What a contrast to prim, starched scholastic life at Palgrave must have
been the smiling world, and the land flowing with oil and wine, in which
they found themselves basking! The vintage was so abundant that year
that the country people could not find vessels to contain it. 'The roads
covered with teams of casks, empty or full according as they were going
out or returning, and drawn by oxen whose strong necks seemed to be
bowed unwillingly under the yoke. Men, women, and children were abroad;
some cutting with a short sickle the bunches of grapes, some breaking
them with a wooden instrument, some carrying them on their backs from
the gatherers to those who pressed the juice; and, as in our harvest,
the gleaners followed.'
From the vintage they travel to the Alps, 'a sight so majestic, so
totally different from anything I had seen before, that I am ready to
sing _nunc dimittis_,' she writes. They travel back by the south of
France and reach Paris in June, where the case of the Diamond Necklace
is being tried. Then they return to England, waiting a day at Boulogne
for a vessel, but crossing from thence in less than four hours. How
pretty is her description of England as it strikes them after their
absence! 'And not without pleasing emotion did we view again the green
swelling hills covered with large sheep, and the winding road bordered
with the hawthorn hedge, and the English vine twirled round the tall
poles, and the broad Medway covered with vessels, and at last the gentle
yet majestic Thames.'
There were Dissenters at Hampstead in those days, as there are still,
and it was a call from a little Unitarian congregation on the hillside
who invited Mr. Barbauld to become their minister, which decided the
worthy couple to retire to this pleasant suburb. The place seemed
promising enough; they were within reach of Mrs. Barbauld's brother, Dr.
Aikin, now settled in London, and to whom she was tenderly attached.
There were congenial people settled all about. On the high hill-top were
pleasant old houses to live in. There was occupation for him and
literary interest for her.
They are a sociable and friendly pair, hospitable, glad to welcome their
friends, and the acquaintance, and critics, and the former pupils who
come toiling up the hill to visit them. Rogers comes to dinner 'at half
after three.' They have another poet for a neighbour, Miss Joanna
Baillie; they are made welcome by all, and in their turn make others
welcome; they do acts of social charity and kindness wherever they see
the occasion. They have a young Spanish gentleman to board who conceals
a taste for 'seguars.' They also go up to town from time to time. On
one occasion Mr. Barbauld repairs to London to choose a wedding present
for Miss Belsham, who is about to be married to Mr. Kenrick, a widower
with daughters. He chose two slim Wedgwood pots of some late classic
model, which still stand, after many dangers, safely on either side of
Mrs. Kenrick's portrait in Miss Reid's drawing-room at Hampstead.
Wedgwood must have been a personal friend: he has modelled a lovely head
of Mrs. Barbauld, simple and nymph-like.
Hampstead was no further from London in those days than it is now, and
they seem to have kept up a constant communication with their friends
and relations in the great city. They go to the play occasionally. 'I
have not indeed seen Mrs. Siddons often, but I think I never saw her to
more advantage,' she writes. 'It is not, however, seeing a play, it is
only seeing one character, for they have nobody to act with her.'
Another expedition is to Westminster Hall, where Warren Hastings was
then being tried for his life.
'The trial has attracted the notice of most people who are within reach
of it. I have been, and was very much struck with all the apparatus and
pomp of justice, with the splendour of the assembly which contained
everything distinguished in the nation, with the grand idea that the
equity of the English was to pursue crimes committed at the other side
of the globe, and oppressions exercised towards the poor Indians who had
come to plead their cause; but all these fine ideas vanish and fade away
as one observes the progress of the cause, and sees it fall into the
summer amusements, and take the place of a rehearsal of music or an
evening at Vauxhall.'
Mrs. Barbauld was a Liberal in feeling and conviction; she was never
afraid to speak her mind, and when the French Revolution first began,
she, in common with many others, hoped that it was but the dawning of
happier times. She was always keen about public events; she wrote an
address on the opposition to the repeal of the Test Act in 1791, and she
published her poem to Wilberforce on the rejection of his great bill for
abolishing slavery:--
Friends of the friendless, hail, ye generous band!
she cries, in warm enthusiasm for the devoted cause.
Horace Walpole nicknamed her Deborah, called her the Virago Barbauld,
and speaks of her with utter rudeness and intolerant spite. But whether
or not Horace Walpole approved, it is certain that Mrs. Barbauld
possessed to a full and generous degree a quality which is now less
common than it was in her day.
Not very many years ago I was struck on one occasion when a noble old
lady, now gone to her rest, exclaimed in my hearing that people of this
generation had all sorts of merits and charitable intentions, but that
there was one thing she missed which had certainly existed in her youth,
and which no longer seemed to be of the same account: that public spirit
which used to animate the young as well as the old.
It is possible that philanthropy, and the love of the beautiful, and the
gratuitous diffusion of wall-papers may be the modern rendering of the
good old-fashioned sentiment. Mrs. Barbauld lived in very stirring days,
when private people shared in the excitements and catastrophes of public
affairs. To her the fortunes of England, its loyalty, its success, were
a part of her daily bread. By her early associations she belonged to a
party representing opposition, and for that very reason she was the more
keenly struck by the differences of the conduct of affairs and the
opinions of those she trusted. Her friend Dr. Priestley had emigrated to
America for his convictions' sake; Howard was giving his noble life for
his work; Wakefield had gone to prison. Now the very questions are
forgotten for which they struggled and suffered, or the answers have
come while the questions are forgotten, in this their future which is
our present, and to which some unborn historian may point back with a
moral finger.
Dr. Aikin, whose estimate of his sister was very different from Horace
Walpole's, occasionally reproached her for not writing more constantly.
He wrote a copy of verses on this theme:--
Thus speaks the Muse, and bends her brows severe:
Did I, Lætitia, lend my choicest lays,
And crown thy youthful head with freshest bays,
That all the expectance of thy full-grown year,
Should lie inert and fruitless? O revere
Those sacred gifts whose meed is deathless praise,
Whose potent charm the enraptured soul can raise
Far from the vapours of this earthly sphere,
Seize, seize the lyre, resume the lofty strain.
She seems to have willingly left the lyre for Dr. Aikin's use. A few
hymns, some graceful odes, and stanzas, and _jeux d'esprit_, a certain
number of well-written and original essays, and several political
pamphlets, represent the best of her work. Her more ambitious poems
are those by which she is the least remembered. It was at Hampstead
that Mrs. Barbauld wrote her contributions to her brother's volume of
'Evenings at Home,' among which the transmigrations of Indur may be
quoted as a model of style and delightful matter. One of the best of her
_jeux d'esprit_ is the 'Groans of the Tankard,' which was written in
early days, with much spirit and real humour. It begins with a classic
incantation, and then goes on:--
'Twas at the solemn silent noontide hour
When hunger rages with despotic power,
When the lean student quits his Hebrew roots
For the gross nourishment of English fruits,
And throws unfinished airy systems by
For solid pudding and substantial pie.
The tankard now,
Replenished to the brink,
With the cool beverage blue-eyed maidens drink,
but, accustomed to very different libations, is endowed with voice and
utters its bitter reproaches:--
Unblest the day, and luckless was the hour
Which doomed me to a Presbyterian's power,
Fated to serve a Puritanic race,
Whose slender meal is shorter than their grace.