Wha are to blame for this mischief”—
was ill fitted to direct the precarious existence of the enterprise, and the old scholar must have sighed often for the free and independent position, and the dear home among an affectionate people, which he had sacrificed in leaving Norwich for Warrington. Dissensions arose, in the midst of which Dr Taylor died.
Dr Taylor, as already stated, was succeeded as theological tutor by Dr Aikin, who retained that position until his death in 1780.
“Dr Aikin,” says Gilbert Wakefield, “was a gentleman whose endowments as a man and as a scholar it is not easy to exaggerate by panegyric.... His intellectual attainments were of a very superior quality indeed. His acquaintance with all true evidences of revelation, with morals, politics and metaphysics, was most accurate and extensive. Every path of polite literature had been traversed by him, and traversed with success. He understood the Hebrew and French languages to perfection, and had an intimacy with the best authors of Greece and Rome superior to what I have ever known in any Dissenting minister from my own experience.”
Under his judicious guidance matters now went more smoothly: indeed, the eighteen or twenty years which followed constituted the golden age of the Academy, and the brightest and happiest of these were the six years of Priestley’s stay.
In the year following Taylor’s death the academy moved from the house by “Mersey’s gentle current,” then, we are told, an uncontaminated stream noted for its salmon, to the new Academy, which is described as a brick building in a quiet and secluded court, with stone copings and a clock and bell turret in the centre, of no great architectural beauty, but not unpleasing with its quaint, old-world look. This, too, was celebrated in verse by Mrs Barbauld:
“Lo! there the seat where science loved to dwell,
Where liberty her ardent spirit breathed.”
It exists no longer: municipal improvements have swept it away, and all that remains of Academy Place are the houses at right angles to it where dwelt Priestley and Enfield. As to emoluments, the tutors had each £100 a year from the subscription fund, and “with respect to dwelling houses, are to be at their own expenses.” Poor students were exempted from the payment of fees, but richer ones paid two guineas yearly to each of the tutors, who might take boarders into their houses at £15 per annum for those who had two months’ vacation, and £18 per annum for those who had no vacation, exclusive of “tea, washing, fire and candles.”
If the living at Warrington was plain and the thinking high, there was a degree of decorous gaiety, of refinement, of social charm, “easy, blithe and debonnair,” pervading the little community, which, as may be gleaned from the memoirs and reminiscences of the period, impressed and delighted everyone who was witness of it. Among those who had pleasant memories of the place were John Howard, the philanthropist, whose works on prison reform were printed by Eyres of Warrington under Dr Aikin’s superintendence;[6] William Roscoe, the author of the Lives of Lorenzo de Medici and Leo the Tenth, who first learned to care for botany from his visits to the Warrington Botanical Gardens, and whose first work, Mount Pleasant, was also printed there; Pennant, the naturalist, whose British Zoology and Tour in Scotland first saw the light at Warrington; Currie, the biographer of Burns, etc.