Page:The works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld volume 1.djvu/72

 Mrs. Barbauld, compared with the long course of years during which she exercised the pen, is a sufficient proof that she offered to the public none but the happiest inspirations of her Muse, and not even these till they had received all the polish of which she judged them susceptible. To a friend who had expressed his surprise at not finding inserted in her volume a poem which he had admired in manuscript, she well and characteristically replied; "I had rather it should be asked of twenty pieces why they are not here, than of one why it is." Her representatives have in the present instance followed, to the best of their judgement, a similar principle of selection. Out of a considerable number of pieces which appear from their dates to have been rejected by herself from her first publication, they have printed only two: that agreeable jeu d'esprit The Inventory of the Furniture of Dr. Priestley's Study, probably omitted in the first instance for reasons which no