ritable 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, Laetitia, 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 Tan