an eminent writer of religious and moral works, was born in 1745 at Stapleton in Gloucestershire, where her father held the humble situation of village schoolmaster. Being afterwards appointed to the parochial school of St Mary Redcliff at Bristol, his daughter gained the intimacy and patronage of Dr Stonehouse, who enabled her to set on foot a flourishing school for boarders and day pupils, which continued to be conducted with great success by her sisters. Her first literary efforts were some poetical pieces, and amongst them was a pastoral drama. Manuscript copies of these effusions were seen and admired by several persons of literary taste and discrimination at Bristol, who strongly recommended their publication. They accordingly appeared; and the drama, which was entitled the Search after Happiness, soon became very popular. This flattering reception induced the author to try her strength in the highest walk of dramatic poetry; and she successively brought upon the stage her tragedies of the Inflexible Captive, Percy, and the Fatal Falsehood. Garrick was warmly attached to her; and it was owing in no small degree to the talents of that distinguished player that the second of these compositions was enacted at Drury Lane during fourteen successive nights. Soon after the production of her first tragedy she published two legendary poems, entitled Sir Eldred of the Bower and the Bleeding Rock, founded upon popular traditions current in Somersetshire. These pieces had very great success, as had also her volume of Essays for Young Ladies, which she afterwards expunged from the edition of her works published in 1801, on the ground that the book was superseded by her Treatise on Female Education.

In 1782 Hannah More greatly added to her reputation by the publication of a volume of Sacred Dramas, to which was annexed a poem called Sensibility, much commended by Dr Johnson. In 1786 this indefatigable writer gave to the world two poems—Florio, a Tale, and Bas Bleu, or the Conversation. The first is a respectable and not ill-natured satire on the frivolous manners of the young gentlemen of the period. The second, also a satire, is directed against the Blue-Stocking Club, which met at Mrs Montagu's in Portman Square, and was so called from one of the members, Mrs Jarringham, always wearing stockings of a blue colour. Other works successively proceeded from her pen. Of these the principal are—a Poem on the Slave Trade, printed in 1788; a tract entitled Thoughts on the Manners of the Great, which appeared the same year; An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World, published in the year 1791, and esteemed one of her best productions; Remarks on the Speech of M. Dupont in the National Convention on Religion and Education; and further, with the view of opposing the propagation of sedition and infidelity, she, in 1795, commenced at Bath the Cheap Repository, which was published in monthly numbers, and contained several very pleasing tales. This periodical obtained a very wide circulation, and was said to have had considerable effect in calming the public mind, then agitated by the doctrines so prevalent in France.

Hannah More now removed from Bristol to Cheddar, where the ignorance and destitution of the place having deeply affected her, she opened a number of schools for educating the poor children and alleviating their misery. Her benevolent designs were at first strenuously opposed; but she ultimately succeeded in establishing a number of schools, not only at Cheddar, but all round the Mendip Hills; and the good effects which they produced soon became apparent. In 1799 appeared her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, three editions of which issued from the press during the same year. This work was censured by some of the critics as too austere; but notwithstanding this circumstance, she was called upon by the highest personages in the realm to put her sentiments in writing on the proper course of instruction to be adopted for the infant heiress to the British throne. She set diligently to work at the command of royalty, and produced in 1805 a work in two volumes, entitled Hints towards forming the Character of a Young Princess. It gave high satisfaction generally; but offence was taken in one quarter, and much abuse was in consequence poured upon it. In the year 1809 was published Caleb in Search of a Wife; two years afterwards appeared Practical Piety and Christian Morals; in 1815 came out an Essay on the Character and Writings of St Paul—an attempt more ambitious than successful; and in 1819 her literary career terminated with the publication of Modern Sketches. She was now aged and infirm, but still continued to take a great interest in the welfare of charity schools, bible and missionary societies, and other benevolent and religious institutions. Her piety supported her in her later afflictions; and she expired with the composure, and full of the hope and faith, of a Christian, on the 7th of September 1833. She is said to have realized L30,000 by her works, a very considerable proportion of which she bequeathed to religious and benevolent societies.

The works of Hannah More have always been highly esteemed by the religious world, and she is generally considered as one of the most distinguished of that class of writers who unite great piety with considerable literary talent, and dedicate the creations of fancy as well as the deductions of reason to the service of religion. Her poetry is not much prized, except by a select few, for the piety and sound judgment which it displays. Her prose is justly admired for its sententious wisdom, its practical good sense, its masculine vigour, and the dignified religious and moral fervour which pervades it. Caleb passed through six editions in one year; and since its first appearance it has frequently been reprinted, besides being translated into several foreign languages. A collected edition of her works has been published in 11 vols.; and The Memoirs and Correspondence of Mrs H. More, by W. Roberts, were published in 4 vols. 8vo, 1834. A new and abridged edition of this Life, with selections from her correspondence, 12mo, appeared in London in 1856.

More, Henry, an eminent English philosopher and divine, was born at Grantham in Lincolnshire on the 12th October 1614. His father, Alexander More, a gentleman of property in that county, was a staunch Puritan, and educated his family in the strictest principles of Calvinism. At the age of fourteen, Henry was sent to Eton, with many affectionate charges to stand fast to the principles of his hereditary creed. Young More, however, who had always been of a retiring and thoughtful disposition, had already secret misgivings as to the soundness of the predestinarian doctrine; and now that he no longer breathed the Calvinistic atmosphere at home, he gave freer scope to his speculative tendencies. While the Eton boys bounded after the ball, Henry More "with his head on one side, and kicking now and then the stones with his feet," was dimly working his way to the bold conclusion that the doctrine of predestination was inconsistent with the justice and goodness of God. He was, moreover, prepared to maintain this position at all hazards; and with characteristic ardour and genuine speculative courage, he stoutly disputed the question with his elder brother, who, in company with his uncle, shortly afterwards visited him at Eton. This uncle of his, who was a blunt, matter-of-fact sort of man, and who believed more in the rod than in the reason, threatened the young heretic that if he did not give over these immature philosophizings, he would subject him to a wholesome course of corporal punishment. Henry of course did not give over his speculations, but continued to vex his young brain with quite insoluble problems. He seems, however, even in those boyish years, to have been remarkable for sincerity and humble purity of heart. At the advice of his uncle— who seems to have monopolized the direction of his education—he was, after a three years' residence at Eton, removed to Christ Church, Cambridge, in 1631, just a year before John Milton left it. Here the young philosopher displayed an extraordinary thirst for knowledge, and read eagerly the works of Aristotle, Cardan, Julius Scaliger, and other thinkers of that class. But such writers could not satisfy his longings for higher light. They made him more sceptical than when he began; and renouncing the guidance of the logicians for ever, he directed his attention to the Platonic writers and mystic divines, and discovered the long-looked-for treasure in the dreamy pages of Marsilius Ficinus, Plotinus, and Trismegistus. "That golden little book," ascribed to John Tauler, the Theologia Germanica, "pierced and affected" him more than all the rest. The simple knowledge of phenomena no longer had any charm for him; he sought for the proper food of the soul among those archetypal ideas which were believed to lie behind all sensible objects. He learned to think away all objects of sense, and strove with his "illuminated" teachers to live alone with God in a supersensible world. The earthly body, however, clogged the upward progress of the spirit; and what he gained in fancied illumination he lost in bodily strength. After a few years practice of this course, the poor youth found himself reduced to a very skeleton, and from his strange talk about "particular experiences," his friends began to charge him with enthusiasm. Some idea may be formed of his state of mind during this period from his philosophical poem called Psychozoa, or the Life of the Soul, published in 1640. He took the degree of Master of Arts in 1639; and on being chosen a fellow of his college, he became tutor to several persons of distinction, and among others to the brother of Lady Conway. At the request of this lady, who was a noted disciple of William Penn, More wrote, among other treatises, the Conjectura Cabalistica, and the Philosophia Teutonica Censura; and if he did not succeed in converting her from Quakerism, he at least secured her friendship, and at her death a legacy of L400, which the benevolent mystic devoted to purposes of private charity. If ever man strove to be true to the light that was in him, it was Henry More. He repeatedly declined the most flattering offers of church preferment, choosing rather to linger about the quiet halls of Christ Church, and muse as he listed, than enjoy the honours of a bishopric at L1500 a year. The rectory of Ingoldsby, which had been purchased for him by his father, he resigned in 1642, and afterwards presented it to his college. He even declined the mastership of his own college in 1654, when the celebrated Cudworth was appointed; and if he accepted a prebend in the church of Gloucester in 1675, it was only to make it over to his friend Dr Fowler. Not that he lightly regarded the wants of his country. He is said to have wept over its miseries. But he believed himself to be more in his proper sphere using his pen in studious retirement, than mingling with the busy turmoil of the world. He was no doubt a little of the "intellectual epicure," as Norris of Bemerton called him; but yet his pen was constantly occupied in behalf of what he judged the cause of religion and virtue. He engaged in a correspondence with Descartes during 1648–9; and three of More's letters, with the replies of the French philosopher, are still to be read at the end of most editions of Descartes' works. More had a great esteem for Descartes, and judging from those letters, the admiration must have been mutual. Not that the English Platonist began with Cartesianism and ended with mysticism, as Cousin in his hasty generalization (Cours de l'Histoire de la Philosophie, Leçon 12me) seems to convey. On the contrary, while More always admired the Cartesian philosophy as "a fine, neat, subtle thing," he constantly maintained that "for the true ornament of the mind, it bears no greater proportion to that principle I told you of [viz., the divine sense], than the dry bones of a snake made up elegantly into a hat-band is to the royal clothing of Solomon." More pursues a still more passionate and unjust strain of invective against Cartesianism in his Enchiridium Metaphysicum, published in 1671. In this work we obtain a more profound and methodical view of More's metaphysical system—if system it can be called—than in any of his other writings. Metaphysics, according to him, is the science of incorporeal existence, and admits naturally of a two-fold division. The one demonstrates the existence of other substances than bodies; the other determines the essence and principal attributes of those substances. His proof of the existence of immaterial things is threefold: first, space, which contains all matter, cannot be itself material; secondly, matter is contingent, for it is possible to think it away, while space is necessary, no such abstraction being possible for it; thirdly, the general series of natural phenomena come and go, begin and end, ceaselessly change, in a word, are contingent; but this supposes some necessary existence beyond the sphere of the sensible world, from the bosom of which the contingent emerges. In attempting to demonstrate the latter position, More ranges over all the sciences with the ease of a master, displaying a knowledge at once extensive and profound. As a speculator, More was perhaps more of the eclectic than the mystic, but his thoughts always gravitated towards mysticism, and found their last expression there. After his own doctrines, More preferred Descartes' to all others; just as Hobbes is said to have preferred More's system to every one but his own. Indeed, the extravagant admiration which More always showed for his own conceits and fancies, no matter how groundless, stood in marked contrast with his acknowledged learning, charity, and humility. His allusions to himself and his own productions in the prefatio generalissima to the Latin edition of his works, and elsewhere, betray more than a mere amiable egotism—they savour much more of personal vanity. More, however, while sometimes extravagant, seldom falls into the rude fervour or weak sentimentalism of the ordinary mystics, and has always the good sense and proper feeling to avoid the gross profanity which often characterized the English mystics of that age. He even wrote an express treatise in 1656, entitled Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, in which he traces the nature, causes, and cure of enthusiasm, and concludes by ascribing this abnormal state of mind mainly to bodily causes. If he was sometimes credulous, he was very generally shrewd and sagacious; and with all his defects, he unquestionably occupies a high place among that bright though small constellation of thinkers known as the English Platonists of the seventeenth century. Some of his books seem to have met with an extensive sale. The Mystery of Godliness was said by a London bookseller to have "ruled all the booksellers" for twenty years. Yet the appreciation which they met with did not quite satisfy their author, and he seems to have occasionally appealed to that "perspicua et pacifica posteritas"—that wise and peaceful posterity—which is to remodel the temple of fame. The young could not understand him, and the old thought him mad. Yet his merits were duly appreciated by such men as Cudworth and Norris. Three hundred pounds were left by an admirer to have some of More's pieces translated into Latin; a circumstance which induced the author to publish the whole of his works in Latin in three folio vols. in 1679. After completing this task, he does not seem to have written any work of importance. His last work was the Medela Mundi, or Cure of the World, which he did not survive to finish. His health had never been robust, and in 1686 he was seized with a fever, from the effects of which he never recovered. He died on the 1st September 1687, in the seventy-third year of his age. Besides the complete Latin edition of More's works already referred to, the greater number of his productions appeared in English, under the title of *A Collection of several Philosophical Writings*, folio, London, 2d ed., 1662, and 4th ed., 1712. *The Life of the Learned and Pious Dr Henry More*, Svo, London, 1710, was written by the Rev. Richard Ward, an enthusiastic and not very discriminating partisan of More's system. (See also the *Biographia Britannica*, the *Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques*, and *Hours with the Mystics*, by R. A. Vaughan, 2 vols. London, 1856. A detailed list of Dr. More's works will be found in Watt's *Bibliotheca Britannica.*)