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]
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]
Her sister, Miss Agnes Baillie, continued to reside at Bolton House, in which she had a number of the windows darkened, so that it came to be called by the children of the Heath ‘the house with the black windows.’ She was becoming very old, and, though sane upon many subjects, had little innocent illusions of going to heaven in the ark, the appearance of which she looked for from day to day. It came at last on April 27, 1861, when she died, aged one hundred years and seven months. Some time before this event a controversy had been going on in a literary paper which questioned the fact of ‘lives of a hundred and upwards,’ whereupon a gentleman wrote to the editor of the Athenæeum as follows:[159]
‘January 7, 1860.—Permit me to forward a copy of the certificate of birth of a lady in her hundredth year, living at Hampstead, viz., the sister of the well-known authoress Joanna Baillie, and of the deceased Dr. Baillie,’ etc.
The document was lately obtained by Dr. Baillie’s son, Mr. W. H. Baillie, of Upper Harley Street, and is as follows:
‘Copy of an entry in a separate register of the Presbytery of Hamilton under the head of “Sholto.” That Mr. James Baillie has a daughter named Agnes, born 24 September, 1760. Attested and signed at Hamilton the 25 day of November, 1760, in the presence of the Presbytery. Signed (James Baillie); John Kirk, Clerk; Patrick Maxwell, Moderator.’
‘This venerable lady,’ it is added, ‘is still, notwithstanding the recent severe weather, in the enjoyment of her usual health.’