OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [High Street 5748
an interesting page in popular literature, and been
the theme of more than one work of fiction.
She was Rachel Chiesley, the daughter of that
Chiesley of Dally who, in a gust of passionate resentment,
shot down the Lord President Lockhart,
and she inherited from him a temper prompt to ire.
She and her husband had been married upwards of
dislike, and would live with her no longer ; while
he, on the other hand, asserted that he had long
been tortured by her ? unsubduable rage and madness,?
and had failed in every effort to soothe or
bring her to reason. She was a woman of more
than common beauty, Another account has it
1 that in her girlhood Grange had seduced her, and
GEORGE BUCHANAN.
(From a Print that brfoqed to tke fate David Lainf.)
twenty years, and had several children, when a
separation was determined upon between them.
?Some portion of her father?s violent temper
appears to have descended to the daughter,? says
the editor of Lord Grange?s Letters, ?and aggravated
by drunkenness, rendered her marriage for
many years miserable, and led at last, in the
year 1730, to her formal separation from her
husband.??
According to Lady Grange?s account there had
been love and peace for twenty years between her
and Lord Grange, when he conceived a sudden
she compelled him to marry her by threatening
to pistol him, and reminding him that she was
Chiesley?s daughter. .
In effecting the separation, he allowed her
EIOO a year so long as she lived peacefully
apart from him; but his frequent journeys to
London, and rumours of certain amours there,
inflamed her jealousy, and after being for some
time in the country, she returned and took a
lodging near her husbands house in Niddry?s
Wynd, as she herself touchingly relates, ?that I
might have the pleasure to see the house, he was
