A Book of Sibyls: Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen. Anne Thackeray Ritchie
him and for the babies of babies to come! There is a sweet instructive grace in it and appreciation of childhood which cannot fail to strike those who have to do with children and with Mrs. Barbauld's books for them: children themselves, those best critics of all, delight in it.
'Where's Charles?' says a little scholar every morning to the writer of these few notes.
IV.
Soon after the marriage, there had been some thought of a college for young ladies, of which Mrs. Barbauld was to be the principal; but she shrank from the idea, and in a letter to Mrs. Montagu she objects to the scheme of higher education for women away from their natural homes. 'I should have little hope of cultivating a love of knowledge in a young lady of fifteen who came to me ignorant and uncultivated. It is too late then to begin to learn. The empire of the passions is coming on. Those attachments begin to be formed which influence the happiness of future life. The care of a mother alone can give suitable attention to this important period.' It is true that the rigidness of her own home had not prevented her from making a hasty and unsuitable marriage. But it is not this which is weighing on her mind. 'Perhaps you may think,' she says, 'that having myself stepped out of the bounds of female reserve in becoming an author, it is with an ill grace that I offer these statements.'
Her arguments seem to have been thought conclusive in those days, and the young ladies' college was finally transmuted into a school for little boys at Palgrave, in Norfolk, and thither the worthy couple transported themselves.
One of the letters to Miss Belsham is thus dated:—'The 14th of July, in the village of Palgrave (the pleasantest village in all England), at ten o'clock, all alone in my great parlour, Mr. Barbauld being studying a sermon, do I begin a letter to my dear Betsy.'
When she first married, and travelled into Norfolk to keep school at Palgrave, nothing could have seemed more tranquil, more contented, more matter-of-fact than her life as it appears from her letters. Dreams, and fancies, and gay illusions and excitements have made way for the somewhat disappointing realisation of Mr. Barbauld with his neatly turned and friendly postscripts—a husband, polite, devoted, it is true, but somewhat disappointing all the same. The next few years seem like years in a hive—storing honey for the future, and putting away—industrious, punctual, monotonous. There are children's lessons to be heard, and school-treats to be devised. She sets them to act plays and cuts out paper collars for Henry IV.; she always takes a class of babies entirely her own. (One of these babies, who always loved her, became Lord Chancellor Denman; most of the others took less brilliant, but equally respectable places, in after life.) She has also household matters and correspondence not to be neglected. In the holidays, they make excursions to Norwich, to London, and revisit their old haunts at Warrington. In one of her early letters, soon after her marriage, she describes her return to Warrington.
'Dr. Enfield's face,' she declares, 'is grown half a foot longer since I saw him, with studying mathematics, and for want of a game of romps; for there are positively none now at Warrington but grave matrons. I who have but half assumed the character, was ashamed of the levity of my behaviour.'
It says well indeed for the natural brightness of the lady's disposition that with sixteen boarders and a satisfactory usher to look after, she should be prepared for a game of romps with Dr. Enfield.
On another occasion, in 1777, she takes little Charles away with her. 'He has indeed been an excellent traveller,' she says; 'and though, like his great ancestor, some natural tears he shed, like him, too, he wiped them soon. He had a long sound sleep last night, and has been very busy to-day hunting the puss and the chickens. And now, my dear brother and sister, let me again thank you for this precious gift, the value of which we are both more and more sensible of as we become better acquainted with his sweet disposition and winning manners.'
She winds up this letter with a postscript:—
'Everybody here asks, "Pray, is Dr. Dodd really to be executed?" as if we knew the more for having been at Warrington.'
Dr. Aikin, Mrs. Barbauld's brother, the father of little Charles and of Lucy Aikin, whose name is well known in literature, was himself a man of great parts, industry, and ability, working hard to support his family. He alternated between medicine and literature all his life. When his health failed he gave up medicine, and settled at Stoke Newington, and busied himself with periodic literature; meanwhile, whatever his own pursuits may have been, he never ceased to take an interest in his sister's work and to encourage her in every way.
It is noteworthy that few of Mrs. Barbauld's earlier productions equalled what she wrote at the very end of her life. She seems to have been one of those who ripen with age, growing wider in spirit with increasing years. Perhaps, too, she may have been influenced by the change of manners, the reaction against formalism, which was growing up as her own days were ending. Prim she may have been in manner, but she was not a formalist by nature; and even at eighty was ready to learn to submit to accept the new gospel that Wordsworth and his disciples had given to the world, and to shake off the stiffness of early training.
It is idle to speculate on what might have been if things had happened otherwise; if the daily stress of anxiety and perplexity which haunted her home had been removed—difficulties and anxieties which may well have absorbed all the spare energy and interest that under happier circumstances might have added to the treasury of English literature. But if it were only for one ode written when the distracting cares of over seventy years were ending, when nothing remained to her but the essence of a long past, and the inspirations of a still glowing, still hopeful, and most tender spirit, if it were only for the ode called 'Life,' which has brought a sense of ease and comfort to so many, Mrs. Barbauld has indeed deserved well of her country-people and should be held in remembrance by them.
Her literary works are, after all, not very voluminous. She is best known by her hymns for children and her early lessons, than which nothing more childlike has ever been devised; and we can agree with her brother, Dr. Aikin, when he says that it requires true genius to enter so completely into a child's mind.
After their first volume of verse, the brother and sister had published a second in prose, called 'Miscellaneous Pieces,' about which there is an amusing little anecdote in Rogers's 'Memoirs.' Fox met Dr. Aikin at dinner.
'"I am greatly pleased with your 'Miscellaneous Pieces,'" said Fox. Aikin bowed. "I particularly admire," continued Fox, "your essay 'Against Inconsistency in our Expectations.'"
'"That," replied Aikin, "is my sister's."
'"I like much," returned Fox, "your essay 'On Monastic Institutions.'"
'"That," answered Aikin, "is also my sister's."
'Fox thought it best to say no more about the book.'
These essays were followed by various of the visions and Eastern pieces then so much in vogue; also by political verses and pamphlets, which seemed to have made a great sensation at the time. But Mrs. Barbauld's turn was on the whole more for domestic than for literary life, although literary people always seem to have had a great interest for her.
During one Christmas which they spent in London, the worthy couple go to see Mrs. Siddons; and Mrs. Chapone introduces Mrs. Barbauld to Miss Burney. 'A very unaffected, modest, sweet, and pleasing young lady,' says Mrs. Barbauld, who is always kind in her descriptions. Mrs. Barbauld's one complaint in London is of the fatigue from hairdressers, and the bewildering hurry of the great city, where she had, notwithstanding her quiet country life, many ties, and friendships, and acquaintances. Her poem on 'Corsica' had brought her into some relations with Boswell; she also knew Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson. Here is her description of the 'Great Bear:'—
'I do not mean that one which shines in the sky over your head; but the Bear that shines in London—a great rough, surly animal. His Christian name is Dr. Johnson. 'Tis a singular creature; but if you stroke him he will not bite, and though he growls sometimes he is not ill-humoured.'
Johnson describes Mrs. Barbauld as suckling fools and chronicling small beer. There was not much sympathy between the two. Characters such as Johnson's harmonise best with the enthusiastic and easily influenced. Mrs. Barbauld did not belong to this class;