er education for women away from their natural homes.
'I should have little hope of cultivating a love of knowledge in a young
lady of fifteen who came to me ignorant and uncultivated. It is too late
then to begin to learn. The empire of the passions is coming on. Those
attachments begin to be formed which influence the happiness of future
life. The care of a mother alone can give suitable attention to this
important period.' It is true that the rigidness of her own home had not
prevented her from making a hasty and unsuitable marriage. But it is not
this which is weighing on her mind. 'Perhaps you may think,' she says,
'that having myself stepped out of the bounds of female reserve in
becoming an author, it is with an ill grace that I offer these
statements.'

Her arguments seem to have been thought conclusive in those days, and
the young ladies' college was finally transmuted into a school for
little boys at Palgrave, in Norfolk, and thither the worthy couple
transported themselves.

One of the letters to Miss Belsham is thus dated:--'_The 14th of July,
in the village of Palgrave (the pleasantest village in all England), at
ten o'clock, all alone in my great parlour, Mr. Barbauld being studying
a sermon, do I begin a letter to my dear Betsy._'

When she first married, and travelled into Norfolk to keep school at
Palgrave, nothing could have seemed more tranquil, more contented, more
matter-of-fact than her life as it appears from her letters. Dreams, and
fancies, and gay illusions and excitements have made way for the
somewhat disappointing realisation of Mr. Barbauld with his neatly
turned and friendly postscripts--a husband, polite, devoted, it is
true, but somewhat disappointing all the same. The next few years
seem like years in a hive--storing honey for the future, and putting
away--industrious, punctual, monotonous. There are children's lessons to
be heard, and school-treats to be devised. She sets them to act plays
and cuts out paper collars for Henry IV.; she always takes a class of
babies entirely her own. (One of these babies, who always loved her,
became Lord Chancellor Denman; most of the others took less brilliant,
but equally respectable places, in after life.) She has also household
matters and correspondence not to be neglected. In the holidays, they
make excursions to Norwich, to London, and revisit their old haunts at
Warrington. In one of her early letters, soon after her marriage, she
describes