Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 03.djvu/150

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Baptist
144
Barbauld

Art of Surgery,’ 1717, and ‘Pharmacopœia Pauperum, or the Hospital Dispensary, containing the chief Medicines now used in the Hospitals of London,’ 1721, 4th ed. 1739.

[Munk's Coll. of Phys. (1878), ii. 131; Brit. Mus. Cat.]

BAPTIST, JOHN GASPARS (d. 1691), portrait and tapestry painter, was born at Antwerp, and was a pupil of Bossaert. His right name appears to have been Jean-Baptiste Gaspars. He was known in England as ‘Lely's’ Baptist, and would seem to have also worked for Sir Godfrey Kneller. There is a portrait of Charles II by this artist in the hall of St. Bartholomew's Hospital.

[Biog. Nat. de Belgique; Pilkington's Dict. of Painters; Nagler's Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon; Redgrave's Dict. of Painters of English School.]

E. R.

BARBAR, THOMAS (fl. 1587), divine, was admitted scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge, 8 Nov. 1560, proceeded B.A. 1563–4, M.A. 1567, and B.D. 1576, and was elected fellow 11 April 1565. He subscribed in 1570 a testimonial requesting that Cartwright might be allowed to resume his lectures. He became preacher at St. Mary-le-Bow, London, about 1576, and in June 1584 he was suspended on refusing to take the ex-officio oath. The parishioners petitioned the court of aldermen for his restoration. In December 1587 Archbishop Whitgift offered to remove his suspension if he would sign a pledge to conform to the law of the church and abstain from conventicles. He declined to pledge himself. His name is attached to the ‘Book of Discipline,’ and he belonged to the presbyterian church at Wandsworth, formed as early as 1572. In 1591 he was examined in the Star Chamber with other puritan divines for having taken part with Cartwright and others in a synod held at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1589, when it was agreed to correct and subscribe the ‘Book of Discipline.’ He is probably the author of a translation of Fr. du Jou's ‘Exposition of the Apocalypse’ (Cambridge, 1596), and of a ‘Dialogue between the Penitent Sinner and Sathan’ (London, without date).

[Cooper's Athenæ Cantab. ii. 236; Neal's Hist. of Puritans, 1793, i. 357; Baker's Hist. of St. John's, ed. Mayor, 601; Strype's Annals (8vo), II. i. 2, ii. 417; Strype's Whitgift, 8vo, i. 504, iii. 271, 282; Brook's Puritans, i. 429; Fuller's Church Hist., ed. Brewer, iv. 385, v. 163–4.]

BARBAULD, ANNA LETITIA (1743–1825), poet and miscellaneous writer, was the only daughter and eldest child of John Aikin, D.D., and his wife Jane Jennings, and was born in 1743 at Kibworth, Leicestershire. When she was fifteen years old, her father became one of the tutors of the newly established academy at Warrington. There she passed the next fifteen years of her life, and formed intimate and lasting friendships with several of her father's colleagues and their families, in whose cultivated society she had every encouragement to turn to account her early, not to say precocious, education. It is related of her that she could read with ease before she was three years old, and that when quite a child she had an acquaintance with many of the best English authors. When she had mastered French and Italian, her industry compelled her father, very reluctantly, to supplement these with a knowledge of Latin and Greek also, accomplishments rarely found in young women of that period. Learned as she was, even in her youth, she was so modest and unassuming, and had so little confidence in her powers, that no one but her brother was able to induce her to appear before the world as an author. It was at his instigation that she published, in 1773, her first volume of poems, including ‘Corsica,’ ‘The Invitation,’ ‘The Mouse's Petition,’ and ‘An Address to the Deity.’ The book had an immediate success, and went through four editions in the first year. The celebrated Mrs. Montagu wrote that she greatly admired the poem on Corsica, and had presented a copy to her friend Paoli. In the same year she, or rather her brother, published ‘Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose,’ by J. and A. L. Aikin. These also have been several times reprinted. The authors did not sign their respective contributions, and some of the pieces have in consequence been generally misappropriated, but in Mrs. Barbauld's share of the work we find several of her best essays, and notably those on ‘Inconsistency in our Expectations,’ and ‘On Romances.’ The former of these possesses every quality of good English prose; the latter is avowedly an imitation of Dr. Johnson's style and method of reasoning. Of this essay Johnson observes: ‘The imitators of my style have not hit it. Miss Aikin has done it the best, for she has imitated the sentiment as well as the diction.’ Croker refers this remark to the wrong essay. In the year following these literary successes, in 1774, Mrs. Barbauld married. Her husband, the Rev. Rochemont Barbauld, came of a French protestant family settled in England since the persecutions of Louis XIV. His father, a clergyman of the church of England, sent him, rather injudiciously, to the dissenting academy at Warrington, where he naturally imbibed presbyterian opinions. He