OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [High Street. 250
Sleat, and so named probably from the vast resort
and slaughter of seals formerly made on its bleak
and desolate rocks. Few or none, we are told, who
have not seen the black deep bosom of Loch Hourn,
its terrific rampart of mountain turrets, and the
long, narrow gulf in which it sleeps in the cradle of
its abyss, can conceive its profound and breathless
stillness when undisturbed by the wild gusts of the
coires, or gales, that sweep through its narrow
gorge. i t was in such an interval of peace that
Lady Grange embarked, and for nine days her
vessel lay becalmed. Two miserable years she
abode in Heiskar.
In June, 1734, a sloop, commanded by a Macleod,
came to Heiskax to convey the victim of all
these strange precautions to the most remote portion
of the British Isles, St. Kilda, ?far amid the
melancholy main,?? where she was placed in a
cottage composed of two small apartments, with a
girl to wait upon her, and where, except for a short
time in the case of Roderick Maclennan, a Highland
clergyman, there was not a human being who
understood the language she spoke.
No newspapers, letters, or intelligence, came
hither from the world in which she had once dwelt,
save once yearly, when a steward came to collect,
in kind, birds? feathers and so forth, the rent of the
poor islanders. In St Kilda she spent seven years,
and how she spent them will never be known, yet
they were not passed without several mad and futile
efforts to escape.
Meanwhile all Edinburgh knew that she had
been forcibly abducted from Niddry?s Wynd by
order of her husband, but the secret of her whereabouts
was sedulously kept from all; but now the
latter had resigned his seat on the bench, and
entered political life, as a friend of the Prince of
Wales and opponent of Sir Robert WaIpole.
At length, in the gloomy winter of 1740-1, a
communication from Lady Grange for the first time
reached those in Edinburgh, who had begun to
wonder and denounce the singular means her
husband had taken to ensure domestic quiet. It
was brought by the minister Maclennan and his wife
Katharine MacInnon, both of whom had quitted
St. Kilda in consequence of a quarrel with the
steward of Macleod of that ilk. hlaclennan was
provided with letters for Lady Grange?s law-agent,
Mr. Hope, of Rankeillor, who made all the necessary
precognitions, including those of people at
Polmaise and elsewhere; after which he made
application to the Lord Justice-clerk for warrants
empowering a search to be made, and the Laird of
Macleod and others to be arrested ; and when Mr.
John Macleod, advocate, was cited, he declared
that he had no authority to appear for Lord
Grange, ? but repelled the charges against his chief
and clansmen, claiming that no warrant should be
granted upon the evidence of such scandalous and
disreputable persons as Maclennan and his wife ;?
and Rankeillor was ordered to produce letters of
evidence that those shown were actually written
by Lady Grange, and being found to be in the
writing of hlaclennan, they were dismissed as insufficient,
and warrants were refused.
Undeterred by this, Hope, on the 12th of February,
fitted out a sloop, commanded by N?illiani
Gregory, with twenty-five well-armed men, and sent
him, with Mr. lllaclennan on board, ?to search
for and rescue Lady Grange wherever she could be
found ;? but Macleod, on hearing of the dqarture
of the sloop-which got no farther than Horse Shoe
Harbour, in Lorn (where the master quarrelled with
his guide, Mrs. Maclennan, and put her ashore)
-had Lady Grange removed, and secluded in
Assynt, at a farm-house, closely watched. There she
became enfeebled in mind and body, the result of
violent passions, intoxication, and latterly sea-sickness,
which produced settled imbecility ; and the
unhappy lady thus treated was the wife of a man
who, ?not to speak of his office of a judge in
Scotland, moved in English society of the highest
character. He must have been the friend of
Lyttelton, Pope, Thomson, and other ornaments
of Fredenck?s Court ; and, as the brother-in-law of
the Countess of Mar, who was sister of Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, he would figure in the brilliant
circle which surrounded that star of the age of the
second George. Yet he does not appear to have ever
felt a moment?s compunction at leaving the mother
of his children to fret herself to death in a halfsavage
wilderness.?
In a letter of his, dated Westminster, in June,
1749, in answer to an intimation of her death, he
wrote thus callously :-?? I most heartily thank you?
my dear friend, for the timely notice you gave me
of the death of that person. It would be a ridiculous
untruth to pretend grief for it; but as it
brings to my mind a train of various things for
many years back, it gives me concern. . . . I
long for the particulars of her death, which you are
pleased to tell me I am to have by the next post.?
After her removal to Skye her mind sunk to
idiocy. She exhibited a restless desire to ramble,
and no motive now remaining for restraint, she
was allowed entire freedom, and the poor wanderer
strolled from place to place, supported
by the hospitality and tenderness which, in the
Highlands, have ever given a sacred claim to the
idiot poor. In this state she lingered for seven
