Illness delayed the realisation of this wish. Mrs. Montagu was in Hill Street in November, receiving only a few of her most intimate friends. “I called on Mrs. Montagu,” writes Mrs. Boscawen to Mrs. Delany, in the above month; “only Lady Townshend was there, and in her best way, very chatty.” In 1775-76, among the visitors at Bath occasionally seen by Mrs. Scott, was a little lame Scottish boy, between four and five years old. When he had bathed in the morning, got through a reading-lesson at an old dame’s near his lodging on the Parade, and had a drive over the Downs with the author of “Douglas” and Mrs. Home, the boy was sometimes to be seen in the boxes of the old theatre. On one such occasion, witnessing “As You Like It,” his interest was so great that, in the middle of the wrestling-scene in the first act, he called out, “A’n’t they brothers?” The boy, when he had become a man, said in his autobiography, “A few weeks’ residence at home convinced me, who had till then been an only child in the house of my grandfather, that a quarrel between brothers was a very natural event.” This boy’s name was Walter Scott. Much of the other company at Bath was then about to withdraw from the stage which the boy was to occupy with such glory to himself, and to the lasting delight of his countrymen. The year 1778 opens with the following letter to Mrs. Robinson: “... I wish I could thank you for your letter in as fair characters as my neice returned hers for the books. I have ostentatiously shewed her letter to many of my friends. My sister and I have not let my brother share in the honour; for we confess no Robinson ever wrote so well; so that she inherits this, with many other good things, from her Mama. If she can compose a sermon as well as her brother, and writes it in her own hand, it will retrieve the honour of manuscript-sermons, which of late years have sold cheaper than even any other goods.... “The town is very empty, and I know not how we who are here contrive to be as much engaged as at other seasons. The Bath has been very full of persons of distinction.