“Mrs Barbauld bore the remains of great personal beauty.[7] She had a brilliant complexion, light hair, blue eyes, a small, elegant figure, and her manners were very agreeable, with something of the generation then departing.... Mrs Barbauld is so well known by her prose writings that it is needless for me to attempt to characterise her here. Her excellence lay in the soundness and acuteness of her understanding, and in the perfection of her taste. In the estimation of Wordsworth she was the first of our literary women, and he was not bribed to this judgment by any especial congeniality of feeling or by concurrence in speculative opinions. I may here relate an anecdote connecting her and Wordsworth, though out of its proper time by many, many years; but it is so good that it ought to be preserved from oblivion. It was after her death that Lucy Aikin published Mrs Barbauld’s collected works, of which I gave a copy to Miss Wordsworth. Among the poems is a Stanza on Life, written in extreme old age. It had delighted my sister, to whom I had repeated it on her deathbed. It was long after I gave these works to Miss Wordsworth that her brother said, ‘Repeat me that Stanza by Mrs Barbauld.’ I did so. He made me repeat it again. And so he learned it by heart. He was at the time walking in his sitting-room at Rydal with his hands behind him, and I heard him mutter to himself, ‘I am not in the habit of grudging people their good things, but I wish I had written those lines.’”[8] Priestley’s choice fell upon Mary Wilkinson, who was of about the same age as Anna Letitia Aikin. She was the daughter of a well-to-do ironmaster at Wrexham, with whose family he had become acquainted in consequence of the youngest son, William, having been a pupil at his school in Nantwich. He certainly had no reason to regret his choice, whatever Mary Wilkinson might have felt at times in the “cloudy weather” she was destined to go through. It is, of course, idle to speculate “on what might have been if things had been otherwise.” The world, at all events, was the richer for the _Hymns in Prose_ and the _Early Lessons_, on which Mr Rochemont Barbauld’s young charges and many succeeding generations of children were nurtured. From a worldly point of view Priestley’s marriage was not without its advantages to him, immediate and prospective. Mary Wilkinson had all the force of character, and much of the mental and intellectual ability of her father and her brother John, both of whom had a considerable share in the development of the iron industry in this country. Of them Miss Meteyard, in her _Life of Wedgwood_, writes:—