acquire knowledge is from conversation with a father or brother....  The thefts of knowledge in our sex are only connived at while carefully concealed, and if displayed are punished with disgrace.”  It is odd to find Mrs. Barbauld thus reflecting the old-fashioned view of the capacity and requirements of her own sex, for she herself belonged to that brilliant group—­Hannah More, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Mary Russell Mitford—­who were the living refutation of her inherited theories.  Their influence shows a pedagogic impulse to present morally helpful ideas to the public.

[Illustration:  ANNA L. BARBAULD]

From preceding generations whose lives had been concentrated upon household affairs, these women pioneers had acquired the strictly practical bent of mind which comes out in all their verse, as in all their prose.

The child born at Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire, a century and a half ago, became one of the first of these pleasant writers for young and old.  She was one of the thousand refutations of the stupid popular idea that precocious children never amount to anything.  When only two, she “could read roundly without spelling, and in half a year more could read as well as most women.”  Her father was master of a boys’ school, where her childhood was passed under the rule of a loving but austere mother, who disliked all intercourse with the pupils for her daughter.  It was not the fashion for women to be highly educated; but, stimulated perhaps by the scholastic atmosphere, Laetitia implored her father for a classical training, until, against his judgment, he allowed her to study Greek and Latin as well as French and Italian.  Though not fond of the housewifely accomplishments insisted upon by Mrs. Aikin, the eager student also cooked and sewed with due obedience.

Her dull childhood ended when she was fifteen, for then her father accepted a position as classical tutor in a boys’ school at Warrington, Lancashire, to which place the family moved.  The new home afforded greater freedom and an interesting circle of friends, among them Currie, William Roscoe, John Taylor, and the famous Dr. Priestley.  A very pretty girl, with brilliant blonde coloring and animated dark-blue eyes, she was witty and vivacious, too, under the modest diffidence to which she had been trained.  Naturally she attracted much admiration from the schoolboys and even from their elders, but on the whole she seems to have found study and writing more interesting than love affairs.  The first suitor, who presented himself when she was about sixteen, was a farmer from her early home at Kibworth.  He stated his wishes to her father.  “She is in the garden,” said Mr. Aikin.  “You may ask her yourself.”  Laetitia was not propitious, but the young man was persistent, and the position grew irksome.  So the nimble girl scrambled into a convenient tree, and escaped her rustic wooer by swinging herself down upon the other side of the garden wall.