, 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 cha