At the present day some of her suggestions have become opinions, and are openly preached; but her anticipatory expression of them reads rather like inspiration than the simple sequence of logical reasoning. Moreover, she was living in times when for women to have opinions at all—or at least to print them—was regarded as unfeminine, and looked upon with disfavour. Mrs. Barbauld herself, in her ‘Life of Richardson,’ tells us how the accomplished and clever Mrs. Delany found fault with a conversation in ‘Sir Charles Grandison,’ in which the words ‘intellect’ and ‘ethics’ occur, as being too scholastic to be spoken by a woman; and Dr. Johnson ‘did not greatly approve of literature as a career for women,’ though he condoned it in the case of little Fanny Burney and Miss Mulso, afterwards well known as Mrs. Chapone, or, as she used to be styled in my young days, _Madame Chapone_, without a course of whose letters no young lady was supposed to have finished her education. But Johnson affected, in Mrs. Barbauld’s case, to underrate her talents. When, however, at the very height of her literary reputation, he heard of her devoting herself to the culture of the young minds entrusted to her own and her husband’s care, she had, we are told, ‘his highest praise.’ No one, according to Mrs. Piozzi, ‘was more struck with this voluntary descent from possible splendour to painful duty than the Doctor.’ But why ‘painful duty’? I imagine that to Mrs. Barbauld the divine gift of teaching, as she, and Pestalozzi, and Dr. Arnold, and a few others, have taught, was as spontaneous and irrepressible as her writing poetry. The first-fruits of her genius had been for children. The publication of her ‘Early Lessons’ was an era in their first steps to knowledge, and her contemporaries declared it unrivalled amongst books for children. She had taught when quite a girl in her father’s school, for the simple love of teaching, and thus I do not believe that the step she took was one regarded by her as a descent. She had made a name that was destined to live, and the estimation in which her writings were held lost nothing by her ceasing to write, though the reputation of them enhanced that of the Hampstead School. No doubt she regarded her acceptance of the position from quite another point of view than did the learned Doctor, who had essayed school-keeping as a means to an end, and failed, while the lady entered upon it _con amore_, and her method was altogether different from the scholastic system then in vogue. She was the friend, companion, and confidant of her pupils; she sympathized with all their small troubles, shared their joys, and catered for their amusement. Howitt, in his ‘Northern Heights of London,’ tells how a lady calling on her found Mrs. Barbauld in the midst of making paper plumes, ruffs, and collars, for the boys who were about to play in private theatricals.