David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes

It is said that as a pleader he attained neither high distinction nor very extensive practice, but he rapidly established a well-deserved reputation for sound knowledge, unwearied application and strict probity, and in 1766 he was elevated to the bench in the Court of Session where he assumed the title of Lord Hailes.

[1] In Edinburgh he resided in rooms in the old Scottish mint on South Grays Close off the Royal Mile[2] (200m east of the Law Courts) until around 1780 when he built a new townhouse at 23 New Street, north of the Canongate.

Upon closing the shutters, "Lord Hailes's will dropped out upon the floor from behind a panel, and was found to secure her [daughter Christian] in the possession of his estates, which she enjoyed for upwards of forty years.

It is, as his friend Dr Johnson justly described this work at the time of its appearance, a "Dictionary" of carefully sifted facts, which tells all that is wanted and all that is known, but without any laboured splendour of language or affected subtlety of conjecture.

[1] The other works of Lord Hailes include: In 1786 he published An Inquiry into the Secondary Causes which Mr Gibbon has assigned for the Rapid Growth of Christianity (Dutch translation, Utrecht, 1793), one of the most respectable of the very many replies which were made to the famous 15th and 16th chapters of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.