But I had no sooner proposed my question about the serpent said to be found in one of them, than the son and heir, a fine little fellow just six years old, reaching out his arm to dart an apple across the table at his sister, roguishly intending to overset her glass, unluckily overthrew his own, brimful of port wine. The whole contents were discharged on the elegant drapery of a white-robed nymph. All was now agitation and distress, and disturbance and confusion; the gentlemen ringing for napkins, the ladies assisting the dripping fair one; each vying with the other who should recommend the most approved specific for getting out the stain of red wine, and comforting the sufferer by stories of similar misfortunes. The poor little culprit was dismissed, and all difficulties and disasters seemed at last surmounted. But you cannot heat up again an interest which has been so often cooled. The thread of conversation had been so frequently broken that I despaired of seeing it tied together again. I sorrowfully gave up catacombs, pyramids, and serpent, and was obliged to content myself with a little desultory chat with my next neighbour; sorry and disappointed to glean only a few scattered ears, where I had expected so abundant a harvest; and the day from which I had promised myself so much benefit and delight passed away with a very slender acquisition of either. The Majesty and Meanness of Man. I returned to town at the end of a few days. To a speculative stranger, a London day presents every variety of circumstance in every conceivable shape of which human life is susceptible. When you trace the solici tude of the morning countenance, the anxious exploring of the morning paper, the eager interrogation of the morning guest; when you hear the dismal enumeration of losses by land and perils by sea-taxes trebling, dangers multiplying, commerce annihilating, war protracted, invasion threatening, destruction impendingyour mind catches and communicates the terror, and you feel yourself 'falling with a falling state.' But when, in the course of the very same day, you meet these gloomy prognosticators at the sumptuous, not dinner but Hecatomb,' at the gorgeous fête, the splendid spectacle; when you hear the frivolous discourse, witness the luxurious dissipation, contemplate the boundless indulgence, and observe the ruinous gaming, you would be ready to exclaim, 'Am I not supping in the Antipodes of that land in which I breakfasted? Surely this is a country of different men, different characters, and different circumstances. This at least is a place in which there is neither fear nor danger, nor want, nor misery, nor war.' If you observed the overflowing subscriptions raised, the innumerable societies formed, the committees appointed, the agents employed, the royal patrons engaged, the noble presidents provided, the palacelike structures erected; and all this to alleviate, to cure, and even to prevent every calamity which the indigent can suffer or the affluent conceive; to remove not only want but ignorance; to suppress not only misery but vice-would you not exclaim with Hamlet, 'What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In action how like an angel! in compassion how like a God!' If you look into the whole comet-like eccentric orb of the human character; if you compared all the struggling contrariety of principle and of passion; the clashing of opinion and of action, of resolution and of performance; the victories of evil over the propensities to good; if you contrasted the splendid virtue with the disorderly vice; the exalted generosity with the selfish narrowness; the provident bounty with the thoughtless prodigality; the extremes of all that is dignified, with the excesses of all that is abject, would you not exclaim, in the very spirit of Pascal, O! the grandeur and the littleness, the excellence and the corruption, the majesty and the meanness of man! The Music Nuisance. 'I look upon the great predominance of music in female education,' said Mr Stanley, 'to be the source of more mischief than is suspected; not from any evil in the thing itself, but from its being such a gulph of time as really to leave little room for solid acquisitions. I love music, and were it only cultivated as an amusement should commend it. But the monstrous proportion, or rather disproportion of life which it swallows up, even in many religious families, and this is the chief subject of my regret, has converted an innocent diversion into a positive sin. . . . Only figure to your self my six girls daily playing their four hours a piece, which is now a moderate allowance! As we have but one instrument they must be at it in succession, day and night, to keep pace with their neighbours. If I may compare light things with serious ones, it would resemble,' added he, smiling, the perpetual psalmody of good Mr Nicholas Ferrar, who had relays of musicians every six hours to sing the whole Psalter through every day and night! I mean not to ridicule that holy man; but my girls thus keeping their useless vigils in turn, we should only have the melody without any of the piety. No, my friend! I will have but two or three singing birds to cheer my little grove. If all the world are performers, there will soon be no hearers. Now, as I am resolved in my own family that some shall listen, I will have but few to perform.' Besides the Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More, by William Roberts (4 vols. 1834), there is a pleasant little sketch by Miss Yonge in the 'Eminent Women' series (1888). Her collected works have been repeatedly reissued (8 vols. 1801; 19 vols. 1818; 11 vols. 1830, &c.). Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825) was born at Kibworth Harcourt in Leicestershire. Her father, the Rev. John Aikin, D.D., then kept a boys' school, and Anna received the same instruction as the pupils, including a thorough knowledge of Greek and Latin. In 1758 Dr Aikin (whose father was a London Scot) undertook the office of classical tutor in a Dissenting academy at Warrington, and there his daughter lived for fifteen years. In 1773 she published a volume of poems, of which four editions were called for in the first year. In May 1774 she was married to the Rev. Rochemont Barbauld, of Huguenot ancestry, who became minister of a Dissenting congregation at Palgrave near Diss, and there opened a boarding-school, which throve under his wife's capable assistance. In 1775 she commenced authoress with a volume of devotional pieces compiled from the Psalms, and with Hymns in Prose for Children. In 1786 Mr and Mrs Barbauld removed to Hampstead, and there the industrious helpmeet wrote several tracts in support of Whig principles. She also aided her brother (John Aikin, 1747-1822, physician and author, father of Lucy Aikin) in preparing a series of papers for children, the famous Evenings at Home (1796) -the bulk of the work being the brother's; and she wrote critical essays on Akenside and Collins for editions of their works. After compiling a selection of essays from the Spectator, Tatler, and Guardian, she edited the correspondence of Richardson, and wrote a Life of the novelist. Her last great enterprise was a col ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD. From an Engraving by Meyer. lection of the British novelists, published in 1810, with an introductory essay and biographical and critical notices. Her husband drowned himself in a fit of insanity in 1808. Some of her lyrical pieces are flowing and harmonious, and her Ode to Spring was plainly an imitation of Collins's manner. Charles James Fox was a great admirer of Mrs Barbauld's poems, but most of them are artificial and unimpassioned. In one, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, she anticipated Macaulay's New Zealander with a youth from the Blue Mountains or Ontario's Lake' who views the ruins of London (both Horace Walpole and Volney had already brought Peruvians or other wanderers thither). Her hymns were long popular, and some of her lighter things, like The Washing Day, are amusing. Lord Selborne included four of her pieces in his Book of Praise, the best known that of which the first three verses run: Praise to God, immortal praise By far her best serious poem is that on Life, of which the last exquisite stanza was so much admired by Wordsworth, Rogers, and Madame D'Arblay; like Flatman's 'Thought of Death' and Pope's Dying Christian,' the poem was inspired by Emperor Hadrian's ' Animula, vagula, blandula.' Life. Life! I know not what thou art, But know that thou and I must part; I own to me's a secret yet. But this I know, when thou art fled As all that then remains of me. O whither, whither dost thou fly, Where bend unseen thy trackless course, And in this strange divorce, Ah, tell where I must meet this compound I? To the vast ocean of empyreal flame From whence thy essence came Dost thou thy flight pursue, when freed Or dost thou, hid from sight, Wait, like some spell-bound knight, Through blank oblivious years the appointed hour To break thy trance and reassume thy power? Yet canst thou without thought or feeling be? O say what art thou when no more thou 'rt thee? 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. Ode to Spring. Sweet daughter of a rough and stormy sire, O thou, whose powerful voice, Thee, best beloved! the virgin train await And vales and dewy lawns, With untired feet; and cull thy earliest sweets To weave fresh garlands for the glowing brow Of him, the favoured youth That prompts their whispered sigh. Unlock thy copious stores; those tender showers That drop their sweetness on the infant buds, And silent dews that swell The milky ear's green stem, And feed the flowering osier's early shoots; And call those winds which through the whispering boughs With warm and pleasant breath Salute the blowing flowers. Now let me sit beneath the whitening thorn, And mark thy spreading tints steal o'er the dale; O nymph, approach! while yet the temperate Sun And with chaste kisses woos The Earth's fair bosom; while the streaming veil Of lucid clouds, with kind and frequent shade Protects thy modest blooms From his severer blaze. Sweet is thy reign, but short: the red dog-star Reluctant shall I bid thee then farewell; Can aught for thee atone, Fair Spring! whose simplest promise more delights To a Lady, with some Painted Flowers. Flowers to the fair to you these flowers I bring, And strive to greet you with an earlier spring. Flowers sweet, and gay, and delicate like you; Emblems of innocence, and beauty too. With flowers the Graces bind their yellow hair, And flowery wreaths consenting lovers wear. Flowers, the sole luxury which nature knew, In Eden's pure and guiltless garden grew. To loftier forms are rougher tasks assigned; The sheltering oak resists the stormy wind, The tougher yew repels invading foes, And the tall pine for future navies grows: But this soft family to cares unknown, Were born for pleasure and delight alone. Gay without toil, and lovely without art, They spring to cheer the sense and glad the heart. Nor blush, my fair, to own you copy these; Your best, your sweetest empire is—to please. Hymn to Content. O thou, the nymph with placid eye! O seldom found, yet ever nigh! Receive my temperate vow: Not all the storms that shake the pole Can e'er disturb thy halcyon soul, And smooth the unaltered brow. O come, in simple vest arrayed, To bless my longing sight; No more by varying passions beat, To find thy hermit cell; The modest virtues dwell. There Health, through whose calm bosom glide The temperate joys in even-tide, That rarely ebb or flow; And Patience there, thy sister meek, Her influence taught the Phrygian sage With settled smiles to wait : And lily of the vale. O say what soft propitious hour Fragments. This dead of midnight is the noon of thought, The world has little to bestow Where two fond hearts in equal love are joined. Society than solitude is worse, And man to man is still the greatest curse. A Memoir of Mrs Barbauld was published in 1874 by her grandniece, Anna le Breton; and in the same year appeared a Life by Ellis. See also Miss Thackeray's Book of Sibyls (1883); and Lockhart's Scott for the share Mrs Barbauld had in awaking Scott's interest in German literature, by her reading at Edinburgh William Taylor's translation of Bürger's Lenore. Mrs Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821), actress, dramatist, and novelist, was born at Stanningfield near Bury St Edmunds, the daughter of a Roman Catholic farmer. At eighteen, full of giddy romance, she ran off to London, having a few things in a band-box, but very little money. After many adventures and even some indignities, the unprotected girl applied for advice to Mr. Inchbald, an actor she had known. Inchbald counselled marriage. 'But who would marry me?' she asked. 'I would,' replied her friend, if you would have me.' 'Yes, sir, and I would for ever be grateful' and married they were in June 1772. The union thus singularly brought about was happy enough; but Inchbald died seven years afterwards. Mrs Inchbald played leading parts in the Scottish theatres for four years, and continued acting in London, Dublin, and elsewhere till 1789, when she retired from the stage. Her exemplary prudence and the profits of her works enabled her not only to live, but to save money; the applause and distinction she earned never led her to deviate from her simple-almost ostentatiously simple habits. 'Last Thursday,' she writes, 'I finished scouring my bedroom, while a coach with a coronet and two footmen waited at my door to take me an airing.' She allowed a sister who was in ill-health £100 a year. Many a time this winter,' she records in her Diary, when I cried for cold, I said to myself: "But, thank God, my sister has not to stir from her room; she has her fire lighted every morning all her provisions bought and brought ready cooked; she is now the less able to bear what I bear; and how much more should I suffer but for this reflection." Her income was only £172 a year, and after the death of her sister she went to live in a boarding-house in which she enjoyed more of the comforts of life. Traces of feminine weakness break out in her private memoranda amidst the sterner records of her struggle for independence. Thus: 1798. London. Rehearsing Lovers' Vows; happy but for a suspicion, amounting to a certainty, of a rapid appearance of age in my face.' Her two tales, A Simple Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796), are the supporters of her fame; but her light dramatic pieces were marked by various talent. Her first production was a farce entitled The Mogul Tale (1784), and from this time down to 1805 she wrote nine other plays and farces. Her last literary labour was writing biographical and critical prefaces to a collection of plays, in twenty-five volumes; a collection of farces, in seven volumes; and the Modern Theatre, in ten volumes. Phillips the publisher offered her £1000 for an autobiography she had written, but she declined the tempting offer; and the manuscript was, by her orders, destroyed after her death. She died as she had lived, a devout Catholic. Of this remarkable woman many interesting facts are recorded in Kegan Paul's Life of Godwin (1876). Mrs Shelley (Godwin's daughter) says of her: Living in mean lodgings, dressed with an economy allied to penury, without connections, and alone, her beauty, her talents, and the charm of her manners gave her entrance into a delightful circle of society. Apt to fall in love and desirous to marry, she continued single because the men who loved and admired her were too worldly to take an actress and a poor author, however lovely and charming, for a wife. Her life was thus spent in an interchange of hardship and amusement, privation and luxury. Her character partook of the same contrast: fond of pleasure, she was prudent in her conduct; penurious in her personal expenditure, she was generous to others. Vain of her beauty, we are told that the gown she wore was not worth a shilling, it was so coarse and shabby. Very susceptible to the softer feelings, she could yet guard herself against passion; and though she might have been called a flirt, her character was unimpeached. I have heard that a rival beauty of her day pettishly complained that when Mrs Inchbald came into a room, and sat in a chair in the middle of it, as was her wont, every man gathered round it, and it was vain for any other woman to attempt to gain attention. Godwin could not fail to admire her; she became and continued to be a favourite. Her talents, her beauty, her manners were all delightful to him. He used to describe her as a piquante mixture between a lady and a milkmaid, and added that Sheridan declared she was the only authoress whose society pleased him.' The extract is from Nature and Art. Judge and Victim. The day at length is come on which Agnes shall have a sight of her beloved William ! She who has watched for hours near his door, to procure a glimpse of him going out or returning home; who has walked miles to see his chariot pass; she now will behold him, and he will see her, by command of the laws of his country. Those laws, which will deal with rigour towards her, are in this one instance still indulgent. The time of the assizes at the country town in which she is imprisoned is arrived—the prisoners are demanded at the shire-hall-the jail-doors are opened-they go in sad procession. The trumpet sounds-it speaks the arrival of the judge, and that judge is William. The day previous to her trial, Agnes had read, in the printed calendar of the prisoners, his name as the learned judge before whom she was to appear. For a moment she forgot her perilous state in the excess of joy which the still unconquerable love she bore to him permitted her to taste, even on the brink of the grave! Afterreflection made her check those worldly transports, as unfit for the present solemn occasion. But, alas! to her, earth and William were so closely united, that till she forsook the one, she could never cease to think, without the contending passions of hope, of fear, of love, of shame, and of despair, on the other. Now fear took the place of her first immoderate joy; she feared that, although much changed in person since he had seen her, and her real name now added to many an alias-yet she feared that some well-known glance of the eye, turn of the action, or accent of speech, might recall her to his remembrance; and at that idea, shame overcame all her other sensations-for still she retained pride, in respect to his opinion, to wish him not to know Agnes was that wretch she felt she was! Once a ray of hope beamed on her, that if he knew her-if he recog nised her he might possibly befriend her cause; and life bestowed through William's friendship seemed a precious object! But, again, that rigorous honour she had often heard him boast, that firmness to his word, of which she had fatal experience, taught her to know he would not, for any improper compassion, any unmanly weakness, forfeit his oath of impartial justice. In meditations such as these she passed the sleepless night. When, in the morning, she was brought to the bar, and her guilty hand held up before the righteous judgment-seat of William, imagination could not form two figures or two situations more incompatible with the existence of former familiarity than the judge and the culprit; and yet, these very persons had passed together the most blissful moments that either ever tasted! Those hours of tender dalliance were now present to her mind his thoughts were more nobly employed in his high office; nor could the haggard face, hollow eye, desponding countenance, and meagre person of the poor prisoner once call to his memory, though her name was uttered among a list of others which she had assumed, his former youthful, lovely Agnes! She heard herself arraigned with trembling limbs and downcast looks, and many witnesses had appeared against her before she ventured to lift her eyes up to her awful judge; she then gave one fearful glance, and discovered William, unpitying but beloved William, in every feature! It was a face she had been used to look on with delight, and a kind of absent smile of gladness now beamed on her poor wan visage. When every witness on the part of the prosecutor had been examined, the judge addressed himself to her: 'What defence have you to make?' It was William spoke to Agnes! The sound was sweet; the voice was mild, was soft, compassionate, encouraging. It almost charmed her to a love of life! Not such a voice as when William last addressed her, when he left her undone and pregnant, vowing never to see or speak to her more. She would have hung upon the present word for ever. She did not call to mind that this gentleness was the effect of practice, the art of his occupation; which at times is but a copy, by the unfeeling, of the benevolent brethren of the bench. In the present judge, tenderness was not designed for consolation of the culprit, but for the approbation of the auditors. There were no spectators, Agnes, by your side when last he parted from you-if there had, the awful William would have been awed to marks of pity. Stunned with the enchantment of that well-known tongue directed to her, she stood like one just petrified -all vital power seemed suspended. Again he put the question, and with these additional sentences, tenderly and emphatically delivered: 'Recollect yourself; have you no witnesses? no proof on your behalf?' A dead silence followed these questions. He then mildly but forcibly added: 'What have you to say?' Here a flood of tears burst from her eyes, which she fixed earnestly upon him, as if pleading for mercy, while she faintly articulated: 'Nothing, my lord.' After a short pause, he asked her, in the same forcible but benevolent tone: 'Have you no one to speak to your character?' The prisoner answered: 'No.' A second gush of tears followed this reply, for she called to mind by whom her character had first been blasted. He summed up the evidence, and every time he was obliged to press hard upon the proofs against her, she shrunk, and seemed to stagger with the deadly blowwrithed under the weight of his minute justice, more than from the prospect of a shameful death. The jury consulted but a few minutes; the verdict was, 'Guilty.' She heard it with composure. But when William placed the fatal velvet on his head, and rose to pronounce the fatal sentence, she started with a kind of convulsive motion, retreated a step or two back, and lifting up her hands, with a scream exclaimed: 'Oh, not from you!' The piercing shriek which accompanied these words prevented their being heard by part of the audience; and those who heard them thought little of their meaning, more than that they expressed her fear of dying. Serene and dignified, as if no such exclamation had been uttered, William delivered the final speech ending with 'Dead, dead, dead.' She fainted as he closed the period, and was carried back to prison in a swoon; while he adjourned the court to go to dinner. If, unaffected by the scene he had witnessed, William sat down to dinner with an appetite, let not the reader conceive that the most distant suspicion had struck his mind of his ever having seen, much less familiarly known, the poor offender whom he had just condemned. Still, this forgetfulness did not proceed from the want of memory for Agnes. In every peevish or heavy hour passed with his wife, he was sure to think of her; yet it was self-love, rather than love of her, that gave rise to these thoughts. He felt the lack of female sympathy and tenderness to soften the fatigue of studious labour, to soothe a sullen, a morose disposition-he felt he wanted comfort for himself, but never once considered what were the wants of Agnes. In the chagrin of a barren bed, he sometimes thought, too, even on the child that Agnes bore him; but whether it were male or female, whether a beggar in the streets or dead, various and important public occupation forbade him to inquire. Yet the poor, the widow, and the orphan frequently shared William's ostentatious bounty. He was the president of many excellent charities, gave largely, and sometimes instituted benevolent societies for the unhappy; for he delighted to load the poor with obligation, and the rich with praise. There are persons like him who love to do everything good but that which their immediate duty requires. There are servants that will serve every one more cheerfully than their masters, there are men who will distribute money liberally to all except their creditors, and there are wives who will love all mankind better than their own husbands. Duty is a familiar word which has little effect upon an ordinary mind; and as ordinary minds make a vast majority, we have acts of generosity, self-denial, and honesty where smaller pains would constitute greater virtues. Had William followed the common dictates of charity, had he adopted private pity instead of public munificence, had he cast an eye at home before he sought abroad for objects of compassion, Agnes had been preserved from an ignominious death, and he had been preserved from-remorse, the tortures of which he for the first time proved on reading a printed sheet of paper, accidentally thrown in his way |