her brother, Dr. Aikin, who had given up his London practice and settled there in 1798. Still full of energy in spite of growing anxieties as to her husband's health, she achieved an excellent piece of editorial work in the Correspondence, with Memoir, of Samuel Richardson. Crabb Robinson first made her personal acquaintance in 1805, and describes her (she was then in her sixty-third year) as bearing "the remains of great personal beauty. She had a brilliant complexion, light hair, blue eyes, a small elegant figure, and her manners were very agreeable, with something of the generation then departing." Her husband ended "that long disease, his life," in 1808. Her brother died in 1822, and she herself survived three years longer, dying at the age of eighty-two, on the 9th of March 1825. A memorable and admirable woman was Anna Letitia Barbauld. Within her limits she was manysided. She was a poetess with a real sense of metrical charm, but with many indications that she was held back by some invisible force from pressing into the kingdom of poetry that was growing up around her. She could never quite resist the influences of the eighteenth century, though the nineteenth was dawning at her feet. Her theology, or the absence of any, causes her devotional writings, hymns in prose or verse, to strike us as tepid and ineffectual, in despite of her truly reverential nature. She never was wholly weaned from the idolatry of commonsense, though she felt, as we have seen, the weak side of the religious conceptions among which she had grown up. But in an age of frivolity and dissipation in high life, she set up noble standards and lived by them herself, and more than one generation of children has had reason to call her blessed. : THE CHILDREN'S BOOKS OF A HUNDRED YEARS AGO THE Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, not many years since given for the first time to the public, have afforded, I have no doubt, to many a real delight, whether or no they came to the book as readers and admirers of her numerous works of fiction. Her charming personality—a mind and nature so well balanced; such good sense, good feeling, kindliness, and humour; all exhibited on a stage of domestic life that must have been full of difficulties and stumbling-blocks -must always be a pleasant subject of contemplation. But with all her achievements and excellences it is doubtful if she ever did better and more enduring work than in that once famous series of children's books which too many of us know only vaguely by name, as Rosamond, Frank, Harry and Lucy, and the Parent's Assistant. If I had addressed such an audience as the present thirty years ago, I might safely have assumed that every educated person of middle age had been " brought up" on some or other of these books, and that the names of the chief personages therein remained with them as household words." But I grieve to say that often now when I cite the once honoured names of Lazy Lawrence and Simple Susan I am met with a countenance of painful astonishment and nonrecognition. The first volume of Maria Edgeworth's stories for children (containing amongst others Rosamond and the Purple Jar) appeared more than a hundred years ago. Those who have read the Life and Letters will remember the origin of these stories. Miss Edgeworth had a father—an amiable and admirable man of considerable ability and untiring energy, to whom she was devoted, and with reason, for (with slight abatements) he was an excellent husband and father. His conjugal history has a humorous side, as such things are apt to have when the chief actor, like Richard Lovell Edgeworth, is all but destitute of a sense of humour. He was one of those profoundly influenced by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and especially by the new ideas of education propounded in that writer's Émile. This work forms the key to Richard Edgeworth's philosophy generally. He took his eldest son abroad to bring him up after the doctrines of Rousseau; and when it was discovered that his daughter Maria possessed the unmistakable gift of narration (she had practised the art regularly on her schoolfellows), it occurred to him how, in the important work of education, stories about young people for young people might be made a means of teaching the coming generation the great doctrines of the French reformer-an education based, as he believed, on the principles of common-sense and pure reason, inculcating temperance, industry, justice, benevolence, and home discipline as the road to all excellence and happiness. And it was he, doubtless, in the first instance, who suggested the methods and furnished the moral topics of his daughter's little books. In the earlier stories the father and daughter were in fact partners, and the prefaces were often signed with their joint initials. The credit of originating the moral story for the young cannot be claimed for Richard Lovell Edgeworth. The influence of the new ideas which had been at work in France, culminating in the French Revolution, had already borne fruit widely in European societies; and the influence of Rousseau had distinctly affected children's literature before the Edgeworths began to write. Moral tales for the young were abundant at the time the Edgeworths began their labours, and had evidently been found to supply a real want. In 1792, for instance, I find already in a third edition a collection of stories translated from the German of Salzmann, written with the express purpose, as the preface announces, of giving birth 'to what we call a good disposition in children -such good disposition meaning, in the writer's |