In the last century there was a Scottish home discipline, compared with which that of school must have appeared amiable. Take the Lanarkshire home of Joanna Baillie, who passed away just twenty years ago at the venerable age of ninety. She and the other children of the family had parents whose hearts were full of affection, which their principles would not permit them to show. The father never kissed his children. Joanna, hungering for a caress, once clasped her mother’s knee, and was gently chided. ‘But,’ Joanna used to say, ‘I know she liked it.’ It is curious to mark the contrast of Joanna Baillie, who could hardly read at eleven, running wild by the banks of the Clyde or on the braes of Calder, and of Joanna Baillie writing songs and plays in the house of her brother, the physician, in Windmill Street, Haymarket--the site of the house now occupied by the Argyll Dancing-rooms. Byron’s daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, had a wonderful knowledge of mathematics, but she cared nothing for her father’s nor any other person’s poetry. Joanna Baillie had not a poet for her sire, but the numbers came. Therewith she acquired the paternal affection for Euclid, and was great in the demonstration of problems. In her unrestrained Scottish girlhood she knew as little of fear as Nelson ever did. She was not only supreme in all girlish sports, but she rushed into audacious deeds that boys stopped short at. She ran unbonneted and high-kilted, along the parapets of bridges and the tops of walls as deftly as Mazurier or Gouffe over theatrical representations of them. She once induced her brother to mount a horse on which she was seated. The steed, waxing angry, bolted, and flung the brother, whose arm was broken. Her equestrianism was the admiration of the countryside. ‘Look at Miss Jack!’ cried a farmer, who saw her pass, riding at the head of a party on a country excursion. ‘Look at Miss Jack! she sits her horse as if it was a bit of herself.’ Not the least singular thing connected with this Scottish lady is that when, after a long residence in London she returned to Scotland, her Scottish accent was stronger than ever. Her Scottish songs, original or adapted, will probably live longer than her ‘Plays of the Passions,’ with all their unquestionable merits. We may here put readers on their guard against concluding that even a very Scottish song must necessarily be by a Scottish author. Mrs. John Hunter, who wrote ‘My Mother bids me,’ and a version of ‘Flowers of the Forest,’ was a Yorkshirewoman. Mrs. Grant, famous for ‘Roy’s Wife,’ was Irish. Mrs. Ogilvy, who has given so many samples of Highland minstrelsy, was born in India. Miss Blamire wrote ‘An ye shall walk in Silk Attire,’ but she was a Cumberland lass; and Mrs. Hamilton, of ‘My ain Fireside,’ was, like Mrs. Grant, of Carron, an Irish lady. They are all held to be virtually Scottish by men who deny that Wallace was a Welshman and that Robert Bruce was a native of Yorkshire. _THE DIBDINS._