Writing twelve months later, Crabb Robinson relates how, on a morning of May, 1812, meeting Wordsworth in the Oxford Road (now Oxford Street), and getting into the fields, he walked thence with him to Hampstead, where they met Joanna Baillie, whom he thus describes: ‘She is small in figure, and her gait is mean and shuffling, but her manners are those of a well-bred woman. She has none of _the unpleasant airs too common to literary ladies_. Her conversation is sensible. She possesses apparently considerable information, is prompt without being forward, and has a fixed judgment of her own, without any disposition to force it upon others. Wordsworth said of her, with warmth: “If I had to present anyone to a foreigner as a model English gentlewoman, it would be Joanna Baillie.”’ Later writers eulogize her quiet, unobtrusive life in the beloved companionship of her sister, and the enjoyment of the yet unspoiled beauty of Nature which surrounded them. A few steps from their house took them to the Heath, with its glorious sun-risings and sun-settings, its cloud and landscapes, its groups and groves of trees, its ferny hollows, and hillocks, purple or golden in their seasons, with the bells of the common heath, or the glittering peach-scented blossoms of the furze. Twenty-nine years after Crabb Robinson’s meeting with her, in the course of a chatty London letter of Lord Jeffreys to Mrs. Innes, he tells her how after breakfasting with Miss Rogers in Regent’s Park, where they had the poet Murray, the hero of the Pawnees, the Milmans, Sir Charles and Lady Bell, etc. (a most lovely morning, by the way), they drove to Hampstead and saw Joanna Baillie, then in her seventy-fifth year. It was on the occasion of a visit to her some time before this that Mary Howitt, with her little son Charlton, I believe, had the pleasure of meeting Sir Walter Scott, whose admiration of the fair curls and bright looks of the boy was ever afterwards associated with her remembrance of the kind-hearted author of the Waverley novels.[157] [Illustration: _Joanna Baillie._] To the last Joanna Baillie continued to keep a little court for literary callers, and received in her simple, old-fashioned home the homage of the great in rank and intellect. In 1851, at the ripe age of eighty-eight (she was born in 1763), the little churchyard through which she had so often passed received the remains of this lovable and gifted woman.[158]