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. 10, 1861.] order: not only clever and well-read, but enlightened;—rather blue, certainly, but sensible, kindly, sufficiently practical for their position—in short, certainly the better for their intellectual cultivation, and in no way the worse for it. The Baillies were not Blue. Joanna’s genius was too strong and natural to be overlaid by any amount of reading she was disposed to undertake. All the sources of wisdom were open to her;—Nature, books, and life: and she drew from them all in happy proportion; so that she became the wise and happy woman that every wise father would desire his daughter to be in herself, whatever she might also do for, and be to other people. If Joanna Baillie had written nothing, she would have been the beloved and revered being that she is in all memories. The only difference is that her lot as an author affords further evidence of the robust character of her mind, in the equal serenity with which she regarded the rise, and culmination, and decline of her own fame. No seat of irritability seems to have been ever touched, more or less, by such a celebrity as very few women have ever attained, or by that extinction of her fame, which must have appeared to her unjust, if the fame had not been itself a delusion. Less celebrated, but hardly less highly endowed, and more thoroughly educated than Joanna Baillie, or perhaps any other woman of her time, was Mrs. Barbauld, whose few but exquisite writings still kindle enthusiasm in duly qualified readers who happen to pick up anything of hers in their path of study.

Her father educated her with her brother; and we see in her noble style, full of power, clearness, and grace, one of the results of her sound classical training. We see others in her compactness of thought, and closeness of expression; while the warm glow of sentiment, pure as the sunlight, excludes all appearance of pedantry, or unsuitableness to the hour in which she wrote. Fox pronounced her “Essay on the Inconsistency of Human Expectations,” “the finest essay in the English language,”—no one being more aware than he must have been of the classical origin of the train of thought, so admirably conveyed in vivid English. The strength and discipline of her moral nature were only too well proved by the experience of her married life. She underwent, with noble outward serenity, a long and excruciating trial from her husband’s insanity, which ended in suicide. The “Dirge,” which remains among her poems, discloses to those who knew her something of what lay under the dignity and calm which she preserved for his sake. The strain and shock induced an indolence, or reluctance to act, and make any appearance, which has deprived us of much which she would no doubt have written, if she had not lost the spirit and gaiety of her early life; but we have enough to understand how it was that her reason and fancy swayed all minds that approached her own, and her words burned themselves in on the memories of all who fell in with them. Having read anything of hers at all, it was irresistible to read it again; and probably nothing of hers ever needed to be read more than twice. Her essays related mainly to the topics of the time: and the time was one of political and moral conflict throughout the country; yet I have been eagerly inquired of by young persons within a few years as to anything I could tell of Mrs. Barbauld, because she had kindled their souls by some legacy of words which seemed to them like the newest and rarest of gifts.

Her father certainly did not train her to be somebody’s companion, or somebody’s mother. He treated her and her brother alike, with the view of freely opening to both the way to wisdom. Her education was a pure blessing to her. It was to her what she briefly and brilliantly describes intellectual pursuits to be in her celebrated essay. Her firm grasp of philosophy, her student-like habit of mind, and the scholarly discipline she underwent did not impair, in the slightest degree, her womanly grace, her delicate reserve, or the glow of her friendships. It is true, she was not much of a needlewoman. There is a tradition that the skeleton of a mouse was found in her workbag; but this kind of disinclination is seen in women who know no language but their own, and whose ideas do not range beyond their own street. As her husband’s aider in the work of his great school at Palgrave, and as a motherly hostess to the little boys, she was tenderly remembered by some men of distinction who had stood at her knee. A nobler and sweeter presence than Mrs. Barbauld’s I have never witnessed; and I have heard from some of her own generation that her sprightliness was once as bewitching as her composure was afterwards pathetic.

In the next generation after the Blues of the last century, there seems to have been a sort of reaction in regard to the education of at least the middle-class girls. As far as I have heard from many quarters, the mothers of the early part of this century were less informed, less able in even the common affairs of life, than those who immediately preceded and followed them. There were, of course, reasons for this: but I cannot go into them now. It is enough to recal to the memory of old people what they heard in their childhood of the boarding-schools, sewing-schools, and day-schools in which their mothers had received their education, as it was called. I remember the fame of a school which was always so crowded that the girls had hardly room to turn round, and none for any due care of their clothes; a school so praised by distinguished church-folk as that the list of candidates for admission was always full; a school which I might describe at some length, to the amazement of modern readers, but of which I will mention only one characteristic fact—that the religious instruction of Sunday (in addition to church-going) was learning by heart four lines of “Paradise Lost,” leaving off (till next Sunday) whether there was a stop or not. There were sewing-schools, where girls sat on hard benches without backs, and without any support for the feet, stitching away for hours together, on fine materials, in any sort of light that might happen; so that a large proportion came out of the process crooked, or squinting, or with back-ache or near sightedness for life, and a sad habit of low spirits. There were country or seaside schools, where the girls learned to gather fruit and vegetables, and to play trap-ball, and perhaps to dance, as well as to