Priestley’s entrance into the Warrington community affected his career in more ways than one. In the first place, the improvements in his worldly prospects enabled him to marry; and in the second he was led to turn his attention to Natural Philosophy, to which, as we have seen, he was already predisposed. The selection of his wife and of his studies influenced the subsequent course of his life profoundly. Why he should have left the sprightly, witty “Nancy Aikin, with the blue and laughing eyes,” to be “carried off to Palgrave by that queer little man” whom she had to “honour and obey” as a school-mistress, is one of those inscrutable dispensations which the hymeneal god delights in. That they were the best of friends and had pleasure in each other’s society is abundantly evident. Priestley warmly admired her genius: she confessed, indeed, that he first encouraged her to try her ’prentice hand at poetry. She was about eighteen when Priestley first appeared at Warrington, and about ten years his junior, a girl of many personal attractions and, as demonstrated by her writings, of great mental ability and accomplishments. She had been carefully educated by her father, had a considerable knowledge of modern literature, and was fairly well-read in that of Greece and Rome. Her first volume of poems was printed at Warrington in 1773 and ran through four editions in a year. It was said of her that she roused the admiration of Fox and Johnson, the envy of Rogers and Wordsworth, and the jealousy of Goldsmith; Scott declared she made a poet of him; Brougham eulogised her in the House of Lords, and Mrs Oliphant has paid her a beautiful tribute in her _Literary History of England_. Miss Lucy Aikin, in her edition of her aunt’s collected works, gives a charming description of her as she appeared in early womanhood:— “She was at this time possessed of great beauty, distinct traces of which she retained to the latest period of her life. Her person was slender, her complexion exquisitely fair, with the bloom of perfect health; her features were regular and elegant, and her dark blue eyes beamed with the light of wit and fancy.” Not less charming is the testimony of Henry Crabb Robinson, who, in 1805, wrote:—