Joanna Baillie’s day as a poetess was of short duration: it is now chiefly as a woman that she charms and helps us. Her house at Hampstead was for many years a meeting-place for those who were most worth meeting, either for talent or goodness; her kindly and gentle influence brought out all that was best in her guests and companions. In Miss Martineau’s autobiography she has something to say about nearly all the lions and lionesses of the literary London of her day, and she singles out our poetess for special commendation. “There was Joanna Baillie,” she writes, “whose serene and gentle life was never troubled by the pains and penalties of vanity; what a charming spectacle was she! Mrs. Barbauld’s published correspondence tells of her in 1800, as a ‘young lady of Hampstead whom I visited, and who came to Mr. Barbauld’s meeting, all the while with as innocent a face as if she had never written a line.’ That was two years before I was born. When I met her about thirty years afterwards, there she was, still ‘with as innocent a face as if she had never written a line!’ And this was after an experience which would have been a bitter trial to an author with a particle of vanity. She had enjoyed a fame almost without parallel, and had outlived it. She had been told every day for years, through every possible channel, that she was second only to Shakespeare, if second; and then she had seen her works drop out of notice, so that, of the generation who grew up before her eyes, not one in a thousand had read a line of her plays; yet was her serenity never disturbed, nor her merry humour in the least dimmed” (_Autobiography_, vol. i. p. 385). This serene and happy temperament accompanied Joanna throughout her long life. She went on writing till past eighty, and lived to the great age of eighty-nine. Her sister Agnes, her inseparable friend and companion, lived to be over a hundred, and preserved her faculties clearly to the end. Joanna Baillie was never ill. The day before her death she expressed a strong desire to die. She went to bed, apparently in her usual health, but was found to be in a state of coma in the morning, and she died on the afternoon of the same day, 23d February 1851. XXII HANNAH MORE MISS CHARLOTTE M. YONGE’S charming little biography of Hannah More brings strikingly before us the picture of the authoress of _Cœlebs in Search of a Wife_, and also depicts in a way that will not easily be forgotten, some of the more striking contrasts between the present day and the England of eighty or ninety years ago. There are some who are always inclined to say “the old is better”; but they must be very curiously constituted who can look back on the social condition of our country at the end of the last century and beginning of this, without being filled with amazement and thankfulness at the improvement that has taken place.