We have no more of this affair until the lapse of several months, when the judge, at the very moment of apparent victory, is routed by his watchful antagonist. He had obtained possession of Lady Mar--she was on her way to Scotland, "in right hands," but had not crossed the border. This was in 1733, a few months after Lady Grange had been safely conveyed to the grim solitudes of Hesker. Surely some bird of the air had whispered the matter to Lady Mary; for her measures were prompt and stern, and they draw from the baffled plotter many hard expressions and insinuations. "But on the road, she [Lady Mar] was seized by Lord Chief-Justice's warrant, procured on false affidavit of her sister Lady Mary, &c., and brought back to London--declared lunatic, and by Lord Chancellor (whose crony is Mr Wortley, Lady Mary's husband) delivered into the custody of Lady Mary, to the astonishment and offence even of all the English, (Sir Robert among the rest;) and Ilay pretended to be angry at it, yet refused to give me that relief by the king in council, which by law was undoubtedly competent."[32] The people with whom his London connexion brought the judge in contact, display a gathering of dazzling names in the firmament of fashion and wit. Bolingbroke, Windham, and "the courtly Talbot" are casually mentioned. Grange says in passing, "I am acquainted with Chesterfield." He has something to say of "sweet Lepel," the "wife of that Lord Hervey who last winter wrote the pamphlet against Mr Pulteney, and on Mr Pulteney's answer, fought with him and was wounded." Arbuthnot, and the prince of classical collectors, Richard Mead, mix with the ordinary actors of the scene. Young Murray, not then a crown lawyer--but sufficiently distinguished for wit, eloquence, and fashionable celebrity, to have called forth the next to immortal compliments of Pope--_must_ have been one of the brilliant circle; and in the early period of his intercourse with his brother's sister-in-law, accident would be strangely against him, if he did not sometimes meet in the ordinary circle the pale distorted youth, with noble intellectual features and an eye of fire, whose war of wit and rancour with "furious Sappho" left the world uncertain whether to laugh with their fierce wit, or lament the melancholy picture of perverted genius, exhibited by a hatred so paltry yet so unquenchable. In his autobiographical revelations, the economical old judge leaves some traces of his consciousness that his journeys from Merlyn's Wynd to Whitehall were a decided transition from the humble to the great world. He thus describes one of these journeys, in the letter already cited, in which he gratified his humour by talking of himself in the third person.