JOANNA BAILLIE, the most illustrious of the female poets of England, unless that place be assigned to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, notwithstanding her many affectations and great inequalities, died at Hampstead, on the 23d of February, at the age of 90 years, within a few weeks. She is best known by her "Plays on the Passions," in which she made a bold and successful attempt to delineate the stronger passions of the mind by making each of them the subject of a tragedy and a comedy. The first volume was published in 1798, and was followed by a second and a third in 1802 and 1812, and in 1836 by three additional volumes. In addition to these she published at different times miscellaneous poetry, which was in 1841 collected into a volume. Her career as an author thus extends over almost half a century. A complete edition of her works in one large volume has been issued within a few weeks. To Miss Baillie and Wordsworth, more than to any others is to be attributed the redemption of our poetry from that florid or insipid sentimentalism which was its prevailing characteristic at the beginning of the present century. They boldly asserted, by precept and practice, the superiority of nature over all affectation and conventionalism. "Let one simple trait of the human heart," says she in the Introduction to her first volume, "one expression of passion genuine to truth and nature, be introduced, and it will stand forth alone in the boldness of reality, while the false and unnatural around it fades away upon every side, like the rising exhalations of the morning." Her dramas are wrought wholly out from her own conceptions, and exhibit great originality and invention. Her power of portraying the darker and sterner passions of the human heart has rarely been surpassed. Scott eulogized "Basil's love and Montfort's hate" as a revival of something of the old Shaksperean strain in our later and more prosaic days. But her dramas have little in common with those of Shakspeare, so full of life, action, and vivacity. Their spirit is more akin to the stern and solemn repose of the Greek dramas. They have little of the form and pressure of real life. The catastrophe springs rather from the characters themselves than from the action of the drama. The end is seen from the beginning. Over all broods a fate as gloomy as that which overhung the doomed House of Atreus. Her female characters are delineated with great elevation and purity. Jane de Montfort--with her stately form which seems gigantic, till nearer approach shows that it scarcely exceeds middle stature; her queenly bearing, and calm, solemn smile; her "weeds of high habitual state"--is one of the noblest conceptions of poetry. Miss Baillie was a conspicuous instance of high poetic powers existing in a mind capable of fulfilling the ordinary duties of life. Among her friends were numbered most of those whose genius has adorned their day. Her modest residence at