Jacotot, Froebel, and Diesterweg, all great teachers,--didactic,
deadly-dull Mrs. Barbauld, who composed, as one of her biographers
tells us, "a considerable number of miscellaneous pieces for the
instruction and amusement of young persons, especially females."
(Girls were always "young females" in those days; children were
"infants," and stories were "tales.") Who can ever forget those "Early
Lessons," written for her adopted son Charles, who appeared in the
page sometimes in a state of hopeless ignorance and imbecility, and
sometimes clad in the wisdom of the ancients? The use of the offensive
phrase "excessively pretty," as applied to a lace tidy by a very tiny
female named Lucy, brings down upon her sinful head eleven pages
of such moralizing as would only be delivered by a modern mamma on
hearing a confession of robbery or murder.

All this does strike us as insufferably didactic, yet we cannot
approve the virulence with which Southey and Charles Lamb attacked
good Mrs. Barbauld in her old age; for her purpose was eminently
earnest, her views of education healthy and sensible for the time in
which she lived, her style polished and admirably quiet, her love
for young people indubitably sincere and profound, and her character
worthy of all respect and admiration in its dignity, womanliness, and
strength. Nevertheless, Charles Lamb exclaims in a whimsical burst of
spleen: "'Goody Two Shoes' is out of print, while Mrs. Barbauld's and
Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lies in piles around. Hang them--the cursed
reasoning crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man
and child."

Miss Edgeworth has what seems to us, in these days, the same overplus
of sublime purpose, and, though a much greater writer, is quite as
desirous of being instructive, first, last, and all the time, and