has been said of her teaching the young Taylor, his appreciation of her influence, and the intimate relations of Taylor and her brother, Dr. Aikin. Doubtless Taylor communicated his new German studies to her soon after they had begun. At any rate that Dr. Aikin knew of his version of the Lenore in 1791 is reasonable evidence that Mrs. Barbauld saw it about the same time. Her visit to Edinburgh is definitely dated from a letter of October 1794, to her friend Mrs. Beecroft. In this she speaks of her enjoyment of her visit to Scotland, and of being twice in Edinburgh.[1]
It was probably in August or early September, 1794, that Mrs. Barbauld read Taylor's translation at the evening assembly in the home of Dugald Stewart. Doubtless soon after, Cranstoun or his sister repeated what could be remembered of the lines to Scott. Yet the latter did not at once pursue the matter.[2] He had, it is true, some knowledge of German, for he had begun the study of that language in the winter of 1792-93 and continued it the next year.[3] Yet he did not obtain an edition of Bürger's poems until late in 1795 or early in 1796, for they were obtained for him by Lady Scott of Harden who was not married until the autumn of 1795. She was the daughter of Count Brühl, and took great interest in Scott's German studies after her acquaintance with him had begun.[4] It was, then, in the winter of 1795-96, or the early spring of the latter year that Scott was again carrying on his German reading.
In fact Scott has himself assigned a second exciting cause for his interest in ballad making, and this also must belong to the latter part of 1795. In the summer of that year "Monk" Lewis, as he
- ↑ Lucy Aikin's Works of Anne Letitia Barbauld, II, 74. Lockhart's Life (ch. VII, vol. I, 204) puts Mrs. Barbauld's visit in the same autumn, but doubtfully: "It must, I think, have been while he was indulging his vagabond vein, during the autumn of 1794, that Miss Aikin (afterwards Mrs. Barbauld) paid her visit to Edinburgh." Lockhart is curiously inaccurate in speaking of Miss Aikin, as she had been Mrs. Barbauld for twenty years. Lockhart's error has been long lived. It is indeed, corrected by the omission of the words "Miss Aikin, afterwards" though without comment, in the last beautiful edition of the Life, by A. W. Pollard, but it probably led Mrs. Steuart Erskine in her book, Lady Diana Beauclerk and her Work, to speak in this connection of "Mrs. Barbauld, or Miss Aitkin (sic) as she was then."—p. 214. It also must have led Professor Beers, in his English Romanticism, to write: "In the autumn of 1794 Miss Aikin, afterwards Mrs. Barbauld, entertained a party at Dugald Stewart's, etc."—p. 391.
To his correction of Scott's error regarding Mrs. Barbauld Mr. Pollard has added another, by altering the date 1794 to 1795, perhaps to square with a letter which immediately precedes. Earlier editions read 1794, and that this is the correct date I have shown by Mrs. Barbauld's Letters above. - ↑ Lockhart says "some weeks"; Life, ch. VII, (Pollard) I, 204.
- ↑ Lockhart's Life, ch. VII, (I, 177). See also Scott's Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad, p. 24, where the interest in German literature in Scotland is referred to a public address on the subject by Henry Mackenzie, author of the Man of Feeling, in April, 1788. Yet Scott admits that their interest waned when their teacher, instead of introducing them to Goethe and Schiller, prescribed Gessner's Der Tod Abels. It was in this year that Sayers gave up medicine for literature; see p. 26.
- ↑ Lockhart's Life, ch. VIII, (vol. I, 214).
