1762-1851
[Sidenote: Crabb Robinson’s _Diary_.]
“We met Miss Joanna Baillie, and accompanied her home. 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 on
others. Wordsworth said of her with warmth, ‘If I had to present any
one to a foreigner as a model of an English gentlewoman, it would be
Joanna Baillie.’”--1812.
[Sidenote: S. C. Hall’s _Memories of Great Men_.]
“Of the party I can recall but one; that one, however, is a
memory,--JOANNA BAILLIE. I remember her as singularly impressive in
look and manner, with the ‘queenly’ air we associate with ideas of high
birth and lofty rank. Her face was long, narrow, dark, and solemn, and
her speech deliberate and considerate, the very antipodes of ‘chatter.’
Tall in person, and habited according to the ‘mode’ of an olden time,
her picture, as it is now present to me, is that of a very venerable
dame, dressed in coif and kirtle, stepping out, as it were, from a
frame in which she had been placed by the painter Vandyke.”--1825-26.
[Sidenote: Sara Coleridge’s _Letters_.]
“I saw Mrs. Joanna Baillie before dinner. She wore a delicate lavender
satin bonnet; and Mrs. J. says she is fond of dress, and knows what
every one has on. Her taste is certainly exquisite in dress though
(strange to say) not, in my opinion, in poetry. I more than ever
admired the harmony of expression and tint, the silver hair and
silvery-gray eye, the pale skin, and the look which speaks of a
mind that has had much communing with high imagination, though such
intercourse is only perceptible now by the absence of everything which
that lofty spirit would not set his seal upon.”--1834.