“A dim old mansion, hidden half-away From a dull world grown careless of its fame,” has been transformed into a place of quiet, old-world dignity, and is now turned to uses worthy of its fame and in harmony with its traditions. In spite of the seeming unanimity of the trustees, and the zeal and energy of their secretary, Mr Seddon, the fortunes of the Academy were ill-starred from the outset. Dr Taylor, one of the first Arians who ministered to the English Presbyterians, and an erudite and accomplished man—an author so widely read in his day that he is even mentioned by Burns in his Epistle to John Goudie: “’Tis you and Taylor are the chief, 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.”