Mrs. Barbauld[6] was worthier than this book; she was a sister of Dr. Aikin--had distinction for great beauty in her youth; married a French clergyman of small parts and weak mind, whose intellect, in his later years, went wholly awry and made her home a martyrdom for her, against which she struggled bravely. That home was for a time out at Hampstead, only a half hour's drive from London, and she knew people worth knowing there; Fox and Johnson among the rest--though {275} Johnson did give her a big slap for marrying as she did and for teaching an infant school.[7] She wrote poetry too, one verse at least which Wordsworth greatly admired, and with condescension declared that he would have liked to be the author of such a verse himself. I cite the verse (with some of the context), which is from an apostrophe to _Life_; doubtless suggested by the "Animula, vagula, blandula" of Adrian, to which allusion has been made in a previous chapter; but the good woman's evolution of the thought is curiously different from that of Pope:-- "Life! I know not what thou art. But know that thou and I must part; And when, or how, or where we met, I own to me's a secret yet. But this I know, when thou art fled Where'er they lay these limbs, this head, No clod so valueless shall be As all that then remains of me. O whither, whither dost thou fly, Where bend unseen thy trackless course, {276} And in this strange divorce, Ah, tell where I must seek this compound I? * * * * * 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." I cannot part from this excellent old friend of British boys, without calling to mind her ardent Whiggism, and her very pronounced advocacy of the American cause, in her last poem of _Eighteen hundred and eleven_; the republican sympathies alienated a good many of her Tory friends, and brought to her temporary disrepute. Wherefor, I think, patriotic American boys may, on some coming fourth of July, fling their caps into the air for the kindly, brave-speaking Mrs. Barbauld, and for her _Evenings at Home_! {277} _Miss Edgeworth._ [Sidenote: An Irish story-teller.] You may be sure that I have not forgotten Miss Edgeworth, who was a good friend of Mrs. Barbauld, and who scored Dr. Johnson and Boswell too, for the printing of their slurs upon Miss Aikin.[8]