MRS. GILBERT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.*

A LIFE of "duty, praise, and prayer" such as was, as Mr. Gilbert truly says, eminently that of Ann Taylor, is by no means, as a

rule—or, indeed, very frequently—one likely to be of special in- terest to the general public, and a vast number of the biographies which are published had much better have remained in that oblivion to which they are destined very speedily to return. Such, however, is not the case with the present memoir. Not only are Ann and Jane Taylor sufficiently well known by their writings to make their private lives of interest, but each of the Taylor family was more or less distinguished in his or her particular line, and their remarkable industry, and no less remarkable family affection, would be worthy of notice, even without the additional attraction pre- sented by those "bygone tints of a finished century,"—the per- fectly truthful and graphic portraitures of artistic and literary life

in a middle-class household,-beginning at a period so far back as April 18, 1781, which are given in Mrs. Gilbert's autobiography.

On that day Isaac Taylor—the son of the engraver of the same name, who succeeded the celebrated Woollett as Secretary to the Royal Incorporated Society of Artists of Great Britain, and who was the friend of Bartolozzi, Fuseli, and Smirke, and the teacher of Bewick—married at the age of twenty-two, and took his wife, who was one year his senior, to his lodging in Islington, then quite a country-place. What a modest start in life was that of this loving and enterprising young couple !—

"The income," says Mrs. Gilbert, "upon which he [Isaac Taylor] calculated that he could lire with complete comfort consisted of half- a-gninea certain for three days' work in each week, supplied to him by his elder brother, Charles, afterwards known as the learned editor of Calmees Dictionary of the Bible—who was at the time in business for himself as an engraver and publisher—and so much as he could earn during the remaining three days, when he was at liberty to work on his own account. This, with thirty pounds in hand, was his inde- pendency, my mother's dowry being one hundred pounds stock, be- queathed to her by her grandfather, with furniture supplied by her mother, sufficient for the pleasant first-floor at Islington they were to occupy."

Although the young wife was so ignorant of domestic matters as to have everything to learn, she devoted herself so sedulously to her new duties as to become an excellent housekeeper ; and with the cares of an increasing family and broken-down health might, says her daughter, have degenerated into the mere household drudge, but for a piece of advice wisely administered and as

wisely followed, to the effect that "it would be well if her hus- band found in her a companion, as well as a housekeeper and

nurse." From this time Mrs. Taylor, who before her marriage had been distinguished for her literary tastes in the small circle to which she belonged, contrived to dedicate a portion of each day to self-improvement ; and having no other time at her dis- posal, began the custom, which she kept up for nearly half a century, of reading aloud at meal-times. Such was the mother of the subject of the memoir, while of the father it is recorded that,—

" His love of knowledge was early, strong, and universal. Nothing was uninteresting to him that he had the opportunity to acquire, and when acquired, his delight was to communicate. Apt to teach he cer- tainly was, and ingenious as apt; all his methods were self-devised, and the life of few men devoted to teaching as a profession would have accomplished more than he attained by husbanding the half-hours of his own. Early hours and elastic industry were the natural magic by which his multifarious objects were pursued and labours performed.

Method, arrangement, regularity in everything, were the characteristics of his mind ; as were a tranquil hoping-for, and be- lieving in the best, those of his heart."

It is characteristic of him that when rapidly increasing expenses made it desirable that the Taylors should move into the country, Isaac obtained from Homerton College a list of all the ministers sent from thence to within a hundred miles of the capital, and wrote to each of them for information as to prices in their various localities before deciding upon a place of sojourn. These inquiries resulted in the choice of that quaint and picturesque Lavenham, in which place were spent ten happy years.

A country town, unapproached by either coach-road or canal, into which the postman's cart conveying passengers entered once a day, and the London waggon carrying goods once a week, where the people were as primitive as they were friendly., and good-natured, and to which Mr. Taylor was able to take sufficient employment in his art for months to come, was just suited to the requirements of the modest family ; and Ann, who could at this time have been only four-and-a-half years old, well remem- bers the freshness of the June summer morning when they set out for what was then a formidable journey of sixty-three miles, and all

Autobiography and other Memorials of Mrs. Gilbert (formerly Ann Taylor). Edited by Josiah Gilbert. 2 vols. London: Henry S. Ring and Co.

the pleasant bustle of taking possession of "the first grand house in Shilling Street," whither her father had preceded them in

order to have everything in readiness for their arrival. When it is remembered that this house, containing twelve spacious rooms

and an extensive garden, was to be had for a rent of /6 a year, the propriety of the move on the score of economy cannot well be doubted.

Mrs. Gilbert's sketches, written, of course, at a long-subsequent period, of the notabilities of Lavenham are full of good-humoured drollery, and show that at an early age she was amply gifted with powers of observation ; her own life being divided between in- struction from her father and mother and games with her sister Jane, in which the future authoresses, converting an unused brick pig-stye into a dwelling, personated by turns various characters, whose histories they wove for themselves, and whose lives afforded something more than the amusement of a day, being suspended and resumed at frequent intervals, and becoming for the time almost realities to these imaginative children.

In 1796, when Ann Taylor was fourteen years old, the family removed to Colchester, where her father, who had long been a deacon in the Independent Church, was requested to assume the office of minister. Upon this removal Mrs. Gilbert remarks, a from whatever cause, my local recollections of Lavenham appear always as if under a cloudy day, though certainly not because I was un- happy there. Those of Colehester, however, never present them- selves but as bright and warm with a summer's sun," and it is natural that to a young girl the exchange from the quiet, secluded little place to the cheerful, busy, garrison town should have been viewed with delight. Even seventy-five years after their depar- ture from it, Lavenham is described by two grandsons of Mr. Taylor, who went to visit it, as,—

" A street of low, nodding houses, which strayed upwards from a small common. Upon the gable fronts, elaborate devices in plaster work, bulging with age, justified the dates they carried, 1690-1695, and soon; while some black carved door-posts or cornices, thick with whitewash,

indicated dates still earlier A successon of lanes branching off, and all climbing upwards, were bordered as much by old gardens and orchards as by houses ; while these, again, were sometimes cottages, and sometimes many-peaked mansions."

On discovering " Cooke's House," the one longest inhabited by the Taylors, they found it "in all the antiquated condition that could be desired ":—

" The large parlour, where Stothard's and Opie's great gallery pictures used to rest against the wall, lacked only them. The little work-room where Ann and Jane sat at their lessons, while the father handled his graver and the mother sped her needle, was, like all the rest, intact. The house-gables towards the garden wore a tangled mass of luxuriance, —vine, and pear, jasmine, and many-coloured creepers ; and the garden itself, abundant in careless flower and fruit, stretched away into an orchard of grey-stemmed trees and cool grass. Upstairs they explored rambling, ghostly rooms, one of them that in which the Isaac Taylor most known of the name was born."

Not long after the family had taken up its residence in Colchester, Mr. Taylor, wisely in advance of the customs of his time, began to instruct his daughters as well as his son in that art which, con- jointly with his duties as a minister, he continued to carry on. Those were not, however, palmy days for engraving ; the foreign market being closed by the outbreak of war, a stagnation was the consequence, and while fewer illustrated books were published, numbers of young men, unable to find other employment, were glad to work for very low prices. Fortunately, however, for the Taylors, their father's methods of education had become locally popular, and pupils were, at their own request, admitted to share in them. Mrs. Gilbert gives a pleasant picture of the "work-room," and the "happy days, mornings, evenings, happy years !" spent in it. At first, in order that the house-mother should not be left without assistance, the daughters only worked at their profession in alternate weeks, the one employed in the work-room being designated as "Supra," and the other downstairs

"Infra," the latter assisting in the cookery and washing, and getting up the fine linen. One day in the fortnight was allowed to these industrious maidens for their own needlework. At a later period both were relieved from household drudgery, and allowed to take their places at the work-table together ; and Mrs. Gilbert remarks, "Visitors never thought of finding us, like other young ladies, in the parlour, but regularly turned into a back- yard from the street, ascended the short flight of brick stairs, and placed themselves each on some wooden stool beside Jane and myself, watching what they were sometimes pleased to call our elegant art." For this work Mr. Taylor, anxious to fit his daughters for self-support in after-life, gave them regular wages, so that they early learned to enjoy the pleasant feeling of pecu- niary independence as the result of their own labour, while as a

family they were bound together by the closest ties of reverence and affection.

The accidental purchase, in 1798, of a "Minor's Pocket-book" containing solutions of enigmas and other poetical contributions, led to Mrs. Gilbert's entrance on the field of literature, her first efforts, under the signature of "Juvenilia," winning for her the magnificent prize of six pocket-books, and being the commence- ment of that connection with Darton and Harvey whence arose, as she informs us, her own and her sister's regular and profitable employment as writers for children. She adds, what it is indeed unnecessary to tell anyone acquainted with their works, "When fairly launched, we were sensible of an earnest desire to be as useful as we could." We must not here omit to remark that of the poems for children the most popular were from the pen of the elder sister, although, as Mr. Gilbert observes, this fact is not generally recognised, because Jane Taylor continued to write and to attract the public attention after Ann had ceased to do so. As Mr. Gilbert describes the two sisters, Ann dealt with the facts of life, and Jane with those of nature,—the former was eminently practical, the latter sensitive and shy, and these characteristics much influenced their writings. In both sisters the religious element was perhaps equally strong. After the removal to Ongar, which took place in 1811, Ann Taylor began to write for the Eclectic Review, and she would probably have distinguished herself in that line, had she not soon after her marriage devoted herself almost exclusively to the duties of the new state of life upon which she had entered. From this point her autobiography ceases, and her story is continued by her son. We cannot follow it farther, although by far the greater part of her long and well- spent life remained to be recorded, for Mrs. Gilbert was thirty- one when she married, and eighty-five at her death ; but of the whole book it may be said that it is written truthfully and without exaggeration, although with appreciative filial tenderness, and is in all respects very pleasant reading.