In the summer of 1763, his curiosity led him for the first time to London, where Andrew Millar the bookseller, was almost his only acquaintance. Of this journey no particular is recorded but that he visited Pope's house at Twickenham. In 1765, having sent a letter of compliment to Gray, then on a visit to the Earl of Strathmore, he was invited to Glammis Castle, the residence of that nobleman, to meet the English poet, in whom he found such a combination of excellence as he had hitherto been a stranger to. This appears from a letter written to Sir William Forbes, his faithful friend and biographer, with whom his intimacy commenced about the same time. I am sorry you did not see Mr. Gray on his return; you would have been much pleased with him. Setting aside his merit as a poet, which, however, in my opinion, is greater than any of his contemporaries can boast, in this or in any other nation, I found him possessed of the most exact taste, the soundest judgment, and the most extensive learning. He is happy in a singular facility of expression. His conversation abounds in original observations, delivered with no appearance of sententious formality, and seeming to arise spontaneously, without study or premeditation. I passed two very agreeable days with him at Glammis, and found him as easy in his manners, and as communicative and frank as I could have wished. Gray could not have requited him with such excess of admiration; but continued during the rest of his life to regard Beattie with affection and esteem. It was not till the spring of this year, when his Judgment of Paris was printed, that he again appeared before the public as an author. This piece he inserted in the next edition of his poems, in 1766, but his more mature judgment afterwards induced him to reject it. Some satirical verses on the death of Churchill, at first published without his name, underwent the same fate. The Wolf and the Shepherds, a Fable, and an Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Thomas Blacklock, which appeared in the second edition, he also discarded from those subsequently published. He now projected and began the Minstrel, the most popular of his poems. Had the original plan been adhered to, it would have embraced a much wider scope. In 1767, he married Mary, the daughter of Dr. Dun, rector of the Grammar School at Aberdeen. This union was not productive of the happiness which a long course of previous intimacy had entitled him to expect. The object of his choice inherited from her mother a constitutional malady which at first shewed itself in capricious waywardness, and at length broke out into insanity.