These were the days of Samuel Johnson, of Sir Joshua Reynolds and his sister, of Miss Burney, of Garrick and of Lyttelton, and it was to this society that Mrs Montague introduced her new Scottish friends. It is true that there were days when ‘Mrs Montague kept aloof from Johnson like the west from the east,’ and when the sage said bitter things about ‘Mrs Montague for a penny’; but there were also the other days when they smiled upon one another, when Johnson forgot that she had called _Rasselas_ a narcotic, and listened while Mrs Thrale compared her conversation with that of Burke. Reynolds thought her beauty classical. Miss Burney once called her the glory of her sex, and all the world reading her essay on Shakespeare believed that she had saved his fame from the calumnies of Voltaire. Into this admiring circle Gregory was admitted and was himself enjoyed and appreciated, and it is possible that he might also in the end have secured a practice if he had continued to live in the south. But in 1756 his brother James died leaving a vacancy in the Chair of Medicine in Aberdeen. To this chair Gregory was appointed and half reluctantly he turned his back upon London, and took up his new duties at King’s College, He returned unchanged except for his broader ideas and wider culture; and, although the rest of his life was passed within the somewhat narrow limits of university towns, he never became provincial. Teaching was not one of his duties as mediciner. A few years apprenticeship to any doctor sufficed for training, and gave the students all the preparation they desired for a degree. John Gregory and Dr Skene fretted against this, and in the hope of founding a Medical School opened Lectures on Medicine. But the students did not attend. It was an indignity to the university, keenly felt by these professors, that an Aberdeen degree should be the laughing stock of all the other universities; but without an Infirmary it was impossible to teach the Practice of Physic, and the attempt had to be given up for the time.