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.

“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.

“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.

---