Page:The works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld volume 1.djvu/79

 balances their respective advantages and inconveniences, evinces great acuteness and a rare impartiality; and the whole must be admired as eloquence, if it cannot be altogether acquiesced in as reason.

Amongst her later pieces, two which first appeared in the Monthly Magazine, the Essay on Education, and that on Prejudice, which may be regarded as in some measure a sequel to it, have justly earned for her not merely applause, but gratitude. The first served to calm the apprehensions of many an anxious parent, who had risen from the examination of the numerous conflicting systems of education then fashionable, alarmed rather than edified, by pointing out, that the success of the great and familiar process of fitting a human creature to bear well his part in life, depended not for its success on elaborate schemes of artificial management, such as