SOURCE: "Mrs. Barbauld," in Littell's Living Age, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1955, December 10, 1881, pp. 579-93.

In the following excerpt, Ritchie discusses Barbauld's political convictions and reviews several of her poems and essays.

"The first poetess I can recollect is Mrs. Barbauld, with whose works I became acquainted—before those of any other author, male or female—when I was learning to spell words of one syllable in her story-books for children." So says Hazlitt in his lectures on living poets. He goes on to call her a very pretty poetess, strewing flowers of poesy as she goes.

The writer of this little notice must needs, from the same point of view as Hazlitt, look upon Mrs. Barbauld with a special interest, having also first learnt to read out of her little yellow books, of which the syllables rise up one by one again with a remembrance of the hand patiently...