'"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; she trusted to her own judgment, rarely tried to influence others, and took a matter-of-fact rather than a passionate view of life. She is as severe to him in her criticism as he was in his judgment of her: they neither of them did the other justice. 'A Christian and a man-about-town, a philosopher, and a bigot acknowledging life to be miserable, and making it more miserable through fear of death.' So she writes of him, and all this was true; but how much more was also true of the great and hypochondriacal old man! Some years afterwards, when she had been reading Boswell's long-expected 'Life of Johnson,' she wrote of the book:—'It is like going to Ranelagh; you meet all your acquaintances; but it is a base and mean thing to bring thus every idle word into judgment.' In our own day we too have our Boswell and our Johnson to arouse discussion and indignation.
'Have you seen Boswell's "Life of Johnson?" He calls it a Flemish portrait, and so it is—two quartos of a man's conversation and petty habits. Then the treachery and meanness of watching a man for years in order to set down every unguarded and idle word he uttered, is inconceivable. Yet with all this one cannot help reading a good deal of it.' This is addressed to the faithful Betsy, who was also keeping school by that time, and assuming brevet rank in consequence.
Mrs. Barbauld might well complain of the fatigue from hairdressers in London. In one of her letters to her friend she thus describes a lady's dress of the period:—
'Do you know how to dress yourself in Dublin? If you do not, I will tell you. Your waist must be the circumference of two oranges, no more. You must erect a structure on your head gradually ascending to a foot high, exclusive of feathers, and stretching to a penthouse of most horrible projection behind, the breadth from wing to wing considerably broader than your shoulder, and as many different things in your cap as in Noah's ark. Verily, I never did see such monsters as the heads now in vogue. I am a monster, too, but a moderate one.'