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Barbauld's Hymns, and they had been something to her; but most of the little poetry she had read was only platitude sweetened with sound; she had never read, certainly never understood a real poem. Who can tell what a nature may prove, after feeding on good food for a while? The queen bee is only a better fed working bee.
He discusses the merits of various authors, and more than once expresses his extreme distaste for didactic writing. Now, he says, it is too directly instructive. Then he complains that the knowledge, insignificant and vapid as it is, must come in the shape of knowledge. He could not obtain at Newberry's shop any of the old "classics of the Nursery," he says; whilst "Mrs. Barbauld's and Mrs.
I feel and understand how many poets and novelists have raised in the mind that sort of enthusiasm which exalts and purifies the soul. Happy and gifted with heaven's best gift must be the poet, the inventor of any sort of fiction that can raise this enthusiasm. I recollect Mrs. Barbauld's lines describing Generous youth that feeds On pictured tales of vast heroic deeds.
Barbauld's works all had a pathetic ugliness, redeemed by a certain consistency of quality. And then the poky, comfortable arrangements, the bath-chair in the coach-house, the four-post bedsteads, the hand-rail on the stairs, the sandbags for the doors, all spoke of a timid, invalid life, a dim backwater in the tide of things.
My mother read the Bible to us in the morning before breakfast; Mrs. Trimmer's and Mrs. Barbauld's Scripture histories and paraphrases were taught to us; we learnt our catechism and collects, and went to church on Sunday, duly and decorously, as a matter of course.
There was the PIRATE in its original volumes, and Mackintosh's MEMOIRS, and Mrs. Barbauld's ESSAYS, and Descartes's ESSAYS, that Arthur Hallam liked to read; Hallam's CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY, and Rogers's POEMS, were there all inscribed and dedicated. Not less interesting were the piles of Magazines that had been sent from America.
"Never mind you shall save your fine speeches for the young ladies." "But I've got some for the gentlemen, too: and there's one running in my head just now." "I should like to hear it." "Should you? Well, this fine evening put me in mind of it; it is Mrs Barbauld's Ode." And then putting myself into due attitude, I mouthed it through, much to my own, and still more to Mr R's satisfaction.
"She is like Barbauld's Spring," put in Sir Mark, lazily, coming up to have his cup refilled. "She is the 'sweet daughter of a rough and stormy sire. Do any of you remember old Charley Blount?" Plainly, nobody does. Everybody looks at everybody else, as though they should have known him, but nothing comes of it.
Now, on some moonless night, in some fitting condition of the atmosphere, if Lord Rosse would permit the reader and myself to walk into the front drawing-room of his telescope, then, in Mrs. Barbauld's words, slightly varied, I might say to him, Come, and I will show you what is sublime! In fact, what I am going to lay before him, from Dr.
One can scarcely persuade one's self that they are not real characters and living people." Even "Roderick Random" made part of the young ladies' reading. "It is a very strange and a very low book," commented the Bishop's celebrated niece, "though not without some characters in it, and, I believe, some very just, though very wretched descriptions." Barbauld's "Life of Richardson," vol. 1, p. 42.
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