FOR THE MIDDLE RANKS OF SOCIETY, AND TALES FOR THE COMMON PEOPLE. BY HANNAH MORE. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: PRINTED FOR T. CADELL AND W. DAVIES, IN THE STRAND. 1818. ADVERTISEMENT. To improve the habits and raise the principles of the mass of the people, at a time when their dangers and temptations, moral and political, were multiplied beyond the example of any other period in our history, was the motive which impelled the writer of these two volumes to devise and prosecute the institution of the Cheap Repository. It was undertaken with an humble wish to counteract, not only vice and profligacy on the one hand, but error, discontent and false religion on the other. As an appetite for reading had from yarious causes been increasing among the inferior ranks, it was judged expedient at this critical period to supply such wholesome aliment as might give a new direction to the public taste, and abate the relish for those corrupt and impious publications which the consequences of the French Revolution have been fatally pouring in upon us. The success of this plan exceeded the most sanguine hopes of its projector. Above two millions of Tracts were sold the first year, besides very large numbers in Ireland. The author, at the desire of her friends, has selected for the present publication those tracts which were written by herself, and which, when printed singly, were distinguished from those written by others by the signature Z. And as these stories, though principally, are not adapted exclusively to the inferior classes, they are here presented to the public in an enlarged and improved form. * * They continue to be very extensively circulated in their original form of single Tracts by Evans in Long Lane, Smithfield, and Hatchard in Piccadilly. |