entirely wore off.
She does not seem to have been in any great harmony with her mother. One
could imagine a fanciful and high-spirited child, timid and dutiful,
and yet strong-willed, secretly rebelling against the rigid order of her
home, and feeling lonely for want of liberty and companionship. It was
true she had birds and beasts and plants for her playfellows, but she
was of a gregarious and sociable nature, and she was unconsciously
longing for something more, and perhaps feeling a want in her early
life which no silent company can supply.

She was about fifteen when a great event took place. Her father was
appointed classical tutor to the Warrington Academy, and thither
the little family removed. We read that the Warrington Academy was a
Dissenting college started by very eminent and periwigged personages,
whose silhouettes Mrs. Barbauld herself afterwards cut out in
sticking-plaster, and whose names are to this day remembered and held in
just esteem. They were people of simple living and high thinking, they
belonged to a class holding then a higher place than now in the world's
esteem, that of Dissenting ministers. The Dissenting ministers were
fairly well paid and faithfully followed by their congregations. The
college was started under the auspices of distinguished members of the
community, Lord Willoughby of Parham, the last Presbyterian lord, being
patron. Among the masters were to be found the well-known names of Dr.
Doddridge; of Gilbert Wakefield, the reformer and uncompromising martyr;
of Dr. Taylor, of Norwich, the Hebrew scholar; of Dr. Priestley, the
chemical analyst and patriot, and enterprising theologian, who left
England and settled in America for conscience and liberty's sake.

Many other people, neither students nor professors, used to come to
Warrington, and chief among them in later years good John Howard with
MSS. for his friend Dr. Aikin to correct for the press. Now for the
first time Mrs. Barbauld (Miss Aikin she was then) saw something of real
life, of men and manners. It was not likely that she looked back with
any lingering regret to Knibworth, or would have willingly returned
thither. A story in one of her memoirs gives an amusing picture of the
manners of a young country lady of that day. Mr. Haines, a rich farmer
from Knibworth, who had been greatly struck by Miss Aikin, followed her
to Warrington, and 'obtained a private audience of her father and begged
his consent to be allowed t