When Dr Gregory came to Edinburgh, he came with his six children. Elizabeth, his youngest little girl, died in 1771. His eldest son James was studying medicine, the other boys were at work, and Dorothea and Anna Margaretta, his elder daughters, were growing into more charming companions for him with every day that passed. They were tall, willowy girls, promising great beauty, and full of sweetness. Dorothea, or Dolly as she was called, was a god-daughter of Mrs Montague’s, and when that lady came to stay with Dr Gregory, she was absolutely fascinated by her godchild. Her visit was a great pleasure to the Gregorys, to whom she was ever her most charming self. Edinburgh society did not take kindly to her, if we are to believe Dr Carlyle, and in fact he is rather bitter upon the subject, calls her ‘a faded beauty,’ ‘a candidate for glory,’ and says she might have been admired by the first order of minds had she not been ‘greedy of more praise than she was entitled to.’ Even he, however, acknowledged her a wit, a critic, an author of some fame, possessing some parts and knowledge, which is praise to a certain point, though not to the point which Mrs Montague would have desired! ‘Old Edinburgh was not a climate for the success of impostures,’ writes the minister of Inveresk, and then to support his judgment with a little legal weight, he added, ‘Lord Kames, who was at first catched with her Parnassian coquetry, said at last that he thought she had as much learning as a well-educated college lad here of sixteen.’ Alas, poor Mrs Montague! and then, too, Dr Carlyle has unwittingly pointed out the rock on which she struck—‘she despised the women’—and by such obvious silliness did she not evoke her fate? Gray the poet was also a visitor at the Gregorys’ and Gregory was asked to meet anyone of interest who came to the town. With Smollett, indeed, who lived in St John Street for a winter, he could have little real friendship, for the novelist had put Lord Lyttleton into _Roderick Random_ in anything but a kindly spirit, and the Gregories were notoriously ‘Love me, love my dog’ people. He lived on terms of close intimacy with Dr Robertson, Dr Blair, David Hume, John Home, Lord Kames, Lord Monboddo, and Lord Woodhouselee. He was a member of the Poker Club, though he went there very seldom, because of the way he was laughed at when he uttered his favourite doctrine of the superiority of women over men. This at least was the gossip of the time, but there is just a possibility that he thought his own company more entertaining than the constant attendance at the Poker from three in the afternoon till eight at night, and though no one knew it, he was busy drawing up a book of advices for his daughters against the time, which he felt could not be very far off, when he would no longer be with them.