lineal and the theological successors of the Academy's students in the Rigbys, the Martineaus, and the Taylors of Norwich, the Heywoods and the Yateses of Liverpool, the Potters of Manchester, the Gaskells of Wakefield, the Brights of Bristol, the Shores of Sheffield, the Hibberts of Hyde, and the Wedgwoods of Etruria."

CHAPTER IV

Priestley marries-Is ordained-His Essay on EducationLectures on History and General Policy-His Chart of Biography-Becomes a Doctor of Laws of the University of Edinburgh-His visits to LondonMakes the acquaintance of Dr Price, Canton and Benjamin Franklin-Writes the History of Electricity—Is elected into the Royal Society.

PRIESTLEY'S entrance into the Warrington community affected his career in more ways than one. In the first place, the improvements in his worldly prospects enabled him to marry; and in the second he was led to turn his attention to Natural Philosophy, to which, as we have seen, he was already predisposed. The selection of his wife and of his studies influenced the subsequent course of his life profoundly. Why he should have left the sprightly, witty "Nancy Aikin, with the blue and laughing eyes," to be "carried off to Palgrave by that queer little man" whom she had to "honour and obey" as a school-mistress, is one of those inscrutable. dispensations which the hymeneal god delights in. That they were the best of friends and had pleasure in each other's society is abundantly evident. Priestley warmly admired her genius: she confessed, indeed, that he first encouraged her to try her 'prentice hand at poetry. She was about eighteen when Priestley first appeared at Warrington, and about ten years his junior, a girl of many personal attractions and, as demonstrated by her writings, of great mental ability and accomplishShe had been carefully educated by her father, had a considerable knowledge of modern literature, and

ments.

was fairly well-read in that of Greece and Rome. Her first volume of poems was printed at Warrington in

1773 and ran through four editions in a year. It was said of her that she roused the admiration of Fox and Johnson, the envy of Rogers and Wordsworth, and the jealousy of Goldsmith; Scott declared she made a poet of him; Brougham eulogised her in the House of Lords, and Mrs Oliphant has paid her a beautiful tribute in her Literary History of England.

Miss Lucy Aikin, in her edition of her aunt's collected works, gives a charming description of her as she appeared in early womanhood:

"She was at this time possessed of great beauty, distinct traces of which she retained to the latest period of her life. Her person was slender, her complexion exquisitely fair, with the bloom of perfect health; her features were regular and elegant, and her dark blue eyes beamed with the light of wit and fancy."

Not less charming is the testimony of Henry Crabb Robinson, who, in 1805, wrote:

...

"Mrs Barbauld bore the remains of great personal beauty.1 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. Mrs Barbauld is so well known by her prose writings that it is needless for me to attempt to characterise her here. Her excellence lay in the soundness and acuteness of her understanding, and in the perfection of her taste. In the estimation of Wordsworth she was the first of our literary women, and he was not bribed to this judgment by any especial congeniality of feeling or by concurrence in speculative opinions. I may here relate an anecdote connecting her and Wordsworth, though out of its proper time by many, many years; but it is so good that it ought to be preserved from oblivion. It was after her death that Lucy Aikin published Mrs Barbauld's collected works, of which I gave a

I She was then sixty-two, and lived twenty years longer.

4

6

copy to Miss Wordsworth. Among the poems is a Stanza on Life, written in extreme old age. It had delighted my sister, to whom I had repeated it on her deathbed. It was long after I gave these works to Miss Wordsworth that her brother said, Repeat me that Stanza by Mrs Barbauld.' I did so. He made me repeat it again. And so he learned it by heart. He was at the time walking in his sitting-room at Rydal with his hands behind him, and I heard him mutter to himself, I am not in the habit of grudging people their good things, but I wish I had written those lines.' I

Priestley's choice fell upon Mary Wilkinson, who was of about the same age as Anna Letitia Aikin. She was the daughter of a well-to-do ironmaster at Wrexham, with whose family he had become acquainted in consequence of the youngest son, William, having been a pupil at his school in Nantwich. He certainly had no reason to regret his choice, whatever Mary Wilkinson might have felt at times in the "cloudy weather" she was destined to go through. It is, of course, idle to speculate "on what might have been if things had been otherwise." The world, at all events, was the richer for the Hymns in Prose and the Early Lessons, on which Mr Rochemont Barbauld's young charges and many succeeding generations of children were nurtured.

From a worldly point of view Priestley's marriage was not without its advantages to him, immediate and prospective. Mary Wilkinson had all the force of

I The lines were the well-known stanza :

"Life! We've been long together

Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear,

Perhaps 'twill cost 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."

character, and much of the mental and intellectual ability of her father and her brother John, both of whom had a considerable share in the development of the iron industry in this country. Of them Miss Meteyard, in her Life of Wedgwood, writes :

"John Wilkinson and his father Isaac played no unimportant part in the vast industrial movement of their time. Isaac invented and first brought into action the steam-engine blast at his iron works near Wrexham. John, at the same place, as also at Bradley Forge, in Staffordshire, executed all the ponderous castings for the steam engines required in the Cornish mines, as well as those for Boulton and Watt when they first commenced business.'

The father was ruined in one of the commercial crises of which the times were fertile. Of the son we shall hear more as this history proceeds. truest and staunchest of the many friends Priestley possessed.1

He was one of the true and staunch

Priestley was married in 1762, Mr Threlkeld, one of the students at the academy, who subsequently became a well-known Presbyterian divine, notable for his linguistic attainments and his extraordinary power of memory, being his groomsman. Whatever might be Mr Threlkeld's faculty of recollection it went wholly. astray on this occasion, for he became so absorbed in the study of a Welsh Bible he found beside him in the pew that he became quite oblivious to the onerous duties of his office.

'He lies buried near Castlehead, in Cartmel, Lancashire, where his monument, a pyramidal mausoleum containing some twenty tons of iron, is a notable feature in the landscape. On it is the following epitaph written by himself:

"Delivered from persecution of malice and envy here rests John Wilkinson, Iron Master, in certain hopes of a better state and heavenly mansion, as promulgated by Jesus Christ, in whose Gospel he was a firm believer. His life was spent in action for the benefit of man, and he trusts in some degree to the glory of God."