She was born at Bothwell, near Glasgow, on the banks of the Clyde, in 1762. In a poem addressed, near the close of her life, to her sister Agnes, she recalls how they had as children— ... paddled barefoot side by side, Among the sunny shallows of the Clyde. Her father was a minister of the Scotch Church, and afterwards a Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow. His death in 1778, and the establishment of his son Matthew in the medical profession in London, caused Mrs. Baillie and her daughters, Joanna and Agnes, to remove there in 1784; and in London practically the rest of the future poetess’s long life was spent. Her first work was a volume of verse published anonymously in 1790. The first of her series of dramas, called _Plays on the Passions_, was published in 1798. These were also published without the author’s name. They made an immediate and very widespread impression; and their author was frequently, and by the very best judges, lauded as being equal, if not superior, to Shakespeare. The idea of these dramas, and of those in the successive volumes which appeared in 1802 and 1812, was to delineate a single dominant passion, such as hatred, envy, etc.; and each of the passions thus treated was made the subject first of a tragedy, then of a comedy. The language employed is easy, dignified, and simple: and it is probable that the contrast Joanna Baillie’s dramas afforded in this respect to the dramas of the generation closing with the death of Dr. Johnson, was the reason of the great hold which they at once obtained upon the public mind. It is not easy in any other way to account for their extraordinary popularity. The time in which Joanna Baillie lived was one marked by a literary revolution, in which the formal, stilted, and didactic manner was overthrown, and poets and great writers sought to express their thoughts in simple and natural language. The leaders of this literary revolution were Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the great movement identified with their names Joanna Baillie bore a humbler, but a useful and effective part.