader who does not come to the perusal, with his principles formed, will be in danger of thinking that the reformation was really not worth contending for.
But in nothing is the skill of this accomplished sophist more apparent than in the artful way in which he piques his readers into a conformity with his own views concerning religion. Human pride, he knew, naturally likes to range itself on the side of ability. He, therefore, skilfully, works on this passion, by treating, with a sort of contemptuous superiority (as weak and credulous men) all whom he represents as being under the religious delusion.
To the shameful practice of confounding fanaticism with real religion, he adds the disingenuous habit of accounting for the best actions of the best men by referring them to some low motive; and affects to confound the designs of the religious and the corrupt, so artfully, that no radical difference appears to subsist between them.
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