[Sidenote: Several years later.] I remember her as singularly impressive in look and manner, with the “queenly” air we associate with ideas of high birth and lofty rank. Her face was long, narrow, dark, and solemn, and her speech deliberate and considerate, the very antipodes of “chatter.” Tall in person,[9] and habited according to the mode of an olden time, her picture, as it is now present to me, is that of a very venerable dame, dressed in coif and kirtle, stepping out, as it were, from a frame in which she had been placed by the painter Vandyke. S. C. HALL: ‘A Book of Memories of Great Men and Women of the Age.’ London: Virtue & Co., 1871. * * * * * She was past fifty when I first saw her, and appeared like an old lady to me, then in my teens. She dressed like an aged person, and with scrupulous neatness. She lived with a sister who looked older still, because she had not the vivacity of Joanna, and was only distinguished for the amiability with which she bore being outshone by her more gifted relative. [Sidenote: “Mrs.” Baillie.] Miss Baillie, according to the English custom, took the title of Mrs. Joanna Baillie, on passing her fiftieth birthday. She gave the prettiest and the pleasantest dinners, and presided at them with peculiar grace and tact, always attentive to the wants of her guests, and yet keeping up a lively conversation the while. She took such pleasure in writing poetry, and especially in her ‘Plays on the Passions,’ that she said, “If no one ever read them, I should find my happiness in writing them.” Though she was young when she left her native land, she never lost her Scotch accent. I thought it made her conversation only the more piquant. She was full of anecdotes and curious facts about remarkable people. I only recollect her telling one of Lord Byron being obliged, by politeness, to escort her and her sister to the opera, and her perceiving that he was provoked beyond measure at being there with them, and that he made faces as he sat behind them. ELIZA FARRAR: ‘Recollections of Seventy Years.’ Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866. * * * * * [Sidenote: Old age.] Of Joanna Baillie I saw much both as a friend and patient. Her gentle simplicity, with a Scotch tinge coloring it to the end of life, won the admiration even of those who knew nothing of her power of dramatic poetry. It was pleasant to visit her in the quiet house at Hampstead, in which she lived with her sister Agnes. She reached, I think, her ninety-second year.[10] Agnes lived to a hundred. SIR HENRY HOLLAND: ‘Recollections of Past Life.’ New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1872. * * * * * [Sidenote: “Dry and Scotchy.”]