Page:The works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld volume 1.djvu/62

 12mo, entitled The Female Speaker. Having thus braced her mind, as it were, to the tone of original composition, she produced that beautiful offspring of her genius, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, the longest, and perhaps the most highly finished, of all her poems. The crisis at which this piece was produced, and concerning which it treats, was confessedly one of the most distressful within the memory of the present generation, and the author's own state of spirits deepened the gloom. She, like Cassandra, was the prophetess of woe: at the time, she was heard perhaps with less incredulity, but the event has happily discredited her vaticination in every point. That the solemn warning which she here attempted to hold forth to national pride and confidence, should cause her lines to be received by the public with less applause than their intrinsic merit might well have claimed, was perhaps in some degree to be expected; that it would expose its