ill 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