“I have often thought,” she says, “with envy of that society. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge could boast of brighter names in literature or science than several of those Dissenting tutors—humbly content, in an obscure town and on a scanty pittance, to cultivate in themselves, and communicate to a rising generation, those mental acquirements and moral habits which are their own exceeding great reward. They and theirs lived together like one large family, and in the facility of their intercourse they found large compensation for its deficiency in luxury and splendour.” But we learn there were other attractions in the Warrington circle besides the tutors and their philosophy. “We have a knot of lasses just after your own heart,” writes Mrs Barbauld (then Miss Aikin) to her friend Miss Belsham, “as merry, blithe and gay as you would wish them, and very smart and clever—two of them are the Miss Rigbys.” We are further told the beautiful Miss Rigbys, whose father was “provider of the Commons,” “made wild work with the students’ hearts; and the trustees had to insist that they must be removed from the house if any students stayed there. And so for a time they were, but Mrs Rigby’s health fortunately broke down, and the young ladies were brought back again. “Rousseau’s _Heloise_, too, had much to answer for, and at its appearance (so Miss Aikin tells me), ‘everybody instantly fell in love with everybody’; and then it was that our poetess, after winning the hearts of half the students, some one or two of whom for her sake lived (I am informed) ‘sighing and single,’ was carried off to Palgrave by that queer little man whom henceforth she was to ‘honour and obey.’” On another occasion she wrote:— “Somebody was bold enough to talk of getting up private theatricals. This was a dreadful business! All the wise and grave, the whole tutorhood, cried out, ‘It must not be!’ The students, the Rigbys and, I must add, my aunt, took the prohibition very sulkily, and my aunt’s Ode to Wisdom was the result.” Those wicked Miss Rigbys must have made the life of that “dullish person,” Mr Seddon, who acted as _Rector Academiæ_, and who was responsible for law and order, well-nigh insupportable. On one occasion—perhaps it was to celebrate their return—they asked some of the students to supper. “Hams and trifles, and potted beef and other luxuries, were placed before them, and the students were asked to help the ladies. But the hams were made of wood, and the trifles were plates of soap-suds, and the potted beef was potted sawdust, and the other luxuries were equally tempting and equally tantalising.” Nor were the Rector’s feelings likely to be soothed by such letters as the following from Mr Samuel Vaughan of Bristol, sent during the Long Vacation, complaining bitterly of the disappointment he felt as regards the Academy, and the “too great latitude allowed the students”:—