SOURCE: "Mrs. Barbauld," in Littell's Living Age, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1955, December 10, 1881, pp. 579-93.

[In the following excerpt, Ritchie discusses Barbauld's political convictions and reviews several of her poems and essays.]

"The first poetess I can recollect is Mrs. Barbauld, with whose works I became acquainted—before those of any other author, male or female—when I was learning to spell words of one syllable in her story-books for children." So says Hazlitt in his lectures on living poets. He goes on to call her a very pretty poetess, strewing flowers of poesy as she goes.

The writer of this little notice must needs, from the same point of view as Hazlitt, look upon Mrs. Barbauld with a special interest, having also first learnt to read out of her little yellow books, of which the syllables rise up one by one again with a remembrance of the hand patiently pointing to each in turn. . . .

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 inspiration 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. . . .

Mrs. Barbauld was a Liberal in feeling and conviction; she was never afraid to speak her mind, and when the French Revolution first began, she, in common with many others, hoped that it was but the dawning of happier times. She was always keen about public events; she wrote an address on the opposition to the repeal of the Test Act in 1791, and she published her poem to Wilberforce on the rejection of his great bill for abolishing slavery:—

Friends of the friendless, hail, ye generous band,

she cries in warm enthusiasm for his devoted cause.

Horace Walpole nicknamed her Deborah, called her the virago Barbauld, and speaks of her with utter rudeness and intolerant spite. But whether or not Horace Walpole approved, it is certain that Mrs. Barbauld possessed to a full and generous degree a quality which is now less common than it was in her day. . . .

It is possible that philanthropy, and the love of the beautiful, and the gratuitous diffusion of wall-papers may be the modern rendering of the good old-fashioned sentiment. Mrs. Barbauld lived in very stirring days, when private people shared in the excitements and catastrophes of public affairs. To her the fortunes of England, its loyalty, its success, were a part of her daily bread. By her early associations she belonged to a party representing opposition, and for that very reason she was the more keenly struck by the differences of the conduct of affairs and the opinions of those she trusted. Her friend Dr. Priestley had emigrated to America for his convictions' sake; Howard was giving his noble life for his work; Wakefield had gone to prison. Now the very questions are forgotten for which they struggled and suffered, or the answers have come while the questions are forgotten, in this future which is our present, and to which some unborn historian may point with a moral finger.

Dr. Aikin, whose estimate of his sister was very different from Horace Walpole's, occasionally reproached her for not writing more constantly. He wrote a copy of verses on this theme:—

Thus speaks the Muse, and bends her brows severe:
Did I, Lœtitia, lend my choicest lays,
And crown thy youthful head with freshest bays,
That all the expectance of thy full grown year,
Should lie inert and fruitless? O revere
Those sacred gifts whose meed is deathless praise,
Whose potent charm the enraptured soul can raise
Far from the vapors of this earthly sphere,
Seize, seize the lyre, resume the lofty strain.

She seems to have willingly left the lyre for Dr. Aikin's use. A few hymns, some graceful odes, and stanzas, and jeux d'esprit, a certain number of well-written and original essays, and several political pamphlets, represent the best of her work. Her more ambitious poems are those by which she is the least remembered. It was at Hampstead that Mrs. Barbauld wrote her contributions to her brother's volume of Evenings at Home, among which the transmigrations of Indur may be quoted as a model of style and delightful matter. One of the best of her jeux d'esprit is "The Groans of the Tankard," which was written in early days, with much spirit and real humor. It begins with a Virgil-like incantation, and goes on:—

'Twas at the solemn, silent noontide hour
When hunger rages with despotic power,
When the lean student quits his Hebrew roots
For the gross nourishment of English fruits,
And throws unfinished airy systems by
For solid pudding and substantial pie.

The tankard now,

replenished to the brink,
With the cool beverage blue-eyed maidens drink,

but accustomed to very different libations, is endowed with voice and utters its bitter reproaches:—

Unblest the day, and luckless was the hour
Which doomed me to a Presbyterian's power,
Fated to serve a Puritanic race,
Whose slender meal is shorter than their grace.

Thumbkin, of fairy celebrity, used to mark his way by flinging crumbs of bread and scattering stones as he went along; and in like manner authors trace the course of their life's peregrinations by the pamphlets and articles they cast down as they go. Sometimes they throw stones, sometimes they throw bread. In '92 and '93 Mrs. Barbauld must have been occupied with party polemics and with the political miseries of the time. A pamphlet on Gilbert Wakefield's views, and another on Sins of the Government and Sins of the People, show in what direction her thoughts were bent. Then came a period of comparative calm again and of literary work and interest. She seems to have turned to Akenside and Collins, and each had an essay to himself. These were followed by certain selections from The Spectator, Tatler, etc., preceded by one of those admirable essays for which she is really remarkable. She also published a memoir of Richardson prefixed to his correspondence. Sir James Mackintosh, writing at a later and sadder time of her life, says of her observations on the moral of Clarissa that they are as fine a piece of mitigated and rational stoicism as our language can boast of. . . .

It was during the first years of her widowhood that she published her edition of the British novelists in some fifty volumes. There is an opening chapter to this edition upon novels and novel-writing, which is an admirable and most interesting essay upon fiction, beginning from the very earliest times.

In 1811 she wrote her poem on the king's illness, and also the longer poem which provoked such indignant comments at the time. It describes Britain's rise and luxury, warns her of the dangers of her unbounded ambition and unjustifiable wars:—

Arts, arms, and wealth destroy the fruits they bring;
Commerce, like beauty, knows no second spring.

Her ingenuous youth from Ontario's shore who visits the ruins of London is one of the many claimants to the honor of having suggested Lord Macaulay's celebrated New-Zealander:—

Pensive and thoughtful shall the wanderers greet
Each splendid square and still untrodden street,
Or of some crumbling turret, mined by time,
The broken stairs with perilous step shall climb,
Thence stretch their view the wide horizon round,
By scattered hamlets trace its ancient bound,
And, choked no more with fleets, fair Thames survey
Through reeds and sedge pursue his idle way.

It is impossible not to admire the poem, though it is stilted and not to the present taste. The description of Britain as it now is and as it once was is very ingenious:—

Where once Bouduca whirled the scythed car,
And the fierce matrons raised the shriek of war,
Light forms beneath transparent muslin float,
And tutor'd voices swell the artful note;
Light-leaved acacias, and the shady plane,
And spreading cedars grace the woodland reign.

The poem is forgotten now, though it was scouted at the time and violently attacked, Southey himself falling upon the poor old lady, and devouring her, spectacles and all. She felt these attacks very much, and could not be consoled, though Miss Edgeworth wrote a warm-hearted letter of indignant sympathy. But Mrs. Barbauld had something in her too genuine to be crushed, even by sarcastic criticism. She published no more, but it was after her poem of 1811 that she wrote the beautiful ode by which she is best known and best remembered,—the ode that Wordsworth used to repeat and say he envied, that Tennyson has called "sweet verses," of which the lines ring their tender, hopeful chime like sweet church bells on a summer evening.

Madame d'Arblay, in her old age, told Crabb Robinson that every night she said them over to herself as she went to her rest. To the writer they are almost sacred. The hand that patiently pointed out to her, one by one, the syllables of Mrs. Barbauld's hymns for children, that tended our childhood, as it had tended our father's, marked these verses one night, when it blessed us for the last time.

Life, we've been long together,
Through pleasant and through cloudy weather:
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear;
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time.
Say not good-night, but in some brighter clime,
Bid me good-morning,

Mrs. Barbauld was over seventy when she wrote this ode. A poem, called "Octogenary Reflections," is also very touching:—

Say ye, who through this round of eighty years
Have proved its joys and sorrows, hopes and fears;
Say what is life, ye veterans who have trod,
Step following steps, its flowery thorny road?
Enough of good to kindle strong desire;
Enough of ill to damp the rising fire;
Enough of love and fancy, joy and hope,
To fan desire and give the passions scope;
Enough of disappointment, sorrow, pain,
To seal the wise man's sentence—"All is vain."

There is another fragment of hers in which she likens herself to a schoolboy left of all the train, who hears no sound of wheels to bear him to his father's bosom home. "Thus I look to the hour when I shall follow those that are at rest before me." . . .