The Works...With a Memoir by Lucy Aikin

New-York: Carvill et al, 1826. . 2 volumes. 12mo in half-sheets contemporary marbled boards, leather spines and tips; some wear to bindings with front outer hinge of volume II cracked but firm; dampstaining to lower bottom corner of text block in Vol. I, much less in Vol. II One of two American editions published in 1826, the other by D. Reed of Boston, no priority established.Mrs. Barbauld was a prolific children's book writer, a poet, critic, and essayist. She could apparently read at the age of two and by two and a half was reading "as well as most women", according to her mother.A most erudite woman (she had finally persuaded her father to teach her Latin and Greek) she was regarded by Dr. Johnson as his best imitator "for she has imitated the sentiment as well as the diction." Charles Lamb bemoaned the fact that "Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery. Harvey Dalton was more positive "Language like that [her "Hymns in Prose"], so simple yet almost majestic, is worth giving to children...Mrs. Barbauld's masterly command of English has been rivalled by few other writers for children;...and if words alone sufficed, she would have achieved for all time her purpose in exciting wonder and delight in things seen."Mrs. Barbauld edited Richardson's correspondence (much of our knowledge of his life is based on this); compiled a 50-volume edition of "The British Novelists"; and in 1791 wrote "An Epistle to William Wilberforce" attacking the slave trade.The present edition is edited by her niece and contains a 42-page Memoir in Vol. I which is not always sympathetic, probably because Lucy Aikin was compared, as a child, to her precocious aunt by her maternal grandmother who dubbed her "dunce"