Amongst these celebrities Mrs. Barbauld was a welcome guest, and many of these gifted men and women visited her in Church Row. She appears to have been as charming in person as she was rich in intellect. A small portrait of her in the _European Magazine_ of March, 1786, suggests, from the sweetness of expression and refinement of the features, the composed beauty of countenance which Crabb Robinson describes her as possessing at sixty-two years of age. In 1802 the Barbaulds removed from Hampstead. Through the kindness of a friend, I have before me the copy of a letter from Rochmount Barbauld to the celebrated Dr. Parr, dated March 29, 1802, in which he says: ‘We are on the point of leaving this charming spot, in order to remove to Stoke Newington, thus exchanging the beauties of nature for the pleasures of the heart and mind—for the advantage, I mean, of living close to Dr. Aikin.’ This closes all questions as to the time when the Barbaulds removed from Hampstead, which one writer has asserted to have been in 1799. It was at Stoke Newington that Crabb Robinson paid his first visit to them in 1805-6. We have seen his personal description of Mr. Barbauld, but he added to it the suggestive expression that at that time the afflictive disease was lurking in him which in a few years broke out, and, as is well known, caused a sad termination to his life. This was the circumstance that made their removal to Stoke Newington a necessity, in order that Mrs. Barbauld should be near her brother for advice, assistance, and protection. No wonder Mrs. Le Breton, in her recollections of her, calls her life a brave and beautiful one. Of Mrs. Barbauld, Crabb Robinson says: ‘She bore the remains of great personal beauty; she had a brilliant complexion, light hair, blue eyes, a small elegant figure, and her manners were agreeable, with something of the generation departed.’ [Illustration: _Mrs. Barbauld._] When he next saw her she was quite aged, and her husband had been dead many years; but she still kept the calm sweetness of countenance that had charmed him on the occasion of his first visit. One of her poems, written in her declining days, is so characteristic of her quiet faith and the serenity of her mind that we cannot forbear quoting it: ‘Life, we’ve been long together, Through pleasant and through cloudy weather; ’Tis hard to part when friends are dear, Perhaps ’twill cause a sigh, a tear; Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not “Good-night!” but in some brighter clime Bid me “Good-morning!”’ And it was in some such mood that death found her in the eighty-second year of her age.