d
not know the meaning of the word.

Mrs. Barbauld's description of Hannah More and her sisters living on
their special hill-top was written after Mr. Barbauld's death, and
thirty years after Miss More's verses which are quoted by Mrs. Ellis in
her excellent memoir of Mrs. Barbauld:--

Nor, Barbauld, shall my glowing heart refuse
A tribute to thy virtues or thy muse;
This humble merit shall at least be mine,
The poet's chaplet for thy brows to twine;
My verse thy talents to the world shall teach,
And praise the graces it despairs to reach.

Then, after philosophically questioning the power of genius to confer
true happiness, she concludes:--

Can all the boasted powers of wit and song
Of life one pang remove, one hour prolong?
Fallacious hope which daily truths deride--
For you, alas! have wept and Garrick died.

Meanwhile, whatever genius might not be able to achieve, the five Miss
Mores had been living on peacefully together in the very comfortable
cottage which had been raised and thatched by the poetess's earnings.

'Barley Wood is equally the seat of taste and hospitality,' says Mrs.
Barbauld to a friend.

'Nothing could be more friendly than their reception,' she writes to her
brother, 'and nothing more charming than their situation. An extensive
view over the Mendip Hills is in front of their house, with a pretty
view of Wrington. Their home--cottage, because it is thatched--stands on
the declivity of a rising ground, which they have planted and made quite
a little paradise. The five sisters, all good old maids, have lived
together these fifty years. Hannah More is a good deal broken, but
possesses fully her powers of conversation, and her vivacity. We
exchanged riddles like the wise men of old; I was given to understand
she was writing something.'

There is another allusion to Mrs. Hannah More in a sensible letter from
Mrs. Barbauld, written to Miss Edgeworth about this time, declining to
join in an alarming enterprise suggested by the vivacious Mr. Edgeworth,
'a _Feminiad_, a literary paper to be entirely contributed to by ladies,
and where all articles are to be accepted.' 'There is no bond of union,'
Mrs. Barbauld says, 'among literary women any more than among literary
men; different sentiments and connections separate them much more than
the joint interest of their sex would unite them. Mrs. Hannah More would
not write along with you or me, and we should possibly hesitate at