I wish I could repay my childish debt of gratitude in terms of appropriate praise.  She is a very pretty poetess; and, to my fancy, strews the flowers of poetry most agreeably round the borders of religious controversy.  She is a neat and pointed prose-writer.  Her “Thoughts on the Inconsistency of Human Expectations,” is one of the most ingenious and sensible essays in the language.  There is the same idea in one of Barrow’s Sermons.

Mrs. Hannah More is another celebrated modern poetess, and I believe still living.  She has written a great deal which I have never read.

Miss Baillie must make up this trio of female poets.  Her tragedies and comedies, one of each to illustrate each of the passions, separately from the rest, are heresies in the dramatic art.  She is a Unitarian in poetry.  With her the passions are, like the French republic, one and indivisible:  they are not so in nature, or in Shakspeare.  Mr. Southey has, I believe, somewhere expressed an opinion, that the Basil of Miss Baillie is superior to Romeo and Juliet.  I shall not stay to contradict him.  On the other hand, I prefer her De Montfort, which was condemned on the stage, to some later tragedies, which have been more fortunate—­to the Remorse, Bertram, and lastly, Fazio.  There is in the chief character of that play a nerve, a continued unity of interest, a setness of purpose and precision of outline which John Kemble alone was capable of giving; and there is all the grace which women have in writing.  In saying that De Montfort was a character which just suited Mr. Kemble, I mean to pay a compliment to both.  He was not “a man of no mark or likelihood”:  and what he could be supposed to do particularly well, must have a meaning in it.  As to the other tragedies just mentioned, there is no reason why any common actor should not “make mouths in them at the invisible event,”—­one as well as another.  Having thus expressed my sense of the merits of this authoress, I must add, that her comedy of the Election, performed last summer at the Lyceum with indifferent success, appears to me the perfection of baby-house theatricals.  Every thing in it has such a do-me-good air, is so insipid and amiable.  Virtue seems such a pretty playing at make-believe, and vice is such a naughty word.  It is a theory of some French author, that little girls ought not to be suffered to have dolls to play with, to call them pretty dears, to admire their black eyes and cherry cheeks, to lament and bewail over them if they fall down and hurt their faces, to praise them when they are good, and scold them when they are naughty.  It is a school of affectation:  Miss Baillie has profited of it.  She treats her grown men and women as little girls treat their dolls—­makes moral puppets of them, pulls the wires, and they talk virtue and act vice, according to their cue and the title prefixed to each comedy or tragedy, not from any real passions of their own, or love either of virtue or vice.