A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Baynard, Anne
BAYNARD, ANNE,
Only daughter of Edward Baynard, an eminent physician, was born at Preston, Lancashire, 1672. She was well instructed in the classics and sciences, and wrote Latin with ease and correctness. At the age of twenty-three, she had the knowledge of a profound philosopher. She often said "that it was a sin to he content with a little knowledge."
To the endowments of mind, she added the virtues of the heart; she was pious, benevolent, and simple in her manners; retired and perhaps too rigid in her habits. She always put aside a portion of her small income for charitable purposes; and to this she added an ardent desire and strenuous efforts for the mental and moral inprovement of all within her influence.
About two years previous to her death, her spirits seem to have been impressed with an idea of her early dissolution; a sentiment which first suggested itself to her mind while walking alone, among the tombs in a church-yard; and which she indulged with a kind of superstitious complacency. On her death-bed, she earnestly entreated the minister who attended her, that he would exhort all the young people of his congregation to the study of wisdom and knowledge, as the means of moral improvement and real happiness. The following character is given of this lady in Mr. Collier's Historical Dictionary. "Anne Baynard, for her prudence, piety, and learning, deserves to have her memory perpetuated: she was not only skilled in the learned languages, but in all manner of literature and philosophy, without vanity or affectation. Her words were few, well chosen and expressive. She was seldom seen to smile, being rather of a reserved and stoical disposition; this doctrine, in most parts, seeming agreeable to her natural temper, for she never read or spake of the stoics but with a kind of delight. She had a contempt for the world, especially of the finery and gaiety of life. She had a great regard and veneration for the sacred name of God, and made it the whole business of her life to promote his honour and glory; and the great end of her study was to encounter atheists and libertines, as may appear from some severe satires written in the Latin tongue, in which language she had great readiness and fluency of expression.
Anne Baynard died at Barnes, in the county of Surrey, in 1697