1971), then a Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen, visited Fettercairn House in Kincardineshire (now Aberdeenshire), in search of papers of the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and miscellaneous writer James Beattie in the possession of Beattie's biographer, and Beattie's and James Boswell's close friend, Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo. Forbes had never resided at Fettercairn House, but the Forbes family papers were stored there after his eldest son, heir, and namesake, the

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... baronet, inherited it in 1821 from his widow's father, fifteen years after the death of his own father. During the second half of the nineteenth century, members of the family were aware of these papers, at least in part, as two manuscripts by the sixth baronet were posthumously published. The first, Memoirs of a Banking-House (1859), chronicled the history of the family bank in Edinburgh, Sir William Forbes, James Hunter and Company, which Forbes and his primary banking partner, James Hunter (known from 1777 as James Hunter Blair), established in the early 1770s after asserting their independence from the Coutts Banks in which they had been partners; 1 the second, Narrative of the Last Sickness and Death of Dame Christian Forbes (1875), described the character and recounted the last days of Forbes's pious mother. If the family knew that Boswell papers were also stored there, that memory appears to have been lost over the course of subsequent decades, as Fettercairn House, along with the books, papers, and other Forbes materials stored in it, passed to later generations of owners with other surnames and titles. In the 1930s it was owned by Forbes's great-great-grandson, the formidably named Charles John Robert Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis (1863-1957), 21st Baron Clinton. When Abbott came upon a mass of Boswell papers at Fettercairn, it formed a second major unexpected twentieth-century retrieval, following the extraordinary recoveries at Malahide Castle in Ireland. 2 Abbott announced his discovery in The Times of London on 9 March 1936, and later that year Oxford University Press published a limited edition of five hundred copies of his Catalogue of Papers Relating to Boswell, Johnson and Sir William Forbes Found at Fettercairn House, a Residence of the Rt. Hon. Lord Clinton, 1930-1931. As Abbott explained in the introduction, the documents discovered at Fettercairn 1 Forbes became a partner in Coutts Bros. & Co. in Edinburgh on 13 March 1761, when he was just twenty-one years old. Hunter became a partner in February 1763 when Coutts Bros. & Co. was reorganized as John Coutts & Co. 2 For the recovery of the Malahide Papers and their publication in BP, see Pride and Negligence, Chs. 5-7, and Treasure, Chs. 2-3. The discovery of the Boswell and Forbes papers at Fettercairn is discussed in Pride and Negligence, Chs. 9-10, and Treasure, Ch. 4. lx INTRODUCTION House included a variety of Boswellian treasures, among them Boswell's remarkable account of his visit to London in the early 1760s (no. 1361)-which would become an international non-fiction best seller when edited by Frederick A.