But it is not from its antiquity, old as it is, that Windmill Hill derives its interest, but from the fact of its having been the place of residence for many years of a woman of genius, whose celebrity, so to speak, still clings to it; for apart from Joanna Baillie’s connection with it, there is little to be said of Windmill Hill.[154] There is a pleasant notice in one of Mrs. Barbauld’s letters from Hampstead of two shy, Nature-loving girls, whom she was constantly encountering in her walks, and who were never so happy as when gathering wild-flowers in the woods and hedgerows, or in seeing the ‘gold-thorn’ blazing on the Heath, or in roaming about the old gravel-pits and water-courses. They were the daughters of her near neighbour, Mrs. Dorothea Baillie, widow of the Rev. James Baillie, D.D., Professor of Divinity at Glasgow, and sisters of the distinguished Dr. Matthew Baillie. But the youngest of these girls was then twenty-two years of age. Later on (in 1800) Mrs. Barbauld writes to a friend: ‘I have received great pleasure lately from the representation of “De Montfort,” a tragedy, which you probably read a year and a half ago in a volume entitled “A Series of Plays on the Passions.” I admired it then, but little dreamed I was indebted for my entertainment to a young lady whom I visited, and who came to Mr. Barbauld’s meetings all the while with as innocent a face as if she had never written a line.’ The play, she adds, is admirably played by Mrs. Siddons and Kemble, and is finely written, with great purity of sentiment and beauty of diction, strength, and originality of character, but it is open to criticism.[155] Six years later the young poetess (the prologue to whose tragedy had been written by the Hon. Francis North, and the epilogue by the Duchess of Devonshire) had become famous, and her home on Windmill Hill an object of pilgrimage to men of the highest intellectual reputation. Hither came Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Rogers, and, as time moved on, succeeding representative men and women, to pay their tribute of respect and admiration to the successful poetess. No longer shy, but simple and unaffected, and full of genuine kindness, she appears to have had the faculty of attaching those whom she attracted—notably Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott, whose appreciation of her as a poetess led to life-long personal friendship.