When Joanna Baillie’s first volume of plays appeared, there was much speculation as to their possible authorship. Samuel Rogers, the banker, poet, and critic, thought that they were written by a man. It seems to have been difficult, at the end of the last century, for the great judges in the literary world to conceive that a poem, worthy of praise, could be of female authorship. Even so late as 1841, a writer in the _Quarterly Review_, writing upon Joanna Baillie’s poetical works, puts the coping-stone upon the praise which he bestows upon her style and diction by saying that they are “masculine.” He says, “Let us again express our admiration of the wonderful elasticity and _masculine_ force of mind exhibited in this vast collection of dramas;” and in another place the writer says, “The spirit breathing everywhere is a spirit of _manly_ purity and moral uprightness.” We should say, at the present day, that there is certainly force of mind in Joanna Baillie’s dramas, but that it is feminine, not masculine in character, and that the spirit of purity which breathes through them is essentially the womanly spirit. She had particular power and skill in the delineation of female characters, especially those of an unusual degree of elevation and purity. This in itself would have sufficiently betrayed the sex of the writer now when people have had far wider opportunities of judging of the differences between men and women as authors. Thackeray could give us an Ethel Newcome and a Becky Sharp, but women were needed to give us a Dorothea, a Marion Erle, or a Shirley Keeldar. Mrs. Siddons, the great actress, was charmed by the character of Jane de Montfort in Joanna Baillie’s Tragedy on Hatred. The play called _De Montfort_ was put upon the stage by John Kemble, the brother of Mrs. Siddons: they both appeared in it. It ran for eleven nights, but it was not successful on the stage. Joanna’s complete ignorance of what was requisite for the success of a play upon the stage foredoomed her to failure; the audience was, in the first act, let into the secret upon which the plot of the whole play turned, consequently as the drama proceeded the interest in it, instead of becoming more and more intense, gradually dwindled away, until in the fifth act it had quite evaporated. Mrs. Siddons, whose admiration for the character of Jane de Montfort has been already mentioned, is said to have remarked to the poetess, “Make me some more Jane de Montforts”—a request which does not appear to have been gratified. In all, five of Joanna Baillie’s plays were put upon the stage—two of them, called _Constantine and Valeria_ and _The Family Legend_, had a considerable degree of success. _The Family Legend_ was brought out in Edinburgh in 1809, under the special patronage of Sir Walter Scott, who wrote the prologue of the play. At a later date it was reproduced in London.