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Mrs. Barbauld.

When he next saw her she was quite aged, and her husband had been dead many years; but she still kept the calm sweetness of countenance that had charmed him on the occasion of his first visit. One of her poems, written in her declining days, is so characteristic of her quiet faith and the serenity of her mind that we cannot forbear quoting it:

‘Life, we’ve been long together,

Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;

’Tis hard to part when friends are dear,

Perhaps ’twill cause a sigh, a tear;

Then steal away, give little warning,

Choose thine own time;

Say not “Good-night!” but in some brighter clime

Bid me “Good-morning!”’

And it was in some such mood that death found her in the eighty-second year of her age.

On leaving Church Row, the school—probably on account of her husband’s malady—being given up, Mrs. Barbauld immediately recommenced her literary labours, and compiled a selection of essays from the Spectator, Tatler, and Guardian, with an introductory one of her own. This work appeared the year after her removal from Church Row, and was followed by her ‘Life of Richardson,’ whose correspondence she had edited. Her husband died in 1808, and the ‘widow recorded her feelings in a poetical dirge to his memory,’ a form of diverting feelings with which I have no sympathy, especially as the ebullition appears to have been published! I better understand her seeking relief in other literary occupation. She wrote a poem in 1811 in which she more naturally refers to her husband. She had also edited a collection of the British novelists, published in 1810, with an introductory essay of her own, and biographical and critical notices.