ABSTRACT
Two lengthy inscriptions from the Baillie family monument in the grounds of Mellerstain House in the Scottish Borders, one of 39 lines for Grisell Baillie (1665-1746) and one of 53 for George Baillie (1664-1738) will constitute my basic texts.4 Grisell and George are hardly unknown personages. Grisell was enshrined, in the work of Robert Wodrow and others, in the pantheon of seventeenth-century Covenanting heroines; she has excited interest as a song-writer; and in the early twentieth century, her Household Book made her equally indispensable to the literature of household management.5 George has excited less historical interest,
1 Boswell, Life of Johnson, 2:407, cited in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd edn (London, 1955), p. 272.
