all, and saw her own writings disappear from public view and be forgotten, like herself, while the works of those to whom she was considered so superior have become the imperishable treasures of the language.

She was born in Scotland in 1762 and died in London in 1851 in her eighty-ninth year, having long survived her contemporaries, her dramas, and her fame.

It was in 1799, when Miss Baillie was in her thirty-seventh year, that a volume entitled "A Series of Plays" was published anonymously. It contained two tragedies, one entitled "Basil and the other "De Montfort," and a comedy entitled "The Tryal."

In the introduction the author explained that these plays formed a portion of an extensive plan hitherto unattempted in any language, and that was a series of plays the chief object of which should be the delineation of all the higher passions of the human heart-each play exhibiting in the principal character some one great passion in all the stages of its development from its origin to its catastrophe.

The volume attracted immediate attention; in fact, created a sensation. It was considered a most notable event in the annals of the drama,

and curiosity was excited as to the authorship. The sensation became all the greater when it was discovered that these vigorous and original compositions were written by a young woman of quiet and retiring life, whose most intimate friends had never suspected in her such extraordinary powers.

The town rang with her praises, and Walter Scott in the introduction to the third canto of

"Marmion" paid a paid a beautiful tribute to her genius, describing her as the "bold enchantress " who seized the harp of Avon,

Which silent hung

By silver Avon's holy shore,

Till twice an hundred years roll'd o'er ;
When she, the bold enchantress, came,
With fearless hand and heart on flame!
From the pale willow snatch'd the treasure,
And swept it with a kindred measure,
Till Avon's swans, while rung the grove
With Montfort's hate and Basil's love,
Awakening at the inspired strain,

Deem'd their own Shakespeare lived again.

Mrs. Barbauld, writing to a friend, relates how amazed she was to find that the author of the plays was not one of the already celebrated writers to whom they had been attributed, but "Miss Baillie, a young lady of Hampstead, whom she

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."

Miss Baillie was now one of the celebrities of London. The world of fashion and of gayety lionized her. Famous men paid honor to her, and Sheridan, the manager of Drury Lane theater, insisted on producing "De Montfort." John Philip Kemble and his sister, Mrs. Siddons, were then at the height of their fame, and they appeared in the leading parts. Never was public expectation wrought up to a higher pitch, and the critics foretold a new era in dramatic literature.

In April, 1800, the piece was produced, but in spite of the transcendent acting it failed. The play was not quite damned, but when the curtain fell there was a genuine sigh of relief. After a run of eleven nights the piece was withdrawn.

"De Montfort" illustrates the passion of hatred, but the hero is a bore. He hates Rezenvelt, but the motive is far from sufficient to account for such an all-comprehensive hatred as De Montfort shows. The tempers of the two men are uncongenial, they have been rivals from boyhood, and Rezenvelt, in a duel with De Montfort, disarms him and spares his life. This simply intensifies the latter's hatred, and in the dénouement

De Montfort murders Rezenvelt, and then commits suicide by dashing his head against a pillar.

This climax has been so long foreseen and is so tedious in coming that the spectators yawn over it and feel glad when it is all over.

Nevertheless, the play reads so well that people still wondered why it could not be represented on the stage. There must be something wrong, they thought, in the theater when plays that read so well as Miss Baillie's could not be exhibited on the stage.

When Edmund Kean was in his prime he undertook to bring out "De Montfort." Some alterations were made and Miss Baillie rewrote the

last act. Expectation was again awakened a second time, and Drury Lane was again crowded. But even Kean's superb genius could not avail to arouse interest in the ponderous though often sonorous lines. Three nights sufficed to satisfy Miss Baillie's admirers that her tragedies were not for the stage.

Miss Baillie wrote eight tragedies, five comedies, and a musical drama, each exemplifying some one overmastering passion of the heart, as love, hatred, fear, jealousy, and ambition. But there is not enough of a story theme to make the portrayal interesting. The characters are clearly

drawn, the dialogue is natural, the lines are poetic, but they all lead nowhere. The plots are meager and even vapid, and much as one may admire them in the study they are unsuited for dramatic representation.

Besides the "Plays on the Passions" Miss Baillie wrote a number of other plays, as well as some poems of a high degree of merit. A poem to her sister," Lines to Agnes Baillie on Her Birthday," has always been much admired.

She was a dear and lovely lady, a woman of undoubted genius, who lived gracefully into extreme old age beloved by all who knew her.

Francis Jeffrey always went to see her when he visited London. In one of his letters to his wife, written in 1842, he says:

We went to Hampstead and paid a very pleasant visit to Joanna Baillie, who is marvelous in health and spirits and youthful freshness and simplicity of feeling, and not a bit deaf, blind, or torpid.

She was then in her eightieth year.