The school at Palgrave was successful mainly through Mrs. Barbauld’s efforts; among the scholars were reckoned many men of future distinction, such as the first Lord Denman and William Taylor of Norwich. After eleven years of courageous and exhausting work, the school was given up, and Mr. Barbauld undertook the charge of a Presbyterian church at Hampstead. The husband and wife here enjoyed the friendship of Joanna Baillie and her sister, and here some of Mrs. Barbauld’s best literary work was done. But the terrible malady which had pursued her husband throughout his life continued to darken their existence. In order to be near her brother, and enjoy the protection and solace of his society, Mrs. Barbauld left Hampstead in 1802, and removed to Stoke Newington, where Dr. Aikin then lived. But Mr. Barbauld’s mania continued to increase, and after a sudden attack which he made upon his wife with a dinner knife, it became obvious that he must be put under restraint. The unhappy man put an end to his own life in 1808. After an interval, Mrs. Barbauld resumed her literary work, bringing out an edition of English Novels in 1810. In the following year she brought out a poem, which she called “1811,” very strongly tinged with the despondency which she felt regarding public affairs. She had been bred as a Whig, to hope for great things from the measures of emancipation with which that party had always been identified. Her sympathies were rather with the French Revolution than with the long-continued struggle of England against Napoleon. The poem had a tone of gloom and deep melancholy, which perhaps reflected more of the writer’s personal despondency than the circumstances justified. It is not a little curious that a passage in it is credited with having suggested Lord Macaulay’s famous prophecy that in years to come a New Zealander “will from a broken arch of Blackfriars Bridge contemplate the ruins of St. Paul’s.” The poem provoked a coarse and insulting review in the Quarterly, with which it is to be regretted that Southey’s name is now identified. Murray, the proprietor of the Review, is said to have declared that he was more ashamed of that article than of any that had ever appeared in his magazine. Mrs. Barbauld’s friends, Miss Edgeworth foremost among them, expressed their indignation and sympathy; a more ungentlemanlike, unjust, and insolent review, Miss Edgeworth said she had never read; and she wrote an inspiriting letter to her friend, concluding with the words, “Write on, shine out, and defy them.” But at nearly seventy years of age Mrs. Barbauld was to be excused if she felt that younger and stronger hands must carry on the fight. The poem referred to was not her last literary effort, but it was the last of her writings published during her lifetime. Very little, perhaps, of her work has permanent value; one poem, however, that beginning “Life! I know not what thou art,” which was written in extreme old age, will probably live as long as anything in the language. It indicates possibly what she might have done, had it not been for the tragedy of her married life. Of two lines in this poem—

Life, we’ve been long together,

Through pleasant and through cloudy weather—

Wordsworth declared that, though he was not in the habit of grudging people their good things, he wished he had written those lines. Her mental powers remained clear and vigorous to the end of her long life. When she was past eighty, writing to Miss Edgeworth, she summed up, as it were, the worth of what she knew and did not know. “I find that many things I knew, I have forgotten; many things I thought I knew, I find I knew nothing about; some things I know, I have found not worth knowing, and some things I would give—oh! what would one not give to know, are beyond the reach of human ken.”

All her life through she laboured with her pen in defence of civil and religious liberty, against the iniquities of the slave trade, and for many other causes which have made life more worth living in England to-day. She died, universally honoured and respected, in 1825, aged eighty-two.

XXI
JOANNA BAILLIE

Mrs. Joanna Baillie, as she was usually called, because, though she was never married, her age and literary reputation were held to entitle her to brevet rank, was a remarkable instance of a writer rapidly rising to the highest pinnacle of fame, and then as rapidly and surely descending almost to the common level of ordinary mortals. But the Scotch woman, with the blood of heroes in her veins, showed herself worthy of her descent, both by the modesty and dignity with which she bore her fame, and by the sweetness and unassuming simplicity with which she bore the loss of it. She was descended from Sir William Wallace, and the fame of this long-past ancestor is perhaps equalled by that of another and a much nearer relative. John Hunter, the great anatomist and physiologist, the founder of the College of Surgeons, was her mother’s brother. She therefore might truly feel, not in a figurative sense, that in everything she was “sprung of earth’s first blood”; and her double connection with the best and greatest of the heroes of Scotland was probably not without its influence on the development of her mind and character.

She was born at Bothwell, near Glasgow, on the banks of the Clyde, in 1762. In a poem addressed, near the close of her life, to her sister Agnes, she recalls how they had as children—

... paddled barefoot side by side,

Among the sunny shallows of the Clyde.