ART IV.-1. Memoirs, Miscellanies, and Letters of Lucy Aikin. Edited by PHILIP HEMERY LE BRETON. Longmans. 2. Cities of the Past. By FRANCES POWER COBBE. Trübner. 3. Italics. By FRANCES POWER COBBE. Trübner.

WE doubt if society in our own time admits of such a picture of a mind and a life as the above memoir presents-if it be possible in our day for any one to be so satisfied with his share of the intellectual good things of the world, so lastingly content with the circle in which he finds himself, so at one with his surroundings, so serenely certain through long years that he and the people about him hold the clue to all the truth not yet attained, as the subject of this memoir shows herself to have been. From her cradle to her grave, as far as we are admitted into her mind, Lucy Aikin felt herself one of the aristocracy of intellect, living in the very centre of light and illumination, and not unworthy of so high a calling. It was no sudden inflation, and, as such, subject to depression, but an abiding conviction, that what the world held of wise discerning and truth-loving she knew, lived, and worked in. The state of parties, the tumult of opinion, the love of change, the divided headships-every one with a creed or doctrine of his own-prevents this serenity of content in every case; but more especially the changes wrought by time alter the position of women, of those women, we mean, who aim at occupying the van of progress. Formerly, clever women of the strong-minded school coalesced with men ; now they have separate interests and aspirations, and are for ever issuing disturbing theories which break up the old compact system of warfare against prescription.

Lucy Aikin may be considered a precursor of the present school of esprits forts among women. We can easily trace the course by which her opinions have grown, by a natural development, into those of the other lady whose name appears in our heading; but they are consequences she would in many instances have disclaimed, and we must say that we greatly prefer the flower to the fruit. There is a solidity, a sense of responsibility about the earlier manifestation of this spirit, which we miss in the later; and moreover there is a dignity in mere consistency. Most lives strike us with such a sense of failure; they are led with so little design, and are so merely the sport of accident and circumstances, that the picture of a decorous, grave, consistent existence, which pursues a course, holds by its opening

of thought and opinion, and retains all the esteem and credit it has ever received to the end, necessarily wins respect, though our sympathies are not otherwise engaged. Miss Aikin was a disciple all her life, a favourable specimen of a certain class of opinions in action, never an originator. The liberal Unitarian element found in her an excellent exponent; the principles of her party exactly hit her natural turn of mind and temper; but we have no reason to suppose that if she had been born into another school of thought she would have forsaken it for the one she so consistently represented. There is a docility even in her professions of independence, and her attraction towards new lights, which shows her always a scholar. She was so usually guided by reason, so emphatically a sensible woman, that she might have sat, indeed very likely did sit, as the model for some of Miss Edgeworth's superior women; and when this idea is conveyed there is little more to be said of her outer course of life. Sensible women do not make adventures for themselves, and circumstances did not provide them for Miss Aikin, as far at least as the slight memoir tells us; hers was a life of talking, and thinking, and writing, not of doing, or even of suffering, beyond what is inseparable from a life of more than eighty years. Her affections were bestowed on her family and friends, nor is there any hint that they were ever centred on a single object. As shown to us, she represents single life in its most self-sustained, satisfied, dignified aspect. Her sphere was society, and this and natural domestic ties were to all appearance fully sufficient for her happiness-a feeling more deserving the name, according to her own estimate, and more sensibly realized by her than most can pretend to. No biography can be more meagre of detail. If we are to know anything of a woman in any way distinguished, we naturally-more in her case than a man's-expect some personal characteristics as guides to our judgment; but we are here left almost in the dark on all points of looks, voice, and manner, and all that makes up the woman's full complement of influence in social life. Perhaps nothing very marked in these respects is to be looked for in a character of which sense in action is the prevailing idea, and, without any hint of externals, we have a clear enough impression given us of a woman, wise according to her light, cheerful, and contented; finding this world a very pleasant place to live in, with no disturbing aspirations which this world cannot satisfy, and no difficulties or spiritual perplexities; cultivating her reason, and apparently never encountering anything too hard for that reason to settle to her satisfaction; always spending her time in what she believed the most useful manner; always talking what she aimed at being something worth hearing; always seek

ing the society of people whom she could respect even to the point of holding them the depositaries of truth, physical and moral.

There is something really generous in the strong impression she shows of living in an age of stirring events, great things, great men, great discoveries, as of a new age opening upon the world in which she would willingly take some share of work to be done; and if her accomplished efforts and partial attempts in this direction fall far short of the point she aims at, or believes herself to have attained, this need not prove her utterly mistaken in her own powers. We see clearly that she had weight in her own circle in its way a distinguished one; and the fact that she was the recognised channel through which Channing learnt what was going on in England, and as it seems conveyed his thoughts and speculations back again, shows the high estimation in which she was held, which her own carefully composed letters in a degree justify. This correspondence probably brought her more formal literary labours to an end. In the pleasure of imparting her own view of parties and events to a man joining in his own person the prestige of a political and religious leader, whom she reverenced in the latter capacity as only a woman can do, she satisfied the writing impulse; and a subject of any sort-whether chosen out of history or from the wide field of morals-would be to any woman possessed by a strong admiration for a man of genius flat and unexciting compared with the work of chronicling passing events, with a view to influence and direct his opinion on current questions. In this sense it is an unusual form of correspondence, a piece of contemporary history so far as she could write it. She had to put him au courant of all that occupied her world, which in her estimation represented the thought of the day. Her opinions on many points are prejudiced and narrow-minded in the highest degree, but not more so than the school in which she lived, and whose views on all public general questions she echoed-though where her womanly instincts had free play, she could think both clearly and candidly for herself. The one prejudice or rather antipathy that never moderates is her feeling towards the English Church, its bishops and clergy; and it is very clear that no expression of opinion on these points could be overcharged for her correspondent's taste, not when she pronounces ninety-nine out of every hundred English clergymen hypocrites. To such people what is called the Oxford movement was so altogether beyond their comprehension that contempt was the only resource. But in fact the school of which she was an hereditary member had not reached then the stage of universal sympathy and lofty insight into every mind which constitutes the impertinence of modern scepticism, and makes its

disciples the insufferable patrons of every form of belief as the right thing for the people weak enough to hold it. Of this party Miss Cobbe is the present female representative.

It will be known to most of our readers that Lucy Aikin, (born Nov. 1781,) was daughter of Dr. Aikin, a man of high literary and scientific reputation in his day, and one of the first promoters and editor of the Athenaeum, a paper which still represents the opinions of the same school in their more advanced stage. The Aikin family were remarkable for unity of thought on this head. Mrs. Barbauld, Dr. Aikin's sister, so well known to our childhood for her prose hymns, and for her 'Evenings at Home,' set herself to the task of liberalizing, and, in some points, really enlarging the infant mind. The Evenings at Home,' by the way, written in conjunction with her brother, we cannot help suspecting to be confused by some modern critics with Miss Edgeworth's Parent's Assistant,' when they speak of the many charming stories contained in these volumes which delighted their childhood. There was no storyteller's impulse in the Aikin mind, which is uniformly didactic, and aims at inculcating views by the true direct method of precept illustrated by formal example. The brothers were both prominent men in the scientific department of the same school, and we will add the strong family affection which held these brothers and their sister through life in such close unity of affection and interests, is a very pleasant trait of family character. It is one of the effects of the aristocratic element to bind men and families to a certain unity and consistency. The members of our great families stick by one another, and, as a rule (to which, however, there may be an increasing number of exceptions), to the principles which they receive as an inheritance along with name, title, and more substantial possessions. It is probably the same with aristocracy of intellect, or what is felt and assumed to be such. There are families that hold themselves to possess a prescriptive genius and talent, and whose credit therefore depends in a degree on conforming to the family type. Some such influence as this is very conspicuous in the mind before us. She never had any misgivings in any part of her life that she and the stock from which she sprung were not of the aristocracy of intellect, and she lived in days when, in a certain sense, power of this sort was much more regarded and respected than it is now.

Miss Aikin's grandfather, the Rev. John Aikin, D.D. had been classical and divinity tutor at the Presbyterian Academy of Warrington, a place which then boasted of a more cultivated and refined society than any other provincial town. There she was born, but, when only three years old, her father removed to

Yarmouth, where he practised as a physician for some years. The grandmother, it is recorded, was so used to precocity in her own children, that she pronounced little Lucy a dunce for not reading fluently at three, an insult very keenly remembered, if not resented, by the authoress that was to be. That she was really sharp enough her father showed by a story of her deciding an historical question when she was but six. We give it to show what were within a sharp child's interests before the modern deluge of exclusively children's books. Some one talking of Cadmus, and whether he lived before or after the Trojan war, she decided the matter by observing that she had heard her brother read in Pope's Homer about a son of Cadmus fighting against the Trojans.

There are a few pages of autobiography, where we read :— 'On reaching Yarmouth, Dr. Aikin at once entered on the active discharge of his profession. His daughter thus describes her early experience of her new residence. "The arrival of a new physician, already a writer of some distinction, of polished and unaffected manners, and endowed with powers and with tact which rendered his conversation attractive and acceptable to all, was an event of no small importance in the town of Yarmouth. His speedy popularity was reflected upon all the members of his family, and upon none more strongly than on the little rosy, laughing, chattering girl of three years old. I was soon in danger of being totally spoiled with flattery; nothing indeed could have saved me but the good sense, the firmness, the parental affection well understood of my excellent mother. She taught me what flattery was, and strongly warned me against being led away by it.

'The lesson was doubly painful; it showed me that those who knew me best were aware that I was far from deserving the praises lavished upon me by strangers, and it gave me the impression that these most agreeable strangers were guilty of the horrible offence of telling fibs. I bore the shock pretty well, however, and was the better for the warning. Still my little heart would beat with triumph when the Rev. Dr. Cooper1 withstood, I know not how long, the impatient summonses of three grown ladies to the quadrille table with the answer, "I had rather talk with this child." To confess the whole truth, I have still a kind of tenderness for the first man that ever flattered me.'-Pp. xiii. xiv.

Miss Aikin, we gather from the whole volume, was uniformly commended for the accuracy and finish of her own style, whether in speaking or writing. It was clearly a point on which she felt herself strong, and sets down even Dr. Channing with the air of one who, on this point, was unassailable and high authority. On the whole, such a reputation acts as a salutary check against extravagance of opinion. Deliberation in the choice and ordering of words is very likely to induce deliberation in thought, and a great deal of the good sense of Miss Aikin's views, where we find it, may owe something to her care in the choice of words, and desire to express herself with clearness and precision. As for any particular felicity or grace of style,

1 The Rector of Yarmouth, father of the eminent surgeon Sir Astley Cooper, Bart.