words, “Write on, shine out, and defy them.” But at nearly seventy years of age Mrs. Barbauld was to be excused if she felt that younger and stronger hands must carry on the fight. The poem referred to was not her last literary effort, but it was the last of her writings published during her lifetime. Very little, perhaps, of her work has permanent value; one poem, however, that beginning “Life! I know not what thou art,” which was written in extreme old age, will probably live as long as anything in the language. It indicates possibly what she might have done, had it not been for the tragedy of her married life. Of two lines in this poem— Life, we’ve been long together, Through pleasant and through cloudy weather— Wordsworth declared that, though he was not in the habit of grudging people their good things, he wished he had written those lines. Her mental powers remained clear and vigorous to the end of her long life. When she was past eighty, writing to Miss Edgeworth, she summed up, as it were, the worth of what she knew and did not know. “I find that many things I knew, I have forgotten; many things I _thought_ I knew, I find I knew nothing about; some things I know, I have found not worth knowing, and some things I would give—oh! what would one not give to know, are beyond the reach of human ken.” All her life through she laboured with her pen in defence of civil and religious liberty, against the iniquities of the slave trade, and for many other causes which have made life more worth living in England to-day. She died, universally honoured and respected, in 1825, aged eighty-two. XXI JOANNA BAILLIE MRS. JOANNA BAILLIE, as she was usually called, because, though she was never married, her age and literary reputation were held to entitle her to brevet rank, was a remarkable instance of a writer rapidly rising to the highest pinnacle of fame, and then as rapidly and surely descending almost to the common level of ordinary mortals. But the Scotch woman, with the blood of heroes in her veins, showed herself worthy of her descent, both by the modesty and dignity with which she bore her fame, and by the sweetness and unassuming simplicity with which she bore the loss of it. She was descended from Sir William Wallace, and the fame of this long-past ancestor is perhaps equalled by that of another and a much nearer relative. John Hunter, the great anatomist and physiologist, the founder of the College of Surgeons, was her mother’s brother. She therefore might truly feel, not in a figurative sense, that in everything she was “sprung of earth’s first blood”; and her double connection with the best and greatest of the heroes of Scotland was probably not without its influence on the development of her mind and character.